So Delicate Situation

(See Cover) After four debilitating years in China, after failing to take the initiative in the south when The Netherlands Indies were weak, Japan last week appeared to have lost the initiative in her own prolonged war of aggrandizement. It remained to be seen whether the Russo-German campaign would enable her to seize the initiative again.

"If America and the Soviet reach more intimate relations," the editor of Hochi warned the Japanese Government--and Japanese editors rarely talk tough--"the Soviet might offer Vladivostok to America as a joint naval base. . . . America is looking for a position near Japan to use as a base for war operations against Japan.

... I cry for responsible consideration of the matter." There was every indication in Tokyo that the Government was giving responsible consideration to many matters arising out of Germany's attack on Russia, which, in spite of official denials, caught Japan as flat-footed as everybody else. Venturesome Foreign Minister Yosuke Matsuoka, who promoted and signed both the Tripartite Pact with Germany and Italy and the Neutrality Pact with Russia, hastened to explain things to Emperor Hirohito.

The Emperor also granted an audience to another businessman-turned-politician, Masatsune Ogura, Minister for Coordination of War Economy and a far more cautious character than Yosuke Matsuoka. This might, or might not, betray a lack of confidence among the Son of Heaven's advisers in the policies of the Foreign Minister.

The day after he saw the Emperor, Foreign Minister Matsuoka summoned German Ambassador Major General Eugen Ott, who was doubtless asked to explain Adolf Hitler's rather belittling reference to Yosuke Matsuoka in his proclamation of war. (Hitler: "I myself advised Japanese Foreign Minister Matsuoka that eased tension with Russia always was in hope of serving the cause of peace.") In Berlin Japanese Ambassador Lieut. General Hiroshi Oshima called on Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop for the same purpose.

Day after day the Cabinet conferred with the Army and Navy High Commands in deepest secrecy. Said the Cabinet's spokesman, Ko Ishii: "The situation is so delicate that there will be no statement on the Government's foreign policy today." There was no statement the next day, or the next.

The delicacy of the situation arose from its complexity, in which the matter of a U.S. threat to Vladivostok and the matter of Yosuke Matsuoka's misplaced, if not lost, face were only two of many aspects. Others:

P: Japan last week was in somewhat the same position as Italy in September 1939. If France and Great Britain had knocked out Italy, instead of trying to appease her, they would have disposed of a troublesome enemy while she had only nuisance value. Broad hints from Rome that Japan's part in the Russo-German phase of World War II was to immobilize the U.S. may have suggested to the sensitive Japanese the possibility of swift U.S. action to immobilize Japan. But the possibility was very remote, because: 1) the U.S. doubted that it could beat Japan quickly; 2) the U.S., in spite of the example of Italy, still hoped that Japan might be weaned from the Axis.

P:Grounds for some hope that she might lay in Japan's position vis-`a-vis a Germany victorious over Russia, another aspect of Japan's so delicate situation. Not even a Japanese could foresee last week what the vast U.S.S.R. might look like if its western armies were destroyed by Germany, but there was a grave possibility that Germany's hegemony would extend to the continent of Asia. To be considered then would be probable German encroachment on Japan's Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere, possible German support of China against Japan, the ultimate possibility that Japan would be reduced to puppetry similar to Italy's.

P:Most engaging aspect of the situation, however, lay directly across the Sea of Japan. There lay Vladivostok, which since the Japanese annexation of Korea has become the "dagger pointed at the heart of Japan." There lay the Maritime Provinces of the U.S.S.R. and, inland, all of Siberia that a hungry Japan could swallow. The prospect was enough to make the Japanese militarists temporarily forget all about Southward Ho! Furthermore, if Germany takes western Russia, Japan may have to invade Siberia in self-defense.

Four deterrents kept Japan from marching right in:

P: Its Neutrality Pact with Russia. The Japanese are honorable people, not treaty-breakers like Hitler, and a Japanese would never think of violating a solemn covenant unless its violation became the more honorable course than the maintenance of its sanctity. In a mood of high morality the newspaper Yomiuri suggested to the Government that the national interest is the highest ethics. "There is no other way," concluded Yomiuri, "except to march forward in a fixed line of national policy and long-standing tradition."

P:More concrete deterrents were to be encountered across the Sea of Japan. Vladivostok is ringed with fortifications. Beneath the cold waters of its harbor lurk submarines, possibly 75 or 100. Within bombing range of Siberian airdromes are all of Japan's paper cities. And guarding Vladivostok and all of eastern Siberia are two special Red Banner Far Eastern Armies, garrisoned and equipped to stand a long siege; mobile, well-trained, efficiently commanded by General of Army Josef Rodionovich Apanasenko. In 1938 the Japanese Army ran into the Red Banner and came out second best.

