Midway (CVA 41) - Naval Cruise Book

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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

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The Japanese child is a source of never-ending entertainment to the foreigner. To the Japanese, children are hopes. A member of the present modern generation in Japan has built his country from ruin to power. Now it ' s up to his children to con- tinue building. From meager wages and bad working con- ditions, the Japanese have built until their standard of living is the highest in all Asia. But in true Japanese tradition, they are not satisfied. They look forward to the 38-hour week with fringe benefits just as eagerly as citizens of the U. S. did ten years ago (and some still do today) It is this heritage that the young Nip- pon inherits. In the meantime, they think not of what is past, nor what is to come, but they enjoy the present. Whether we liked them or not, we will remember the Japanese women. From the painted ones in the alleys, to the strikingly beautiful (in the true Western sense of the word) models, the spectrum of Japanese women is just as wide as that of the American product. The difference comes in the role that their civilization has willed. In the U. S. the woman is pampered and waited on from birth by men. In the East, the philosophy is exactly the opposite. 97