Prison officials are highly trained. Last year, though two-thirds of those who passed the national qualifying test for prison guards were university graduates, only one-fourth were hired. Successful applicants must spend two weeks as observers in a prison and then complete eight months of intense training before they may begin to work. Guards are transferred every few years to promote standardization within the system.

All Japanese wardens began as guards. Their experiences have given them both "hands on" time with prisoners and philosophical depth. Yokosuka's Warden Kayaba affirms the good of man. "All human beings are 98 percent good and 2 percent bad," he says. "The men who end up in prison are not more evil than others in our society. They are weaker:

With the proper education, we can make even the worst offenders as calm as the others. " Guards do this not through force, but through intense counseling and physical denial. A difficult prisoner is removed from the collective environment and placed in an even more austere "punishment cell," where counseling continues. "We make them think," says Kayaba. "We talk to them again and again about why they were sent to prison, until gradually they understand."

"We are their caretakers, not their oppressors," says Fuchu 's present warden, Kiyoshi Taru, of Japan's most hardened criminals. An aircraft gunner during World War II, Tam saw the corrections field as a way to continue serving his country after Japan's military was disbanded. "Criminals have violated the well-being of others in order to satisfy their greed," says Tam. "We teach them how to control their desires and still satisfy themselves. You cannot do this unless you are unimpeachable yourself. We use our example as the instrument for their rehabilitation. "

Tam says all guards are martial arts experts but adds, "If a guard unfairly strikes a prisoner, he will himself be imprisoned for a mandatory seven-year sentence."

Okinawa's warden, Yoshitaka Myojin, followed his father into the field. He says the key to prison stability lies in the workshop: "The guard who runs the workshop performs three functions-instructor, disciplinarian and counselor-so the prisoner does not direct his anger toward the guard purely as an authority figure. The guard is part of the overall unit, the father figure." Noting with irony that many fundamentals of the Japanese system were adapted from the U.S. system, Myojin wonders, "What has happened in America?"

His question is echoed by many here. If the U.S. incarceration rate is one of the highest in the free world, so is its crime rate. Overcrowding-our prison population has expanded by 30 percent in the last three years-contributes to abuse and acts of violence. Sodoes idleness. Few prisoners work in the U.S. jails because of trade-union pressure and "state use" laws that forbid their making competitive products. Only about 10 percent of the inmates in our state systems are allowed to work.

Our guards are often unskilled and untrained. Robert Fosen, director of the commission on Accreditation for Corrections, indicates that the "recommended levels of training" that his group recently set for U.S. prisons consist of a mere 40 hours of "orientation training," followed during the guard's first year by 120 hours of further training in supervision and the use of force. He notes that standards had to rise "in well over half the states" to meet these new requirements.

Could we adopt parts of the Japanese system? I asked three Americans of markedly differing political views and responsibilities: Norman Carlson, director of the Federal Bureau of Prisons since 1970, who inspected the Japanese system in 1971; Fosen, who was a New York prison official during the Attica riots; and Edward Koren, an attorney for the American Civil Liberties Union's National Prison Project.

All three support more inmates working, and Carlson and Fosen favor a decrease in the length of sentences for nonviolent, non dangerous offenders but longer sentences for others.

Carlson notes that all federal wardens begin as line officers. Fosen argues that our varied institutions require a wider range of training. Koren agrees.

Their greatest resistance to the Japanese system concerns individual treatment. Says Koren: "No heat in a prisoner's cell is outrageous. That would be a clear violation of the Constitution's prohibition against cruel and unusual punishment. The other living conditions are quite extreme. The denial of reading materials without clearly showing they are a threat to prison order, the withholding of writing materials from in- mates and the censorship of correspondence all violate the First Amendment,"

Koren says of Japanese trial procedures; "The exclusionary rule is our way of enforcing Constitutional rights.  Involving the victim before a person is convicted should be done only at the defendant's initiative, Eliminating plea bargaining would be impractical,"

But is the present U.S. way fair?

"American jails are filled with hate," says Arnett, "If their walls fell dowh today, do you think the prisoners would run past you without stopping? An American prisoner might kill you; just because you're the first person he sees, If the walls of the Japanese prisons fell down, the Japanese prisoners would just goon home,"

I told this to Toyofumi Yoshinaga, a legal assistant at the Corrections Bureau in Tokyo who had spent several hours providing me with statistics. His eyes lit up. Said Yoshinaga: "During the great Kanto earthquake of 1923, the walls of one of our prisons did fall down." He smiled, "No one escaped."