Wairarapa Times-Age THURSDAY, MARCH 12, 1942. JAPAN’S NEW ORDER.

Wairarapa Times-Age, 12 March 1942, Page 2

Wairarapa Times-Age THURSDAY, MARCH 12, 1942. JAPAN’S NEW ORDER.

TN the absence of specific and authoritative information, and in spite of some early and disquieting reports, hopes were entertained that in her treatment of military and civilian captives in the territories she-has meantime overrun in the SouthWestern Pacific, -Japan would at least make some approach to the practice of civilised nations and to the international conventions in which it has been sought to standardise that practice. It is now demonstrated conclusively that these hopes were entirely delusive.

In the statement in the House of Commons which was reported yesterday, the British Foreign Secretary, Mr Eden, presented’concrete evidence that in their treatment of helpless military prisoners and the civilian population of Hong Kong, the Japanese have been guilty of bestial atrocities which place them as a nation outside the pale of civilised humanity.

Japan stands convicted before the world, as Mr Eden said, of appalling outrages and of nauseating hypocrisy. Her hypocrisy appears not only in the claim that her armed forces are animated by a lofty code of chivalry, but in all that her spokesmen have had to say on the subject of a new order in East Asia. With much that has gone before, the tragedy of Hong Kong will serve one good purpose in showing that Japan stands in fact for the destruction of any order that civilised humanity can afford or bear to contemplate.

Sympathy for the victims of Japanese outrage, and every feeling of horror and.anger awakened by their late, will best be expressed, as the British Foreign Secretary justly observed, by redoubling our efforts to ensure the utter and overwhelming defeat of Japan. That redoubling of effort is nowhere more obviously demanded than in our own country and others now faced by an imminent threat of Japanese attack, or, in the case of Australia, by the reality of attack.

It need not be doubted that in the end the methods of savage violence and atrocity -Japan has adopted will bring upon her an appropriate penalty. Her vicious crimes will make an end of any lingering element of indecision or half-hearted-ness in the nations to whom she stands opposed. There is already a foretaste at least of retribution in the failure of the Japanese to subdue China, the nation against whom their woyst crimes and excesses have been committed.

Making every military effort in her power, ami supplementing that effort by 'ghastly outrages in areas of occupation, Japan Jias failed utterly in four and a half years of war to reduce China to submission. In these terrible years China fought without assistance save that derived from a limited flow of foreign war material. She is now a member of a powerful alliance which in good time will bring upon Japan the fate her crimes so richly merit. At the stage that has been reached, the heroic resistance of the Chinese nation is a better indication of what the future holds for Japan than the measure of success she has been able to gain for the time being against the Allies in the South-Western Pacific.