JAPAN: From Words To Deeds

In that most dingy of Japanese official buildings called the Gaimusho, a flimsy affair of wood and beaverboard, whose shabbiness is accentuated by the grandiose Navy Office across the way, Japan’s new Foreign Minister, Yosuke Matsuoka, introduced himself to his staff one day last week. His was a critical audience—blunt Yoshizawa of the American Division, cross-eyed Spokesman Suma, dyspeptic middle-aged clerks and angry youngsters who think Japan should expand all the way to the Suez Canal—who had seen Foreign Ministers come & go like rainstorms. They expected thunder in this maiden speech.

Yosuke Matsuoka smiled his confidential smile and ran his hand over his bristling army-cropped head. He knew, and he knew his audience knew, that his job would be the most difficult in Japan. He knew that in acquitting it he should never try to dominate these demagogues; he should use them. Quickly he came to the point: “. . . Though I am an older man than most here, I will not shrink from exchanging verbal blows with you.”

Then he went into the staff dining room and, rubbing elbows with the underlings, noisily ate a 50-sen lunch of fried fish and noodles.

A short time before Yosuke Matsuoka’s boss, Premier Prince Fumimaro Konoye, had talked a little with newsmen about the Foreign Minister and his terrifying job. A reporter asked what Mr. Matsuoka’s policy would be. “Japan’s foreign policy,” said the Premier after thinking for a long time, “will be renovated.” Everyone knew what he meant. Other less discreet Cabinet Ministers had indulged in a chorus of blatantly tough speeches. Japan, like Italy, was aboard the bandwagon of triumph, and for the first time Japanese statesmen openly aired their fantastic ambitions. Kobayashi (Commerce) declared: “A high degree of State efficiency must be achieved through hitching ourselves to the Italo-German Axis.” Yasui (Home & Welfare) boasted: “We cannot doubt that the day will soon come when Japan can share the world with Germany and Italy.”

Renovation fell upon Yosuke Matsuoka like a lash across the shoulder blades, unexpectedly, unpleasantly, from behind. He had tossed verbal blows with his staff for only 72 hours when it came. It came not from his own ambitious mind, not from the Emperor or Prince Konoye or the Army—but from a fountain pen in a hand which wrote the words Franklin D. Roosevelt. The signature was set under an executive order which amounted to an embargo on oil and scrap iron. Japan had been getting an average of 70% and 90% respectively of her supply of these vital war materials from the U. S.

Now Yosuke Matsuoka, who was brought up in the U. S. by a hardy Oregon woman, who had talked more with U. S. correspondents than any other Tokyo leader, knew pretty well the U. S. state of mind. He knew that Americans considered the China war a nuisance (since it kept the U. S. Fleet tied down in the wrong ocean), a tragedy (because the weaker and righter side seemed to U. S. citizens to be the same), a reproach (because self-righteous Americans thought the U. S. should have been able to end the war long ago). But hfc also knew that the U. S. was divided umpteen ways on what to do about it.

When all the nuances and morals were brushed away, alternative U. S. programs for the Far East, he realized, fell into three general heads: 1) crush Japan; 2) make a deal with Japan; 3) prolong the conflict as long as possible. What really distressed Yosuke Matsuoka was that last week’s quasi-embargo could be used, paradoxically, to further any one of the three programs, if & when the U. S. State Department ever should make up its mind to pick one.

If the choice should be to fight Japan, the first and most obvious step must be to throttle the flow of supplies without which Japan would long since have had to cry uncle. The second alternative, a deal, could never be negotiated without the thing which the embargo gave the U. S. for the first time—a bargaining advantage as visible as a point-blank muzzle. Finally, if the U. S. should choose that old Russian game, keeping the potential enemy fighting someone else, the embargo was equally useful. Closure of the Indo-China and Burma supply routes put an end to direct U. S. aid to China, which for three years had impaled 1,125,000 Japanese soldiers and most of the Imperial Fleet. Only other way to prolong the deadlock was to end direct aid to Japan.

Japan reacted to the embargo violently, but alert Foreign Minister Matsuoka was a jump ahead of his own countrymen. He instructed Ambassador to the U. S. Kensuke Horinouchi to call on Sumner Welles and lodge a protest. He instructed Spokesman Suma to use strong words. That master of anticlimax told reporters: “Our reaction will be very great.” But the most serious thing Yosuke Matsuoka did was to let word get about that Japan might have to retaliate by cutting off U. S. supplies of rubber and tin from the East Indies.

