Letter from Warren Johnston to Bobby [Letter 365]

Letter from Warren Johnston to Bobby [Letter 365]

314 Thursday 30 Aug 1945 7:45 am Darling, Over the radio last night came the preposterous description, yet which did not surprise me, of a sign visible to men on ships in Yokahama Bay - “Three Cheers for the American Army and Navy.” The reaction of all of us sitting around the radio was a mixed gasp and horselaugh. Jim Baird and I sat discussing Japan and the Japanese afterwards. He is sorry to see the old, pre-industrial Japan (in which he's spent a couple of years) die; he sees it as just another outpost where imagination and aesthetic sense and certain notions of living gracefully are being exterminated forever by crass American materialism. But it is no less inevitable, we agreed, and better this time that the job be done thoroly. My guess is that Japan will go thru a period of fervid Americanism now for some twenty or thirty years, aping everything including the worst and only gradually sifting and making uniquely her own. I.L.Y. Warren

1945-08-30

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Wilson College, C. Elizabeth Boyd '33 Archives.

WJ365

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C. Elizabeth Boyd '33 Archives at Wilson College

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