JAPAN’S ARDOUR

Wairarapa Times-Age, 3 April 1941, Page 7

JAPAN’S ARDOUR

O —. CHILLED BY RECENT EVENTS WARM UP LATER. EFFECT OF EUROPEAN WAR. Shanghai. Relatively quiet after a period of high tension, Shanghai and China in general have settled down to a grim but uneventful winter (states a despatch by Randall Gould, published by the "Christian Science Monitor”). , It is the/ impression that if a major crisis is to come, the event will be deferred at least until spring. What most residents are counting on is that Tokio has experienced a genuine winter chill, through evidence of Anglo-American co-operation, the reopening by Britain of the Burma highway, and Washington’s evacuation advice to non-essential Far East Americans. It is hoped that this chill will continue for some months. Nevertheless it is feared that eventually things are bound to warm up again x because of the well-nigh irresistible Japanese expansionist urge which can hardly be suppressed except by setbacks of decisive nature.

Finally, the fate of the European war must decide the fate of Asia, a great many observers believe. Japanese decline to accept this thesis openly, preferring to insist that whatever happens elsewhere, there must be a universal subscription at last to the notion of a Nipponese-dominated - “Greater East Asia mutual prosperity plan.” But the extreme lack of prosperity in East Asia for anyone, up to and including Japan, has made it difficult to promote this idea in,any fashion, except at the point of the bayonet. Japanese local officials and especially various irresponsible military (such as sentries,. who seem always to be a law unto themselves) continue to manifest a bellicose and reckless spirit. But from Tokio come signs of unmistakable desire to placate someone. In Japan proper there are virtually no pro-Japanese foreign residents any more. Some of those who were formerly warmest in their regard for the Japanese have been made to suffer most bitterly through arrest and Home Office interrogation, carried on in the most arrogant and stupid fashion. As to foreigners in the Far East outside Japan, they have been given no chance to see the better side of Japanese character. Instead they have had to fight economic discrimination, coupled with the impudence of officials and the army, and in general they have been made to feel that they were on the way out. Japan’s Axis partners are no exception. Germans in China have never favoured the Japanese military adventure, which has meant only losses for them; the Italians have fared no better.

As to the Chinese, they have lost nothing of their patriotic spirit and at Chungking in particular they have never been more convinced that Japan could be beaten. During last summer, at the time Britain consented to closure of the Burma Road. Chinese officials in some cases (never such men as General Chiang Kai-shek at the top) felt a little softening toward the idea of Axis participation—but with the unification and stiffening of an AngloAmerican front the Chinese quickly swung back more strongly than ever in the direction of their natural affiliation. Now a great many Chinese feel certain that a victory for Britain finally in Europe will result in the application of united pressure upon Japan by America and Britain to the end that peace on a fair basis be restored in the Far East.

There is always the Japanese jingo press and the voice of the excitable retired or younger officer. Such bombast receives a good press outside Japan but is little noted within the country. Rather oddly, it is the fact that many readers in the outside world hear more of the various excitements, in the Japanese press than do the Japanese themselves, for the Japanese usually must read each newspaper directly if they want to learn what that paper says, whereas the foreign correspondents get the cream of the day’s offerings and spread it throughout the world by meanse of the press associations. In any event, the Japan ese do not take their papers very seriously; it is an utter impossibility b believe everything the Tokio and Osaka press prints, for it seldom makes either coherence or elemental sense.

Naturally the Japanese keep up hope that somehow I heir top men, such as Premier Prince Konoye, will at long last devise means to settle the “China incident" and free factories, cargo carriers. materials, and manpower for cashing in on (he war situation elsewhere. That is what the country longs for, and it realises now that things were badly timed when hostilities were started in the middle of 1937 with the hope that the beginning of 1938 would see everything satisfactorily settled. It seems now generally realised that only Chungking, rather than the puppet regime al Nanking, holds any hope for true peace in China.