Japan As She Is

BEHIND THE RISING SUN--James R. Young--Doubleday, Doran ($3). JAPAN UNMASKED--Hallett Abend--Washburn ($3).

Fortnight ago, startled Americans blinked in the rising sunlight and asked: How could it happen? Japan, loudmouthed opponent of Communism in Asia, had just signed a non-aggression pact with Russia, loudmouthed guardian of Asia against Japan. Even five years ago the pact would have been unthinkable. What had happened to Japan? This week two veteran U.S. correspondents in the Far East, "Jimmy" Young and Hallett Abend, told them something about the revolution which Japan is carrying out in the midst of a great foreign war.

James Russell Young arrived in Japan as a footloose seaman on a German steamer, jumped ship to sell space for, become advertising manager of Tokyo's great English-language daily, the Japan Advertiser. He also became manager of the Tokyo Bureau of Hearst's International News Service and King Features Syndicate.

Correspondent Young lived in Japan 13 years. He doesn't live there any more. One day in January 1940, Correspondent Young answered a smart rap on his door. Outside was a Japanese plain-clothes cop who invited him to visit police headquarters for a brief conversation. There the police took away Young's shoes. "You are not going anywhere," they said. To William T. Turner of the U.S. Embassy, who accompanied Young, they shouted: "The American Embassy people are fools. Get out of here!" But Jimmy Young did not get out for two months. Most of that time the Japanese quizzed Young constantly, trying to prove that he was a spy.

One exhibit which the Japanese thought crushing were photographs of captured Russian tanks they had fished out of Young's files. Young let them get steamed up, then showed them that the pictures were authorized Japanese War Office handouts which had already appeared in LIFE magazine.

Another thing that aroused police suspicions was a note from Young to his wife asking if their young son had been to see the monkeys in the zoo. All over the East, Japanese are referred to as "monkeys." When Young explained that he meant the monkeys in the Hibiya Park, the police checked, found there really were some monkeys there. Writes Author Young: "I had not realized their sensitiveness on this anthropological point. . . ."

Once Walter Winchell nearly got Young into trouble. Winchell broadcast: "What are they holding you for, spreading peace rumors?" Spreading peace rumors in Japan is a prison offense. When the police asked what Winchell meant, Young told them: "In New York they have a different dialect from my part of the country, and I cannot understand Winchell-san's dialect."

Worse than the police was the cold prison. Young had nothing to sit down on but the damp cell floor. At last Ambassador Grew sent Young his sealskin-lined overcoat. Grew is over six feet tall; Young, much shorter. When Young turned up the coat collar, he was covered from head to foot. Young soon discovered that the Ambassador's coat gave him a certain diplomatic immunity. "As long as I had it on, the police would recognize it as Ambassador Crew's property. Removed, I was just another reporter." Young never took it off, wore it even to the toilet, later to court. He asked the police what would happen if there were a fire or an earthquake and the coat were destroyed. After studying the matter for three days, they announced that thereafter the door of Young's cell would be left unlocked. In case of emergency, he could get out and save the coat.

Ambassador Grew did what he could, but Young accuses some other members of the U.S. Embassy staff of not pushing his case. When Young got tired of waiting, his wife requested William Randolph Hearst to intervene. Hearst cabled Matsuoka and other big shots. Young's trial was called at once.

Found guilty, but promptly released, Young got out of jail to find that:

> The Chinese war had taken an eighth of an inch off every Japanese match.

> Oranges cost $1 apiece.

> Car owners were no longer given even their one-gallon-a-day allotment of gasoline.

> Eggs, butter, potatoes were more precious than jade.

> Public dancing was prohibited and U.S. jazz bands were banned from Japan.

> The annual tourist trade had dropped from some $10,000,000 to almost zero.

> Rat skins were being used for shoe leather.

> The scrap-metal famine was so acute that wire wastebaskets and metal doorknobs had to be guarded; most of the manhole covers had been stolen from the streets.

>The toy, novelty, and handicraft industries had died of international boycott.

> Income taxes were up 35% to 50%, with taxes on incomes over $200.

> Seven airplane factories were working day & night and fascists of the Army clique flew high.

So Young sailed back to the U.S.

