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Big-boned, eagle-bald William Cameron Forbes was over 60 and paunchy when he astonished Peiping's hard-riding legation set one day in 1931 by climbing on a Mongolian pony and playing a fast game of polo. As U. S. Ambassador to Japan, Mr. Forbes displayed no less aplomb at his diplomatic tasks in Tokyo during the strained days of the Manchurian crisis. His wealth, tact and toughness won him such respect among the Japanese that at a farewell banquet before his return to the U. S. the president of the House of Peers declared him "a worthy compeer of George Washington."

Compeer Forbes, who is also a grandson of Ralph Waldo Emerson and a cousin of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, did not relinquish his interest in Japanese affairs with his Ambassadorship. In 1935 he went back to Japan as head of the American Economic Mission to the Far East, whose report on Japanese industry acted powerfully to dispel the popular notion that Japan's booming foreign trade was made possible by hideously sweated labor. One of the members of the Forbes mission, President Roosevelt's Georgia neighbor, Cason Callaway, followed it by helping to promote the agreement concluded last winter between U. S. and Japanese cotton textile men, freezing Japan's export quotas at 255,000,000 yd. for 1937-38. These visits stirred the shrewd and courteous Japanese to reciprocity. Last month Mr. Forbes became chairman of a national reception committee for the first Japanese Economic Mission to the U. S. since 1922.

Conceived last summer in conversations between the Japan Economic Federation and the Foreign Office, the mission was organized last February, thoroughly feted in Tokyo, written up in a special supplement of the Osaka Mainichi and the Tokyo Nichi Nichi, blessed at length by the then Prime Minister Senjuro Hayashi, Finance Minister Toyotaro Yuki and Foreign Minister Naotake Sato and showered with confetti ribbons as it sailed from Yokohama on April 28. The party of ten Japanese industrialists had no intention of making any immediate trade agreements. Avowed their chairman, sunny President Chokyuro Kadono of the Japanese Chamber of Commerce: "The primary consideration . . . was that the courtesy shown to us in the spring of 1935 [by the Forbes mission] . . . should be returned without delay." When they departed on the Normandie last week to attend the International Chamber of Commerce meeting in Berlin, Mr. Kadono and fellow missionaries were fatigued but well-satisfied that they had missed few contacts in the U. S. Accompanied by two wives, three managers, seven assistants and some 200 pieces of baggage, they had been entertained in San Francisco, Los Angeles, Dallas, Houston, New Orleans, Chicago, Detroit, Niagara Falls, Buffalo, Boston, New York and Washington. They had toured Ford and General Motors plants, the Endicott Johnson shoe factory at Binghamton, N. Y., General Electric's Schenectady plant and the broadcasting studios of Radio City. In conference with U. S. automobile men they were pointedly reminded that a car selling for $730 in the U. S. costs $1,194 in Japan, heard what benefits would follow for Japan were the present tariff lowered and more U. S. cars imported. At a publishers' luncheon in the Waldorf-Astoria somebody asked: "What would happen to a man like John L. Lewis in Japan?" Grinned Mr. Kadono: "I don't think he could talk his head off in Japan, but I think he would have his own way."

In Washington the U. S. Chamber of Commerce's old and new presidents, Harper Sibley and George H. Davis turned out to welcome the Japanese with Ambassador Hirosi Saito. With Secretary of Commerce Daniel C. Roper they exchanged polite greetings. Secretary Roper's Business Advisory Council gave them a luncheon. Secretary of State Cordell Hull made a speech. At the Burning Tree, Metropolitan and Chevy Chase clubs they played golf earnestly and remarkably well. Convinced by members of the State Department that Franklin Roosevelt minded not at all their lack of formal morning clothes, they spent a smiling half hour with the President.

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