Transition

In Japan last week, 127,000 hollow-cheeked boys and girls stood patiently in queues. The boys and girls were students, waiting their turn to be examined for entrance into the nation's 89 universities and colleges. In the Tokyo line-up was Shiro Suzuki, 20, an ex-soldier.

Suzuki had gone to a tiny country school in his home village. He had listened to his teachers tell of Japan's glorious destiny. Later, in the Army, he had been stirred by the fiery speeches of his officers. After the war, in a Japan suddenly decreed democratic, he was told that everything he had been taught before was wrong. Bewildered, he had drifted for weeks about the capital, slept in railroad stations. At times he thought of taking his own life.

Last week Suzuki, like thousands of other students, was still lost and bewildered. Said he: "We students talk and talk, but cannot find the answers. How do you figure values between the former education and the present? If one is better than the other, we must understand it. But we have no one who can tell us. In Japan today there are many restrictions which MacArthur has placed upon the people which are not the will of the people. Where is the difference between democracy and what we had before the war?

"I don't know. There are too many things about democracy which we students have not had time to study. All of us here walk three kilometers a day to get a meal of a little rice and radish. It is difficult to contemplate the philosophy of government under such circumstances."

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