OCR Text |
Show 77 For though his warmth had overcome her initial fearfulness it did not immediately wipe out the diffidence of a lifetime, and the pressures of an entire culture. Japan was under great stress, and many of the girls who tripped away so blithely to a GI's bed were the poor and desperate, too beleaguered to bother with pride. But Kimiko. . . .barren as her home was now, she could not but remember what it had been. Her father had been respected, called on by all Japanese dignitaries, and with a wide connection among the Dutch and Indonesians. From her earliest days she had been exposed to Western culture, though always, behind her father's graciousness, lay a slight sense of condescension. Japan, he had felt, had not only been the first oriental country to westernize, but still kept a deep sense of its own character, and must examine each potential importation before taking it on. (The lower the class, of course, the narrower that vision grew: Akako, Kimiko's maid, had been contemptuous of Indonesia. To her Japan, and behind it China, had came forth as the final fruition of the human mind, and all other countries - certainly those noisy, brutal Western producers of warships and movies - were either dangerous or irrelevant.) Akako wasn't, of course, all of Japan: even though in numbers she and her kind had predominated, before the war they had little power. In politics the militarists had prevailed, in culture, the upper classes. But her opinions were representative. Now, Kimiko sensed, the shoe was on the other foot - and with a vengeance. Japan had come to be occupied by half a million blonde, blue-eyed Akakos, their interest in Japan as fleeting as their yearning for home was deep. And they were |