Carp

Last week, with the U. S. Pacific armada war-gaming nearer Japan than ever before, with U. S. textile men tearing their hair about a Japanese commercial invasion, with William Randolph Hearst pumping the U. S. full of what a shame it is that all sorts of Japanese goods sell so cheap, the two nations continued to offer each other the handclasp of friendship in many a place and many a different way:

P: In Tokyo Japan's divine Emperor graciously received goodwill-touring Admiral Frank B. Upham of the U. S. Asiatic Fleet, 50,000 of whose seamates on 160 vessels were maneuvering four days' sailing away. The Emperor professed himself "delighted to receive the representative of a friendly nation."

P: Japanese horticulturists were scoring a peace smash by escorting around their country a "friendship group" from the Garden Club of America, sure to return in ecstasies, since Japanese flower arrangement is unsurpassed.

P: Batting about western U. S. states was a baseball team of 16 Japanese former college stars, a Japanese golf team and numerous unobtrusive "delegations." The Japanese athletes were not letting nine straight defeats dim their toothy smiles.

P: The Yale baseball team was preparing to embark for a goodwill sporting tour of Japan as the guests of Tokyo's Six-University Baseball League.

And Prince Konoye, a Princeton Freshman, had invited the golf teams of his own university and Yale to be his guests at home this summer.

P: As he boarded a train in New Jersey en route to Japan where he expected to open a six-day bicycle race track. Reginald ("Iron Man") McNamara was arrested on his wife's charge of desertion.

P: Agitated was a Tokyo visit of the 65 five-to-nine-year-old moppets of Kansas City's famed ''Toy Symphony Orchestra," children whose tootling might soothe Japanese breasts and help spread happy impressions of Japan when they returned to Missouri.

These were but the most immediate of many recent and amiable overtures (chiefly initiated by Japan) to make U. S. and Japanese citizens like each other more & more, to turn the black tides of circumstance which have made them like each other less & less ever since Japan bolted into Manchuria in spite of Secretary of State Henry Lewis Stimson's ineffectual "Whoa!"

A great source of friction then was that Japan's old-school Ambassador in Washington, Katsuji Debuchi. honestly knew of no other diplomatic technique than to tell the U. S. State Department, week after week and month after month, that Japan had not done what she had done and would not do what she then proceeded to do. This was not lying but diplomacy, according to the lights of Ambassador Debuchi and many another. Nevertheless, it did get on U. S. nerves. But Mr. Debuchi was among many who did not foresee or predict that President Roosevelt would recognize the Soviet Union, and for that failure the Japanese Government was able to recall him (TIME, Dec. 4. 1933). His successor in Washington, the youngest Japanese ever accredited as Ambassador to the U. S., had to be jumped over a whole series of Debuchis in the Japanese career service, where promotion is most rigidly formalized. He was boosted over the hurdles because Japan's now dominant militarists wanted their government to be represented in Washington not by a superbly polished and preserved mothball but by a Japanese New Deal patriot like themselves.

His Excellency Ambassador Hirosi Saito, who arrived in Washington year ago last February, was born the kind of youngster his wife had in mind when she drew the attention of an Embassy guest to a pair of superb paintings on silk of Japan's most symbolic fish, the carp. "See the carp swim strongly against the rapids and overleap even the waterfall." said Mrs. Saito. "According to Japanese ideas the carp is the symbol of courage and energy. Our young men are told to imitate the carp, who tests his strength by trying to jump over the waterfall and by swimming upstream."

Nowadays, on an average of once a week. Carp Saito appears before some more or less hostile U. S. chamber of commerce, club, or banquet and swims with such sheer vigor up the rapids of preconceived U. S. notions against Japan that he frequently manages to jump that particular waterfall amid a dazzling spray of half surprised applause. A sample of Saito at his best was Saito not only addressing the Chicago Council of Foreign Relations this winter, but rising with happy carp-leaps to hostile questions deluged upon him. Said whilom Ambassador to Britain Charles Gates Dawes who attended, "I believe it is unprecedented for the accredited representative of a foreign power to submit himself to cross-examination."

