Suppressed Three

In Tokyo last week the Imperial Government banned as "detrimental to public peace" three of the best modern U. S. books on Japan, all written by authors who strive to be objective and praise Japan quite as often as they damn her. Excerpts from the books banned: Challenge: Behind the Face of Japan by Upton Close (Farrar & Rinehart, $3): "Perhaps the most amusing of Japan's new industries is the reproduction of old American heirlooms--New England furniture and such. ... It is as hard for our diplomats to converse with the Japanese foreign office as for a man to argue with a woman.

. . . Japanese hope of peace and understanding with the West is based upon our acknowledgment of Japan's divine mission and acceptance of what Japanese do. . . .

Japan will not change. Neither will the West, which feels as justified by logic in its position as a man 'talking reason' with a high-strung woman. . . . Nippon, the most feminine-minded nation, may yet accomplish what Alexander, Caesar, Genghiz, Charlemagne, Napoleon and Kaiser Wilhelm II failed to accomplish." Far Eastern Front by Edgar Snow (Smith & Haas, $3.75) "A visit to India, to Japan, to the Philippines, leaves you suddenly with the conviction that in many obscure but important ways the Chinese people are far in advance of Eastern men elsewhere, and that in them ultimately and inevitably resides the cultural leadership of Asia. . . . Two years of undeclared war with Japan have not perceptibly shaken China" but if Japan succeeds in detaching Chinese Turkestan "that would complete a period of fifty years of decline, during which 3,000,000 square miles of territory had been detached from the anatomy of China. . . .

"To one close to realities in the East, it does not seem unlikely that China may in time unite with Japan against the West." Japan in Crisis by Dr. Harry Emerson Wildes (Macmillan, $2): "It is certainly a libel upon Japanese womanhood to say, as does the little red brochure bought by many tourists and entitled How the Social Evil is Regulated in Japan, that 'ten percent of the female population of all ages' is engaged in prostitution. But it is exceedingly significant that, with a press censorship as strict as that in Japan and as ready to suppress publications which are undesirable, the little red brochure is allowed to be distributed and sold. . . .

Because of the close alliance of the Government with the vice interests . . . one such scandal, occurring in a very recent year, involved a Premier, the heads of the three leading political parties, a governor and other Japanese officials in a million-yen bribery case. . . .

"Revolution is scarcely yet upon the home horizon. . . . But Japan has fallen prey to the graft, corruption and slackness that have undermined so many empires in the past."

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