A JAPANESE FANTASY.

Wairarapa Times-Age, 11 December 1940, Page 4

A JAPANESE FANTASY.

jN its strange mingling of sinister threats, mild pleadings and absurd distortions of fact, the statement by the Japanese Foreign Minister (Mr Matsuoka.) in a general interview with foreign correspondents, reported yesterday, was an-extraord-inary effort of its kind. Japan is at present carrying on in its fourth year a war of pure brigandage against China —a war which follows on much earlier aggression and theft of territory from that country—and yet Mr Matsuoka had the hardihood to say: “«We are opposed to conquest, oppression and exploitation, whether by Japan or anybody else” and again:— We are not fighting to conquer and exploit China, although I admit it looks like that. I say give us time and we will prove—perhaps 30 or 50 years hence —that we mean the things we are saying. This, of course, is at once unadulterated nonsense and hypocrisy of the most unblushing kind. No nation is more obviously guilty than is Japan under her present, rulers of the crimes that Mr Matsuoka professes to abjure, and the answer, to the astonishing claim just quoted, is that Japan is today straining evdr.V nerve, as she has been for years, to conquer and exploit China. The enormity of her crime is not lessened by the fact that it has brought her problems rather than profits. What did Mr Matsuoka mean when he said that Japan would only go to war with the United States in the event of that country being adjudged the aggressor in a conflict with Germany? A possible view of this statement would be that it is saved from being intolerably offensive only by being strongly suggestive of mental disorder. It is possible, however, that the Japanese Foreign Minister has found a Japanese way of saying that Japan will not in any circumstances go to war with the United States in support of Germany. It is, of course, sufficiently obvious that there can be in fact no question ol aggression against Nazi Germany, committed as that nation is, under its present regime, to a policy of attempting to enslave the rest of the world. If this is what Mr Matsuoka meant, an element of sense entered into his otherwise fantastic statement. The reality to be faced, in any case, is that the Government and people of the United States recognise in the Nazi regime a deadly enemy whose continued existence is incompatible with the maintenance of their own liberties. The United States is contributing more and more heavily to the defeat of Nazism, though as yet in measures short of war. At the same time, there is every indication that the United States is of one mind with the British Empire in being determined to repel any extension of Japanese aggression in the Pacific. The English-speaking countries are agreed on the policy of leaving it open to Japan to retreat from her policy of aggression if she is prepared to do so, but both also have definitely rejected the policy of appeasement which has been found in working practice to be so disastrous when applied to aggressors. The larger possibilities of Anglo-American naval and other co-operation in the Pacific are left in abeyance for the time being, but some definite, if more or less tentative economic pressure has already been applied to Japan. American embargoes on the export to Japan of aviation petrol and iron and steel scrap and a Canadian embargo on the export of copper are an earnest of much more that may follow should it be found necessary, ft is open to the United States, for example, by refusing to purchase Japanese exports, to destroy at a stroke the source of more than one-third of Japan’s foreign exchange. Britain and the United States are of one mind, too, in their determination to give increasing aid Io China in her heroic struggle against barbarous invasion. The granting 01. another British loan to China is reported today. No diplomatic contortions by any Japanese Minister can alter these cardinal realities of the situation as it stands in the Pacific,