BD. Edmund Blunden

78. ‘MacArthur’s Japan’ and ‘Japanese Questions’. Reviews of Kakemono: A Sketch Book of Post-War Japan, by Honor Tracy. Observer, 25 June 1950, p. 7; TLS, 30 June 1950, p. 402.

Two reviews of the same work, the second published anonymously. In both works Blunden questions Tracy’s pessimistic view of the Occupation, though in the Observer he expresses doubts about what might become of ‘certain grand and favourite plans . . . for creating a Japan in the American image’. In TLS he expresses relief that Tracy’s study is not ‘another bright album of festivals, art treasures, [and] thatched farmhouses’. The Observer review includes reference to Hearn (D9).