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It is all real, but really only a part of Japan. The stenographer who trips along in high heels and Western dress is often hurrying home for a quiet lesson in flower arranging. The man who elbows his way into an elevator jammed with strangers will a moment later bow two or three ceremonial bows to an acquaintance. The Western-tailored businessman returns at night to a severely plain house of wood and paper. At the entrance he takes off his shoes, steps onto a straw mat (tatami), changes into a kimono and walks straight out of the Western world until tomorrow morning. The central room, except for mats and sliding panels and perhaps a low table, is without furniture; the eye is left free to contemplate the one picture and the single flicker of white plum blossom arranged carefully beneath it.
The factory worker's home in Osaka or the farmer's on Kyushu will be smaller and meaner, but it too will have half a dozen or more prints to be hung, one at a time, and contemplated according to the seasons. Each object, each gesture gives off a melancholy beauty inimitably Japanese. All is so precisely arranged that a wisp of dried fern or a few swirls of gravel in a garden may seem more overpowering than an Alpine view; a slightly disarranged bamboo blind can suggest chaos.
Something Borrowed. Between these two ways of life, between the jostle and the ceremony, the Japanese maintain a sort of coexistence, each facet rubbing against and invisibly changing the other, but never allowed quite to melt into one pattern. This frictional interplay was going on long before the Americans arrived with their atomic bombs, occupation army and MacArthur's new constitution. For 70 remarkable years after Commodore Perry steamed into Uraga Harbor, Japan, under the enlightened reign of Emperor Meiji, force-fed itself on all the Western notions, inventions, techniques and customs it could absorb.
Just as, 14 centuries earlier, they had borrowed the essentials of their nationhood from Asia—the writing and art of China, the advanced mores of Korea, the ethic of Confucius, the religion of Buddha —the Japanese in the Meiji period borrowed the makings of a second way of life, and wrought history's most remarkable transformation. The cocoon of medieval primitivism was broken and Japan emerged a modern world power—the first and only industrial nation of the Orient.
From the industrial revolution the Japanese borrowed the factory (Japan got steel mills almost as early as home looms); from the English they borrowed Parliament, from the Latins a brawling way of running it, and from Tammany Hall the ways to get around it. The new Japanese army was modeled after Prussia's, the navy after Britain's, and the battleships came by way of the latest designs of Clydeside and Newport News, Va. The Japanese bought Manhattan's disassembled Sixth Avenue Elevated as scrap iron (and returned it later with a bang). They also borrowed, from Britain's successful example of the 17th to null centuries, the notion that a poor island nation has a right and a destiny to build an empire. What they could not get by borrowing or adapting, they went after with a savagery that bloodied history with the rape of Nanking and the death march of Bataan.