Japan and Asia

The Japanese Embassy in Bangkok is a modest building which behind its plain facade hides a skillfully designed microcosm of modern Japan-efficient, stylish, and purposeful. A row of tall casaurina trees almost totally masks the Embassy from the seething traffic of the Phetchburi road. It is a contrived essay in discretion. If the Japanese Embassy truly reflected its economic power in Thai affairs, it would be one of the tallest, most flamboyant buildings in this flamboyant city. But Japan has deliberately chosen the path of modesty in postwar Southeast Asia. Some observers attribute this to a Machiavellian plan, by which the Japanese intend, under a screen of self-effacement, to rebuild the Asian empire which they won by force in the two decades before the collapse in August 1945. That interpretation does not take into account the deeply-ingrained Japanese abhorrance of panache. Ichiro Kawasaki, in his well-known book Japan Unmasked,' tells of a veteran Japanese diplomat who had served in a number of European capitals and later became a foreign minister, and who composed a poem while in his ambassadorial post in Europe. The poem was to the effect that though he was living in the glamor and luxury of diplomatic life, he would sooner go home to view a full moon through a tomrn paper screen in his wooden house. This is one aspect of the complex mixture of opposites which forms the Japanese. Southeast Asians who deal with them find them also insensitive, arrogant, and treacherous. The official policy of