JAPAN: End of Compromise

One evening last week newsboys whipped through Tokyo’s streets, warm papers under their arms. “Gogai! Gogai!” (Extra! Extra!) they shrilled. The Cabinet had fallen. Men peered at headlines in the dim light, then walked on, thoughtfully.

Behind the darkened windows of his official residence, Premier Prince Fumimaro Konoye, grave-faced beyond his habit, looked at the frowning, worried men of his Cabinet. He told them that the Emperor had accepted their resignation. Then they departed. They, too, were thoughtful. This, they knew, was the end of Japan’s effort to compromise with destiny.

Failure of a Coalition. It had been a long week of conferences: the Emperor and the Prince, the Emperor and the War Minister, the Emperor and the Privy Council, the Cabinet and the Prince. Again & again they had examined the smooth, word-worn facets of Japan’s problem.

The men who conferred had heard one another’s opinions on this problem more times than they cared to remember. There was one inescapable fact: the U.S. was adamant in its embargo. There was another: Germany was urgent for action. The echo of her terrible armies thunder ing at the gates of Moscow beat louder & louder in Tokyo. It caused the blood of warriors to race. But Prince Konoye refused to assume responsibility for a break with the U.S. The Army had opposed Prince Konoye for months, the Navy had supported him. Last week the Navy suddenly turned, declared itself “itching for action.” The uneasy coalition of the Navy, and civilians, on which Japan’s Cabinet had rested for months, dissolved.

The next day Japan’s former Premiers conferred on the selection of a new leader. Even 91-year-old Count Keigo Kiyoura came from his sickbed, entering the Palace in a wheel chair, attended by a nurse, bringing with him an oxygen inhalator. In less than four hours the choice was made: a general, the son of a general, would be Premier. War Minister Lieut. General Eiki Tojo, a man of strong will and a friend of the Axis, was to head the nation. General Tojo hurried to the Emperor’s presence and, leaving it, announced: “I have received an Imperial Command to form a new Cabinet and am overwhelmed with awe.”

It was late in the afternoon and the new Premier was in a hurry. But one matter had first to be attended to. He hastened to Yasukuni shrine, attended the deification ceremonies for 15,000 war dead newly fallen in China. He stopped, too, to pray briefly at the shrine of Emperor Meiji, founder of the Empire, and at the shrine of Admiral Togo, conqueror of the Russians.

The Cabinet. Within 36 hours General Tojo had brought his choices through the grey fog to the palace, presented them to the Emperor. Then he went to report his assumption of office to the Sun Goddess at the Grand Shrine of Ise;.

It was two days before Tokyo read of the new Cabinet. Sharp as Mount Fuji on a clear day was its outline. There were five holdovers, mostly civilians, concerned with domestic affairs. There was a new Admiral in the Ministry of the Navy: Shigetaro Shimada. Foreign Minister was Shigenori Togo, onetime Ambassador to Berlin and Moscow, a colorless, competent diplomat, who has a German wife. Finance Minister was Okinobu Kaya, who helped the Army develop North China during the past few years. But Tojo was The Man. Three times he had been invested by the Emperor: once as Premier, once as War & Home (espionage, police) Minister, once as full General.

“In Tojo’s Opinion.” The sloppy uniform, horn-rimmed glasses and sad mustache of Japan’s new Premier make him look like a professor at a masquerade, but his bluntly expressed, razor-sharp opinions are anything but mild. In 1938 he so infuriated Japanese political and business circles by one of his speeches that he was kicked upstairs from Vice Minister of War to Chief of the Air Force.

Earliest hate of Premier Tojo is Soviet Russia. In 1938 he warned Japan that she must face a “titanic” simultaneous war with China and Russia. During the last two years he has hated the U.S. and Great Britain as the greatest obstacles to a “lasting peace.” Last summer, when Germany blasted Russia into the arms of the democracies, all of General Tojo’s hates were turned against one iron ring of encirclement. Last week, as Russia convulsed in agony, General Tojo and the Army felt that the moment had come to strike. “In Tojo’s opinion,” said a Japanese magazine once, “the entire nation should move as one cannon ball of fiery resolution.”

General Tojo’s hates were important. More important was the fact that his hates were the Army’s hates, his will the Army’s will. He is one of the Army’s Big Three, confrere of square-faced Chief of Staff General Gen Sugiyama, who believes the Army is “the pilot rather than the spark plug of Japan’s efforts to advance her fortunes,” and of the little-known, politically potent Commander of General . Defense Headquarters, General Otozo Yamada, who once commanded the Central China expeditionary forces (1939) and is an arch foe of the Soviet Union.

This week, at last, the Army moved to front center on the stage, took full responsibility for Japan’s future. Japan had turned her corner in history.