Midway (CVA 41) - Naval Cruise Book

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The one lasting impression in the minds of all who have seen the Japanese country- side is the green. The rich landscapes contain every shade of green known in Kentucky, Wisconsin or Vermont — and then a few. . . . but most from the deep green of Honshu and Kyushu farmlands . aiL vfT ( , A W i S5J6« - ' • ■- ' -,.

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Memory is a strange thing. Two days after an event, you can remember most everytliing about it. Two months after the event, you can remember only the bare outhne of what happened. Two years after, you have forgotten entirely what the event was about, but you can still glimpse small scenes that occurred during it. This is the way it will be with this cruise to Japan. In a few years we will have forgotten the places visited and the people we went with. But even many years from now some favorite small scenes will stick in our minds. Women and children will make up most of these. For centuries, children everywhere have been the favorite subject of writers, artists, photographers and, in short, humanity. To Americans, the Japanese child embodies everything that should be a child. He is the epitome of joy, yet quiet and well-behaved to a degree unheard of in the U.S. but we ' ll remember most Women in general, and Japanese women in particular, have fascinated men for centuries. The American humorist Kin Hubbard said, I don ' t know of anything better than a woman if you want to spend money where it ' ll show. Some of us believed him. Another man, Charles Baudelaire, said, We love women in proportion to their degree of strangeness to us. And so forth, through the centuries, we can find observations written about women by men who tried to figure them out. George Meredith probably put down the only real truth about them, Women will be the last thing civi- lized by man. 96