Returning to Japan after our wide-ranging wanderings was like medieval travellers must have felt when after braving the hazards and inconveniences of open country and strange lands, they returned to the walled safely of their castles and towns, the gate firmly shut behind them. We felt so protected in Japan, so snugly oblivious to what went on outside.

Well, almost. We did follow the world news of course, albeit from a safe distance. The biggest news of early 1965 came from America, which was in danger of losing its reputation as the bulwark of freedom and democracy, as the world began to realise the depth of its racial divisions. The violence in Alabama surrounding the peaceful marches and demonstrations led by Dr Martin Luther King's and others against racially discriminatory laws and practices caused widespread dismay, as did the killing of Malcolm X in February.

The ‘typical’ Japanese attitude to America's woes lay halfway between sympathy and incomprehension. Sympathy with America's inescapable need to deal with expressions of mass discontent in the same way Japan had to face up to the student demonstrations of its own recent past. Incomprehension at the apparent inability of this proud world power, with its loudly proclaimed superior democratic and egalitarian values, to do a better job organising its own society.

This attitude was not free from hypocrisy. Japan, it was argued, had no race problem because it had never bought imported slaves to work for them and had always been cautious and selective in its immigration policies. The plight of Japan's own ‘untouchables’ and of hundreds of thousands of Japanese-born and educated Koreans, many of whose forebears had been brought over forcibly to work in Japan's mines, was called a ‘different matter’. The denial of citizenship to the Koreans, the argument ran, was a political not a racist issue. As for the burakumin, or ‘settlement people’, as Japan's outcasts were referred to, the Government recognised that they were not racially different from mainstream Japanese. The problem, it was emphasised, was a social and religious one. Burakumin were descendants of people who had traditionally practised trades that in Shinto were considered unclean because they were related to death, such as gravediggers, butchers and leather workers.