Alien Rice; A Novel. by Ichiro Kawasaki

trip over the steps and get hurt."
    Obviously the unbelievable congestion within the store made such a precaution necessary.
    After leaving the department store, the couple went to nearby Hibiya Park. "This is the famous Hibiya Park, the largest in Tokyo," Saburo explained.
    "You say this is the largest park?" Alice could not believe it. Compared with Hyde Park or Regent's Park, Hibiya was so small and so shabby that it could hardly be called a park in the Western sense of the word.
    "How small and low these benches are!" remarked Alice, unable to hide her astonishment.
    On the way back to the hotel they happened to walk along a narrow street lined with rickety houses and open booths gaudily decorated with strange signs and banners. There, to her amazement and annoyance, Alice saw several young boys practicing baseball, their favorite game, unmindful of the traffic hazard.
    Overpopulation and lack of space were apparent everywhere.
    Saburo reported to the Head Office to start work on the day following his arrival. He first went to the section chief of the foodstuff department, who was to be his immediate chief. Without preliminaries the section chief said,
    "Tanaka, I'm afraid our foodstuff section is not doing well lately. Competition is keen and the margin of profit of our exports is falling. We must by hook or crook increase our profit for the coming six-month period by 20 percent. I want you to be in charge of the export of canned goods to Europe, since you know the area quite well."
    "I will do my best, Sir," Tanaka replied tersely.
    "By the way, Tanaka, I hear your wife is English. You may have some difficulty in your private life but I expect the fact of your wife being a foreigner not to interfere with the conduct of your work."
    Saburo sensed a certain reserve and felt that his chief disapproved of an East-West marriage as a matter of principle.
    Saburo Tanaka also detected a certain coolness toward him on the part of his colleagues. This was explained by the fact that only about 8 percent of the total staff of Tozai was normally posted in its overseas offices. Life in Europe or America has always been a coveted dream and cherished desire of Japanese in all walks of life. At Tozai, as everywhere else in Japan, there had always been keen competition to get a foreign assignment, which is hard to come by.
    Hence those left behind in Japan, going through grinding daily life in the overcrowded country, tended to look upon a new returnee from abroad with a sense of envy mingled with jealousy, if not hostility. And in regard to Saburo, jealousy was obviously greater now that he had come home with a Western wife.
    Tozai's Tokyo headquarters were huge. The entire staff of nearly five thousand was housed in an ultramodern nine-story ferroconcrete building. There were over a dozen departments dealing with iron ore, machinery, textiles and foodstuffs, and each department was subdivided into several sections.
    In Saburo Tanaka's section there were twenty workers, of whom five were girls who did miscellaneous work and also served hot Japanese tea to the male members of the section as well as to visitors. Those twenty employees were huddled into the small space allocated to the section. Even the section chief did not have an office of his own. He had a desk in the center while his junior clerks, each with a small desk, sat in rows, facing one another. Every worker could hear and see what the others were doing. There was absolutely no privacy.
    Most of these employees lived in company dormitories or apartments located in the suburbs of Tokyo. Some, of course, lived in their own homes or apartments. Usually it took an hour and a half of travel time from home to the office, which meant that the average worker spent at least three hours every day commuting in overcrowded buses or trains. The resultant physical strain was very great indeed.
    After staying a week in the hotel, the Tanakas moved to a company apartment near Yokohama, some