Fresh Typhoon?

The summer holiday of Japanese Emperor Hirohito and Empress Nagako was cut short last week by fierce fighting in Soviet Siberia and in North China. Their Majesties hurried from the seaside back to a highly excited Tokyo in which Premier Prince Konoye repeatedly held midnight cabinet councils with members of the General Staff. Japanese businessmen, as usual, could not find out whether Japanese soldiers had been fighting at the command of their Government or because their local Japanese commanders had decided that the local opportunities for getting in a few blows were too good to miss last week.

Soviet Russia had on its hands fortnight ago a frontier clash among the Amur River islands which ended when Soviet Foreign Commissar Maxim Litvinoff secured hasty withdrawal of the Russian forces, claimed the Japanese had withdrawn too as promised by their Ambassador Mamoru Shigemitsu in Moscow (TIME, July 12). Last week Mr. Shigemitsu delicately hinted that there had been no Japanese promise to withdraw, and wrathful Comrade Litvinoff, on discovering that the Japanese either had not withdrawn or anyhow were on the disputed islands again within 48 hours, was in no mood to continue meek and conciliatory when news arrived of a bloody Japanese-Soviet clash in the Vinokurka Hills. This affray was on the Soviet-Siberian frontier nearly 1,000 miles east of the disputed Amur River islands. Comrade Litvinoff promptly handed a sharp warning to Ambassador Shigemitsu: "Soviet frontier troops have firm orders in no case to allow Japanese and Manchurian troops to cross Soviet frontiers, and upon their appearance on Soviet territory to drive them out with all means."

Japan's closely censored newsorgans meanwhile filled their columns with reports of mutinous Red Army ferment in Siberia, announced that "several hundred Red Army officers and soldiers" had been overpowered by the secret police after "resisting arrest" in Vladivostok and were being shipped toward Moscow as prisoners on two trains. "The rest of the Soviet Far East army, as a result of these arrests, has been thrown into utter confusion!" crowed the Tokyo Nichi Nichi.

Meanwhile Japanese forces in North China had given notice of daytime maneuvers near Peiping. Savage shooting began at night and, according to a Chinese official communique: "The Japanese fired first after certain persons had fired on Japanese emerging from Fengtai barracks for night maneuvers around Wanpinhsien and Lu-kouchiao." These two centres soon saw pitched battles in which 16 Japanese and some 200 Chinese were killed, with Japanese artillery plunking poorly aimed shells, one of which landed in the empty bed of a local Chinese magistrate. Increasingly sharp fighting made it no clearer who were the "certain persons" who opened fire before the Japanese "fired first," but the Chinese Government at Nanking for the first time began acting as if it were ready for war with Japan.

Never before has Chinese Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek been reported sending on troop trains, in the direction of Japanese forces, the German-trained army of crack Chinese troops known as "Chiang's Own." Latest dispatches said these were rumbling from central toward northern China, and the Japanese Embassy officials had been handed a Chinese note of such unprecedented vigor that they were visibly flabbergasted. The note demanded that the Japanese Government "formally apologize for the hostilities" in North China, then "punish the Japanese officers responsible and pay an indemnity for the Chinese casualties."

Said a high Nanking official: "We are preparing for war."

Significance. That it should be China and not the U.S.S.R. which showed the most fight last week, that not Stalin but Chiang should be demanding Japanese apologies and payment of indemnity, made Far East observers remember with a start that the Nanking Government this year has, been quietly settling its differences with the Chinese Communist armies it had been battling for a decade, formed a Popular Front. The U.S.S.R. has always frankly financed the Chinese Communists, supplies them with munitions, and today under Popular Front banners patriotic Chinese are raising in all parts of their vast homeland the slogan "FIGHT JAPAN !"

Outward signs in Tokyo this week were that the Japanese Government, whether or not they believed Japanese newspaper accounts of mutiny in the Red Army, were astonished at the bold line taken by Nanking, uncertain whether the Russian bear was replying to the slaps Japan has given him in Siberia with an uppercut from China. Japanese troops in the Peiping area have been so accustomed for years to make the Chinese grovel by harsh measures that they were considered apt to do something rash and undisciplined this week. Nervously the Japanese Government sent to them by airplane from Tokyo a Lieut. General Kuyoshi Kazuki, described as a "famous disciplinarian." The Japanese Cabinet then decided to move several troop trains of its regulars down from Manchukuo toward Peiping. Since Chinese troop trains were approaching from Nanking this week, North China had precariously become the pivot of a fresh typhoon of Far East trouble.

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