JAPAN: Benevolent Assassin

Ever since Japanese cadets & petty officers slew Premier Ki (“Old Fox”) Inukai for the patriotic reason that they feared his war policy was not firm enough (TIME, May 23), closest police secrecy has shielded the assassins, whose names remain unrevealed.

In the House of Peers last week Viscount Masatoshi Okochi demanded that the Premier’s slayers should at least be tried. Temporizing, the Minister of the Navy, beefy Vice Admiral Mineo Osumi, called the case “complicated,” promised a trial eventually. He then entertained the House of Peers by reading what he said was a confession made by one of the killers, “a young naval officer.”

The confession: “To destroy the present for the sake of the future is not the right means to promote idealization of national life. I realize my past conduct was a result of emotions which were not based on realities. My error was gross. What I took to be benevolence was merely emotional indignation. I now await Heaven’s sentence.”

Saito Next? Touchy Japanese patriots boiled afresh last week at rumors that Premier Admiral Viscount Makoto Saito recently “affronted” Emperor Hirohito by speaking out of turn and ahead of His Majesty at the Imperial New Year’s Banquet. In or out of turn, what Premier Saito spoke was a eulogy of his Emperor, yet zealots of the Imperial Banner Immortality Association began to distribute a “proclamation” which many a Japanese considered a death threat to Saito:

KNOW EVERYONE!

We intend to do certain things to an official who smeared and muddied the glorious name of the Emperor of Japan, whose nimbus shines over the world and who is saving the world from its present crisis. The world and all human beings under the sun should be subject to the godly and divine Emperor of Japan.