Royal Nonentity

A drab PBY with red star markings landed at Tokyo's Atsugi Airport. Out squirmed a crowd of uniformed Russians and a stoop-shouldered Chinese peering myopically through violet-tinted horn rims. Henry Pu-yi, the perennial puppet, had been fished out of history's dustbin to testify at the trial of the Jap war criminals.

Joseph Berry Keenan, Chief Prosecutor of the Tokyo Tribunal, thought Pu-yi might give evidence of Jap crimes in Manchuria. The Russians, who have held Henry incommunicado since last August, produced him only on condition that he remain under Soviet control while in Japan. From Atsugi they took Henry to a modest house next to the Russian Embassy in Tokyo, where they would have a chance to help him prepare his evidence.

No one expected Henry to speak his own mind. In childhood he was a puppet of warlords scheming to restore monarchy in China. When he grew up he became a puppet of the Japs, for whom he "ruled" conquered Manchuria. Only once in his 40-year lifetime had Henry Pu-yi ever used his own initiative: at 16, he cut off his own queue when his eunuch barber refused to commit such a sacrilege.

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