Japan Steps South

Last October Japan took advantage of the demoralization after Munich to step quietly south and seize Canton, at the back door of British Hong Kong. Stepping just as quietly, last week she took advantage of the confusion of the Spanish war's climax, went still farther south and occupied the island of Hainan, at the front door of French Indo-China.

Overnight a Japanese expeditionary force which had sailed down the China sea landed on and occupied, in spite of a 32-year-old treaty with France and in the teeth of warnings received last year from France and Britain, this fertile and strategic patch of about 13,500 square miles. Once more the Anti-Comintern bloc was up to its clever trick of kicking the democracies in the pants when they were worried about troubles elsewhere. The Japanese war office hissed assurances that the Hainan occupation was purely a military operation to keep the Chinese from shipping arms to South China. The Japanese said they would withdraw when there was no further military necessity for their presence. Every government in the world knew they would not if they could help it.

Hoihow, Hainan's chief port, is potentially a good harbor, and a naval base there would command the Indo-China coast, some 200 miles to the west. It sits across the British Singapore-Hong Kong line and might menace the line from the Philippines to Singapore, should the U. S. and Britain ever act in concert in the East. It gives Japan a better jumping off place toward the oil-rich Netherlands Indies than it has ever had before. The Japanese Empire now stretches 2,400 miles from its farthest northern to its farthest southern outposts.

The French asked their Ambassador in Tokyo to ask the Japanese what it was all about. The British were "in touch" with the French. The Dutch and the Americans looked dumb.

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