A Year in Japan

New Zealand Listener, Volume 16, Issue 405, 28 March 1947, Page 5

A Year in Japan

HE survey by the official correspondent which we printed last week was a sufficient. answer to those who still want to know what the New Zealand troops are doing in Japan. It was of course not the correspondent’s job to say why they are there at all; nor is it ours. But there is one point which it is permissible to make, and even emphasise.. It is this: that the longer our Brigade stays there, the more New Zealanders there will be with some kind of understanding of the continuing perils of the Pacific. We all know in a vague way that we live more comfortable lives than the people of Japan, but it is necessary to live in Japan to realise what the difference is. Even then it is necessary to think a little to realise what the difference means. It is easy enough to understand that a hungry man looks enviously at a well-fed man, a man in rags at a man wellclothed, a man in a hovel at a man who has lived all his life in a comfortable house. That has always been true of rich and poor everywhere, and it is not necessary | to go to Japan to know that it is the first page of the story of most revolutions. But it may be necessary to go to Japan to read the second page-to see all that envy harnessed to science, and directed by leaders of restless energy and disciplined intelligence who know precisely how casual we are here. None of us can be simple enough to think that the menace of Japan has been finally removed-that we can go on for ever comfortable and careless while 50 times as many Japanese live hard, restless, envious lives within a day or two of us by air and a week or two by sea. It is certainly costly to maintain 4,000 troops in a foreign land and look after them as well as we look after ours. But if not having them there at all would mean that we would all go to sleep again, we can’t afford for an indefinite time to bring them home.