Like many people who have grown to love Japan, I first met the Japanese in war, where in the steaming South Pacific, they were terrible enemies. I next saw the Japanese in their homeland, and they seemed at first aloof and almost morbidly serious. In those cold days of little food, the people of Tokyo hurried along crowded streets with never a smile, their minds apparently obsessed with problems of unbearable gravity. Even today, strangers who pass quickly through Japan rarely attain even a clue as to what the people of Japan are like, for in no other nation of the world does a frigid and formal exterior so completely mask a warm, and even hilarious, interior life.
THE DELIGHTFUL PEOPLE
Oh, the boisterous fun of knowing a Japanese family well! Take the letter I received last month from a former American soldier. “I flew back from the front in Korea with an introduction from my friend to a family in Kamakura. When I first met them, they stood like statues and I thought, let’s get out of here. Ten days later, at the end of my leave. I wanted to stay with them forever. Looking back, I think it was the constant laughter.”
In recent years, many travellers have discovered this hidden laughter. It dominates one’s most poignant memories of Japan. Let me explain how gently this laughter arises.
The Kato family lives on the outskirts of Tokyo, in a small house with practically no furniture. The floors are immaculately clean, and when you arrive some evening with Kato-san he shows you where to kick off your shoes. Then, ceremonially, he seats you beside a brazier, glowing with charcoal, which will warm the tips of your fingers and little more.
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