Leniency Towards Japan
There is a growing and salutary feeling of restiveness, primarily in Australia, secondarily in this country and equally, it is to be hoped, in America, at indications that in various parts of the vast Pacific theatre of war the Japanese are being treated with grossly undeserved indulgence. The report on atrocities compiled by a committee presided over by Sir William Webb, the distinguished Australian judge, revealed a depth of bestiality and sadism to which even the German butchers of Belsen and Buchenwald hardly sank. How far the authors of such unspeakable atrocities can be identified and punished remains to be seen. But when readers of the news- papers learn that Japanese are still driving about luxuriously in high-powered cars in the Malay peninsula, that the Australian General who took the surrender at Bougainville was offered, and apparently accepted, "surrender-presents," that Japanese else- where arc prevaricating about any surrender at all ; that the vic- torious " foreigners " were excluded from the Japanese Diet when the Emperor's face-saving address was being read ; that the mur- derers of prisoners are favouring the Allies with ceaseless bows and smirks, beneath which a 'resolve to reorganise for a new war is too plain to be concealed—in face of this and much more it is bare justice and bare prudence to demand that the Japanese everywhere shall be treated with the utmost rigour compatible with those standards of humanity below which the Allies must not sink. To all appearance the Japanese, sub-human though they have shown themselves, are so far having a considerably easier time than the Germans. Their guilt is no whit less, and their treatment should not be a whit more lenient. The fact of defeat must be burnt into their souls. Nothing, incidentally, is gained when the British Press sensationalises such an incident as Tojo's attempted suicide.
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