Our Friends the Japanese
By ROBERT WAITHMAN Washington.
HE American peace with Japan, signed, sealed and sup- ported by all the nations who fought in the Pacific ekcept India. Burma, the two Chinas and the cacophonous Communist dissenters, is a conspicuously generous one. The , polite little Japanese Premier, Mr. Shigeru Yoshida, acknow- ledged this truth whenever the opportunity occurred during his private and public conversations in San Francisco last week. He and his fellow-delegates, the first Japanese statesmen to be admitted to an international meeting since V.J. Day, projected themselves as the grateful heirs of sinners, conscious of the kind- ness that was being visited upon them and determined to be worthy of such treatment. Mr. Yoshida even found the means of apologising for the attack on Pearl Harbour to the assembled Peace Conference before he placed his signature upon the Treaty. "It is with feelings of sorrow," he said, that we recall the part played in that catastrophic human experience by the old Japan."
Most of the Foreign Secretaries, Under-Secretaries and Am- bassadors gathered in San Francisco must have been acutely aware of the contrast this penitence and humility afforded to the attitude of German statesmen with whom they have been dealing on the other side of the world. And many of the delegates, par- ticularly those from the Western countries, plainly found it an agreeable experience to deal with an ex-enemy which now (whether or not the phenomenon would last) was exhibiting such suitable sensibilities.
It was rather noticeable that the one delegate who appeared to be least moved by the performance of the Japanese was Mr. Romulo from the Philippines. Mr. Yoshida's exquisite Oriental manners did not deter Mr. Romulo from observing to the Japanese Premier that he welcomed him " not in a spirit of letting bygones be bygones; but that bygones must never be repeated."
That appears to have been as close as the Japanese visitors ever came to what is usually called an "incident." Mr. Gromykd; the head of the big delegation from the Soviet Union—which came in its capacity as a former fighting ally, though the Russians were reminded by other delegates that their participa- tion in the Pacific war had lasted a total of six days—came a good deal closer. The San Francisco police did not make it known that they had warned Mr. Yoshida to be careful where he went. But the Chief of Police in Hillsborough, the suburb where the Russians were living, referred on one occasion to the period of Mr. Gromyko's stay as "the present emergency," and told newspapermen that he had warned the Russians not to walk alone in the neighbouring woods because "feeling was running high over their presence here." This was well before the moment when the White Russian plot to run a lorry into Mr. Gromyko's car as he was on the way to the Conference was declared to have been uncovered ; well before the still more exciting moment when, by golly; a lorry did overturn and did block Mr. Gromyko's route into San Francisco !
A few days in advance of the arrival of the Japanese delegation it was reported from Tokio that the Japanese Foreign Office had circulated among the members of the delegation a list of dos and don'ts designed to encourage behaviour that would be impeccable by American standards. This list was sufficiently detailed to include, for example, an injunction not to belch after a meal, it being explained that an American host would not take such appreciative noises in the complimentary spirit in which they were intended. All that could be done to ensure against any manifestation of unfriendlinesss to the Japanese had plainly been done in Tokio. But the Japanese Foreign Office must have had assurances from the State Department in Washington that the risk of any hostile demonstrpion was small. The State Depart- ment was right. And yet itlsnce looked—and only a few years ago—as though no Japanese was ever going to be able safely to show his fact in San Francisco again.
Within a few months of Pearl Harbour the United States Government removed well over 100,000 Japanese and Japanese) Americans from the West Coast to "re-location centres" inland, The well-to-do and the poor, the business-men and the hired hands on the farms, were rounded up by the United States Army and their property and crops were made subject to forced sale. It was a difficult situation, and self-preservation may well have justified the Government's actions ; but even during the war there were signs that a good many Americans were uneasy over what was happening. When, later, the Nisei were allowed to enlist for service against America's Western enemies, and when some of these Japanese-American battalions showed themselves to be capable of great gallantry under fire, the man-in-the-street in America was ready to applaud these performances—for by then it had become obvious that the danger of a Japanese invasion of!
California assisted by Nisei fifth-columnists had pretty well dis- appeared. Thus it was that, even before the Japanese surrender, some of the Japanese and Japanese-Americans were able to return to California. Only the brave attempted it, and they went back to the old towns, villages and farms in considerable trepida- tion. But in all but a few cases they found that they were safe, and that they could work and draw wages again.
They are back in force now—there are more in San Francisco' than there were before the war—and with such confidence that in California alone claims against the Government amounting to $200,000,000 have been filed by Japanese-Americans who suffered losses because of the re-location drive. Mr. Yoshida and his friends must have known that the San Francisco Chamber of Commerce staged a big banquet to mark the first post-war Japanese Trade Day. He must have had explicit assurances that there would be no restrictions on his and his fellow-delegates' movements during the Peace Conference. Nor were there. At Versailles, after the First World War, the German delegates were confined to a wired-off compound at the Hotel des Reservoirs, where they were quartered. In San Francisco the Japanese dele- gates and a large body of accompanying newspapermen have been distributed among the leading hotels. The Secretariat pro- vided fifteen elegant cars to convey them to and from the - Conference.
The Americans are bad haters, and they have learned a lot ; but it would be difficult to persuade anybody that the peace with Japan could have attained last week's height of sweetness and liberality if every one of the signers of the Treaty, including the United States and Japan, had not been as anxious as they are to fill the power vacuum the war has left in the Far East with something better and less menacing than Communism. The job has been done, and Mr. Gromyko could not prevent it from being done. But most of the delegates have left San Francisco without any profound belief that all their problems have been solved ; and some of them have taken back home apprehensions which were only temporarily suppressed in the interest of unity.
This is a very high interest, and nobody has any doubt that the number one priority it received was a triumph of good sense. Nevertheless, there still are those nations which fear that the United States, failing to look far enough ahead, is making it too easy for the new Japan to steer a course that would bring it around to the militaristic ways of the old Japan. There are those whose calculations have been totally upset by the resolute refusal of Mr. John Foster Dulles and his colleagues to depart from the formula which denies the victims of the old Japan's aggression anything approaching reparations on the expected scale. And there are those who wonder how long it will be before a flood- tide of cheap Japanese goods begins to erode their trade balances., But San Francisco was not the place to invoke these spectres. It was the setting, as was observed by Mr. Dean Acheson, the American Secretary of State—whose poise and calm the Western delegates were saluting—for a historic act of reconciliation. It was an occasion not for questions but for a toast. And those who were anxious to enter fully into the spirit of the hour could drink the toast in the form of a Peace Cocktail, invented and offered for sale in at least one of the San Francisco bars. The Peace Cocktail was made by mixing one jigger of Japanese saki with one jigger of gin.
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