Indo-China "Weaned"

Among Japanese esthetes there is a pretty distinction. On the one hand are those who study purely Japanese culture, lovers of No and Go (respectively formal drama and classical checkers), amateurs of the Thurberesque cartoons of Twelfth-Century Toba Sojo, appreciators of verse by the formal Hitomaro, experts in flower arrangement, tea-brewing and fish-breeding. On the other hand are the assiduous, tough-minded students of Chinese culture, whence sprang the Japanese culture which is now being foisted back on China. The former are generally peace-loving, stay-at-home liberals; the latter are nationalistic fire-eaters.

Unhappiest esthete in Japan last week was Charles Arsene-Henry, French Ambassador to Tokyo. A scholar of Japanese language and literature, voluminously informed particularly on Japanese poetry, polite as a Japanese minstrel, Ambassador Arsene-Henry falls into the first classification. Last week he was cruelly hounded by devotees of the second. In a week of bitterest tragedy for his France, it appeared that something equally ruinous might be at hand in Asia--the beginning of the end for the white man's oriental empires. The discomfort of Ambassador Arsene-Henry was pathetically symbolic.

Anglo-French imperialists, especially in the East, were last week far too soft, too effete, too gentle, too civilized, to be able even to realize the extent of the world revolution, to say nothing of stemming it.

M. Arsene-Henry's misfortunes began immediately after France's request for armistice. The Japanese Army spokesman in Canton said that if French Indo-China refused to "reconsider herself" on the matter of sending munitions by rail into China, the Imperial Army would "undertake to wean Indo-China away from hostility to Japan." M. Arsene-Henry, who understood the meaning of that "wean," who also well appreciates the classical Japanese conceptions of fact and fiction, flatly denied that any arms were going from French Indo-China into China (although two-thirds of China's war supplies have gone that way since the fall of Nanning).

Next the Foreign Office demanded maintenance of the status quo in French Indo-China--i.e., no one should take it but Japan, not even Japan's friends Germany and Italy. Louder & louder grew the cry among extreme nationalists in Tokyo that Japan should occupy and "protect" the territory, and thus snip both outside intervention and the China supply line.

The Foreign Office began buttering up to the victorious Axis, and onetime Foreign Minister Naotaka Sato turned up in Rome and Berlin on a good-will mission.

The Foreign Office soon handed gentle M. Arsene-Henry demands that French authorities: 1) give the Japanese a detailed inventory of gasoline, trucks, railway stocks in French Indo-China; 2) allow Japanese customs officers periodically to examine these stocks; 3) let Japanese troops supervise transportation across the border into China.

This was a lot to swallow, but on instructions from defeated Bordeaux, Ambassador Arsene-Henry acceded. Of course, the Japanese were not satisfied. The Navy concentrated several units, including an aircraft carrier, off Hainan Island, opposite the French Indo-Chinese port of Haiphong. The Army was reported moving troops down from the Yangtze area, with 100,000 already billeted on Hainan.

A land blockade tightened around Britain's nearby Hong Kong. The French Indo-Chinese defense, 50,000 mostly native troops almost entirely unsupported by airplanes, would probably not last long without help from British Singapore.

To Japanese militarists, occupation of French Indo-China was a delightful prospect. It would shorten both the long faces of discouraged civilians at home and the China campaign--by cutting Chiang Kai-shek's chief supply lines. If & when the U. S. Fleet were shifted from the Pacific to the Atlantic, Japan could begin her long-planned campaign to drive the white man from all Asia.

Whether or not they took territory, the Japanese last week took great realms of prestige. At week's end they placed before cultured, scholarly, helpless Ambassador Arsene-Henry a document similar to one signed by Britain under pressure a year ago--recognizing Japan's "specific rights" in China, promising not to impede the Japanese from maintaining peace and order. Peace and the New Order, when realized, would mean death to French, British, Dutch, and U. S. interests in Asia.

M. Arsene-Henry sighed and signed.

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