Monday, Sep. 10, 1951

Not long before the japanese peace treaty is signed in San Francisco (see NATIONAL AFFAIRS), the Editors of TIME will present Your Stake in Japan, a 60-minute television report on the treaty, its background and its probable effects on the great world battle between Communist Russia and the Christian West. To be broadcast over a joint CBS-ABC network at 10 p.m. (E.D.T.), Friday, Sept. 7, the program will combine the techniques of TV and TIME in an unprecedented journalistic experiment.

The idea for the show grew out of our experience with the telecasts of the Kefauver hearings, when TIME correspondents reported background on the testimony as each new witness shed more light on U.S. crime. But in San Francisco this week, the speeches and formalities of the conference, even the provisions of the treaty, will be less important than the pressures on the nations concerned and the world's power situation as it readjusts to Japan's new independence. To focus on the main elements of this news, Your Stake in Japan will go far outside the conference building to bring together dramatic and documentary, contemporary and historical material from many sources.

The basic thought and planning of this work fell naturally to Max Ways, Foreign News Editor of TIME for the last five years. He has at his disposal, in addition to the regular staff of U.S. and foreign correspondents, a task force from the MARCH OF TIME, which was detached from its work on Crusade in the Pacific to edit films showing how events before, during and after the war led to today's situations.

No. 2 man on the program staff is Frank Gibney, former Chief of the Tokyo Bureau (one of the first three correspondents wounded in Korea), who flew to San Francisco for a talk, in Japanese, with Premier Yoshida. Like some other correspondents helping with the program, Gibney has been working with a movie camera grinding away by his shoulder. TIME Cartographer Bob Chapin got busy on a major map to portray graphically the military and economic forces now operating in the East.

Researcher Yi Ying Sung, former associate professor at Peking University, supplied the show's writers with material on Japan's past & present and with the facts about the disintegration in Asia of the ancient family pattern. (On this theme one of television's leading dramatists, Joseph Liss, has written a play for the TIME program.)

While I write this letter, these and other staffers are working to fulfill the purpose of the program. This job is like any TIME story; we must get beyond the externals of the conference into the main elements of the new situation now developing in the Pacific.

Cordially yours,

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