It may be supposed that when men like Generals Wan Fu-lin, Ma Chan-shan, Su Ping-wen and others took their places as makers of the new State at the outset, they thought that they were holding their own as best they could. It is hardly likely that from the outset they were inspired by a deep but patriotic duplicity. At the outset, they were not greatly different from Yuan Chin-kai, Chang Ching-huei, Hsi Chia, and Chang Hai-peng, except in so far as they were all better soldiers and had hitherto been comparatively free from having to deal with Japan. But when they realised that to be “independent” was merely a euphemism for taking service under the Japanese, they came out and fought for their liberty.

Jehol was a special instance of this hesitation on the verge of a false independence. When the independence of Manchu- kuo was declared in March 1932, Jehol was included. It had only lately been placed by the Nanking Government under the control of Marshal Chang Hsueh-liang, and the propa­gandist fiction that Manchuria was never a part of China could not be stretched to cover Jehol, which was the “Imperial Province” par excellence. Nor up to this time had any attempt been made by the Japanese to occupy it. General Tang Yu-lin, who had for some years been Governor of Jehol Province, and had a good reputation, had at first apparently been prepared to consider acknowledging Hsin- king as the fount of authority, but refused to have anything to do with the new State when he discovered that it was only a Japanese counterfeit. The Japanese industriously warring against bandits in the Three Provinces left the fourth alone. Frequently they chased the enemies of the new regime across the border, but seldom pursued them, and they referred contemptuously to Jehol as “the Mecca of bandits.”

Refugee recruits joined him in such numbers that Tang Yu-lin found them an embarrassment rather than a source of strength. Their appetites were good but their fighting power was dubious. Tang put an embargo on exports of foodstuffs, and taxed the people in every way he could think of in his straits for money. Japanese critics could find nothing bad enough to say of him, and they said that he even put a tax on the birth of babies. He was jeered at as master of an opium province; his moral turpitude was proved when he remitted the opium revenue to Marshal Chang Hsueh-liang; and words failed his critics when it was reported that he was receiving help from the Marshal.

The Mongols of Jehol presented a petition to the League of Nations to save them from Chinese tyranny, so in pre­paring to add Jehol to the other provinces, Japan was almost doing the work of the League—except for the trifling fact that the Manchukuo officials were all Chinese tyrants themselves. But under Japanese tuition they wore their rue with a difference. The Mongol petition doubtless was intended to show Geneva how little the North liked Nanking; but the uncertainty as to the status of Jehol, notwithstanding the original declaration of independence, gave point to Lord Lytton’s remark on the difficulties of recognising a State of which even the Japanese officials admitted that they were far from certain as to the location of the boundaries.

There was a pretence of great indignation in Japan when Jehol, so far from seeking to know the wishes of Hsinking, declared that it intended to have nothing to do with Japan. On December 12, 1932, there were clear indications that the Japanese were preparing for an attack, but the League of Nations had not yet come to a decision on the whole question of Manchuria, and nominally everything was at a standstill. Manchukuo called upon her ally Japan to lend assistance in bringing this rebellious province to heel.

After the worst had happened at Geneva, an ultimatum was delivered to Jehol by the Hsinking Government on February 22, 1933. For a month past there had been sporadic bombings of Mongolian towns by Japanese planes from Chinchow and Tungliao. Accounts from Chinese sources described these raids as terribly destructive, and declared that large numbers of incendiary bombs were used; but the Japanese reports declared that the population of every town greatly rejoiced at the arrival of the Japanese, and blessed them for delivery from the tyranny and exactions of native rule. When the Japanese march on Jehol began, it was swift. Japanese reports described desperate resistance on the part of the Chinese. The fall of one town after another was recorded, but when at last the expeditionary force reached Jehol, held by a motley horde lacking food and arms alike, it met with little resistance. It was useless to resist when the slaughter of the populace and the destruc­tion of the city would be the only possible results. All along the road from Chinchow there had been slaughter and ruin, but the Japanese had lost only one man killed and thirty injured. So the defenders, who had done little but eat up the provisions, fled from the Imperial city and left it to be incorporated into Manchukuo by the Japanese, who took possession on March 4th.

The campaign was advertised as the swiftest on record, the mechanised army advancing as much as fifty miles a day despite a rough road and cruel weather. On March 5th it was announced that Japanese waitresses had arrived in the wake of the army, to be installed in numerous little cafes, where they ministered to the needs of their countrymen.

The Japanese pursued the fugitives to the Great Wall and even beyond it. Chinese regular troops and volunteers marched up to defend the Wall, and there was some dreadful slaughter. But the fact that badly armed and untrained men stood up to the mechanised army of Japan contrasted sharply with the utter unreliability of the new Manchukuo troops, who apparently enlisted only to get the equipment, with which they straightway deserted.

On the eve of the lightning rush to Jehol, Count Uchida, the Foreign Minister, announced in the Diet that Chinese regular troops had invaded Jehol, a province of Manchukuo, wherefore Japan was called upon to exercise her fundamental duty of maintaining the peace of the Far East and of the world.

Thus was completed the creation of Manchukuo; but it took years to make railway travel as safe as it had been before the “incident.” A legend grew up, however, that that was the condition from which Manchuria had had to be rescued, and this was instilled into every foreign visitor.

 

CHAPTER XVIII. THE MANCHURIAN AFTERMATH

 

More than Manchuria was lost on September 18, 1931. It is doubtful whether the bomb even dislodged a railway sleeper, but it did irreparable damage to the League of Nations. The League being a by-product of the Great War, it may have been unreasonable to expect it to work for peace, and there may also have been something funda­mentally unsound in the conception. For it looked to the gaining of moral ends by force and by economic pressure. It may be that moral ends cannot be served that way, but the manner in which the Manchurian problem was handled left a feeling that the helpless had been tricked by clever people who could have saved them but thought the expense too great.

Something was gained, however, in the Report of the Lytton Commission. National histories being all so hope­lessly biased, Mr. G. B. Shaw once suggested that they should all be rewritten by neutral committees of the League of Nations, and that only the volumes thus produced should be used for instruction in school. Here was a happy example of what could be done by such means. The Lytton Report was an excellent piece of history. When an advance copy arrived in Japan it was immediately reprinted and had an enormous sale. But it will never be used as a text­book in Japanese schools: every patriot devoted himself to the task of “refuting” it.

Mr. Matsuoka Yosuke was sent to Geneva as Refuter-in- Chief. He lacked a pleasing or diplomatic manner, but he was undeniably able, and great hopes were based on the power of his advocacy. He did his best, but Japan’s actions had been indefensible, and her attempts at justification only annoyed everybody by their shameless subterfuges. Mr. Matsuoka was to change all this. Geneva was busy with the Manchurian question when the Diet met in January 1933, and Dr. Ashida, formerly of the Foreign Office, who had been elected in the Seiyukai interest, made a long inter­pellation on the great question of the day. The burden of Dr. Ashida’s complaint was that though a co-ordination of the whole national policy was the one thing needful now that they had undertaken this responsibility for Manchukuo, the fact was that Manchukuo was a monopoly of the militarists, and that there was not an important office in the State not occupied by an officer or protege of the army, and he asked whether the Minister for War had any inten­tion of receding from the assumption that the army was everything.

Reuter sent a scrupulously fair summary of this inter­pellation to Geneva, whereupon Mr. Matsuoka made a grieved protest to Dr. Suzuki, President of the Seiyukai. Dr. Suzuki without hesitating telegraphed a denial that any such interpellation had been made—notwithstanding its appearance verbatim in the Official Gazette. It was a little unfortunate that Dr. Ashida had lately become presi­dent of the Japan Times, in which he had printed the interpellation in full in his own excellent English. But no harm was done. Refutations by mail arrived too late to do any good. Dr. Ashida argued powerfully that the presen­tation of a clear plan for administering Manchuria for the benefit of the Manchurians would make far more impression on the League than the verbal juggleries hitherto depended upon. But it was left to Mr. Matsuoka to impress the League, and he impressed it very badly. The climax of mendacity was reached in a message published in the Japanese papers as from the Nippon Dempo Tsushinsha stating that the correspondents at Geneva were astonished at the great difference between Reuter’s message and the text of Dr. Ashida’s interpellation—which they had not seen. But that was good enough for the Japanese public, whose intelligence is always rated by the journalists at a very low level.

Whatever ideas the Japanese authorities may have had of benefiting the Manchurians, it soon became clear that the only instrumentality they could imagine was that by which everything had been done hitherto—the South Manchuria Railway. An issue of new capital was announced in February 1933, and at the same time all coal and iron mines and all new railway development were committed to its charge. Mr. Pao Kuen-chen, the Manchukuo repre­sentative in Tokyo, issued a statement to the Press explain­ing how, because there was no co-ordination between the working of the various railways in Manchukuo, and because they owed large sums for construction, equipment, and management to the South Manchuria Railway, it had been found best for this company to take over the whole Man­churian railway system, including contracts for all new lines. For the most urgent of these, the Tunhua-Tumen, the Lafa-Harbin, and the Taitung-Hailun lines, the public was invited to subscribe 100 million yen new capital, with a guaranteed divided of 4 per cent. The new issue was made on March 1st, the anniversary of the proclamation of Manchukuo.

In the course of the long discussions by the League of Nations over the Manchurian affair, there were several occasions when, despite Occidental inability to understand the situation, the Japanese expressed great satisfaction. For instance, by way of implementing a League resolution, the British Government put an embargo on the export of arms to China and Japan alike. It was so obvious that, while this might embarrass China, it made no difference whatever to Japan, that Japanese critics thought that they were bestowing the highest praise on Sir John Simon when they saw in this embargo a wily device for helping Japan. But the embargo, like the idea that it would force Japan’s hand to cut off credits and loans (which was put forward in high quarters in England), merely indicated that there were British statesmen who were still living mentally in the period when England was the world’s workshop and the world’s banker.

It being manifestly impossible that Mr. Matsuoka Yosuke should convince the world that when Japan made war she was really keeping the peace, and that when she broke treaties she was only transferring their integrity to a higher plane, it was very fortunate for him that his failure was total. No half-victory would have satisfied his countrymen. For patriotism had become such a morbid and irritable growth that a negotiator who secured less than a conqueror’s terms for Japan was in danger of his life. Prince Saionji, returning from Paris with the spoils of war in 1919, was threatened with assassination; Admiral Takarabe, having won advantages for Japan in the London Naval Treaty, was presented with a dagger on his return. When Admiral Nagano, having failed to convince a later naval conference that Japan’s claims were anything but ridiculous, came home, he was given a rousing reception; and Mr. Matsuoka, returning empty-handed from Geneva, became a national hero. The national spirit had risen to such heights that agreement on equal terms had become a derogation of dignity.

Japan had forcibly tom from China four great provinces, had fired on the capital, had devastated a square mile of her greatest port, and had erected there a great fortified barracks and a Shinto shrine to symbolise Japanese dominion, but the army was still far from satisfied. Some attempt was made to continue the war in North China. Posts on the Great Wall were taken and the Chinese troops driven far from that ancient barrier. But these performances only demonstrated again that, though the Chinese were not yet equal to the Japanese in their equipment for scientific war, they realised in a new manner that they were fighting for their country’s cause. At Shanghai the 19th Route Army had shown a valour equal to anything that Japan could display; and in the retreat from the Great Wall, they showed other admirable qualities. The Japanese Press described the beaten forces as a disorderly rabble whose demand for quarters caused further distress to the impoverished population of the ancient Capital. Actually they behaved finely. The wounded were brought in by an insufficient supply of motor trucks, and distributed among the crowded hospitals. The soldiers, hungry, ragged, and defeated, plodded doggedly after them. Arrived in Peiping, they sat quietly by the roadside, while their officers found quarters; and in the houses where they were quartered they gave as little trouble as possible and cleaned up before they left. Restraint was preserved even when several hundred Japanese troops were railed in from Tientsin and added to the Legation guard, who swaggered in the streets where Japanese lived, “to protect them,” though the residents showed so little sense of needing protection that Japanese women and children went about on foot as usual. For several days Japanese bombing planes, fully loaded, flew over the city.

The Japanese army had already, in its communiques, declared its intention of destroying the Nanking Govern­ment; but there was some fear of measures more energetic than the moral condemnation of the whole League, so the war against China was called off till a more propitious moment, and the Occident returned to the well-fostered delusion that the civil power had the upper hand and that the army would henceforth behave itself—except for such little things as murdering Japanese statesmen.

A military agreement was made, providing for a demili­tarised zone south of the Wall, and was signed at Tangku, at the mouth of the river below Tientsin, on May 31, 1933. Its effect was to hand over power to the Japanese, but peace of a sort was preserved until the abuses which it protected brought about new crises.

In launching the Manchurian campaign the army looked for a victory at home as well as abroad. It was due largely to its own heavy military expenditure in peace-time that the Government had found it difficult to make ends meet, and had been compelled to cut off the subsidies from industries that it was anxious to foster, to postpone public works, and to deny departmental expenditure on every possible occasion; but this only increased unemployment; there was bitter discontent; trade unions were militant, yet almost inactive for want of funds; and poverty suicides were frequently reported. Military pamphlets encouraged the discontent by sympathising with the poor, especially with the farmers, but never forgot to emphasise that defence was the first need. This was a counterblast to the demands for a reduction in military expenditure, and a campaign by soldiers and patriots was carried on against democratic government, which was threatening to put the civil above the military power.

The blow that was struck on September 18, 1931, was as much against constitutional government as it was against the Chinese. A wave of patriotism swamped the country. The needs of the campaign stimulated industry and put an end to the rigid economy which, after all, had made the present extravagance possible. Naturally, the first instinct was to ask for higher wages when work increased, but all such talk as this was silenced by the inculcation of the patriotic need of standing together against a hostile world. Foreign exchange being allowed to collapse, there was a sudden stimulation of exports, but wages were cut down. To have expected immediate relief would hardly have been reasonable, and in the north of the Main Island there was terrible hardship in 1932, owing to a local failure of crops —and of banks. The Press was forbidden to mention bank failures or financial crises, and, while the nation at large was being fed with glory, there was hunger in a considerable section.

The trade unions allowed themselves to be swept off their feet and converted into patriotic societies for the promotion of overwork and underpay. More important politically were such bodies as the Great Asia Society, promoted by General Matsui for the subjugation of China under the name of liberation; the Kokuhonsha, the mouthpiece of Baron Hiranuma’s senile fanaticism; and numerous others that played their part in creating intolerance and destroying democracy.

The murders of 1932 were the direct result of the Man­churian venture, which glorified militarism and violence. The murderers, civilian and military alike, wanted a mili­tary Government and even administration by martial law. But the army was as full of jealousies as a girls’ school, and there were other difficulties. The Imperial Diet still existed and could not be altogether ignored. Mr. Takahashi, the Finance Minister, became Premier temporarily, as he had done eleven years before when his chief Hara Takashi was murdered; but he was unwilling to accept a formal appointment. Dr. Suzuki, president of the Seiyukai, with a large majority in the Diet, was very willing to run the risks for the sake of the honour of the premiership, and the Minseito would rather see an opponent in office than a man “above party.” On the other hand, the Minister for War was talking at large of the murders being a public testimony of the nation’s disgust with party corruption. If there were to be a military premier, then General Ugaki had the best claims and was willing; but he had been so reasonable as to consent to the reduction of the army, and the fire-eaters hated him. Next came General Minami. But Araki was uneasily conscious that the same Cabinet could never hold himself and his immediate predecessor. The right to advise the Emperor on the subject lay, in any case, with Prince Saionji. So: Araki rushed off to the Prince’s villa at Okitsu to advise Saionji to nominate his friend Baron Hiranuma.

Saionji had little liking for soldiers, but he had still less for such patriots as Baron Hiranuma and refused flatly to take Araki’s advice. Suzuki, a consummate political wire­puller but no statesman, was another type that Saionji disliked; and to nominate a Minseito man was to risk political confusion and more murders. So the Prince chose Admiral Saito, a statesman well proved for imperturbable courage and sobriety of judgment.

The Premier’s choice of Ministers is limited. The army and navy appoint their own, who frequently continue in office when Cabinets change. But there is a tradition that when there is some serious breach of discipline, whether in the military or civil services, the Minister concerned should resign “to show his sense of responsibility.” Naval and military officers had partaken in the Premier’s murder, and Admiral Osumi resigned. General Araki was enjoying his post with tremendous zest and did not want to resign. Having made his arrangements, he gave out to the Press that General Masaki, Vice-Chief of the General Staff, General Hata, in command of the Gendarmerie, General Koiso, Vice-Minister for War, and General Muto, Inspector- General of Military Education, all wanted him. He then made the expected gesture, and resigned. Viscount Saito offered it to General Hayashi, and the newspapers came out with panegyrics on the mighty deeds of the Korean garrison in the conquest of Manchuria; but Hayashi declined on the understanding that he would come next, and Araki continued in office. Muto resigned in anticipation of the Manchukuo dictatorship and Hayashi succeeded him, so he did not even have to wait for promotion. Minami also, who had done so much in preparation for the Manchurian coup, had a special post made for him in Manchukuo. The appointment of H.I.H. Admiral Prince Fushimi as Chief of the Naval General Staff and of H.I.H. General Prince Kanin as Chief of the Army General Staff contributed much towards raising the Services above the shafts of criticism.

Not that there were many of these shafts. Among news­papers the Miyako, of Tokyo, alone definitely condemned the lack of discipline in the army, and some time afterwards the army endeavoured to get a clause added to the Peace Preservation Law making it as definitely a crime to criticise the army as it was to criticise the Emperor. This was more than the legislators found practicable, but the warning was enough.

Even if the Press were gagged, there remained one outlet—the one that the army hated most of all. The House of Representatives was still a place of privilege, though it took courage to be critical even there, as one might be beaten or even stabbed in the lobby. And when the Diet met in special session on June 3rd, after the new Cabinet had been sworn in, Mr. Sugiyama Motojiro, a Labour member, lashed out vigorously at Governments so subservient to the army as those of Inukai and Saito. The farmers’ debts, he said, were mounting, and what was the Minister for War going to do when the men came back from the front to find that their farms had been sold up? He proceeded to read a manifesto given out by Inukai’s murderers, and this so alarmed the House that it passed a motion that it should not be included in the stenographic report. The Minister for War, replying, protested against an insinuation of his own complicity in the murders. He shared the murderers’ patriotism, he said, but not their misdeeds, and his constant care was to avert such deplorable incidents.

The Premier deplored the assassinations and said he was convinced that the naval and military authorities would restore discipline. He did not know that they were already contemplating his own murder. Instead of improvement there was deterioration. It could not be otherwise when every device was used for the promotion of sympathy with the murderers. The murders were regarded not as crimes but as a political problem. The Minister for Justice, Dr. Koyama, gave a big dinner for high officials of his own Department and his colleagues in the Cabinet, at which the company discussed the proper attitude of the judiciary towards the trials. Self-mutilation is supposed to prove sincerity in Japan, and General Araki received from Niigata perfecture alone nine little fingers cut off to prove the vehemence of their owners’ desire for pardon for the mur­derers. It may be noted that the same prefecture sold 4,962 girls into prostitution in the first half of 1932.

Nor was a favourable verdict the only concern of sym­pathisers. Less than two months after Inukai’s murder complaints appeared that the murderers were suffering in health through their confinement, and the fact appeared to be regarded as a great scandal. In contrast to this was the appearance in court at that time of two hundred of the men arrested early in 1928 on charges of Communism— unaccompanied by murder or any other crime. They had been under arrest for more than four years, and the con­ditions of confinement are such that few emerge without permanently impaired health, and all but those naturally immune suffering from tuberculosis.

No nostrum for the cure of bodily ills is so firmly believed in as murder is in Japan for all ills of the body politic. Soon after Admiral Viscount Saito had taken office, it occurred to Dr. Imamaki, a well-known patriot, that the Spirit of the Foundation of the Empire was still unawakened and that Japan’s glory was not made manifest. So he engaged a gorotsuki (a ruffian who commits unlawful violence for hire) to murder Saito for a hundred yen, which he paid in advance. The gorotsuki spent the money on a week-end spree in a licensed brothel and left the Premier alone. His patron wrote him a reproachful letter, which he straightway used as an instrument of blackmail. Dr. Imamaki gave him a thousand yen (about £70) to keep him quiet, but the extor­tion continued, and the elderly reactionary was so sure that his patriotism would be taken into account that he denounced the blackmailer to the police. He did not misjudge the efficacy of his reputation. His trial and that of the gorotsuki dragged on for some months. They both pleaded patriotism. Dr. Imamaki, pointing out that he wielded no weapons himself, said that his interest in assassination was purely academic: he regarded it merely as a possible instrumen­tality of patriotism. The gorotsuki was patriotic even in his essay in blackmail. He wanted the money in order to set up in business in Manchuria, so as to promote the interests of the Empire. The pair of them got off with farcical sen­tences—terms of imprisonment with stay of execution of sentence—which means no punishment at all. Had such a thing happened in a country where political assassination was unknown, the judge might think it best not to minister to the vanity of a fool; but where the murder of statesmen is so common such judicial frivolity is incomprehensible. Yet this is not a unique example. When a demand sprang up for the control of patriotic ruffians, Dr. Koyama, the Minister for Justice, confessed that he found it extremely difficult to punish a man for any act which he declared to have been performed from a patriotic motive.

 

CHAPTER XIX. SAITO AND THE SPENDING POLICY

 

Saito commanded respect, but nobody was really satisfied with his appointment. Most dissatisfied of all was the pro­fessional politician Dr. Suzuki, president of the Seiyukai, whom Saito was anxious to placate, but who refused any­thing short of the Premiership. He could hardly prevent other Seiyukai men from joining the Cabinet when invited; indeed, there was fierce competition between the two big parties for the loaves and fishes of office; but a day was to come when Suzuki arrogantly put loyalty to himself before public service and expelled members who consented to serve in any Cabinet not headed by himself.

It was an elderly Cabinet, the average age of the members being sixty-two, even with the almost youthful Goto’s forty- nine to bring down the average. Mr. Takahashi, one of the seniors, began with a rush that looked favourable at first to the military plans. He expanded the untaxable note issue of the Bank of Japan from 250 million to 1,000 million yen, and, though he confessed that he did not like doing it, increased the import duties by one-third in order to make up for the depreciation in the yen. (Similar treatment of the yen by other countries importing Japanese goods was com­plained of bitterly.) An issue of Government bonds to the extent of 500 million yen helped to make things easier, but though Takahashi spoke optimistically, the Premier, in his first speech, confessed that there was no sign of prosperity and that agriculture was in great distress.

The case of the farmers assumed such prominence during the Saito regime that some account of it is necessary. Agriculture is by far the greatest industry in Japan. The tourist takes due note of the wonderful achievements of primitive implements, and of the picturesqueness of Japanese farming. Since the beginning of the century, however, there had been revolutionary changes. The fields were bearing richer crops than ever, but the farmer’s difficulties increased. Some of these are characteristic of farming every­where, notably the complaint of the tenant farmer that he cannot earn enough to pay his rent. In 1925 a law was enacted whereby a tenant farmer could borrow four thousand yen at low interest, to be repaid in the course of twenty-five years, in order that he might purchase himself a cho (2 acres) of land, which the landlord was bound to sell. In the latter part of 1927, Mr. Yamamoto, Minister for Agriculture and Forestry, wanted another bill passed for giving further relief, but the Government refused to sponsor it, on the ground that the Act of 1925 was working satisfactorily; 12 million yen out of the 70 millions earmarked for the purpose had been advanced, and a thousand yeoman farmers created; but this was a phantom success, for peasant farmers owning their land were disappearing at the rate of ten thousand a year and becoming the tenants of their creditors, or, in some cases, simply deserting the land and taking a chance on what the towns were offering.

There were many factors in these troubles and the sequence of cause and effect was often difficult to trace. The standard of living on the farms had improved. In older days rice was grown largely for urban consumption, and (as Lord Redesdale tells us in his Tales of Old Japan) the farmer’s chief complaint was always the low price of rice. Nowadays the farmer seldom eats millet, and if he more often than not mixes barley with his rice, he is all the better for it. Some townsmen, hearing that the farmer’s economic position was becoming desperate, proposed that he should export rice instead of eating it, and import millet for his own use, but there was no response to this invitation to return to more spartan days.

Some capitalists who looked forward to a rice shortage through an increase in population—that deferred hope that makes the heart of the Japanese farmer sick—still harped on the possibility of rice culture in the Maritime Province of Siberia, with Korean and even Russian labour, for the supply of Japan’s needs. The whole economic organisation was changing. When Dr. Suzuki was Home Minister he had put forward a plan for making 3,700 miles of motor roads, for the motor truck services were speeding up the whole of rural life; but the Finance Minister could not find the money, and the Ministry of Agriculture instead evolved a plan for the better organisation of country cart services, the expenditure on which was calculated at 650 million yen against only 200 millions in railway freights.

For many years an endeavour was made to get Japanese farmers to raise sheep, more for the sake of providing home­grown army clothing than for any economic advantage, but in 1928, in spite of a generation of propaganda, there were only 23,000 sheep in Japan, chiefly in the Hokkaido. A much brighter idea was the keeping of fowls, for which about 1929 the Department of Agriculture started an extensive propaganda, with the result that in a very few years the import of eggs was replaced by a large export. But again, the American slump of 1929 knocked the bottom out of the raw silk market, and the farmer’s mainstay broke in his hands.

The profoundest changes of all were wrought by the adoption of chemical fertilisers, particularly sulphate of ammonia, of which, though patent rights had been held for many years, the large-scale manufacture did not begin till 1928. At this time it was calculated that fertiliser imports totalled 170 million yen and fertilisers made and marketed in Japan about an equal amount—a large sum for the Japanese farmers to pay for modernisation, and a constant source of complaint, as the dealers formed rings to protect themselves from competition, and so deprived the farmers of a benefit that they badly needed. The farmers became enslaved to debt, and the need of a large cash expenditure on chemical fertilisers seems to have been the chief cause. In 1930 the farmers’ debts amounted to 4,000 million yen, and a year later to 5,000 millions. Industrial depression sent many city workers back to the farms, and probably their extra help contributed to the production of the greatest rice crop ever raised in Japan. Prices dropped and the Government lent a hand in exporting a large quantity at low prices. The Opposition blamed the Minseito economy; freer spending was demanded—“Food before face!” as an Opposition leader put it—though it was a glut of food that had caused the trouble.

A world slump in the price of wheat had led to restrictions of wheat-growing, and the Japanese Ministry of Agriculture began to talk of restricting the area under rice; but General Araki said he could not allow that, as military considerations had to be taken into account. It was as well, because famine conditions prevailed in part of North Japan in 1932, though crop diminution was only local and it was a money rather than a harvest failure. The social effects of agrarian indebted­ness were deplorable—there was even a slump, through over-supply, in the price of virgins for the brothels—but in an age of “economic nationalism” there was consolation in the fact that the money went from one Japanese pocket to another. Only a small percentage of the five or six thousand millions of debt was advanced by the banks: the biggest creditors were landholders and money-lending farmers.

The plan for making yeoman farmers was itself blamed for some of the distress. Farmers often found it so difficult to pay off the purchase-money that they had to abandon ownership. Under stress of debt they combined and asked for a moratorium, but the Seiyukai administration (1932) proposed depreciation instead. Manufacturers for export had welcomed depreciation, and it was carelessly taken for granted that it would benefit the farmer also. A delegation of farmers was sent to the capital and interviewed the House of Representatives, to whom they explained that however much good depreciation had done the manufacturer, the agriculturist had not benefited.

In Yamanashi prefecture, it was stated, 22,000 silk reeling girls had not been paid for months, finding it better to work for food and shelter than to get nothing. In Miyagi the electric light was abandoned; from various prefectures came reports of unpaid teachers and of local officials on reduced pay. Children were not sent to school so that the small fee, hitherto cheerfully paid by the poorest, might be saved. The army, both officers and men, was largely recruited from the rural districts, and the army pamphlets of the time took on an almost Socialistic tone, demanding relief for the farmer and a thoroughgoing social reconstruction which was, by some mysterious process, to produce money for the Manchurian campaign as well. Mr. Tokutomi proposed a cancellation of debts, but the creditors were too powerful. Mitsui’s gave three million yen for relief—perhaps in the hope of moderating General Araki’s denunciations.

It was a curious thing that the police precautions for preventing the disturbance of the public mind—in this case by allowing no news about the distress in the North to be published—left the Finance Minister in ignorance of the existing conditions. He was shocked when he heard of them, and became a convert to the need for relief grants, though hitherto he had recommended self-help, not realising that there was anything more serious than book debts.

Before the special session closed, Mr. Mori Heibei, in the House of Peers, demanded another special session in August to consider the plight of the farmer. It was called on August 23, 1932, and the various plans for relief were hotly debated. The Government had on hand a fund of 350 million yen for stabilising the price of rice, but it was com­plained that there was a prospect of a bumper crop, and if this were realised it would, in spite of the stabilisation fund, complete the ruin that the record crop of 1930 had begun. With reference to the relief which it was claimed that currency depreciation had brought, it was pointed out that it made it very hard for some big concerns which had issued dollar debentures in America; but Mr. Takahashi said that no measures could be beneficial to everybody.

He confessed that much of the relief expenditure was applied to the keeping of the banks on their feet at a time when they could not recover their advances, and this, he said, was an advantage to the debtors as well as to the banks. It was rather a favourite line of argument (among capitalists) that the capitalist was a more suitable recipient of relief than the proletarian, because his relief was widely distri­buted, and he repaid the loan. There were also members who waxed impatient with the concentration of pity on the farming classes, and asked what was to be done about the urban debtor.

It has always been difficult to recover debt by process of law in Japan. Determined Japanophils have found this praiseworthy and have talked of a system more humane than the harsh Roman law of contract. A considerable effort was made at this session to loosen still further the bonds of contract, and it was proposed that debtors might appeal to the courts to mediate—that is, to reduce their debts. Bankers were rather alarmed, and pointed out to the legislators that money owing to a bank is different from other debts. The banks could hardly be blamed even if their argument was not strictly logical. Forty-nine of them had had to close because their advances were not recover­able. The Bill for Adjusting Debts fell through because the Government refused to accept the Seiyukai amendments, but another Bill passed which involved the appointment of twenty thousand mediators. It did not have much effect.

The first relief to the depression undoubtedly came about by the increase in expenditure on munition-making in connection with the Manchurian campaign—that is to say, by the squandering of the economies of the Hamaguchi Government and a reckless plunge into debt. Secondly came the increase in exports brought about by depreciation in exchange and by improvements in manufacture. But the lag in both cases was considerable—so much so that on August 26, 1932, nearly a year after the Manchurian adventure began and over eight months after Japan had gone off gold, depression was still the leading topic of the day, and the Shakai Taishuto (or “Social Mass” party) held a meeting at the Kyocho (Capital and Labour) Hall, in Tokyo, to which they brought petitions for the relief of the unemployed bearing a hundred thousand signatures. Numbers of policemen were in the hall, and the street running thence to the Diet (then in session) was heavily guarded. Every speech was stopped by the police, and there was such indignation that the meeting became a general scrimmage several times. At length fifty of the members of the party set out with copies of the resolutions demanding relief and rehabilitation of the farmers. They had to battle their way against the police to the Diet, and when they reached the parliament building they were not admitted. The best they could do was to leave the resolutions with a sympathetic member who promised to do what he could.

