[Rarebooks] FS: Pearl Buck Handwritten Manuscript with Disparaging Remarks about the Japanese People

[Charles Agvent]

BUCK, Pearl. AUTOGRAPH MANUSCRIPT Book Review containing stereotypical 
insulting remarks on the Japanese people. n.p., [1938]. Handwritten 
Manuscript, not signed and apparently complete in 2 pages, of a review 
of William Henry Chamberlain's JAPAN OVER ASIA, published in 1938 by 
Duckworth. In part: "The vast majority of Western people know almost 
nothing about Asia.... Here, with a journalist's easy and vivid 
accuracy, the author sums up the story of Japan in Asia an explains the 
reasons for the advance into China.... Mr. Chamberlain understands 
Japan, and while he avoids going into discussions of the Japanese 
philosophy which has shaped their psychology, he ... explains well 
enough that the Japanese do what they do, because that is the shape of 
their minds. Their minds are limited but they have a certain intensity. 
They are disciplined almost to the point of being punitive ... one must 
say that they practice better than most what they believe. The trouble 
seems to be primarily with what they believe. They believe, first, that 
they are right, and they lack the imagination to see other points of 
view than their own. They believe, second, that they have a divine 
mission to force upon others their beliefs and they pursue this with the 
[?] of the missionary. These two things alone make them a world menace. 
They are the basis of fascism. Indeed, the natural tendency of the 
Japanese mind seems to have been always toward fascistic thinking.... 
I 
think truly the Japanese are a simple minded people, not at all astute, 
and they have the rigidity, the lack of tolerance, the absence of humor 
of the somewhat stupid." Buck, daughter of missionaries to China and who 
had lived in China most of her life, was famous for her Pulitzer 
Prize-winning book THE GOOD EARTH (1931) and for being the first 
American woman to win the Nobel Prize for Literature (1938). She became 
entranced with the Chinese people but, as can be seen clearly here, she 
exhibited a virulent hatred of the Japanese. This review appeared in 
ASIA, Vol. 38, No. 2 (February 1938), page 115. Minor stains including 
from a paperclip at the top of the first page. Near Fine. (#019432)    
     $1,500.00

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