Books: Sketches of a People

IN PEACE JAPAN BREEDS WAR—Gustav Eckstein—Harper ($2.50).

The eminent U.S. physiologist, Dr. Gustav Eckstein, has visited Japan often. He has been more interested in Japan than in any other country except his own. Since Pearl Harbor, Dr. Eckstein has been busy thinking about the Japanese, and writing about them. He has written a rambling yet limpid book, of uncommon charm in style, in insight as rich as it is unpretentious. If every U.S. citizen read this book, and digested it, the chances of a durable Pacific peace might be greatly improved.

Eckstein’s straight history is fascinating enough, especially his profiles of the men greatly responsible for modern Japan:

>The bull-necked southern samurai Saigo, whose revolt in 1866 against the Shogun unified the Japanese clans under the Emperor for the first time in centuries. He later revolted against his Emperor and died the death of an ancient Roman.

>The noble-minded Hirobumi Ito (1841-1909), who drafted Japan’s toothless constitution; who, almost alone among the Japanese of his time, realized that one might deal with the West “by diplomatic give and take”; and whose civilized hopes were used to throw dust in the eyes of the Western World while others plotted the violent future.

> Aritomo Yamagata, who almost single-handed created Japan’s army and learned from Germany, “with consequences for the world,” the usefulness of making that army free of civil authority; who, above all others, rendered the constitution meaningless.

>The aged, quiet fanatic Mitsuru Toyama, the gang boss who appears to be finally responsible for most of Japan’s political assassinations for decades.

Intelligent Gentlemen. Eckstein’s personal observations poke searchlight beams into corners of the Japanese psyche:

A highly cultivated Japanese calmly explained, about the Japanese habit of assassination, “It is like voting. Things get settled. . . .”

Another gentleman, to whom Eckstein remarked that a man who had committed hara-kiri was, after all, dead, quickly replied: “No, that’s where his life begins!”

Eckstein first saw Japan on the day the American Exclusion Act went into effect. He spent his first night with a Japanese family in the home of a surgeon. The surgeon’s Western education had not altered the decorum, the grace, the rigid loveliness of his family life, which adorned that evening like a page out of Lafcadio Hearn. It had not altered anything else, either. Late in the evening, after a good deal of pleasant enough talk, and apropos nothing, the surgeon “said quietly that he wished his country would wipe off the insult, declare war on mine. I was amazed. I asked, ‘What insult?’ He answered, ‘The insult of the Exclusion Act.’ ”

Eckstein lay one strange night watching, from a loft, while a village family prepared against a rising flood. “All proceeded as if polished by experience, and yet it had been several years since the last flood.” It was as if they were beyond the need for that “philosophical” attitude with which most human beings help themselves to meet recurrent disaster. The bamboo lattices began to float on the rising water. And the grandmother spoke, in this book’s most magnificent symbol of Japan: “As the water recedes, they will be floated exactly back into place.”

In a shop where he lived awhile, Eckstein saw a superb example of the Japanese woman’s physical control and grace. There were two steps, each of 18 inches, between the kitchen and the living quarters. He saw the woman “come with a tray of teacups full of tea, and while stepping up, with the free hand tie the sash around her kimono.”

On several occasions, walking in the woods with medical colleagues, finding a waterfall, Eckstein was moved to exclaim over its beauty. The one comment of the doctors on each occasion was: “What a place to drop down!”

In a summer home, Eckstein observed two families. In one, the sense of discipline was so inborn and exquisite that immediate disciplinary gestures were almost never necessary. In the other, he watched the dark, sharp-fingered mother, with camera-shutter speed, pinch her little girl, over & over. The gentle father of the other family, noticing that Eckstein was disturbed, described at calm length how, when a child is really bad, a bit of dry weed is twisted into a cone, set on the child’s bare abdomen, and burned.

Out of such observations Dr. Eckstein builds a portrait of a people so immemorially, ideally shaped for warfare, that the theory and practice of National Socialism seems, by comparison, as youthful and synthetic as the conscious mind beside the unconscious. The Japanese face death with a detachment, a simplicity even deeper, if possible, than their most flagrant reputation for it. Their piety is of a brand which makes human life a mere phase in a grand society of vivid ghosts.

Their sexual and family life, of a stability which the romantic West can scarcely conceive, is of a sort that any war-minded Government would dream of. Their sense of discipline, of protocol, of ceremony, of hierarchy, of obligation to the family, to the state, to the dead, is ingrained as it is nowhere else on earth. Their usually little bodies have contributed heavily toward a craftiness in physical and mental practice for which jujitsu — -the destruction of the opponent through his own strength — is the far-reaching symbol.

The War and the Peace. Dr. Eckstein’s book is filled with suggestions, some speculative, all worth attention. He warns most earnestly against bombing the great, packed industrial cities. That matchwood fire and massacre might, he agrees, shorten the war, but it will be wiser not to “put a Sherman’s march bloodily into [Japanese] children’s primers.” That march, though it shortened a war itself—and it was not particularly bloody, just destructive—has done decades of irreparable damage, and the Japanese are far more hypersensitive than the most fire-eating of U.S. Southerners.

Eckstein recommends that the biggest possible soldiers be sent against the Japanese, in the most impressive possible mass. He warns against trying to use small men subtly, in the enemy’s manner. He thinks that the talents born of Japanese smallness might be paralyzed by pure size and shock. But if Americans tried to beat them at their own game they would not only fail; they would also intensify Japanese scorn. On the whole, however, Eckstein is content to leave the winning of the war to warriors.

About the peace he is more deeply concerned. It would be a fatal mistake, he feels, to impose upon the Japanese a form of government “for which they have no instinct, no wish, and no preparation. . . . The peace must be thoughtful, the conditions wise, and Japan’s vitality and insistence be constantly in our minds.” Here those who are familiar with Japan will think of one great lack in Dr. Eckstein’s book. His acquaintance with the Japanese is largely confined to the urban middle and upper classes. Of the tremendous proletariat he knows and says little. Yet it is in these masses, if they are helped to liberal education, that the best hope probably lies. Readers who wish to learn something of what Dr. Eckstein, for all his great usefulness, is not equipped to tell, are referred to John F. Embree’s unparalleled book on rural Japanese life: Suye Mura: A Japanese Village.