After the Jolt, Yosuke Matsuoka quickly rebounded, confident that he was the man to straighten things out. He has not felt many twinges of modesty in his 60 years. Urbane, roly-poly, positive as an electric shock, with a flair for guessing what others are thinking and hiding what he is, Yosuke Matsuoka is ideally suited to ride the second biggest saddle in a near-totalitarian regime. In his own person he symbolizes the collapse of the ideal of collective security: it was he who, with an unlit cigar clenched between his teeth, imperiously beckoned to the Japanese delegates in the great Hall of the League of

Nations and led them out one day in 1933, never to return.

The word which Prince Konoye used last week in connection with foreign policy, Matsuoka once used of domestic—in an intuitive anticipation of the streamlined Government into which he was called fortnight ago: “Japan,” he said as he assumed presidency of the monopolistic South Manchuria Railway five years ago, “cannot halt its North China operations. The arrow has already left the bow … to carry through these operations a domestic renovation is inevitable.” When he re signed from the S. M. R. last year because he could not tolerate Army interference, he declared: “If they would just let a businessman run the country, I would put it on a paying basis in ten years.” As for foreign policy, he is nothing if not a man of high hope. “I have always dreamed,” he says, “of unfurling the flag of the rising sun over the Urals.”

When an Imperial Liaison Conference, consisting of the Cabinet and military and naval leaders, met at week’s end, Yosuke Matsuoka was all set. He was able to remind his colleagues that this was the first anniversary of the U. S. decision to abrogate the 1911 Trade Treaty with Japan. He then laid before them a program for Renovation. Because talkative Mr. Matsuoka had suddenly declared himself for deeds, not words, the nature of the program was not divulged—but an incident later the same day gave a strong hint.

British Ambassador Sir Robert Leslie Craigie called on Mr. Matsuoka and said that though his Government had done “everything in its power to ameliorate the situation,” unpleasant brushes still occurred. Just where did Britain stand? Mr. Matsuoka smiled his confidential smile, and said he could not give an answer just then. When Sir Robert returned to his

Embassy, a piece of news awaited him which was a clear enough answer.

During the very same hour when he was conferring with the Foreign Minister, gendarmes in Tokyo, Kobe, Shimonoseki, Osaka and Nagasaki had rounded up and arrested at least ten prominent Britons: Reuters Correspondent Melville James Cox, C. H. N. James, chief representative in Japan of the Federation of British Industries, and eight other key businessmen. The London Daily Herald was guilty only of understatement in sensing that these arrests were connected “with some sudden change in Japanese policy.” Mr. Matsuoka’s official reason: “Ever increasing activities of foreign organs of espionage. …”

This week the plot thickened. The Japanese Foreign Office announced that Melville Cox had committed suicide by jumping from a police headquarters window. They reported, but did not produce, a note he was supposed to have written to his Belgian wife: “. . . I have been well treated, but there is no doubt about how matters are going.” Britons in Japan at once declared the note a phony. Their reason: Melville Cox, 55, a big, chubby, curly-haired Englishman, could never curb his tongue. At press conferences he infuriated officials with bitterly sarcastic questions. For a whole year the Japanese took his telephone away. His friends were sure that even if he had been treated well, he would never have admitted it. Melville Cox, they were convinced, had taunted the gendarmes into a fury, and had been pushed from a window.

In China, Japan opened up an anti-U. S. campaign full blast. It opened up fortnight ago with the bombing of a U. S.-managed newspaper, assassination of U.S.-hired Insurance Executive Sam Chang, roughing up of New York Times Correspondent Hallett Abend. Last week the Japanese citizens of Hangchow (100 miles southwest of Shanghai) issued a proclamation warning the U. S. and its citizens to “abandon their hostile attitude and with draw from Asia forthwith.” Consul General Yoshiaki Miura hindered investigation of the Abend case. The recent lawful arrest of Japanese gendarmes by U. S. marines was truculently rehashed. Japanese in the northern resort of Tsingtao assaulted a U. S. sailor on the beach.

This epidemic of hate was not the work of Foreign Minister Matsuoka, not yet a matter of policy. The hand of the Imperial Army, trembling with frustration and fury, was clearly to be seen in each of these incidents. But the Foreign Office did nothing to check them. The one phrase which occurred over & over in the news papers and statements of Cabinet Ministers last week was: “We must free ourselves of dependence on the United States and Britain.” And the phrase which Yosuke Matsuoka fancied most was this: from now on, Japan’s diplomacy would be something new under the rising sun—”surprise Blitzkrieg.”