Reds Mopped

Except in case of 100% natural disasters such as earthquakes & typhoons, Japanese ethics demand that when things go radically wrong in the Empire someone should voluntarily make himself the scapegoat. Last week Tokyo censors released the news that last year 6,900 Japanese had to be arrested as "Communist suspects." Things have gone so wrong that the Reds seized were found to include young men & women of high Tokyo society: three daughters of millionaires, the daughters of a peer and a fashionable surgeon, several sons of generals and bankers, a socialite clerk of the Foreign Office, six junior naval officers (promptly court martialed), two professors--one from the Imperial University of Tokyo, the other from the Imperial University of Kyoto--and Toshio Shibata whose father is Chief Secretary of the Japanese Cabinet.

Painful were these revelations to Tokyo's Mayor, popular Hidejiro Nagata, who with flying coattails has opened many a baseball game at Tokyo's Stadium in the Meiji Grounds, and who is a national figure, renowned for sturdy patriotism, sage wit. Though no slightest suspicion pointed at either Mr. Nagata or at any of his kin, he promptly scapegoated, announced his resignation as Mayor of Tokyo with this terse explanation, "I desire to embrace full responsibility."

Six times in the past ten years Japanese police have staged major mop-ups of Reds. As in Russia, before the fall of the Romanovs, a special section of the Imperial police is assigned to spy on political suspects, obtain evidence by methods in which, according to last week's revelations, strong drink and loose women figure. On the night of Oct. 30, according to last week's disclosures, no Tokyo police put on bullet-proof vests and stealthily surrounded an inn at Atami in which eleven Communist leaders were asleep. Ten were seized as they slumbered. The eleventh woke up, shot four policemen, wounded them sorely.

Only 2,200 suspects of the 6,900 arrested last year were still "detained" last week. Police alleged that foreign (Russian) Communist agents have almost ceased to do anything in Japan, confine their efforts to inciting Japanese and spend much of their time secreted in rooms paid for by the sons & daughters of Japanese socialites.

No paradox, the tendency of liberal-minded socialites to assist revolutionists against an autocratic regime has been dignified as a "law of revolution" by that eminent authority Comrade Leon Trotsky, concocter of the theory of "The Permanent Revolution" (TIME, March 14).

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