Some alarm was caused by a sharp fall in the deposits in the Post Office Savings Bank. It was realised, no doubt, that this was due to widespread hardship, but the chief comment was that it put the Government into a dilemma because it lessened the amount of money available for low- interest loans, by means of which it was customary to assist various necessary enterprises that were not sufficiently remunerative for the bankers.

In these days General Araki, the Minister for War, was the national oracle. He insisted that an immediate increase in the taxes was feasible and necessary. It was certainly necessary to get money somehow, for the army’s irreducible minimum demand was for an allotment of 550 million yen as its share in the next year’s budget, out of a revenue of 1,342 million yen, while the navy, in addition to its current expenditure, wanted 460 millions for “replenishment”— which, however, it was willing to spread over three years. The Premier, Admiral Saito, warned the Cabinet at the beginning of December 1932 that the estimates for the following year were a thousand million yen in excess of the revenue, and he begged them to make a further cut.

It was possible to raise the money by the issue of national bonds, but this might jeopardise the yen’s exchange value. Mr. Takahashi, the Finance Minister, was adamant against an increase in taxes, and advanced powerful reasons in support of his stand.

But General Araki allowed nothing so base as arithmetic to stand in the way of his expensive ideals. On one occasion he gave quite an obstetrical lecture. Japan was suffering: he admitted it: but her pangs were those of travail, and would soon be forgotten in the joys of giving birth. An ignorant doctor (presumably Takahashi) might, of course, take the labour pains for gastritis and dose the patient with unsuitable drugs. But objections to taxation could not all be dismissed as bellyache. Baron Go Seinosuke, presiding at the Japan Chamber of Commerce, said that the apparent improvement in the economic situation was due only to the munitions trade and to the relief granted to farmers. Actually the country was in danger of a currency collapse like that which overtook Germany after the war.

Baron Go was Japan’s foremost man of business, but Araki was not abashed. The only danger to the country, he said, was dangerous thought. In the Cabinet councils he descended to realities, and confessed that his early pro­mises of Manchukuo being speedily remunerative had been disappointed. This was not an expression of remorse but merely a reason why his colleagues should agree to a heavy military expenditure in the independent State for some years to come. At the same time demands were being made at Geneva for a three-quarter naval ratio, but that was only a prelude to the rejection of the ratio principle alto­gether.

There were all sorts of nostrums for improving the financial situation, and (England having set an example) old loans were converted into new ones at lower rates of interest. Indeed, lower rates of interest were so much preached as a requirement of the patriotic spirit that high dividends came to be regarded as a sort of moral turpitude, and directors had to find ways of disposing of profits other than wasting them on shareholders. It was even suggested that patriotism was at such a high pitch that it would be feasible to issue bonds bearing no interest at all; but Mr. Hijikata, Governor of the Bank of Japan, deprecated this, saying that the bonds would merely become a sort of cur­rency of high denomination with no safeguard against depreciation, and that they would drag the rest of the currency down with them.

From 1932 there was a complete reversal of the Hamaguchi policy of economy. Instead of balancing income and expenditure and constantly reducing the costs of govern­ment, there began a system of budget-balancing by loans of the order of a thousand million yen a year, most of which were taken up by the banks, who, by reducing their own rates of interest on deposits, hoped to be able to carry on. The currency note issue was greatly increased, and the yen was reduced in its exchange value from approximately 50 cents (American) to 20 cents. Manufacturers were not against restabilisation, but insisted on a 20 cent maximum, which they found advantageous for export, there being no increase in wages throughout Japan. When at length the United States went off gold as well, there was some dismay lest the bottom had been knocked out of the depreciation game. But Mr. Takahashi handled the situation firmly and “managed” the currency successfully, fixing it at is. 2d. instead of the 2s. of the golden age. He had to be careful, however. Several European countries had aligned their currencies on that of England, but an open declaration that Japan had set her standard by that of Britain instead of being independent would have evoked indignant protests from the patriots.

When the 1933 budget was presented and new features of a size unexpected and a recurrence unanticipated had evidently become permanent, the Asahi was, as usual, the only big newspaper to offer any reasoned criticism. Neither the Press nor the political parties had any real policies.

The Seiyukai still had a large majority, and its president, Dr. Suzuki, wanted to be Premier, but the Government might dissolve the Diet at any moment so as to get an amenable House. The Asahi, remarking that the Seiyukai must soon make up its mind one way or the other, said:

If it makes up its mind to fight the Government, there is no lack of subjects on which to join issue. In the first place, there is the huge budget of 2,238,000,000 yen, which is predominantly military. Of the total the army and navy estimates amount to 820 millions, or about 40 per cent. If to this are added the interest on war bonds, pensions, and allowances for bereaved families, the percentage will rise to 50. The army and navy esti­mates are equivalent to 70 per cent of the ordinary State revenue of 1,288,000,000 yen. Referring to the new expenditure, it will be seen that of the total, amounting to 730,000,000 yen, 56 per cent, or 409,000,000 yen, is absorbed by the new war expenditure. Is it the correct attitude of political parties to indulge in sordid party strife, while swallowing these disproportionate figures of war expenditure? Common sense forbids one to believe in the efficiency of national defence provided in such a way. . . . National loans are mounting up at an alarming rate. They are expected to reach the ten thousand million yen mark in the fiscal year 1935-6, by which time 90 per cent of the tax revenue will have to be devoted to tax payments.

But neither party could agree upon a programme for itself, and naturally when they tried to combine against the Saito Government, agreement was no easier to reach. There was a good deal of dissension in the Cabinet not only over matters of policy but over appointments in the gift of the Government. Takahashi and Araki quarrelled openly over the question whether the army was the ruin or the sal­vation of the country. Goto, the Minister for Agriculture, wept when he told his subordinates how he had striven for the amelioration of the farmers and had failed.

It was felt that the “National Government” was far from satisfactory, but the chief popular complaint, because it was safest to make, was that it was suffering from senile decay. But the break-up began with one of its youngest members—the flamboyant Araki, who could not tolerate criticism. Few dared criticise him, but among the few was Baron Wakatsuki. Araki was always prating of the “crisis year” that Japan was about to face—apparently in 1936, about when the Washington treaties expired, Japan finished with the League of Nations, and so on. Baron Wakatsuki ridiculed the crisis and said that anyhow it was three years off and it was impossible to keep people in a state of excite­ment so long. Wakatsuki defended the London Treaty, and pointed out that if, as was often said, it was one of the causes of the May 15th murder, then the murderers had killed the wrong man. As for the militarists’ attempt to destroy party government, he said, the Emperor Meiji had granted the country a democratic constitution, and this attempt to impose an imitation Fascism on Japan was a breach of the Peace Preservation Law.

Many threats of assassination and two or three actual attempts followed this plain speaking, but Wakatsuki refused to keep quiet. He asked what was wrong with the naval treaty and how it justified the monstrous replenish­ment programme foisted on the nation. Araki declared that Wakatsuki had taken leave of his senses. He insisted that Japan’s relations with her neighbours were unsatisfactory, and demanded an international peace conference at which Kodo should be explained to the nations. He was always talking about Kodo, the Imperial Way, and was its self- appointed apostle if not its inventor. But he never explained it to his own nation. It was not a dictatorship, and it was not economic nationalism, but he found the effort to explain what it was too much for him.

He managed to get the Minister for the Navy (Osumi having returned to the post that he had resigned) to join with him in issuing a statement denouncing the endeavours being made to estrange the army from the people, especially by declaring that the “crisis” was only propaganda. One allegation that roused Araki’s wrath was that in war only common soldiers and sailors were killed and not high officers. This recalled a bitter article that appeared in a Japanese paper during the Great War, in which, after naming a number of highly placed young men in Europe who had been killed, the writer said that in the Russo- Japanese war the two sons of General Nogi were the only men of distinction killed. This was an exaggeration: besides, the European papers were already calling attention to the “over the top” technique whereby officers were economised in the slaughter. Criticism of the army and of the army estimates, said Araki, could only be inspired by the Third International.

Araki’s proposed peace conference, which, he said, would put them on good terms with Russia, received no support outside the army; his plans for agrarian relief did not even gain agrarian support; and not even the army could work up any enthusiasm for his military-economic plans for Manchuria. A mild attack of pneumonia gave him time to reflect; he saw that his “song and dance” had come to an end, and he resigned. It takes more than vanity to make a successful Minister for War, and Araki had not the other necessary qualities.

The Cabinet seemed to please nobody. There were so many cases of “dangerous thought” in educational circles that Mr. Hatoyama, Minister of Education, was driven into resignation. His enemies also charged him with corruption, and a ladies’ social reform society waited on Viscount Saito and asked him to see that his next Minister of Education neither ill-treated his wife nor kept a concubine. Presently there was a hue and cry after Baron Nakashima, Minister for Commerce and Industry. Many years before he had written an essay in praise of Ashikaga Takauji, a great man in his day several centuries before, but one who backed the wrong horse when there were rival claimants to the throne. The exigencies of loyalty had become so great that it was now disloyal to admire the fine qualities of this fourteenth century dictator.

But the fatal blow at the Cabinet came from within. Mr. Kuroda, Vice-Minister of Finance, became implicated in some serious corruption, and in the midst of the uproar that followed the Cabinet resigned, on July 3, 1934. It had been a patchwork affair, and certainly no improvement on the party system; but it had had to carry on in an atmosphere darkened by murder, and with a national economy destroyed by a military conspiracy.

 

CHAPTER XX. TRIALS EXTRAORDINARY

 

Even in cases where the arrests are made on the spot and there are no difficulties about the evidence, it takes a long time to bring criminals to justice in Japan. In the case of political murders there are long consultations as to what attitude the court shall take, and the crimes committed in the early part of 1932 provided no more sensation for the newspapers until the latter part of 1933. The time was spent in working up the cases for the benefit of the accused. One of them, who had been taken ill, was released on parole and died. His funeral, on December 9th, was attended by every reactionary who could get there, and there were speeches on the high calling of political assassination. Two days later a Communist was buried, and of those who came to pay their last respects, the police arrested two hundred, on the ground that their presence on such an occasion placed them under suspicion.

Some months before the trials began, Mr. Koyama, Minister of Justice, reported progress. He explained the connection between the murders. Mr. Inoue and Baron Dan, he said, were murdered by members of the Ketsumei- dan, or Blood Brotherhood, of whom a Buddhist priest, Inoue Nissho, was the leader. Priest Inoue’s immediate followers, seeing that the enterprise was a dangerous one, shirked further action, whereupon the Aikyojuku took up the task. Concerned in the murder of the Premier were thirteen naval officers (one of them retired) and twelve military cadets (of whom one had already been expelled). Another group had raided Count Makino’s house, and some more threw bombs at banks and tried to put the power houses out of action.

Priest Inoue, who instigated the simplest of his disciples to murder, was a type perhaps peculiar to Japan. He had long been a spy, first in South Manchuria for the Army General Staff, later in Peking for General Banzai, Japanese military adviser to President Yuan Shih-kai, and in the Shantung campaign of 1914-15. Thereafter he became a Buddhist priest and built himself a Nichiren temple, where he attracted a following of young men. His instincts were bloodthirsty, and he formed his patriotic Blood Brotherhood, who mixed their blood and drank it as an accompaniment to their initiation oath. Besides the victims whose death he had compassed, Inoue had a list of twenty more eminent men whom he had decided to persuade his followers to murder.

The Aikyojuku, or Native-land-loving Society, who par­ticipated in the murder of the Premier when Inoue’s men began to fight shy, attempted to make a “direct appeal to the Throne” on behalf of the murderers, but were arrested and charged with this grave offence. The news of this was not allowed to get out, but a much better example of police efficiency in the suppression of news was the silence main­tained for many months over the Shimpetai, or “God’s Soldiers” affair. This was a conspiracy on a much larger scale than the others, and the murders which it had arranged to commit in July 1932 would have made the earlier crimes look pale and almost bloodless. But the conspirators were apparently men of less calibre than Tachibana and Priest Inoue, and in any case they failed entirely to carry out their design.

In Japanese trials everything of importance takes place at the preliminary examination, and the court proceedings are little more than a formality, though often a tedious one. The preliminary trial was not, therefore, accounted unduly long. Though the army did not claim the credit of the murders, it acted as though they had vindicated its own opinions. In April 1933 the Asahi said that though the army’s indignation against party politicians, which cul­minated in the bloody deed of May 15, 1932, was moderated, the army was not yet disposed to permit the creation of a party Cabinet. This was generally accepted as a simple statement of fact, and nobody raised the question whether the army was acting within its constitutional rights. Dis­cussions took place which would be impossible where sub judice trials are kept as free from prejudice as possible. Were the service men guilty of rebellion or murder? was a favourite subject of debate. The Minseito found it easy to bear the murder of a Seiyukai president with fortitude, and issued a manifesto in which they said that “the motive for their crimes was their solicitude for the welfare of the State. They cannot properly be viewed in the same light as ordinary murderers.” Rumour had it, the manifesto concluded, that the accused were to be tried on a charge of murder, lest treating them as patriots might encourage future murders, “but this is surely sacrificing the dignity of the law on the altar of expediency.”

The trials began at last, that of the Blood Brotherhood on June 28th, the naval court-martial on July 24th, and the military court-martial on July 25th, with the full assurance that none of the accused would suffer the extreme penalty.

Ordinarily the trials of yesteryear are very cold mutton in retrospect, but these throw such light on points of view incomprehensible to the Occidental that their salient features are worth recalling. Open discussion of sub judice cases generally tells against the accused; the newspapers quote the police and even judges as affirming his guilt. On this occasion it worked the other way. Cabinet Ministers extolled the murderers. When the hearing came on, Mr. Hiramatsu, for the military murderers, pointed to an enormous heap of papers piled before him, saying that they were petitions on behalf of his clients from every part of the country. An “opinion census,” he said, had been taken in many places, and always showed an enormous majority praising their acts. Mr. Hiramatsu proceeded to attack the judicial authorities for their proclivity for acting upon Western theories, and demanded of the President of the Court, “which is more important, the nation or the law?⁵³ Nor did he wait for an answer, but said that, the nation being the more important, and the murderers⁵ motives evident, they should be acquitted. He cited historical cases of amnesties being granted after rebellions as clinching his argument.

It has to be remembered that practically all Communist trials in Japan are conducted in camera, so that no affirmation of Communist principles made by the accused shall be heard by the public or get into print. In these cases the trials were public, and the accused were encouraged to air their views at unlimited length.

Priest Inoue made no attempt to gain any advantage by altering the charge from murder. He had, he said, a high regard for constitutional procedure, but the emergency which the country faced justified strong measures. He gave a list of those he had intended to murder, and it included (with the names of those already killed): Prince Saionji, Count Makino (Keeper of the Privy Seal), Baron Wakatsuki (President of the Minseito), Mr. Inukai (Premier), Count Ito Myoji (Privy Council), Dr. Suzuki (President of the Seiyukai), Mr. Tokonami, Mr. Inoue, Baron Shidehara, Baron Dan, Mr. Ikeda (Mitsui firm), and Mr. Kimura (Mitsubishi firm).

As the murders were professedly a preliminary to political reforms, the Court asked Inoue what was the nature of the reforms contemplated. He replied that he had no idea. It was his part to see to the killing. He left reconstruction to others. But, he said, such acts are not murder, and “But for me, there would have been no Fifteenth of May.⁵⁵ Another of the accused, Furuichi Shoji, said that he was inspired with disgust by the prevalent individualism, and believed the State could be reformed by bloodshed.

At the naval court-martial, which was held at Yokosuka, the naval port. Lieutenant Nakamura stated that the object of the essay in murder in which he had participated was to get a Cabinet with Baron Hiranuma and General Araki in it. He hated the Mitsui and Mitsubishi firms. Lieutenant Mikami, another murderer, declared that Count Makino and Prince Saionji had exploited for their own profit the rivalry between the two firms. Lieutenant Kuroiwa declared that he shot Mr. Inukai, the Premier, because he was boiling with indignation at the Nanking affair (over five years before). As for Baron Shidehara, witness considered him no better than a Chinaman. Clear thinking was evidently not a strong point with these patriots.

At the military court-martial Cadet Sakamoto confessed to having a more constructive mind than Priest Inoue. The object of the murders and the bomb-throwing, he said, was to have the Emperor, through Admiral Togo, proclaim martial law, and to ask Gondo Seikyo to do the work of reconstruction. This Gondo was an elderly man, whose part in the conspiracies was ambiguous, but who was supposed to be a scholar and was reputed a patriot. He was some­times mentioned as the brains of the movement, but when he was asked his opinion as to how the agrarian crisis might be alleviated, all he could recommend for the farmers was self-help.

The only other man connected with this deplorable business who was supposed to have any brains was Dr. Okawa Shumei, President of the Jimmukai, a patriotic society. Of the quality of his mental make-up some idea may be gathered from the testimony given that he had proposed the assassina­tion of a number of Japanese traders in Manchuria, in order to get stronger action taken. Perhaps he was encouraged to think along these lines by the excellence of the results that had followed the killing of Captain Nakamura. He offered his suggestion to Lieutenant-Commander Fujii (who was killed in the fighting at Shanghai), who passed it on to Inoue; but though the spy-priest was far from squeamish, he could not agree to this.

The prisoners showed little gratitude for the indulgence of the courts. Priest Inoue broke out into violent expostu­lation against the manners of Judge Sakamaki, who occupied himself with some other activity than paying perfect atten­tion to the boastings of one of the accused who was making his harangue. The accused all refused to go on with the trial, and the judge actually visited Inoue in prison to try and placate him. The judicial authorities overruled the accuseds³ objections and ordered the trial to proceed. But the prisoners had their way. They reiterated their complaints and at length the judge resigned, Judge Fujii being appointed in his place. Four months were lost over these extraordinary proceedings.

The military court-martial finished its business first. The accused were moderate in their orations, one of them having a fling at the police, who, he said, were too cowardly to arrest him when he threw a bomb into their headquarters. The procurator declared that they were prompted through­out by patriotism pure and simple, though of course their acts were of an impermissible irregularity. He asked for a uniform sentence of eight years, and the court gave them four years, saying that their faith in Kodo led to their im­proper actions—which was rather a reflection on General Araki, the exponent-in-chief of the doctrine.

The naval court-martial was more loquacious. In the course of it there was an announcement, for instance, that at the next hearing Procurator Yamamoto would discourse on the misunderstood naval treaty. On September nth, the procurator demanded sentence, death in three cases, and terms of imprisonment down to three years in the rest. All the accused were young men between twenty-five and twenty-nine, and Lieutenant Asada, as their class-mate, made an oration in their defence. The Cabinet, he said, for lust of power and gain, deceived the nation; the Diet had become an arena for the contests of drunkards and outlaws; foreign policy was weak-kneed, following the lead of the Western Powers and calling it co-operation; hence the fiascos of Nanking and London. Morale was declining at home and contempt was increasing abroad. Scholars were full of cranky theories, and the spirit of Japan was in danger of extinction. Rightism and Leftism had run to extremes; the farmers were impoverished and unemployment was increasing. The Chief of the Naval General Staff had denounced the London naval treaty. Finally, he eulogised the purity of the patriotism of the accused.

Lieutenant Asamidzu had the last word: “They may perish, but the brilliance of their patriotism will never grow dim.”

The death sentences, of course, were not imposed, but there was a sentence of fifteen years’ imprisonment. Though more than a year had been spent in preparation for the trials, the staff work was execrable. The sentences were so disparate that there was a great deal of grumbling; but if this helped to break up the unity in the patriotic murder clubs, it was a fault for which there was good reason to be thankful.

The suspension of the Blood Brotherhood trial enabled the trial of the civilian murderers of May 15th to follow on the court-martial. The twenty accused, with Tachibana at their head, were arraigned on September 26th. Tachi- bana’s opening address alone lasted many days. He gave the court a lengthy account of his life, and how he came to hold the convictions that inspired him to form the Aikyojuku. Here the judge interposed, asking him to describe the brotherhood in detail. Several times, indeed, during this and other long speeches, the judge asked for more details, as though he could never have enough. Tachibana described how, in spite of his agricultural brotherhood, the Aikyojuku, rural conditions became worse, so that he became convinced that drastic steps were necessary, and joined the Ketsumeidan—Priest Inoue’s Blood Brotherhood. Day by day Tachibana informed the court of the subject that he would take up at the next hearing. On October 5th he was so overcome by his own pathos that the court adjourned to give him time to recover. Another day he dwelt on his fondness for Beethoven and Rodin, and said that it needed a great purpose to induce him to desert these joys for the company of bedbugs in prison. On October 14th, still continuing his oration, he was asked some further ques­tions by the judge. In reply to these, he said that had the murder scheme miscarried, they all intended to flee to Manchuria. (That, in fact, was where he did go. Manchuria, for the Japanese, offers the “great open spaces where men are men,” except when they happen to be Chinese.) Asked why the power houses were bombed, Tachibana said he thought it would do the luxurious good to be in darkness for a spell. They had not had a sufficiently severe lesson. Ten years after the great earthquake Tokyo was more luxurious than ever, but the farmers, how miserable! And whom did he expect to succeed the murdered Inukai? He wanted Araki!

It is possible that this remark brought Araki’s career to an end.

Tachibana’s followers were allowed to harangue the court on whatever subjects they chose, and they all denounced the shortcomings by which the country fell short of perfect patriotism. But they did not mention among these murder or the military usurpation of power: rather they assumed that these things were virtues. The trial dragged on till February, when Tachibana received a sentence of imprison­ment for life, and the rest to various terms, the sentences being on an average much heavier than those inflicted on the naval men, just as these were heavier than those received by the soldiers. It rather looked as though the accused had been punished according to their loquacity in court, but nobody suggested that this was the case. The navy felt sore at the army letting itself off lightly, and the civilians thought both services were unduly favoured. Mr. Hatta, in the Diet, declared that the military murderers had worn their uni­forms in order to put Inukai off his guard, and he accused the Minister for War of echoing the sentiments of a gang of murderers who should at least have slit their bellies by way of apology for their crimes: but things like this, that needed saying so badly, hardly ever were said except under protection of parliamentary privilege.

The murder of Inukai revived interest in the murders of other premiers and admiration for the murderers. Early in 1933, while the trials were eagerly awaited, the con­federate of Hamaguchi’s assassin was released from prison and was interviewed by the newspapers, to whose represen­tatives he complacently declared that he had emerged from his two years’ confinement “more patriotic than ever.” An eminent lawyer, Dr. Uzawa, defending Sagoya Tomeo, the first murderer, one of the dullest fools who ever pulled a trigger, found justification for doing to death one of Japan’s most courageous and devoted public servants in the fact that during his premiership Japan concluded the London Naval Treaty and permitted the export of gold. Mr. Hiramatsu, defending the military murderers, said that Sagoya’s foresight was proved by the murders of 1932. No doubt it was hoped that clemency for Sagoya would auto­matically bring clemency for the rest. The Supreme Court confirmed the death sentence on November 6, 1933, two years after the crime, and the propaganda for pardon became more insistent than ever, even the younger Hama- guchi being subject to pressure in order to make him plead for the life of his father’s murderer. There is no indecent hurry about hanging a condemned murderer in Japan, and as the Crown Prince was born on December 23, 1933, there was great rejoicing because all the murderers would benefit. Thirty thousand prisoners in all did benefit by the amnesty which was proclaimed on February 11, 1934, but not, of course, those who were in prison for dangerous political opinions. Premier Hara’s murderer, another excessively stupid man, who had been serving his “life sentence” since 1922, did not benefit by the amnesty, for he had already, on February 7th, been liberated and lionised. All Japan loves a murderer.

The Shimpeitai, or God’s Soldiers case, has already been mentioned; while this was being investigated, yet another murder club came to light, the Kokoku Seinen Horyukai, whose programme seemed to be to murder everybody, making a start with Dr. Suzuki, president of the Seiyukai, who was to be sent to his account at a party meeting on November 14, 1934, but the plot was betrayed and thirty participants were arrested on November 13th. They were sent to prison in due course, but the case was not taken very seriously.

The Ketsumeidan or Blood Brotherhood trial, interrupted so long by the murderers’ complaints of the judge’s inatten­tion, was begun again on March 27, 1934, under Judge Fujii. At the outset, Priest Inoue gave a very boastful account of himself. It was still dragging its slow length along in August, when some of the witnesses who had testified already in the May 15th case (Premier Inukai’s murder) were examined, among them General Sakanishi, who described Inoue fervently as “a very great man.” In November sentences of imprisonment were pronounced. The procurator in demanding sentence extolled their patriotism, but said the law must not be broken. The judge spoke kindly to the prisoners, advising them to take care of their health in prison—which was equivalent to a promise that the terms would be shortened. Petitions for clemency came in a flood, and Priest Inoue’s patronising approval of Judge Fujii had much more “news value” than the Judge’s opinion of the murderers.

Before the year was out three youths were arrested who said that, “greatly encouraged by the May 15th affair,” they had formed a Shonen Ketsumeidan (Young People’s Blood Brotherhood) for the purpose of killing all promi­nent men, and had made two or three attempts. Most prominent men, however, were by this time taking pre­cautions.

Modern murderers who, like the men of May 15th, enter an undefended house to kill an old man, are naturally compared with the Forty-seven Ronin, who did this very thing in 1702, and have become Japan’s favourite heroes. They are familiar to a multitude of English readers through Lord Redesdale’s Tales of Old Japan. In the sixty-six years that have passed since Redesdale wrote, the story has become more popular than ever. The new year is ushered in with its dramatic performance at the principal theatres, and the great Japanese historian Tokutomi Soho devotes a whole volume of his tremendous work on the Tokugawa period to the Forty-seven. The literature of the heroic episode is enormous. The Forty-seven waited long and patiently in order to consummate their revenge, their object being to kill their lord’s enemy. They adopted every pre­caution against failure, and finally broke in to an all but deserted mansion, and raged through it till they found their victim cowering in a cupboard. They cut off the dotard’s head and made off, without any resistance being offered. If anybody asks what there is admirable or heroic in this, the reply is that they knew that they would all be ordered to commit hara-kiri^ as in fact they were. The modern political assassin is more fortunate in that he lives in an age more appreciative of murder and very tender towards the murderer.

Except that the excuse of a feudal vendetta and the pros­pect of a painful death were lacking, there was a consider­able resemblance between the two murders of helpless old men in 1702 and in 1932, and the question was argued, not for the first time, whether it was consistent to give the murderers heroic honours without exacting the lawful penalty of their deed. On this occasion the Miyako, a Tokyo paper, produced an ingenious argument. At the time of the Ako vendetta, it said, there was a strong feeling in favour of clemency, which would doubtless have been exercised but for the influence of Sorai Ogyu, a great scholar of the time, who insisted on the lawful punishment. Therefore the murder itself is the heroic act, not the suffering of the punishment. The doing of the aged Kotsuke-no-Suke to death was the feat to be admired; the forty-seven simul­taneous belly-slashings were a matter only for tears.

At the time of the Forty-seven Ronin there were no newspapers and the discussion of public events was for­bidden : hence the famous drama is put back to an earlier period in history. This was recalled by an order given out in 1932 that no theatrical or cinematographic represen­tations of the affair of May 15th would be permitted. But the large crop of murder clubs must have made the police wish that there were no newspapers.

Some interesting details emerged about the Shimpeitai. It was financed by business men whose plans on the Stock Exchange were laid in accordance with the results to be expected of the contemplated orgy of murder. But the affair lost public interest, not so much because it dragged on too long, but because there were no murders. The Japanese are realists and like results.

 

CHAPTER XXI. JAPAN’S AEGIS OVER THE MAINLAND

 

Despite the League of Nations, which was unwilling to take warlike action against Japan, as provided for in Article XVI. of the Covenant, and which shrank from the untried experi­ment of an international boycott, Japan successfully wrested Manchuria, Jehol and part of Chahar from China, and occupied them in sufficient strength to deter China from any attempt at their recovery. Under the Tangku Truce Japan was in a semi-occupation of a large area in North China, there was a demilitarised zone in which the Japanese did as they liked, and according to the Japanese interpreta­tion of the Tangku Truce, they could ask for the removal of any Chinese officials of whom they did not approve. It was hoped that the Central Government, after this demonstration of its weakness, would break up and that the Kuomintang would be discredited. This, however, did not happen. General Chiang Kai-shek devoted himself to the consolida­tion of his power wherever the Japanese did not intrude, and to the suppression of the peasant revolt—the “Com­munist-bandits” as they were officially called.

When the conquest of Jehol was determined upon but not yet accomplished, the Japanese newspapers, under military inspiration, were full of scorn and contempt for the “opium province,” Jehol having indeed a bad name as the worst backslider among the Chinese provinces. But when the conquest was effected, the strange announcement appeared that the downtrodden Chinese farmer would now get a fair price for his poppies. The truth was that Jehol opium had competed with the opium monopoly in Dairen. For years past the opium poppy had been cultivated in Formosa, Japan, and Korea, and the distribution of its products all over the world was a scandal for which Japan offered very inadequate excuses every year at Geneva. Unquestioned dominance over Manchuria, Jehol and a large part of North China offered her a market for heroin and morphia where nobody would be able to complain, and this market she proceeded sedulously to cultivate. The Japanese Concession in Tientsin became the chief centre of manufacture of the derivative drugs, and the Japanese army was the protector of drug-shops wherever they were set up under its aegis. Often these were run by Koreans, upon whom any attaching obloquy could be placed. They assisted materially in demoralising the inhabitants and lessening any danger of revolt, and the trade brought in more money than any honest business.

But while Japan was demoralising that part of China over which she had gained control, there was disconcerting progress where it had been supposed that there was only hopeless corruption and poverty. The New Life movement, though its rules and maxims sound naively simple, was touching and renewing the lives of a people who had begun, at last, to be conscious of their nationality and anxious to preserve it. The League of Nations, disappointed over its failure to protect China against aggression, was continuing its other work, notably the organisation of the Committee for Technical Assistance, with Dr. Rajchman at its head, and this Committee, which neither offered gratuities nor pushed loans, but which helped with expert advice, and had no axe to grind, was also impressed with China’s recovery and will for progress.This was particularly hateful to the Japanese, who could no longer co-operate with the League of Nations and regarded all its acts as hostile. Animadversions against the Committee of Technical Assistance appeared in the Press, and personal slanders against Dr. Rajchman and the Secretary, Mr. Haas. Japanese strategists regarded the pro­gress shown as inimical to the maintenance of peace in the Far East.

