Perhaps even the inscrutable Buddhas among the temple cedars of Hokkaido lifted their eyebrows for a moment last week to see so many up-to-the-minute copies of TIME circulating freely in Japan.

For TIME was banned from the Mikado's empire for years before the war began (just as we were banned in Germany and banned in Italy).

In those days our Tokyo correspondent had to work incognito -- operating like a ''cloak and dagger" boy and smuggling the news out by slipping it into the hands of American tourists on their way home.

Today we have eight TIME & LIFE men sending us daily reports from conquered Nippon. We have opened an office on the famous (and garish) Ginza, complete with two reception rooms the last tenant used for ceremonial tea drinking.

And we are printing thousands of copies of TIME each week right in Tokyo. They are printed primarily for the occupation forces, of course, but we hear that a great many Japanese have been trying to borrow copies from our troops to get their first uncensored news in many a year.

The first issue distributed in Japan was August 27 with General MacArthur on the cover. And copies of the next issue (Sept. 3) were being printed within sight of the moated Imperial Palace in Tokyo four days after the 1st Cavalry Division entered the southern outskirts of the city.

To arrange for this printing, Bernard Clayton (who heads the Far-Eastern edition we print each week in Manila) had entered Tokyo a week ahead of our troops. His arrival on the electric train from Yokohama was prosaic enough, but a few days before the Japanese shore batteries had fired on the plane in which he flew up from Okinawa to be among the first Americans landed in Japan.

Negotiations with the printer we finally chose were complicated by the fact that he knew only one word of English (cabled Clayton: "When I asked through our interpreter why TIME had to be folded and stitched by hand, Matushima led me to a door on the second floor which opened into a charred nothingness. Said he in awed respect, 'Ah, B-29'").

News is always tremendously important to American boys far from home, but our Tokyo edition found its news-hungriest audience among the prisoners, long cut off from any word of the world outside the barbed-wire. Said Chaplain R. S. Waldrop: "These copies are a Godsend, for these men are as hungry for news as they are for food and medical aid." A B-29 crew man shot down in a big fire raid last spring had a different angle--

"Reading this issue of TIME is sort of like walking into the middle of a mystery movie. What is this Potsdam declaration? What happened to all the secretaries of state?

"When I was shot down Roosevelt had just died, and we had a mental image of the new president sitting at the piano admiring a movie actress' legs. We're mighty relieved to read in TIME that Mr. Truman is doing a real job and pleasing almost everyone--even the Russians."

Cordially,

P.S. Bill Laurence of the New York Times, heading home after reporting the atomic bombing in Japan, found our August 20 issue with its atomic bomb section selling in the Central Pacific for the fabulous price of one bottle of whiskey!

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