Details
The China Society for People's
Friendship Studies (PFS) in cooperation with the Foreign Languages Press
(FLP) in Beijing has arranged for re-publication, in the series
entitled Light on China, of some fifty books written in English between
the 1860s and the founding years of the People's Republic, by
journalistic and other sympathetic eyewitnesses of the revolutionary
events described. Most of. These books have long been out of print, but
are now being brought back to life for the benefit of readers in China
and abroad.
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Japan is one of those countries, like modem Italy, that welcome the
traveller with open arms——provided he remains a tourist, or a discreet
student of aita cultura. Wherever you move within such harmless fields,
museums, theatres, and university libraries open their doors with quiet
efficiency, and a charming official courtesy. One could only be grateful
for this; and my first weeks in Japan passed pleasantly enough. The
cultural approach is the one most of us would choose for the study of
any nation, had we but world enough, and time.
But time was the
enemy; I had come to Japan in the hope of seeing something more than
museums. A few actual and contemporary details could be supplied, of
course, by an unconducted tour of the Tokyo slums, or a night visit to
the Asakusa, playground of the city proletariat. Even more revealing was
a stroll through the cheap licensed quarters, where tiny painted
creatures peer like mice through a grating at the passer-by. (It would
take a hardy statistician to calculate the total number of prostitutes
in this third-largest city of the world. Most of them have been sold
into the trade by poor country families.)