Mr. Huang Fu, Chairman of the Peiping Political Council, had come to an agreement with the Nanking leaders, more favourable to Japan than they liked, yet recognised by them as the necessary price of peace; but it was expected that, with the making of a settlement, the inclination of the League to assist China would grow, with the result that Western influence would be increased, and Nanking would act more independently towards Tokyo. Early in April 1934, Mr. Arnau, the head of the Foreign Office Intelligence Bureau, gave the foreign journalists, at one of the regular gatherings, an outline of the Japanese view regarding Chinese affairs; but they apparently regarded it as only one of the essays in abstract principles in which Japanese Government Departments frequently indulge. So little notice was taken of it that it was like a ballon d'essai that had failed to rise from the ground, so on April 17, 1934 the Asahi published an inspired statement emphasising Japan’s attitude in a way which could not be ignored. The Arnau Statement is of sufficient historical importance to require quotation:

As a result of the Nanchang Conference the hope is now enter­tained that the various problems in North China will be settled in the near future. At the same time, there is a body of opinion in Nanking Government circles which is hostile to the policy of Mr. Huang Fu, and which cannot be ignored. Some of these hostile elements, desirous of stronger co-operation with America and the League Powers, are contemplating schemes to invite their financial aid on the plea of economic or technical help. Regardless of the success or failure of these schemes, the Japanese Government is firmly determined to shape its course towards China in accordance with its own view of the situation. Recog­nising the necessity of calling the attention of China and the Powers to this attitude of the Japanese Government, the Foreign Office authorities have just given out an informal statement. This statement says that Japan’s views and assertions on the Chinese problem may not be in perfect agreement with those of the Powers, but Japan is so circumstanced that she must do her utmost to fulfil her mission and responsibility in the Far East. Her withdrawal from the League of Nations was due to the con­flict of views held by herself and by the League of Nations about Japan’s position in the- Far East. Although Japan’s attitude towards China may be at variance with that of other countries in some respects, these divergences cannot be helped, as they arise from Japan’s position and mission. It is hardly necessary to say that Japan is ever mindful of maintaining and promoting friendly relations with all countries, but it is only proper that for the maintenance of peace and order in the Far East she should act independently on her own responsibility. Indeed, it is Japan’s mission to achieve peace, and she is determined to do so. For the fulfilment of this mission Japan must necessarily share responsi­bility with China for the maintenance of peace in the Far East. There is no other country with whom she can share this responsibility.

China’s integrity and unity and the restoration of order in that country are what Japan most eagerly desires. Past history shows that nothing short of China’s own awakening or effort can attain this. Such being the case, if China should attempt to exclude Japan or take such steps as are detrimental to the peace of the Far East by exploiting the influence of other Powers, or if she should resort to the policy of playing off one foreign country against another, Japan would be compelled to oppose such measures stoutly. On the other hand, if the Powers, in considera­tion of the situation developing out of the Manchurian and Shanghai affairs, should attempt to act in concert in regard to China, such action would of necessity acquire political signifi­cance, no matter whether its nominal object is to help China financially or technically. Such a situation, if fostered, would open the way for the establishment of spheres of influence in • China, or for the international control of China, or for the partition of that country. Not only would it bring a great mis­fortune on China, but it would impair the integrity of the Far East, and affect Chinese interests very seriously. Japan cannot but oppose, as a matter of principle, any such development. In the individual efforts of Powers to negotiate with China on economic and trade matters, however, Japan does not see the necessity of interfering, so long as they do not hinder the work of maintaining peace in the Far East. If they should prove dis­turbing to the maintenance of peace in the Far East, Japan will be obliged to oppose them. For example, Japan must oppose the attempts being made of late by Powers to supply military planes to China, to aid China in the establishment of aerodromes, to supply military organs and advisers, and to give political loans to China, as it is obvious that these measures will, after all, serve to cause estrangement between China and Japan or other countries, to the detriment of the peace of the Far East. Japan’s policy, set forth above, is a natural corollary of the course which she has hitherto been pursuing, but its pronouncement at the present moment may not be out of place, in view of the fact that some countries have been acting positively of late in China, on the nominal pretext of joint action and joint aid.

This amounted to a declaration of suzerainty over China. It denied China’s right to any foreign relations except such as Japan approved; and its permission to foreign traders to continue such business as Japan allowed, conveyed the hint that, when it suited Japan, that privilege might be withdrawn. The manner in which the Statement was given out to the newspaper correspondents was so offhand that it did not attract their attention; but the pointed repetition gained the notice which it sought. Europe, however, was busy with its own quarrels, and though English newspapers pointed out that the Statement tore all treaties across, Sir John Simon, the Foreign Secretary, refused to comment upon it on the ground that it had not been communicated to him by or through an ambassador. For lack of adequate protest the Arnau Statement superseded all rights, treaties, and understandings with China, and left China tributary to Japan—a complaining and disobedient tributary, no doubt, but unable to enlist help in resisting. Even the peaceful and unpolitical efforts of the League of Nations were paralysed. Europe’s dissensions made a convenient opportunity for this challenge to the world; but the occasion for it was the prospect that, with the help of the League of Nations, China might experience an economic and political renaissance.

Though perhaps the method was novel it called for some­thing more than indifference. The fact that those Powers most concerned made a pretence of ignoring it greatly encouraged Japan in preparing for her next step, for she rightly regarded it as indicating that no forcible action would be taken, when she herself chose to act forcibly. Meanwhile the possibility still existing of selling aeroplanes and munitions to China and China’s continuance to engage foreign instructors were assumed by the silent chancelleries to justify their silence.

For the time being Japan had her hands full with the settlement of Manchukuo. Soon after the issue of new capital for the South Manchuria Railway, a Manchukuo Telegraph and Telephone Company was started, with a guaranteed dividend of six per cent. The money could have been had cheaper, but the rush of subscribers helped to popularise the Manchukuo idea and to give a solid bourgeois backing to all plans designed for the firmer establishment of Japanese control.

Money continued to be poured into Manchuria for all sorts of industries and enterprises, and it was not long before Mr. Takahashi angered the military men by uttering a warning against too large investments in the new Empire. The amount of capital, he said, was limited, and too reckless investment might bring about a crisis. The army, it is true, disapproved in theory of exploitation by large capitalists, which seemed to be inevitable with so many new concerns starting up; but it was semi-officially explained on behalf of the Manchukuo Government, that the Government gave charters only for approved projects, and subscribed half the capital itself by way of exercising proper control. How far it actually did this is doubtful. The new Government had its own problems, and its share of the capital was probably more in evidence in the books than in the bank. The Meirinkai, a comparatively respectable body of political reactionaries, supposed to be chiefly interested in ethics, did a good deal to promote Manchurian investment.

Great hopes were entertained at one time of the cultivation of cotton, for which, only a hundred years earlier, Manchuria had been famous, but cotton had been disappointing in Korea, and it was quickly decided that Manchuria was unsuitable. To those who objected to manufactures in Manchuria it was pointed out that a purely agricultural country could never be densely populated or wealthy and so would always lack the essentials of a good market. Mitsuis at this time attracted some attention by selling to the public some of their most profitable ventures, and an obliging Press represented this as indicating a change of heart—a desire to be less of an octopus in the business world. Actually it was done to raise the money for new investments, Manchuria getting its share.

Strategic railways were hurried on, especially the connec­tion with the North Korean ports, and lines crossing North Manchuria to the Amur, but there was a railway problem of the first importance still to settle. The Chinese Eastern Railway from Manchuli to Pogranichnaya, with the southern branch from Harbin to Changchun (Hsinking), was still under Russian management. A foreign railway running through some part of the loosely knit empire of China created no very difficult problems; but it was an entirely different matter when a highly centralised and active, not to say irritable, Japanese administration took the place of the Chinese. Parties of Japanese soldiers were surveying every nook and corner of the Four North-Eastern Provinces (except where the bandits were too formidable) and there were many complaints from Russia that these parties were not content to explore Manchuria, but were constantly crossing the border and exploring Russian territory as well. An agitation was started in Japan for the taking of the railway by force. Manchukuo was to do this, or perhaps it would be better to say that the Japanese were to do it for Manchukuo, who was to accept the responsibility. The plan was not officially approved, however. To have done this as a friendly gesture, to help the new State to establish its independence more completely, would have been too raw a pretence, and might have brought on a war with Russia, who already showed a far keener interest in the safety of the border than ever she had while there was a Chinese administration on the other side.

Russia recognised that the situation could only become worse, and at the end of April 1933 offered to sell. Diffi­culties were increasing. Japan, Russia complained, used the line for carrying troops but did nothing for its protection and maintenance. Under the Treaty of Portsmouth, Russians and Japanese had agreed that neither side should keep more than fifteen soldiers to the kilometre for the protection of their respective portions of the line. The Japanese railway troops together with the garrison of the Leased Territory, had become the Kwantung Army, but the Russians had left the protection of the line to the Chinese troops, whom the “independence⁵⁵ of Manchukuo had turned into bandits. It becoming impossible to work the line properly, the Russians withdrew a considerable part of the rolling-stock into Russian territory, which was a source of bitter complaint on Japan’s part, as the Russian gauge was larger than the standard gauge, and rolling-stock could not be supplied from other lines. In reply to one of Russia’s complaints about the hostile actions of Manchukuo, Japan made the usual reply that she was not responsible for Manchukuo’s acts and had no influence over the new State’s policy. Manchukuo sent what amounted to an ultimatum demanding the return of the rolling-stock. In spite of these quarrels the discussions regarding the sales went on, and were hardly disturbed by China’s protests that she had a definite share in the ownership of the railway which could not be thus ignored.

After about a month’s discussion Japan decided that she would not herself buy the railway, but would advise Manchukuo to buy it. Meanwhile the unrestricted attacks by bandits evoked Russian complaints that Japan was de­liberately ruining the line so as to cheapen it. Banditry grew worse, and that part of the line from Harbin to Pogra- nichnaya went out of action altogether. This section, which railed Manchurian produce to Vladivostok, had competed in the past with the South Manchuria Railway, but when it was out of action Japan had her share in all trans-Siberian traffic, so Russia had reason in thinking that it was not purely by chance that bandits were ten times worse here than on the western section.

Formal negotiations for the sale started between Russia and Manchukuo, the new State’s spokesman being Mr. Ohashi, the energetic Japanese gentleman who served Man­chukuo as Vice-Minister of Foreign Affairs. China sought representation on the conference, but in vain. The conference began in Tokyo with speeches by Count Uchida, Foreign Minister, Mr. Yurenev, Soviet Ambassador, and Mr. Ting of Manchukuo. China talked of a North China railway project to be financed by British and Belgian capital; but Japan had her own plans for North China, and was not to be deflected from her immediate purpose. The strangest part of the protracted negotiations was the manner in which, through their inspired newspapers, Russia and Japan con­stantly abused each other. On September 10th, an attempt having been made to resume traffic on the eastern section, bandits held up the train near Pogranichnaya and captured over a hundred passengers.

About this time Count Uchida fell out of favour. Mr. Takahashi had declared that as the present generation would get no benefit from Manchukuo, they should not be made to pay its whole cost, and Uchida had supported him in this contention. Whether from this or other cause, Uchida found it expedient on September 14, 1934, to resign, and was succeeded by Mr. Hirota Koki, who, like himself, had been Ambassador in Russia. Hirota belonged to the patriotic school of Toyama Mitsuru, but had the discretion not tc imitate his master’s style of speech. Almost his first public utterance, however, was to the effect that though India received orders from Westminster (the Indo-Japanese cotton conference having just begun), it was otherwise with Man­chukuo, which did not receive orders from Japan. This was so palpably untrue that the Isvestia thought it well to indicate that though the Japanese army might have more trust in Hirota than in Uchida, Russia had not, and it warned Japan against any attempt to seize the railway. The Japanese army responded by saying that Russia’s threatening attitude necessitated an increased military expenditure. Araki, the Minister for War, declared that Russia must withdraw from the Manchurian frontier, and discoursed on the superiority of arms to amiability. After so much had been said about seizing the Chinese Eastern Railway, it was not surprising when some “documents” on the subject were published in Russia, purporting to give the project an authoritative air; but Japan declared that the documents were impudent forgeries.

The discussion on the sale had begun with the Russians demanding 250 million yen, and the Japanese (on behalf of Manchukuo) offering 50 millions. The Russians pointed out that they were asking only half the original cost; the Japanese replied that it was declining in value every day, to which the Russians retorted that that was Japan’s fault, if not her deliberate contrivance. Then there were difficult questions of the rate of exchange, and of simultaneous or prior settlement of various outstanding questions. Agreement seemed so impossible that the talks were dropped in October 1933, and were not reopened till the following May.

From that time progress was slow but fairly steady. The price was all but agreed upon when the Russians asked that Japan should guarantee payment. The dignity of the sovereign State of Manchukuo was insulted! But the guarantee was given. Then came the question of how payment should be made, and the futility of “managed currencies” suddenly came into view. Would Russia take payment in kind? Yes, but in goods that she wanted, and if Japan did not make them, she would have to buy them. This nearly wrecked the contract, but there were so few things that Japan could not make, that the Russians agreed to take Japanese goods.

Even now difficulties were not entirely removed. There would have to be a Russian buying committee, who would have the right, in respect of certain goods, to see them in process of manufacture—a common enough requirement in contracts, and the simplest way of assuring quality. This caused tremendous indignation, for Japanese manufacturers are absurdly afraid of industrial espionage.

At the last moment the army almost wrecked the whole plan. They objected to supplying the Russians with cement. Cement was used for concrete fortifications, and it was almost traitorous to supply it to a potential enemy with a long coterminous frontier. That concrete was defensive rather than offensive was a mere quibble. The best defence is offence, and Japanese cement might therefore prevent Japanese self-defence.

At length, however, an agreement was initialled on March ii, 1935, agreed price being 140 million yen, with another 30 millions as discharge allowances to the Russian employees. Mr. Ting, the Manchukuo representative, handed Mr. Yurenev, the Russian ambassador, a cheque for 23 million yen as a first instalment, whereupon the South Manchuria Railway took over charge and paid off the Russian staff. The Nanking Government sent a last protest, pointing out to Japan that she had undertaken a grave responsibility in guaranteeing payment for Manchukuo. The South Man­churia Railway had increased its payroll by 10,000 employees in the past two years, and now it had another fourteen hundred miles of line to care for. Its first task was to change the gauge from Harbin to Changchun, which improved the service greatly.

In exchange for the railway Russia took a large variety of goods, including some ships. The bargain, which it had taken so long to conclude, was carried out with unexpected smoothness and mutual satisfaction, and probably stands on record as the largest example of barter known. Early in 1938, however, Japan repudiated the obligation to pay the last instalments, owing to Russia’s disapproval of her attack on China.

 

 

CHAPTER XXII. THE BOOM IN MANUFACTURE

 

We are considering a period when not only in Japan, but throughout the world great problems clamour for solution. There are population problems, for instance, including that of Japan; the problem of supplying demand without economic disaster resulting; the problem of using collective force without making the individual subhuman; and the problem of successful manufacture. That Japan offers a field for study in. the first three is obvious. That success in manufacture is one of the world’s major problems may not be uppermost in the reader’s consciousness until he considers the craze for “protection” and for “economic nationalism.” This being a chronicle of events rather than a philosophic treatise, no attempt will be made to answer questions with which many great minds are wrestling, but it may be pointed out in passing that the beating of the war-drum, audacious yet easy conquests, and a patriotic call to close the ranks against a hostile world coincided with a forward stride in successful manufacture such as had been striven for in vain for a generation. But the reason for this sudden success may lie elsewhere. The great American slump of 1929 was felt all over the world. Professor Irving Fisher, the prophet of the Permanent Boom, begged his countrymen in vain to keep on; President Hoover, casting aside three centuries of Quaker economics, exhorted them to spend their way into prosperity. Echoes of such doctrines were naturally heard when the Hamaguchi policy of thrift seemed only to increase the depression in Japan. But it may be that, without those years of sound finance and intensive propaganda for the improve­ment of manufacture, the expansion which seemed to scare the whole world could not have taken place. Historians will dogmatise on this point according to the experiences of the next few years. We may remember here that Baron Shide- hara, the Foreign Minister in the Hamaguchi Cabinet, in an announcement of policy, said that Japan intended to deal with the population question by industrialisation, which would absorb the increase.

European experiments in post-war depreciation had all ended disastrously; but when England went off gold in August 1931, there was a rush of orders for goods which greatly impressed Japanese manufacturers. So, when Japan followed suit four months later, she brought down the rate drastically. The result, so far as the promotion of Japanese sales was concerned, fulfilled expectations. It had generally been reckoned that such benefits exhausted themselves in about six months, after which the necessity of replacements purchased with a depreciated currency brought things back to their old level, but in spite of Japan’s poverty in raw materials, her food supply was abundant, and wages were kept at their previous level. It seemed, therefore, that there was a possibility of the benefits of the depreciation being permanent; for even though raw materials cost more, manufacturing costs, in terms of foreign currencies, were incredibly low. Later on it was observed that the benefit was gradually diminishing. The amount of manu­factured goods which had to be exported to pay for a stated quantity of raw material imported, increased year by year. There are probably several causes for this, but the complex phenomenon has become an “economic law.”

Undoubtedly the “home goods campaign,” which had been carried on with great energy and enthusiasm by Messrs. Egi and Tawara, two of Hamaguchi’s Ministers, was a factor in the new success. Everywhere Japanese manufactures, comparable in quality with imported goods and now far cheaper, helped to keep the cost of living down, and to prevent the people from feeling directly the effects of the greatly increased price of foreign goods.

Japan still found it almost impossible to export up to the value of her imports, but she was conscious of a destiny as a workshop of the world, or at least of an ambition to take this place, and she regarded with much misgiving the raising of tariff walls everywhere. Even England had put an import tax on many things and was soon to adopt a general tariff. Before the Great War Japan had been an example of heavy protection and heavy taxation, but she found herself now moderately taxed and in a position with regard to tariffs that enabled her delegates at Geneva to laud her devotion to free trade. Her salesmen thrust out into new markets with praiseworthy enterprise, but so often was a new market made difficult of access by the raising of the tariff that Japan’s complaints of hostility to her trade became, in view of the actual increase, suggestive of a persecution mania.

As we have seen, complaints of depression and unemploy­ment were still loud and bitter in 1932, yet it was in that year that a turn in the tide of international trade occurred, which brought Japan’s commerce with the British Empire into the limelight. The normal course of trade with India had been greatly in India’s favour from the point of view which regards it as better to sell than to buy; but for some years it had excited remark that Indian cotton could be brought to Japan, manufactured, taken back, and sold in India at prices lower than those of Indian or Lancashire manufactures. Tariffs had been revised so as to favour India and Lancashire, but Japanese cheapness still triumphed. Then it happened that there was in India a poor crop at high prices and in America an abundant crop at low prices, so that Japan bought far more of the American than of the Indian cotton. At the same time, a great advance was made in the sale of cotton goods to India, with the result that in 1932 Japan sold much more to India than she bought. There had been a good deal of propaganda in India regarding the advantages of Japanese friendship, which was to lead to the emancipation of Asia, but perhaps India remembered now the warning of Mr. Gandhi, that economically Japan was a greater menace to India than Britain. There was a great uproar about the sudden reversal of the trade balance.

The dispute with India led to the adoption of the quota system on the largest scale yet seen. India denounced the commercial treaty with Japan—in which Japanese critics naturally saw the malign hand of Britain; the Japanese Government advocated export control, but the idea that hostility could be averted by not pushing the trade was a hopeless one, when Japan was definitely making a bid for supremacy in cotton. The situation was aggravated by the reckless manner in which Japanese manufacturers competed against one another. India raised the duties still higher. Japan retaliated with a boycott,—the smaller mills, who had most to lose, participating unwillingly. The Raw Cotton Traders’ Association said that the boycott might be the death of them, but that they were ready to die for their country. Mr. Adachi’s small but vociferous party, the Koku- min Domei, passed a resolution declaring that Britain was squeezing the three hundred million inhabitants of India in order to keep the superannuated Lancashire industry alive, and was guilty of bad faith in this endeavour. Baron Wakatsuki warned the spinners that hasty measures of retalia­tion might be unwise; that Britain’s action was regrettable but long views must be taken.

Except for those immediately concerned, the World Eco­nomic Conference seemed a much more important matter than the regulation of Indo-Japanese trade; but the world conference was stillborn, and the chief Japanese delegate thereto, Viscount Ishii, who had been sent so often to lie abroad for the benefit of his country, found himself on tour explaining blandly why Japanese boycotts, whether of Indian cotton, Indian pig iron, or Indian rice, were essentially different from Chinese boycotts, and adroitly casting doubt on the accuracy of the translation of the fiery speeches against England being made by his countrymen.

The Great Asians (General Matsui’s crowd) called on India to rise to the occasion, but the National Congress paper, the Bombay Chronicle, was so tactless as to ask what Japan had done for China. Before the Japanese delegation to discuss the new problem had left for India, similar troubles were springing up in the trade with the Netherlands Indies, more especially, to start with, over the “patriotic” habit of Japanese shippers reserving their cargoes for Japanese ships; but Dutch complaints were ascribed to British instigation. The immediate sequel to the boycott of Indian cotton was a large import of coarse counts of yarn from China, which imparted a little realism to the dispute. Nevertheless, the Yomiuri boldly opined that if Japan boycotted Indian cotton, Australian wool, Canadian wheat, and British machinery and woollens, the British Empire would find itself in a bad way. However, lectures on interdependence are lost on a world with a craze for “economic nationalism.”

An English commercial expert at this time wrote to the English Press that he found no boycott in Japan, but a sort of understanding that British goods should not be bought; the smaller mill-owners were facing charges of want of patriotism because they imported Indian cotton by devious routes. The Ambassador at the Court of St. James regretted to find critical articles in the English Press, because they might impair friendship. But the forty-fifth edition of Lieut.- Commander Ishimaru Tota’s England and Japan Must Fight had just been published, and the Japanese reports of pro­ceedings at Simla represented the Japanese delegates as talking very severely.

The Japanese delegation was bombarded with telegrams to be firm and to uphold the boycott. Unfortunately only a year before, Japan’s chief excuse for devastating Shanghai had been the Chinese boycott, but that, it was now passion­ately declared, was a different matter altogether. The Chinese boycott, they said, was inspired by the Government, whereas this was a purely independent movement. It was not a boycott, but an expression of indignation, and when the cause of indignation was removed, there would be no boycott—it could not be bargained over. Again, it was not a boycott, but an abstention from buying, and Mr. Sawada, of the Foreign Office, who headed the delegation, had no control over the spinners, and could not stop the boycott. Indians asked whether, if they guaranteed purchase of a quota of Japanese goods, Japan would buy a quota of Indian cotton. The reply to this was an emphatic “No.”

There was a popular legend in Japan that at Versailles in 1919, Prince Saionji moved from one hotel to another, and that, when great quantities of baggage appeared in the hall, the word went round that the Japanese were going back, with the result that the Peace Conference, as if by magic, came round to the Japanese point of view. At Simla, after two months’ vain discussion, it was suddenly bruited abroad that the Japanese delegates were arranging for their return home, but Simla was undisturbed. After another month the delegates did pack their boxes, but only to come down to Delhi.

The tone gradually changed: they had to answer some unpleasant questions about the yen; they agreed that they might buy a quota as well as sell one; and Mr. Sawada found that, after all, he could call off the boycott. To India’s purchase of 400 million yards of piecegoods, it was agreed that Japan should respond with a purchase of i| million bales of cotton. As the 1932 purchases were 640 million yards, the larger spinning interests in Japan were far from satisfied; but the boycott was called off, the Indian duty was lowered to 50 per cent., and in 1934 the natural trends of trade reasserted themselves, and Japan bought much more from India than she sold. Had India made no fuss, the recovery of trade would probably have been about the same, and much debate would have been saved; and had the Japanese not retaliated, they would not have been committed to the purchase of i| million bales of raw cotton a year.

Yet another grotesque outcome of the conference remains to be recorded. At the end of November 1933, it was reported, Mr. Matsuyama, Commercial Counsellor in London, in accordance with a plan conceived by Baron Nakashima, Minister of Commerce and Industry, called a meeting of Japanese merchants in London, and it was decided that these merchants form an importing guild, to co-operate with an exporting guild in Japan, and monopolise the import of goods from Japan. They graciously added that British merchants would be admitted.¹ Of course, it did not materialise, but no sooner was the quota of Indian raw cotton fixed than it was reported that the Big Three in Osaka had monopolised it. Trade was controlled indeed.

It brings a touch of colour into the world’s greyness when great disputes produce something less dreary than official reports, and as Japan’s saving grace is her artistic sense, she redeemed the follies of the cotton conference by producing a drama. Mr. Muto Sanji, who had retired from the presidency of the Kanegafuchi Spinning Company, which he had raised from a half-bankrupt state to a position unique in the world’s textile trade, celebrated the occasion by writing a play, which told the history of cotton in Japan, especially in its relations to India. Mr. Muto was a free-trader (almost the only one in Japan), an apostle of mass production, an admirer of English Liberalism, and a paternalist in industry. In his retirement he led a political party—the only one which had ideas and a purpose, but it had hardly any members.

The play was called Sangyo Nihon Koshin Kyoku (“The March of Industrial Japan”), and dealt with real characters and events, but, like Thucydides, Mr. Muto made his dramatis personae say what they ought to have said rather than what they actually did say. We begin with a scene in a farmhouse in May 1858. There are handlooms lying idle, and the family is obviously in the depths of despair. Shimadzu, the Daimyo of Kagoshima, has started a cotton mill, and there is no longer any profit in handloom weaving. The dutiful daughters propose that their father should repair the family finances by selling them into a brothel. The father objects. A caller says that hands are wanted at the cotton mill. The father rages against Shimadzu, and will not hear of his daughters working there. The girls run away, and we see them next in the mill, on a day when the Lord Shimadzu is showing some officers of the Shogun’s new warship round. He explains how cotton spinning is in its way as patriotic a work as creating a navy, and how he has ordered a lot of machinery from Platt Brothers. Just then there is a crash, the machinery stops working, and in the midst of a confused struggle a young man is dragged in whom the girls recognise as their brother. He has put the motive power (water wheels) out of action with a boulder. Seeing his sisters, he curses them. They should die of hunger rather than work for their enemy, he says. Shimadzu calmly asks the young man what he means, and the youth thereupon tells him of the distress into which hand spinning and weaving have fallen. Shimadzu is so distressed that he has a good mind to abandon the enterprise. Even now local suplies of raw cotton are in­sufficient, and it will impoverish the country to buy from abroad. But stay! Why not export the surplus manufacture and enrich the country? Yes, that is the idea!

Then we have the early troubles of the industry. Would-be manufacturers have more enterprise than caution, and are taken in by foreign experts who know nothing. One pro­prietor in the play is on the point of bankruptcy; his wife goes mad; the latest expert, who is a ship’s engineer, feels compunction, returns his pay, and swears he will work for nothing and make a job of it. He studies books, sets to work, and presently the machines are running, yarn comes forth, sorrow is turned into gladness, and the proprietor’s wife recovers her sanity.

From the early 1870’s we proceed at a bound to 1893. Viscount Shibusawa (Japan’s patriarch of banking and industry, who died in 1930), Asabuki (Managing Director of the Kanegafuchi Mill), and Morioka (President of the Nippon Yusen Kaisha), are confronted on the stage with Messrs Joseph, Shields, and Rickett, of the P. & O. Co., and a debate ensues. The Englishmen are rude and none too reasonable regarding the N.Y.K.’s intention to start in the cotton-carrying business. There are several references to Jamsetji Nusserwanji Tata (founder of Tata, Sons & Co.), without whose aid at the Bombay end the N.Y.K. could not have succeeded. The sextette ends with compliments and with commercial war, and the scene changes to the Kobe pier, piled up with cotton bought speculatively by the P. & O., which no Japanese spinner will buy. Messrs. Joseph and Shields confess themselves beaten, and return to their own place.

Two scenes follow in which Mr. Muto is himself the chief character—which is surely unique in dramatic literature. He appears as the exponent of high quality, and damn the customers who want rubbish and the shareholders who want dividends. In the main the two scenes were historically true. Appreciation of high quality had been won, and in spite of world depression in 1932, Kanegafuchi was paying 25 per cent, had enormous reserves, and treated its employees better than any other mill, though with extreme paternalism.

The last scene is on the pier in Calcutta, in December 1933, when the Japanese delegates to the Simla-Delhi Con­ference are leaving for London. Mr. Kurata, the head industrial delegate, standing half-way up the accommodation ladder, addresses a vast crowd of Indians. He thanks everyone for their courtesy, is gratified at reaching an agreement, but he regrets that there was not a single delegate who represented the true interests of the Indian masses: through­out the negotiations the true voice of the people of India was not heard. (Loud cheers from the Indians.) For the pro­motion of human happiness by industry, freedom of trade is necessary, but unhappily England, once the home of free trade, is now excluding Japanese cottons from the Empire. Cobden’s spirit must mourn, and must look towards Japan as the only country still upholding his principles. Some think the boycott against Indian cotton will soon breakdown (the speaker on the steps goes on), but remember the struggle against the P. & O. Japanese industrialists are much more united than in those days. They can get cotton elsewhere, but even if Lancashire takes twice as much as at present, how can the Indian cotton-growers live? “We did not come to fight; we did not come to cause suffering to the Indian people; Japan has no desire to threaten Indian industry, or to demand special treatment for her own goods. We depart, our task unsatisfactorily ended. Behold, the sun is setting: it will rise again. Farewell, people of India. We await the time when we can join hands for the peace of the world.” (Fran­tic cheers as the curtain falls.)

The Thucydidean method of composing speeches that were never delivered reaches a climax when it relates to the history of the month before last. The literary experiment is interesting; and it provokes thought when we find so very liberal and widely read a Japanese setting forth the idea of Asia under Japan’s aegis, and so earnest a student of free trade regarding Japan as an exemplar of Cobdenism. Muto’s play was to have been staged in Osaka, but, like so many of Japan’s best men, he was murdered. His assassin stabbed him while he was taking a morning walk near his house at Ofuna on March 9, 1934. The murderer committed suicide, and it was believed that he bore a personal grudge, but there were plentiful speculations as to whether there was not a political society at the bottom of it.

It would be wearisome to make a complete survey of the commercial disputes and conferences which Japan had with other countries at this period. The one—or the series—with the Netherlands Indies was even more prolonged than that with India, and was carried on with wide departures from the usual international amenities. It involved freight wars, shipping boycotts, and various other drastic measures. It had been merely a façon de parler when General Araki, as Minister for War, declared that the three hundred millions of India were groaning under white oppression; it had a rather more sinister significance when articles appeared in the Japanese Press about the Dutch oppression in the East Indies and the burning desire of the Javanese to have Japanese educationists and teachers, and to learn the Japanese language, as this was most suitable for people of an Oriental culture. Articles also appeared about the equally repre­hensible oppression practised by the French in Indo-China and about the high mission of saving Siam from the British maw.

As for the dispute with the Netherlands Indies, there was no such argument available on the Japanese side as there had been in the discussion with India. The Dutch colonies had become very large buyers from Japan, without any reciprocity on Japan’s part. Japan regretted that she could not, as requested, buy sugar, as she had her own industry to think of. On two or three occasions in the course of the disputes Japan started boycotts, cutting off supplies of goods in which Dutch liberality of trade had allowed her to secure almost a monopoly. It was a dangerous game, but it scored sometimes. As regards shipping, one of Japan’s lesser shipping magnates,. Mr. Ishihara, who ran a line of steamers to Java, was particularly belligerent, and insisted that the official language of the conference called to settle the disputes that had arisen, must be Japanese. Owing to the peculiar nature of the Japanese language, this would have meant that in the case of any dispute it would have been impossible to do anything but accept the Japanese interpretation, for the Dutch delegates would have signed an agreement which ‘ none of them could read. The Dutch wanted English to be the official language. Mr. Ishihara’s refusal to budge from his position held up the conference for many months. The large number of Japanese traders in Java was another source of trouble, as they endeavoured to monopolise the imports and, of course, to restrict them to Japanese vessels. In Osaka the premises of a leading glass-maker were wrecked by a party of roughs under the leadership of Mr. Ishihara’s manager, for failure to participate in one of the boy­cotts. In spite of these and other obstacles to harmony, however, quotas both of goods and shipping were settled at last.

