Big Talker

Alexander S. Panyushkin, Russia's Ambassador to the U.S., was in a rare, talkative mood. He told newsmen who had gathered outside Dean Acheson's office that he was "supremely happy." What about? The pale-faced ambassador looked surprised that the reporter hadn't already heard; he was going back to the Soviet Union, leaving the U.S. "forever." It was the most positive statement Panyushkin had made in his 4 1/2 years in the U.S.

To replace Panyushkin, the Russians last week proposed Georgy N. Zarubin, until last week Soviet Ambassador to Great Britain. Zarubin, who first came to the U.S. in 1939 as assistant commissar general of the Soviet exhibit at the New York World's Fair, was Ambassador to Canada when Soviet spies were caught redhanded stealing atom-bomb secrets. The Canadian Royal Commission later cleared him, produced an exchange of messages between the chief Soviet spy in Canada and his Kremlin boss which indicated that Zarubin was not to be informed of the spy ring in his own embassy.

In Washington, State Department officials emphasized that the shift appeared routine. Whoever serves as Soviet Ambassador to Washington may well be only the embassy's titular head, with the real power in the hands of someone more obscure.

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Last week, 10 1/2 years to the day after the attack on Pearl Harbor, the U.S. also welcomed its first postwar Japanese ambassador, a political unknown, Eikichi Araki.*

No stranger to the U.S., Araki served in both the '20s and '30s in New York as an official of the Bank of Japan. In 1945 he became a vice-governor of the bank, a fact which put him on MacArthur's purge list. He was depurged in 1950. Araki tried to turn down the Washington appointment on the ground that he was not a diplomat, but Premier Yoshida insisted that Araki's financial experience was required in the main business of the embassy: straightening out Japan's debt to the U.S. and arranging for loans from the U.S. Government.

An old-school Japanese, Araki is so polite that he finds it almost impossible to finish 18 holes of golf in a day because he keeps asking others to pass him. He wears a kimono at home and prefers to sleep on a straw mat on the floor. To cook for him and act as his official hostess (he is a widower), the new ambassador brought along his 20-year-old daughter Tomiko, a shy, pretty girl who speaks little English, prefers Western dress. Tomiko is due for some surprises: she prepared herself for her trip to the U.S. by plowing determinedly through works of Faulkner, Dos Passos, Hemingway and Sinclair Lewis.

* No kin to convicted war criminal General Sadao Araki, who directed Japan's 1931 conquest of Manchuria, served in 1938-39 as Japan's Minister of Education.

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