DURING MY FIRST year at the ANU, I had insufficient supervision and was consequently lacking direction. Soviet foreign policy in East Asia was plainly not going to work as a thesis topic, but in the course of pre-researching it I had come increasingly to the view that the most interesting country in East Asia was Japan. In the 1960s most people observing post-colonial Asia from the outside probably agreed that the most important Asian countries were China, India and Japan. Maoist China had many supporters among left wing intellectuals in Western countries, but it was difficult for researchers to access, and as it turned out, its economy would not attain the spectacular heights we are now familiar with for another half century. Post-colonial India had established a complex democratic constitution under the leadership of Pandit Nehru, but the country remained a complex web of languages, religions, castes and ethnicities, while economic development in later years, though it was to be impressive, left millions seeking in vain to escape from poverty.

Of course, I could not have foretold such future developments at the time I was deciding on my path of research, but I was finding positive reasons for choosing Japan as my main focus. In later years I have sometimes told people who ask me ‘why Japan?’ that when I began to study Japan I knew less about Japan than about Argentina, and all I knew about Argentina was Eva Peron and Fray Bentos beef. But when I think back, I realise that that was not entirely correct. Like most British people of my generation, old enough to remember at least the later stages of the War, I had uncritically accepted an image of Japanese people as extremely tough fighters, even fanatically so. I had heard stories about Emperor worship, refusal to surrender, kamikaze raids, cruelty towards prisoners of war. And yet my comment on an American military film about the Japanese reproduced in Chapter 5 shows that I was also shocked by the extreme anti-Japanese character of that film. The atom bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki also affected me as it did so many others, even though I was only nine at the time, and I saw my parents critical of the bombing as well.