Echoes From Sino-Japanese War

Manawatu Times, Volume 63, Issue 45, 23 February 1938, Page 14

Echoes From Sino-Japanese War

VVTHATEVER country is the aggressor in war, the women of both combatant nations suffer. A lot has been written lately of the Chinese women’s heroic reaction to the invasion that is laying waste their land, but very little is heard of the women of Japan, whose men are being torn from their families to fight on the Asiatic mainland. Mrs. D. M. Shaw, who, with her husband, the Rev. R. D. M. Shaw, arrived in Sydney on the Taiping recently after 30 years in Japan, gives an interesting account of the women of that country. During the last four years she has lived in Tokio, where her husband was attached to St. Paul’s University. ‘'The great Japanese virtues are loyalty and patriotism—these, with self-control, are taught girls and boys from their earliest years,” she says. ‘‘Ancient tradition always puts the man first. A little girl must give way to her brother to a certain extent in everything.” Tradition and early training explain the intensely patriotic attitude of Japanese women while their husbands and brothers are being conscripted to fight a war of aggression. The severe censorship, which hides both Japanese defeats and the case for China, does not give the whole reason for the support Japanese women lend the war aims of their Government. “Not many of the girls are educated abroad, where often the boys may go to a foreign university,” Mrs. Shaw explains. “Usually girls are married by the time they are 20. Even if they have gone to a modem school for girls where advanced ideas are taught, and even if these ideas should be held so strongly that they would embarrass their families before marriage, after marriage the women are so busy with their homes that their ideas often peter out. “It is hard for an Australian or New Zealand woman U understand the Japanese. For instance, a woman will never precede any of the men of her family into a room. When a man wishes to entertain his friends, h e does not take them home, but to an hotel. The wife can never have a women’s party if there are men in the house,” said Mrs. Shaw. “So the Japanese women are largely kept in ignorance of what goes on at the Chinese front. “Since the war began the Japanese have organised their guilds into ‘war chests* and so on to supply things for the men at the front. “Every time a man is called up, a representative from each house in his district will go to see him off, waving a little flag. The women wear their white kitchen aprons with long sleeves which, with a ribbon band across the front, are signs of their membership of the Women’s National Organisation..”

Women Ignorant Ot Conflict

Because of unforeseen circumstances, this became impossible, and she is now engaged in voluntary nursing in Shanghai. Amazing incidents of the war fill her letters—the last to be received was written at the end of November. When she arrived from a French cruiser, a big battle was in progress, as the Chinese were attempting to bomb the Japanese warship Idzumo from their planes. “I was in such a daze that day that I really do not know how I arrived; I was also feeling very ill, having seen so many dead soldiers floating on the river. White flashes came from the guns of the Idzumo as they were fired at Chinese planes, and an ear-splitting noise never seemed to slop,” she writes. She paints vivid pictures of life in Shanghai at the end of November. Air raids at dawn were common-place, and tracer bullets would light up the sky at night. “The screech of the shells is like the tearing apart of silk material,” she says. At the same time, Miss Murray and a Swedish friend, Miss Vivienne Dorf, being about the only young unattached, foreign women left in Shanghai, were showered with invitations to dances and cocktail parties. In September, Miss Murray was wounded with shrapnel when returning home while an air raid was in progress. Owing to a shot in the arm, she missed the “Bloody Saturday” when 1500 Chinese and many foreigners were killed by a bomb explosion. “We all find ourselves changed—a little tougher, maybe,” she writes. The bravery of the Chinese is shown in small incidents. One soldier, after a leg amputation, had rested only two days and thought he could be sent back to the front.

“What’s the matter?” he asked. “I still have a good- leg and two arms to fight for my country.” Such is the spirit of China, she says. Ironic touches are not lacking in the Weir zone.

“On Armistice Day,” she writes, “1 attended the Italian celebrations on the racecourse; veterans of the Ethiopian campaign took part and paraded with trophies such as banners, spears and shields captured in Abyssinia. During the ceremony, shells were literally whizzing over our heads, as the Japs were firing long-distance guns from one side of the Settlement, and they were timed to land in Nantao, on the other side.”