It is like a squirrel cage [here], round and round, getting nowhere except every day a slight slipping backward, that losing feeling. How many millions go through life with it –hideous insecurity and malnutrition which makes only half a person.
There were distinct changes of attitudes toward Americans among the Japanese who stayed here any time at all. Tomibe, Kaito, Saito—they liked us, wanted to understand us even as we wanted to know them. But the sterner characters among them call this cowardly, feel it undermines the will to fight (as it does), so had them transferred, removed from danger and subversive thoughts, from too friendly attitudes.
Shorty came to tell his sister “good-bye” for five days as this is his sentence in the Chicken Case. In comparison to the others involved, he showed stamina. The small closet room which used to house the Red Cross supplies is now the jail, with a double bunk and window which looks out onto a red dirt bank. A hind quarter seems to have been filched from one camp-killed cow, cooked in one delectable roast for the Kitchen. Only now has Jerry heard of it, when all the rats and roaches are coming out of holes into the light in order to play down present guilt. This roast and the Pork Chop Case when no one could be found who would testify are the chief highlights of kitchen graft uncovered by the Chicken Case. I think the peasant class would have had a cleaner, straighter record than some of our intelligentsia.