223 With Canada there was a somewhat bitter dispute. The Canadian Government had been one of the first to impose excessive duties on Japanese goods, especially rayon, and it was a very arbitrary imposition of supplementary charges at the discretion, apparently, of any Customs official, which brought about a crisis in the trade. Japan’s Trade Protection Law enabled her to retaliate without incurring a charge of discrimination, and peace was made. In the case of Australia there was little complaint of discrimination, but insistence that Australia buy a reasonable amount of Japanese goods. Australia fell back on an appeal to popula­tion. Australians bought vastly more per head from Japan than Japanese, per head, bought from Australia. The only remedy for Japan seemed to be to get her wool elsewhere, and this, as a commercial proposition, was difficult. Many fine merino rams were imported from Australia to improve the breed of sheep in Manchuria and Mongolia; but the success of the experiment still awaits demonstration.

The military ideal was to grab as much of China as would, with Japan, make a complete economic bloc, and then to return to the economic isolation of a hundred years ago. The manufacturers’ ideal was very different. They were themselves rather reckless in their enterprise, and, by swamping new markets and competing against each other, minimised their own profits and provoked the hostile tariffs which they so much deplored; but most of them believed that those who gave best value would win in the end and they were also very conscious that they had already reached a stage of industrial development where China could neither supply all they wanted nor buy all they had to sell. They were almost as much afraid of a foreigner catching sight of their machinery as the soldiers were of strange eyes seeing their fortifications, but on the whole had much more common sense than the soldiers.

In spite of hostile tariffs, Japan’s exports continued to increase, but so did the difficulties of foreign trade. The world had changed since the Great War, and it was difficult to get new markets without taking them from somebody else. Cheapness had become an offence and abundance a bugbear, and Japan felt that her grab in Manchuria had earned her a bad name, cost her much money, and done her no good.

 

CHAPTER XXIII. JAPAN’S NEW EMPIRE

 

Before the appointment of Mr. Pu Yi as Chief Executive there had been many speculations regarding the probability of the new State being a monarchy, but all mention of this was prohibited, though it was evident that the regime was only a provisional one. The delicacy of feeling regarding the discussion of the popular sentiments of a neighbouring country was amazing. First the Japanese Press was forbidden to say anything about independence movements in Man­churia; then, when it was independent, the Press was for­bidden to mention monarchical aspirations. The new State was not to be called anything but its name—Manchukuo— and its ruler was not to be called by his name, but Chief Executive. Political gestation was in progress; on January 20, 1934, the police notified the newspapers that on March 1 st, the second anniversary of the proclamation of the Era of Tatung, the Chief Executive would become Emperor, with the name Kang Te, which would also be the name of the new Era. The name was officially translated Tranquillity and Benevolent Virtue, and was more applicable to its bearer than to the times in which he lived. The State was given yet another name to signify its imperial character, being henceforth Manchutikuo; but this was a mouthful so lacking in euphony that it was quickly abandoned, even in official publications. The enthronement ceremony was nothing very elaborate. The Japanese newspapers gave photographs of the new throne, with the information that it had been made in Osaka.

In two years Salvador alone had recognised Manchukuo, and as Japan was flooding the little republic with cheap goods, it begged her to buy some coffee, but in vain. Announcements by the new State to foreign Governments (who took no notice of them) suggested that on recognition trade relations would be welcome. That trade does not depend on diplomatic recognition the case of Soviet Russia had shown plainly enough; but so long as there was no recognition it was so difficult to protest against the obstacles to trade which Japan put in the way of other countries, that Japan quickly realised that the refusal of recognition made monopolisation easier for her. There was, however, an eager welcome for the least sign of a disposition to depart from the Geneva resolution, and chance remarks were exaggerated beyond recognition.

At the time of the enthronement it had been announced that Manchukuo was at last clear of bandits; but almost immediately after there were several encounters in one of which twenty-four Japanese soldiers were killed. Manchurian tram-conductors showed so little sense of the privilege of being subjects of a new empire that they distributed disturbing leaflets. On March 27th, a North China Association was formed in Tokyo, with Mr. Yoshizawa Kenkichi as President. It was already clear that Japan’s interests, like her soldiers, could not be prevented from spreading south of the Great Wall; but a society sufficiently respectable to have Mr. Yoshizawa at its head was not calculated to do anything very stirring, and its name was honourably absent from the record of subsequent doings in North China.

It was clear that Manchukuo had “come to stay” at least for the time being; but it was also clear that it was not going to stay at that. Both General Araki, and General Hayashi who succeeded him at the War Office, expressed anxiety lest the peaceful settlement of Manchukuo should be a prelude to the loss of martial spirit by the Japanese army. Quite frankly they expounded the doctrine of the necessity of always having a crisis on hand if the nation’s spirits were not to flag. In this they were supported by Count Futara Yoshinori, in the House of Peers, who congratulated the nation on the revival of the Japanese spirit, but regretted that irresponsible talk had created an impression abroad that Japan wanted to fight. Kodo was an inspiration that would bring victory without fighting. Here and there was some healthy criticism. A military officer was quoted in the Manshu Nippo (a Japanese daily, published in Dairen) as saying that the Japanese, by their overbearing ways, made themselves so disliked in Manchuria that the Man­churians often preferred the bandits—and joined them.

A more concrete complaint was made by Okura Kimmochi in the House of Peers, who declared that the combination in one person of the duties of Ambassador, Commander-in- Chief, and Governor-General did not work well, especially in view of the fact that by the very nature of the case, it meant a neglect of the duties of Governor-General. There was certainly a sufficiency of other duties to keep the Japanese representative occupied. On the military side there was the capture, just before Kang Te’s enthronement, of Mei, one of the most troublesome of the bandit chiefs, who operated on a large scale, and kept three big sailing ships in his service on the Sungari river, always ready to attack Harbin. Though the extirpation of banditry was such a long task, however, Japanese activities seemed unable to confine themselves to the bounds of the new empire. It was not merely that the Great Wall had failed once more in its long history to keep out invaders, but the Russians were con­stantly complaining of Japanese aeroplanes flying over Soviet territory. Sometimes the complaints were in the opposite direction. The Russians, for instance, apologised for having fired some shots at the Japanese consulate at Habarovsk.

While Japan proclaimed to the world the perfect in­dependence of Manchukuo, she had much difficulty in concealing from herself the struggle among different Japanese authorities for power in the new empire. At a Cabinet Council on March 30, 1934, Mr. Matsui, of the Resources Bureau, explained his plan for an economic bloc co-ordinating the productivity and consumption of Japan and Manchuria; and Mr. Nagai, Minister of Overseas Affairs, said that he regarded the South Manchuria Railway as destined to be the chief organ of development in Manchuria. Here he was clearly seeking an alliance with the South Manchuria Railway, which the military men had plans for controlling. They also had plans for taking Manchuria out of the hands of the Overseas Ministry altogether, and these they realised by the creation of the Manchurian Affairs Bureau, which was directly under the Premier, in theory, though in practice it comes under military control.

The efforts to create a military dictatorship never relaxed, though the army was discreet enough to avoid giving them too much publicity. Military opinion was constantly quoted, however, and the military “economic experts” would have qualified as dangerous thinkers had they not been in uniform. Five months after Manchukuo became an empire, fears were expressed in the Privy Council that the army was becoming too arbitrary in the new State; but the civilian element naturally had a larger capacity for growth, and civil control was making such strides that Mr. Maeno, of the Manchukuo Department of Justice, sent to Japan in August 1934 for sixty more judges and procurators.

Similarly, when it came to exploitation, everybody was quite willing to praise the mighty works of the army in capturing Manchuria, but though some distinguished officers denounced the capitalists, investors showed no inclination to depart from the customary practices, and opposed successfully the army’s desire to manage the railways. The only point on which civil and military opinion coincided was that “Manchu” opinion did not have to be consulted. In making a bid for increased authority the army had to promise economic advantages, and in setting itself up as an authority on economics it departed further and further from the Imperial Injunctions which enjoined complete dissociation of the soldier’s profession from politics. Inevitably the military politicians’ plans were compared with those experiments in dictatorial Socialism in Europe, which had been in large part their inspiration. A foreign student of the economics of the new State wrote, in the course of a review of the first two years of Manchukuo:

When the establishment of Manchukuo was first announced, the young officers in the Kwantung army and the Fascist politicians in Japan envisaged a State freed from the grip of the capitalists. Their expectation was that Japan would turn over the South Manchuria Railway Company and all the Japanese Government rights in the leased area to the new State; and that the new State would then be turned over to the control of the Kwantung Army. In February 1934, however, Foreign Minister Hirota made it clear that the Japanese Government had no intention of abandoning the South Manchuria Railway Com­pany either to Manchukuo or to the Kwantung army. Neverthe­less, proponents of various Fascist and Socialist plans for Man­chukuo admit only temporary defeat. The Army, it is contended, has not abandoned hopes of ultimately coming into full control of the South Manchuria Railway Company, though for the present it deems it politic to avoid any outward assaults on the capitalists. The capitalists, in turn, have deemed it politic to make certain concessions to the opposition.

The weakness of military rule everywhere is that the military ruler thinks that government consists entirely in giving orders. The complaint made by Dr. Ashida in the Imperial Diet that the army monopolised Manchukuo has already been recorded; at that time it was commonly said that Mr. Komai Tokuzo, Chief Secretary of the Manchukuo Council of State, was the only Japanese with a civilian mind in high office. He, it will be remembered, was chosen to convey to the Japanese Government the new State’s request for recognition. He very soon found that his position was untenable, but after he resigned he conceived a plan for serving the new State by starting a class for young men— a three years’ course, with ten recruits each year, forming a small college of imperial administration. In practice the curious spectacle was presented of the civil power, under the banner of the South Manchuria Railway, struggling against the military power with the Commander-in-Chief (who was also Ambassador) at its head.

Mr. Komai’s plan came to nothing, but the civilians in the employ of the new State were stung into action by the encroachments of the military power. The most galling of these was the proposal to put the police under the control of the Commandant of Gendarmerie. Fifteen thousand Japanese officials declared that they would resign. It was pure military arrogance which had dictated the proposal, for the experiment in Korea had been a most unhappy one. Had Admiral Saito still been in office it might have been averted, for he had had much experience in the repair of military mistakes in Korea; but Admiral Okada had succeeded him, and held the Overseas portfolio as well as the premiership. His subordinates in the Overseas Depart­ment submitted a memorial protesting against the subordina­tion of civilian administration to the military authorities, and warning him that the carrying out of the schemes in hand might bring about bloodshed. Many of the officials of the Department offered their resignations, though the Premier promised that there should be no change in personnel.

The army was quite ready to try conclusions, and anim­adverted on the civilians’ lack of official discipline, so General Hayashi, the Minister for War, refused to budge from his plan, though the officials clamoured that all posts in the new Bureau for Manchurian Affairs should be filled by civilians. Admiral Okada explained that the measures to which they objected were only temporary—which was true in the sense that nothing in this world lasts for ever. He also appointed Count Kodama Minister for Overseas Affairs, and with this for a conciliatory gesture the officials had to be content. It was just enough to save their face, and they dared not carry things to a desperate conclusion. But as many of the police force in Manchuria as could get leave proceeded to Tokyo, and at the Meiji Shrine commended their case to the spirit of the great Emperor and to the Imperial Ancestors in general.

The new administration, however, had been badly shaken. It had been unfortunate that seniority and prestige caused unsuitable men to be appointed to the military ambassadorship which ruled the new Empire. The first of these, Field­marshal Baron Muto Nobuyoshi, died at his post on July 28, 1933, and was succeeded by General Hishikari Takashi, whose singular lack both of energy and ideas soon brought about a clamour for his resignation. He could not survive the crisis of the official strike, and resigned in December 1934, on the 10th of which month General Minami was installed as his successor, and General Araki left unemployed, to the relief even of some of his former admirers.

On some points of policy in the new Empire there was perfect unanimity—on that, for instance, of discouraging all enterprise except Japanese. In the autumn of 1934 a British commercial mission, with Lord Bamby at its head, toured Manchukuo under the guidance of Mr. A. H. Edwardes, formerly of the Chinese Customs, but now adviser to the Manchukuo Government, whose presence naturally made an independent survey impossible. The extreme discre­tion that stultified every utterance of the mission was eloquent of its conception of the value to be set upon the promises to respect foreign interests and maintain the open door.

Incidentally the open door was neatly explained away by Mr. Arnau, the head of the Intelligence Department of the Foreign Office. The Bamby Mission had departed from its perfect tactfulness by making inquiries about the proposed petroleum monopoly in Manchukuo, though none of its members was directly interested in petroleum. The Govern­ments of Great Britain, the United States, and the Netherlands had all protested against this monopoly, sending their pro­tests to Japan, just as though she were responsible! When a group of foreign journalists followed up the Notes and the Mission with their own inquiries, Mr. Arnau was distinctly nettled, and told them that they had better ask the Nanking Government about it. Recovering his courtesy, he explained the Manchukuo policy, and hazarded the opinion that people of all nationalities might subscribe to the capital of the company which would manage the business on behalf of Manchukuo. The open door, he said, only meant that there was no discrimination among the foreign nationalities interested. So long as that condition was fulfilled, it appeared, the impossibility of doing business could not be held to indicate a closing of the door. Nevertheless, for a long time petroleum policy was not allowed to be mentioned in the Press.

Another Press embargo was that which prohibited the mention of abolition of extraterritoriality in Manchukuo. From the Japanese point of view abolition presented no terrors, for the Manchukuo police and judiciary were largely staffed by Japanese, and nothing could be done without Japanese knowledge and consent. The Japanese objection to the abolition of extraterritoriality was that it would subject them to taxation, which hitherto they had escaped. But when at length, at the beginning of 1936, the official plan was disclosed, it was found that the Japanese were so well safeguarded that it was no more than a friendly gesture towards Manchukuo. It did involve the payment of taxes, it is true, but the Japanese officials who were responsible for raising the revenue could not themselves countenance the idea of so great a number of citizens enjoying a position of unfair privilege.

Regarding the rights of other nationals, precedents were soon established for overriding them. The case of the power­ful petroleum corporations has already been mentioned. The abolition of the rights of smaller men was also taken care of. In Harbin, Mr. E. Lenox Simpson, a British subject, published a newspaper and conducted a printing office and publishing agency. On the grounds that he had published something of a Communistic nature (always a safe line to take) he was turned out of his premises and railed to Dairen, his plant being confiscated. Diplomatic action was taken and the British Government demanded compensation, but when, four years after the wrong had been done, a question was asked about the case in Parliament, the only reply was that the Manchukuo Government had refused to pay and that nothing could be done. The value of British citizenship in partibus infidelium had reached what the stockbrokers call a “new low.”

There had been a good deal of discussion as to whether it would not be right and reasonable to hand over the leased territory and the railway to Manchukuo, but Mr. Hirota gave the quietus to that idea by a pronouncement in the Diet in November 1934. Japan’s rights would continue, he said. He might have added that the Railway Zone had at last become a reality, for, instead of allowing cultivation right up to the line, as before, it was set back a rifle-shot on each side so that the trains should be safe from ambuscade. Though at the same time General Hayashi defended the “armed colonies,” these were dismal failures. In some of the wilder places, especially on the lower Sungari, Japan had planted out colonies of soldier-agriculturists. They were expected to till the land, to be fruitful and multiply, and to exterminate bandits in their spare time. It had been costly to give them this start, and most of them found the life intolerable. The life of the Japanese farmer is hard, and he fares but poorly for all his labour; but the armed colonists missed a thousand things that are not to be had in the wilderness; some deserted, some preyed on their Chinese neighbours (when they had any), and none relished living in a country where they were hated and might at any time be raided by bandits.

Defence was not a simple problem. Manchukuo had been represented as a country greatly desiring independence; yet, now that it was independent, Japanese life was far less safe than before, except in places where the presence and mobility of Japanese troops made it too dangerous to attack the intruders. In railway development it was far ahead of any other part of China, yet the first task before the liberators was to construct new railways so that their armies might hold the country. Simple-minded visitors who were escorted over the safer parts were told that it had always been thus— that the country consisted of nothing but bandits—whereas in reality it had been more orderly than those regions where railway development was less in evidence.

The completion of the line from Tunhua to Seishin, North Korea, and the creation of a new port, were the first tasks; then followed the link between Lafa, on the Kirin- Tunhua line, and Harbin; and in December 1934, a line from Paianchan to Taheiho was begun. Troops can now be railed straight from Dairen or Rashin to the northernmost part of the course of the Amur and to Jehol. The Russians, seeing strategic lines approach their border, and conscious of the vulnerability of the Amur Railway—their only line of communication with Vladivostok, now that the Chinese Eastern Railway had been sold, busily fortified their frontier, which they had hardly troubled to protect while the Chinese were the other side. In so doing, they played into the hands of the Japanese army. When the regular session of the Imperial Diet opened in 1935, there was an urgent demand for the reduction of the 180 million yen budgeted for Manchurian defence. The army’s own reports were quoted to show that three years’ unremitting man-hunt had almost exterminated the bandits, but General Hayashi refused to abate the demands by a penny. Even if the bandits were exterminated, he said, there could be no reduction, for the border was in a threatening state: and he recited a list of border incidents to prove the bad intentions of the Russians.

As it chanced, neither the bandits not the Russians were concerned with the next incidents which followed on im­mediately after General Hayashi’s explanation. Jehol had been taken, but this only created a problem in Chahar, where fugitives from Jehol had taken refuge, and were apt at any time to make raids into Jehol. Late in January 1935, the Japanese troops came into collision with the forces of General Sung Che-yuan, Chairman of the Chahar Provincial Government, and supposed to be a friend of Japan. The Japanese, as usual, won an easy victory, dislodged the Chinese from Tatun, and drove them over the border. Their defeat was severe, and Japanese troops, as so often happened, occupied the evacuated zone as the only means of preventing anarchy there. Further north, another body of Japanese troops attacked the Mongolians at Halha Miao, north-east of Buir Nor, and drove them out. Here, it would appear, Manchurian Chinese, assured of strong backing, had harassed the Mongolians, and the affair ended in a Mongol defeat. But the further back the Mongols were pushed, the greater became the anxieties of the Japanese, who, with every advance, came nearer the area that the Russians would defend against invasion.

Japanese ideas of the strategic requirements of safety compelled them to advance continually so long as the country was weak, and these operations attracted no atten­tion whatever in foreign countries, where people were becoming rather bored with Japanese victories in outlandish places; yet this pushing back of the Mongols was the crowning folly of the Japanese. There were Japanese who had studied the Mongols in their homes, knew that they had little love for the Chinese, and had had the prescience to engineer the Mongol petition to the League of Nations. The Mongols were very anxious to stop Chinese encroach­ments, and would have been good allies of the Japanese if rightly handled. But the Japanese could not leave them to manage their own affairs, which was the one thing that they insisted upon, so that, since 1935, instead of being a bulwark against Russia, they regard the Japanese as the source of all evil, and are ready to throw in their lot with the Moiigols of Outer Mongolia who accept Russian direction. The Chinese and the Japanese between them can make nothing but a desert of Inner Mongolia, which responds to cultivation like the American prairie, by becoming dust under the spade of the farmer.

It was a strange way of bringing peace to Manchuria; Russia on the north and east had been converted from a neighbour into an enemy; Japan had extended her sway beyond Jehol into Chahar, which she was not eager to present to the Emperor Kang Te, but which she could use for a descent into Hopei and Shansi, if she wanted further conquests in China; but maladroit handling of the Mongols and her threat to China ensured hostility to the new Empire on the west too. Without Japanese bayonets the new Empire could not stand a day; its people were infinitely further from independence than they had been under the Chinese regime, imperial or republican; and those Japanese who gave themselves time to think were wondering what the future would be. Were they to restore Kang Te to the Dragon Throne, or divide up China into tributary States? Korea and Formosa had been difficult enough to handle. Meanwhile there was the Manchu Emperor, seated on his Osaka-made throne by grace of Japan. After his enthrone­ment Prince Chichibu, the Emperor’s brother, had paid him a state visit and congratulated him on the loyalty of the millions of Manchurians who had placed him there. The Asahi, to improve the occasion, said that the immediate future must be devoted to the cultivation of friendly relations, in order to show that Manchuria was not to be merely a second Korea. To those who did not know recent history this creation of an empire showed that Manchuria was completely independent. Others remembered that Japan had insisted on the King of Korea becoming Emperor as a prelude to annexation. In view of the benefits conferred on Korea by the annexation some felt that the Asahi³ s remark was a little disappointing.

The visit to Hsinking paid by the Emperor’s representative had to be returned by the puppet Emperor in person—the significance of which was not lost upon a people who, though lavish in courtesies, measure them meticulously. Kang Te arrived on a Japanese warship on April 6, 1935, and sailed on the 23rd. Very elaborate preparations were made for his reception and especially for securing his safety. The streets through which he drove were lined only with school children and the members of patriotic societies, and the closed car passed quickly by. The care taken caused much embarrassment to many people. On the most capricious suspicions men would be arrested and kept in the lock-up until the new Emperor had come and gone, their friends meanwhile wondering anxiously what had become of them. Happily there were no untoward occurrences and the police were greatly relieved when the august visitor was safely back in Hsinking.

Perhaps the visit struck the popular imagination. A de­throned and fugitive Emperor of China taking refuge in a Japanese consulate was merely a romantic incident—a lesson on the impermanence of terrestrial glory; but an Emperor of China, restored to imperial state, paying homage to the Emperor of Japan as a tributary visiting his liege lord was a spectacle that the gods might well gather round to see. Even the school children and*the patriotic braves who saw the motor-car go by must have felt something of its significance.

Some matter-of-fact Japanese, however, wondered what was going to be done about the succession. The Emperor Kang Te was a young man, with a young and beautiful wife, but they had been married some years without off­spring, neither had the secondary wife whom he had in earlier days been fruitful. The problem was not an urgent one, but was full of interesting speculation. More to the general taste and safer to discuss, was the story told in the Japanese Press of Yuan Chin-kai, Keeper of the Privy Seal in Manchukuo, meeting Admiral Okada, the Premier of Japan, on the occasion of the imperial visit, and challenging him to a drinking bout. Both were mighty men of valour, and could carry their liquor like gentlemen; but the Man- chukuoan was the victor of the day. Perhaps the story was invented as a subtle flattery. Toujours la politesse!

 

CHAPTER XXIV. THE DETERIORATION OF THOUGHT

 

Patriotism is supposed to be pre-eminently a Japanese quality, and love of country and native courage both exist in such measure as to justify the belief; but for the sake of creating that unity and discipline necessary to the military ideal of national strength the whole Japanese polity is founded upon fables concerning Japanese origins, belief in which on the part of intelligent men is almost as incredible as the fables themselves. Actually no educated Japanese does believe them, but all are committed to a profession of belief, and the greater the scepticism which has to be concealed, the greater is the fear that the whole national edifice will collapse if the pretence is undermined by the unbelief of those whose self-interest will not keep them silent.

Socialism as a theory seems to have been introduced into Japan in 1898, and gained a good many adherents. When it was realised that even as an academic theory it was inimical to the political structure of Japan, authority struck hard. A leader named Kotoku and twenty-three associates were prosecuted in 1911, their trial being secret. Twelve, including a woman, were executed, the other twelve sentenced to life imprisonment. Some twenty years later the last survivor was liberated, incapable of further action. To prevent any questioning of the verdict, it was given out, verbally, that there had been a plot against the Emperor, but whether this was really the case is very doubtful. Nothing was heard of militant Socialism for a long time after this; but when, in 1917, it swept away the Imperial Family of Russia and the nobility and bourgeoisie besides, fears of a doctrine so subversive became intense. The fascination of the great Russian experiment was so great that time increased these fears rather than allayed them. Count Goto, one of the first to advocate reasonable relations with Soviet Russia, scornfully asked what was the use of boasting about Japanese loyalty and at the same time living in such a state of fear of a foreign political theory; but the fact that even a few were led by reason to prefer the doctrines of Marx to the folklore of officialdom struck terror into the bureaucratic mind.

Speaking on September 1, 1929, the sixth anniversary of the great earthquake, which was celebrated with special solemnity, Mr. Hamaguchi, the Premier, deplored the “deterioration of thought” which had followed that calamity though, as large numbers were in prison on “thought” charges at the time, and 1,300 were arrested immediately afterwards, the arrest of some three thousand during the eighteen months preceding this speech indicated the persis­tence of a line of thought already well established rather than a novel deterioration. The deterioration was on the part of the Government rather than on that of the reformers. A few years before, it had been proclaimed that, though politics were an unsuitable subject for middle schools, thought in universities was free. Almost immediately afterwards, the weeding out of every sign of unorthodoxy in the Universities began.

By July 1928, there was hardly a liberal professor left in any high school or college in Japan; but the Department of Education called an official conference, which made various recommendations for keeping youth on the right path. This conference proposed the creation of a Social Education Bureau, with an elaborate system of espionage in order to ensure a proper foot-binding of thought. Two million yen were allotted for this purpose, and plans were made for keeping an eye on Japanese students abroad, so that they should not become a danger when they returned home. In China, at least, it became almost as dangerous for a Japanese to indulge in “thought” as at home.

The month following the Premier’s earthquake-day speech (October 1929) one of the numerous mass trials of young Communists came to an end. Counsel for the defence, pleading for clemency (for Japanese counsel hardly ever maintain the innocence or even justification of their clients), pointed out that the young men had been under a secret inquest for eighteen months, during which one had died, while two others were in hospital, and those, in court were all physically and mentally exhausted, but none of that counted: their punishment still awaited them. It was typical of such trials. The Press agencies which supply photographs to the newspapers circulated some photographs of “thought” prisoners after their examination, in which, besides being unshorn and filthy, they had expressions hardly human. Yet there were judges who testified to the high mental and moral qualities of the young men brought before them for punishment on “thought” charges. So shocking were the photographs that the publication of any more was prohibited. The judicial authorities could endure such sights, but they feared that the public could not.

Japanese Cabinets have varying degrees of illiberality, but none shows any disposition towards leniency for dangerous thinkers. Some Home Ministers are worse than others, but the bureaucracy goes on, and suffers no interference with its extirpation of heresy. The converse to patriotism is thought, and in every procurator’s office large enough for a subdivision of duties, there is a special “thought” section. As for the dangerous thinkers, they may roughly be divided into proletarian reformers and student reformers. It is customary to describe Korean and Formosan malcontents as Communists, though their whole mental equipment may be nothing but a dislike for the Japanese. There appears to be no connection between these rebels against alien domination and the Japanese Communists.

It was customary, after a specially large batch of suspects had been disposed of, to issue a semi-official statement about the case, but there was never any description of what the activities were for which they had got into trouble. Even South Manchuria had its Communists—a number of students of the Port Arthur Engineering College on one occasion— of whom it was said that they had denounced the directors of the South Manchuria Railway!

Whatever the injustice done to the victims of patriotism, nobody ever dared to stand up for them, and when the last professor who could be suspected of harbouring a liberal thought was dismissed from the Tokyo Imperial University, Mr. Robert Nichols, the English poet, then holding a pro­fessorship there, made a lonely protest. Occasionally the voice of sanity was lifted up against the excessive fear of Thought, as when the Dowakai, a Peers’ group, complained that the Metropolitan Police continually hunted “thought,” to the neglect of murder, violence, and theft. And not only in Tokyo but in other cities it was frequently all but impossible to get the police or procurators to take up complaints against wrongdoers, because they were too busy with “thought.” It was a happy time for the petty criminal, who dreads the preliminaries with police and procurator far more than he dreads the judicial punishment.

It was seldom that anything was known even of large-scale arrests until the examination was concluded and the accused were committed for trial, a process which sometimes took years; and the work of the police was so efficient, that during this time nobody even had positive knowledge of the arrests, though the prisoners’ friends and relatives knew, of course, that they had mysteriously disappeared. Great bitterness was added to the movement by the use of agents provocateurs, against whom, when they were discovered by the Com­munists, fierce reprisals were carried out.

The three biggest hauls of suspected Communists were made in March 1928, May 1929, and February 1930, on each of which occasions about a thousand simultaneous arrests were made. On May Day 1930 there was a pistol fight with police at Kawasaki, near Tokyo, and on May Day 1931 there were also some hundreds of arrests, after which all May Day celebrations were prohibited. Each of the three big arrests was believed to have extirpated the movement, but it invariably cropped up again.

In one of the smaller raids, Nakamoto Takako, an officer’s daughter and an expectant mother, was arrested, on July 14, 1930. Her condition gained her no consideration, the police point of view being the excellent biological one that instinct would impel her to betray her confederates, so as to save the child in her womb. The method of examination is to keep it on, one questioner following another, continually bullying and threatening. They examined Takako until she aborted, but she made no admission. She was removed to hospital, where the doctors operated. She survived the operation but lost her reason, and in this condition was consigned to prison in October, where she was kept till January, undergoing further questioning. By that time the police decided that she was incapable of informative speech and therefore useless for their purposes. It was in May 1931 that they reported to this effect and disclaimed further responsibility for her.

Extraordinary punishments were sometimes meted out. One Communist who was serving a long sentence was, after eighteen months in prison, given another two years’ penal servitude for writing “disrespectful” words on the wall of his cell. Another man got a long sentence for writing disrespectful words in his private diary. In another case disrespectful words were found written on the wall of a public urinal, and this was so terrible that the news was banned from the Press. Such things seem childish, but the consequences were serious.

A new idea was tried when it was suddenly anounced that Sano Gaku, one of Japan’s most distinguished Communists, then serving a sentence of imprisonment, had repented. Another prominent prisoner repented almost simultaneously, and repentance became epidemic. Indeed, it was this that spoilt it, for it had been taken for granted that the sinner who repented would be released with joy; but it was im­possible to believe that so many could sincerely repent at one time, and the subtle argument that the truly penitent would find a holy joy in expiation was enough at last to leave them to finish their time.

Though the fear of trade union Socialism was swept away by the flood of patriotism that the conquest of Manchuria evoked, the murders by reactionaries in 1931 rather per­versely created an impression that the jacquerie was begin­ning. A bank hold-up by gangsters had been laid at the door of the Communists without any evidence whatever, and there was a tendency to ascribe all unpunished crimes to ex­ponents of “thought.” There were suggestions that Inukai’s murderers may have been inspired by cunning Leftists. Procurator-General Hayashi, addressing a Judicial Confer­ence a month after the death of Inukai, dwelt on the horrors of Communism. The Communists had a clean record, and the three major murders of the year awaited vengeance, so the Procurator-General, having emphasised the fact that the Communists were the worst possible variety of criminal, went on to say that even disinterested murder could not be tolerated. Extreme Rightists, he said, were in quite a different category from extreme Leftists, and the two often came into collision; but both represented a spirit of discontent and might in certain circumstances join forces. It was a subtle and ingenious speech, for it resolved the doubts that many were feeling in face of the blameless lives of the Communists compared with the outrageous crimes of the patriots. The suggestion that the Communists were really responsible enabled people to come to the customary conclusion without the labour of thought.

