6. The two MRA conferences in Baguio gave Japanese opportunities to establish wide contacts with their former Asian enemies and led directly to the diplomatic breakthroughs in negotiations with both the Korean and the Philippine governments.

Summing up this record Matsumoto stated, 'I speak in the name of the Government, and especially of the Foreign Office, when I say that at each critical turn we have been aided by the services of Moral Re-Armament.'8

Matsumoto also spoke for himself. During the reception he drew Entwistle aside and said that he had decided to run his election campaign for the Diet on MRA principles: he had gone through his speeches and eliminated the bitter references to opposition candidates.

The policies initiated by Kishi were carried to fruition by his successor, Takeo Fukuda, whom he had in the meantime brought to Caux.

In 1958 President Garcia of the Philippines paid an official visit to Japan. His host in the Diet was Niro Hoshijima, and the President stated, 'The bitterness of former years is being washed away by compassion and forgiveness.'9

Another of Buchman's long-cherished aims - to make some contribution to better race relations in the United States - began to become both possible and more urgent during that summer of 1957. He had, as he had told Griffith in Australia the year before, previously refused invitations to intervene in the Southern states because he lacked the people and the means to make such intervention effective. The initiative finally began in an unusual way.

While the Seinendan delegation was at Mackinac, two actresses arrived there independently in the course of a single week. One was Muriel Smith, the mezzo-soprano who had created the role of Carmen Jones on Broadway, and in London sang Carmen at Covent Garden and played for five consecutive years at the Drury Lane Theatre, first in South Pacific andthen in The King and I. The other was Ann Buckles, a rising young star from Broadway who had been appearing in Mr Thing and Pajama Game. Muriel Smith met the young Japanese, and was particularly moved by the honesty of one of them who had faced the implications of terrible things he had done during the war. Peter Howard took Ann Buckles to see Buchman. She was on the point of separating from her husband, but had told nobody. 'I talked all the time, trying to impress him,' she recalls. 'Buchman just gave me a long, quiet look and said one sentence: "Divorce is old-fashioned." This startled me. I was trying to pretend the divorce didn't matter, but I felt all wrong inside. He saw it. He said nothing else. He just looked.' Soon after he sent me flowers, and later asked me to tea. I talked for forty-five minutes. At the end, he said, "If I have any guidance about it all I'll tell you; if I don't it won't bother me." I realised that he was a man who was true with words and that I could trust him.'

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