Heroes, Dead & Alive

Martial law was declared in Japan after fanatical junior Army officers assassinated three of Japan's leading statesmen (TIME, March 9). As a sign that martial law continues, the Divine Emperor and Son of Heaven, who prefers mufti, has been wearing nothing but military uniforms ever since. By his command an Extraordinary Court-Martial with unprecedented powers was set up under the presidency of General Count Juichi Terauchi, the new War Minister, to try the assassins. They were denied the right of being defended by lawyers, their trial was secret. Seventeen death sentences were furtively announced in the dead of night (2 a. m.), and last week Tokyo ears were cocked for daybreak fusillades by firing squads.

All this was absolutely unprecedented in Japan, where public opinion has long regarded political assassination as legitimate and most killers of Japanese statesmen as heroes. To prepare the public for what came last week, the Imperial Government nervously sent before a firing squad fortnight ago Lieut. Colonel Saburo Aizawa, the "hero" who killed Director of Military Affairs General Tetsuzan Nagata last summer (TIME, Aug. 26). Before the firing squad blew his brains out, Hero Aizawa cried: "It is proper that a soldier should die to the sound of rifles. Flesh disintegrates but the soul lives on. Seven, even eight lives more will I devote to this imperial land."

The fusillade which followed marked the first execution of a Japanese officer for political murder in 28 years. It occasioned no disturbance, no further outcropping of assassinations, and wary little Premier Koki Hirota felt safe last week in giving his firing squads some real work. According to the sentences of the divinely constituted court-martial, they were to shoot two infantry captains, a quartermaster captain, six infantry first lieutenants, an artillery first lieutenant, two infantry second lieutenants, an artillery and an engineer second lieutenant, a graduate of the Army Cadet School not yet commissioned and a retired Army officer--16 Army men, plus an eminent Japanese labor agitator named Yoshaki Nakamura, a onetime Communist.

Only trouble with sentencing these men to death was that the reasons they gave for the killings they perpetrated have been incorporated by the present Japanese Cabinet into its announced program. It was typical of Japanese Justice that, while 17 sentences of death were meted out and all proceedings of the trial kept secret, the War Office released for publication throughout Japan the full text of the reasons given by the assassins for assassinating.

In the first place, these young officers "deplored the corruption of the age and the flippancy of the public mind"--as does every Japanese Army officer. They thought that Japan's "financial magnates only seek to satisfy their avarice"--and so does every Japanese. The assassins objected to the craven attitude of previous Japanese Cabinets in signing the London Naval Treaty of 1930. This pact the new Japanese Cabinet has now repudiated.

Moreover the assassins "claimed that statesmen close to the Throne had, ever since the London Naval Treaty was signed, been interfering with the Imperial prerogative." This was a poke at Prince Saionji, who is still His Majesty's chief adviser despite nebulous promises by the new Cabinet to make the Emperor and his prerogatives utterly supreme. Finally the assassins, like the new Cabinet, sought "to assure clarification of the national policy, expansion of national defense armaments and stabilization of the peoples--in a word, to bring about the so-called Showa Restoration" under which the Japanese Empire is to grow until it includes all Eastern Asia.

Well might assassins with such motives hold their heads high, and so they did last week as firing squads cracked out the deaths of 15 at an hour kept rigorously secret. Two were mysteriously spared.

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