There were some Anti-Imperialist societies about 1932, who greatly exercised the minds of the police. They were not disloyal to the Emperor but had a prejudice against that territorial expansion often called imperialism, and were arrested in batches. A number of them who were in the Osaka Police Station lock-up asked whether they might clean out the cell, so as to be able to worship the Emperor from a distance. Their object was, of course, to get rid of some of the vermin and the foulness; but, praiseworthy as their proposal was, and though it would have been highly extolled had they been patriotic murderers, it greatly troubled the minds of the police, who thought they must have some malign intent.

The Procurator-General’s lecture stirred the police to great activity. They had been embarrassed at the idea of arresting patriots, however bloodthirsty, but now their impulses were directed with increased force along the accustomed channels, and on October io, 1932, they arrested two thousand two hundred dangerous thinkers at one haul, including a judge, whose thoughts had somehow become “reddened.” Dr. Koyama, the Minister of Justice, was so shocked at the idea of a radical judge that he considered the propriety of resigning. Among those arrested was also a Professor Otsuka. His wife brought his lunch daily to the police station. On the forty-fifth day, reported one of the newspapers, the policeman at the door said, “I am very sorry.” Mrs. Otsuka turned pale. It meant that her husband had made admissions under questioning that enabled the police to send him on to the procurator. She turned homewards; the lunch was no use now. One young Communist named Kobayashi Takiji, who had escaped the October round-up, was arrested early the next year, and died under examination at the Tsukiji police station the next day, a mishap over which there were some bitter recriminations. Nobody was punished: perhaps the police made an error of judgment and tried some too dangerous method of questioning, or perhaps Kobayashi was more delicate than he appeared to be. Accidents will happen.

Soon after this, four members of the Diet presented a joint interpellation in which they praised the Services, though regretting a certain lack of discipline shown in the murder of Inukai, and said that the deterioration of thought must be due to defects in the educational system. The interpellators expressed horror at a judge and a professor being included in the last big haul, and quoted “some publicists” as being of opinion that the faculties of Economics, Law and Literature in the Imperial Universities should be abolished, as they were nurseries of Bolshevism. Notwithstanding the death penalty prescribed in the Peace Preservation Law, dangerous thought increased. What did the Government think was the cause?

The Government, in reply, saying nothing about the army and navy officers who indulged in patriotic murder, said that the army and navy were both doing their best to prevent dangerous thought from invading the services; that the increase in dangerous thought must be due to economic depression “and other social conditions at home and abroad”; and that Government and people must make a combined effort to apply the Peace Preservation Law more effectively.

Here, then, was the adoption not merely by the Pro­curator-General, but by the Government itself, of the dogma that all evil comes from radical thought—which meant in practice that in the case of patriotic crime, punishment must be visited on the Communists who were presumed to have inspired it rather than on the patriots who committed it. The police tried to get the path to conviction made easier by complaining that they could not hold a prisoner long enough to get a confession out of him. In practice there seemed to be no limit to the time they could get on pro- curatorial order. As we have just seen, it was not till the forty-fifth day that they sent Professor Otsuka to the pro­curator. The police asked for two months, which was the least time in which they could be reasonably sure of making a Communist confess. The procurators also asked for un­limited time, though here again the need was not apparent, as they sometimes took over three years to bring their Communists to trial. The judges, not to be behindhand, asked for the denial to Communists of the right of appeal; and Communists had already been denied the right of trial by jury—lest the jury be corrupted. The judges also wanted the scope of the Peace Preservation Law widened; but as they were ready to regard the giving of a meal to a hungry Communist as a contribution to the Communist funds, the necessity, again, is not clear.

There were constant complaints of torture at the police stations, and Dr. Koyama, the Minister of Justice, at a conference of chiefs of perfectural police held in March 1933, warned them against the infringement of personal rights— the polite form which is used for all kinds of physical maltreatment. The conference decided that under the exist­ing laws the police could not do anything against Rightists, so it passed on to discussing means for exercising greater severity against Leftists. A plan was drafted for enrolling two hundred thousand “volunteer police”—apparently for giving information about “Thought,” but it was not carried out.

Perhaps the “preaching burglar” might be regarded as an exception to the usually clean record of the Communists. This man committed many burglaries in 1927, taking no care whatever not to be heard. He went masked and armed, and would give the household a lecture on the unequal division of property and other social injustices—dangerous thinking of the worst kind. At the end of the year he was caught, and was no more heard of until he was sentenced in June 1933. The procurator demanded the death sentence, but the court gave twenty years’ imprisonment. The news­papers, recording this, said that, under examination, the burglar’s spirits flagged in the spring of 1929, and that by the end of June in that year he was incapable of answering. He was carried into court to be sentenced.

The question was often asked whether sound opinions and beliefs could not be made more attractive than political heresies, and the fact that apparently they could not greatly intensified the animus with which the heresies were pursued. The Home Minister regretted that despite three thousand years of Kokutai, Marxism found a fertile soil in Japan, and he advised the starting of a Propaganda Department “like Germany’s.” The Education Department, like the Home Department, took up the question of making ortho­doxy more attractive, and promised an improvement in the teaching of history, so that the “spirit of the foundation of the country” (again the precious “Kokutai”) and the “national idea” might be inculcated. Actually this meant the substitution of fiction for history. At present the Depart­ment considered there was too much science and not enough morals in the curriculum.

Of the brutal attitude adopted towards “thinkers” one more example must suffice. Professor Kawakami Hajime, of the Kyoto Imperial University, who in England or France would pass for a very mild Liberal, wrote to his wife express­ing regret that he had followed a course which had brought trouble upon him and his family, but concluded with the confession that even seven months’ suffering in prison could not obliterate the convictions and labours of thirty years. At his trial on August 1, 1933, the procurator used this letter in evidence against him, saying that as seven months’ incar­ceration had done him so much good, he would recommend a sentence of seven years to give him time for further contemplation of his errors. The judge gave him five years. Nor was the family forgotten. His young daughter had gone away, changed her name, and got employment: the police ferreted her out and made her employers discharge her.

An official “Thought Committee” opined that poverty helped to produce “thought,” an idea which was partly borne out by the fact that hundreds of elementary school teachers were accused of thinking, especially in the poorer provinces, where their salaries were frequently unpaid owing to the difficulties of the local administration.

The tribulations of the Communists were increased by the growing difficulty of getting counsel to defend them. A lawyer who defended thinkers was himself in danger of being suspected of “ thought.” It became disloyal to defend people charged with disloyalty, and the Minister of Justice added to the difficulty when he exhorted the Osaka Barristers’ Association, in November 1933, to support the authority of the law, and to realise the danger of subversive thought. The two years following the 1932 murders were bad ones for everybody suspected of liberal opinions. Partly to distract attention from the patriotic anarchy with which they dare not try to cope, and partly to satisfy themselves that they were acting energetically in dangerous times, the police and judiciary pursued “ thought” with an implacable and almost insane severity.

The police stretched the law considerably by holding it an offence to “sympathise” with Communists or Com­munism, and the Department of Justice sought sanction of the Diet for almost unlimited powers. One item in the pro­posed new law gave the courts power to punish those who had committed political offences beyond Japanese jurisdic­tion, whoever such persons might be. This was an attempt to override the consensus of opinion of the best authorities on international law, who held that this could not be done. Much more serious was the provision that, after a Com­munist’s prison term was finished he could still be kept in preventive confinement, lest he repeat his offence. This confinement was to be in a special prison where the necessary measures were to be adopted to procure repentance and reform. No indignation was expressed at the introduction of a law so monstrous. Curiously, the reactionaries saved it from passing. They could not agree that there was any need for the Peace Preservation Law to take any action against Rightists, however flagrant their offences.

Truth, though not much of it, could still be spoken within the walls of the Diet. A Representative who declared that the growth of Communism was due to the atrocities com­mitted by the police was compelled to withdraw his remarks, but when Mr. Matsumoto, Director of the Police Bureau in the Home Office, declared that the police tried to preserve the freedom of speech, another Representative said, without reproof, that he did not believe it. Viscount Okochi, in the House of Peers, went further; he said there was no freedom of speech except for soldiers, who continually denounced the politicians. The Defence Ministers protested that they only wanted purity; but the Viscount retorted that even the leader of a political party dared not make a speech on disarmament for fear of offending the army.

It was the firm belief of the rulers of Japan that the Empire could only endure if every spark of intellectual honesty were relentlessly stamped out. This dread of truth is a phenomenon found all over the world, but seldom in such strength and abundance as in modem Japan.

 

CHAPTER XXV. THE FAR EAST AND EASTERN ASIA

 

A sane man may twiddle a coat-button, but an expert alienist has sometimes detected dementia through this act. People therefore wondered how serious was the symptom when the Foreign Office in Tokyo let it be known in 1935, to all who were interested, that henceforth the name Nippon would be preferred, and that the official practice in future would be to speak of the region hitherto known as the Far East by the name Eastern Asia. It appeared at first as though the question of Nippon was merely the settlement of a fine point in philology. Though the fame of the Nippon Yusen Kaisha was worldwide, the foreigner in Japan was generally informed that Nihon was considered more elegant, and in the notification regarding the use of Nippon, it was expressly stated that in names where Nihon was sanctioned by long usage, it would remain, as in Nihonbashi. But presently Nippon began to appear on postmarks and other places where it had been customary to use “Japan.” As regards Eastern Asia, there was a certain amount of reason for the change. East and west are purely relative terms, and Americans had customarily taken trips to “the Orient,” since the United States is so big that “the East” and “the West” are in common speech both comprised in its own boundaries. But there was also the suggestion of a feeling of annoyance that the position of Japan on the mundane sphere should be merely relative to that of England, with her Near East, East, and Far East. This, indeed, was the reason for the change; but throughout many years of military aggression Japan got so thoroughly into the habit of “keeping the peace of the Far East,”—and proclaimed it so often as her sacred mission—that nothing was heard of Nippon keep­ing the peace of Eastern Asia. She was too busy absorbing it.

After Manchukuo had been settled, so far as an armed peace within and immunity from attacks from without constitute a settlement, pious hopes were expressed of an improvement in the relations between Japan and China. General Chiang Kai-shek was very willing for such improve­ment, but the Japanese terms made it impossible. Japan required as a preliminary the recognition of Manchukuo and an entire suppression of anti-Japonism, but she refused to make any promise to refrain from further aggression in return for the first, and she retained the right to decide in every instance what constituted anti-Japonism. An import tariff, a “home goods” campaign, a newspaper criticism— all were evidences of anti-Japonism; and as for aggression, Japan had never admitted that there was or could be any.

General Chiang had domestic troubles of the most serious kind to contend with, chief of which was the widespread peasant revolt. His task was to create a united and armed China; but the planes and munitions that he bought with money sorely needed for other purposes were for a long time used against Chinese. As the leaders of the revolt called themselves Communists, the Nanking Government happily escaped censure on the part of the Powers, to whom the only good Communist was a dead Communist. The very necessity of achieving unity made it inevitable that the war against dissentients should be implacable.

Times were changing in China, and Japan was finding intrigue more difficult. The old-fashioned Chinese General had his price, and the race was not extinct; but the growth of national feeling in China had led to the discovery even by the most venal, that there could be no more fatal course than toadying to the Japanese, and they were themselves becoming conscious of their national obligations. During her long history China was a civilisation rather than a nation. Recent critics, enamoured of nationalism, which has proved to be the curse of the world to-day, have reproached the Chinese with a lack of patriotism, but patriotism depends on the existence of enemies. Few Chinese ever heard of Hideyoshi, who in the sixteenth century swore he would conquer the whole of China; but in the twentieth century the spirit of Hideyoshi is Japan’s inspiring force, and Chinese nationalism has necessarily been built on a foundation of anti-Japonism, other countries being regarded as either impotent to help or as contributory to Japan’s aggression.

Endeavours were made early in 1935 to bring about a rapprochement, Mr. Ariyoshi, the Japanese Ambassador, was reasonable and a man of good will, but he failed to agree with Mr. Wang Ching-wei, head of the Executive Yuan. Mr. Wang was ready to promise that there should be no more anti-Japonism, but asked Mr. Ariyoshi what guarantee he could give that there would be no further acts of aggression on Japan’s part. Mr. Ariyoshi emphatically declared that Japan had never been aggressive, so it was evident that a common basis for discussion was lacking. The military view was even more hopeless. Lieut.-General Suzuki Yoshimichi, Japanese military attache at Peiping, gave an interview to a group of journalists, just after a conversation with the Generalissimo. Chinese unity was now, he said, so unpre­cedentedly complete that Chiang could suppress all anti- Japonism with the greatest of ease. Such an utterance sounded impeccable in Japanese ears, but it could only be regarded by the Chinese as either a military menace or an invitation to the Chinese leader to ruin himself. Never­theless, there was some truth in a remark by the Asahi, made at the same time as these pronouncements, that the economic system was so bad that Chinese merchants would welcome any conditions that gave a promise of peace. Japan, however, would not permit peace except under her own aegis.

Unofficially the Japanese Foreign Office informs its friends from other lands that it simply hates the methods of the War Office, and this may be true in so far as the Foreign Office must dislike having its business taken out of its hands from time to time by the military men; but the final effect of these protestations is that the army gets away with the plunder while the diplomats get sympathy instead of demands for withdrawal. In its relations with China this system per­mitted of the Foreign Office ignoring the rape of Manchuria as something that could not now be discussed, while it did its best to maintain ordinary relations with the rest of China.

The military view, however, was that the Manchurian adventure was not merely an accomplished fact, or closed chapter, but was part of a continuing process, and, surveying these events, it is necessary to take the military rather than the official point of view as to what was happening. At the beginning of 1935 Mr. Hirota, the Foreign Minister, definitely promised to make an effort for the improvement of relations with China; but what the Chinese regarded as the least that was due to their national self-respect the Japanese considered proof of their insincerity, and what the Japanese believed was the very least they could ask for seemed to the Chinese barefaced aggression. Approaches were made, how­ever, and Mr. Wang Ching-wei welcomed them, saying that there was nothing in the differences between the two countries which sincerity could not solve.

Both in the Arnau Statement and in her attitude towards the League of Nations Technical Committee Japan had shown a determination that nobody but herself should help China. The Mainichi, to assist in the agreement by sincerity, published an exposition of the Foreign Office policy towards China, which was to the effect that Japan would help China in the same measure as China showed sincerity towards Japan, but that China must not conclude agreements with other Powers, and that Japan would take steps to prevent her from implementing “most favoured nation” clauses in any agreements that she might make.

The prospects of friendship were ruined by General Doi- hara making a tour through the country, giving his orders. Trouble always followed in the path of this “Lawrence of Manchuria.” General Chiang Kai-shek and Mr. Wang Ching-wei had both condemned boycotts as an instrument of policy; but Doihara declared that he could find no sincerity in China. He told the Chinese that they must abandon forthwith the All Nanking Native Goods Promotion Society; and even Mr. Ariyoshi said that the campaigns now popular in China to promote the use of home-made goods were a proof of Chinese insincerity. Considering that Japan had for some years past carried on just such a campaign with much enthusiasm and with powerful support, it will be seen that the sincerity required of China was of a very high order.

There had been some Anglo-American conversations on the feasibility of helping China, whereupon Mr. Shigemitsu (who had been injured in the Shanghai explosion and was now Vice-Minister for Foreign Affairs), announced that Japan was ready to negotiate separately with any Power to help China, but thought it best for China to achieve her aims without help, seeing that such help only exploited China’s unhappy divisions. Articles, speeches and further Foreign Office pronouncements all reiterated Japan’s suze­rain rights over China, even while they expressly disclaimed them. Doihara brought the argument to an end by declaring that, now that he had seen China for himself, he was con­vinced that there was no sincerity there, but that China, having seen him, perfectly understood Japan’s sincerity.

Though there were large tracts in China’s vast area unsuited for dense population, Manchuria had been the only part which was really under-populated, and was the place for China’s overflow. Her population problem was a more real one than Japan’s, but it was decided that an unrestricted flow could not be allowed into the free State of Manchukuo. It was not that the Japanese settlements were anything but costly failures; but Japan considered it a better idea to settle the land with Koreans, who were increasing rapidly. The Koreans did not love the Japanese, but it was more to the point that they had no great affection for the Chinese, and were not likely to combine with them, but would prefer to look to the Japanese for protection. Moreover, the Koreans were cultivators of rice, and the Northern Chinese always annoyed the Japanese by refusing to grow rice. The economic problems in and arising out of Manchukuo were so many and difficult that it was apparent that the new State and the Japanese Empire did not form the self-contained economic unit that was sought, and there was already some speculation, especially on the part of the military economists, as to how much of China would have to be taken in to round off this ideal.

The attempt to draw China and Japan together in bonds of friendship was defeated before it began. American monetary policy had increased the price of silver, and there began a great efflux of specie from China. Ordinarily it might be supposed that it would be all to the good to have a metal currency increase in value, but there was a certain lag in the adjustment of the exchange, and Chinese silver was worth more in London or New York than it was in China. The Nanking Government prohibited export, but the tech­nique of smuggling was too well understood for such a prohibition to be effectual. The means to defeat it had been learnt in Shantung in 1915. When the Japanese turned the Germans out in that year, they protected the import and sale of morphia and heroin and the export of currency (copper and bronze at that time), despite the Chinese law. Much the same process began again in 1934, in North China. Where military stores passed, drugs could always find a way in, and if the Japanese or Korean smugglers were interfered with, they appealed to the Japanese military authorities who always upheld them. The Chinese threatened to fine the ships which brought in the drugs, which caused an outcry in Japan, for it would, it was pointed out, amount to a discrimination against Japanese vessels. It was rather unfortunate that this outcry should have come just after Mr. Hirota had informed a conference of prefectural governors that China was now distinctly more friendly.

The drugs performed a triple function: they gave the people something other than anti-Japonism to think about; they were very profitable; and they supplied no negligible part of the silver specie that was smuggled out. There were other lines of smuggling also. After the Japanese took over the working of the Peking-Mukden Railway as far as Shanhaikwan, it became the custom to take large bundles of Japanese goods on the train, and hurl them out of the window just before the border was reached; athletic Koreans picked them up, and crossed the border with them on foot, seldom meeting with any opposition, as it was dangerous to interfere with Japanese subjects. When it became profitable to smuggle Chinese currency out of the country, it crossed the border in the same way but in the opposite direction. But this was rather primitive, and presently there was a regular line of mo tor-trucks running, flying the Japanese flag and refusing inspection on the ground that they carried military stores.

There was no ban on taking silver from Manchukuo into Korea, but the exports from Japan were more than double the imports from Manchukuo; so it was perfectly well known to the authorities that large quantities of Chinese silver specie were smuggled into Japan. There was nothing underhand about this: when carried by sea from China it could not be entered on the ship’s manifest, and therefore when passed by the Customs in Japan it could not be entered as an import.

Smuggling became elevated to the level of poetic justice. The Manchuria Daily News (published by the South Man­churia Railway in English) informed its readers that from October 1934 to April 1935, 398,677 kilogrammes of Chinese silver were smuggled through the port of Antung alone into Manchukuo, most of the smugglers being Koreans, and at the same time the Japanese Keijo Nippo, published in Seoul, said that Koreans entering Manchukuo prided them­selves on the fact that they were subjects of the Japanese Empire, and were filled with the desire to avenge themselves for the persecutions and humiliations they had suffered under the regime of Chang Hsueh-liang. The same paper also stated that Koreans were being invited to Manchukuo to promote the harmony of the five races and “the realisation of Great Asia with Japan as a guiding spirit.” To call a policy of Divide et impera harmony seems rather an abuse of language. The Special Service Bureau of the Kwantung Army announced in May 1935, that, after striving for three years to promote friendship between Japan and Manchukuo, it had decided that the best means was to erect a big Shinto shrine at Hsinking, dedicated to the Sun Goddess, ancestress of the Japanese Emperors, to the Emperor Meiji, and to the Manchu Ancestors. Needless to say, the Manchu An­cestors play a very small part in the matter: the shrine, like those in Korea, Formosa, Shanghai, and Tsingtao, was to be a proclamation to the world of the spread of the domain of the Sun Goddess.

Large-scale smuggling and the use of Koreans to do the dirtier part of the work naturally did not help towards the officially desired rapprochement with China. It had been observed with some misgiving that the Kwantung army was developing a will of its own, an idea that it was not entirely subordinate to the Tokyo Government, but had a heaven­sent mission in the new Empire; and similarly the North China Garrison Army was inclined to discover for itself a sacred duty of putting everything right in North China.

The Japanese army and Government having exercised their uncontrolled will in Manchuria, it was psychologically impossible for them to come to terms in North China on any other footing than that of complete Chinese subservience. On May 31, 1935, Mr. Hirota telegraphed to all Japanese diplomats abroad to dispel other countries’ misgivings by explaining to them that Japan had no designs in North China beyond that of keeping the peace, and on that very day the Asahi published the demands made on the Nanking Government as the price of keeping the peace: (1) General Yu Hsueh-chung’s Hopei Government must be dismissed and anti-Japonism extirpated in the province; (2) North China must be cleared of Blueshirts and adherents of the Kuomin­tang; (3) all troops under control of the Central Government at Nanking must be withdrawn from North China; (4) General Chiang Kai-shek must sign a formal pledge to promote friendship between China and Japan and to destroy anti-Japonism. That is to say, Japan claimed the right to expel from North China everybody that was suspected of not liking the Japanese.

The Nanking Government kept its temper diplomatically, but universal discretion under such provocation was hardly to be expected. A couple of Chinese editors in Tientsin who drew Japanese salaries and wrote accordingly were murdered and the Japanese indignation exhibited would have been excessive even had they been Japanese subjects. Attempts to utter soothing words sometimes caused offence. Mr. Ying Tung, an important Chinese official, returning to Shanghai after a visit to Tokyo, was interviewed by the Chinese journalists, to whom he said that he thought that the Japanese bark was often worse than the bite, and that the Japanese War Office and Foreign Office did not always see eye to eye. Thereupon General Isogai Rensuke, Military Attache at the Japanese Embassy, sent for Mr. Ying and talked to him very severely. What he had stated was not only untrue but impossible, said the General, and he must be more careful what he said. Men like Isogai were never reproved by their superiors, and they deliberately made all improvement of relations impossible. They had other plans. General Hayashi went on tour in Manchukuo and came back with the informa­tion that the situation there required more Japanese troops. Without troops the State would not have lasted a day, but as the army of occupation had already shot down three- quarters of the 200,000 bandits, it was obvious that more were not required. It simply meant that they were required for the invasion, in due course, of North China. Of course, the Russian danger was cited, but that was well known for a bogey.

Doihara, the Lawrence of Manchuria, came back from his trip to China not only thoroughly convinced of Chinese insincerity, but with plans for a Japan-Manchukuo-North China bloc. This, he explained, would include the mines of Shansi and Shantung, while Japan would supply agricultural experts who would tell the Chinese farmers just what they would find it most healthy to grow. The Japanese garrison in North China had an Inquiry Corps which drafted economic plans whereby Japan, by expanding to the necessary extent, would be freed from all her difficulties.

For the present the Doihara plan was pigeonholed; the moment was not convenient, and the longer it was put off, the less resistance would be encountered, at least so far as the North was concerned, for drugs and disorder were weakening the possibility of resistance, and the civil war might take a turn against Nanking, though in some respects the Kuomintang Government was increasing in solidarity. The chief means of undermining the Central Government’s authority in the North was a simple defiance of law. The earlier stages of the smuggling racket have already been described: it was to take on a much more menacing form. At Tientsin gangs of ruffians, Koreans, Chinese and Japanese, working together in a manner which indicated an authority behind them well capable of maintaining discipline, took charge of consignments of Japanese goods and carried them through the Customs, in defiance of the officials. They were protected in this by the Japanese military, who insisted that the Customs must not be armed. A levy was placed on the goods, much smaller than the Customs duty, for the benefit, as was alleged, of an autonomous council presided over by a Chinese who had been educated in Japan and had a Japanese wife.

The Japanese army supervised all this, proclaiming that any interference with Japanese shipping would be treated as piracy, and offering the excuse that the Customs were not interested in collecting duty which simply went to Nanking, but preferred to support the local administration. Foreign trade other than Japanese was, of course, almost extinguished, and on complaints being made to the Japanese Foreign Office, the reply was given that Japanese merchants too had complained, and that apparently it was the high duties that caused the smuggling. In April 1936, the loss to the regular Customs revenue was estimated at eight million Chinese dollars, and it was calculated that the year’s losses would amount to a hundred millions. This proved to be an over­estimate as the market became saturated and for a time could absorb no more goods, even smuggled ones. The Japanese Press referred to this gigantic “racket” as the “new trade,” and found justification for it easily enough. It gave Japan a monopoly of the north China trade, it taught the people to look to Japanese rather than Chinese authority, and it deprived the Nanking Government of its revenue. Such a desirable combination hardly needed justification.

There was a check to the smuggling out of the Chinese silver currency which was regarded as an intolerable affront, and was the more annoying in that it was difficult to find any good reason or any effective means of opposing it. Sir Frederick Leith-Ross, Chief Economic Adviser to the British Government, paid a long visit to the Far East. Visiting Tokyo, he was received politely by the Japanese officials, but found them quite uninterested in any sort of co-operation. The Japanese Press was less polite, but contemptuously dismissed his mission as futile. It assumed that he had come out to see what he could save out of the wreck of British interests in China, and that he would be glad to secure the interests in the South and leave the North to Japan, but, it added, why should Japan consent to any arrangement since the whole of China would fall into her lap in the natural course of events?

Consultations at Nanking apparently were as fruitless, till suddenly in November 1935, Mr. H. H. Kung, the Finance Minister, announced that China, like the rest of the world, was henceforth to have a “managed currency.” The Com­mandant of the North China Garrison was exceedingly angry: he said it would ruin the country and that he would not allow it in North China. He found, however, that he could not prevent it. The foreign banks, other than Japanese, surrendered their silver currency to the Government, and even the Yokohama Specie Bank followed suit when it was found that the new currency was generally accepted and was working quite well. Some bitter remarks were made on Mr. Kung’s intention to align the value of the dollar on British sterling; but as the Japanese currency had taken the same standard (though informally) not much could be said. Indeed, nothing at all could be said in a little while, because the Japanese found it expedient to “manage” the Manchukuo currency. Before this reform China’s currency had been very chaotic, and the ready acceptance of a standard currency seemed to augur well for the future and to be a weighty testimony to the general confidence felt in the stability of the Government. In Japan, however, every sign of China being able to recover her position was resented. The Arnau Statement and the hostility shown to the League of Nations Committee, were equivalent to announcing that Japan would neither assist China nor allow others to assist her; and the animosity shown to every sign of self-help on China’s part could bear no other interpretation except that Japan desired that China should be reduced to a state of such complete helplessness that she would willing assent to Japan coming in to reorganise the country.

 

CHAPTER XXVI. UNEASY NATIONALISM

 

According to that eminent psychoanalyst Dr. Adler, the most disturbing element in our mental make-up is the fear that we may be looked down upon by our neighbours or that some inferiority actually characterises us. People react in various ways to this fear, not infrequently trying to overcome it by self-assertion. Mass-emotion is a far more difficult thing to dogmatise about, but those who have claimed to discover a national inferiority-complex in Japan could certainly make out a plausible case. It is not a subject on which one can afford to be censorious, for all drum­whacking is suspect. Sometimes there was no real feeling underlying an apparent display of self-conscious nationalism, but rather a search for something to commend an idea that it is desired to popularise. There may have been a well- reasoned argument, for instance, against the spending of so much time and money over the teaching of English in Japanese schools; the opposition was apt to express itself in terms of scorn; but it was particularly strong at a time when the youth of the country, at any rate, had a perfect craze for adopting foreign words, often strangely curtailed.

Some irritation was expressed from time to time at the fact that in all dealings with foreign countries, it was Japan which was expected to learn the foreign tongue; few troubled to learn Japanese. But at the same time there was a sort of pride in the language being so intricate as to be almost a secret code, while it was also deplored that this very difficulty entailed a much longer schooling than other nations needed. At a period when such great stratagems as the conquest of Manchuria were contemplated, fierce bureaucratic tussles also took place over the retention of the Roman character on the name-boards of railway stations, and also over the question whether the kana names should read to left or to right. The Roman names in some patriotic eyes were a truckling to foreigners, but for some purposes romanisation was necessary, and there are even men not lacking either in learning or patriotism who believe that Japanese, like the Turkish, will have to undergo a general romanisation. If that becomes necessary a little judicious Sinophobia will enable the change to be made. For some years a Romanisa­tion Committee discussed the matter without coming to a conclusion; for half a century the Hepburn system (named after a learned American missionary) had been used, but in many quarters the name damned it. They must have Nipponshiki (Japanese system) instead, though it was rather confusing, and, if adopted, could only lead to more con­fusion, as there was a massive growth of Hepburn texts and dictionaries.

If civilisation survives the follies of twentieth-century statesmanship, it may go down to posterity as a period in which the rewriting of history was a major industry. Japan has done her part in this, not merely in suppression for the promotion of the patriotic cult: a quite commendable interest has been taken in the early days of foreign inter­course—also, of course, with a patriotic twist that has its peculiar charm. Hoshi Toru, a distinguished Japanese statesman, one of the long list who fell by the hand of an assassin, was the subject of a play which had quite a long run. The author’s object was, as much as anything, to “debunk” Sir Harry Parkes, the masterful first British Minister to Japan. Hoshi, at the time of the play, was Commissioner of Customs, and Sir Harry, a strutting, ridiculous figure, is brought before him, and, for his impertinence, has his ears boxed and is driven off the stage. It was a somewhat belated “compensation,” as psychologists would call it, as the tradition of Sir Harry’s brusqueness still lives. The Embassy, without any member having seen the play, informed the Foreign Office what it had heard about it, and the Foreign Office, equally careful not to be positive, replied that it understood that the play was not at all like that. By that time it had had its day and ceased to be, so the intimation that it had not passed unnoticed was sufficient.

A different method was taken with the dramatisation of Townsend Harris, the first American Minister, whose sacred memory is always invoked as symbolic of the warm friendship between Japan and America. The chief figure in the play was Okichi, Harris’s geisha-maidservant, whom Japanese tradition always regards as his mistress; but the play was so little concerned with sentimentalities, personal or inter­national, that it recalled, with embellishments, that Harris had said in his haste that (in Japan) all men are liars. Both plays were essentially an assertion that neither of these first ministers was the hero in Japanese eyes that he was in the eyes of his countrymen.

The debunking of foreign notabilities is a harmless pursuit: nationalist sensitiveness of a much more disagreeable kind was often shown. For instance, when the Kellogg Pact was signed “in the names of their respective peoples,” an amazing amount of ink and oratory was expended over the outrage, though the necessary adjustment, showing that so far as Japan was concerned, it was signed on behalf of the Emperor, was made with no trouble whatever. Another storm threatened over a treaty that was signed “in the year of our Lord,” but the lightnings missed their mark—the expression had not been used.

