Foreign News: Medicine

General Sadao Araki is Japan’s champion sabre-rattler and No. 1 Militarist, but Japanese like to point out in his favor that he is personally frail-looking, mild-mannered, small, ascetic, “a mystic.” Araki himself reconciles these contradictions in his character with his favorite maxim, “Be greedy only in mind.” To keep fit he put in 20 minutes a day bastinadoing a dummy with a bamboo sword, until influenza laid him low last winter and politicians forced his resignation as War Minister. When he was ill, Japanese teachers collected sen from their schoolchildren to buy Araki medicine. Last week he was fit again, beating his dummy. The Diet was about to convene again, and it was time to make a speech thanking the moppets for their medicine.

Said General Sadao Araki: “I am now recovered, thanks to you children. Every sen of your money was spent in building war planes and making ammunition. Hitherto Japan has been following the lead of Western nations. However, the time has come for Japan to lead the world. Have you ever seen a snake with two heads? No, but you may, and I beseech you to be courageous when you do.”†

Two days later Japan’s precise-mannered young Emperor Hirohito. who does not like such openly greedy talk, drove in panoplied procession from his palace to the dingy, stuccoed Parliament Building. There The Son of Heaven read the proclamation opening the 67th session of the Diet, which promptly recessed. When it finally gets to business at month’s end, it will presumably swallow its medicine: Japan’s all-time high in defense budgets, a monster achievement of the military clique which Sadao Araki heads.

†Only intelligible as a reference to Japanese fear that Britain and the U. S. may wage a joint war of chastisement against Japan.