The Inscrutable Scrutinized

HONORABLE ENEMY--Ernest O. Mauser --Duell, Sloan & Pearce ($2.50).

THE ARMED FORCES OF THE PACIFIC--W. D. Puleston--Yale ($2.75).

Off & on for twelve years a journalist in the Orient, Ernest O. Hauser has not been content to meet the East over a Scotch & soda in Tokyo's Imperial Hotel. He has dug his way deep into the mysteries of Oriental temperament. Honorable Enemy is a knowing and compassionate portrait of the Japanese character.

To Hauser, the typical Japanese is a "nervous, emotionally high-pitched, sensitive person ... a poor man in a poor country" unable to break through the manners and social limitations of the "oldest totalitarian system on earth." His legendary imitative talents extend only to the materialistic trappings of other cultures (his "Westernization . . . has reached its climax already"). The "die-easy" liberals within Japan's congenitally feudal society have lost faith and hope--seeking to fuse two irreconcilable attitudes toward life, they "forgot to give liberalism to the people." Though Japan may never return to a point where, as in the last century, the mere intention to travel abroad was punishable by death, Hauser implies that East is still East, West still West. . . .

Cardinal point of Hauser's study is the split personality of the Japanese. At home he is "serene and tender," is so hypersensitive he requires vases of flowers in his subway trains; in uniform he is "as ruthless as the Prussian sergeant" and is capable of such atrocities as the Rape of Nanking. In explaining him Hauser eschews Freud for Cervantes: he is "a frustrated knight whose quixotic sense of chivalry makes him fight windmills and cut his belly if he is defeated." Thus millions of Japanese have been convinced of the sanctity of their service to China, have regarded it somewhat as a "charity bazaar." Says Hauser: "The impact of a military defeat upon the Japanese would be more violent, more revolutionary, more savage and more definite than in any other nation or society."

Captain William Dilworth Puleston, U.S.N., onetime Chief of Naval Intelligence and author of the authoritative Mahan: The Life and Work of Captain Alfred Thayer Mahon, understands the Japanese people principally as sailors good and true. An old-line imperialist, he sees the Far Eastern issue in terms of the Open Door.

The Armed Forces of the Pacific proceeds to compare in detail the physical strength of the Japanese and U.S. fleets to draw conclusions from the Russo-Japanese War and the Battle of Jutland to suggest the commonly supposed hankering of Navy men to go beat the Japs while the beating is good.

Chances for a U.S. victory, implies Puleston, are very bright providing 1 ) we maintain our naval superiority, 2) our fleet is kept concentrated (either in the Atlantic or Pacific) until the two-ocean navy is completed, 3) Singapore, Guam and Manila are adequately fortified. Invasion of Japan would not be necessary and the Nipponese Navy, to escape being bombed out of the Inland Sea, would probably have to fight a decisive full-dress battle-- which Journalist Hauser, no naval expert, insists high Japanese naval officials would seek to avoid.

Captain Puleston sees an alternative to war. Germany has little more to offer Japan than moral support in the Pacific. Perhaps Japan will come to realize she has picked the wrong horse-- that her economic destiny lies closer to the Washington-London Axis.

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