JAPAN: Tokugawa

A small round man with a large round face the color of old bronze landed in Manhattan last week from the 23-year-old Mauretania. This personage is the head of a Japanese house which for 264 years was more than Imperial.

“Say Prince,” asked a ship-news gatherer, “do you have breadlines in Japan?”

“What do you mean?” gravely replied Prince Iyesato Tokugawa, President of the Japanese House of Peers. President of the Japanese Red Cross, scion of ancestors who ruled Japan as Shoguns or Tycoons while the power of the Imperial House was in abeyance (1603-1868). “What are breadlines?” “He doesn’t know what breadlines are!” exclaimed the questioner with a wink for his fellows. “Why sure, you know Prince, breadlines are a lot of poor guys standing in line to get a handout—breadlines, see?” “We have had nothing like a breadline in Japan that I have ever heard of,” said Prince Tokugawa firmly. “That is, we had had nothing of the sort up until the day I left, June 12.” “What about unemployment?” “There is unemployment throughout the world,” agreed His Highness blandly. “There always is.” “Well, how about the riots in Formosa, those atrocities, those head-hunters?” “They make a lot of trouble, those head-hunters,” mused Prince Tokugawa, “but such things are always happening.”* To a further question he replied, “Yes, earthquakes happen in Japan all the time. That is nothing. It happens all the time.” “What are you going to do in this country?” finally asked the exasperated newshawks. With great dignity the Scion of Shoguns replied: “I am going to Washington to pay to President Hoover a visit of respect. My first visit to the United States was in 1882. This is my fourth visit. In 1921, when I was a Japanese delegate [he was chief delegate] to the Washington Conference, I met Mr. Hoover who was then Secretary of Commerce.”

*On the tea-green Island of Formosa 7,000 Japanese and Formosans have been killed during the past quarter century in periodic raids launched from Formosa’s mountains by her head-hunting savages. Last week some 300 killings occurred during a rampage of 1,500 headhunters through Central Formosa which was finally quelled by 600 Japanese troops. As the soldiers closed in on the last headhunters’ village involved, Mahebo, 108 village women committed suicide “so that our husbands, sons and brothers may fight to the last man without thought of us.”