JAPAN: Death to Ozaki?

A thousand Japanese and squads of police stood on the docks at Kobe last week to watch a brave little old gentleman come home to what he believes certain assassination. The performance began almost immediately.

Converse with 74-year-old Yukio Ozaki, former Mayor of Tokyo and member of the Diet since that body first met in 1890, is made difficult by the fact that he is nearly stone deaf. But there is nothing the matter with his foresight. Far clearer than most of his countrymen, he has seen which way Japan was heading. An unyielding pacifist, he has campaigned for world disarmament since 1921.

First attempt to assassinate Pacifist Ozaki occurred in 1917 when two Japanese with drawn short swords rushed a lecture platform from which he was speaking. Some time later 13 members of a Japanese nationalist assassination league tried to kill him in his own home, were sent sprawling by four faithful servants who had been studying jiu-jitsu in their spare time against just such an emergency. Shinave Ozaki, one of his quarter-British daughters,* smuggled him out of the house in one of her kimonos. Since then Dr. Ozaki has lived abroad, in Britain and the U. S., lecturing on disarmament. Month ago his wife died in London. Dr. Ozaki, preparing to take her ashes back to Japan, wrote to his daughters: “The best form of death for a public man is to fall at the cold hand of an assassin.”

Japanese militarists have sworn to take Ozaki’s life; failure to do so would mean for them a tremendous loss of “face.” No sooner was his steamer, the Terukuni Maru, inside Kobe harbor than police arrested three members of a terrorist club attempting to board the ship. Dr. Ozaki smiled at his two pretty daughters, then stepped down the gangplank to a waiting automobile. Other amateur assassins were on the dock. Two of them broke through a police cordon brandishing heavy cudgels, shouting “Wait, Ozaki, wait!” They too were arrested. Unruffled, Dr. Ozaki agreed to return to the ship, proceed from Kobe to Yokohama, less than an hour’s train ride from Tokyo. He knew that other attacks would continue, day after day.

*Known as “the bachelor statesman” for years, Yukio Ozaki in 1915 married the daughter of the British wife of a Baron Ozaki (no kin) whose mail was always delivered to his address.