destroyed by it seems the next thing to certain." Occupation of Japan and foreign service About a month after General Douglas MacArthur arrived in Tokyo to assume control of Japan, Seidensticker landed with the Marines at Sasebo, a naval base city in Nagasaki Prefecture. He was assigned duties disarming Japanese forces and disabling heavy weapons on the islands of Tsushima and Hirado. It was during his few months at Sasebo that Seidensticker began to develop a deeper appreciation of Japan and the Japanese people. In early 1946 he was sent to San Diego and discharged. On his return to the United States, Seidensticker enrolled at Columbia University and took a master's degree in 1947 in what was then known as "public law and government." He joined the U.S. Foreign Service and, after further studies during a summer at Yale University and a year at Harvard, was placed in Tokyo assigned to the Diplomatic Section of the Supreme Commander for the Allied Powers (SCAP). In May 1950, roughly two years after he arrived in Japan, Seidensticker decided the Foreign Service was not his calling and he resigned on his own initiative. He had not been promoted while colleagues had, and had deemed himself not the salaryman type. Moreover, he sensed a "witch-hunting" in which bachelors were subjected to "peculiar rumors" and a skeptical eye. He also suspected his room at the Daiichi Hotel, his billet, was bugged. Scholar, educator, and latter years After his short Foreign Service tenure, Seidensticker studied Japanese literature at the University of Tokyo on the GI Bill and later under a Ford Foundation grant. With the Ford fellowship, Seidensticker switched his focus from studying Heian literature to that of modern Japanese literature. In his remaining years at Tokyo University he read virtually the entire canon of modern Japanese literature. By the mid-1950s, having exhausted the fellowship circuit, he found work as a lecturer of both American and Japanese literature at Sophia University. While Seidensticker enjoyed his time at Sophia, at the time it did not pay well and he took on a free-lance writing assignments and other part-time jobs. In 1954 he was contacted by Harold Strauss, the chief editor at the New York publishing house Alfred A. Knopf about translating Japanese literature for Knopf, and was soon at work. As the 1960s began to unfold, Seidensticker, growing weary of life in Japan and living life as