A Personal Journey Through Time and Space
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JOURNAL OF INTERNATIONALBUSINESS STUDIES, THIRD QUARTER 1994
letters and an unofficial visit to the Pentagon, I was able to get myself transferredto the program preparingpersonnel for the military government of Japan.That took me to the military government programat the University of Virginia, to Japanese language and cultural studies at Harvard, and later to the Army language school in Monterey, California. We were being trained to hit the beach in Japan and take control of the civilian population, that is, until the bomb ended it all. I had not even gotten my feet wet except in training, let alone been shot at in anger. If it had been otherwise, and the JapaneseEmperorhad so ordered,the Japanese,I am sure, would have fought on to the end, and this intellectual journey might well have been short-lived. Of course, the nearly two years of studying Japanese and Japan produced an intense interest in all things Japanese. At one point I was even classified officially as an "interpreter." There would have been a lot of surprisedand puzzled-Japanese! Suddenly, someone remembered South Korea, which had been bisected by the 38th parallel into two military zones, the north for the USSR and the south for the United States. The result was that some of us were shunted off to bring peace and wisdom to the Koreans, I among them, where one really did not dare speak Japanese. Staged through Manila, where my brother was located at the time as a U.S. Treasury representative, I got my first taste of life abroad, little realizing that I would not returnto the U.S. to live for nearly fifteen years. Then, I was on to Japan very briefly and shortly thereafter to Seoul, Korea. In Seoul, I found myself in the Office of Public Opinion with the U.S. Military Government of South Korea. Working with an all Korean, but largely English-speaking staff, my office conducted very unscientific public opinion surveys throughout the South, as a nod to the idea of responsive government. During this activity, I had the good fortune to be assisted by Sul Kuk Whan, a highly competent, well-educated Korean, with many connections, particularly among the intellectuals of South Korea (and later a very successful business executive), from whom I learned much about his people and their culture. Together, we toured the country, poking into all manner of problems and recruiting and briefing interviewers. The U.S. Military Governor, a buffoon under the name of General Lerch, abruptly terminated our operation when we ran a survey that indicated that a bare 51% of the South Koreans preferred the U.S. occupation to that of the previous Japanese, which, of course, the Koreans hated bitterly. The U.S. authorities did not wish to hear that message, which resulted from cruel mismanagement of the South Korean economy, and in particular, of the distribution of food, during the extremely brutal winter of 1945-46,
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