To Tokyo and Back

New Zealand Listener, Volume 13, Issue 334, 16 November 1945, Page 5

To Tokyo and Back

a series of articles specially written for our readers by James Bertram, a recently returned prisoner-of-war from Tokyo. Mr. Bertram, whom we introduced in our last issue, has agreed to our suggestion that his story should be as personal as possible, but says that he can’t help being political to some extent. We hope he will be political to a very considerable extent, first because New Zealand has not yet fully realised that it is a Pacific Ocean nation, and can’t therefore escape Pacific Ocean politics, and in the second place because it would be silly to allow a man like Mr. Bertram to flit across our pages without saying any of the things that we his fellow countrymen ought to hear for our own safety. By any test at all he is one of the younger authorities on the New East, and he is also one of ourselves-a New Zealander made more aware of his own country’s needs by contact with the best minds of Britain and service with the makers of modern China. That was true of him even four years ago, and since then he has been to Tokyo and back-the first an involuntary journey, the second the result of one of those lucky blunders scoundrels sometimes make when they seem to have everything organised on the side of iniquity. If the Japanese had grasped who he was it would have been a one-way journey; but their organisation failed, and he can now tell us, with the conviction born of bitter experience, what lies ahead of democracy in the Pacific if it does not adapt itself to recent developments. Mr. Bertram described himself once as an "uneasy Liberal." The Liberal who is not uneasy is dumb, and it is not a part of our plan that he should try to make any of us less uneasy than he himself was when he went away. Complacency has done us enough harm already. we print the first of