Southern Outpost

Great copycats are the Japanese. Last July the U. S. formally denounced its trade treaty with Japan. Last week Japanese Foreign Minister Hachiro Arita, in language he might well have picked up from U. S. Secretary of State Cordell Hull, denounced the Japanese-Netherlands treaty of arbitration and conciliation. The U. S.-Japanese treaty expired six months after denunciation; so will the Japanese-Netherlands treaty.

The reason Japan gave for the abrogation was that The Netherlands treaty provided for the arbitration of some disputes by the Permanent Court of International Justice at The Hague. This court is affiliated with the League of Nations, from which Japan withdrew in a huff. But that was five years ago, and, moreover, the Japanese have not yet denounced a similar treaty with Switzerland.

Skeptics looked elsewhere and had cause to suspect that perhaps the real reason could be found in The Netherlands Indies, the rich, oil-laden islands in the South Seas. Switzerland does not own colonies. Tokyo correspondents quickly dug up a forgotten paragraph of a recent Arita speech in which the Foreign Minister spoke of "economic cooperation and collaboration" with "South Seas regions." Hugh Byas, the New York Times'?, man in Tokyo, believed that "collaboration" meant "more than cultivation of mutual trade." He speculated on the possibility of a U. S. embargo on oil exports to Japan, and the subsequent necessity of the Japanese Navy finding needed supplies elsewhere.

Lending color, if not substance, to this theory was an announcement from the Japanese Imperial Household of the establishment of a "grand national shrine'' to the Sun Goddess on Carooca, southernmost of the Japanese-owned Palau Islands. "The islands have come to occupy a very important position as an advance outpost of Japanese development southward in industry, economy and culture," read the announcement.

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