Peace In Our Time?

Last week the two-faced Japanese Janus seemed to be going two ways at once. A tug of war was going on between the fire-eating, Axis-loving generals of the Japanese Army and the go-slow civil Government engaged desperately in a last-minute buttering-up of the U.S.

The Army, hating the democracies in general and Chiang Kai-shek in particular, is savagely pro-Axis. Feeling the hot breath of time on their necks, pinched seriously by the U.S. blockade, the officers want action. Speaking for the Army last week, blunt Colonel Hayao Mabuchi accused the U.S. and Britain of "a crime against humanity," urged Japan, if diplomacy failed, to break through encirclement "by force." Last week the Army acted by: 1) denying gasoline to all Japanese busses, taxis, private automobiles; 2) setting up a special A.R.P. bureau in the Home Ministry and distributing instructions on how to combat incendiary bombs (at Vladivostok Russian planes are only 625 miles from wooden-housed industrial Japan); 3) concentrating men, tanks, planes, food, ammunition in Manchukuo.

No More Axis to Grind? Trying to effect a last-minute reconciliation with the U.S., feeling his Government giving and straining beneath him, remembering the recent attempted assassination of Baron Kiichiro Hiranuma (TIME, Aug. 25), Premier Prince Fumimaro Konoye was on a spot. Either a difficult war or a new wave of political assassinations was possible. Knowing how little the Axis had to offer, weighing the combined Allied might in the Orient, sensing the industrial and commercial profits to be gained from a Pacific peace, Prince Konoye must have hoped that some arrangement could be worked out with the stiffening U.S.

A straw in the anti-Axis wind was an editorial in a quickly-suppressed edition of the Japanese magazine News Week, usually close to the Foreign Office: "German momentum has been definitely arrested. ... By the end of the third year the finish of the horrible carnage should be within the grasp of the Allies."

Peace? . . . Still shrouded in secrecy last week, still unanswered, was Prince Konoye's personal note to President Roosevelt. From Washington, however, came a report giving one version of the Japanese aims in current negotiations. Premier Konoye, it said, had assured President Roosevelt of his desire for peace, requested economic discussions, told the President that peaceful Ambassador Kichisaburo Nomura was really empowered to speak for his nation. Ambassador Nomura was empowered, according to this report, to demand: i) U.S.-British recognition of Manchukuo; 2) U.S.-British recognition of Japan's special position in North China. In return for this Japan would: 3) make peace with Chiang Kai-shek on a basis of American mediation, withdraw from all China south of the Yellow River and west of the Peking-Nanking line; 4) withdraw from South China and Indo-China; 5) abandon the southward drive. Nor was this all. Am bassador Nomura further was to seek restoration of normal U.S. -Japanese trade relations, Anglo-American recognition in principle of the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere, U.S. economic assistance to Japan.

Japan peace with China would entail: 1) Chinese recognition of Manchukuo; 2) Chinese recognition of a special region al government in North China ; 3 ) Chinese assent to the garrisoning of the coastal strip as far south as Nanking by Japanese forces, the Chinese capital to be permitted to come as far east as Hankow; 4) Chinese and Japanese economic cooperation. Left unanswered in these purported terms were two vital questions : 1) Who would guarantee the peace and how? 2) What about Russia?

Basically these terms, if true, were Japan's offer of peace-in-our-time. As Hitler at Munich asked just so much in the east and promised no trouble in the west, so Japan now asked just so much in the north and promised no trouble at all in the south.

... Or the Sword? In Washington a Chinese Embassy spokesman flatly denied knowledge of any peace proposals. So did U.S. Government officials. True or not, the report summed up the Japanese idea of a good solution, the best that Japan would offer. Any Far Eastern expert might have forecast it and forecast the answer: flat refusal by the U.S. Government. In fact some Japanese circles may have put the terms out, knowing that they were basic, just in order to force a showdown between Prince Konoye's Government and the U.S. For such proposals were undoubtedly about the minimum terms upon which the Japanese Army would be willing to let Prince Konoye negotiate with the U.S. If the U.S. turns them down, then the Konoye Government cannot prevent the Army's clearing the decks for war, as bushido ("the way of the warrior") demands.

Still uncertain was the opinion of the Japanese Navy, to which amicable Ambassador Nomura, an admiral, belongs. Could it guarantee Japanese food supplies from overseas against submarine and air attack? Could it fight a long war with short fuel? In this war the navy had been relatively pro-Anglo-American. The Japanese Navy failed to halt U.S. tankers going through to Russia.

Said Premier Konoye: "Japan faces the gravest emergency in her history."

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