JAPAN: Straight from the Mouth

U. S. Ambassador to Japan Joseph Clark Grew is such a skillful diplomat that every time he criticizes the Japanese, they like him better. He has virtually all the qualities which a foreign emissary to Tokyo needs: seven years’ residence in the country, tall body, grey hair, dark mustache, spectacular brows, horn-rimmed glasses, sensitivity, firmness, a gentlemanly capacity for hard work and saki (rice wine), good clothes, a beautiful house filled with Oriental antiques, and one deaf ear, which he knows how to turn at the right moment.

Whenever a U. S. Ambassador arrives in Tokyo, whether for the first time or after home leave, he is tendered a dinner of welcome by the America-Japan Society, a frequent sounding board for the two countries’ relationships. Five years ago Ambassador Grew returned to Tokyo after a furlough. The America-Japan Society’s welcoming speech was made by suave, old Viscount Kikujiro Ishii, one of Japan’s most subtle diplomats, then Privy Councilor. Viscount Ishii amazed everyone by saying that a war between Japan and the U. S. was remote unless “the U. S. ever attempted to dominate the Asiatic continent and prevented Japan from her pacific and natural expansion in this part of the world.” Ambassador Grew rose, said he was terribly sorry that because of his deafness he had missed parts of the Viscount’s speech, but had taken notes on what he had been able to hear. Consulting them, he gave a pleasant little talk.

Last week Ambassador Grew was again back in Tokyo after four months at home. The America-Japan Society again gave the usual dinner. This time Joseph Grew made a speech which was not only unusual: it was virtually unprecedented in ambassadorial usage. The Ambassador gave his distinguished audience an earful which made many of them wish for deafness. He used an unofficial occasion to express an official, definitely controversial, exceedingly ticklish point of view. His words, he said, “came straight from the horse’s mouth . . . and mind you, I know whereof I speak.”

He told the dumbfounded notables that Japanese are badly mistaken when they say that U. S. public opinion as to Japan’s aims is founded on misunderstanding. “The facts as they exist are accurately known by the American people. I do not suppose any country in the world today is better served by press and radio with accurate foreign information than the United States.”

Then the Ambassador spoke shockingly frank words. “Many of you,” he said, “are not aware of the increasing extent to which the people of the United States resent methods which Japanese armed forces are employing in China, and what appear to be their objectives.

“The American people regard with growing seriousness the violation and interference with American rights by Japanese armed forces in China in disregard of treaties and agreements.

“When such opinion tends toward unanimity, it is a force which a government cannot possibly overlook and will not fail to reflect in its policies and actions.”

This was, in effect, a threat. How much weight did it carry? Did the Japanese take it seriously? U. S. newsagencies immediately queried State Department officials, who endorsed the speech. Japanese news-agencies were told that they could not quote the speech at length; it was too important for public consumption. Said Foreign Minister Admiral Kichisaburo Nomura: “I am planning to have a talk with Mr. Grew.”

In August the U. S. abrogated the 1911 Trade Treaty with Japan. And after Admiral Harry Ervin Yarnell retired from command of the China fleet and came home in August to get from Franklin Roosevelt a Distinguished Service Medal for keeping the Japanese in line so far as U. S. nationals were concerned, he kept the fireball rolling. “If the Japanese plans succeed,” the Admiral warned, “I doubt very much whether there will be any business for Americans in China.” The Ambassador’s slap, which was no less stinging for being deft, not only reminded the Japanese that they had been slapped before, but made them realize as never before that the U. S. State Department and people had by no means decided to acquiesce to the New Order in Asia, even if their headlines had recently seemed to have forgotten Asia was there. The U. S. was patently in a mood to spank as well as slap.

Fortnight ago the U. S. Pacific Fleet held maneuvers off San Pedro, Calif.; and 29 scouting vessels were newly based in Pearl Harbor, Hawaii. The U. S. was considering helping China and herself by buying enough tungsten for ten years of war. Filipinos and interested Americans agitated for revision of the Philippine Independence Act on the ground that though battleships might have a hard time defending the islands from the Japanese, the U. S. flag defends them just by waving. “Fellow Americans” was what new Philippine High Commissioner Francis Sayre significantly called 15,000,000 Little Brown Brothers in his inaugural speech.

Plenty also happened in China to keep U. S. eyes westward to the East. When a Chinese policeman was killed and a Sikh colleague wounded in a Shanghai fracas, polo-playing, hard-working Chairman Cornell S. Franklin of the Shanghai Municipal Council announced that he might ask U. S. Marines to come into the International Settlement and do something the Japanese love to do—restore order. Puppet-elect Wang Ching-wei, popping in and out of his fortified castle in Shanghai’s “badlands,” announced he was “satisfied that Japan’s peace conditions toward China do not infringe on China’s sovereignty or territorial rights.”

In an interview in Chungking, China’s gentle Premier Dr. H. H. Kung asked the U. S. some pertinent if rhetorical questions: “Why should Japan build a great Navy if her territorial ambitions are confined to China? Why should they have established in the United States, Panama and elsewhere in the Americas an espionage system from coast to coast? Why, also, should Japanese fishing fleets congregate in such numbers off the Pacific Coast of the U. S. and why should Japanese fishermen ply their craft in every bay and inlet of the Hawaiian Islands?”

Meanwhile, a letter reached the U. S. from Author Agnes Smedley (China Fights Back), serving with the Red Cross in China’s New Fourth Army: “As for the neutrality and isolation of my own country, permit me to emphasize that America is not keeping out of this war in China. Japan could not wage this war without American help. The American property being destroyed in China is destroyed by American airplanes run by American gasoline, and loaded by bombs made of American material. … So, when I hear Isolationists speak, I’d like to ask why in hell they don’t send American troops to surround American firms aiding Japan in this war, and arrest the heads of all those firms for murder.”

The answers to these questions, the echoes of these events, would probably serve more & more to shift embargo-conscious, war-wary U. S. attention from one set of names once faraway, now close to home — Saarbrükken, Ankara, Helsinki, Scapa Flow—to another which looked as if it might get too close for comfort—Osaka, Oahu, Hainan, Mindanao.