P:If Japan became embroiled with the U.S.S.R., the U.S. would almost certainly cut off supplies of oil to Japan. Only the fear that Japan would attack The Netherlands East Indies for oil has so far kept the U.S. from putting a potato in the spout of the oil can.

P:Before Japan attacks anybody she must make up her mind to do so. Except for such pushovers as French Indo-China, Japan has been unable to make up her mind to attack anybody since she bogged down in China. Last fortnight a Japanese economic mission to the Indies returned empty-handed to Japan, and last week the Indies decided to sell nearly all its rubber output to the U.S. after 1941.

Japan & Mr. M. On the responsible consideration given to Japan's so delicate situation hung not only the future of Japan but the future of her most aggressive diplomat, Yosuke Matsuoka. To Foreign Minister Matsuoka, his future and Japan's are scarcely distinguishable, but it would be possible for Japan's Premier Prince Fumimaro Konoye and Japan's Privy Council and, above all, Japan's well-advised Emperor Hirohito to choose a course that would leave Mr. Matsuoka with no alternative but to resign. That would be the course of conservatism, of rapprochement with the U.S., of resistance to Germany. That course, as of last week, looked as hazardous as the course of rash adventure, because the London-Washington Axis has yet to win a major victory.

Yet by last week the course of Foreign Minister Matsuoka--a course of adventuresome diplomacy combined with military caution--had put Japan into one of the worst dilemmas of her history. Japan had to decide, and quickly, whose sun was setting on the horizon of world dominion.

If she chose wrong, she stood to lose all she had painfully won since the Russo-Japanese War of 1904. If she chose right, she might still finish a second-rate power.

This would be the final irony of Foreign Minister Matsuoka's opportunism.

In an Oakland, Calif, high school 46 years ago Yosuke Matsuoka wrote in an essay: "If my country needs a statesman, I will be the statesman." He has been businessman, diplomat, foreign minister; always he has anticipated, with the mind of a lightning calculator, what it was that his country would need. He was an Asiatic expansionist before the Manchukuo Incident, a totalitarian seven years before the Konoye reorganization. The crew haircut, the round, boy's face, the carefree smile, the candor, the courtesy, the mystic organ-note of his speechifying, all mask the hard core of the opportunist who has made of himself what he is and hopes to make of himself still more.

He is too shrewd to be carried away by jingoistic phrases, even his own; too practical to guide Japan as fast on her New Order as her Army clique may wish to lead her. A totalitarian, he lacks Colonel Kingoro Hashimoto's aggressive and hare-brained Fascism. And it may be that, unless he can give the Army its pound of flesh, he will find himself out of the office he treasures, replaced by someone less brilliant, less cautious, "more vigorous." For with Mr. Matsuoka in the Foreign Office, Japan has moved in the East only when events in the West were favorable.

Tale of a Japanese Schoolboy. Yosuke Matsuoka was born in March 1880, at the little port of Morotsumi in Yamaguchi Prefecture on the lovely island-flecked Inland Sea some 500 miles west of Tokyo.

He was the fourth son of one Sanjuro Matsuoka and a woman who at 90 still lives in the Yamaguchi countryside. The story goes that Yosuke Matsuoka's family is of the Choshu clan--one of the two daimiates, or fiefs, of western Japan (the other is Satsuma), which less than 20 years before his birth had led in the destruction of Japan's feudalistic shogunate, and which emerged dominant in the Japanese Army. Whatever the truth about this glowing connection, Mr. Matsuoka speaks of himself proudly as a Choshu man.

At 13 he had to seek his own fortune.

He landed at Portland, Ore. in 1893, worked to put himself through grammar school in Portland, through high school in Oakland and through law school at the University of Oregon, from which he took his LL.B. in 1900.

To be a solitary Japanese boy on the U.S. West Coast, to serve as houseboy, to hoe fields of Japanese truck gardeners, to wait on table, to be a hotel busboy, gave him a hard core under the candid and mannerly exterior; certainly it taught him that there was only himself to fend for himself.

Campaign by Railroad. At 22 Yosuke Matsuoka went back to the country he had left at 13. He spent nearly two years studying Japanese and Chinese classics, passed his Foreign Service examinations brilliantly, was launched on almost two decades of diplomacy. By 1917 his fleetness of wit and tongue, his drive, brought him to be Secretary to Foreign Minister Count Shimpei Goto; the next year he was Secretary to Japan's first commoner Premier, Takashi Hara. In 1919 he was a Japanese delegate to the Paris Peace Conference.

