Video games craze

It doesn't seem ten years, let alone forty years, this Sunday that we sat around a fire in Washington on a piping cold but diamond-bright day with the radio on just after lunch ready to listen to the New York Philharmonic Orchestra, which was something of a Sunday ritual in those days.

The orchestra was just tuning up, the cellos yawning and the woodwinds tootling, before taking off on a Shostakovitch symphony, when a breathless announcer's voice came in and said, 'One moment, please!' And then, after a crackle of static or whatever, 'The Japanese have attacked Pearl Harbor, the United States naval base on Oahu Island in the Hawaiian Islands. This means that war is under way between Japan and the United States.' Just like that.

Next to assassinations, I can't think of any event that seemed so suddenly unbelievable, so incredible, in the moment of hearing it that outrage came later.

You wouldn't think it was like that if you saw some of the movies they've revived on television this weekend as a solemn, if entertaining, celebration of the attack on Pearl Harbor. I saw one the other night so awful in every way that I won't bring up its name. It's enough to say that, in one respect, it followed practically every other movie of the sort made since – in the picture it painted of the Japanese, a picture that took many years to efface. Now, admittedly this particular movie was made in 1942 in the first year of the war, America's war, and therefore in the first flush, also, of martial patriotism and recruiting propaganda and Hollywood giving its all for the land of the free and the home of the brave and a tinkling box office.

It was about a detachment of marines building a base on a Pacific island months before the war began and, at one point, a Japanese diplomat appeared. He was stopping by the island to refuel on his way to Washington. He was seen as the guest at a dinner thrown by the marine brass. He was a comic-strip Japanese, fawning and buck-toothed and dripping syrupy compliments all round and raising his glass to peace and Japan's great friend, President Roosevelt. Throughout his little speech, the major and the other officers were exchanging very dirty looks as if they'd been privy for months to the secret plans of the Japanese army, navy and air force. THEY knew Pearl Harbor was coming, even though it was many weeks away.

Well, President Roosevelt didn't know. Nor did General Marshall, the army's chief of staff who was out riding in the woods and knew about it an hour or so after all the millions who'd tuned into the Philharmonic.

It struck me, watching that movie the other night, who the comic-strip Japanese was meant to be. He was Saburo Kurusu, a special envoy sent by Tokyo to Washington at the end of October to help the Japanese ambassador, one Admiral Nomura, continue the talks with the State Department that had been going on and off for months about undoubtedly important matters like getting Japanese troops out of the parts of China and Indochina they'd invaded four years before, as a condition of signing a non-aggression treaty with the colonial powers in the Pacific, as a necessary step to concluding a new trade agreement with the United States – that's what they were all after.

I remember going out to LaGuardia airport here to report that October on the arrival of Mr Kurusu. He was a meek, intelligent, rather bewildered, small man. Time, the news magazine, summed up the general feeling about Japan and the reason for Mr Kurusu's mission by writing, 'Japan, jittery, encircled, embargoed, proposed to follow months of Washington conversations with still more conversations. It was a clear sign that Japan still did not dare follow its sword brandishing with sword play.' Well so much for the silly hindsight of the movie and for the foresight of us expert diplomacy watchers.

Within minutes of that excited announcer's voice breaking into the Philharmonic concert, the man I was staying with in Washington – he was a high official of the British Supply Council – he and I felt in our wallets for our White House passes and were on our way there. After the press briefing, which was very brief indeed, the White House at that point not being disposed to tell anybody of the catastrophic damage that had been done to the American Pacific fleet, my friend and I walked out of the White House grounds and stepped aside to let an official car go by. It was the limousine of the Secretary of State, Mr Cordell Hull. He'd had the Japanese ambassador and Mr Kurusu over to the White House that day and been actually in the middle of talking over the old agenda when an aide came in with the astounding news.

