INTERNATIONAL: Finish Japan First

Caution walked the streets of Tokyo last week. The little race of Eastern adventurers suddenly swallowed their loud, brave words. Suddenly the people of Japan realized that the world is contagious with wars too big to fight successfully, depressions too steep to contemplate without vertigo, threats too insistent to be whistled down with bravado.

It was hardly necessary for the myopic Japanese to see beyond their noses to realize that their communications, industry and man power were already in the em brace of a seductive war. Coal was short, and winter was near. Rice was scarce. The Government recently felt obliged to reduce the diameter of match sticks from .072 to .06 of an inch. Women patrolled Tokyo last week handing out cards to luxuriously dressed people which admonished “right recognition of the present situation in the country.” Geisha girls had been instructed not to accompany their clients to the theatre, on flower-viewing trips, or on walks. Actors were told to “exercise self-admonition in acting, refraining from expressions suggestive of loose ideas.” Excursion traveling by boat or train was prohibited. Brothels’ hours were limited to between 5 a.m. and midnight ; the prostitutes of Tokyo’s red-lit Yanagihashi district voted to adopt uniforms like those worn by waitresses in keeping with the national restraint; parents were prevented by law from selling their daughters to houses of prostitution “unless they have a justifiable reason for doing so.” Girl cyclists were directed to wear “peg-topped, coverall type of trousers as the tendency of kimonos to part in the front runs counter to the spirit of the times since it quickens the pulses of delinquent youths strolling in the streets who often lose their heads at such sights.”

But Japanese blessed with farsightedness saw things abroad to make them lose their heads in graver ways. They saw that Japan had been treated to the short end of the Axis, that the three-way pact had tremendous advantages for Germany and Italy, but that it merely brought Japan new wrath from the U. S. and renewed suspicion from Russia. To Winston Churchill the pact was so weighted against Japan that he wondered “whether there are not some secret clauses.” Besides this lopsided pact, there were specific threats.

What could Britain do? On July 17 the British Government, preoccupied with stringent preparations for an invasion which then seemed imminent, acceded to Japanese demands to close the Burma Road, China’s last major avenue of supply. The face-conscious British attached a rider: the road would be closed for three months only—to give Japan one last chance to end her war with China. Last week Britain had not been invaded and China was still resisting. Winston Churchill announced that the road would be reopened. The Chinese announced that during the three months the road had been vastly improved. From London came word that huge stocks had piled up in Calcutta, Singapore and Rangoon waiting to be rushed to Chungking. The Japanese sniffed, pointing out that the Burma Road is now within bombing range of Japanese bases in French Indo-China; that Great Britain still has her hands tied. But no Japanese scoffed at the real significance of the move: Britain would never have been able to reopen the road had she not had assurances that the U. S. would take a strong hand in the Far East. The first slap from that strong hand tingled on Japan’s face last week.

Would the U. S. fight? Japan’s first unpleasant surprise was the unanimous reaction of U. S. newspapers to the three-way pact. Japanese correspondents in Washington sent home sheaves of alarming messages. Then came official action of an ominous sort. Without saying a word to Japan, the State Department quietly instructed consular officials in the Far East to advise U. S. citizens to go home. In China, Formosa and Manchukuo there were about 7,000 of them; in Japan 8,000 more (including probably 4,000 of Japanese descent); in Hong Kong 1,500; in French Indo-China 125. Implicit in the order was a recognition that the Far East had become as dangerous as the war zones of Europe.

Whether the U. S. would fight, Japan did not know. But Japanese knew what the application of further sanctions would mean to Japan’s sagging economy. Last week Britain’s Under Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs Richard Austen Butler divulged that joint consultations were being carried on with the U. S. on this very subject.

Double Ten. In a tightly guarded house in Shanghai a mixed group of Chinese and Japanese caroused late one night last week. The food was served not by Chinese boys but by Japanese geisha girls; for the Chinese host feared poison from the hands of his own race. For two years he had evaded assassins by never sleeping two nights in the same bed. This party was being given in the safest of his several houses. He was Fu Siao-en, puppet mayor of Greater Shanghai, a 69-year-old mouse who had learned to conform with pathetic alacrity. At 2:30 a.m. the party broke up. The mayor and his wife went to sleep. So did the mayor’s 20 guards at their posts. At 5 a.m. Mme. Fu was awakened by horrible gurgling sounds. In the adjoining bed she found Mayor Fu with his throat cut and his forehead terribly gashed by a heavy meat cleaver.

The Japanese had a tantrum of frustration. They were unable to find the assassin—apparently a trusted servant who quietly rode away from the house on a bicycle. This was almost the last straw in the process of trying to make the Chinese cooperate. The Japanese had planned the day of the assassination quite another way. This was Oct. 10, the famous Double Ten, anniversary of the 1911 revolution which preceded Sun Yat-sen’s founding of the Chinese Republic. The Japanese had planned to celebrate the occasion by officially recognizing the puppet Nanking Government of Wang Ching-wei. Chungking’s continuing resistance made that move absurdly unwise, and it was postponed for the umteenth time.

In Chungking Double Ten was celebrated with tremendous enthusiasm. Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek made a radio address in which he said that foreign aid to China was increasing hourly. Said he: “China is approaching the stage of final reckoning with Japan.”

Rumors Outrageous. In the face of all this, Japanese officials hurried round for helpings of humble pie. The same men who had boasted the week before that Japan would discipline the U. S. with war now spoke sweet and lowly. In Tokyo Foreign Office Spokesman Yakichiro Suma deplored reports in the U. S. that relations with Japan might be broken off within ten days. Said he: “These are rumors, outrageous and unfounded.”

Foreign Minister Yosuke Matsuoka quieted down from his exultant crowing about the three-power pact fortnight ago. He said: “There is no thought of challenging the United States. . . . If the United States or other neutral countries should become involved in the war, then it would be a great calamity to humanity. I shudder at the thought of the horror of such a contingency. In short, the three-power agreement is a pact of peace.”

The first skirmish in the political Battle of the Pacific had not gone well for Japan. She proved jittery, unwilling to assume major risks in the face of major threats, terribly shocked to find the U. S., for once, ready to follow through. Sensing this, the Chinese Ambassador in London, Quo Taichi, suggested a strategy for the enemies of the Axis: “The program for the democracies, I suggest, is to finish with Japan first. She is the weakest link in the Axis chain, with her military and air forces deployed in China, her financial and economic resources weakening, and her people growing war-weary.”