Into Japan

New Zealand Listener, Volume 13, Issue 323, 31 August 1945, Page 5

Into Japan

EFORE this issue is printed Allied troops will have entered Japan. Before they ‘leave again the world will perhaps know whether they should have entered in silence or behind: fire and smoke and the roar of guns. Everybody is happy that peace has come; but very few are happy about the way in which it has come-or is coming. The fact that Japan’s war leaders are not contrite does not matter: very few criminals ever are. Nor should we be surprised that her political leaders are playing the warleaders’ game-from the Emperor down: lying, bluffing, obstructing, face-saving. That was bound to happen the moment it was decided to end the struggle before the Allies entered Japan itself. But it is disturbing that nothing has happened yet to bring the truth home to the Japanese people that they are sunk in irretrievable disaster -their fleet blown out of the sea; their air force shot out of the sky; _ their armies routed on every front; , their merchant marine no longer ' capable of carrying their dispersed troops home. They know something. in Hiroshima, something wherever cities have been devastated on a grand scale; but Britain knew things like that, Russia, and all the Allied nations of Europe, and now they are celebrating victory and using their enemies as a footstool. To make the Japanese people realise where their leaders have led them would not have been easy whatever turn events had taken, but it would have been easier if the war had swept through their cities and over their farms and left them without strength to fight on. The cost of that would have been hundreds of thousands of casualties on both sides, and was not to be thought of if it could be avoided. But the fact that it did not happen leaves the » conquerors with a difficult choicerelentless severity where the people themselves will feel it, or mercy and generosity’ in a long gamble '. with time,