JAPAN

The unexpected news that the Japanese Peace Treaty would be signed in September 1951 in San Francisco was suddenly announced. Once more, as in 1945, Buchman had unknowingly anticipated the event. Months earlier Buchman had engaged a theatre in that city for that period to show a musical, Jotham Valley, which illustrated, through the true story of two feuding brothers in Nevada, how deep divisions could be overcome and hatreds healed. When the plenipotentiaries arrived, it became clear that much healing still needed to take place. The United States had convinced most of her World War II allies that the time was ripe to sign a treaty, which would be followed in eight months by Japan's full independence. But Russia boycotted the conference and, among the participants, Australia, New Zealand and others expressed serious reservations about the integrity of an independent Japan. So the delegates met in an atmosphere of tension, the Japanese finding themselves almost totally segregated except during the official business of the conference.

Buchman, Twitchell and Entwistle knew five of the six official Japanese delegates, as well as a number of the alternative delegates. Much of their work was done around a table for twelve at the Mark Hopkins Hotel which Buchman booked for lunch nearly every day, and often for breakfast and dinner as well. There delegates from most of the other nations met the Japanese, while in the evening large groups of them attended Jotham Valley. On his return to Japan, Hisato Ichimada, the Governor of the Bank of Japan and a principal delegate, told Mitsui and Entwistle that Buchman's efforts had been the one means of bridging the gulf with the delegates of other nations at the conference.16

On the eve of the official signing five of the Japanese signatories dined with Buchman, and at the signing itself Buchman introduced them to Robert Schuman. A week later Schuman was in Ottawa for a NATO conference. Buchman was in Ottawa too, and Schuman and the Danish Foreign Minister, Ole Bjørn Kraft, came to tea with him at the MRA centre there. As they left, Schuman said to his host, 'The world is not big enough for you. You made peace with Japan before we did.' Back in the house Buchman, according to one present, 'led his friends in a spirited, if discordant, rendering of a favourite song, "After the ball is over".'17

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