THE NATION: A Matter of Days

A smiling, bespectacled little man in a baggy white suit and a battered Panama hat stepped unobtrusively off a silver Pan American airliner at the Honolulu airport one day last week. Leaning on his cane, Japanese Premier Shigeru Yoshida bowed and shook hands all around with the American greeters who towered above him, spoke politely about the “loyalty and bravery” of American-born Japanese, and cast no more than a sweeping glance at the skeletal cranes and hangars of Pearl Harbor. Then he took off again, heading for San Francisco to sign the formal peace between Japan and 51 powers who had gone to war with his country after the attack on Pearl Harbor Dec. 7, 1941.

Mutual Defense. Several of the other delegations were already in San Francisco before him. Secretary of State Dean Acheson, John Foster Dulles, and a contingent of Senators and Representatives busied themselves with preliminaries. In Washington they had just signed a treaty of mutual assistance between the U.S. and the Philippines. At the Presidio in San Francisco, the envoys of the U.S., Australia and New Zealand listened to the U.S. Sixth Army band play God Save the King and The Star-Spangled Banner, then signed a mutual-defense pact.

The one jarring note at the family reunion was supplied, as usual, by the Russians, who took advance counsel with no one. Swarthy, cob-nosed Andrei Gromyko led his 39-man crew off their two private Pullmans at the Oakland mole. They had come directly across the U.S. from Manhattan, without the customary protocol swing through Washington. Gromyko was stopped momentarily when a grey-haired little woman thrust a bunch of red roses into his arms. Then he retreated, in a private limousine flying the hammer & sickle, to the 39-room mansion erected by California’s railroad-building Crocker family in suburban Hillsborough (which he had rented at a reported $250 a day in preference to a downtown hotel suite).

“The Fact of Peace.” In general, the U.S. had no nerves about whatever delays and charges Gromyko & Co. might be brewing at Hillsborough. Before the President flew in from Washington to make his inaugural speech at the conference, the State Department took a firm grip on the events of this week. “One definite prediction can be made,” said a State Department estimate of the situation. “In a matter of days the treaty will have been signed by so many allied powers . . . that there will be no doubt in any quarter as to the fact of peace or the terms of peace.”

The most conspicuous absentee from the gathering in San Francisco was the nation which fought Japan longer and at greater cost than any of the allies. Because Britain recognizes Communist China, while the U.S. recognizes the Nationalists, neither regime was invited; under a compromise painstakingly worked out by John Foster Dulles, Japan will be left free to pick which of the China governments it will deal with. Last week, after Diplomat Dulles made a secret visit to Capitol Hill, the news leaked out: Japan will sign a separate peace with the Nationalists right after San Francisco. But the Nationalists’ resentment at their exclusion from the treaty meeting remains strong. The Nationalist case:

¶ The common war against Japan began more than ten years before Pearl Harbor with Japan’s invasion of China on Sept. 18, 1931.

¶ The Nationalist government was the first to take up arms against Japanese aggression; it was the government which, in China’s name, declared war on and did the actual fighting against Japan.

¶ The Nationalist government is the legal Chinese government recognized by the United Nations; it actually represents China in all international organizations dealing with Japan (e.g., the Allied Council for Japan in Tokyo); it is still the government recognized by the majority of the nations which fought Japan.