DESTINY OF JAPAN

Greymouth Evening Star, 15 January 1941, Page 8

DESTINY OF JAPAN

MR. MATSUOKA AS LEADER. With Japan playing a role in the East;,, fully as dynamic as anything offered in the West by Hitler, Mussolini or Stalin, the question naturally arises: “Who is the man?” says Mr. Rpy W. Howard in the New York “World Telegram.” While the answer must be given with some reservation, he adds, present indications all point to Yosuke Matsuoka as Japan’s likeliest man of the hour. Raised in America from the time he was nine and graduated with honours from the University of Oregon, Mr. Matsuoka might be expected to be strongly pro-American. He is not. While he would deny that he is antiAmerican, he would be quick to admit that in any situation involving a clash of Japanese and American interests he is always pro-Japanese. Thinking in American-English as well as speaking it and knowing American politics and methods almost as well as those of his homeland, Mr. Matsuoka is deeply resentful of west coast legislation discriminating against Japanese and national legislation which prevents Japan from having an immigration quota on the same principle established for European nations. He accepts as necessary the restriction of Oriental immigration to the United States. His objection is not to what has been done but to the method employed—a method which involves great loss of face to the Japanese. Most Americans with a knowledge of the Far East and of Japanese psychology share Mr. Matsuoka’s viewpoint on this subject. Like most of the present-day strong men, once they are entrenched in power, Mr. Howard continues, Mr. Matsuoka has little love for or faith in democratic processes. He believes that American meddling in Oriental matters, dating back to the Portsmouth Treaty of 1906 ending the Russo-Japanese war, repeatedly has been a bar to Japan’s legitimate expansion. Where international treaties, including the Nine-Power Pact guaranteeing the territorial integrity of China, tend to hamper and thwart what he regards as Japan’s manifest destiny, he long has favoured their cold repudiation by Japan.

In justification he alleges coercion and duress by the “have-got” nations aligned against Japan, a “havenot” nation, and finds further justification in the argument that Japan must expand to survice, and that survival and self-preservation are laws of nature taking precedence over even the most sacred treaties.

NATIONALIST PSYCHOLOGY. To fail to understand or to accept this, to Americans and British, wholly untenable attitude toward international law and practice is to misunderstand or repudiate all Japanese nationalist psychology. Mr. Matsuoka is no starry-eyed dreamer of the Hitler type, guided by the mumblings of astrologers and soothsayers. Neither is he a bombastic tub-thumper and chest-beater of the Mussolini type. He 'is a realist. There is in this stocky and aggressive Japanese 'business-statesman little of the suavity or the over-em-phasised courtesy ordinarily associated with Japanese statesmen. Neither is there any of the bull-in-a-china shop technique of the Japanese soldier, whose ultra-aggressiveness has forced Japan into her present not-so-happy situation in China.

Throughout the Far East, Mr. Matsuoka is referred to as the tool of the ultra-aggressive Kwantung army clique, but none among his many American friends believes that Mr. Matsuoka ever has been or will be the tool of any man or group. He may be wrong and he may be obdurate, but it will be on the basis of his own convictions. In this fact lies both the hope and the danger.