COLUMBIA
LIBRARY
COLUMNS
 

Japan Revisited;
A Vignette of World War II

FAUBION BOWERS
 

The author of the following, excerpted with his permission from his
memoir in the Oral History Collection in the Columbia Libraries and
here printed for the first time, witnessed an episode of World War II
that was at once highly dramatic, poignant, and (at unexpected
moments) comical: the reception of the first Americans to land in
Japan after her capitulation.

Faubion Bowers told the story fifteen years later at the behest of
the University's Oral History Research Office. Like Bowers, the
person who conducted this interview, Mrs. Beate Gordon, served the
country as a Japanese interpreter during the war and the Occupation.
The reader should bear in mind, of course, that he is reading a tran¬
script of the spoken word, taken from a tape-recorder—the raw ma¬
terial of history, not the finished product.

LOUIS N. STARR, Director of Oral History Research Office

(Mr. Bowers explains in the opening pages of the memoir that
he first visited Japan as a student en route to study music in Indo¬
nesia in 1940.)

... I was terribly poor, as you can imagine. I borrowed the
money in order to do it. And I went second-class. And they had
these arrangements whereby you could land in Yokohama and
then you could rejoin the ship thirteen days later at Kobe, and