JAPAN: Time in Flight

Only Japan’s High Command knows how large is her reserve of oil. But all the world knows that Japan’s reserve of time is growing short. Japan has been under oil blockade for two months, and before her oil is gone she must move or renounce her imperialist ambitions.

Another time limit weighs upon Tokyo. It is set by U.S. aid to China, trickling now, rising steadily, destined to rise & rise. Before that stream of aid becomes a torrent the Japanese must crush Chiang Kai-shek’s armies or face defeat.

Only one nation has the power to alter these time limits for the Japanese Empire: the United States. Last week a great debate raged in Tokyo. The Navy-and-civilian-dominated Government of Premier Prince Fumimaro Konoye wanted to persuade the U.S. to relent and alter the fixed time limits. The Japanese Army, struggling for power in the Government, felt that U.S. policy was inexorably fixed, that Japan must move before the time limits expired.

The pressure on Japan to come to a decision increased with each day that passed. Last week top-flight British Far Eastern officials conferred earnestly in Singapore. To Manila went Britain’s Far Eastern Commander Sir Robert Brooke-Popham, to discuss Anglo-U.S. military plans with U.S. Far Eastern Military Commander Lieut. General Douglas MacArthur; U.S. Asiatic Fleet Commander Admiral Thomas C. Hart; and Brigadier General John Magruder, head of the newly appointed military mission to China. The Netherlands East Indies, which have denied oil to Japan, were sending oil to Vladivostok through seas theoretically dominated by the Japanese Navy. To Japan all this spelled tightening encirclement.

Face for the Cabinet. For ten years a struggle has gone on between Army and Government for control of the nation. Their usual point of conflict: Japan’s role in the world. Three Cabinets in four years of war have fallen because of foreign policy. Last week the fourth tottered. The strain of more than a month of fruitless U.S.-Japanese conversations was telling. In Japan the conviction grew that the U.S. was neatly outsmarting Prince Konoye, that the U.S. was wasting Japan’s oil, spinning out the talks for days, for weeks, endlessly.

Sensitive to the grinding strain of the nation’s economy, the Cabinet that had sponsored the negotiations hoped desperately that the U.S. might grant Japan an eleventh-hour reprieve. Squeezed now by the Allied embargo on scrap iron and iron ore (she imports two-thirds of her steel industry’s raw materials), and on oil (she imports 93% of her oil), Japan also faced an extraordinarily poor rice harvest, a subnormal fishing catch.

The Cabinet knew Japan’s weakness, feared the air and sea power of the South Sea Allies, the mechanized, air-supported Red Army. To the U.S. the Cabinet was willing to promise hands off the South Seas and Siberia in return for oil and the recognition of Japan’s conquests in China. But last week the U.S. was rock-firm in its refusal either to sell oil to Japan or to recognize her conquests. And the Cabinet knew it could not settle for less and survive.

Friends for the Army. The Japanese Army wants to fight now before it is too late, is impatient of all negotiations. It wants to fight Russia, wants to fight in the South Seas. It is backed by a powerful German fifth column, three thousand strong, giving friendly 24-hour service. Headquartered in Tokyo’s Imperial Hotel and the German Embassy, hundreds of German technicians swarm through Japan’s war industries, advise the Ministries of War, Navy, Finance. Gestapo agents teach refinements in police and counterespionage technique to the Home Ministry. German propaganda floods Japan with war documentaries and lavishly illustrated “culture” magazines. German money has taught two important Japanese newspapers (the Army’s Kokumin Shimbun and Hochi Shimbun) to sing an Axis tune. Under Hermann Göring’s friend, Helmuth Wohlthat, German experts teach Japan tricks of totalitarian finance. Germany wants Japan to throw its weight into the world struggle: against the Allies at Singapore, in Siberia, or both.

While the U.S. talks dragged on last week the Army refrained from forcing the issue, maintained an uneasy compromise with the Cabinet. Army, Navy and civilians all agree on one thing: Chiang Kai-shek has to be smashed. The Japanese public is also hungry for victory. With the Japanese Army engaged in two campaigns in China (see p. 24), its spokesman declared that, regardless of world affairs, Japan’s chief aim is the conclusion of the China War.