JAPAN: Remember the Panay

JAPAN “Remember the Panay”

Once when Mark Twain wanted to express the quintessence of complacency, he reached down into his grabbag of artful characterizations and pulled out one of his greatest: “The calm confidence of a Christian with four aces.” Japanese statesmen wore just such a cocksure air last week. Their spiritual complacency (the sacred mission of creating a New Order) was reinforced with all the aces and most of the face cards in the Asiatic pack.

The Japanese Bar Association discovered a legalistic basis for Japanese demands that Europeans get out of China.

Since both Japan and conquered areas of China were neutral with regard to Europe’s war, said the lawyers, they had a perfect right to ask belligerents (Great Britain and France) to withdraw all military and naval posts.

In Washington Japan’s Christian Ambassador Kensuke Horinouchi admitted to newsmen that his country had given Britain and France “friendly advice” to go home. This was because they were at war. Then the Ambassador casually played his ace. The U. S. is not at war. The U. S. and Japan should be friendly. It was too bad, he said, that since denunciation of the U. S.-Japanese trade treaty of 1911 there would soon be no commercial arrangements between the two countries.

At home in Tokyo, Ambassador Horinouchi’s Embassy counselor, big, pleasantly pompous Yakicniro Suma, complemented his chief’s words by publicly regretting the U. S. animus, and especially the U. S. Navy’s, towards Japan. The toast among young U. S. naval officers, he said, is: “Remember the Panay.”

Newspapers, as usual, were solidly in line. One morning the leading newspapers of Tokyo all ran strikingly similar editorials on how the U. S. was becoming the “watchdog of the Far East” on behalf of Britain and France.

The Government had the ace of trumps up its sleeve. When Premier General Nobuyuki Abe assembled a new Cabinet month ago, he reserved the portfolio of foreign affairs for himself “for the time being.” Last week he named as Foreign Minister one of the best Japanese friends of the U. S., Admiral Kichisaburo Nomura. As a student at Annapolis and as naval attache in Washington, he acquainted himself with U. S. naval strategy and Franklin Roosevelt (when he was Assistant Secretary of the Navy). A remarkably huge Japanese—six feet tall and nearly 200 pounds—he lost an eye fighting in Shanghai. In public gatherings he alternately dozes and rolls with silent laughter. His good nature will be hard for U. S. diplomats to resist, but in case Japan has to do the resisting, he is a Navy man: smile for smile, fleet for fleet.

On the mainland, meanwhile, the Army began operations with the cards stacked in its favor: with far superior equipment, with new determination to jack its sagging morale, with the knowledge that Britain and France were no longer the whalebones in China’s financial corset. The Army’s greatest blessing was that it no longer had Russia to fear. Soldiers read reports from Domei, the official news agency, telling that in the no man’s land of the Manchukuo-Outer Mongolian border, a Japanese lieutenant colonel and a Soviet major general stepped from cars decorated with white flags and shook hands in formal recognition of their truce. Domei reported nothing, not even the gist, of their conversation. All it said was that the Japanese officer “made a loud laugh.”