The Kimono Mind: An Informal Guide to Japan and the Japanese

"Of all the contradictory intelligence we have on foreign peoples, that on the Japanese is the most contradictory. Cliches utterly fail us: Frenchmen are frivolous, Italians are lazy, but what shall we make of the Japanese? They are at once geniuses and copycats, aesthetes and vulgarians: their politeness is as exquisite as their rudeness, their wisdom often indistinguishable from stupidity." So writes Bernard Rudofsky in The Kimono Mind, an appreciative and unsparing look at Japan by an unusually perceptive and intelligent traveler and student of life and human nature, who lived for two years with the Japanese, far from the tourist route. Mr. Rudofsky is at his happiest when he describes the modern Japanese ministering to their immemorial conceits, watching the ease with which they keep afloat in an atmosphere of total ambiguity. Surveying the wreckage of their glorious culture and the giddy civilization they are building on it, he observes, "Anybody who wants to study Americanization had better go to Japan these days." Austrian-born Bernard Rudofsky has been living intermittently in New York since 1935. His books reflect persuasions gained during more than half a century of worldwide travels and residence in a dozen countries. Architect, engineer, critic and a Ford, Fulbright, and Guggenheim Fellow, Dr. Rudofsky has held professorships in art and architecture here and abroad. His books include Architecture Without Architects, The Prodigious Builders, Streets for People, The Unfashionable Human Body, and Now I Lay Me Down To Eat.