Togetherness in Japan

Sir: Veracity and readability were uniquely combined in "The Right Eye of Daruma," your cover story on Japan and Premier Sato [Feb. 10].

The only pertinent fact that I might have added is that the Japanese are a nation of strong collective mentality. A Japanese standing alone feels as naked, lonely, isolated, conspicuous and bewildered as a Honda on the Kansas turnpike --and doesn't like it. He may seem at times to long for individuality, to talk about it and even try to display it. Nevertheless, he is disquieted to find it in himself. Sato's consensus politics is but a manifestation of this national trait.

YUTAKA TSUBOI

Washington, D.C.

Sir: I wish to offer my congratulations on the excellent article on Prime Minister Sato and the contemporary political situation in Japan. However, I am constrained to draw your attention to the passage in which it is stated that Prime Minister "Sato . . . was on the verge of sending a token number of troops to aid Saigon before the U.S. buildup and the bombing of the north began." The sending of troops abroad by Japan is prohibited under the provisions of our constitution and, therefore, as policy, it is inconceivable that the government should send troops abroad and the Japanese government has consequently never expressed its intention to do so.

Kinya Nuseki

Director

Public Information Bureau

The Ministry of Foreign Affairs

Tokyo

The Astronauts

Sir: The Astronauts [Feb. 3] have become heroes at a time when heroic figures are sorely needed. Perhaps their greatest legacy will be not their contribution to the space program, though that is considerable, but the inspiration they have given to the youth of America. Because of these young men, many younger people will value their education more and set their goals higher than before.

MRS. R. DE BAISE

East Syracuse, N.Y.

Sir: Any child is aware of the highly volatile nature of a pressurized, 100% oxygen environment. I find it inconceivable that a fire-extinguishing and emergency-hatch system capable of being instantaneously triggered at any stage of the countdown was not ordered into the design of the Apollo capsule. It is true that "accidents will happen," particularly in research programs such as this--but they are excusable only if due to causes unknown or unforeseeable. This wasteful tragedy is made even more poignant by the fact that its prevention was well within our present technological capability.

H. A. LANGDON

Margate City, N.J.

Sir: With all due respect and admiration for the three ill-fated astronauts, I cannot help wondering if our space program and its nebulous goals justify the past, present and future sacrifices and costs involved, and at the expense of down-to-earth domestic programs.

Perhaps we should consider what Tennyson wrote in Locksley Hall Sixty Years After. "Is it well that while we range with Science, glorying in the Time./City children soak and blacken soul and sense in city slime?"

M. P. MESKELL

Medford, Mass.

Under the Big Sky

Sir: This morning I awakened to another windy Montana morning. I grumbled a little as I dressed; I've never liked wind, and we get a lot of it in this prairie country.

Something happened this morning, though, that made me change my mind forever: I read your cover story on air pollution [Jan. 27]. Then I went to the door and opened it. The turbulent air was clean and bracing, and the snow that had fallen a week ago was still white and clean.

I will never complain about the wind again. I will thank God every day of my life that I am privileged to live in this Big Sky country. But what is more to the point, I will support every effort to alleviate air pollution elsewhere and to prevent it in Montana.

JEAN BILLINGS HARTMAN

Great Falls, Mont.

In the Eyes of the Viewer

Sir: In response to "What Is Art Today?" [Jan. 27], may I suggest a definition I created a few years past while a student at the University of Chihuahua?

Art is an enduring and continuingly communicating record of man's emotional response to his existence. This applies to all of the traditional fine arts, music, poetry, drama, architecture, painting, sculpture, etc., but obviously has little bearing on many current creations, collectively best described as the neo-excretionist school.

CARLOS MIRANDA

San Patricio, N. Mex.

Sir: The province of the artist is not to reflect the bafflement of mankind but to show that order and beauty exist.

RUTH SMOCK

Silver Spring, Md.

Sir: Art is anything that evokes feeling.

HOWARD B. REICH

Pine Beach, N.J.

