Mikadoism

Since Pearl Harbor no high U.S. official has attacked the Mikado. Tojo and the warlords--never Hirohito--are the targets of attack.

Then fortnight ago in San Francisco, California's earnest young Representative Will Rogers Jr., junketing on a lecture tour, gave currency to a proposal often discussed among experts on the Far East. Said Will Rogers: perhaps the Mikado would be an ideal U.S. puppet in Japan. The idea had been proposed by a British diplomat, he said. Congressman Rogers carefully did not endorse or condemn the plan; he merely offered it for his listeners' "consideration."

Almost alone in the U.S. press, the alert St. Louis Post-Dispatch took notice of Will Rogers' remarks. Said the Post-Dispatch last week:

"This is no innocuous bit of pollen wafted idly on the currents of international thought. It is a seed already planted in many minds. OWI is as forbidden to speak lightly of Hirohito as it is to call Victor Emmanuel a 'moronic little king. . . .'

"We have reason to believe that the Mikado . . . has never felt unfriendly to the Western world . . . that the Pearl Harbor treachery was in conflict with the Emperor's concept of foreign policy. Therefore, it is argued, in Hirohito we might have a friend. . . .

"Yet this is the very logic which explodes the theory itself. What safety can there ever be in a hereditary monarchy when even a ruler with a fairly enlightened point of view is nothing but the tool of the faction in power? . . . The religious zeal of Japanese loyalty and patriotism must be broken, and through the Emperor, if humanism is ever to penetrate to the Nipponese themselves."

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