JAPAN: Son of a Samurai

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A huge Japanese lay half asleep on the immaculate mats of his living-room floor. Wall panels had been pulled wide so that he could contemplate his precise garden and bask in the afternoon sunshine. His brown, rough-silk kimono lay open from shoulder to ankle, his undershirt was unbuttoned, he wiggled his toes in white, mitten-like socks. His radio blared a grunt-by-grunt account of the winter sumo wrestling matches.

Occasionally staccato news flashes broke in: The Abe Cabinet is definitely out . . . Prince Konoye is being urged . . . General Hata will almost certainly be chosen if the Army consents. . . .

The big man half-listened. He fought to keep his heavy lids open. Towards sundown, he stretched, yawned, painfully arose, and laboriously shuffled off to the bathroom. Half an hour later—bathed, dressed and wide awake—he crouched at a low table and began eating.

Suddenly the telephone rang. An urgent voice commanded: “You will present yourself immediately at the Imperial Palace.” The big man put on his naval court uniform, and with trembling hands arranged a blazing white decoration over his heart. He stepped into his waiting Buick.

A few minutes later he stood in the Imperial throne room.

He could scarcely believe his one good ear when he heard the Son of Heaven command him, the new Premier of Japan, to form a Government. It was all he could do to bow low, mumble the prescribed formulas of acceptance (“I am filled with trepidation . . . I beg time . . .”) and back away.

Admiral Mitsumasa Yonai was amazed and wildly happy. He had been aloft in giddy rigging before—had climbed to power (as Admiral of the Combined Fleet, beginning in 1936) and into politics (as Navy Minister in three crucial Cabinets, 1937-39). But seldom had he dared dream of touching this uppermost skysail of influence.

Not that he lacked self-confidence. Mitsumasa Yonai knew that he had in him the genes of command. Nearly six feet tall, weighing 188 pounds, with airplane shoulders and a tri-motor voice, big of hands and feet and manner, he had always dominated littler men. His nickname—The White Elephant—was one of awe, and had none of the Occidental connotations of that phrase. It referred to his size; his exceptionally fair and aristocratic complexion, accented in its whiteness by his hair, black and shiny as a phonograph record; and his appearance of strength and wisdom.

If Admiral Yonai was himself amazed at the Emperor’s choice, the people of Japan were more so. The White Elephant was certainly a dark horse. The appointment of General Shunroku Hata, War Minister in the fallen Cabinet, had been so generally taken for granted that afternoon that newspapers came out with extras announcing his appointment as a fact. Office seekers prematurely crowded the Hata home to congratulate him.

One of the first things knowing Japanese noticed was that Premier Yonai hailed from Iwate Province. Only two Iwate men before him rose to the Premiership. Both died at the hands of assassins. But neither public surprise nor superstition dampened Mitsumasa Yonai’s confidence. He felt sure that by inventing a few metaphors neat as chopsticks, by continuing to mouth nebulous phrases about the New Order and completion of the China Incident (taking steps meanwhile to prolong it), by playing ball with the Army—in short, by emulating most of his recent predecessors—he would make as good a Premier as the next fellow.

All that was six weeks ago. Not until last week did Premier Yonai see the immense inadequacy of that first estimate, realize that he had stepped parachuteless off a precipice into an utterly new, bitterly abysmal Japan.

Three Legs. His first press conference was prophetic. He swaggered in with a tricky metaphor on the tip of his tongue: Japan today is a tripod, whose legs are “disposal of the China Incident, international questions, and domestic problems. . . . A tripod cannot be stable unless all three legs are in position. . . .” He ended up having confessed he had no specific plans to end the war, no idea when the Wang Ching-wei puppetry could be set up, no more definite formula than “elimination of the causes of trouble” in clearing up the tangle of foreign relations, no economic nostrums or even knowledge (“I do not know the proper use of the terms ‘controlled economy’ and ‘economic control’ “), no ideas about the budget.