Sir: Art is so completely subjective that it cannot be defined except on an individual basis. What may be art to you is not necessarily art to me.

For myself, I demand only that a picture or an object be interesting; it need not be beautiful or even have a meaning. Much so-called modern art, however, does not interest me; some of the things currently presented as art seem to me to be atrocities. I resent the contention so commonly made today that it is my duty and that of all other persons to make a continuing effort to understand and appreciate it. As a scientist, I have some esoteric interests of my own, but I do not insist that anyone else share my interests in these things. In fact, I would be surprised if many people did.

J. MARVIN WELLER

University of Chicago

Chicago

Sir:

Art is in itself life;

to look

and see the true;

the intensifying of time

and space into love,

and not a dirty four-lettered word.

THOMAS V. PRITSCHER

Munich Federal Republic of Germany

Sir: Whatever else it may be, art is difficult. To achieve it, the artist gives most of his time and often all of his energy. Whatever their school, painters of the past sincerely engaged in creating works of art labored for months, even years, to perfect a single picture. They were like Yeats, who slaved an entire day to get a few lines that satisfied him. The quick pace of modern life has accelerated the painter and wrecked his work. If I draw nice circles and squares, or if you paint pretty stripes set off with excellent polka dots, we have not made art, because, as we have all been saying for years while only half believing it, anybody can do that.

But this is the age of junk, and nothing is difficult any more.

WILLIAM R. MYSHRALL

Catskill, N.Y.

Shock Troops

Sir: Critics of Professor Shockley [Feb. 3] unjustly claim that he seeks evidence for Negro inferiority to foster racial bias. There may be biological as well as environmental bases for social problems involving many individual Negroes. It may be that one means to equality of achievement for Negroes as a "racial" group is biological, i.e., by positive eugenics or by biological engineering when means are developed. Social actions are being taken on the basis of whether persons are white or Negro rather than on the basis of their individuality, and actions are being taken on the assumption that if environments are made similar, people will become alike. These questions are researchable, and Shockley and I are among those opposed to the substitution of closed systems of belief for the free pursuit of knowledge. DWIGHT J. INGLE

Chairman

Department of Physiology

University of Chicago

Chicago

Cold Comfort

Sir: Planning to be a freezee some day just as Dr. Bedford is, I must voice some objections to "Never Say Die" [Feb. 3]. You call the process of freezing "strange rites," but, as Jessica Mitford has ably pointed out, interment is the method that is eerie. Cryobiology is a young science, but the mass of individuals now planning on being frozen should give it a stimulating boost. Last year predictions ran that it would be 50 years before a mammalian brain would be successfully frozen, but one was successfully frozen and thawed that very year (Nature, Oct. 15, 1966). Now you are saying that success with a human organ lies in the distant future. How distant?

JUDIE WALTON

Spartanburg, S.C.

Sir: I don't understand all this concern about the feasibility of freezing bodies. The unlikelihood of resuscitating a refrigerated body is irrelevant to the philosophy of cryobiology. The only relevant question is whether or not cryobiology is marketable.

In the near future, look for some market-research survey to come up with these conclusions: To whom will cryobiology appeal most? Middle and upper-class agnostics and atheists. To whom will it appeal least? Nuns (who aren't a heck of a good market anyway). Who will benefit most? Lawyers, existentialists, loan companies, adaptable morticians. What group will be most resistant to it? Eskimos. To whom will it all be one big joke? Those who finally develop the knowledge to thaw us out and the common sense not to.

LEONARD G. KASSEL

Beverly Hills, Calif.

Getting the Bird

Sir: Your statement that Michael Caine's latest bird, Camilla Sparv [Feb. 3], is a rura avis is in need of amplification. Sparv is the Swedish word for the ubiquitous sparrow, if anything an avis communis.

No offence to Miss Sparv, who from her picture seems to be a fine chick indeed.

L. BORJE LOFGREN, M.D.

West Stockbridge, Mass.

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