TEN DAYS IN JAPAN With Some Notes By the Way

New Zealand Listener, Volume 14, Issue 352, 22 March 1946, Page 6

TEN DAYS IN JAPAN

With Some Notes By the Way

f Rpt) is the first of a series of articles written by the Editor of "The Listener" about his recent visit to Japan

WENT to Japan at 48 hours’ notice at the request of the New Zealand Government. My task was to see what life there would mean to the New Zealand soldiers who would form our section of the army of occupation. Ten days after I arrived I came away again, ‘and now, 33 days after I set out, I am back in Wellington writing this report. Necessarily it is a superficial report. In 10 days one sees little but external things, and sees even those through a haze. If I had stayed 10 weeks I should have seen a little more; but to get the picture right I should have had to stay 10 months, and that is nearly twice as long as our advance troops will remain in Japan. I have no choice but to say what I saw and felt in the days available to me, knowing that time will change some of my impressions and obliterate others. But first impressions are not entirely valueless. A longer stay would have enabled me to speak with more authority, but it would have disqualified me from presenting Japan as it will appear to our arriving troops when they arrive, which is my sole aim and duty. I found Japan exciting, confusing, depressing, alarming, but every day more interesting. As clearly and simply as I can I shall say why. ba bd *

THE LAND IS LIKE OUR OWN

] WRITE, of course, for soldiers first, and then for their mothers and fathers. I want to interest them in J apan, but to do so truthfully; and I know of no better way than by telling them frankly what interested me. Far more than most countries Japan has to be

seen to be understood, and there is at present no country in the world which it is so dangerous

for New Zealanders to get wrong or refuse to see at all. It is as like New Zealand physically as a dog is like a wolf or a bullock like a buffalo; the Same general shape, the same geological skin, the same uncertainties under the skin, Though I felt no earthquakes while I was there I saw the same faults in the rocks as we have in ours, the same fear of brick houses, the same indifference to smoking mountains. I saw no rivers comparable with the Waikato or the Clutha, and nothing as big as the Waitaki or the southern Waiau, but I saw more than one that you would hardly have distinguished from the Manawatu, and half a dozen that could have been the Hutt, the Ashley, of the Aparima. The mountains in general are black with bush, the bare faces above the bush white with snow. Our lakes are bigger, deeper, remoter, and wilder, but Japan’s in general are the same kind of lake, and have taken the same hold on the national mind. There are so many physical reminders of New Zealand whichever

way you look or turn that, when the light goes and the foreground is blotted out, it is easy to forget that you are 8,000 miles from home and not in Nelson or the Wairarapa. No New Zealander will feel physically lost in Japan whether his home is Bluff or Bay of Islands; but when he turns his back on the earth and looks at the millions inhabiting it-stands on a railway station while the crowds surge in and out; wanders through the narrow lanes of streets where people are shopping; listens in the middle of the night to the almost unbroken clatter of clogs -he may well feel lost then, and not merely lost but bewildered, and not merely bewildered but half afraid. He will not fear the Japanese people, who are subdued, polite, as friendly as they are allowed to be, and certainly quite harmless. But he may fear the whole surging East, the cluttered earth and the human swarm, and wonder how much longer he can live in his own clean comfort and abundance. a. 3 ae

GETTING THERE IS EXCITING

BUT first he must get to Japan-fly there or go by sea. If he flies, as I was lucky enough to do-and many more will have the same kind of luck before the occupation ends-he will find the journey excitingly varied and interesting, not at all exhausting, and even in

a military plane only now and again uncomfortable, If it is his first flight the incredible ease and speed of it all will drive dis-

comfort from his mind; but even if he is a seasoned traveller, no longer moved by the miracle of flight and unable to forget the difference between a chair and a steel rail under his buttocks, he will find himself coming to life again on this journey. I found it so exciting over the sea and so absorbing over the

land that I was afraid to go to sleep in case I missed some new thing-buffa-loes in a swamp, islands above and islands below the sea, mountains pushing their heads out of clouds, cities like toy towns, and breaking waves made motionless by the speed of our flight. All these things kept me watching and waiting when my more sensible companions were resting, but I don’t think anyone was indifferent to them or slept all the time. And it is still a wonderful journey if you travel on the surface of the earth instead of 10,000 feet above. You will be three or four weeks on the way instead of three or four days, but you will see people and places at close range as Cook and Tasman saw them, since it is not possible to go to Japan by sea without threading your way through reefs and islands, and not possible to journey from, 40deg. S to 40deg. N without crossing from Capricorn to Cancer, seeing things it is impossible-to see in our cool temperate world, and discovering that the sun is not merely a pleasant titillation of the skin on a cold day, but the maker and breaker of societies a thousand feet down in the sea. * * a

