ABSTRACT
On 5 October 1952 the 16,OOO-ton Japanese freighter Heiyo Maru sailed from Tilbury docks, London, on its way to Kobe. On board, four passengers - an Australian, a British diplomat and his Danish wife, and a British woman joining her husband who was a serving officer in the US Army - shared the boat with a cargo of concrete and Volkswagen cars. 1 The trip, which took 49 days, was significant in that the Heiyo Maru was the first Japanese merchant vessel on the high seas after Japan's defeat in 1945. On 23 April Japan had regained its sovereignty. At that time Britain followed the US with the world's second-largest merchant fleet. Japan produced virtually no cars and the German Volkswagen was regarded by the British as a joke! Unobserved by most people in Europe, Japan was already taking the first steps towards world economic superpower status. 'The Korean War proved a salvation for the Japanese economy.'2 The Americans found they needed vast supplies for their armies in Korea. Japan supplied $3 billion-worth of them. This was a sum nearly double Britain's gold and dollar reserves in 1952. Former members of the Japanese navy manned 46 ships in Korean waters during the conflict.3 Sony, the Japanese company, developed the first pocket-sized transistor radio in 1952. The transistor had been invented by English-American physicist William Bradford Shockley and others in 1948.
