Victory and Profits

The farther Japanese troops push into China, the poorer grow the folks at home. To Japanese army leaders the solution is obvious--soak Japan's few rich even harder. To do so, the army wants to invoke Article 11 of the National Mobilization Act passed by the last Diet. This article makes it possible not only to limit industrial profits, but to direct how they should be used.

It so happened, however, that Japan's Minister of Finance, Seihin Ikeda, was formerly managing director of the vast Mitsui Bank (he was rumored marked for assassination in the February 1936 uprising of young army officers) and his daughter married into one of Japan's four wealthiest families. For long he has rebelled at the army's proposal; last week it was rumored that, for the sake of his conscience and his skin, he was getting out. Prince Fumimaro Konoye, golf-playing descendant of a long line of courtiers, has from the beginning disliked his job. For 19 months he and other moderates in his Cabinet have conducted a gallant, ineffective rearguard action against army-dominated colleagues. Premier Prince Konoye quit, so did Finance Minister Ikeda.

Then, for the first time since Japan began its conquest of China, the army got its own man the premiership. The Emperor gave the job to austere, fanatically patriotic, 73-year-old Baron Kiichiro Hiranuma. Recognized civilian leader of Japan's military-fascist front, since the army's uprising in February 1936 Baron Hiranuma has been president of Emperor Hirohito's Privy Council.

A bureaucrat from way back, the new premier is not popular, has never held an elective office. His entire official career has been spent in the Department of Justice and the Privy Council. Both these institutions are surrounded by a forbidding wall of secrecy, are regarded by liberal Japanese as respectively the dungeon and citadel of reaction.

While in the Department of Justice the Baron, then plain Mr. Hiranuma, became notorious for harsh, even sadistic, persecution of persons harboring "dangerous thoughts," an official euphemism for any ideas critical of the existing order. In 1914 he founded the Kokuhonsha (National Foundation Society), the nucleus of the military-fascist front. In 1936 the society was disbanded because Baron Hiranuma had become president of the Privy Council, and as an adviser to the throne was considered above politics.

By his resignation, easy-going Premier Prince Konoye has thus smartly passed on to the political leader of the group responsible for pushing Japan into her continental adventure, the responsibility for pulling her through. Also up to the new Premier is the difficult task of finding some formula for cooperation between the army and private capital, in the search for both victory and profits in China.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.