85 Million Paradoxes

FIVE GENTLEMEN OF JAPAN (373 pp.) --Frank Gibney--Farrar, Straus and Young ($4).

The Emperor of Japan is a stooped, middle-aged man whose greatest pleasure in life is marine biology. He was against the war and the militarists. He is no deity and doesn't want to be. He even likes the idea of Japan as a democracy. But he is also, perhaps more than any man alive, the creature of centuries of rigid tradition. So when a factory worker tried to shake Hirohito's hand during one of his democratic postwar tours, the Emperor said: "Let's do it the Japanese way"--and they exchanged bows.

The Japanese way, like the Japanese themselves, has been but faintly understood by the rest of the world. Prewar insularity, wartime brutality and postwar docility have confused even those who thought they were in the know. This week, in a crisp, lucid book called Five Gentlemen of Japan, the outward confusion is shaken down to meaningful comprehension. What Author Frank Gibney has tried for, and achieved, is a character analysis of the Japanese nation. He has succeeded--perhaps better than anyone else so far--in explaining how decent Japanese could become the brutes of Bataan and Manila, why they are now worthy of trust and important to the free world.

Overseas Rampage. Author Gibney reached Japan on his 21st birthday, Sept. 21, 1945. A Navy lieutenant with a command of the Japanese language, he was detailed to the job of interrogating prisoners of war. He remained less than a year before he was discharged, but in March 1949 he was back again as a correspondent for TIME & LIFE. His Five Gentlemen of Japan are real people: Emperor Hirohito; Fumio Shimizu, a wartime vice admiral, now an engineer; Tadao Yamazaki, a Tokyo newspaperman; Hideya Kisei, a steelworker; Sakaji Sanada, a farmer. In Author Gibney's hands, they are far more than sociological types--or slick stereotypes. Each of them has his own real problems; the Emperor is as much shackled by the deadweight of traditional reverence as Farmer Sanada by the limitations inherent in a six-acre farm. But by hewing to the facts of life that differentiate the five, while underlining what is common to them all, Gibney provides a key to the explanation of Japan's 85 million.

The key, says Author Gibney, lies in understanding the "web" society of Japan. It is based not on anything resembling democratic fairness or Christian morality, but on a semifeudal system of responsibilities and obligations that drains the individuality from all. A poverty-stricken farmer must without question feed a tenth cousin he may hate. Not law, but the web, demands it, just as it lays down that suicide is preferable to capture by the enemy. Overseas in World War II the web was lifted, and Japanese soldiers went on a moral rampage. But when Hirohito perforce accepted the U.S. occupation, MacArthur's rule was sincerely accepted. It became, in an odd way, part of the web --something to live by without question.

Shape of Things to Come. In explaining the Japanese character and the web society that helped form it, Author Gibney refuses to slip into dogmatism. Much of Five Gentlemen is a highly readable and informative historical narrative, showing events shaping national character and national character shaping later events. The paradox of Hirohito's vast national authority and surprising political meekness is seen as the end product of the careers of the 123 emperors who preceded him. Even a sign like the "Forgive and Forget Electrical Company" implies more than the simple opportunism that G.I.s laughed at.

The Japanese have worked hard at democracy, and the web, Author Gibney believes, has been sharply strained. But he is not at all sure that it will soon be torn apart. Communism in Japan is a flop, but the overriding factor in Japan's position today is its proximity and vulnerability to Communist military power. What comfort the Japanese can feel comes from U.S. friendship. It is here that Five Gentlemen becomes an important as well as an illuminating study. Gibney came to like and respect the Japanese. His book explains why the five gentlemen and their 85 million countrymen are entitled to "American responsibility to see Japan through this tense period, insuring the safety no longer of an apprentice, but of a respected equal with great potency for good. The Japanese give much promise of justifying such a trust."

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