A Tremendous Army Truck

A friend in Tokyo had told me that he has a chum there whom I must meet.  “He’s so much like you.  Every time I see him I call him by your name.”  One can only hope this gent is as handsome as he is cool.  Regardless, he’s had, literally a lifetimes’ experience with Japan, as his father was a Japanologist (I’d assumed the word was Nippon-ologist, as per Sinologist, but a quick look on-line suggests it isn’t popularly used) who worked with the great scholars of modern Japanese history, Edwin Reischauer and Edward Seidensticker in the years after the War.   That gentleman had seen Japan change since the sixties. 

His father John Howes has written an account of a trip across China he made with his brother, in 1948.  That’s a date for you.  China was still Republican China at that time, but tide had already turned.  The Communist forces had, with Russian help extended into Manchuria and were steadily advancing throughout the countryside. Within a year of his visit, the Guomindang would have fled to Taiwan and Mao would be in the hills of Xiangshan outside Beijing, plotting his entrance. 

A fairly quick and engrossing read, I joined Mssr. Howes and his brother this morning on their trip from occupied Japan to the port of Shanghai and onward, in a ship up to Tianjin, a flight out to Xian, a boat up the Yangze, a rough ride from Chongqing to Chengdu in a tremendous army truck which took them on to Kunming, before they made their way to Burma and on to Calcutta.  I know all those places and can place them in a contemporary context, but I enjoyed reckoning with this familiar territory, before there were any highways, before there were any high-speed trains, after the Japanese had been expelled and before the revolutionary period had begun. 

It wasn’t clear to me whether the book had yet to be published.  Perhaps it’s a bit predictable to suggest but if I had a memoir like that to reckon with, I’d consider writing the modern corollary, and retrace their steps, using the same means by which they traveled.   Perhaps I'll have a chance to discuss on my next Tokyo visit.  '

Saturdays should be for reading.  Plenty of work pending but for this morning, my mind is back, seventy years or so in China’s floundering past.   

Saturday 01/20/18