Challenge to Hell

Challenge to Hell

Japanese delegates to the London Naval Conference last week walked reverently with the U. S., British, French and Italian delegates around the great international loan exhibit of Chinese Art at Burlington House (TIME, Dec. 9). The soul of even the most bellicose Japanese is at peace in awe and wonder before marvels of Chinese Art. To the white delegates, most of whom did not escape inner qualms similar to an inferiority complex in Burlington House, sturdy little Japanese Chief Delegate Admiral Osamu Nagano explained exquisite niceties with elegance and charm.

The Admiral had been sent from Tokyo to smash the Conference and he was about to smash the Conference. By so doing he would incur for Japan the supreme risk that her defiance might stir up the Great Powers to do something at last to check the onslaught Japan launched in 1931 when she thumbed her short nose at the Briand-Kellogg Pact, made war her national policy and, withdrawing from the League of Nations in 1933, continued to advance upon China in a predatory campaign still highly successful. Perhaps there was no real risk of the tabby cat powers doing anything, but whatever the risk Admiral Nagano was resolved to run it. First, however, he had insisted upon having his cabled instructions from the Son-of-Heaven minutely double-checked by cable while he expatiated in Burlington House upon the loveliness of Chinese Art.

Everything being ready for the Grand Smash, faultless politeness constrained Admiral Nagano merely to tell journalists that he had written a letter withdrawing Japan from the Conference at 6 p. m. This letter was not delivered to the British Admiralty until about midnight, by which time the Naval Conference had most enjoyably dined & wined with the Lord Mayor of London and the Prince of Wales.

As the diplomats emerged, sucking their Havanas, the press placards of London carried blood-red headlines. Inside the papers one could gather from small type that Japanese "pride of race" no longer submits to the "inferiority" branded upon Japan by the 5-5-3 naval ratio. Therefore Japan, like race-proud Germany, will hereafter build what war boats she pleases. If steel is to be piled onto the oceans until it is time for blood, Japan nevertheless maintains that in any such naval race everyone else will be as much to blame as Japan.

In London next day the U. S., British, French and Italians turned the Conference into a painful and frivolous pretense that naval limitation or disarmament can still be striven for by other Great Powers without Japan. Some talk was heard about new Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden's idea of inviting to the Conference both Nazi Germany and Bolshevik Russia. Any such move was soon postponed, but the Conference did agree that its member states are to tell each other early each year what warboats they are going to build that year. The Conference further agreed that Japanese observers left behind by Admiral Nagano shall not be permitted to attend the Conference's secret sessions, as they impudently requested.

Tokyo papers editorialized on such themes as that Japanese shipyards can build war boats faster than U. S. shipyards; that Depression has sapped U. S. strength until it no longer overwhelmingly exceeds Japan's; and that not only are most U. S. citizens unwilling to fight but also, in the words of Nichi Nichi, "Most American Navy men are mere professionals and lack devotion to the State."

Boiling with devotion to the State, and wrought up to such a pitch that he interspersed his words with loud, hysterical laughter, the Commander of the Japanese Home Fleet, Vice-Admiral Sankichi Takahashi, cried in Tokyo: "Put your minds at ease! {hah-hah). If we are compelled to use the short sword to combat a foe brandishing the long sword (hah-hah}, I am sure we shall win! We have tactics to defeat the combined fleets of Great Britain and the U. S. (hee-hee}."

A member of the Emperor's Privy Council, experienced and perfectly self-possessed, Count Kentaro Kaneko, said quietly but with a hard, triumphant light in his eyes : "At London for the first time in history Japanese diplomacy has been on a basis of equality with the other powers." -- i. e., Japanese have looked white men in the face and with impeccable politeness challenged them to go to Hell.

Although the fighting services are dominant, Japan's strongest party, the Seiyu-kai, raised such a tremendous hubbub in caucus against the Cabinet this week, partly because of the London walkout and partly because of Japan's strained eco nomic fabric, that Tokyo expected the Son-of-Heaven to dissolve Parliament soon and order a general election.

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