Large Order

New York Herald Tribune's Tokyo correspondent, Wilfrid Fleisher, who is also managing editor of Japan's best English-language newspaper, Japan Advertiser, likes to tell about playing catch-as-catch-can with Japanese censors. When he found that Japanese could tag him whenever he wrote things down, but lagged far behind when he spoke English, he began telephoning his stories to the Tribune.

He says he slipped one over on the bewildered censors, who tapped his wires and took his conversations down on records, but were never quite quick enough to catch him in the act of spilling beans. Finally they told him: "So sorry. Weather no longer suitable for Japan-America transoceanic telephoning." When he complained, even the Foreign Office said it could not improve the weather. So Wilfrid Fleisher cabled the Tribune to telephone him from Manhattan each day. America-Japan weather seemed fine, and for a while, he says, the new system had the censor completely baffled.

But last week the news out of Tokyo was hot, and the censors, who had meantime permitted him to do his own telephoning once more, caught up with Wilfrid Fleisher in the middle of a revealing sentence.

The Diet, Japan's pretense at party-system democratic government which ever since the bloody "Young Officers' " revolution of 1932 has accomplished precisely nothing, convened in Tokyo. His Imperial Highness Emperor Hirohito read a classical rescript of welcome. Then, to everyone's surprise, 240 of the 466 members of the lower house of the Diet presented a resolution condemning the Cabinet of indecisive Premier Nobuyuki Abe, and asked it to resign. Then the Diet adjourned until Jan. 21.

Premier Abe nervously hurried around to talk with the Emperor and the Grand Keeper of the Imperial Seals. Afterwards Wilfrid Fleisher reported: "The Cabinet apparently has decided to carry on. ... [but] it is believed that the days of the Government are numbered and its downfall is looked for before the Diet reconvenes on Jan. 21. .. ."

Reasons: 1) The Cabinet's offer to open the Yangtze to U. S. trade had got no warmer comment in the U. S. than: "It's about time"; 2) It looked more & more as though a "non-treaty situation" would exist after Jan. 26, when the abrogated Treaty of 1911 lapses; 3) Although the Army in China was having episodic successes in Lanchow and the Southwest, war still dragged on; 4) At home Japan had a severe shortage of rice and fuel.

When Wilfrid Fleisher began talking about the future, the censors pricked up their ears: "There has been no speculation in the press so far," he said, "regarding the personnel of a new Cabinet, but the name of Prince Fumimaro Konoye--" Snip! The conversation was cut off. But, as usual, Wilfrid Fleisher's dope was out.

Correspondent Fleisher has been wrong before, but Prince Konoye is a good bet to pick up where the aimless Abe Government leaves off. Premier from 1937 to 1939, he is now the most popular statesman in Japan and probably the only Japanese with enough astuteness and courage to play Mussolini to Hirohito's Vittorio Emanuele. It was he who invented the famous, mystical but so far meaningless slogan: New Order in East Asia. He may find accomplishing it not only New but Large.

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