Slap, Thumb, Cats

Smutting the sky with great streaks of black smoke, a pack of Japanese destroyers swooped down in attack formation last week upon Taku, the bustling port entrance for Tientsin and Peiping. So far as jittery, defenseless Chinese could see, Japan had simply decided to seize Taku, striking as usual without a declaration of war.

Abruptly, while all Taku watched with Adam's apples bobbing, the Japanese war boats split into two fleets, began an extremely realistic war game in China's front yard. Fleet No. 1 "defended" the Chinese port as if it were already part of Japan's Empire. Fleet No. 2 "attacked." In shame and humiliation the helpless captains of the few rickety Chinese war boats tied up at Taku went down into their cabins for a pipeful of the stuff that cheers.

Chipper Japanese officers said when they came ashore: "Our naval exercises are part of a program which necessarily places control of the approaches of North China with the Japanese fleet." When timid Chinese newsorgans murmured that Japan's war games were interfering with Chinese shipping, the Japanese commander snorted "Ridiculous!"

On the day of this slap by Japan in China's face, Japan also slapped at the Great Powers, signatories of the Washington and London naval treaties. She did not, to be sure, stage Japanese naval maneuvers off San Francisco or Liverpool. But in Tokyo the official Foreign Office spokesman, Mr. Eiji Amau, a great adept at diplomatic nose-thumbing, called in white correspondents, gave an impressive exhibition of his art.

Japan, according to Mr. Amau, has resolved to rupture the naval treaties and bring next year's Naval Conference to disaster unless the Great Powers accept "a new scheme of naval limitation which Japan will propose." This scheme is to replace the 5-5-3 naval ratio with something "fairer" to Japan. When correspondents asked point blank if Japan was asking naval parity with the strongest, Mr. Amau grinned, cackled, "That is a card we must keep up our sleeve. It is premature as yet to discuss the details of our scheme."

That Japan is in dead earnest appeared from the fact that her "scheme"' was roughed out at an acrimonious conference last week between those two tomcats of Japanese statecraft, Navy Minister Admiral Mineo Osumi and Foreign Minister Koki Hirota. Over their snarling presided Premier Keisuke Okada, who arrived from an audience with the Son of Heaven,

Emperor Hirohito. Leaks indicated that Naval Tomcat Osumi demanded abrogation of the naval treaties at once by Japan, while Diplomatic Tomcat Hirota spat that it would be better to face the Great Powers with impossible demands and lead them into rejection of Japan's scheme, for which they must then take the blame.

That the quarrel grew really hot was clear when Japanese reporters, close respectively to Mr. Hirota and Admiral Osumi, claimed for each that he worsted the other. At the Foreign Office, Spokesman Amau, cheering for his chief Mr. Hirota, announced: "Admiral Osumi has at length recognized the Foreign Office's constitutional right to decide the method of conducting foreign affairs." Cheering for the Admiral, his spokesman said that Mr. Hirota could indeed choose his "method" but that the "substance" of Japan's naval demands to the Great Powers would be dictated by her Navy. Prognostications were that Japan will ask Britain and the U. S. to scale down their navies to equality with hers. This Japanese "scheme" will be carried to London by Rear Admiral Gombei Yamamoto who will sail next week via Suez.

Recently at Hyde Park, President Roosevelt was understood to have instructed Disarmament Ambassador Norman H. Davis to keep up his fight in London for the retention of the present naval ratio, 5-5-3.

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