The Secret of Success

from the “highway code” the principles that one should follow in the vaster arena of life. Always confine your activities to your own sphere; if you infringe on the sphere of others, you are sure to clash with them: then your progress will come to an abrupt halt. When certain signs appear on the horizon of society, try to make out what these signs imply. Do not just go by outward signs; try to reach the meaning behind them. If one just goes by what one sees and fails to see what lurks in the background, one will not advance in one’s journey through life. Others, more farseeing than oneself, will forge ahead, while one falls victim to dangers that could have been avoided if one had read the signs properly. Per Ardua ad Astra According to an English scholar, Ian Nash, who spent eleven years in Japan making a detailed study of the people and the nation, what shook the Japanese most profoundly was not upheavals in politics, but the great Kanto earthquake, which devastated the whole of the most populated eastern part of Japan on September 1, 1923. Another terrible blow was the reduction of two of the great cities of Japan to smouldering mounds of waste by the dropping of atomic bombs. This led to the ultimate defeat of Japan in the Second World War in 1945. One might imagine that any country which has been dealt such shattering blows would never be able to rise again from its ashes. But this is far from the truth, for Japan has not only rehabilitated itself, but now figures most prominently on the world’s commercial and industrial scene. Japan has become a great hive of technological activity, in spite of having launched itself on an industrial course long after Britain, Europe and America. This is all the more remarkable considering that Japan has none of the natural resources that the older established