JAPAN: Tokyo Team

(See front cover)

Like other U. S. Ambassadors, when delegated to negotiate and sign treaties, “Joe” Grew by a legal fiction is “Frank” Roosevelt. Were he to sign a treaty at Tokyo tomorrow, Ambassador Grew would figure in it as “[for] the President of the United States: Joseph Clark Grew.”

In the case of Mr. Grew, though he is a Republican and cousin-by-marriage to J. P. Morgan, there is no incongruity whatever that he should be the President by a routine feat of diplomatic ectoplasm. Both men are Old Grotonians who have called each other “Joe” and “Frank” since boyhood. Both, too, are the rich sons of landed squires who sent them to Harvard as a matter of course. Yet the Forgotten Man is passionately sure that “Frank” Roosevelt remembers him. and “Joe” Grew has a like reputation among local U. S. residents of all classes wherever he has held a diplomatic post.

Last week Tokyo was decidedly the hottest, the most crucial U. S. diplomatic post in the world. The Japanese Government of that testy old sea dog, Premier Admiral Keisuke Okada, had at last reached the overt, defiant stage in its pursuit of three drastic policies:

1) To smash the Washington Naval Treaty unless the U. S. and Great Britain consent to grant Japan full naval equality.

2) To slam shut and bar by means of Japanese-controlled monopolies of oil, tobacco, motor cars and other goods the so-called “Open Door” to trade with Manchukuo which Japan has for months been cautiously closing against the Great Powers.

3) To squeeze the great foreign oil interests in Japan until they either influence their home governments to favor Japan’s ambitions or are forced to disgorge most of their profits in ways which Japanese ingenuity is now busily devising.

Plainly such policies are a broad challenge to the West, and therefore to nearly every diplomatic mission in Tokyo. Teamwork to hold the impulsive subjects of the Son of Heaven reasonably in check was never more necessary. By last week Ambassador Grew had come to be recognized as a sort of informal Captain of the Team.

Teammate Sir Robert Henry Clive, the Ambassador of George V, is a great golfer, a greater fisherman, and the genial, erudite lord of half a dozen new buildings of trim English brick. He and that hard-bargaining art collector, French Ambassador Fernand Marie Jean Pila, give the Tokyo corps’ grandest fetes. Runner-up in this respect is the Soviet Ambassador, Comrade Konstantin Yurenev. For a year and a half he has stewed in the hot juice of trying to sell Russia’s share of the Chinese Eastern Railway, with Japan’s Cabinet still wavering between the wisdom of buying or stealing it.

Teamwork has been closest in the efforts of Ambassador Grew and colleagues to deal with the oil crisis as provoked by Japanese in the puppet Empire of Manchukuo. Only last week did His Majesty the Emperor Kang Teh (“Henry Pu Yi”) of Manchukuo officially make known that he has granted the notorious Manchukuo petroleum monopoly (TIME. Nov. 5, et ante) to Manchuria Oil Co. which is 80% owned by Japanese. To get in ahead of this deliberately delayed announcement, Mr. Grew and Sir Robert Clive in close co-operation have been peppering the Japanese Foreign Office with formal notes and informal memoranda ever since last July.

Even hotter than oil in Tokyo are armaments. At the deadlocked London Naval Parley (TIME. Oct. 22. et seq.) the issue last week was brutally drawn. As the U. S. and Britain strove to keep Japan down at the tail of the 5-5-3 ratio. Japanese fury mounted—chiefly against the U. S. which Japanese always blame for every “indignity.”

In such an atmosphere of irate jitters diplomacy becomes impossible. Able though he is Ambassador Grew needed a big break last week. He got it.

Banzai Babe! For only one 100 U. S. institution do the Japanese people have a passionate, unreserved respect: baseball.

All the more popular in Japan is Ambassador Grew because he is a baseball zealot. But that was not the point last week. The point was, as anti-U. S. ire mounted in Tokyo, that suddenly 100,000 Japanese rushed in a joyous frenzy down the Ginza (“Tokyo’s Broadway”) to hurl thousands of fistfuls of confetti and shrilly cheer George Herman (“Babe”) Ruth.

“Banzai Babe!” they cried. “May you live 10,000 years!” For the harassed U. S. Ambassador this was indeed a lucky break. Mr. Ruth is not merely touring Japan. With a troupe of American Leaguers led by Connie Mack he is barnstorming the Far East de luxe. Seventeen games will be played in Japan. It would be naive to suppose that Japanese baseball frenzy for baseball’s Babe will sway public opinion, but last week it did ease tension. The Ginza broke out in a rash of Stars & Stripes. As they cheered Mr. Ruth and milled around him for autographs, Japanese could less easily believe that President Roosevelt was a Naval Ogre and an Oil Molloch.