But journalistic embarrassments did not discourage Mitsumasa Yonai. He waded out into the public ring slugging. His first speech before the Diet was a huge success. He said nothing, and said it briefly, elegantly, forcefully. He was not worried about financial matters because he had achieved the major political triumph of persuading former Finance Minister Sotaro Ishiwata to demean himself to be the Premier’s own secretary; nor about military matters because the Emperor had taken the spectacular, unprecedented step of calling in General Hata to bid the Army obey the Cabinet.

Last week Premier Yonai still had his confidence and his office. Because of the former he could probably keep the latter. But the Japan he had inherited, and the three-legged stability he had promised for it, had deteriorated in four dizzy weeks into something very close to chaos.

Two of the legs of Premier Yonai’s tripod were no more wobbly than usual. In its own sphere, the military was still effective. The Army could still announce an objective, go and get it over dead Chinese bodies, and then retire into garrison.

Under experienced Foreign Minister Hachiro Arita, foreign relations were actually picking up a little. The danger of an immediate U. S. embargo was past, and Japan was successfully finding new markets and sources in South America. Last week a new trade treaty with Uruguay was approved, an Argentine economic mission reached Tokyo for discussions, and Mexico, Peru, Colombia and Venezuela were on the docket for similar explorations.

“There is a Limit.” Leg No. 3—domestic problems—was shot through with dry rot, termites, woodworms and every other agent of collapse. And this Japan was last week beginning to realize, talk about, tremble over.

> Fish, vegetables, rice—the staples of Japanese diet—were crucially scarce. The rice shortage was beginning to affect the supply of sake (rice wine). Enough rice had been plundered from North China, already hard up because of severe floods, so that in Tientsin the price of a sack of rice—two months’ supply for one person—had gone up from $12 (Chinese) to $100. Food riots broke out in Tientsin and Peking. In Tokyo, according to the Agriculture and Forestry Ministry, so many Japanese were eating the bean curd waste usually fed to cattle that cows were giving only one-fifth of their usual milk supply.

> Charcoal, the national domestic fuel, was recently introduced as a substitute for precious gasoline in powering automobiles. Last week the fuel shortage was so grim that gasoline had to be used as a substitute for charcoal. Schoolchildren were sent into the mountains to cut wood and carbonate it for charcoal. A great scandal broke out when two 15-year-olds fell to their death in a charring pit.

> Labor was so scarce that a Diet member proposed forcibly repatriating all Japanese from the U. S. and Hawaii. Koreans and Chinese war prisoners were being drafted.

> Coal was desperately rare. Even before the shortage its price had been so high that mines found it cheaper to use water power than steam power generated on the premises by their own coal. The shortage was caused by lack of laborers, transport difficulties, and breakdown of the mining-equipment industry. One whole mine recently fell idle for want of a single bearing which could not be speedily replaced.

> Because of the coal shortage and a great drought all through 1939, electric power was so acutely inadequate that in some places (notably industrial Osaka) a 30% cut in consumption was ordered. Osaka was under virtual blackout. Most light industries were entirely shut down, and even war industries were last week being rationed.

> For over two years building trades have been curbed for the sake of war industries. By last week this had resulted in such a housing shortage that in Tokyo ten people were found living in many a six-mat room (nine by twelve feet).

> Last week the Diet’s lower House passed the heaviest budget in Japan’s history. Its ¥10,300,000,000 ($2,400,000,000) was more than one third of the entire national income of Japan, and more than three times the State’s revenues. Nearly 70% of the budget was earmarked for military expenses.

> Most notable shortage was in self-restraint. All the material shortages had been long developing, but only recently have the Japanese begun howling about them. Not so long ago any statesman with the gall to criticize the Government as openly as Diet members have in the last month (TIME, Feb. 12) would have been obliged to commit honorable suicide. Newspapers have suddenly begun speaking out of turn. Said nationalistic Kokumin:

“There is a limit to the people’s patience and endurance of hardship. . . . Present conditions are like a long-distance race without any fixed goal. Even champions become exhausted in such a race. . . .”

Last week Representative Haruji Tahara rose in the Diet and before the very face of Premier Yonai said: “We must have a strong man at the top, a Hitler, a Mussolini —” (the House drew in its breath, remembering the expulsion of a member last year for urging a Mussolini, Hitler, or Stalin) “— or a Roosevelt.” The House relaxed.

