JAPAN IN CHINA
,To the Editor of TEE SPECTATOR.]
Sra,-.—In last week's issue of The Spectator your comment on the arresting picture painted by your correspondent in Shanghai is interesting, as in an American paper, Time, which I received a week or two ago, an even more gloomy outlook is shown ; quoting from a Tokyo newspaper, Nichi Nichi :
"Mr. Hirota, Japan's foreign Minister (who wrote the Twenty One Demands in 1915), informed Generalissimo Chiang at Nanking that if Nanking accepts the tutelage of Tokyo, Japan is willing to do the following for China : 1. Assist China to withdraw from the League of Nations and toward abandoning the Chinese policy of relying for aid in crises upon the Great Powers of the West. 2. Furnish China with Japanese military advisers to the national and provincial armies of Generalissimo Chiang, now advised chiefly by German and U.S. officers with crack World War records.
3. Conclude a separate pact with China nullifying the Washing- ton Nine-Power Treaty and other treaties' so far as China and Japan are concerned.
4. Assume responsibility for the Japanese defence of China in the same terms of alliance that Japan stipulated in agreement to defend Manchukuo.
5. Exalt China by exchanging Ambassadors with her, whereas Japan has always refused to exchange with China any diplomat of higher rank than Minister."
- Finally, last week the whole Tokyo Press buzzed with gossip that to get Generalissimo Chiang to accept the above, Japan's Imperial Government was cff:ring China whopping loans. " Japan olizred loans, threatened war as the alternative."
There are three portraits of Japanese : " General Suzuki," `-` Minister Ari Yoshi," in a kimona and slippers in his garden, and " Admiral Osumi " in naval uniform, the Minister of the Navy, who asserted " We have no intention of embarking on a naval race, but if negotiations fail we have a policy!— the whole Japanese nation must make up its mind to cope With the situation, even if we are reduced to eating rice
gruel."—Yours truly, GRACE L. MORROW. ; Pine Lodge, Strandtown, Belfast.
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