Fifty years ago, a young American writer named Frank Gibney, fresh out of the U.S. Navy where he had been a Japanese-speaking intelligence officer, published "Five Gentlemen of Japan," in which he delved into the values and virtues, the faults and failings of a people who had been his mortal enemies only a few years before.
"Five Gents," as Gibney himself calls it, has been re-issued by D'Asia Vu Reprint Library and is as revealing as the day it first appeared. The author says he hasn't changed his mind about Japan although he says, wryly: "On reflection, I find my judgments and conclusions at 27 were stated with somewhat more firmness and assurance than I could muster at 77."
About the vigor of the Japanese, the book says: "Struggle is in their bones and hard work is the condition of their life. They do not shirk struggle -- and its rigors have made them hard but not brittle, pliant but never dissolving. It has not lessened the extent of their art and their capacity to feel. It has left their culture narrow but deep."