Black Dragon

A year ago the U. S. had four great and potent friends in Japan: Premier Hama-guchi, his successor Wakatsuki, able bow-&-arrow man, Foreign Minister Baron Shidehara, the "Roosevelt of Japan," Finance Minister Junnosuke Inouye. Premier Hamaguchi was shot by a fanatic, died a lingering death. Premier Wakat-suki was driven out of office by Japanese militarists. Baron Shidehara dared oppose the invasion of Shanghai fortnight ago (TIME, Feb. 15) and lay gravely ill at his home last week. And last week grey-templed, precise Junnosuke Inouye drove to a political rally in Tokyo.

His car swung in to the curb in front of a schoolhouse. Out stepped Mr. Inouye. Out from the shadow of a doorway stepped a thin little fellow in a tattered kimono and dirty black felt hat to send-- Blam! Blam! Blam!--three bullets into the left breast of Junnosuke Inouye. The fellow in the tattered kimono was quickly arrested. His name was Sei Konuma, 22, and he came from the country. With sirens screaming, police whisked Mr. Inouye to the Imperial University Hospital where in a few minutes he died. At the hospital his wife, pale and dry-eyed, said:

"I had prepared myself to expect such a tragedy while my husband was in office, but I had hoped the danger was past."

Junnosuke Inouye was the ablest economist in Japanese public life. Minister of Finance in 1924 and from 1929 to 1931, his drastic economies lifted Japan out of her first post-War depression and shoved the country back on the gold standard. He believed that Japan could have remained on the gold standard if the army and navy chiefs had accepted a drastic cut in their budget appropriations, and said so. Somebody bombed his home in February 1931. The Wakatsuki Cabinet to which he belonged was forced out of office eleven weeks after the invasion of Manchuria began.

As every correspondent in Tokyo knows, the present Government of fox-bearded Premier ("Old Fox") Inukai is heavily dependent on Japan's various supernationalistic secret societies. It did not, take the police long to discover that Mr. Inouye's pale little assassin was a member of a society known as the Seisanto which in turn is an offshoot of the formidable Kosuikai or Black Dragon Society, closely allied to the War Party of Premier Inukai.

The day before Peace Man Inouye was assassinated the fact became known that rich Japanese in Tokyo and in Manhattan were betting at odds of three to two that the Seiyukai (War) Party of Premier Inu-kai would lose the election of Feb. 20 to the Minseito (Peace) Party of Inouye, Shidehara, Wakatsuki.

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