Cordell Hull was, at all times, a walking contradiction. A graceful, handsome man, with finely chiselled, what we'd call 'aristocratic' features. He was in fact the son of a very poor Tennessee mountaineer and once he read the message about Pearl Harbor he turned on his guests with a spate of mountain abuse, that very telling southern combination of biblical rhetoric and metaphors taken from animal biology. Outside the press room in the White House, it was possible to hear him. Think of every dog-patch variation for traitors, swine, tricksters and bounders and you will hear him too. Of course the visit of Mr Kurusu had been a marvellous blind as if, to turn it around, Hitler had waited to get Neville Chamberlain in the room in Munich and, at that instant, started bombing London.

Well, this weekend it's only in the movie reminders of the disaster at Pearl Harbor that we see the Japanese as sinister or oily men. Today you see them everywhere. I don't mean only pouring out of tourist buses to pay their respects to the Statue of Liberty or Disneyland or the Grand Canyon, I'm thinking of their businessmen, their trade envoys. Today, the most powerful men in America are far more likely to behave towards a Japanese like that company of automobile tycoons I mentioned this summer – all sitting attentively in an auditorium in Detroit, their notebooks out, listening earnestly to a Japanese tycoon explaining to them how to make superior motor cars and how to handle management-labour relations.

Of all America's allies (and when you live 3,000 or more miles from Europe, it's obvious every day) of all America's allies, the Japanese are the most – how shall I put this delicately but truly? – the most admired, anyway. Perhaps the most envied. With an almost alarming lack of raw materials which they must import, they have built up an export industry in automobiles, photographic equipment, television, radio and electronics generally so easily competitive with the products of the older industrial nations that we've had to beg them not to do it; in one instance, to restrict the number of cars they ship into the United States, the great pioneer of the notion of a car for every man .

And the success of Japanese cars alone – one car in three bought by Americans is Japanese – has been enough to make a lot of people think hard about the plight of Detroit, the great motor-car manufacturing hub of this country. New Englanders, especially, wonder if it will follow the fate of Brockton, Massachusetts, a town which, until about 15 years ago, was the American capital of shoe manufacture. Its decline was so gradual and the reason for it so hidden or ignored at the time that the inevitable trend was not spotted until it was irreversible. The reason was the arrival and the increasing popularity of foreign, but especially of Italian, shoes. First they were chic, then they were popular, then they were markedly cheaper than American shoes and captured the market. For the past ten years, Brockton, as a shoe manufacturing town, has been in as bad a depression as it was in the early 1930s.

Well, it now appears that about 600 people a week leave Detroit and emigrate to Houston, Texas which has a booming job market and boasts, for the present, that it can employ a thousand newcomers a week, the antithesis of the national condition. The incoming Detroiters are particularly valuable because mostly they are engineers, mechanics, designers and Detroit is understandably worried that if the brain drain continues, it soon won't have the talent, the skilled and specialised labour to maintain it as the automobile centre of the country.

And now suddenly a new name, a new delight and a new threat, has come bounding over the western horizon. It is the name Atari and with it the promise of a wholly new industry and a very hot stock in which the Japanese are the monopoly partner. It's the video game industry. My ten- and eight-year-old grandsons are, like their pals, already insane about the approach of Christmas and want nothing else but a game, several games, they can play on their television screen with the help of attachments, buttons and game cassettes.

Atari has exploded into this market with, so far, 28 separate games from Missile Command and Asteroids and Space Invaders to Video Chess, the Indianapolis 500, American Football, Tennis, Video Olympics, Backgammon and Golf and there's nothing of penny-arcade crudity about these games. They reproduce the hazards and call on the precise skills required by the real thing, whether it's handling missiles or handling a tennis racket.

I telephoned my golf partner and told him that no longer would we have to spend the snowbound winter months practising putting on the carpet. I told him that, with the video golf game, you could pay the penalty for under clubbing, you could top the ball, as you do in life.

'Judge the distance wrong', I said, 'and you land in the bunker. It's just like golf!' I said. He said, 'That bad, eh?'.

This transcript was typed from a recording of the original BBC broadcast (© BBC) and not copied from an original script. Because of the risk of mishearing, the BBC cannot vouch for its complete accuracy.

Letter from America audio recordings of broadcasts ©BBC

Letter from America scripts © Cooke Americas, RLLP. All rights reserved.