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.)