Mitsumasa Yonai, a confident man, smiled. He knew how to take criticism. He was born to debts, weaned on trouble, schooled in adversity.

His father was a samurai—one of those ferocious retainer-warriors who wore two swords sharp enough to shave with, who scorned money because their liege lords supplied them with houses, clothes, food, concubines, whatever else they needed.

But a few years before Mitsumasa was born Japan was suddenly turned from a feudal to a capitalistic state. The elder Yonai, given an inadequate political job, cracked up and deserted his family when Mitsumasa was 6.

Yonai’s mother, also of samurai blood and, being a woman, even less prepared to earn her daily rice than her husband had been, nevertheless buckled down as a seamstress and sewing teacher. While Mitsumasa was in school, he got a job copying documents, each week gave his pay envelope to his mother, unopened. He went on to the Naval Academy, where he was a popular mediocrity. He finished at the centre of his class — 60th among 125 cadets. At 21 he wrote, in clumsy, inept calligraphy, a pathetic little self-portrait: “My strongest characteristic: gluttony—I never get enough to eat. My credo: self-respect—I believe in myself. My weak points: none. My favorite book: Momotaro [a heroic fairy tale]. My favorite dish: boiled millet and soup with dry leeks [a poor peasant food].”

Up through the Navy Yonai plodded, pushing himself ahead with alternate fits of rebellion and unctuousness, in alternate shifts of deck and desk duty. He lost the hearing of his left ear in target practice, and quickly learned the political uses of deafness. In time he became chief of the big naval bases at Sasebo and Yokosuka, then Commander in Chief of the Combined Fleets. He was Navy Minister when Japan went to war, when the Navy let itself be sucked into the battle of Shanghai, when the Panay was bombed. He is said to have torpedoed an open military alliance with Germany last year with the remark: “The Japanese Navy belongs to the Emperor. It is not for hire by Hitler, or anyone else.”

At 60 he is steady, pleasant, strongwilled, plodding, articulate. He lives simply, unconscious of money. Long ago he donated the gold from his teeth to China war funds. He still delivers his paycheck —unopened—to his 80-year-old mother. He denies his reputation for being able to drink like a Cossack, says he has been drunk only three times (once he drew a blank, once he dimly remembers he downed two quarts of whiskey on a train in Poland, once he got drunk to help survive a Chinese feast of 100 courses), and insists that he drinks only “to celebrate a past event, to indulge the feeling of work well done, or to warm up for the future.”

The future of Japan was last week more obscure—more likely to put a Premier in his cups—than at any time since Japan invaded China in July 1937. For the first time the Japanese people were admitting to the world that they want peace. The Japan Times went so far as to publish a long and surprisingly generous list of suggested peace terms, specifically renouncing territorial ambitions, asking no indemnity, guaranteeing Chungking’s legal currency. Never before had any Japanese spoken of negotiating with the Chungking Government.

The Army hotly denied that its telegram to Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek fortnight ago, notifying him that its objectives had been reached, was a plea for peace. It was nothing more, said Army spokesmen, than an old Chinese custom—after an overwhelming victory, offer the beaten enemy merciful terms. But the Army could not deny that it had failed to send similar telegrams after its victories at Shanghai, Nanking, Hankow. Three days after the newly assembled straw army of Puppet-elect Wang Ching-wei was reported in revolt, Premier Yonai assured the Diet that the forthcoming installation of Puppet Wang would be the first step toward peace.

Is peace likely? As long as Japanese soldiers remain on South Chinese soil, no. As long as the Japanese refuse to discuss terms with Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek himself—not the “Chungking Government”—no. A remote chance for peace (for a time) lies in the Japanese withdrawing to the five occupied northern provinces, the Chinese conceding them. But if the war drags on—for six months, a year, two—Japan may slip off the rope to the end of which she has so nearly come. If that happens, if Japan’s military economy collapses, then all Hirohito’s horses and all of his men will not put Japan back together again.