In 1920 Mr. Matsuoka resigned from the Service. Some said he found diplomatic discipline galling to his lone-cat temperament, his American education a liability in a service dominated by Tokyo Imperial University graduates. True to form, he reappeared on a higher rung five months later, as director, later president, of that octopus, the South Manchuria Railway. The South Manchuria Railway was no mere private enterprise; half its money was Government money, its policies were the Government's. The Railway not only controlled some 1,300 kilometers of railroad, but operated steamships, harbors, coal mines, shale-oil plants, ironworks, chemical-fertilizer plants, electric & gas plants, hotels, public works, schools and hospitals. Mr. Matsuoka's role was something like Japan's Clive of India.

Campaign by Talk. Having furthered Japanese imperialist expansion in Manchuria and North China, Yosuke Matsuoka was just the man to explain to the world Japan's case after Japan seized Manchuria in 1931. He was sent as chief delegate to the Plenary Session of the League of Nations, which was considering the Lytton Report on the China-Japan conflict. There he conducted a dramatic rearguard campaign in a series of unconventional, eloquent, unrehearsed speeches in which he dragged in even Christ:

"Some of the people of Europe and America may wish even to crucify Japan in the 20th Century. We are prepared to be crucified. But we do believe, and firmly believe, that in a very few years world opinion will be changed and we also shall be understood by the world as Jesus of Nazareth was."

Mr. Matsuoka's ingenious explanation to the democracies included the fact that there could be no such thing as a war between Japan and China because there was no such thing as China. "It is a conglomeration of disunited nations and hostile chieftains." The 43 nations voted to condemn Japan; Siam, the 44th, abstained. Mr. Matsuoka gathered his papers, stalked out, his suite scuttling after him. His arguments had failed to convince, but Japan got away with the Manchuria grab and the note he set at Geneva was echoed later by Italy over Ethiopia and by Germany over the Rhineland.

Yosuke Matsuoka arrived home from Geneva in a burst of glory, still talking sweetly to the rest of the world. ("I have become convinced that we can tell the American people what we have at the bottom of our hearts.") The Emperor sent him a case of sake and a cask of fish. But temporary fame began to fade. In one of his usual quick moves he resigned from the Diet and the Seiyukai Party to work for the dissolution of all parties in the interest of "national solidarity." thus becoming in late 1933 forerunner of a movement that was to bear fruit in 1940.

Campaign by Diplomacy. In 1937 the second China war began and Mr. Matsuoka was made Cabinet advisory councilor in Prince Fumimaro Konoye's first Premiership. In March 1939 he again made one of his sudden resignations en route to better things, and reappeared in July 1940 as Foreign Minister. As an ardent expansionist and strong supporter of the Prince's plan for totalitarian one-party rule, he was Prince Konoye's choice.

No longer feeling called upon to soft-soap the foes of Japan's aggressions, he talked about her "mission in the interest of civilization." He promptly began his campaign to bring Japan into the Axis by purging the Foreign Office and diplomatic corps of men friendly to Great Britain and the U.S., promised a "diplomatic Blitzkrieg" when he took office. The era of "toadying" was over for Japan. As a result of his contradictory utterances down the years, of his diplomatic adventurousness and military caution, the London-Washington Axis heartily mistrusts him; so do many Japanese, and possibly the Berlin-Rome Axis does also.

Too Much Talk? When he returned from his last junket to Berlin, Rome and Moscow, Mr. Matsuoka was welcomed at a mass meeting sponsored by the City of Tokyo and the Imperial Blue Assistance Association. Bubbling with his accomplishment, he told how he and Joseph Stalin had signed their Neutrality Pact:

"When I saw Stalin-san for the second time, I said: 'Shall we now bring an end to this prolonged dispute between our two nations?' and he said: 'Let's finish.' It was very simple. . . . How differently our authorities make any decision! Holding conference after conference, and yet giving no decision whatever! ... If you can't make any decision, you will be left behind in the quick current of this changing world."

This was widely and correctly interpreted as a crack at Home Minister Baron Kiichiro Hiranuma, most powerful conservative leader in Japan but a notorious conference-holder. When the speech was printed in pamphlets for distribution, the Home Ministry promptly seized them.

The problems that Japan faced last week had brought the conflict between conservatives and the go-ahead group to the point of crisis. Between the hotheads of the Army and the conservatives represented by Baron Hiranuma and Masatsune Ogura, Yosuke Matsuoka was steering a perilous course, veering toward the activists, on whom he has always counted for support.

Having sold the democracies the seizure of Manchuria, having helped to sell Japan on defying the democracies, Mr. Matsuoka was perhaps now on the point of either having to unsell the Japanese on their grandest aspirations or selling them out to Hitler.

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