Five Gentlemen of Japan: The Portrait of a Nation’s Character (D’Asia Vu Reprint Library

This classic account (1952) of the makers of “New Japan” tells the life stories of a journalist, an ex-Navy vice-admiral, a steel worker, a farmer, and Emperor Hirohito. Frank Gibney was a wartime U.S. Navy intelligence officer who became Time magazine correspondent during the American Occupation of Japan. He went on to be a major interpreter of Japan to Americans and America to Japanese, known as a knowledgeable, genial presence in the PBS series Pacific Century . In the late 1940s and early 1950s, Japan was a poor, broken, and troubled society. Many in both Japan and the West assumed that it would always be so. But Gibney reported on Japan in such telling and readable detail that we can see in this book both the now forgotten atmosphere of that time and the basis for the “Japanese miracle” to follow.