It was at Chicago that Saito had the courage to put an end to his government's long-maintained "diplomatic" attitude that Manchukuo is an "independent" Empire set up by its inhabitants' "spontaneous revolution." Quite candidly he declared that since Manchuria had been economically developed by Japan, Japanese believed they had performed "a rightful mission" in appropriating it.

In the past four years a whole school of vigorous, militant, aggressive young carp have appropriated the waters of Japanese politics. And none outshines whiskey-drinking, golf-playing, Cadillac-driving Hirosi Saito. Young Carp Saito, still only 48, came into the world the son of an untitled, inconspicuous translator of English at the Japanese Foreign Office.* He leaped his first waterfall when he landed in the Peers' College. There he dovetailed into a group of nationalistic-minded students who are now Japan's bright young leaders in the fighting services and Foreign Office, many holding posts today that were reserved for mossbacks before Japanese expansion entered its latest, most virile phase. Almost by instinct, Carp Saito chose to do most of his career swimming in the U. S. On entering foreign service he was attached to the Washington Embassy from 1911 to 1917, served as Consul in Seattle (1921-23), Consul General in New York (1923-28), Charge d'Affaires in Washington (1932-33).

Saito prides himself on his U. S. ways, his "Americanese" ("made," he jokes, "in Japan"). In Washington he has staffed his Delano & Aldrich, neo-Georgian Embassy with what he believes are the closest Oriental approximations of U. S. "good fellows." His corps of 18 (the British have 15) is more numerous and harder-working than that of any other Embassy. Having observed the lobbying tactics of fellow-Washingtonians, shrewd Hirosi Saito spends most of his Embassy allowance for "representation" not on balls and champagne for Washington socialites but on highballs and beefsteak suppers for the Press. When he makes a speech it gets printed. When hospitable wags of the Kenwood Golf Club gave him a two-ounce bottle of whiskey marked "A Year's Supply," adding the gift of five toy battleships, not only did Washington columnists recount the hilarity at length but even printed that, four of the battleships hav-ing disappeared, Ambassador Saito tucked the last in his pocket, sardonically remarking: "Ah, such is justice in this world." During last year's London Conference, when Japanese delegates were trying to argue Japan up from the inferiority of 5-5-3 to 5-5-5, the Washington Embassy switched to an English brand of cigaret on each of which appears the symbol 5-5-5. Normally Saito smokes Luckies.

But neither Ambassador Saito nor his enterprising staff would deny that their task has been made infinitely easier than that of their predecessors. A prime source of diplomatic boondoggling has been removed. For since Saito has been in the U. S., his great & good friend cocky Japanese Foreign Minister Koki Hirota has torn the mask off Japan's "mission in the Orient," has come out flatly and finally for Asia for the Asiatics, i. e. the Japanese. An illustration of how neatly this mission was progressing was at hand last week. After months of negotiation, Foreign Minister Hirota was about to honor China for its "cooperation" with Japanese aims by elevating Minister Akira Ariyoshi to an Ambassadorship.*

In Washington, Saito likes to recall that he has had his eye on Franklin Roosevelt ever since Saito was a humble secretary and Roosevelt was a sub-Cabineteer. Today Saito has his eye more fixedly on Franklin Roosevelt than ever. He knows that President Roosevelt's new Navy is the most potent afloat, that it is still abuilding. He knows that Washington wiseacres see this Navy as a net to prevent the Japanese carp from becoming so exuberant as to try an Eastward leap. Hirosi Saito's job is to convince the man in the White House that, at any rate, the carp will not permit the net to roil his own Asiatic waters.

*Mme Saito, no commoner, is the daughter of the late Baron Dr. Shokichi Xagayo, granddaughter of the even more famed Baron Dr. Sensai Xagayo who introduced vaccination into Japan.

*Ambassador Saito's Washington Embassy and Minister Ariyoshi's Peiping Legation are twin cornerstones of Japanese world diplomacy. Minister Ariyoshi was transferred from Brazil in 1932. Japan's contact man in her recent devious dealings with Chinese politicos, he seldom remains in one place very long but plies between the Japanese diplomatic and consular offices at Nanking, Peiping and Shanghai.

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