NEW YORK -- Sometimes a perception formed during an era, however unthinking, never seems to leave you. When I read, in a detailed chronology of Yukio Mishima (1925-70), that Meredith Weatherby visited Mishima at a New York hotel for an all-day discussion about his translation of Mishima's "Confessions of a Mask," the timing threw me. Then I knew I still harbored "the Occupation mentality" -- the reverse side of it.

The Weatherby-Mishima meeting took place in January 1952, during Mishima's first trip overseas. At the time Japan was still under the U.S. Occupation. As my late friend, Herbert Passin (1916-2003), reminded the reader in his introduction to Theodore Cohen's "Remaking Japan" (Free Press, 1987), the Occupation lasted for nearly seven years or, to be exact, "six years, seven months, and twenty-eight days."

The Occupation meant, among other things, that a Japanese needed a permit to go overseas, and the permit required the signature of the Supreme Commander for the Allied Powers (SCAP). Naturally, only a few permits were issued. Mishima managed to get one because a top editor at the Asahi Shimbun was a classmate of his father, a former bureaucrat, and the editor was able to designate the young author as his paper's "special overseas correspondent."