Two days later 65,000 fans, among them Ambassador and Mrs. Grew, watched the opening game in which Tokyo University alumni (there are no professional baseballers in Japan) batted for the Empire, after Marquis Okuma, president of the Japan Baseball League, pitched the first ball. When the Babe hit only a single, though his team won 17-to-1, Japanese sportsmen politely said that it must be because Meiji Stadium is so very, very large and their fielders had stood so very, very far back to catch all the Bambino’s terrific deliveries. Next day Mr. Ruth again hit only a single. This was harder to explain, for Lou Gehrig and Jimmy Foxx both hit homers, and Earl Averill hit two, polishing off the game 5-to-11. With exquisite sportsmanship, Japanese baseball scribes then wrote that of course all the handshaking Japanese had inflicted on Mr. Ruth must have tired his arm. Said Manager Connie Mack, with feeling: “I wish Judge Landis could see how the great Japanese crowds are handled, how well behaved they are and how efficiently they conduct ball games here.”

Floating Embassy. Swift is Ambassador Grew to exploit promising U. S. visitors for their country’s good; and his Embassy plant, structure and personnel is one of the finest in the U. S. Foreign Service. Big as three city blocks, the diplomatic preserve in Tokyo rises in terraces up a hill once the property of the late, great Premier Ito, a hill violently shaken by the earthquake of 1923.

Completed three years ago at a cost of $1,250,000, the Embassy buildings, with their bases of steel gridirons, are positively earthquake proof. Let Tokyo heave and they might slide down the hill, but instead of collapsing they would “float” on the wavering sea of earth. L-shaped, the uncollapsible Embassy home is faced with white stucco, has a dining room in the left wing of the L, a living room in the right wing, a State staircase in the crotch. Of marble is the Ambassador’s outdoor swimming pool and he may refresh himself and guests in three tiny tea houses in the domain.

Tea is not to a Grew Embassy what it is to many another. The Ambassador drives his staff, makes a fetish of seeing that they work the Service’s statutory seven-hour day. Instead of “stealing” the bulk of his reports from his staff, an old trick of lazy diplomats, Ambassador Grew works up most of his own stuff, pecks it out with two fingers on a rickety typewriter. Specialists, of course, he must have. Small, crisp, sharp-nosed First Secretary Erie R. Dickover is the specialist on oil, the Embassy aide of the hour. For nine years stocky, dimple-cheeked Councilor of Embassy Edwin Neville, fluent in Japanese, cagey and impossible to ruffle, has been the mainstay of successive Ambassadors. But Mr. Grew has leaned on this vital prop less than any predecessor. The Embassy is Grew, suave but adventurous “Tiger” Grew. Poker is his game. Japanese music and Japanese flower arrangement are the hobbies of Mrs. Grew, a granddaughter of Japan-opener Commodore Matthew Perry.

“Tiger” Grew. Theodore Roosevelt was the President under whom Joe Grew got his start in the Foreign Service—with extreme difficulty. Joseph, on graduating from Harvard, took two years abroad, sailed for the Far East. From Singapore he and two college friends went up into India with his well-worn set of Kipling.

Pulsing with the thrill of it, Joe Grew at Lahore “straddled the Big Gun as Kim had done.” Then he plunged into the deeper East to write that he loved its “vivid colors and majestic smells.” He still does, despite what the East did to him. In the Malay States malaria deafened one ear and nearly killed him. He came home to write a book about tiger hunting, Sport and Travel in the Far East, passionately resolved not to go into Boston banking. For a scion of the aloof Grews the only way to live in the places with magic names was to enter the Foreign Service. “When I flunked my first examination,” Joe Grew has said, “I nearly committed suicide.”

Grew prestige was not exactly of the kind to impress two-fisted President T. R. Roosevelt. Wires from Boston were pulled in vain. Joseph’s efforts to be sent with Minister Edwin Morgan to Korea, then the hot spot Japan is today, landed him as a consular clerk in Cairo.

Not until the President had a mind to go tiger hunting in the East and chanced to read Grew’s account of the subject did Grew get his first break in the Service. Any young man who could crawl single-handed into a cave and dispose of a tiger, Teddy Roosevelt decided, deserved promotion. One of Grew’s best jobs was done in Germany just before the War, shooting pheasants with the ebullient Kaiser and deftly restraining his own ebullient chief, Ambassador James W. Gerard.

