We have all done it. An interesting paper comes across the desk or is picked up along the way. One glances at it, perhaps even makes some cursory study and then tosses it into a box against some future need or just because it looks too interesting to throw away. That is just what Second Lieutenant Ian Nish of the Intelligence Corps did while working on Japanese documents as part of the British Commonwealth occupation force in Western Japan from 1946 to 1948. Now, as Professor Emeritus in International History at the London School of Economics and Political Science and Britain's leading scholar of matters Japanese, he has brought out some of the contents of the box, to throw light on Japanese attitudes on a range of subjects during and after the war.

That is not all. Nish gives his personal account of what it was like to live and work among Japanese far away from the centre as they came to terms with defeat. A small section of Nish's photographs and ephemera add to the interest, and, for good measure, he also includes a brief memoir by the late Professor William Beasley of the School of Oriental and African Studies, who worked as a naval intelligence officer in Tokyo just after the war ended. Beasley's experience, living in the former British Embassy, now recommissioned as a naval station, was very different but the account is equally valuable. We have much information on the making of high policy during the occupation, and it is useful to be reminded that orders issued from above could look very different at ground level. Young occupation officers might be called upon to explain democracy or to sort out black marketing. And whatever official injunction there may have been about non-fraternization, even the lowest-ranking intelligence officers had to deal with Japanese people on a day-to-day basis, which gave them some insight into what they were thinking both about the war and about the new world that descended on them after Japan's surrender. Travel was also possible, and, even if travelling conditions left much to be desired, it provided further opportunities for learning. For both Nish and Beasley, their time in Japan and their increasing skill in the language would provide the basis for their future academic careers as well as giving them Japanese and other friends for the rest of their lives.