INTERNATIONAL: Thunder in the East

The Fascist Alliance was one week old last week. The capitals of the world had had time to digest it, to react. The reactions were various, ranging from frank jubilation in Berlin and Rome to London’s grim decision to reopen the Burma Road in the face of a muttered Japanese threat that this would bring war. From Moscow, where the balance of world power now lies, there was no news.

Washington still held to its tortuous course midway between appeasement and action, while the Navy itched for a go at the little yellow men in their big boats (see p. 32). As usual U. S. public opinion was slow to react, because its leaders had as yet to give it clue or cue. The State Department, in this month before election, was even charier than usual of taking a firm stand until it knew what the reaction was. But in Tokyo, where the Government not only informs but makes public opinion, there were many signs that Japan intended to force the U. S. to take its stand. Every official and semi-official spokesman who opened his mouth—and the Japanese talked plenty last week—let it be known that Japan considers the Fascist Alliance a challenge to the U. S.

First official to sound off was Foreign Minister Yosuke Matsuoka, who has a big reputation for talking. In an interview given to International News Service’s Larry Smith, the Foreign Minister was quoted as follows:

“Japan will be compelled to fight the United States if our sister nation on the shores of the Pacific enters the war in Europe. I fling this challenge to America: If she in her contentment is going to blindly and stubbornly stick to the status quo in the Pacific, then we will fight America. For it would be better to perish than to maintain the status quo.

“I have always considered America my second home land.* I have always known the American people as a good and decent people, so it grieves me to realize that today America is the most unprogressive nation on earth. … It is nice for the United States to say that we must settle everything peacefully, but if we wait for America we must perish in the years of waiting. So I say to America: Now is the time for action, and Japan will not hesitate when its hour arrives.”

It was not until two days later, after Washington had unofficially called the interview an insult, that Foreign Minister Matsuoka decided that perhaps he had talked too much. The Japanese Foreign Office explained that Mr. Matsuoka had been talking off the record to a “magazine artist,” gave its “official” version of the interview:

“The treaty speaks for itself. Japan would have to fight America if America entered the European War. But that is an eventuality that I shudder even to think of.”

Next speaker to take the stump was sleepy-eyed Premier Prince Fumimaro Konoye himself. Said he: “Should the United States refuse to understand the real intention of Japan, Germany and Italy, and persist in challenging them in the belief that the pact among them represents a hostile action, there will be no other course open to them than to go to war.”

Foreign Office Spokesman Yakichiro Suma chimed in with the assertion that the U. S. is “taking step after step in the wrong direction, which might precipitate her into the vortex of armed conflict.” Spokesman Suma paid his respects to a suggestion by Publisher Roy Wilson Howard that the U. S. send a commission to Japan to improve U. S.-Japanese relations. Such a commission could be effective only if the two Governments were in agreement on fundamentals, said Yakichiro Suma, “and they have no mutual grounds any more.”

Japanese newspapers went all the way out on the limb. In Nichi Nichi, Nationalist Leader Seigo Nakano proposed that Japan take over the foreign concessions in Shanghai and Tientsin, restore Hong Kong to China (i.e., to Japan’s puppet Government at Nanking) and “restore The Netherlands Indies as an Asiatic country.” In a telegram to Publisher Howard, Director Hoshio Mitsunaga of the Nippon Press Association suggested that the U. S. can prevent a crisis if it “abandons its fortifications at Pearl Harbor, Guam and the Midway Islands, gives up its support of Chiang Kai-shek and restores trade to normalcy.”

By such words as those spoken last week, as well as by fundamental disagreements, wars are made. Officially the U. S. kept silent, but there were those who talked back. Arrived in the U. S. from Shanghai, Publisher Cornelius Vander Starr of the Shanghai Evening Post & Mercury did his bit to fan the smoldering crisis by telling Manhattan reporters that Japan was a fifth-rate power whose principal weapon was bluff. “Regardless of her bombast, Japan will under no circumstances risk actual war with America,” said lean Publisher Starr, whom the Japanese have separated not only from his newspaper but from the largest insurance business in the Far East.

At week’s end lights burned late in the old grey State Department building in Washington. If Cordell Hull & Co. were not talking, at least they were pondering —perhaps preparing to act. Unless the U. S. was willing to go all-out against Japan, it would be useless to slap an embargo on oil, because that would be an invitation to Japan to take the East Indies. But an agreement with Britain for a string of Far Eastern naval bases from New Zealand to Singapore was worth pondering, as were the chances of Japan’s risking war to keep the U. S. out of Singapore.

While Washington pondered, the Japanese continued to consolidate their gains in French Indo-China, moving southward toward Singapore (see p. 50). They worked to reach an agreement with Russia that would enable them to close the China Incident. The little yellow men were out to see whether the U. S. would scare. A firm U. S.-British stand on aid to China via the Burma Road, plus naval cooperation in the Far East, might scare them instead. If neither side would scare, there was a better than even chance of war.

*Yosuke Matsuoka graduated from the University of Oregon Law School in 1900, has been a loyal, dues-paying member of the Oregon Alumni Association for 20 years. This week in a “report to my Alma Mater” in the alumni magazine, he wrote feelingly of Japanese aims in polite, meaningless platitudes.