After 1917 he specialized in the bloody Balkans. At Lausanne he helped make peace and in Ismet Pasha, now Premier of Turkey, he has jocularly been said to have met his match. Both deaf, they shouted back & forth across the conference table at each other in French. Ten years later Mr. Grew, one of the first career men to be promoted to an Ambassadorship, became the first U. S. Ambassador to Dictator Kemal Pasha’s new Republic (TIME, May 30, 1927).

The Ambassador’s three daughters have all married into the Service—Lilla to J. Pierrepont Moffat, now the Department’s expert on Disarmament and adroit head of the State Department’s Western European division; Elizabeth to Cecil Lyon, Third Secretary at Peiping; Anita to Robert English, Third Secretary at Budapest. It was Mrs. English who swam the Bosporus while her father was Ambassador to Turkey. He fed her chocolate from a boat and played a phonograph to help her rhythm.

In Japan, whence he went direct from Turkey, Ambassador Grew has found it extremely convenient not to hear too fiery outbursts by supercharged Japanese patriots at formal dinners. His reports, always held up as models of freshness and exactitude in the State Department, have, however, been weighted as never before with strong advice that in dealing with the Far East it is now necessary that Washington take a firm hand. In Tokyo recently he is said to have admitted: “I never before had to write such strong dispatches.”

Strong but above all quick was the line he took when the National City Bank branches in Japan were threatened after a rumor that their managers were guilty of “photographic espionage” (TIME, Sept. 19, 1932), and when Japanese hoodlums set out to destroy the Singer Sewing Machine branch office at Yokohama with cordwood clubs (TIME, Jan. 30, 1933). In both cases Ambassador Grew was at the Foreign Office almost before its officials knew that trouble had broken. In both cases, by reminding the Japanese with courteous firmness what protection their property in the U. S. has always enjoyed, Ambassador Grew was able to get instant, effective police action.

“A prompt [not necessarily soft] answer turneth away wrath” is a Grew maxim which he would like to see the lumbering State Department adopt. Last week Secretary Hull was out of Washington when the Japanese Foreign Office at length made answer to Ambassador Crew’s note protesting Japan’s petroleum laws. Acting Secretary of State Philips said the Japanese answer was “vague . . . incomplete . . . unsatisfactory.” He hoped to get off fresh instructions to the U. S. Embassy in Tokyo soon. Meanwhile capable Joe Grew pushed on with the job which calls to a diplomat when he is not sure how far his chiefs want him to go. He did his best to check the ire of mounting tempers and to clear the way for intelligent, thoughtful negotiation. Out of the garnered wisdom of 28 years’ diplomatic experience Ambassador Grew said, shortly after his arrival in Tokyo two years ago: “For statesmanship and for diplomacy there can be no more important duty than to smooth out and to align differences of opinion among nations.”

If the Naval parley breaks down — and a break at London was perilously near this week— then indeed the Peace of the World will be on the great team’s gridiron. They would try to slow down the inevitable naval race, try to keep the Great Pacific War from becoming inevitable. Last week they were doing what they could to avert a break at London. There the U. S. is ably represented by trouble-shooting Ambassador-at-Large Norman Hezekiah Davis. But dispatches indicated that per-haps only in Tokyo can the trouble he is after be shot.

Shooting Trouble. In London the Japanese negotiator Rear Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto at last made clear that he could not or would not yield. The U. S. and Britain, he said, must yield 100% to Japan’s demand for naval equality. Ambassador Davis and Prime Minister MacDonald surpassed themselves in efforts to get Admiral Yamamoto to promise at least that if Japan were granted paper parity she would not build up to it. “Very sorry, but no,” purred Admiral Yamamoto. “Very sorry, but no.”

The Washington Naval Treaty, fixing the famed naval ratio of 5-5-3 between Britain, the U. S. and Japan, is so drawn that it runs on indefinitely unless denounced by one of the signatories. Two years’ notice must be given of such denunciation and it cannot take effect before Dec. 31, 1936. To smash the 5-5-3 treaty on that earliest possible date, Japan must therefore file her denunciation promptly by Dec. 31, 1934. By that same token Ambassador Grew and team, representing the Powers in Tokyo, have a few more weeks in which to impress on the Japanese Government the colossal risks of denunciation.

At the Japanese Foreign Office, famed Outspokesman Eiji Amau has been threatening denunciation as only he can threaten. Last week in Tokyo the Supreme Military Council and the Board of Marshals and Admirals convened. They decided in august assembly to hold in abeyance Japan’s decision on denunciation until Nov. 18 when the Son of Heaven, His Majesty Emperor Hirohito, returns from Grand Military Maneuvers. That gave the Tokyo corps and their Governments a fateful deadline.