Agricultural College people at the Imperial University, and to eat and
drink with rural authorities who chanced to be visiting the capital
from distant prefectures. I had many setbacks. I was misinformed, now
and then intentionally and often unintentionally. There were many days
which were not only harassing but seemingly wasted. I often despaired
of achieving results worth all the exertion I was making and the money
I was spending. I must have worn to shreds the patience of some
English-speaking Japanese friends, but they never owned defeat. In the
end I found that I made progress.

But so did the War, which when I set out from London few believed
would last long. I was troubled by continually meeting with incredible
ignorance about the War, the issues at stake and the certain end. The
Japanese who talked with me were 10,000 miles away from the fighting.
Japan had nothing to lose, everything indeed to gain from the
abatement of Europe's activities in Asia. Not only Japanese soldiers
but many administrative, educational, agricultural and commercial
experts had been to school in Germany. There was much in common in the
German and Japanese mentalities, much alike in Central European and
Farthest East regard for the army and for order, devotion to
regulations, habit of subordination and deification of the State.
Eventually the well-known anti-Ally campaign broke out in Tokyo, a
thing which has never been sufficiently explained. Soon I was pressed
to turn aside from my studies and attempt the more immediately useful
task: to explain why Western nations, whose manifest interests were
peace, were resolutely squandering their blood and wealth in War.

If what I published had some measure of success,[6] it was because by
this time, unlike some of the critics who sharply upbraided Japan and
made impossible proposals in impossible terms, I had learnt something