At a time when the whole world (at Geneva) was arrayed against Japan, the Minister of Education, weary perhaps of hunting young Communists in the schools, but wanting to do his bit in the promotion of patriotism, declared that it was disgraceful for any Japanese child to address its parents as Papa and Mama. In November 1934, the appointment of a National Language Commission was decided upon, for the “control” of foreign words, but alas! “Papa” and “Mama” persisted. But their interdiction had served a useful purpose. Instead of merely heating hotter still the flame of patriotism, it afforded “relief” of the kind known to every good tragedian.

One of the most disagreeable features of a nationalism made morbidly sensitive is that suspicions of espionage become a perfect plague. It is not too much to say that in the eyes of the Japanese every foreigner is a suspected spy: it is not at all uncommon for the Japanese newspapers to an­nounce that a special watch is being kept on foreigners. The Japanese have never discovered, apparently, that the most dangerous spy is always the native spy, and this, of course, applies to Japan just as much as to countries that advertise their patriotism less. The fuss that is made about photographing is incredible, and nearly always ridiculous. With the introduction of infra-red photography it became worse than ever, and it is taken for granted that every Brownie camera may be taking snapshots at a fifty mile range. The late Dr. Teusler, of the American Red Cross, spent his whole life in improving Japanese hospital practice, his culminating work being the erection in Tokyo of a splendid hospital and medical school; and his reward was, when the St. Luke’s Medical Centre towered above the buildings in the neighbourhood, to be charged in the Press with using the tower, with which it was crowned, for photo­graphing distant fortifications.

Tokyo became a favourite goal of foreign aviators, and if these happened to deviate from the prescribed route there was endless trouble. Pangbourn and Herndon, who in 1931 flew from Habarovsk to Tokyo, had much ado to convince the authorities that they had no photographs; and when, on their release, they crossed the Pacific in a single hop, the demonstration of Japan’s vulnerability was worth millions to the air services. The leisurely visit of the Lindberghs the same year would have been much more useful if espionage had been its intention, but there was no hint of that for over two years, when an interview with Admiral Suetsugu appeared in a Japanese magazine, in which that distinguished officer was represented as saying that Lindbergh did some espionage among the Kurile Islands. This happened to get abroad and was naturally the subject of a protest. The matter being brought up in the Diet, Admiral Osumi, Minister for the Navy, said that Admiral Suetsugu had not written the interview and had been much surprised at its effect. Admiral Osumi thought the interviewer had gone too far.

Nine-tenths of the trouble is caused through amateur counter-espionage, exploits in which are incredibly fantastic, and the belief in which reflects seriously on the intelligence of the police and gendarmerie. For instance, the National City Bank of New York, wishful that its customers should see what a mighty city it was operating in when it opened a branch in Osaka, asked a Japanese photographer to supply photographs of the principal buildings. The photographer, scenting mischief, informed the police, and there was plenty of publicity for a month after. On some occasions hotel waiters, almost entirely ignorant of English, have been known to report to the police that guests whom they served had spoken of Japan in an improper manner. The Tourist Bureau, and even the Foreign Office, asked the police not to let their mania for detecting spies lead them into such foolish excesses, but it was no use. Mr. Arnau, of the Foreign Office, whose business it was to give out information and hear inquiries, was tackled on the subject and loyally tried to belittle it, saying that the cases complained of all turned out to be laughable misunderstandings. That they were misunderstandings was true enough, but only on the part of the police, and they were never laughable, except in the memories of their more philosophic victims. On one occasion a prominent Rotarian from America took occasion at a Tokyo Rotary lunch to bare his soul on the subject of his own eleven days’ detention. Often people suffered the greatest distress, discomfort and anxiety, and were given no opportunity of communicating with those who could have guaranteed their respectability.

In justification of all this, the Mainichi stated that in the first half of 1933, 232 military spies were operating in Japan, 152 Americans, 82 British, and 18 others. Later the information was published that in 1933, there were 2,346 offences, of which 311 were punished. Of those arrested eight were foreigners, some of whom were believed to be spies! None, apparently, was proved to be a spy; and as vastly more than eight were detained and questioned, had their films destroyed and their cameras confiscated, apparently none of this counted. Notwithstanding the 232 spies supposed to be at work, none was discovered.

 

CHAPTER XXVII. BIGGER AND BETTER MURDERS

 

So long as Prince Saionji survives to nominate new Premiers, there will be a certain amount of guessing as to his choice, which has often been unexpected; but when the Saito Ministry resigned in July 1934, the guessing was rather as to whom the army wanted than as to whom Saionji thought most suitable. The army had the substance of power, and it was mainly its civilian admirers who wanted a military Government. The army let fall hints that it would accept Baron Hiranuma, Viscount Kiyoura, Baron Dr. Ikki, or Prince Konoe, or would even tolerate another dose of Admiral Viscount Saito, so long as he did not keep the obstinate Takahashi as his Finance Minister. General Ugaki was the foremost soldier, and was credited with a desire to be Premier, though he had declared that he hoped to die at his post as Governor-General of Korea: but the army was not keen on Ugaki, for he had consented to a reduction of its numbers when he was Minister for War.

Saionji took everybody by surprise by nominating another admiral—Okada, who had been Saito’s Minister for the Navy, but had resigned on reaching the age limit for active service. In a way there was as much objection to Okada as to Ugaki, for he had supported the London Naval Treaty, and had pleaded with Admiral Kato Kanji, the Naval Chief of Staff, to accept it as loyally as he had done himself. Okada formed a competent but by no means remarkable ministry. The most distinguished man in it, Mr. Tokonami, had one of the less distinguished portfolios, that of Com­munications ; the Minister for Railways was Uchida Shinyu, famous in the war years as a funa-narikin—one who had grown wealthy in the shipping trade; Hirota Koki, a disciple of Toyama Mitsuru, the professional patriot, became Foreign Minister, having already had a successful diplomatic career; and instead of Takahashi as Finance Minister, Fujii, a capable man who had served under him and was determined to maintain his principles. Unhappily the task was more than he could eope with. The army increased its demands, and Fujii, refusing to propose new taxes, could not satisfy it. General Hayashi, the Minister for War, demanded Fujii’s dismissal, but withdrew it when Okada put it to him that if Fujii went the whole Cabinet would resign.

But Fujii broke down in health after four months of office, and died after an illness of two months; and the aged but robust Takahashi was called upon again to take office.

The sentimentalities of Japanese philosophy were always much concerned with the impermanence of all mundane things; yet there was always a demand for a-definite national policy which should ensure the right course of action in any circumstances which might arise, and so free the country from the possibility of error. The demand was again heard, so Admiral Okada did his best to fulfil it. With himself as Chairman he made up a National Policy Council of sixteen members, all “elder statesmen” of a kind. But though there had been such a strong demand for the Council, it was rather the expression of an aspiration than a wish for a real council of fallible human beings. The Home Minister hailed it as a “brain trust,” but nearly everybody else, when they read the names of its members, realised that transcending mundane impermanence was not to be expected of such a “crowd,” as a leading politician dubbed it. It was very difficult to decide on the scope of the Council’s duties, and it had only been in existence for a month when a Seiyukai member of the Diet demanded to know why the Council had been forbidden to discuss either diplomatic or military affairs. The Premier explained that these topics had not exactly been prohibited, but that it was clear that the Council could not infringe on the Imperial prerogative. A strong suspicion was voiced by a good many politicians that the Council’s real function was to reduce the Diet to impo­tence: that, however, proved to be groundless, for the Council was so completely impotent itself that it could do nothing.

The experiment, however, was not without its lessons. At the time of the Manchurian campaign a request for a “firm offer” to withdraw the invading troops was evaded on the ground that such an order could be given only by the Throne. This was grimly laughed at in Europe as an Oriental subterfuge; but in this later development it was used as a means of keeping policy in the hands of the army, un­hampered by laws laid down by any Council, however eminent. So the Council, after all, did confirm the impotence of the civil power, for by invoking the Imperial prerogative the army was able to exalt itself above all authority.

These military encroachments did not pass unnoticed. The newspapers criticised the Government with their usual freedom; but the Asahi, commenting on the closing of the Diet, said that the freedom of speech had almost disappeared, and that not only had it become very dangerous to criticise the army, but almost equally so to say or do anything that offended the Rightists. In some directions, no doubt, the Asahi went on, there was no curtailment of liberty. Everybody was free to denounce the Minobe theory, though, on the other hand, nobody dared defend it.

This was all expressed in such a manner that nobody could say it was ironical, but it was very courageous of the Asahi to say it. No topic was more to the fore in 1935 than the Minobe theory, and this has been so little understood that it must be explained here. Dr. Minobe was a learned expert in law, specialising on the Constitution. Two-thirds of the professors of law in the country had been his pupils and disciples, but of late he had give serious offence on no less than three occasions. First, on the question of the authority of the civil power, he maintained that it did not permit of any dispute. It was the civil power which imposed taxes, collected revenue, and passed the budget; and the power of the purse was, in the ultimate issue, the supreme power. His second offence was worse: the question was put to him whether the right of the Defence Ministers and the Chiefs of General Staff to have audience and advise the Throne as freely as the Premier himself did not put an undue power into the hands of the army and the navy. He replied that it did not; for the Defence Ministers and Chiefs of Staff only advised the Throne of the opinion of the army or the navy, as the case might be, while the Premier advised the Throne of the opinion of the nation. Thirdly, he gave great umbrage by saying that soldiers did not understand economics. At an earlier date the soldiers might have regarded this as a testimony to their superiority of soul; but they had committed themselves to the promise that Manchuria was going to pay well and to bring prosperity to itself and to Japan. The Kwantung Army and the North China army had their corps of economic experts, and in the latter days of Admiral Viscount Saito’s Ministry a big meeting was held at the Tokyo Chamber of Commerce, attended by officials, military officers, and business men, to discuss national economics. A colonel presided, and he and other officers expounded the principles of healthy economic development, which, it appeared, was to be achieved only by the directive control of industry. The right industry must be in the right place, and unnecessary competition avoided.

The first two of these offences were far from recent, but the army waited: then help came: in a textbook on the Constitution, which had been used in colleges and universities for at least twenty-five years, somebody discovered that Minobe had described the Throne as an organ of the State. Here was blasphemy. Large-scale denunciations were or­ganised. Toyama Mitsuru, whose ignorance was as encyclo­paedic as Minobe’s knowledge, was particularly loud. Kokuiai^ the imperial polity, was ineffable. Any words used to describe the Emperor were wrong. The army and all the patriotic societies demanded condign punishment. The Editor of the Xomiuri ventured to take the Doctor’s part, and was promptly the victim of a murderous attack by a patriotic ruffian. Not another soul said a word in his defence; but many suffered on his account. Every professor and teacher who had been his pupil lost his post. Dr. Minobe himself lost all honours, employment and emoluments, but though the Minister for War said that the army was demanding further punishment, no further official action was taken except the proscription of his books. Unofficially an independent patriot shot him, but fortunately made bad practice, only getting him in the leg; and as the Minister of Justice had recently talked about the necessity of dealing severely with law-breaking Rightists, a judge was found sufficiently courageous to give the ruffian a prison sentence.

Such was Japanese patriotism in its most fervent manifesta­tion—a passion artificially fomented not out of regard for the Emperor, but for the sake of revenge on an eminent scholar who denied the validity of military pretensions.

The Okada Government was, in its nature, a continuation of the Saito Government, that is to say, a demonstration that the army would not tolerate a Government with the democratic flavour acquired from association with a political party. The army based its claims on its function of protecting the country and on its profession of a special loyalty, though within itself it was greatly rent by petty jealousies which masqueraded as patriotism. The appeal to loyalty was an effective one, but there was a very large number of citizens who abhorred military government. Attempts made to combine the two big parties against the “national” oligarchy were ineffectual. In such an administration, unchecked by demo­cratic criticism, the characteristic features of bureaucracy, always evident in Japan, became more pronounced, and any resulting inefficiency was ascribed to a lack of the spirit of true patriotism as understood only by the army. Reaction continued to be more admired than progress, arid efforts to check the rapscallions who pretended that their misdeeds were inspired by patriotism were spasmodic and half-hearted.

While it was to the army’s interest to keep a united front to the rest of the world, its internal dissensions were so bitter as to rend the veil that hid them from the public. General Hayashi, though very much the militarist, and though he encouraged the contemptible military agitation against Dr. Minobe, was not in favour of the “young officer” movement. General Araki Sadao, whom Hayashi had succeeded as Minister for War, encouraged the super-patriotism of the “young officers” (many of whom were old enough to know better) and during his term of office got his friend General Mazaki Jinzaburo, another “idol of the young officers,” appointed Inspector-General of Military Education. The great importance of this position in Japan is due to the fact that it sets the tone of the army and determines its attitude. To have a man like Mazaki in such a position was highly dangerous: the effects of super-patriotic and anti-democratic teaching had already been tragic enough. There was a dangerous military conspiracy in November 1934, which was nipped in the bud and hushed up, and was thereafter known only mysteriously as the “November affair.” Whether Mazaki had anything to do with it is not known, but Hayashi considered it necessary to remove him from his post. It was not easy, even for the Minister for War, as the post of Inspector-General carried great prestige, but with the help of his principal lieutenant, General Nagata, Director of the Military Affairs Bureau, a loyal and moderate soldier, he put sufficient pressure on Mazaki to force his resignation, and appointed in his place another moderate, General Watanabe Jotaro.

There was a certain solemn fanatic, Colonel Aizawa, who considered that something must be done to save the army from degeneracy. Accordingly, three days after General Mazaki’s resignation, he went to General Nagata and advised him to resign. For an inferior to tender advice of this sort is less surprising in Japan than it would be in Europe, though when the object of such advice is very exalted, the Far Eastern tradition would generally have the adviser commit suicide afterwards. How General Nagata received these overtures is not recorded; but Aizawa brooded over the small chances of the army rising to heroic heights as long as a man like Nagata was in a position of such influence. A personal grievance supervened. Aizawa was ordered to Formosa—an assignment which, while it was nominally in the way of promotion, he probably thought was General Nagata’s way of side-tracking an inconvenient officer. Now his mind was made up. He visited the Grand Shrine at Ise—the spiritual centre of Shinto—bought a charm there, which he sent to his family (he had four children), and on August 12th he marched into General Nagata’s room in the War Office, and, before his victim had time to turn and ask him what he wanted, stabbed him to death with a short sword. Colonel Niimi, of the Tokyo Gendarmerie, who was present, tried to intervene, but the murder was done so quickly that he could not save Nagata, though he got wounded in the arm himself.

The most extraordinary thing about the murder was that Aizawa had brooded over its righteousness so intensely that he could not believe that anybody would disapprove of it, and directly it was done he went and reported for duty, believing that he would be sent to Formosa as arranged. General Hayashi remarked at the time that Aizawa had been misled by pamphlets—presumably those issued in such large numbers by the army itself; and a similar statement was made in a report on the case issued by the War Office about two months later.

A law had just come into force to curb pamphleteering, which had become very vexatious to authority. The printer (on discovery) was to be punished equally with the man who ordered the printing, though he was to be spared if he denounced his customer in time to prevent distribution. But the greatest pamphleteers were the army men, who did not seem to be under control even of the War Office, General Hayashi, on occasion, having to draw distinctions between what might be regarded as the opinions of the War Office and what were just military opinions of undefined authority. A week after the murder a hundred thousand copies of an army pamphlet entitled “The International Situation on the Turn—and Japan” were distributed. It had nothing to do with the murder, but was a typical example of the propaganda of preparedness constantly published by the army. Any writings suggesting that Japan’s own policy was leading to war were, however, promptly suppressed.

General Hayashi resigned, according to the usual formula, “to show his sense of responsibility” for such a breach of discipline. Such was the state of military discipline that if he had not taken this step, Aizawa might have found the court-martial very sympathetic. Even as it was, there was a strong bid for his vindication. The trial was postponed, and meanwhile the “young officer” movement was seething and bubbling. Takahashi at a Cabinet Council on November 27th, pointed out that he had been forced to compile a budget in which the revenue was only half the expenditure, that the Services were taking 60 per cent of the expenditure, and that the national bonds had to be taken up by the banks because they dared not put them on the market except by very small instalments. The newspapers, he went on, were intimidated and dared not criticise the military, nor did the financiers, but there was general dissatisfaction with army and navy extravagance. Japan was perfectly secure from attack, but enormous sums were being spent on unneces­sary armaments. He asked what the Defence Ministers thought of it. These gentlemen replied that they must have the money, so the Government departments cut down their already curtailed allotments in order to placate them.

It was difficult to make out that Aizawa’s was a heroic act: had he committed hara-kiri he would have passed for a hero, but he wanted^ to be his own chief admirer. The procurator, whose usual function was to affirm guilt and demand punishment, did his best for the murderer in this case, and produced in court letters of commendation written by schoolgirls in their own blood. The Colonel, who had acquired some underclothes supposed to have belonged to General Nogi, got the Court’s permission to wear them during these troubled days—a proof of his sincerity. He made a highly religious speech in his own defence, declaring that he had been ordered by God to act as he did, and describing his plan for the Showa Restoration. This was one of the catchwords of the time. The Meiji Restoration had swept away the Shogunate and started Japan on her career of conquest. From the time Meiji’s grandson ascended the Throne, the era being called Showa, the ultra-militarists had talked much of modern degeneracy and of the necessity for a Showa Restoration.

Some sensation was caused when, on February 25th, the court-martial summoned General Mazaki whose removal from the military triumvirate was the immediate cause of the murder. He indignantly refused to reply to the questions of the court-martial, which thereupon adjourned to recover its equanimity and to consider what to do in the face of this unprecedented difficulty.

The next morning, February 26, 1936, whispers went round of tragic happenings, and there was tense excitement. Roads in the neighbourhood of the Palace were guarded by soldiers and forbidden to the public. There was a coming and going of military men, placing of guns, erection of barbed wire fences. Telephones worked spasmodically, telegraphs not at all. The mass of the population, of course, endeavoured to pursue their ordinary avocations. Men went to office, shops opened, housewives cooked the food, policemen arrested Communists.

What had happened gradually became known, with plenty of embellishments, but the essentials were given out to the public in military communiques. Early on the morning of the 26th, while it was yet dark, bands of soldiers, each numbering about thirty, set out for the houses of Prince Saionji, the last of the Genro, Admiral Okada, the Premier, Mr. Takahashi, the Finance Minister, Admiral Viscount Saito, Keeper of the Privy Seal, Count Makino, former Privy Seal, Admiral Suzuki, Grand Chamberlain, and General Watanabe, the Inspector-General of Military Educa­tion who had succeeded General Mazaki. Japanese houses seldom fasten very securely, and the intention was to murder all these elderly gentlemen in their beds. The chief slaughter took place at the Premier’s official residence, which was comparatively well guarded, and five policemen lost their lives trying to resist the murderers’ entry. At the other houses there was little resistance to overcome. Admiral Saito, who had laboured for seventeen years in repairing the blunders of military men, was stabbed to death, the Vis­countess, who had shared many perils with her husband, being wounded in an attempt to throw herself between him and his murderers. Takahashi, whose financial services to his country were inestimable, was butchered by the soldiery whom he had tried to prevent from ruining the country. General Watanabe, who had dared to replace Mazaki, suffered a like fate. Admiral Suzuki was sorely wounded, but did not die. Prince Saionji, warned by a telephone call that he was in danger, drove from his villa at Okitsu to Shizuoka and claimed the hospitality of the Chief of Police for the night. Makino, whose life had been attempted several times, was adept at avoiding murder, and could not be found at the hot spring resort where he was supposed to be staying.

The Premier provided a touch of comedy in the midst of this horror. He was reported dead, and was laid out. His murderers mounted guard round the house, well satisfied that they were national heroes, and streams of friends came to pay their farewells. But Okada had sought concealment in the servants’ quarters when he learnt that his brother-in- law, Colonel Matsuo, who bore some resemblance to him, had been murdered by mistake. Faithful servants smuggled his clothes to him, and provided him with the huge respirator worn by many Japanese when there is influenza about, a pair of tortoiseshell spectacles completing the disguise.

Mingling with the mourners and paying a tribute of respect to what was supposed to be his own body, the Premier passed out undetected among the numerous other elderly gentlemen in frock coats and top-hats. The first inkling of the truth was in the omission of the Okada family’s name from the Imperial condolences.

Dreadful as these occurrences were, they exhibited a contemptible degree of incompetence on the part of the organisers of a conspiracy which lacked neither elaborateness of planning nor brutality of execution. There were some fourteen hundred men involved, and they showed a certain boldness of conception in their seizure of the War Office and the Metropolitan Police headquarters, but a conspiracy of this sort can only succeed in Japan if the conspirators surround the Throne and make themselves the channel for the issue of Imperial mandates. This was the historic method and as recently as the 1870’s such a conspiracy had only been foiled by the courage and loyalty of the Palace guards. The conspirators had the game in their own hands. They had occupied some of the Government buildings in the immediate neighbourhood of the Palace, and there was nothing to prevent them from taking possession of the person of the Emperor, but the bigger men, who had incited the conspiracy, would not take the risk of appearing in it themselves before it was completely successful. The handful of junior officers, who had been ready enough for massacre, shrank from invading the sacred Palace without an older man to lead them—and so the Showa Restoration miscarried.

All senior officers professed to regard the murderers as rebels. Martial Law was proclaimed, and General Kashii, himself an ultra-patriot, was appointed Martial Law Com­mandant, and took charge of operations. Troops were placed in commanding positions, where they could reduce the conspirators by force, and handbills were distributed from aeroplanes and tanks, calling on them to surrender, informing them of the Emperor’s disapproval of their action, and making it understood that there would be no great severity exercised if they surrendered without further resistance. The force of this argument was so irresistible that the affair ended on the evening of the 29th, without any more violence or bloodshed. The case of the fourteen hundred of the rank and file was soon disposed of. They had acted under the orders of their officers, it was announced, and as a soldier’s first duty is to obey his officers, the question of guilty knowledge and of responsibility was not gone into: they were ordered back to their barracks. Of the officers, the only one with the rank of captain, a handsome young man with the aquiline glare frequently associated with a fanatical temperament, killed himself. The rest, all lieutenants, to the number of seventeen, were tried by court-martial, which, for some unexplained reason, took five months. With them were tried, also by court-martial, a hundred or so civilians, who had had nothing to do with the conspiracy, and whose names were not published, the majority of whom were sentenced to long terms of imprisonment. The seventeen, according to a statement issued by the War Office, were shot. Incidentally the exploit sealed the fate of Colonel Aizawa. He seemed on February 25th to be well on the way for special service in Manchuria; after February 26th it was impossible to give him favourable treatment, and he was shot also.

Documented history often errs in matters of fact, and the recorder of undocumented history cannot hope to be free from error. It is unlikely that the truth concerning the remarkable series of murders that took place on February 26th will ever be revealed, since all concerned are more interested in concealing than in revealing the truth. That the murders and the revolt were parts of the one conspiracy is certain. It was said that the navy felt bitter about it, seeing that the conspirators set out to kill no less than three admirals. If they wanted to murder one of their own generals that was their own affair, but why three admirals? It was not because they were members of a service which the army did not particularly like, but for other reasons. An examination of the list of victims affords some clue to the nature of the conspiracy.

The murder of the Premier was quite natural: it had become almost a tradition to murder the Premier as an indication of dissatisfaction with the government. Besides, Okada had consented to a weakening of Japan’s defence forces, he showed no zeal in the matter of punishing Minobe, and, as a nominee of Saionji, was essentially unsatisfactory. Takahashi had again and again told the army that it was ruining the country and could not have all the money that it asked for. He had been warned when the Okada Cabinet was created that the army wouldn’t have him at any price, but he took office as Finance Minister again when Fujii died. Prince Saionji had long been a thorn in the militarist side. He had gone on living to a preposterous age, and while he lived there was little hope of getting a Premier such as the army wanted, for the Elder Statesman had a con­genital dislike for soldiers. General Watanabe had taken the place of the “strong man,” General Mazaki, and as Hayashi, who had jockeyed Mazaki into resignation, had resigned himself, this probably saved him from the massacre. These reasons were quite sufficient in Japan to account for four of the projected murders, but we still have to account for the determination to kill Saito, Makino, and Suzuki. Makino was a civilian who had a long and distinguished record of public service. In late years he had been Minister of the Imperial Household, and then Keeper of the Privy Seal, and was still regarded as a close friend and adviser of the Emperor. Like Saionji, he had no taste for soldiers, and told the army men plainly on one occasion that he couldn’t have them dragging their intrigues into the Palace. Admiral Saito had succeeded him as Privy Seal, and Saito, though not a statesman of genius, was imperturbably courageous without being fanatical, and would never consent to any extreme measures. Admiral Suzuki, Grand Chamberlain, was a man of similarly stable character. It was quite certain that while these three, to whom, with Prince Saionji, the Emperor would inevitably appeal for counsel, had the entry of the Palace, it would be useless to take possession of the person of the Emperor. Yuasa Kurahei, Minister of the Imperial Household, was a man of much less personal prestige and probably of smaller calibre, and perhaps would not object to shining in the glory of the Showa Restoration, so he was spared. The common reason for what seems at first to be a strangely assorted list of murders is sufficiently plain in the light of these considerations.

That the conspiracy was conceived and executed by a group of young men of whom the senior was Captain Nonaka, nobody even pretended to believe. It was said both in the Diet and in the Press that there were others behind it; but the subject was too dangerous to emphasise or to pursue.

How near success the conspiracy came was shown by the fact that some of the troops ordered to hem in the insurgents joined them instead, and that when the army gave out its bulletins it merely said that groups of officers had visited the houses of So-and-so, “who had died immediately.” While the issue hung in the balance murder was too delicate a thing to mention. The police were as determined as the Vicar of Bray to be on the right side. They would not even allow to be published such details as the army released; they supplied body-guards to all sorts of important persons, and they began industriously to arrest Socialists. The army too gave out a proclamation that the populace must keep cool, and that the army would protect it from the “Reds.” Neither police nor army referred to the murders with the least hint of reprobation.

When the insurgents surrendered and the crisis was averted, the army made a very extraordinary pronouncement. It regretted that the tranquillity of the capital had been disturbed even for a short time, and reminded the public at large that they shared the responsibility, and that it was for them to help in maintaining order and promoting correct ideas, and especially to see that adequate provision was made for defence. So the army remained the saviour of the country and dangerous thought was still the only danger that threatened.

No names were mentioned of men higher in rank than those who openly led the revolt; but General Minami, only lately appointed to the Manchurian dictatorship, was almost immediately recalled, and five out of seven of the Supreme War Council resigned. The Government, of course, resigned, and General Hayashi was not reappointed Minister for War in the new Government.

The appointment of this new Government was the first business. Prince Saionji, once more compelled to leave his peaceful villa, and to repair to the Palace, proposed Prince Konoe, but the Prince declined on grounds of health. To be Premier was certainly not a healthy occupation. Saionji once more made a surprise choice by nominating Hirota. It could hardly be supposed that he liked the school of Toyama Mitsuru, but, after all, it was better than appointing a soldier. Baron Hiranuma was almost the only other civilian that the army extremists would accept, and Saionji abhorred him. In place of the murdered Watanabe, General Nishi had been appointed Inspector-General of Military Education, and he consulted with Prince Kanin, the Chief of the General Staff, regarding the appointment of Minister for War. Their choice fell on General Count Terauchi, son of the General Count Terauchi who had been Premier in 1916-18.

Meanwhile Hirota compiled his list of Ministers. When it was complete, General Terauchi looked over it, and informed him that it would not do—that the list included party men and could only be regarded as an attempt to maintain the system which must be reformed. He proceeded to reproach the Premier. The army, he pointed out, had purged itself by the resignation of some of its chief generals; the political world must also purge itself, since, as the army had already announced, it was also responsible for the untoward events of February 26th. An example of the military criterion in the choice of Cabinet Ministers was General Terauchi’s objection to Mr. Ohara, as Minister of Justice, whose con­tinuance in office he would not allow because of his luke­warmness in the matter of punishing Dr. Minobe.

With the exception of Takahashi, none of those marked down for murder on February 26th was a party politician; moreover, there was a “national” Government in power; so the excuse that served for Inukai’s murder, that it was the natural outcome of party corruption, would not serve here. The massacre was immensely popular in the army. Its protagonists had to suffer, like the Forty-seven Ronin, but that made the whole thing glorious and heroic. The army acted as though the revolt was the work of the whole body and had succeeded. It gave out a number of pronouncements on subjects of the day. For instance, it set forth four principles for the guidance of the new Cabinet :

(1)     Vindication of the National Polity (Kokutai).

(2)     Stabilisation of the livelihood of the people.

(3)     Reform of Foreign Policy.

(4)     Strengthening of National Defence.

The second of these looks like one of the “Three Principles” of Dr. Sun Yat-sen, and, no doubt, was sincerely desired, but for the time being it had to give way to the fourth. In its new orders the army said that it could not tolerate liberalism, that internationalism and individualism must be banished, and nationalism and “the Japanese principle” promoted.

The army let it be known that it concerned itself not only with the physical part of defence: it was the final authority on finance, economics, foreign policy, education, and con­stitutional government. Undue importance, it declared, was ascribed to science in the universities. Rather than science, moral ideas congruent with the ideals of the Foundation of the Country and with the true mission of Imperial Japan must be inculcated.

Other pronouncements guaranteed the sacred inalter­ableness of the Constitution granted by the Meiji Tenno in 1889, but required the abolition (by amalgamation) of some of the civilian Ministries and the creation of new military Ministries of Air and Propaganda, as well as a new National Policy Council like the General Staff but less trammelled. Army economics included a new plan of taxation for “the execution of the Asiatic policy.” ¹

Much that was thus flourished over the heads of the nation was held over to a more convenient season: the army contented itself for the time being with a censorship of the Premier’s choice of Ministers, and a louder voice in policy. General Terauchi actually nominated the Finance Minister, Mr. Baba, formerly Governor of the Hypothec Bank, who announced, as soon as he was appointed, that the Takahashi financial policy was mistaken and that something would have to be done about taxation; whereupon there was such a sharp drop on the Stock Exchange that he hurriedly declared he did not mean anything like that, but that everybody should remain calm and convinced that the Government would not harm anybody. This seemed to cool the military ardour a little. Perhaps some of the military men remembered that Marshal Chang Tso-lin had once tried to check a decline in exchange by lopping off heads of stockbrokers; and though their economic ideas were as crude as the Marshal’s, they re­membered that the medicine had not been effectual.

Some better reason than the corruption of the political parties had to be found for the murders of February 26th, and one which justified and gave continuity to what was evidently a feature of military policy. The matter proved comparatively simple. This time it was the “new bureaucracy” which had offended. As mentioned elsewhere, Japanese administration tends to be excessively bureaucratic, and this tendency seemed to become more pronounced under the “national” governments, though the cause of this may have been the growing complications of ordinary life rather than the abeyance into which the party system had fallen. The “new bureaucracy” were said to be tyrannical and selfish and to act as though the country belonged to them.

They were obstinate and would not listen to advice, and certain warm-blooded young men with their country’s interests at heart could tolerate it no longer. In brief, the civilian had not the same sense of duty as the military man, and the reforms for which the murders of 1932 had called were still uncompleted in 1936. Most of Inukai’s murderers were already at liberty in February 1936, but they did not participate in the new series of murders.

