JAPAN AND PEACE PROPOSALS.

New Zealand Herald, Volume LXIX, Issue 21100, 6 February 1932, Page 8

JAPAN AND PEACE PROPOSALS.

Japan's reply to the AngloAmerican peace proposals rejects emphatically the request that there should be neutral observers or participants in negotiations concerning the root causes of the quarrel. The question of Manchuria, the Japanese Government insists, must be treated separately, and settled by direct Sino-Japancse discussion. This attitude of hostility to mediation has characterised Japan, more or less, throughout the trouble; she objected to the United States having even an observer at the League Council when the quarrel was in its earlier stage, and withdrew that objection only after strong pressure to do so had been exerted. It is in conformity with much that has marked trouble in the Far East. When it was understood that the Washington Conference of ten years ago might consider the difficulties of China, with a view to composing turmoil then threatening to assume large proportions, Japan at first refused consent to this being done, and the Nine Power Treaty conserving the territorial integrity of China was arranged with difficulty because of Japanese reluctance to agree. China, however, although in the present instance appealing to the League, is not guiltless of the same sort of thing. In the dispute with Russia over the Chinese Eastern Railway she resisted as strenuously as her opponent every effort to apply outside suasion. That has been a difficulty in almost every Oriental quarrol. Yet nothing is more imperatively justified than the exercise of Western goodwill in making Manchuria safe for both China and Japan, to say nothing of other Powers with interests there, and Japan's reply to this proposal cannot very well be the last word.