While Edgar Baker, general manager of TIME-LIFE International, was in Tokyo last month on business, he heard from our Korean distributor J. H. Song for the first time since the Korean war began. Song and his family had survived "the Communist nightmare" by hiding in the outskirts of Seoul during the Communist occupation. Luckily the office of his company, the International Publicity League, had escaped destruction and pillage.

At the request of his regular customers, who missed TIME and LIFE during the war, we are now supplying Song with all available back copies as well as with the current issues, which are going to him by commercial airliners. At present TLI is also flying more than 15,000 copies of TIME to the armed forces in Korea each week. They go in mail pouches to Troop Information and Education Officers, who distribute them to company units.

During his 30,000-mile trip to Japan, Hawaii, Formosa, the Philippines, Hong Kong, the Republic of Indonesia and other Far Eastern points, Baker had extended conversations with U.S. diplomats, local government leaders and businessmen. In Japan, he is convinced that the economy is reviving strongly. TIME-LIFE International, which prints two-thirds of its Pacific edition in Tokyo, has switched from a dollar to a yen basis in carrying on its Japanese business; from now on it will be accepting Japanese currency instead of dollars in payment for our magazines.

Baker arrived in Formosa, where TIME and LIFE have the largest circulations of any American magazines, on Double Tenth (October 10), China's Fourth of July, commemorating the end of the Manchu dynasty and the beginning of the Chinese Republic. That afternoon he took in his favorite spectator sport, a baseball game played before some 70,000 Formosan fans, including ex-head-hunting aborigines down from the hills for the occasion.

In Hong Kong he had occasion to investigate the black market for TIME and LIFE inside Communist China. Travelers reported the following prices for TIME in Shanghai: for the current issue, $1.80 (54,000 Chinese dollars); up to two weeks old, $1.50; up to one month old, $1.20. Copies of TIME can be bought furtively from street vendors in Shanghai and are passed from hand to hand to other readers.

Says Baker: "This active market for American publications in Shanghai points up the fact that in the Orient, the war of ideas and words is a real war. Certainly the Chinese Communists recognize this. In many Southeast Asian countries the Red Star and Mao Tse-tung's face are among the most familiar sights; bookstores overflow with Communist propaganda produced locally or imported from Russia, China and Vietminh. In areas where literacy rates are generally very low the Communists have accepted the great truth that the spoken word, the whispering campaign and the picture cartoon are far more potent weapons than the written word.

"The democracies have disappointingly little to offer in opposition. Our State Department is stepping up its program rapidly and beginning to adapt its methods to local conditions. But unless a bigger and better job is done, by U.S. private enterprise as well as government, there is clear danger that we shall again, as in China, lose the war of ideas -- and the support of the illiterate millions whom we have not yet learned to talk to in ways they understand." Cordially yours,

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