INTERNATIONAL: THE JAP AS BOSS-MAN

The Japanese were last week clamping a chill pattern of subjugation over the still-warm framework of military conquest. All the world knows that Hitler’s European New Order is failing. It will be a long time before the world knows how Japan’s New Order will fare in Asia, for the Japanese have a genius for suppression. But by last week two facts began to glimmer through the huggermugger murk: 1) the Japanese were stealing everything in sight; 2) they were treating prisoners surprisingly well.

One or Two Lumps? After his troops the Jap sent engineers, chemists, industrialists. They drained off food supplies, created inflation by “military yen,” adjusted exports to Japan of food and war supplies in exchange for paper, piece goods and children’s toys. To bolster Asiatic predominance, radio, press and education were revamped to the Jap’s liking; the Japanese calendar was introduced.

From Indo-China the Jap took a vital supply of rice and minerals; from Malaya, Java. Sumatra he got rubber; in Borneo he hastened repair of blown-up oil wells; from the Philippines and the erstwhile Dutch islands his diet was sweetened with sugar; from China he got cotton and high-grade bituminous coal. Japanese sources reported that in Java great Japanese banks (Yokohama Specie Bank, Bank of Taiwan) were already exceedingly active. The Jap’s New Order in Asia was potentially one of the richest economic units in the world; already the Japanese felt heady enough to discourage use of the word Japan in favor of Nippon or Dai Nippon (Great Japan).

Shoe Shine, Mister? Like a crazed animal, the Jap had purged himself after a savage campaign in Nanking’s 1937 blood bath. But, whatever fears gnawed at hearts in U.S. homes last week, there was no confirmed evidence that the rape of Nanking had been repeated, not even at Hong Kong, where the British wrathfully protested Jap atrocities. A few cases of rape were reported there, and British troopers were said to have been put to work shining shoes. But, on the whole, what happens before complete order is restored in a captured city is often better left unsaid.

As for Japanese treatment of prisoners after the first bloody plunge, best evidence in the U.S. pointed to the Jap’s adherence—with variations under varying field commands—to the Red Cross Convention of 1929* for fair treatment of prisoners of war.

In the Philippines, best sources available indicated that U.S. citizens were not being seriously molested, that some had been allowed to reoccupy their former homes—under surveillance.

They’re On the Fire. Still cursed with as tough luck as they had faced ever since the Jap attacked Pearl Harbor were the estimated 2,000 U.S. soldiers, sailors and marines taken off Guam, Wake Island and from China ports, the 40,000 U.S. fighting men previously captured in the Philippines, and the 10,000 who were captured on Corregidor last week.

Under terms of the Red Cross Convention, interned U.S. fighting men were being mistreated only to the extent that the Japanese standard of living was abusively lower than the U.S. standard. These men received the pay and rations of men and officers of similar rank in the Jap forces. After as valiant a fight as history records, thousands of these men faced months of a Jap soldier’s diet of rice and raw fish. How long before they tasted ham & eggs again was up to the U.S.

* Which Japan approved in principle, like Russia did not ratify.