MANILA MAKES YOU THINK

SINCE they can’t refuel at sea, landplanes follow the land-masses, and our route therefore was Wellington Auckland Brisbane Cloncurry Darwin Morotai Manila Laoag Okinawa Kanoya Hiroshima. Cloncurry gave us our first sight of

wnat Foster Fraser would have called the real Australia, but which is in fact no more real than Canberra or Sydney. It

is the Australia of Mrs. Gunn and the old Sydney Bulletin — blinding heat, flies, tin shacks, blokes, beer, and a deliberate and almost truculent despon-

dency. Yet for hundreds of miles round about there had been heavy rain and the grass was deep green, So it was all the way to Darwin, which seemed planless and untidy and to having a struggle to survive, It had of course been savagely bombed and had found neither the time since nor the spare men to tidy up and rebuild. Its day is coming, but you feel at present that it is just holding its own against the forces of disintegration. Morotai is only two degrees over the equator and does not let you forget it day or night. But Manila was the highlight of our journey-a shock and a_ bewilderment to the dullest of us. Before the Japanese came it was as big as Auckland and Wellington together, and in many respects far ahead of either. To-day it is a dusty or muddy mess, with slums so foul that you speed up your jeep as you rush through them and ruins so extensive that you wonder whose energy, confidence, and wealth built them in the first place. It was the first war damage we had seen on a big scale, and I don’t think any of us knew before how much the city had suffered. Buildings that have been completely destroyed are shocking but mentally assimilable. They are even in a sense stimulating, since you think at once of the cleaning up and rebuilding. But when a_ building bigger than anything in New Zealand has just fallen in on itself, roof, walls, partitions, floors, tilted and sagging but hanging hideously together, the effect is unspeakably depressing. Instead of the bulldozers, drag-lines, and scoops that will come one day to clear it all away, you see it sinking further and further into decay, weeds swallowing the paths and mould covering the masonry, and the things it expressed dead forever. That is the whole of the old city of Manila today and much of the new, and when you

remember that the Americans have committed themselves to walking out this year you are not sorry to be away before it happens. P % * *

THE BASE THAT WAS KURE

HAT else you see on the way depends on the route you take, but you will sooner or later come to Japan itself, and in Japan sooner or later come to Kure-until a few months ago one of the best-equipped naval bases in the world. I know nothing of such

things myself, but the commander of a British destroyer told me that Kure had been an eyeopener to them all. "We

expected something pretty good," he said, "but it astonished us, British and Americans alike, to discover that we had nothing anywhere that was missing here." To-day Kure is a mass of twisted steel and piled-up rubbish. Everything that had military value, except the water itself, was bombed beyond the possibility of use before Japan surrendered; and even the water is cluttered up with ruins. I’ve seen nothing more horrible in war damage ‘than Kure’s bombed dockyards, which still hold water, but have become a stupendous sump with midget submarines (some possibly holding corpses) breaking the surface of the scum and hundreds of tons of steel and mud obliterating one end. Japan was beaten long before Hiroshima, and in Kure at least, which lies like Lyttelton under a hill, the people must have known it. You can’t hide stranded cruisers, levelled acres of masonry, or a shell of rusting steel 400 yards long and at least 100 feet high, when the people who made all these things and operated them live above them and look down on them. But New Zealanders only pass through Kure and do not come to rest there. Their resting place is Eta-Jima, an island about half-an-hour away by launch, which will take their breath away. I don’t know why they have been lucky enough to be given this paradise for a base, but they have been. The Americans, who have luxurious standards in such matters, told me that the barracks the New Zealanders will occupy are better than any they have seen anywhere-that they were built for the officers and cadets of the Japanese navy and "have everything." I don’t know what such places usually have, but I do know that this place has everything (baths, theatre, sports grounds, etc.), that the Japanese themselves thought necessary for the morale of conquerors, and that the setting is what Day’s Bay might have been if it had been occupied for a thousand years by a race devoted to beauty. ~ * *

FROM Eta-Jima to Kure is half-an-hour by water, from Kure to Hiroshima another half-hour by road, and that will be the first journey of many soldiers. It will be a journey made by everyone who visits Japan for a hundred years, perhaps for a thousand; but although I saw Hiroshima from the air as well I shall not attempt to describe it.

The damage can of course be described: it is the centre of Coventry, the flattened blocks of Rotterdam, the rubble heaps of Berlin extended to an area of about nine square miles. The rubble is a little smaller, the dust a little finer, the silence a little greater, the still standing things a little less numerous, and that is about the full story considered as devastation. We get the whole picture out of focus if we suppose that there is nothing in history to compare with Hiroshima in the way of destruction. Scipio did worse things at Carthage, Titus as bad at Jerusalem. The story of Hiroshima is not what was done, but how it was done-the tiny bomb, the blinding flash, and then no city or safe civilisation any more. For that is what Hiroshima means. You are not looking at the*dust of a city. You are standing in the ashes of the system that has ruled you, the civilisation that has shaped and curbed you. A new day has dawned, and neither you nor I nor anyone else can know how it will end. Neither did the silent little group I saw at work making a garden in the rubble. They knew only that they were hungry, that the earth would still grow vegetables, that the concrete blocks would break the wind, and that there in the meantime was a piece of free land. They were the first Japanese civilians I had seen at close range in a Japanese setting. They took no notice of us whatever, of our notebooks, cameras, or car, but I was not sure when we drove on that they were not as ominous as the bomb. For there are millions and millions of them working like that, without haste and without rest, defeated, hungry, houseless, cold, but neither shattered nor changed. (To ‘be continued)