In the course of explaining the murders there was a new development. It had been announced soon after the murders that the civilians arrested were “notorious Rightists,” but now it was discovered that they were “Leftists,” and had been guilty of incitement to violence. In 1932, the Minister of Justice had made a similar charge regarding the patriotic murders of that year; yet nobody appeared to see any incon­sistency in thus allocating the patriotism to the murderers and the guilt to the “Reds.”

 

CHAPTER XXVIII. THE SUN GODDESS EXTENDS HER KINGDOM

 

It is unfortunate that members of the military profession, instead of being exemplars of a courage that nothing can disturb, live in a state of perpetual panic. The citizens of Tokyo, on the 26th of February, as on other days, had their living to earn and went about their work as usual, in spite of the tramp of armed men, the efflorescence of barbed wire, the rumbling of tanks and gun-carriages, the thunder of the captains and the shouting. In three days the affair was at an end, but the army did not recover its nerve for months, but kept the capital under martial law. It may be that there was reason for this. When General Mazaki was manoeuvred out of the Military Triumvirate, a number of senior officers were shelved with him. These the insurgents would have acclaimed as their leaders if their coup had been successful, and the more moderate party in the army were not easily reassured of their loyalty. The free pardon extended to the rank and file prevented discontent from manifesting itself in the ranks; but the heads of the army, moderates or extremists, did not breathe freely again until the young leaders of the insurgents were all shot. Only then could they pretend to themselves to show a united front.

Meanwhile they realised that the proclamation of martial law did not mean that the business of government was superseded. In accordance with custom the formation of a new Cabinet was followed by the summoning of a special session of the Diet, and there was much speculation as to how far the existence of martial law would be inimical to the privilege that the members enjoyed of speaking their mind. No newspaper dared say a word in criticism of the army, but, as everybody knew that the lieutenants under arrest were not the real conspirators, there was much suppressed indignation at such doings, and enormous crowds attended the funerals of Admiral Saito and Mr. Takahashi: it was a demonstration far beyond accounting for as the curiosity of sightseers.

When the Diet opened the Minister for War gave a perfunctory and colourless statement regarding the murders, hinting that the Communists were behind them, though that was obviously untrue. Mr. Saito Takao, a Minseito member, then rose, and spoke with great solemnity and deliberation to a hushed house. He disclaimed any intention to create prejudice against the army, but pointed out, in regard to these political murders, that the young soldiers who participated in them were disobeying an injunction of the Meiji Tenno against officers concerning themselves with politics, as a soldier’s duties, properly fulfilled, took up his whole time. The disastrous effects of young soldiers dis­obeying the Emperor were before them. He recalled that dreadful day, the 15th of May, 1932, when the Premier was murdered by young naval and military officers. The pro­curator at the subsequent trial did his duty. He demanded the death penalty, with the consequence that his own life was threatened: his family had to be secretly removed to a place of safety and his house strongly guarded. And behold the independence of the judiciary! The murderers all received comparatively light sentences. Much heavier punish­ments were meted out to certain civilians who on that same bloody day threw some bombs, which failed to explode, at the power houses. The attitude of the Services over the 1932 murders was responsible for this greater tragedy they had just witnessed. Twenty young officers were under arrest. Did they receive no inspiration from any of higher rank than themselves?—this was a very important question.

Those accustomed to parliamentary procedure in demo­cratic countries can hardly conceive the high degree of courage that it needed on the part of Mr. Saito to make this speech. Though a big man with a hearty manner, General Terauchi made a poor show of replying. He said that he thought Mr. Saito’s questions were very pertinent, and heartily agreed with him. The army’s political views must be expressed only through the Minister for War. The rank and file in the recent trouble must be regarded as innocent: they had obeyed orders and a soldier’s first duty was obedience.

Emboldened by Mr. Saito, a less discreet gentleman, Mr. Tsumura, in the House of Peers, had his say in the Upper House. The rank and file, he said, were fine fellows, as ready to die as the Three Human Bombs: he was sorry he could not say as much for the officers: here was one who murdered his superior, was condemned to death, and then appealed against his sentence. Was this yamato damashii (the spirit of Japan)?

There was a tremendous uproar. Nobody stood by Mr. Tsumura, who got so alarmed that he apologised abjectly, paid a round of visits, apologising everywhere, and finally resigned his membership of the Upper House, which alone saved him from consequences more dire. Yet it was true; the miserable Aizawa had appealed. But parliamentary privilege could not stand against martial law. Nor could any civil rights be protected. Under martial law the arrested civilians were tried by court-martial, in camera, without benefit of counsel or right of appeal, and sentenced, some to fifteen years and some to life imprisonment; and there is no reason to believe that they had had anything whatever to do with the rising. One arrested civilian, however, appears to have escaped the court-martial, and that was Mr. Kuhara Fusanosuke, a leading member of the Seiyukai, and a man of much wealth, whose arrest was kept secret for a long time. He was supposed to have financed the rising—for large-scale murders, however patriotic, cost money—but the charge fell through and, after some months, he was discharged.

Mr. Hirota’s Government had by no means an easy time. It was engaged on a diplomatic offensive against China and an administrative defensive against the army. The army’s idea of saving money was to abolish several Ministries; but it was also very insistent on the appointment of a “Minister without Portfolio” to be duly approved by the army, who would act as a sort of Dictator of Policy. The army in November issued 300,000 copies of a pamphlet on arma­ments, in which it pointed out not only how necessary armaments were for securing the country’s safety, but how their manufacture brought prosperity to the whole country.

The basic position was that the army had to maintain its prestige and to find a diversion of the public mind from home discontents. This, of course, was found in China, As much as possible was made of the Russian menace, but the Soviet Government had been so persistently unaggressive that this was a very ineffective bogey. With China it was a different matter. There were so many Japanese there that it was always easy to find cause for complaint. There was, for instance, a Japanese sailor who apparently got killed in a Shanghai brothel; there was a Japanese journalist who, against the orders of his consul, plunged into the midst of a civil disturbance in Szechuan and lost his life; and there was a Japanese drug-seller in Kwangtung killed in some way. These set the whole Press howling against the hostility of all Chinese to Japan, though in Manchuria, after five years’ peace and self-government, Japanese soldiers on an average of thirty a month were being killed.

Conversations were always being renewed at Nanking and it was ominously declared that the price of Japan’s friendship was the settlement on her own terms of over two hundred “outstanding issues.” The Japanese demands re­garding North China were extraordinary: all troops owing obedience to the Nanking Government were to be with­drawn; more Japanese military posts were to be created; the tariff was to be revised in accordance with Japan’s wishes; and any official whom Japan found to be anti­Japanese was to be dismissed. Naturally General Chiang Kai-shek found it impossible to accede to such demands; and the Miyako, of Tokyo, without realising the admission that it was making, said that Chiang in the last extremity would fight rather than lose his influence in China. The steady increase of that influence had a peculiarly infuriating effect on Japanese critics. His success in getting on good terms with the Canton group was referred to as though it were the acme of treachery. His refusal to allow the Japanese to fight his battles for him against the Communists who had got round to the north was regarded as an outrage.

Then came that rather mysterious incident, the “capture” of Chiang Kai-shek at Sian, when the Japanese suddenly realised that, unaccommodating as he had sometimes been, he was the least hostile of the men at that moment con­stituting the Government of China. But there was a sense of injury and frustration when his captors apologised and ranged themselves under his banner, and the Communists affirmed that in the present circumstances the unity of China was the most important thing. For some time past there had been an increasing demand from the Japanese side that Japan should assist China in the suppression of the Communists. So long as the Communists were on the south or the west, indeed, the Nanking Government was welcome to go on wasting its resources in fighting them; but when they got round to the north, they might join hands with the Soviet Government, and Japan had all these years been saving the world from the devastating flood of Bolshevism which was conventionally supposed to be about to break over Asia. Without this bogey to invoke, there was no excuse at all for Japan to be pressing forward in North China except that she must have an “outlet.”

Such was the position when the regular session of the Diet got to work at the beginning of 1937. The army had made little headway. Their own nominee to the Finance portfolio was a broken reed who was afraid to impose taxes with the necessary boldness; and as for the other reforms, nobody seemed to be willing to abolish ministries; the idea of a ministry for the direction of policy aroused no en­thusiasm; the only army project which received any support was the nationalisation of electrical supplies, and the interested capitalists put every obstacle they could think of in the way of that. The two great political parties were more in agreement than they had ever been before, in the face of the common danger of even the semblance of democratic institutions being abolished. Mr. Hamada, a leading Seiyukai member, who had been President of the House, denounced in the strongest terms the condition to which the military dictatorship had reduced the legislative body. Even in the House of Representatives, he said, nobody dared utter a word of criticism of army policies.

General Terauchi, the Minister for War, proceeded to show that while his capacities as a dictator might be superb, his qualities as a statesman were negligible. Again and again he demanded a dissolution of the Diet, and at last he compelled his colleagues to seek imperial sanction for a suspension of the session. He had antagonised the whole Diet with the exception of Adachi’s handful, the Kokumin Domei, who desired to shine in a blaze of patriotic splendour. Hardly was the session suspended when the Government resigned: it was simply impossible to work with such a Minister for War. Prince Saionji, of course, was called upon to recommend a new Premier to the Throne, and there seemed to be nothing for it but to have a military Premier. He nominated General Ugaki, whose eminence and services as well as his statesmanlike qualities, entitled him to pre­cedence of all other officers. For four and a half days Ugaki endeavoured to obey the Emperor’s command that he should form a Cabinet; but the army was against him. General Count Terauchi, lost to all sense of samurai dignity or soldierly decency, declared that if Ugaki wanted to see him he could call on him, for he was certainly not going to call on Ugaki. This, of course, amounted to a military revolt against the Premier, for no other general dared accept the War Ministry. The quarrel with Ugaki was that he had consented to a reduction in the army during Hamaguchi’s premiership, being convinced that the country could not afford to keep up the existing numbers and mechanise as well.

So General Ugaki had to report to the Emperor that the army which pretended to be the fine flower of loyalty, had re­jected the imperial nominee.

Saionji’s advice was once more in request. This time he chose Hayashi. Nothing could be said against Hayashi’s capacity for rising to a patriotic occasion. He had been prominent in the Manchurian coup. He was Commander-in- Chief in Korea in September 1931, and, without waiting for orders of any sort, he railed his troops across the border into Manchuria, an act which fitted in marvellously with the dispositions and actions of the Kwantung Army, and con­tributed much to the overnight seizure of Manchuria. It was reported on that occasion that the Japanese Foreign Office was astonished; but no astonishment was evinced by the War Office. Nevertheless, though he was so ready for energetic action abroad, he had no taste for homicidal policies at home, as he showed when he dispersed the group headed by General Mazaki. But though General Terauchi had declared that he would have the Diet dissolved as many times as was necessary, he was not prepared to reject as many military Premiers as Saionji cared to nominate. So Hayashi was allowed to form a Cabinet, though it was a matter of sufficient difficulty to make it necessary to swear in Ministers holding two and even three portfolios.

So passed the Hirota Cabinet, brought in by military insubordination and thrust out by military arrogance. It had accomplished one feat—the anti-Comintem pact with Ger­many, with its implication of moral support in continental activities; but by this very act it wrecked the Fisheries Treat} with Russia, which was very necessary if Japan’s missior really was to “keep the peace of the Far East.” Unfortunately for peace, General Count Terauchi had to be offered the pos of Inspector-General of Military Education when Genera Sugiyama, who occupied it, was appointed to the War Ministry.

The Diet was summoned, but after a few meetings, at which it appeared nobody was willing to support the new Government, it was dissolved, and a general election ordered for April 30th, 1937.

Meanwhile there was some talk of adopting a less blatant manner. Two commercial missions were arranged, one to Europe and America, and the other to China, and it was also reported that many of the previous demands on China were to be dropped. The impression was created abroad that the army had had a set-back, that civil government was to come to the fore, and that there was to be a “new deal⁵’ for China. Mr. Kawagoe, the Ambassador in China, had apparently reported, with approval rather than rancour, that China now was really united and that Chinese nation­alism, sc long a disappointed aspiration, had become an accomplished fact.

But it was mainly domestic troubles which diverted atten­tion from foreign conquest. Munition-making might minimise unemployment, but it aggravated other ills, and since the beginning of the year prices had gone up with a rush, and there was a record number of industrial strikes. There was also an unprecedentedly unfavourable balance of trade. There was only one party pledged to support the Govern­ment—a new and feeble body called the Showakai—and when polling day came, the Hayashi Government found that its pledged supporters had dwindled from 24 to 18. Labour (the Shakai Taishuto, or “Social Mass”) increased from 18 to 36. and the two big parties were almost even—the Minseito 179 and the Seiyukai 175. The Government found itself without a single popular measure to propose, and resigned, to be succeeded by Prince Konoe, who, because he belonged to an ancient and aristocratic but non-military family, was supposed to be modernly liberal in outlook, which got the new Cabinet a good Press at home and abroad. The new Government did not represent the Diet any more than the old one had done—perhaps less, as it was remarked that it included fewer party men. Indeed, Prince Konoe appealed to the Representatives to put the State above party, and especially not to let party disputes intrude into foreign affairs—but these were old slogans, and since the 1932 murders the activities of the parties had been confined to demanding a restoration of constitutional government, with­out getting it.

Dr. Baba, who had failed badly as Finance Minister, became Home Minister in the new Cabinet, and the militarists wanted him to be chairman of a Planning Com­mittee—an attempt to realise the “Corporate State”—but this proposal was so unwelcome that Dr. Baba resigned, the “strong” Admiral Suetsugu taking his place—a nomina­tion to which the militarists could raise no reasonable objection.

The endeavour to come to amicable terms with China was little affected—if, indeed, such an endeavour was being made, which was sometimes very difficult to believe. Some of the diplomatists may have personally desired such an agreement, but they were so subservient to the army, which was seeking excuses for an attack on China, that they persisted in putting forward conditions which the Nanking Government could not accept, especially in regard to jurisdiction in North China. So much was said later about China’s insensate hostility that it is necessary to look back on the contemporary evidence which is conveniently forgotten. In June 1937 Admiral Takahashi, a Japanese War Councillor, returning from a tour of the Yangtse valley, spoke of his surprise at the great unification and constructive growth that he had witnessed. The “New Life” movement was making great headway; finance and defence showed a new strength; there was a social purification and a revival of the Confucian spirit. He laid special emphasis on the fact that he could detect no traces of anti-Japonism, though there was a growing resistance to Japan’s penetration, and he said that the two things must be clearly distinguished. There was no evidence of a boycott anywhere, he concluded. At the same time as Admiral Takahashi returned, Mr. Munakata, a high official of the Bank of Japan, also came back from a Chinese tour. He declared that Japan must revise her ideas of China. World conditions had improved, and, thank? to her currency reform, China’s economic outlook was now much brighter. There was a spirit of hope and enthusiasm, and the Chinese Government and public would welcome Japan’s help in economic reconstruction; Chinese business men and bankers were in favour of economic co-operation with Japan.

Unfortunately, when concrete plans were discussed, the Japanese wanted entire direction of every co-operative pro­ject, and could not bring themselves to negotiate with the Chinese on equal terms. Moreover, the increasing economic pressure in Japan made it necessary for the Japanese, in any economic deal, to have a large profit and a quick one. Japan had been carefully feeling the diplomatic pulse. She had already suppressed all foreign interests in Manchukuo and declined to pay damages for wrongs done there; early in 1937 she cancelled all the remaining “perpetual leases” in Japan without compensation. British subjects were the chief losers, but the British Government made no protest, and the other Governments whose nationals were concerned also remained silent.

In a country like China, overrun with many thousands of Japanese, often of the “toughest” kind, there are always incidents when they are required; but though the Japanese Press may shout for vengeance, the military men choose their own time and manufacture the necessary incident. Perhaps sometimes the men on the spot rush their superiors a little, but that may be only an illusion created by the pretence of making a settlement. In this case the Japanese troops in the north furnished the excuse. On July 7th, outside a town not far from Peiping they indulged in some “night manoeuvres” of so realistic a character that a Chinese military post thought an attack was in full career, and fired a few rifles. In the skirmish that followed a couple of Japanese were killed and at least ten times as many Chinese.

Had the Japanese had any wish for peace, an amicable settlement could have been come to the next day; but instead of that they tackled General Sung Che-yuan, who was commander of the 29th Army and Chairman of the Hopei-Chahar Political Council. In the latter capacity he had been continually urged to declare his independence of Nanking, but this he steadfastly refused to do; now as commander of the 29th Army, he was ordered to send that force away from Peiping. After a slight show of resistance it withdrew, and on August 8th, the Japanese occupied the ancient capital. The Japanese army loudly announced its intention of effecting a local settlement, so that hostilities should not extend; but this was simply a denial of the authority of the Central Government, and an attempt to separate North China by force after other methods had failed.

Throughout the negotiations with Nanking, it had been constantly urged that in North China there must be no troops owing obedience to Nanking; this pressure only con­solidated China; and the more consolidated China became under the direction of General Chiang Kai-shek, the more bitterly was the generalissimo assailed by the Japanese army and its satellites. With a speed that indicated full preparation, Japanese troops were hurried into North China, and, by way of creating terror, bombs were dropped into the thickly populated Chinese quarter of Tientsin.

Chinese troops were already on their way to the north, so it was decided to make an attack on the capital, though that was far inland. A couple of Japanese were sent to “take” the aerodrome at Hungjao, a piece of audacity which, a few years before, might have been successful. They were shot by the Chinese sentry, which was equally satisfactory, because it furnished an excuse for operations which had hitherto been entirely lacking. Such action, however, had to be taken at once or not at all, since an army cannot be dispatched with no better excuse than the shooting of a trespasser. But the Japanese navy was in a state of greater readiness than it had been in 1932. It had a special source of strength in the large fortified barracks, built in defiance of all treaty limitations, at Hongkew Park, at the north end of Shanghai. As in 1932, therefore, it launched its attack, and waited for the Japanese army to come to the rescue. This it did with the expected promptitude.

Thus far the 1931-2 programme had been followed—the attack in the north followed by a large-scale diversion at Shanghai in order to prevent an effective dispute of the hastily-snatched victory. But conditions had greatly changed: in 1932 Chiang Kai-shek was so uncertain of his own position that he could not effectively succour the valiant 19th Route Army, which had defended the marshes north and west of Shanghai so desperately. Now he had an ample supply of men who displayed the most desperate valour. Far inferior still to the Japanese in mechanisation, they set an example to which history could offer few parallels in the devotion with which they sacrificed their lives to hold up and even beat back troops with infinitely superior equipment. In 1932 there was hardly a plane to meet the Japanese bombers, but in 1937-8 the Chinese, though still far inferior, put up many a good air battle.

General Matsui, one of the leading chauvinists in the army, whom General Hayashi had tried to sidetrack, flew over to take command in the north, and later proceeded to Shanghai, which became the most important centre of the campaign. The liberal and pacific Premier, Prince Konoe, became the obedient echo of the army, and promised to “beat China to her knees.” To double the taxes and raise the people to a high pitch of patriotic enthusiasm and an unquestioning belief in the righteousness of their cause, was an easy matter, all policy having been directed to this end for years past.

Before even Shanghai was taken, the Japanese bombed Nanking and Canton, besides many other places, and blockaded the whole coast to Canton—and beyond. The bombing was pure terrorism, but the Japanese, rather than confess that their frightful methods had failed to terrorise, declared that they were such bad marksmen that, aiming at arsenals, they had only hit dwelling-houses.

Perhaps nothing was more revealing of the Japanese objectives than the triumphal march through the Inter­national Settlement at Shanghai which they staged after the Chinese troops had been compelled to withdraw at the end of September. Its object was twofold—to demonstrate to the Chinese the contempt in which they held the Powers, against whose wishes they made this display, and to provoke such disturbances as would provide a plausible reason for putting the whole city under martial law.

The Chinese resistance after they had been driven out of Shanghai was much weaker, which was to be expected in view of the terrible losses suffered. The Japanese pushed on, committing much unnecessary destruction at Soochow, and captured Nanking, the Government retiring into the interior, but never losing its effective organisation. The Japanese excesses in Nanking were horrible, but calculated. Men under discipline must have a little relaxation now and then.

In the north, conquests were easier and movements much more rapid than in the Yangtse region; but though conquests seemed easy at the beginning, it was by no means easy to hold captured railways when guerrilla bands were constantly attacking, and movement slowed down. The vital lines in China are those from Peiping via Tientsin and Nanking to Shanghai, and from Peiping to Hankow. There is an im­portant chord line from Hsuchow to Kaifeng. The recently completed line from Hankow to Canton makes it possible to travel from Canton to Paris by rail. Before Japan can claim to hold China she must have undisputed control of all these lines, and at the end of eight months’ fighting on an unprecedented scale she was far from having that.

When the Chinese Government retreated from Nanking, the Japanese army announced that it would not in future deal with General Chiang Kai-shek; but this did not shake the country’s loyalty to him—and that is the most surprising of all the phenomena in modern China. But though armies march and countermarch, destroy and devastate, the people must go on as best they can. Over large areas of China the spring-time sowing of 1938 must be impossible, and in the next twelve months there may be famine on a scale that even Asia has never seen before; but where communal life exists, civilised people will organise it. In her own defence Japan has set up puppet governments in Peiping and Nanking— without as yet setting bounds to their jurisdiction. The men composing these may not be utterly the creatures of Japan, and if not, they will become less and less so. It is possible that Japan’s megalomania contemplates the formation of a federa­tion of States like Manchukuo, all overrun with Japanese officials and all utterly subservient to Japan. There are demands already for Shinto shrines, such as have become the symbol of Japanese conquest in Korea, Formosa, Manchukuo, Shantung, and Shanghai. Shinto zealots have declared that the kingdom of the Sun Goddess covers the whole earth.

In Japan itself, a hard working and hard faring populace may not always find its heart uplifted by such a consumma­tion, even if we presume that it will come about. The Chinese are by no means hopeless of being able to resist Until an exasperated Japan pulls down its false gods. The country is not yet completely submissive, though it has little freedom left. The Shakai Taishuto, which scored so heavily in the elections of April 30, 1937, passed a vote of thanks to the army at its general meeting in December of the same year, and solemnly abjured class consciousness for “nation consciousness.” The Diet in its 1938 session was tame and passed practically all the Bills set before it; but the army did not have its way completely either over the plans for economic mobilisation or the militarisation of all electrical supplies. A significant army order was one that, after six months of war, forbade assemblies at railway stations when the troop trains left, whereas up to that time it had been a sacred duty to see the heroes off.

For many years past the army has been building up its plans for the conquest of China. The dissensions in Europe have created the opportunity; but China, which formerly knew nothing of nationalism because it knew of nothing except its own civilisation, has become a nation—late in the day but perhaps not too late to preserve its existence. Japan has tried to destroy the culture from which she drew her own civilisation. If China resists to the end, the universities and colleges that the invader has destroyed will rise again, but the world will regret the passing of a great civilisation that cared more for the gracious arts of life than for the tarnished glories of conquest.

 

NOTES

Page 13.—Mr. Eugene Chen (Chen Yu-jen) was born in Trini­dad, and was master of a very forcible English style, though, on the other hand, he suffered from the lack of a sound Chinese education. He attracted a good deal of attention about 1913 as Editor of the Peking Gazette^ and afterwards as a member of Dr. Sun Yat-sen’s Government in Canton. In 1927 the Canton group formed a separate Government in Canton, having broken with the Nanking Government, and in 1931, when feeling was very tense over General Chiang Kai-shek’s denunciations of Japanese doings in China, Chen, on behalf of the Canton group, visited Japan, where he stayed from July 22nd till August 14th, nominally on a sightseeing tour, but the newspaper reporters described him as denouncing Chiang Kai-shek bitterly. Their great leader, the late Dr. Sun Yat-sen, he said, had declared that China could only hope to prosper if she were on friendly terms with Japan, and Chiang was disobeying those injunctions. He afterwards had interviews with Baron Shidehara and the military leaders. So far as can be gathered, he proposed that if Japan would recognise the Cantonese Government as the Government of China, he was prepared to offer, in his capacity as Foreign Minister, advantageous terms for the settlement of the Man­churian difficulty. It was a strange reversal of the position when Dr. Sun Yat-sen’s Japanese visitors assured him that his Canton Government would be recognised if he made a statement that he did not consider Manchuria and Mongolia integral parts of China. Baron Shidehara reminded Mr. Chen that it was Japan’s accepted doctrine that Manchuria was an integral part of China, to which Mr. Chen readily assented, but proposed that, instead of continuing to allow Manchuria to be garrisoned with troops which were liable to come into collision with the Japanese, and which, while consuming the taxpayer’s money, did not ensure entire immunity from bandit outrages, it would be better if Manchuria were entirely demilitarised, and the policing of the whole region left in the care of the Japanese, always with the proviso that China’s sovereignty was unimpaired.

Apparently this proposal appealed strongly to Baron Shidehara, but he was not prepared to interfere so drastically in the affairs of China as to denounce the Nanking Government and recognise the Canton group in its place. In the troubled days that followed he said on more than one occasion that if it were possible to treat with a body like the Canton Government, or if the Canton Government could only amalgamate with that of Nanking, he thought there would be no great difficulty in arriving at a satis­factory settlement. With the military leaders Mr. Chen made no progress. They did not like the Cantonese and preferred to make their own arrangements about Manchuria. When at length an amalgamation was contrived, Mr. Eugene Chen was left out and General Chiang Kai-shek left in—but by that time the Japanese military party had had their way in Manchuria.

Page 16.—Michael Borodin arrived in Canton in October 1923 with a letter of introduction to Dr. Sun Yat-sen from Karahan, Soviet Ambassador in Peking (shot as a Trotskyist in December 1937). He was highly esteemed by Dr. Sun as an adviser on revolutionary method and on political organisation generally, and he was an inspiring force to the Chinese Communists and even to the non-Communist members of the Kuomintang. There was also in Canton a Soviet emissary, M. N. Roy, a headlong person of less reliable judgment than Borodin. On the strength of Roy’s reports Stalin telegraphed on June 1, 1927, instructing Borodin to form a Communist army and adopt a more militant policy. Borodin, realising that this would mean an immediate and fatal break with the Kuomintang, was unwilling to make the contents of the telegram known, but Roy disclosed’ them. The majority of the Chinese Communists, who agreed with Borodin on the necessity of maintaining friendship and co­operation with the Kuomintang, drove Roy back to Russia. On July 15th, the Kuomintang adopted a resolution to expel the Communists, and Borodin thereupon resigned and returned to Russia. He received thereafter a much less conspicuous official appointment in the Caucasus. The Communist purge proved to be a very bloody affair, and plunged China into civil war for nearly ten years.

Pages 29, 67, 84.—Chientao, called Kanto by the Japanese, a hilly region across the border from North-west Korea, settled chiefly by Koreans, but definitely demarcated as Chinese territory in a treaty concluded in 1909. Its Korean population was greatly increased when Japan annexed Korea, and, when propagandists used to refer to the two million Japanese subjects in Manchuria who needed protection, seven-eighths of the number consisted of these emigrants. Naturally it was always a strong­hold of bitterly hostile Koreans. The Japanese established consulates there and did more policing than the Chinese. In 1920 they invaded the place without a by-your-leave in order to “punish anti-Japanese Koreans,” burnt churches and houses, and killed many Koreans. There was some desperate work there at the beginning of the “Manchurian affair” in 1931, of which no account has ever appeared in print. And there were monstrous mass trials of Kanto Communists which dragged on in camera in Seoul for long after. Yet for the English reader Chientao is a place for a pious pilgrimage—at least in fancy. Stella Benson once lived there. The climate nearly killed her, but she wrote a beautiful book about it—Tobit Transplanted.

Page 40.—Chang Tsung-chang was a thoroughly bad type of warlord. He was a cruel oppressor, and his exactions drove many of his suffering subjects to Manchuria in the years before the “independence.” The Japanese found it to their interest to keep him in power in Shantung, and provided him with a Japanese concubine, with the usual result. He was as pusil­lanimous as he was gigantic, and always avoided a fight. He was also a great boaster and declared that the Japanese had offered to make him Emperor of Manchuria. When things were uncom­fortable in China he used to pay a visit to Japan; but after the creation of Manchukuo the Japanese seemed to have no further use for him. Then he was reported as saying that if China had ten years’ peace he would undertake the reconquest of Man­churia. Perhaps a thought so dangerous was remembered against him. He was assassinated at Tsinan station on September 3, 1932. Japanese reports said that the murder was committed at the instance of the Young Marshal.

Page 96.—“The Soong Dynasty.” Perhaps the phrase was invented in Japan, where “dynasty” for anything Chinese was almost a term of vituperation. The father and son who succes­sively ruled in Mukden were spoken of as the “Chang Dynasty.” The “Soong family” would be a more appropriate term. The three very talented and charming daughters of a mother as remarkable as themselves married respectively Dr. Sun Yat-sen, Mr. H. H. Kung, and General Chiang Kai-shek. Messrs. Kung and Chiang, along with a son of Mrs. Soong, were the mainstay and the brains of the Kuomintang Government. T. V. Soong was probably the best Finance Minister China ever had, and his three sisters had an immense influence for good in the New China which they were building up but which Japan determined to destroy.

Page 97.—In the endeavour to shape a policy, or at least to find moral support, Baron Wakatsuki, the Premier, in the early days of October 1931, paid a round of calls on Prince Saionji, Admiral Count Yamamoto, Count Kiyoura, and Mr. Takahashi. These were the four men living who had held the office of Premier, and Wakatsuki’s consultations with them were interesting for this reason: When Prince Saionji laid down the reins of office for the last time in 1912, he received an Imperial Command to be ready to serve the Throne at all times. This was regarded as placing him among the Genro, or Elder Statesmen, whose few survivors were well stricken in years. When, four years later, Marquis Okuma received a similar command, it was suggested that the Genro as an institution was to be kept in being by the appointment of men who had been twice Premier. But Okuma had always spoken scornfully of the Elder Statesmen, and never attended their councils—if he was ever invited. Admiral Yama­moto’s second brief and inglorious essay in premiership was followed by no such marked acknowledgment from the Throne. As for Count Kiyoura, though a man of great prestige and formerly President of the Privy Council, he had been Premier only once, briefly and unsuccessfully. Takahashi had been Premier once, taking the place of the murdered Hara in 1921. The idea of a Council composed of former premiers was no more talked of after Okuma refused to take his place among them, but Wakatsuki’s round of visits suggests that to be Premier is recognised as giving some lifelong authority. One important duty of the Elder Statesmen was to advise the Throne on the choice of a Premier. Saionji, at the age of eighty-eight, still (1938) has this final word, but of late years there has been a confabula­tion between other elders—the President of the Privy Council, the Minister of the Imperial Household, the Keeper of the Privy Seal, etc. When in 1913 Prince Katsura, a very masterful soldier, became Keeper of the Privy Seal, it was regarded almost as a revival of the Shogunate, but he died very soon after; and though another soldier, Marshal Prince Yamagata (one of the Genro), was the real ruler of Japan till his death in 1922, he sought no office to reinforce his authority.

