Books: Japan's Collective Führer

GOVERNMENT BY ASSASSINATION—Hugh Byas—Knopf ($3).

With the possible exception of Joseph Clark Grew, there is no one as well qualified to explain the Japanese to Americans as Hugh Byas. Ambassador Grew spent ten years in Japan, Hugh Byas spent 36. Both loved the Japanese and were apparently loved by them. Both prefer facts to hysteria.

As Tokyo correspondent of the two most formidably restrained newspapers in the world, the London Times and the New York Times, Hugh Byas could afford not to be a hawker of sensations. In late years it was a rare...