"Soak the Rich"

As long as he lives, Japan's "greatest Secretary of the Treasury since Korekiyo Takahashi" will always keep popping up again in the person of that lovable, rascally old greybeard himself. In the Empire's expensive career of wars, earthquakes, typhoons and economic crises he remains the lucky mascot of Japanese finance. Last week he was 80, full of chuckles and shrewd wisdom, when the Son of Heaven gazetted him for the seventh time Minister of Finance, amid popular roars of "Banzai Daruma!''

Daruma is the Buddhist godling of prosperity, good luck and harmony. Japanese moppets play with potbellied, round-bottomed darumas which bob up, imperturbable and grinning, as often as they are knocked over--exactly like Mr. Takahashi. In his spectacular career he has lost several fortunes and more reputations but emerges at the end of every scandal a millionaire once more, happy that other people have turned out to be more to blame than himself.

It was less than nothing to Daruma Takahashi last week that he was forced to resign as Finance Minister only a few months ago because of gross and outrageous pilfering in his department, as usual "by others'' (TIME, July 16). All that mattered last week was that somebody must do this winter what Mr. Takahashi did last winter, namely, wangle through Parliament a budget which is again the largest in Japanese peacetime history.

In 1918 and 1919, after the disastrous "rice riots" which threatened civil war, Mr. Takahashi restored tranquillity by importing shiploads of rice and distributing it free among Japan's forgotten men. He was thin with worry then but has since grown fat on the crises he has weathered: the assassination of his friend Premier Kara; the banking crisis of 1927; the tight squeeze in 1931 when Daruma Takahashi boldly took the yen off gold, thus starting the world toward devaluation and perhaps Recovery.

Every Japanese knows that the House of Mitsui ("Morgans of Japan") made millions out of devaluation by selling yen short. It was the Daruma's own luck that patriots assassinated not him but the Mitsui Manager Baron Dan who had filled the campaign coffers of Mr. Takahashi's party. Last week the Seiyukai. still financed by Mitsui, were incensed when their Daruma joined the militarist Cabinet of mild Premier Admiral Okada and dictatorial War Minister General Hayashi. Japan's fighting services are now out to "soak the rich" as never before. The new budget proposes to supertax Japan's munitions profiteers, none more prominent than the Mitsui. Doubtless at their bidding, Seiyukai party chiefs threatened last week to kick Daruma Takahashi out of their party. In his big swivel chair he only chuckled and sat tight as Emperor Hirohito rode out to open a special session of the Imperial Diet last week, significantly garbed as a Field Marshal with military orders blazing on his breast.

In Japan not only the fighting services, but also the Emperor, the peasants and the proletariat are out to soak the bourgeois rich. Before the soaking begins this week, the Diet was edified by a discourse from ingenious Mr. Koki Hirota. A stone-cutter's son, he once tried to get a job in the household of Captain John Joseph Pershing, then U. .S. military attache in Tokyo, who turned him down because "his English is so poor." Today Koki Hirota is Foreign Minister. "Please tell General Pershing," said he not long ago to Ambassador Joseph Clark Grew, "that Hirota is still as poor at English as he was 30 years ago." In purring, spitting Japanese last week he told the Diet that Japan defies the English Speaking Powers on the naval issue, demands scrapping of the 5-5-3 ratio and full equality with Britain and the U. S.

Next day the Foreign Office admitted that Mr. Hirota recently received from Mr. Grew and British Ambassador Sir Robert Clive the English Speaking Powers' third series of vigorous protests against the new oil monopoly laws of Japan's puppet state Manchukuo (TIME, Nov. 5). For the third time cocky Mr. Hirota's still cockier spokesman, famed Eiji Amau snapped: "We cannot admit any contention which ignores the sovereign independence of Manchukuo."*

* Recognized as yet by no nations except Japan and San Salvador.

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