Cordwood & Thugs

LOOK OUT!

Brute-like American by name of Aurell dismissed his company's 1,000 employes who logically worked for the company's interests, yet obtained not a sen at their retirement from services.

Aurell dares to discharge the employes thus cruelly and is still indifferent. There is no knowing what he further attempts to kill the employes to starvation.

Neighbors! Be very careful about Aurell whose inhuman acts know no bounds. Expel Aurell from Japan!

(Signed) All Japan Singer Sewing Machine Employes Union

Just before Christmas silent-footed persons posted the above notice on the door of Japan-born Alvin K. Aurell, son of a Kansas-born missionary, today branch manager in Yokohama for Singer Sewing Machine Co. Mr. Aurell was not exactly alarmed. Singer's labor troubles in Japan began more than a year ago, caused the company to close its Osaka and Kobe branches last November. Last week Manager Aurell sat calmly eating his lunch when a large motor truck drove up to his branch, dumped a load of cordwood in front of the door.

Two hundred excited Japanese strikers and sochi ("hired thugs")* arrived with the cordwood. Slamming the door in their faces, Singer Assistant Manager Gilbert Parsons shot the bolt, raised an alarm and led the few Singer office workers who had not gone out to lunch up four flights of stairs to the roof.

Swinging their cordwood. the sochi and strikers broke down Singer's front door, broke in through Singer windows, beat typewriters to smithereens, poured ink over Singer ledgers, smashed office furniture and seized Singer records of tens of thousands of Japanese who are paying for Singers on the instalment plan. Tearing these records to shreds, the attackers then pulped the shreds by dumping them into a convenient canal.

All this took 20 minutes. Police, who must have seen the mob of 200 approach, arrived tardily, arrested 138. "We strikers acted in a gentlemanly manner as long as possible," said a strikers' spokesman. "We only decided to act when the Singer firm hired thugs as guards."

In Manhattan lives Singer's aristocratic, Vandyke-bearded President Sir Douglas Alexander, Bart, a loyal subject of George V. The Singer building in Yokohama is owned by a Swiss. Last week the U. S. Embassy and the Swiss Legation in Tokyo hotly protested to Japanese Foreign Minister Count Yasuya Uchida. He was "very sorry," promised police protection for Singer property throughout Japan.

Yokohama police took the line that Singer had employed thugs as guards, arrested some of the alleged Singer thugs who were said to have fought the attackers. Reporting to the State Department last week U. S. Ambassador Joseph Clark Grew cabled: "The loss occasioned by this destruction will amount to hundreds of thousands of dollars. . . . Americans who were present in the building were unharmed, but two Japanese employes are reported seriously injured."

In previous anti-Singer riots, marchers have carried anti-foreign banners: "Down With Foreign Capital!"; "The United States Is Rich But Little Japan Can Whip It!"; "Give Foreign Factories To Japanese Workers!" Last week no such banners were reported. After the Yokohama smashing, white Singer employes continued to live, as they have for several months, in the closely guarded Grand Hotel. Eightyper cent of "household type" Singer sewing machines sold in Japan are made by Scotsmen in Singer's Scotch plant. Ninety-nine per cent of Singer stock is said to be owned in the U. S.

*Not to be confused with Japan's unique ronin. Extremely proud & snobbish, the ronio take no pay for their thuggery, which is exclusively political and supposed to be patriotic. Generally attached to some potent Japanese politician, a modern group of ronin seldom commit violence themselves, spend their time plotting and instigating patriotic youngsters, such as the assassins of ex-Finance Minister Inouye (TIME, Feb. 22) and the Empire's No. 1 financier, Baron Dr. Takuma Dan (TIME, March 14). Most famed, almost deified in Japan, are the Forty-Seven Ronin, heroes of feudal thuggery who avenged the death of their daimyo (overlord) by slaying his enemy, then committed hara-kiri themselves, and are now buried around a Tokyo temple where pious Japanese keep incense ever burning before their tombs.

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