THE BLACK DRAGON.

Evening Star, Issue 25301, 9 October 1944, Page 4

THE BLACK DRAGON.

Two deaths were recorded last week of personalities that might be supposed to have had a great deal in common. They were Herr • Buerdkel, the first of the Nazi gauleiters in occupied Austria, and Mitsuru Toyama, the venerable head of the notorious Black Dragon Society, in Japan. .Both stood' for ideas, admired by the majority of their countrymen and practised with the same fanaticism, that are only explainable as survivals in the one case and deliberate re-creation in the other of medisevalism. The Gestapo and the S.S. forces, with their creed that all crimes are lawful and all sacrifices a duty that are performed in the interests of the Teutonic " blood and soil," might have been modelled on the Society of the Black Dragon. Not so much has been heard of the Japanese organisation as of the German ones, but its activities were well vouched for by close students of Japan before the war,, when they .interested most Westerners less than geisha girls and chrysanthemums even battleships, which, being western things, they could understand.

The Black Dragon derives directly from feudalism. Its members, known as " ronin," form an upper class society who pride themselves on their descent from the Samurai, retainers of the military lords who ruled one hundred years ago. Their part it is to protect what they are pleased to regard as the " honour " of Japan by assassinating Prime Ministers or others, when those show themselves too enlightened for their code, performing public "hara-kiri," or suicide, when they think " face " has been lost, or directing, as on many Pacific islands, mass destruction of less resolute Japanese when those have lost the power of injuring an enemy. In such countries as China, before they were occupied, thev were, accustomed to hire other ruffians, " menials of the baser sort," to perform acts of provocation that would make an, excuse for intervention by force, and perform also acts of banditry, kidnapping, massacre, and incendiarism, of.which the records of Shanghai and other cities present hideous examples. Secret service work and espionage came within their scope. Thb society was explained to be the secret agency of the War Office abroad (< financed by its special military intelligence fund. The Chinese called the " ronin " hooligans; by the Japanese they were held in the deepest veneration. The home of Toyama, their high priest, was reported to be an inviolable sanctuary for certain persons : wanted by the police. Toyama was a person of patriarchal dignity, the mildest-looking man who ever cut a throat or directed others to cut it. Only Japanese, however, will lament his death, as only Germans will lament that of BuerckeL There have been hopes of re-educating Germans. Awed, perhaps, by the impracticability of the task, no one has proposed that for the. Japanese.