THE New Zealand Herald AND DAILY SOUTHERN CROSS TUESDAY, OCTOBER 21, 1941 BREAKING POINT

New Zealand Herald, Volume 78, Issue 24101, 21 October 1941, Page 6

THE New Zealand Herald AND DAILY SOUTHERN CROSS TUESDAY, OCTOBER 21, 1941 BREAKING POINT

Relations between the United States and Japan have never been so strained. Mr. Wendell Willkie places as much reliance on the warlords of Tokio as he does on Hitler, with whom an understanding might as well be sought as with a maneating tiger. Mr. Willkie is not in office and can speak with less restraint than the President. He still leads the Republicans, who do not always relish his interventionist foreign policy. But even the Republicans realise the danger from Japan, whose northward expansion would bring them close to Alaska and whose southward march goes ever closer to America's reservoir of vital raw materials in the Dutch East Indies. The United States is reaching the culminating point of tension with Japan which dates from 1915. In that year Japan presented to China the famous or infamous Twenty-one Demands, the purpose of which was to create a Japanese protectorate over the whole of China. The time was well chosen. Great Britain, France and Russia were busily engaged in Europe, an American army was practically nonexistent. and the demands were presented in secret. They leaked out and the American Government showed its strong disapproval. That the demands were not enforced was solely due to Japan's fear of the American Navy and of the potential strength of the American people. The episode left an atmosphere of distrust in the United States which the Japanese have never dispelled. Even when America and Japan became Allies in 1917 the Japanese did little to remove the suspicion in Washington that Tokio was using the war merely for Japanese expansion. In the first place, the Japanese played unmercifully on a clause which they had obtained in 1915 from Secretary of State Bryan, wherein the United States recognised that "territorial contiguity created special relations between Japan and Southern Manchuria," Viscount Ishii appeared in Washington, claimed that "special relations" meant paramount interests and delicately but significantly said that Germany had three times asked Japan to withdraw from the war. Washington did not relish the information and again recognised Japan's special interests in contiguous portions of China, but secured a Japanese undertaking to respect China's territorial integrity. Nor were the Americans any more cheered when the disintegration of Tsarist Russia encouraged the Japanese to enter Vladivostok. To the great annoyance of Japan, 7500 American troops took part in the expedition. Not until 1922 did the Japanese withdraw from Siberia. The Great War thus ended with tension between the two great Pacific countries, tension so great over American intervention in China and Siberia that rather than wait for the peak of United States naval construction Japanese extremists planned for war by 1923. The Washington Conference of 1922 averted war—but by limitations of naval armaments which secured Japan the impregnability of her own islands to any attack from Pacific waters and gave her a dominating position in the Far East. The Anglo-Japanese alliance was abandoned and the United States and Great Britain waived any further fortification of Guam, the Philippines and Hongkong. If Japan were moderate, if she observed her solemn promise to maintain the open door in China, this retreat of Great Britain and the United States from the Far East was justified. For a while the moderates in Japan were at the helm ; but not for long. The gradual growth of the new China alarmed those Japanese elements which feared the ruin of their plans for the eventual control of the vast republic and a fire was set alight in Manchuria in 1931 which led to the Chinese incident, the great war daily consuming the blood and treasure of Japan. Again it is the United States which has consistently refused recognition of Japanese pretensions in China. Mr. Stimson, the present Secretary for War, in 1932 condemned Japan's violent creation of Manchukuo, the first step in the rake's progress which led to the present war. From that time relations between America and Japan have steadily deteriorated with each further stop of Japanese aggression and brutal violence in China, in 1937 Mr. Roosevelt made his famous Chicago speech suggesting the quarantining of aggressors after Japanese aeroplanes had bombed the Panay, the United States denounced her trade treaty with Japan in July, 1939, in 1940 and since she has granted extensive credits to China, in 1941 she "froze" Japanese assets and established an embargo subject to licences, and not long ago she abolished the licences. With the threat of General Tojo's Government, only one further step remains—war, unless Tokio holds its hand.