CHINA: Troubles of a Tosspot

On May Day some 150,000 Japanese troops began the first big drive of spring 1940 against Chinese forces on the plateau in northern Hupeh and southern Honan near Hankow, bomb-gutted “Chicago of China.” Object was to win a victory spectacular enough to justify final and official recognition by the Imperial Japanese Government of their Chinese puppet ruler at Nanking, multiple-turncoat Wang Ching-wei.

Neither the victory nor the recognition went according to schedule. Soon the broadcasting stations of Free China began jubilant descriptions of how the Japanese spring drive was being routed, claimed 50,000 Japanese had been killed. Special Ambassador General Nobuyuki Abe, who long since arrived to recognize the Wang regime in the name of the Son of Heaven, continued to hang around doing nothing. More significantly, in Tokyo no audience with the Emperor was scheduled for a delegation of Chinese who arrived representing Mr. Wang.

In a face-saving Japanese Army communiqué, the spring drive was finally said to have “wiped out ten Chinese divisions.” But out of a welter of Chinese and Japanese claims it appeared fairly certain this week that the Chinese were nimbly scattering whenever the Japanese attacked in force, immediately re-forming to harass the Japanese flanks and rear. Specifically the Chinese claimed capture of 52 pieces of Japanese artillery, 54 tanks, 100 Japanese Army trucks.

But the Tokyo press labored mightily to raise Puppet Wang in Japanese esteem. Unlike most other peoples, the Japanese like their statesmen boozy. Several Japanese Premiers have been notoriously copious tosspots. It was therefore a great build-up of Chinese Puppet Wang in the eyes of Japanese when the Tokyo Hochi Shimbun (News) quoted Director Yakichiro Suma of the Japanese Foreign Office Information Service apropos his personal acquaintance with Wang Ching-wei some dozen years ago in Peiping:

“Even in those days,” declared Mr. Suma, “I felt Mr. Wang’s patriotic ardor, his zeal to construct a rejuvenated China. You know, he is quite a drinker, although you wouldn’t take him for one. He could take it all right. I think it was in the summer of 1931, when he established a National Government in Canton against Chiang Kaishek, [that] I presented him with a cask of Akita sake (rice wine) from my native province and we drank together one night at his house in Tung-shan [suburb of Canton]. He drank sake, cold, from a big glass and swallowed big mouthfuls, instead of, like us, heating it and sipping it from tiny cups. But he didn’t seem a bit influenced by alcohol. I suppose he can take it more like a gentleman than any other man in the whole Kuomintang [Chinese Government Party].

“Remembering this partiality of his. I think I shall send him a big cask of sake. The only drawback is that he must be more careful of his health. He has diabetes and alcohol is taboo. If his wife or secretary gets hold of the cask, the game’s cooked.”