Wairarapa Times-Age TUESDAY, AUGUST 5, 1941. AN EXPLOSIVE SITUATION.

Wairarapa Times-Age, 5 August 1941, Page 4

Wairarapa Times-Age TUESDAY, AUGUST 5, 1941. AN EXPLOSIVE SITUATION.

ACCORDING to the Japanese ZMinister of Commerce, ViceAdmiral Saikonji, the international situation is so tense that a single spark might be sufficient to cause an explosion. This statement oE Die position presumably is intended to embody a denial that. Japan is responsible for the state of extremely critical tension that admittedly exists in the Pacific. The plain truth, however, is that Japan is definitely and completely responsible for whatever dangers the existing situation holds. Not content with her wanton and indefensible attack on China, in which she has now been engaged for more than lour years, she has occupied French Indo-China in conditions which have been denounced by a responsible representative of the American Government as constituting a menace to American security.

Tn addition, Japan is now threatening similar action in Thailand—action which -would raise a direct threat to Singapore, the Netherlands East Indies and other territories, and the massing of Japanese forces on the Manchnkuo-Siberian frontier is believed in London to constitute a threat to Vladivostok.

Far from having been driven to this course of unbridled aggression and menace, Japan has been treated by other nations, particularly Britain and the United States, with a gentleness which recalls the attempted appeasement of the European dictatorships in the days preceding the present war. It is only at this late stage, for example, that action is being taken to withhold from Japan external supplies of vital war .materials, of which oil is the most noteworthy. As a result of her uninterrupted flow of imports, Japan has been able, according to a. reported statement by the American Secretary for the Navy (Colonel Knox) to build up reserves of oil which would suffice for from fifteen to eighteen months of war.

It is presumably not in mere weakness that the Englishspeaking nations and others have gone so far in what has been described as appeasement of Japan, but because they share the view expressed by the British Foreign Secretary (Air Edon) when he said in a recent statement in the .House of Commons: —

I cannot believe that statesmanship in Japan is entirely dead or blind, and I sincerely trust that those responsible for the destinies of the Japanese Empire will reflect while yet there is time where their present policy is leading them.

It is recognised clearly by the nations concerned that warin the Pacific would be an unmixed calamity, but Britain, the United States and the Netherlands East Indies have all intimated in. uncompromising terms that a point has been reached at which even war will be preferable to the further toleration of Japanese aggression and there is not much room for doubt as to the nature of the reception the Japanese will encounter if they attack Siberia. It has been said with justice that the policy now being pursued by the Konoye Government defies explanation. It is a policy that could not well be improved upon if it had been, designed to bring upon Japan overwhelming military and economic disaster.