FIVE GENTLEMEN OF JAPAN:
The Portrait of a Nation’s Character – Fourth Edition
Frank Gibney
Introduction to the Fourth Edition by Frank Gibney
This classic account (1952)
of the makers of “New Japan” tells the life stories of a journalist, an ex-Navy
vice-admiral, a steel worker, a farmer, and Emperor Hirohito. Frank Gibney was
a wartime intelligence officer who became Time
magazine correspondent during the American Occupation of Japan. He went on
to be a major interpreter of Japan to Americans and America to Japanese, known
as a knowledgeable, genial presence in the PBS series Pacific Century.
In the late
1940s and early 1950s, Japan was a poor, broken, and troubled society. Many in
both Japan and the West assumed that it would always be so. But Gibney reported
on Japan in such telling and readable detail that we can see in this book both
the now forgotten atmosphere of that time and the basis for the “Japanese miracle”
to follow. As the writer Timothy Garton Ash observes, “the scholar will not
know, and therefore will find it more difficult to recreate, what it was really
like at the time, how places looked and smelled, how people felt, and what they
didn’t know. . . . There is nothing to compare with being there.”
“Here is a thoughtful,
charmingly written, well-balanced interpretation of Japan, with special
emphasis upon the recent years. It seeks to understand and explain the contradictions
in the Japanese character of which we heard much during the recent war. On the
one hand, the Japanese are courteous, honest, sensitive, lovers of beauty, and
loyal in their friendships and their family relations. Moreover, they
accommodated themselves smilingly to the Occupation, although it was an
experience unprecedented in their history. On the other hand, during their
years of war with China and then with the United Nations, they were callously
cruel, brutal, ruthless, and fanatically courageous. How is this paradox
explained? . . . If the busy American
can find time to read only one book on Japan, this is the one it should be.”
- Kenneth Scott Latourette, Saturday
Review
“Mr. Gibney is well
qualified to write this book. During the war the Navy sent him to language
school and then put him to interviewing Japanese prisoners. Since the war,
except for eighteen months in Europe, he has been continuously in Japan, first
in with the occupation and then as the head of the Tokyo bureau of Time magazine. More than this, he brings
to his task understanding, objectivity, warmth and humor.”. . .
- Elizabeth
Gray Vining: New York Times Book Review
Frank Gibney, a veteran journalist and writer, is President of
the Pacific Basin Institute at Pomona College. He is the author of twelve
books, including The Pacific Century,
Japan: The Fragile Superpower, and Korea’s Quiet Revolution; his edited
books include SENSO: The Japanese
Remember the Pacific War — Letters to the Editor of Asahi Shimbun, and The Nanjing Massacre: A Japanese Journalist
Confronts Japan’s National Shame, by Honda Katsuichi.
EastBridge D’Asia Vu Reprint Library · 2003 · 386 pp
ISBN 1-891936-09-3 (pb) $29.95