Books: Four on Japan

WHY JAPAN WAS STRONG — John Patric — Doubleday, Doran ($2.50).

MY WAR WITH JAPAN — Carroll Alcott —Holt ($3).

JAPAN'S MILITARY MASTERS — Hillis Lory—Viking ($2.50). THE JAPANESE IN SOUTH AMERICA — J. F. Normano and Antonello Gerbi — John Day ($1.75).

Before he visited Japan in 1934, Patric lived for three months in the U.S. the way a poor Japanese lives in Japan. This was to save money for the trip, and also to condition himself for Japanese life. He slept in the front seat of his car, ate canned salmon heated on the exhaust manifold (food cost: 25¢ a day), pressed his trousers by using the running board and a towel for the ironing board; alto gether saved $375. Then he worked his way across the U.S. to his native North west, stopped at the Nippon Yusen Kaisha office in Seattle and paid $195 for a round-trip ticket to Yokohama, tourist class.

It was money well spent. Why Japan Was Strong is a candid, simple record of traveling light through a country that most American visitors see expensively, if at all. Author Patric has only one regret. It would be so much easier to hate everything Japanese if he had not made the journey.

He carried his luggage wrapped in a bandanna. When he arrived at the big resort of Nikko he went to a tailor shop, got his silk shirt and white trousers pressed for 20 sen (6¢), searched until he found a hotel he liked. "My room and two meals each day in this, perhaps the very finest native inn in all Japan, was two yen fifty, or 70¢."

The jochu, the pretty servant girl, sat beside him as he ate, remembered how much sugar he liked in his coffee, and pattered into his room in the morning before he was dressed. She had never been kissed. Patric grew fond of her, took her walking in quiet lanes, and when he left gave her an expensive copy of Lamb's Tales from Shakespeare, translated into Japanese. "I wanted her never to forget the first man and perhaps the last who kissed her." That idyllic interlude was soon lost in the travels in industrial Japan, Korea, Occupied China, in questionings by the police, grafting by smart young Japanese racketeers, and a growing knowledge of how systematically Japan was preparing for war with the U.S. Says Patric: the coprosperity sphere in Asia means much to the average Japanese. Huey Long's "Every man a king" seems picayune in comparison.

Drugs and Assassinations. Carroll Alcott (TIME, May 31) began to hate the Japanese in 1927, when, as a Manila news paperman investigating Japanese fortifications he found himself blocked and thwarted by Japanese agents in the Philippines. The principal one: his barber. My War With Japan is intermingled newspaper reminiscences and history of such Oriental affairs as the Japanese drug trade, together with a blow-by-blow account of how the Japanese tried to jam Alcott's anti-Japanese broadcasts from station XMHA in Shanghai. He was shot at and bombed; efforts were made to kidnap him and break his arms. One value of the story: recalling the days after 1937 in Shanghai, when the Japanese were abducting and decapitating Chinese journalists, and when gun fights between Japanese and Chinese terrorists were daily affairs that the news of impending war in Europe crowded out of even the Shanghai newspapers.