Page 105.—General Chang Ching-huei, though he seemed to be very disappointing at first, later became Premier of Manchukuo—a position in which lack of military qualities and initiative was a recommendation rather than a bar ‘zone’ in the sense that any international document has used the term to apply to an area specifically delimited by mutual agree­ment between China and Japan. Not only is the area of the South Manchuria Railway’s lands not delimited by agreement, but it is constantly, though slowly, expanding in size, a procedure which is entirely in accord with the original 1896 railway contract, taken over by Japan, which provided that lands might be pro­gressively added for the use of the railway. . . . Although the term ‘railway zone’ is used almost invariably by Japanese writers to refer to the South Manchuria Railway’s lands, and very frequently by Chinese and foreign writers, it is, in fact, a misnomer. Its use creates a presumption of a well-defined area, limited to a uniform width on either side of the railway itself, a presumption which is entirely contrary to fact.” (C. Walter Young, Japanese Jurisdiction in the South Manchuria Railway Areas, Johns Hopkins Press, p. 140.) The zone in some places included whole towns. It was the area, generally speaking, in which the Chinese found it more convenient to permit Japanese pretensions than to prevent them.

Page 116.—When Inukai was murdered by a gang com­prising both military and naval officers, it is much more likely that they were signifiying their objections to his advocacy of civilian Defence Ministers than their dislike of party corruption, Inukai being one of the least corrupt of men; but the plea of stamping out corruption was generally accepted as genuine. W. H. Chamberlin, in Japan Over Asia, suggests that the close­ness of his connection with Toyama saves Mr. Hirota from being on the murder list. It did not save Inukai, but on the other hand, Inukai was not, like Hirota, a protege of the Ronin leader. There was a good deal of prejudice in the Services against the great firms, and the “party corruption” plea was partly founded on the fact that their patronage of politics tended to increase and to be not merely partisan. A Seiyukai Government was at one time known alternatively as a Mitsui Government and a Minseito Government as a Mitsubishi Government; but the firms often found their interests identical, and both of them con­tributed liberally to both parties in order to get a suitable iron and steel policy adopted. Because there was some military dislike of the big firms, it was often assumed by writers on Japan that they were as much devoted to peace as the army was to war, but there is no reason to believe this, for they never made such huge profits as when Japan was “keeping the peace” by making war.

Page 118.—Notable murders in the previous reign: the most notable was that of Hara Takashi in November 1921, by a minor railway employee who sought heroism. He was liberated from prison early in Showa and was lionised by the Press. Well satisfied with his achievement, he announced his intention of becoming a Buddhist priest. Mr. Yasuda, a great banker, reputed to be Japan’s richest man, was stabbed by a “ronin,” who committed suicide. The murderer’s funeral was attended by a great concourse—or rather two great concourses—one of political bullies and ruffians, and the other of class-conscious labour, the latter well pleased that a man who had a reputation for merciless hardness had met his end. In 1913 there was the murder of Mr. Abe, who had much to do in the direction of China policy. The murderer, to signify his opinion of the weakness of that policy, spread a map of China on the floor, sat on it, and disembowelled himself. Then there was Captain Amakasu, who, shortly after the great earthquake of 1923, murdered Osugi, Japan’s leading Socialist, his wife, and adopted child. As soon as the conquest of Manchuria began he was appointed head of a special police force. In 1920 a lawyer, Yonemura, shot a Socialist dead without provocation, and was let off scot-free, as he was President of the Anti-Bolshevik Society. All these murders being quite “disinterested” (like that of Thomas a Becket in Mr. Eliot’s Murder in the Cathedral) were greatly admired.

Page 119.—When untoward things happened to the Japanese exchange it was the regular thing to blame the foreign exchange banks or the “Shanghai brokers.” At the time when Japan went off gold there was a campaign in the Press against the National City Bank of New York, which lodged a formal protest against the Japanese newspaper inventions regarding its gold manipulations.

Page 120.—In describing Baron Dan’s murder as unique Mr. Inukai was not quite accurate. As mentioned in the note to page 118, Mr. Yasuda Zenjiro, a banker who had nothing to do with politics, was murdered on September 28, 1921, by a Rightist. Inukai’s remark about the dangerousness of Rightists, however, derived point from an incident of the previous day which the Press was apparently too timid to report. Dr. Nitobe, one of Japan’s greatest scholars, was known throughout the world as the author of Bushido—he was almost its inventor. A member of the Society of Friends, he spent a large part of his life as an apologist for Japan, especially for her militarists; but his religious associations prevented his propaganda from being entirely divorced from the truth, and he had lately remarked that in certain circumstances militarists could be as dangerous as radicals. For this he was dragged out of a sick-bed by a group of officers and taken to a hall filled with ex-service men, before whom he was made to apologise. He tried to qualify his apology and was forced to repeat it humbly in writing without qualifica­tion. Not long after, Nitobe fled to America, at the instance, it was said, of General Araki, the Minister for War, who told him that his work had always been to set Japan in a favourable light before the world, and that just now Japan needed this help. It did indeed. Nitobe’s was a tragic tour. He had, when Congress passed the Immigration Bill excluding Japanese, declared that he would never visit America again; and now he pitifully toured the country, justifying to sceptical audiences the doings of the Japanese army. He died the following year in Canada, defending to the last what the Quaker side of his soul knew to be inde­fensible. Nitobe’s strong line was the untruthfulness of the Chinese. Even the missionaries in China he found untruthful— so different from the missionaries in Japan. One of the latter wrote for the Christian Century an article so favourable to Japan’s Manchurian policy that it was reprinted in the Japanese semi­official papers. He mentioned therein, by way of showing how vital Manchuria was to Japan, that Japan imported much of her rice from this region. The reverent writer did not, of course, intend to be as untruthful as a China missionary. He had heard so much of the “lifeline” that he took it for granted, not knowing that Japan imports no rice whatever from Manchuria, but exports much food thither. A month later it was stated that Japan was threatened with a bumper rice crop, and that the Government must take steps to keep up the price, so as to avert the ruin of the farmers.

Page 129.—The best account of Yoshida Shoin for English readers is “Yoshida Torajiro,” in R. L. Stevenson’s Familiar Studies of Men and Books: His name is still a very famous one in Japan.

Page 130.—Whether the Aikyojuku or its home town Mito really deserves credit for all these outrages is not a point on which the present writer insists. The police in Japan have a habit of crossing undetected crimes off the list when a later culprit is vain enough to boast of them or foolish enough to be cajoled into confessing them. A burglar or murderer will often confess to a long series of undetected crimes, and these are “taken into consideration,” but not quite in the English sense.

Page 136.—As an example of how little the Japanese parlia­ment was regarded by the Services, it is interesting to note that when Admiral Shiosawa told the Asahi representative that he was going to take reprisals in three or four days, the Minseito party, which had supported Baron Shidehara’s peaceful policy, still had a large majority in the Lower House. The Diet was, in fact, dissolved the next day, in order that a Seiyukai majority might be elected to support a strong policy. Mr. Yoshizawa, the new Foreign Minister, had by that time already been in Tokyo for a week, his first task having been to reply to Mr. Stimson’s Note from Washington, pointing out that Japan was recklessly violating the treaties. Mr. Yoshizawa argued that the treaties had assumed that China was a stable entity, and had not con­templated the internal disorders which modified the obligations that Japan had entered into. The Chinese retorted that he might just as well have pointed out that the High Contracting Parties had not contemplated the impotence of the Japanese Govern­ment when the General Staff took a hand. The murder, four months later, of the Premier, Mr. Yoshizawa’s father-in-law, pointed to disorders in Japan which the signatories to the treaties had not contemplated.

Page 141.—The Japanese retreat was only a slight withdrawal, and undertaken too readily to be very costly—which, perhaps, is why it inspired the tragic farce of the “three human bombs.” But it had a tragic sequel. Major Kuga, badly wounded, was deserted by his men, but when found next day by the advancing Chinese, was still alive. They took him to their lines, whence he was sent to Nanking and carefully nursed in the Chinese hospital. By March 15th he had recovered sufficiently to leave hospital, and the Chinese handed him over to the Japanese authorities. He returned immediately to Shanghai and reported for duty. The duty that he was assigned was to go to the place where the Chinese picked him up, and blow out his brains. (Later versions, to make it more romantic, say that he committed hara-kiri.} An orderly went with him to see that he killed himself. He was sacrificed to the tradition that Japanese officers are never taken prisoner. Suicide rather than capture has its logical reason in the tradition of the torture and enslavement of captives. The Chinese by the humane treatment of prisoners (for Major Kuga was not the only one) showed that they had reached a point of civilisation where the custom would be better honoured in the breach than in the observance. It was singular that suicide remained an obligation for the Japanese major, and suggests some reflections on comparative mental advance.

Page 142.—Most energetic protests were made to the United States Government against allowing its citizens to fly for the Chinese. The Japanese have some claim to be pioneers in bombing from the air: they used this means of breaking the spirit of the Formosan aborigines before the Great War; and they bombed Chinchow in 1931 and Hangchow as well as Shanghai in 1932. But a weapon which they were eager to use they greatly dreaded. Then and in 1937 they were very fearful of foreign airmen helping the Chinese. Japan’s one contribution to the naval disarmament proposals was one for the total abolition of aircraft carriers.

Page 142.—Mr. Matsuoka Yosuke went to America at an early age and studied there. Later he was in the consular service, stationed at Shanghai. His conspicuous energy and masterful­ness gained him an appointment as Vice-President of the South Manchuria Railway, and when the conference of the Institute of Pacific Relations met at Kyoto in 1929, his ability made a great impression on the foreign delegates, though even he was unable to answer to their satisfaction two insistent questions, “Who killed Chang Tso-lin?” and “What are you doing in Manchuria?” Officers and diplomats at Shanghai, their sen­sitiveness blunted by Far Eastern experience, found him less impressive. Later he went to Geneva on the hopeless mission of persuading the Assembly of the justice of Japan’s cause. Even­tually he became President of the South Manchuria Railway, when its functions and authority were enormously enlarged.

Page 143.—The anxiety of the Japanese semi-official news agency in Shanghai to see a decision reached in every offensive led to some strange reporting. It reported the “fiercest fighting yet” on February 17th; on the 21st the general attack excelled everything; on the 24th “the sternest battle since the beginning” was reported; on the 29th, “after the comparative silence of the past two weeks,” there was a terrific attack on Chapei; and again on March 1st and 2nd the fighting was “fiercer than at any previous time.” That there was a crescendo in the Japanese effort was true, and the necessity of reducing previous “terrific battles” to a “comparative silence” is a measure of the disappointment caused by the repeated failure to break down the Chinese resistance.

Page 148.—We have been dosed ad nauseam with Japanese loyalty—the most advertised of all human virtues. It appears in history to have been mainly for retainers, and was rare among feudal lords. In Japan’s civil wars there was a constant changing of sides, and some families tried to be on both sides at once in order to save the estates, however the fortune of war might go: perhaps this was loyalty to the family.

Page 148.—Captain Amakasu is referred to in the Note on page 118. More about him may be read in the author’s Japan under Taisho Tenno, pp. 300—301. When the author was editing the Japan Chronicle, Kobe, he was reproved by the police for recalling Amakasu’s exploits in murder when recording the Captain’s appointment to a special pacification force in Manchuria.

Page 149.—The reader unfamiliar with Japanese literature may not recognise the literary touch in the description of General Ma Chan-shan’s military apparel. Heroic chronicles, such as the Heike Monogatari, habitually describe minutely the armour and accoutrements of a gentleman about to engage in battle.

Page 156.—Manchurian and other Northern Chinese troops had often been singularly disappointing to the lover of battle, for, when the stage was set for a conflict, they always seemed to walk off. But when they had a real cause to fight for, such as the Japanese provided, they often did very well; and an army would follow its general with extraordinary fidelity.

Page 161.—We have a glimpse of General Tang Yu-lin in Sven Hedin’s JehoL He entertained the Swedish explorer’s party when they went there to get the measurements of the temple of which Mr. Victor Bendix had a replica made for the Chicago exhibition. It was true that there was a good deal of poppy-growing in the province—and this, though the Japanese raged against it, was one of their chief objectives. They organised the drug trade efficiently and used it for demoralising the whole of North China.

Page 162.—In an article “The Phantom of Mengkukuo,” in Pacific Affairs for December 1937, Mr. Owen Lattimore describes how the Japanese, if they had really been concerned for Mongol liberty, could have helped the Mongols to achieve it, but have earned their hostility instead. The Mongols of Manchuria and Inner Mongolia have apparently come to the conclusion that if they have got to suffer liberation, it is better to suffer it at the hands of Soviet Russia rather than at those of Japan.

Page 163.—In the war on China which Japan began in July 1937 there were many complaints of violations of Chinese women such as belong to the most savage traditions of war. Compara­tively few such complaints were heard in the Manchurian cam­paign. Indeed, there was little serious fighting. There were Japanese already in all the towns, and more flocked in as soon as the Japanese troops occupied them. The pimps and panders saw to it that plenty of women were supplied to Manchuria, and the exploit of getting women to Jehol the day after its capture had been paralleled many times in Manchuria. Major Usuda, of the Kwantung Army, was reported as remarking on the rapidity with which prosperity had followed the capture of Hailar. Speaking early in February 1933, he said that the Japanese colony in that town now numbered three hundred, including eighty prostitutes, and that it was evidently destined to become one of the foremost cities of Manchukuo. Similar statistics were published of several townships. The Bascom Johnson report to the League of Nations on the traffic in women in the Far East, which was published about this time, said that the trade in women was generally to provide for men of their own nationality in foreign parts; and these reports may be taken as endorsements of this conclusion. But the manner in which the reports appeared in the Japanese newspapers often conveyed the impression that procuring was regarded as an enterprise that was as vigorous and praiseworthy as that of “preserving the peace of the Far East.” The only part of the Bascom Johnson report dealing specifically with Manchuria was that where it said that in most of the villages in Manchukuo were to be found a Russian woman or two living in a state of most shocking degradation and misery. Had something been done by the new regime to remedy this, it might, at small cost, have gained many friends. But it can hardly be made the subject of reproach that nothing was done, for Japan could not be expected to be more considerate in such a matter than the Western Powers who had been concerned in the intervention in Russia, and who, when that reactionary effort failed, left the people who had trusted in them naked to their enemies. There was no tradition in Japan that women should be protected, and nothing was done to remedy the many complaints that girls were hired to go to Man­churia to serve in department stores or hotels, and that when they arrived there they were treated “no better than geisha”—which was a delicate way of saying that their life was one of prostitution.

Page 166.—The Japanese always seems to be surprised when anything published in their own language comes to be known abroad. They are fully conscious of the difficulty of Japanese and always ready to deny that a statement has been published at all or that it has been correctly translated. Quite commonly officials assure foreigners that no translation in an English paper in Japan can be trusted, whereas the fact is, of course, that even an imperfect translation is better to be trusted than any official assurance.

Page 169.—The author was in Peking in May 1933 and wit­nessed this remarkable restraint of the Chinese troops in the face of grave provocation; Chinese friends who had soldiers quartered in their houses testified to their excellent behaviour. When the Japanese planes were flying overhead, there were exclamations of anger and contempt but none of fear.

Page 179.—In view of the fact that Japan’s aggression on the mainland is constantly excused by her need for food for her excessive population, it is well to remember that a big rice crop is hailed as a national disaster; also that in January 1938 the Finance Minister, discussing Japan’s ability to fight a long war in China, said that Japan was self-supplying in food.

Page 183.—In the Occident it might sound almost Sunday- schoolish to say that there was no danger except dangerous thought. In a country where patriotic assassination is so much esteemed it was almost an invitation to murder anybody who talked financial sense. Baron Go, however, was not to be deterred by Araki’s fireworks. In January 1938, at a much more serious crisis, he again protested against the imposition of heavy taxes to pay for the crushing of China. Fortunately for Japan there is more courage in civilian ranks than in those of the army.

Page 190.—Nichiren was a heretical Buddhist priest in the thirteenth century who made himself so objectionable to the authorities that he was exiled to the remote island of Sado. The sect he founded continued to flourish, and is famous for its fanaticism and love of noise. They were Nichiren priests who started the trouble in Shanghai in 1932. They are very patriotic in these days, as the example of Inoue Nissho shows, and Nichiren was solemnly canonised in 1923 with the name of Rissho Daishi. A few years later a young professor who drew a comparison between Rissho Daishi and the late Prince Kropotkin, exiled from Tsarist Russia for his liberality of thought, got into serious trouble, though actually the comparison was unduly flattering to Nichiren.

Page 190.—Some great monarchs, notably Akbar, have tried to arrange things so that the humblest of their subjects might be at liberty to appeal to them. For the very different view taken in Japan the reader may be referred to Lord Redesdale’s Tales of Old Japan, where it is related how, in the first half of the seven­teenth century, a farmer, Sakura Sogoro, his wife, and three sons (two of them children) were crucified because Sakura had thrust into the Shogun’s palanquin a petition against a rapacious landlord. The severity was dictated, of course, by tyrants’ fears of assassination.

Page 191.—Early in 1923, in the case of a foreigner who was charged with a criminal offence, the Osaka Mainichi mobilised all the anti-foreign sentiment that it could foment, with the result that the police, the procurators, and the court were deluged with letters demanding condign punishment, and it published accounts of the progress of this inundation and speculations on its probable effects. It is impossible that the judges should be impervious to this mass suggestion. Justice was vindicated in the Court of Appeal, where the late Dr. J. E. de Becker, whose great services to Japanese law have never been adequately acknow­ledged, obtained special permission to cross-examine, proved that the charges were false, and secured an acquittal. Such vindications are very rare.

Page 196.—Bedbugs are rare in Japan, but the police-court cells are infamous for them—and for filth in other forms. They are the subject of bitter complaint by all who claim to have been unjustly consigned to the lock-up. Bugs are called Chinese insects by the Japanese. It is a strange coincidence that the police methods are notoriously pervaded by the old Chinese tradition and that the police cells have almost a monopoly of bugs.

Page 205.—It was the intellectual renaissance in Korea springing out of a sudden realisation that the Christian missions were revealing a new world to their pupils that led to the con­version of suzerainty into annexation, just as it was the realiza­tion of a national unity in China that led to Japan in 1937 deciding to “beat China to her knees” as the Premier, Prince Konoe, elegantly put it. Every sign of progress in Siam is watched with a sinister solicitude. Progress in the Far East, except under Japanese direction, is regarded as inimical to Japan.

Page 218.—This cotton play of Mr. Muto’s has several points of historic as well as literary interest which seemed to justify its rather lengthy appearance in this book. Shimadzu Saburo was the Daimyo whose followers, four years later than the scene in the play, murdered an Englishman, Richardson, just outside Yokohama. The attack on Richardson and his three friends (one of them a woman) was totally unprovoked Shimadzu did nothing to stop it, and refused to regard it as a matter worthy of his notice. This led to the bombardment of Kagoshima to enforce payment of compensation. The American Minister of the time, Pruyn, who depended on gossip and surmise for his information, sent a very untruthful account of the matter to Washington, which has been repeated by a hundred American writers since as history. It is agreeable to find the Daimyo who defied his own as well as the British Government and showed so little regard for humanity, figuring on the stage as so enlightened a person. It is of-interest to note that, when Mr. Muto was putting into Shimadzu’s mouth the sentiments about manufacture being as patriotic as the military arts, Mr. Tsunata Yano, Pre­sident of the First Mutual Life Office, Tokyo, said that the Japanese victory at Shanghai was won by superior arms, which were the product of industry. Industry, he went on, had as great a share in saving nations as soldiers had, and at the same time brought wealth instead of crushing the nation as the army did. So obvious a deduction from patent facts caused great offence, and some of the military men declared that they were going to take action. But Mr. Tsunata was apparently left unmurdered. In regard to Shimadzu’s remark about the shortage of supplies of raw cotton, it is interesting to recall that in the old days Japan grew much of her cotton and imported much of her silk. The imported cotton, however, made cotton cultivation in Japan unremunerative, but the Japanese made a tremendous success of the scientific culture of silk.

Page 228.—While the Japanese are proud of their expansion overseas, they lack a sense of responsibility for these new pos­sessions, which is natural, considering how recent is the endeavour to implant any democratic sense of responsibility for their domestic concerns. The somewhat rare questions asked in the Diet concerning Korea and Formosa were customarily answered by the Premier, but often received no answer at all. That this was not satisfactory was generally acknowledged, and in 1927 a Department of Overseas Affairs was created, but the Premier, General Baron Tanaka, took the portfolio himself. Much hostility was shown towards the new Department, emphatic declarations being made at various times that Korea, or Formosa, or South Manchuria, as the case might be, should not come under its supervision. The Governor-Generalship of Korea especially was considered so important that its incumbent ought not to be subject to a comparatively junior member of the Cabinet. The creation of the Manchurian Affairs Bureau effectively took this region out of the Department’s purview. The Ambassador to Hsinking is not subject to the Foreign Office; he is a soldier, but not subject to the War Office; he rules Manchuria, the Cabinet having been abolished in 1937 and the Ministers made sub­ordinate to him; and he is set in authority over the President of the South Manchuria Railway—a unique position for a Japanese subject.

Page 244.—Kobayashi Takiji was thirty years old at the time of his death, and was the author of some proletarian stories. One of these, The Cannery Boat, gives its title to a book of stories by him and other proletarian writers published in English by Messrs. Martin Lawrence, London, 1933- Professor M. Bickerton, of New Zealand, who was a teacher in Tokyo, and sympathised with the forward movements, though not himself a member of any Communist group, added as an epilogue to this collection of stories a brief account of the murder of Kobayashi by the police. His name did not appear on the book, but the police suspected him, and got him in 1934. They handled him very severely. He managed to escape from the country when awaiting trial. Neither the law nor the trade unions could give workers any protection in the more distant parts, and there were many gruesome stories of the treatment of the men on the fishing boats and floating canneries. In 1930 the Etrop Maru came back eighteen short—victims of inhuman cruelties according to the usual accounts, but officially dead of scurvy or beri beri. The collection of stories published under the name The Cannery Boat was, of course, prohibited in Japan.

Page 252.—Wang Ching-wei (also known as Wang Chao- ming) was in pre-revolution days the right-hand man of Dr. Sun Yat-sen, though of a rather too independent character to make the perfect disciple. On March 28, 1910, he attempted to blow up the Prince Regent in Peking by means of a bomb con­cealed under a bridge. The work of the conspirators, however, set the dogs in the neighbourhood barking, and the bomb was discovered. Wang himself was arrested some days later, and sent to prison for life. He preached revolution to his jailers to such effect that the authorities, hearing of it, put him in irons, which no prisoner could survive more than two or three years. The revolution set him free, however, and, rather spasmodically, he has taken a prominent part in Chinese affairs since. He and his colleagues did their best to come to terms with Japan. Wang protested that Japanese acts of terrorism were far worse than those of the Chinese, against which the Japanese demanded guarantees; and the Chinese went so far as to punish Chinese critics of Japan. But nothing was enough, and Wang Ching-wei resigned. This endeavour to meet Japan’s wishes is in part admitted by Mr. Kodama Kenji, a former President of the Yokohama Specie Bank, who wrote the second of a series of propaganda booklets circulated in England and America in ^I937~3^- He says that Mr. Wang “responded to the policy of  economic co-operation”, but that after his resignation Chiang Kai-shek became hostile again. When Wang Ching-wei com­plained of Japanese terrorism, Mr. Hirota sent a very minatory note to him, declaring that China would be held responsible for every untoward event—a. fair example of the manner in which friendly conversations were conducted.

Page 257.—It is a common belief that China takes little notice of what goes on in the world without; but it is significant that when the craze for proclaiming One Big Party by the colour of its shirt was at its height in Europe, China broke out into blue as the outward assertion of patriotism.

Page 265.—By way of placating the Services, Admiral Suetsugu was appointed Home Minister in Prince Konoe’s Cabinet in 1937. It might be supposed that there was nothing for a spy to exercise his talents upon in the Kuriles, which are not fortified; but in July 1934 it was announced that a fishing base was being con­structed on Horomushiro Island, just south of Kamchatka, at a cost of 21,000,000 yen. A perennial source of disagreement with Russia is found in the Japanese fishing rights on the Kamchatkan coasts.

Page 266.—Rotary was organised rather thoroughly in Japan, with a view to promoting “direct trade,” that is, substituting Japanese for foreign middlemen. In the stress of war-patriotism it was proposed in some quarters at the beginning of 1938 to suppress Rotary Clubs as un-Japanese, and in others to utilise them for inculcating the correct point of view in foreign countries regarding Sino-Japanese hostilities.

Page 268.—Prince Saionji was born in 1850 of a huge family— the ancient nobility attached to the Imperial Court and sharing its obscurity in the long periods when Japan was governed by military dictators. In 1868, the year of the Meiji Restoration, he was in command of an Imperial army, but despite the distinc­tion of being a general at eighteen, he never acquired any taste for militarism. Soon after the Restoration he was sent as Minister to Prussia, quickly discovered that his spiritual home was in Paris, and had to be officially reminded that a national envoy was supposed to spend at least part of his time in the country to which he was accredited. He returned to Japan so much in sympathy with the principles of the leaders of the Paris Com­mune that he became rather a problem. The task of reasoning with him was entrusted to Marquis Okuma, perhaps because Saionji could not possibly charge Okuma with being old- fashioned. Prince Saionji never sought office, his ideal being a quiet and scholarly retirement, but he was so distinguished as always to be wanted for the service of the State. At the end of his second Premiership in 1912, an Imperial Message was so worded as to be regarded as the equivalent of his appointment to the council of Genro, or Elder Statesmen, and he was the only man whose counsel was ever sought as being on an equality with the original members, all of whom he outlived by many years. His position from February 1922, when Prince Yamagata died, was unique, no great decision being taken without consulting him. His last official position was when he went to Versailles in 1919 as Japan’s chief delegate at the Peace Conference; and there were many threats that he would be assassinated on his return for his failure to get better terms for Japan.

Page 271.—It may be because the Japanese are so adept at explaining that black is white that they are liable to mistrust the efficacy of words. Kokutai is by no means the only important thing which is ineffable. The “Zen” philosophy, which its ex­ponents have declared to be Japan’s greatest gift to the world’s culture, is in nothing more Japanese than in the insistence of its professors that words cannot explain it. Sir Charles Eliot says: “To a certain extent it has moulded the Japanese character, but it is also the expression of that character. ... In the time of the Sung (the Sung Dynasty, a.d. 960-1280) Zen may have been the full flower and expression of Chinese culture, but in later periods it is characteristically Japanese and challenges us to define what this characteristic but elusive teaching is. When a sect boldly states that its doctrine must be felt and not read, and that every attempt to state it in speech or writing must be ipso facto a failure, the expositor need say no more. Yet the rash pen longs to formulate the ineffable and is apt to suggest that the mysteries which cannot be expressed in words are really non-existent and that the literary history of Zen, though copious, is not a heap of philosophic jewels buried in a little dust, but a farrago of anec­dotes reporting grotesque and irrelevant sayings and still more grotesque and often brutal actions. I confess that I am not quite in sympathy with the Zen view of things, and that is why I wish to emphasise the great practical achievements of the sect and to point out that a creed which has produced such remarkable results must be based on something more than eccentricity.” Chinese scholars are naturally very scornful of Japanese Zen, which for them begins in failure to understand and ends in abusing the understanding. Some of Japan’s most notable assassins have professed a devotion to Zen, perhaps because it absolved them from explaining their actions.

Admiral Viscount Saito Makoto was born in 1858 and had a distinguished naval career, rising to Cabinet rank. He had already retired, and had every hope and expectation of a quiet evening of life when a crisis arose in Korea in 1919, where General Hasegawa, a military martinet of the most rigid type, had, as Governor-General, exasperated the Koreans beyond endurance. The feeble, unarmed rising was put down with cruel severity, and Admiral Saito was chosen as a man moderate enough to restore peace as well as order. More than one attempt was made to assassinate him, but he continued his work with imperturbable courage, the Viscountess accompanying him on all his tours. In 1927 he resigned, and was sent as Japan’s chief delegate to the naval conference at Geneva. The aged and easy­going General Yamanashi succeeded him, and became involved in an orgy of corruption. In 1929 he returned to Japan to stand his trial, which, after the manner of such trials, lasted very long and came to nothing. Admiral Saito again shouldered the burden and disentangled another web of trouble. He resigned once more in 1931, and was called to be Premier after Inukai’s murder in 1932. Thus for fifteen years after his retirement from the navy he laboured to remedy the blunders, defalcations, and crimes of soldiers. His reward was to be butchered by soldiers. Not a Japanese newspaper had a word of parting praise for him at his death. The police, waiting to be on the successful side, had warned them not to write any appreciations of the murdered statesmen.

Page 288.—Mr. Kuhara Fusanosuke, a business man of great ability and diversity of enterprise, came rather oddly into conflict with the British Government. As owner of a shipyard, the Nippon Kisen Kaisha, he took an order in 1917 for four ships, for which he received nearly two million yen in advance and facilities for importing steel (then almost unobtainable) from the United States. Messrs. Dodwell & Co., Ltd., were the agents through whom this was arranged. The ships were to be delivered late in 1917, but were not ready, so the time was extended. On November 11, 1918, they were still undelivered, so Dodwell’s cancelled the contract and demanded the two million yen back. Kuhara refused on the ground that as no limit had been placed on the extension of time the contract was interminable. Actually the keels had never been laid. Having lost his case in every court to which he could appeal, Kuhara promised to pay by instal­ments on condition that no bankruptcy proceedings should be taken. In 1927, General Baron Tanaka, the Premier, with whom he was on very friendly terms, wanted to make Kuhara Foreign Minister, when a newspaper disclosed the fact that none of the instalments had been paid, and the British Ambassador put it to Baron Tanaka that it would be embarrassing to deal with a Foreign Minister who owed his Government money; so Kuhara, who had political ambitions, had to be content with the Ministry of Communications, for which the little affair was not considered a disqualification. A year or two after, he did pay, and he proved to be a useful “manager” for the Seiyukai party. At the time of this writing (1938) he was not quite out of the toils of the Feb­ruary 26th affair, a charge of “harbouring” having still to be investigated.

Page 295.—To the student of diplomacy the “perpetual leases” may be an example of the inadvisability of making contracts in perpetuity, since nothing mundane is everlasting; but in the case of the leases in Japan there was a natural course of extinction. They could be sold to Japanese subjects, and when they were so sold this extinguished their particular character. Fully half of them had ceased to exist. (In Osaka the last lease was sold in 1914.) After the Great War, the Allies encouraged the Japanese to confiscate the German leases, and, of course, the confiscation of the rest, when an equally safe moment arrived, was the in­evitable sequel. The privilege attaching to the leases lay chiefly in a fixed ground-rent in lieu of ordinary house-taxes, and this, very high at the beginning, had become, in comparison with the municipal rates, very low. The Japanese Press was continually encouraged to enlarge on this as a grievance, though no Japanese editor ever troubled to acquaint himself with the facts. There were diplomatic conversations, but the Japanese Government would never make a “firm offer” for a cancellation. At length two birds were killed with one stone. The leases were cancelled (ordinary ownership being substituted), and the lack of diplomatic protest was an assurance that foreign rights in the Far East would not henceforth be protected by any of the Governments concerned, no matter to what extent they were violated.