The Land od the Rising Yen

produce
their second-rate little cars, this concentration on industry will keep them
out of serious mischief. They did continue, they kept the Western trade names
for many of their products but — to our surprise and often hardly concealed
annoyance — their products kept on improving. A few years after the war people
said about Japanese cameras: ‘Well, not bad for the price.’ Then it became
widely known that the lenses were superb, perhaps the best in the world, but
the rest — shutters, built-in exposure meters etc. — were somewhat inferior.
But before long Japanese cameras improved further and gained an excellent,
all-round reputation — yet remained very competitive in price. Similarly, we
tried out their cars and nodded benevolently: ‘Not bad,’ which in this
exceptional case meant what it should mean: not bad but not really good. We
were right: even five or six years ago they were not outstanding. Today they
are.
    The Japan Times has a slogan
printed on its front page: ‘All the News Without Fear and Favor’. Being a good
Westerner, I smiled at this at first. It was, of course, a childish imitation
of the New York Times slogan: ‘All the News That’s Fit to Print’. A mere
rewording. And why have a slogan, in the first place? The overwhelming majority
of newspapers appear without slogans and (with regrettable exceptions) survive.
But after a few days I came to regard this slogan in the Japan Times as
a prototype of Japanese treatment of imported methods and ideas. Imitation?
Certainly. Mere childish rewording? Most certainly not. The New York Times is one of the world’s great papers but its slogan is arrogant. Fit to print?
Who will decide for you and me what is ‘fit to print’? Who will censor the news
for us, and on what grounds, on the flimsy pretext that it is not fit for us to
see? What the New York Times meant — and practises — is exactly what the Japan Times proclaims: ‘All the News without Fear and Favor’. No
goodwill or admiration could call the Japanese slogan original; no malice can
deny the improvement.
     
    So what about imitation? We should
remember, first of all, that all knowledge is imitation. The baby learns to
walk and talk through imitation; man learnt how to build better houses and how
to improve on his agricultural methods because he imitated his neighbour or the
neighbouring — often previously conquered — tribes; millions of books from the
simpler do-it-yourself kind up to the most complicated treatises instructing us
how to build spacecraft, teach us how to imitate others. In some cases we call
imitation knowledge; in others we call knowledge imitation. The Japanese in
their wild quest for knowledge, in their insatiable desire to learn, made the
imitative aspect of their learning more obvious than most other people. But all
who learn imitate.
    Even today: when we copy
things American we follow the fashion; if the Japanese do it, they imitate.
    While imitation was sometimes a
euphemism for unscrupulous stealing of rights and ideas, in other — later —
cases it was a pejorative term for learning. There is nothing wrong, per se, in imitation and I think the time has come when we should start imitating the
Japanese. There are quite a few things we could learn from them to our benefit.
    What? one may ask. Many technical
innovations and improvements but those are not what I have in mind. We ought to
imitate their courtesy; their respect for privacy (respect for privacy, yes:
about lack of privacy see later); their veneration of old age; their loyalty —
loyalty to families, firms, all the groups they belong to; their pride in their
work; their sense of beauty and their cultivation of it in everyday, trivial
things; and also their gentleness.

THE BRUTALITY OF GENTLE PEOPLE
     
    The mention of gentleness must have
caused many brows to be raised. Gentleness indeed? These people whose brutality
was notorious have suddenly become gentle? And we should imitate their
gentleness?
    After spending some time in Japan, one would still be puzzled but would word the same question differently: how could
these smiling, bowing, courteous, gentle people behave with such unspeakable brutality
as they did? Because there is no denying it: they did.
    It is vaguely connected with their
devotion to imitation. Some people try to explain it in this simple way. Every
significant event in Japanese history seemed to point a moral. Foreigners could
force Japan open? Then — said