When Lieutenant Morris arrived in Japan in 1945 he was not seeking the position of manager of the Imperial Hotel in Tokyo. He came simply to run it as a billet for senior officers of the Allied Occupation Forces. But hotels, it seemed, were already in his blood, and when he was demobilized in 1946 he decided "to stay around just to see what could possibly happen next." The Wise Bamboo is his account of what did happen.