Correspondent Young does not like Japanese ways. He does not like Japanese red tape, formality, police spying, fashions, food, housing, weather. During his 13 years in Japan he seems to have relaxed only in circles of U.S. business and newspapermen similar to the ingrowing foreign groups of Shanghai's International Settlement. Against this handicap, his position with the Japan Advertiser gave him intimate contacts with almost every section of Japanese society, and he learned Japanese.

His reporter's trained eye is sharpened by constant irritation. The best sections of his book are such frolicsome ones as those in which he describes the passing fads in Japanese suicides (belly-ripping, jumping into volcanoes, drowning). Most important are those in which he discusses the Army fascists and fanatics like Sublieutenant Kiyoshi Koga, who testified in court that he had plotted to assassinate Charlie Chaplin. Koga's reason: "Chaplin is the darling of the capitalistic class. We thought that killing him would bring on war with the United States."

Hallett Abend sees nothing funny in the Far East. His book covers more ground than Young's, is tense, timely, ominous. Abend never lived long in Japan. But as New York Times correspondent, he spent 14 1/2 years covering China. More than once he was in hot water with Chiang Kai-shek's Government for his realistic reporting. When the Japanese got to China, Timesman Abend was in hot water all the time. Japan's Washington embassy had called Abend's dispatches "more fair and just than any news reports coming out of China." The Japanese Army in China thought otherwise.

Last year Abend was warned by a Japanese friend to cross-examine his servants. Abend asked questions, found that one had been offered a bribe by a Japanese gendarme to put "some papers" in Abend's file. Another had refused $500 to put a box of opium and two loaded revolvers in Abend's car. When Abend complained, the Japanese said: So sorry. "The leader of the plot . . . is being sent back to Japan in chains."

One midnight two masked Japanese got into Abend's apartment, forced him to kneel by twisting his arms. They kicked him in the small of his back, slapped his face. Then they made off with 354 typed pages of Abend's new book, did not touch valuable jewelry or $350 in cash.

On the day after Abend obtained a three-day scoop on the Japan-Axis pact, there were five threats by telephone. Next day there were more. Then anonymous letters began to arrive. So Timesman Abend said a sad farewell to his two Scotties and one dachshund, began a long inspection tour of the democratic bastions in the Far East that took him to Singapore, The Netherlands East Indies, the Philippines, back to the U.S. In part his book is a report of what he saw, in part it is a report of his years as a journalistic China hand.

Like Young, Abend reports that in Japan "life is harder, pleasures are fewer, luxuries are banned, clothing is shoddy, food is rationed, amusements are curtailed." Unlike Young, he is unable to laugh at what he finds. Instead he tries to see Japan's case from the viewpoint of a patriotic Japanese. So he does not run the risk of underestimating the Japanese.

"We, in the United States," he says, "see Japan as a conquering Power. . . . But Japan sees the whole process from the inside of what, to her, seems to be a vicious and choking circle. . . . Those Americans who rashly believe that Japan could be beaten in war swiftly and with ease should ponder upon Japanese national psychology and upon the quality and temperament of Japan's leadership."

As in more than one non-fascist country, Abend finds that in Japan the war is being used as a pretext for setting up totalitarian socialism. In Japan, socialism is the old army game. "Capitalistic and liberal elements are to be driven to earth ... all initiative is being stifled, and Government control is being ruthlessly extended into every branch of industry. Exchange control, production limitations, restrictions on the purchasing and shipment of supplies, rationing of raw materials--these are among the means. . . ." "A mere whispered threat" by the Army to repeat the 1936 Tokyo mutiny keeps politicians and financiers in line.

By "Army" Abend means "that small minority within the service itself which will not hesitate to use violence if necessary for the attainment of its ends." Among fascist-minded Japanese he names: General Araki; Baron Hiranuma, Minister of Home Affairs; Naoki Hoshino, president of the powerful Planning Board; Vice-Minister Toshio Shiratori; "sinister" Colonel Kingoro Hashimoto (see cut p. 97), who ordered the bombing of the U.S.S. Panay.

To worried Americans, Timesman Abend offers some worried advice: Keep a large part of the U.S. Fleet at Singapore. "Once Japan makes an assault upon that key position it will be too late for us to get there. . . . We did not send our Fleet westward to or toward Singapore, because we feared such an action might anger Japan to the point of a declaration of war. . . . Our refraining from action may go down in history as another blunder of the democracies--trying to avert an inevitable conflict. . . ."

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