The Japanese are now being told, with examples, that America "is a barbaric nation unparalleled in the world." The examples are taken from our civilian life, not from our military performance, and they include wrestling matches, blackface comedians, plays like "Tobacco Road," and actresses selling kisses for war bonds. A retort will doubtless come easily to American lips, but it is interesting, nevertheless, to show the difference in mores. The exercise, moreover, is helpful in understanding Japanese psychology, and in the task ahead understanding is more helpful than invective, being fundamental to the waging of psychological warfare, and no less essential when the shooting is over.
    Much of our psychological warfare, for instance, was undone when the magazines ran pictures of Japanese skulls and bones that had been fashioned by some of our soldiers into souvenirs for their sweethearts. Copies found their way to Japan. They filled the Japanese with more horror than they filled Americans, though Americans from the President down expressed it. For a religious connotation is attached to their dead among the Japanese people, who, though irreligious as a rule, have a respect for the dead greater than ours. Even the irreligion of the Japanese coexists with a filial piety which almost amounts to religion, and there is none of the blank irreligion to be encountered in Western lands.
    Exhibitionism, free and easy relations between the sexes - these things are never found in Japan. The Japanese in particular think of promiscuous osculatory and other contacts between men and women as quite uncivilized. But we don't see what the Japanese mean in arraigning our wrestling as a barbaric spectacle. Wrestling is an ancient and popular sport in Japan, whence, of course, came the aristocratic pastime known as jujitsu. The "huge and horrible looking monsters" (vide the Japanese commentator) in our rings are duplicated in Japan, where professional wrestlers are several times as big as ordinary folk. Perhaps the Japanese are thinking of the lack of etiquette and artistry in some forms of American wrestling. In Japan wrestling has all the protocol of a Spanish bull-fight. But, when all is said and done, our barbarisms are pretty pallid by comparison with theirs, and the stories from the Pacific, from cannibalism among themselves to the mutilation of our wounded and the fiendish brutality shown to our prisoners, put a gap between the standards of the two countries.