The Land od the Rising Yen

is in the realm of chewing gum that a happy solution
lies: the Japanese have produced a chewing gum with the flavour of sake, their rice-wine. As heartening an example of the amalgamation of two cultures
as I have ever seen; a glorious feat of uniting the worst of two worlds.
     
    A final thought: Okinawa is a
reminder that old-fashioned nationalism is not dead in Japan. A great and proud nation must find a proper outlet for its talent, and energy. Should
Japan find such an outlet in the substitute nationalism of motor-cars,
cameras, transistor radios, baseball and ice-cream, or in the grimmer type of
nationalism hinted at in the Okinawa issue? This is the real question for Japan and the world. It’s either-or.

TWO NATIONALISTS
     
    Defeat rankles; yet Japanese nationalism is
not aggressive. Even in Okinawa, all they want is to get back a purely Japanese
island. Japanese nationalism is often bitter, disillusioned and ambitious; but
hardly ever aggressive. In this chapter I should like to describe two extreme
types of Japanese nationalist: the most sophisticated and the most naïve. The
first gentleman quoted is a member of the government. (To be on the safe side I
shall not name him although he makes no secret of his views.)
    ‘We are the true isolationists of
this world. Our basic desire is — or would have been — to be left alone. A
little more than a hundred years ago our country was opened up by force and
this, naturally enough, strengthened our U nationalism. This nation depends
more on foreign trade than any other, with the exception of Britain. We have to import so much oil that our annual import would be enough to cover the whole of Japan with a fifteen-inch i layer of oil. Yet we would be happier without the influence ^
of the outside world — and without its oil. Our natural inclination, like the
natural inclination of the British, is for isolation. The Japanese are neither
travellers nor j explorers. From Kyushu you can see Korea. Yet it never used to
occur to the ordinary Japanese citizen to go there. Our culture comes from China. We made tremendous efforts to learn written Chinese; our people (and we had very few
illiterates) wrote Chinese for long centuries and — essentially — do so
today. Yet we never really tried to learn the Chinese language. Neither did we
try to go over and visit China. Look at our foreign policy. We have become one
of the largest and most important industrial nations of the world yet we have
no real foreign policy. As far as it exists, it is a policy of non-involvement
— a policy aimed j a t being left alone. Isolation. At the United
Nations nothing empties the debating chamber quite so fast as a Japanese
delegate rising to speak, putting on his spectacles preparatory to reading a long
string of clichés and platitudes. This is deliberate policy on our part. Do you
think we are unable to improve the quality of our speeches, to equal, say, Bulgaria or Upper Volta? We don’t want to. This excruciating dullness safeguards our non-involvement.
The only positive line taken by our foreign policy is not to offend the United States; in sharp contrast with the now departed General de Gaulle whose only
positive idea was to offend them.
    ‘The Japanese are reputed to be poor
linguists. They seem to be even worse than they are because deep down they do
not really want to learn a foreign language — which means English in our case.
And we want to prevent foreigners from learning Japanese. We regard foreigners
who know our language as intruders on our privacy. One cannot know a country
without knowing its language — and we don’t want to be known. We need English,
you might say. We do indeed. That’s why we have found an excellent solution — a
truly Japanese solution: we understand English but refuse to speak it.
    ‘Defeat in war used to be different
in Europe. France was defeated by the Germans in 1871 but won the next
encounter about half a century later; and after another quarter of a century
she won a further bout. We can’t do that. We really have finished with
militarism, we are sick of it. Some nations have been invaded many times; a few
never. We were invaded once. Perhaps twice. Not such a bad record — in any case
we have to live with it. We have no intention of being invaded again, or of
invading others. We have no intention even of becoming Number One Economic
Power. We only want to preserve our way of life.
    ‘When Perry arrived, although we were
a highly