Orchid Party

Japan's late, illustrious Emperor Meiji (1852-1912), who extracted his realm from Medievalism and started the buzz-saw of Progress, was prayerfully approached last week by 5,000 neat, respectful Tokyo policemen at the Meiji Shrine They hoped he would help them thwart the assassination of an especially honored guest of Japan's Divine Emperor bespectacled young Son-of-Heaven Hirohito With 15 days of such pomp as even the Orient has seldom seen, Japan was giving a $1,000,000 coming-out party for her shy puppet Emperor of Manchukuo His Majesty Kang Te.

When is a puppet not a puppet? Japan's answer is that the world simply must take seriously a crowned head in whose honor she deployed last week the Japanese combined fleets of more than 70 potent battle craft, each blazing away the 21-gun salute of an Emperor. This supreme honor Japan paid to a foreigner for the first time when Emperor Kang Te, in his babyhood the last Manchu ruler of China, approached Japan for the first time in his life on the Japanese Emperor's own flagship the Hiyei, his deeply sculptured features impassive beneath his one-star helmet (see cut).

"Good luck is already assured," radioed Captain Inouye from the Hiyei. "We have sighted the propitious omen of two Japanese cranes, apparently emigrating to Manchukuo."

A retinue of 74 accompanied the Chinese whom Japan would like to make Emperor of China as well as of Manchukuo. In this retinue the little round tummy of Mr. Ryusaku Endo was prominent. In Manchukuo he bosses the Emperor, holds the all-embracing title of Secretary General of Manchukuan Affairs. Last week he began by effacing himself so that for once in his life the puppet Emperor could shine.

On the 18-mile trip from Yokohama to Tokyo a Japanese soldier stood beside the railway track every 60 feet, rigid at attention as the young man who was once plain Mr. Henry Pu Yi passed. In Tokyo all rail traffic in & out of Tokyo station was stopped for two hours; the entire railway station district was cleared. And Japan's Son-of-Heaven himself went down to greet the onetime occupant of China's Dragon Throne. Correspondents, kept back with the Tokyo populace to a distance of one block on either side of the imperial route, spitefully cabled that they could not be sure they had seen the Emperor of Manchukuo, hinted that a double might have been used to prevent his assassination.

Since an orchid is the puppet Emperor's official flower, his Legation in Tokyo was decked with 750 orchids. Wherever he appeared Japanese schoolchildren, drilled for weeks in a Hymn to Manchukuo, shrilled it. In Tokyo he was quartered in Akasaka Palace, a replica of the Trianon Palace at Versailles and in 1922 the Tokyo residence of Edward of Wales. There Boss Endo suddenly popped up to announce: "While Emperor Rang Te is here no political matters will be discussed. None whatever. The Manchukuan Constitution effectively keeps the Manchukuo Court out of politics."

Later the two Emperors, both earnest young men in tortoise-shell spectacles, hung around each other's necks the highest orders of their respective realms. Amid the festivities it was officially announced that in Manchukuo today "only about 60,000 bandits are active," a statistic considered to reveal, in the circumstances, nothing less than the triumph of Law & Order.

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