Windows On The East

Press, Volume C, Issue 29436, 11 February 1961, Page 3

Windows On The East

Eastern Windows. By .0, D. Ommanney. Longmans. 245 pp. It is with regret that the perceptive reader will come to the last page of this delightful and informative book. For more than 10 years, Dr. Ommanney has been on fishery research projects in Far Eastern waters, and though 1 e devotes a fair amount of space to a subject which might well baffle or bore the lay mind his disquisitions on exotic fish are so lucid and graphic that they never pall.

The "Eastern Windows” through which the author has viewed the world are Singapore, a Malayan village, Tokyo and Hong Kong. He is now on the staff of the University of Hong Kong as Reader in Marine Biology and director of a fishery research unit. When he first arrived in Singapore it was still a Crown Colony, but even then attempts were being made to draw it into the Communist net. The new Chinese—strident, bespectacled, intolerant of family ties and full of Communist enthusiasm ranged the streets looking for trouble. “Chinese schoolboys,” who were often louts of up to 25, staged demonstrations and fomented riots. In 1954, when the colony was granted self-government, the Communist organisation was too much for the Malayan and Indian elements which were trying in a rather un-co-ordinated way to form political parties of their own, and swept noisily into power on a mere 50 per cent, of the votes. The author’s life in Changi, on the eastern tip of Singapore Island, where by painfully slow degrees a research station at last too' shape, is a delightful study of the Far Eastern domestic scene, and the vagaries of servants. A Malayan wedding, in which the bride and bridegroom, to ensure their future happiness, must assume expression of deep-seated woe is pleasantly described. And the sea-trips m the ship allocated to him for his work are recalled with gusto.

Tokyo, where Dr. Ommanney attended a conference of fishery experts from all the countries of South-east Asia, is, he avers, “the ugliest capital city in the world. The Japanese are an artistic people, and, as is often said, their taste is faultless. Yet where architecture is concerned they have developed a blind spot.” The influence of the recent American occupation is everywhere, and the Japanese, a people with little sense of humour and an infinite desire to come to terms with the powerful West, conscientiously accommodate themselves to the American way of life. “Things like baseball . . . have become a kind of nightmarish religion. . . . They have cheerteams and cheer-leaders who go through all the frenzied antics . . . with a kind of grim, humourless intensity as though it all mattered dreadfully.” This is a sad but revealing picture of an ancient country apparently exchanging age-old customs for the brash vulgarities of an occidental utopia. Hong Kong has its tragedies in a different way. Undeniable inequalities of great wealth and poverty are the most apparent of them, but the British maintain a precarious political balance between the Communist and Nationalist elements and if labour is sweated, the armies of refugees from the Chinese mainland who accept such conditions show no desire to go back to the People’s Paradise. “You see many signs of poverty around you in the streets, says Dr. Ommanney. but little of disease and almost none of starvation.” The panorama of life in the Far East is seen through the eyes of compassion, intelligence and understanding. The result is an outstandingly good book.