Looking at the document which he held, he related its contents to me: "On the basis of our careful recommendation, the General Headquarters has approved a mission to the United States which you are to head, and has already determined the time of departure of your mission." He went on to explain that some fifteen representatives of various offices in prefectures, cities, towns, and villages would make a three month's tour of the United States and visit various specified cities. We would carry out intensive research in each locality, which it was hoped would enable us to bring back to Japan useful knowledge of the workings of state and local governments in the United States. By means of such tours, even though of short duration, my superior went on to say, General MacArthur desired that as many Japanese officials as possible should observe representative government in action. We were to observe democratic principles and practices as Americans used them. He gave me a list of the offices which were to be represented and stated that in a day or so I would meet the delegates chosen to represent those offices. He congratulated me on having been assigned to head the mission and teasingly told me that he was slightly jealous for not going in my place.
Have you ever been taken back with surprise or "rocked," as my English friends say? I expressed my deepest gratitude as well as I could and gathered my papers awkwardly from the chair and floor to which they had fallen. I was indeed surprised and overjoyed at the appointment, and the details of the measure I had so carefully prepared floated away in my excitement.
I left his office and departed for home, without a word to any of my associates, even though they eyed me inquiringly. I was deeply happy that I was going to the United States once again, regardless of the mission. Today, I am happy that I went, and I shall continue to be the rest of my life.
I was so anxious to start that it seemed to take an eternity for the members of the mission to assemble! As the other members arrived on successive days, I discovered that they too were excited and anxious to take off. Just as my superior had informed me, these fellow delegates came from all parts of Japan. There was Governor S. from Kyushu, the southernmost island of the country, who was anxious above all else to learn the workings of state assemblies in America. Mr. K., who had served many years as a prefectural governor both in Japan and Korea, wanted to know how excise-tax revenues were collected in American municipalities. Mayor S. of a town in Aichi prefecture was eager to study garbage disposal and fly extermination in various rural municipalities in the United States. Then there was Mr. I., until recently Vice-Minister of Education in Tokyo, who was interested in school districts of America, a subject about which the Japanese were almost totally ignorant.
Before we had too much time to express our impatience, we found ourselves actually flying along 20,000 feet over the enormous expanse of the Pacific. The conversation of my immediate companions and the little chats I had with the others aboard gave me pause for serious contemplation. Here we were speeding to the United States, and none of my companions had ever been there before. "What did they expect?" I wondered.
On board the great Pan-American clipper soon after leaving Tokyo, we were each given a carton containing various kinds of food, including a big piece of roast chicken! My fellow passengers asked me in whispered tones whether this constituted the whole day's ration. What a surprise we had when we were told that that was to be our breakfast and that we would be fed similarly at each mealtime! Having been used for so many years to meager food supplies, especially during the war years, we naturally reveled in this American extravagance. What we used to get occasionally at first-class restaurants in our country and thought was a sumptuous repast was but "chicken feed" in comparison.
In my travels to various countries while I was an official with the Foreign Office of the Imperial Japanese Government, I was often profoundly shocked by certain customs of the people in those countries. I was jerked around more than once by the structure of their language in terms of mine. It is my opinion that what some of my foreign friends regard as merely trivial become more often than not the monumental hurdles in otherwise peaceful journeys. These minor customs, methods of speaking or thinking or acting, so frequently become the turning points of truly great issues that all of them deserve more than a casual survey. As for myself, I have studied them as best I can.
Thus, though coming to the United States with a group of my countrymen on an important mission, my thoughts and interests turned to the little habits and customs of daily living. I could picture our group being most curious and even amused by what we observed and also could see that, even though my companions spoke and understood little English, they realized that they themselves would be the cause for many an American to chuckle.
While thus musing, I resolved, in touring about America this time, to draw as many comparisons as I could. My companions had already given me evidence of a similar desire on their part, and throughout the entire journey, I was never surprised to see them making quick but lengthy entries in their fattening notebooks. Our primary concern would be: How do Americans do things? Moreover, for us Japanese the question does not cover just a few things, it includes everything! But we had little time for philosophizing! We were landing!
As our giant trans-Pacific clipper roared over the Bay region of California in the early morning and headed toward Travis Airfield, memories came back thick and fast of my residence in San Francisco a decade before.
Thoughts of Tokyo, left behind only thirty-seven hours before, were rapidly receding into haziness, and others raced into our excited minds! I had thought Tokyo was a prosperous metropolis, whose war scars had finally been obliterated; some foreign visitors have called our city the "oasis of the troubled Orient." As a matter of fact, as we took off from Haneda Airport and soared over the twin-city area of Tokyo and Yokohama two nights before, I had been impressed by the myriads of glittering lights beneath us, which presented a veritable fairyland! I flattered myself that my country was well on its way to recovery and imagined that neither San Francisco nor New York would look different from Tokyo when viewed from the air at night. My illusions were rudely shattered, for here below me was this great city, whose powerful incandescent lamps lit up imposing skyscrapers and showed block after block of homes and buildings in clear relief. Tokyo is a compactly built-up area with seven and one-half million people. But how dim Tokyo seemed in comparison!
Soon after our arrival at the California airdrome, one of the first sights to greet our eyes was the constant stream of motor vehicles on the highway leading to San Francisco. What a sight to behold! That wriggling stream was a never-ending procession of shining limousines and monstrous vans racing along on the six-lane highway. It was stupendous, breath-taking, and almost unbelievable.
Tokyo today abounds in automobiles—we have more cars on the roads now than we had in the most prosperous prewar years. Narrow and straggling Tokyo streets have almost become untenable with some 60,000 passenger cars. The city of Tokyo has a population of some seven and a half million, so the ratio of automobiles to population is one car for every 125 persons. In contrast, we were told that the ratio in California was one car for every two persons. A dusty concrete and macadam road links Tokyo and Yokohama and constitutes Japan's Route 1 national highway. Compared with this cavalcade, however, it seemed like a mere country lane.
As I rode into San Francisco, all the buildings seemed massive and awe-inspiring. True, we have eight- to ten-story reinforced-concrete buildings everywhere in Tokyo, Kyoto, Kobe, Osaka, and Nagoya, and still more are being built. But how undersized they are in Western terms! Our ten-story buildings are no higher than a four-story building of the same kind of steel and concrete structure in America. Ours are smaller in scale in almost every respect, especially in the height of the rooms. Likewise, sidewalks of the city streets in the United States are perhaps three times wider than those of the Ginza, Tokyo's Fifth Avenue. Also, the streets are less crowded, and people seem to breathe more freely in the United States. In suburban districts, especially, this sense of space is particularly in evidence. Nowhere in Japan can be found such spacious lawns as are seen on American university campuses. Even the patches of small lawns which surround most middle-class duplex homes are seldom, if ever, duplicated in the urban areas of my country.
One day while in San Francisco, I went to see the house in which I and my family had lived some ten years ago. How spacious and spick-and-span the house looked!