Insulted at Fuji's Feet

Japanese diplomats try hard to act by Occidental standards of hard-headed opportunism, always end the Oriental way: face first, facts afterwards. Last week Japan chose to let the end of her trade treaty with the U. S. -- a really serious incident -- pass with hardly an official sigh but spilled a hot lava of diplomatic hate on Great Britain over a comparatively microscopic incident -- the stopping of the liner Asama Maru by a British cruiser while 21 German reservists were taken off (TIME, Jan. 29).

The Japanese Foreign Office, in stiffer language than the U. S. State Department used to protest the sinking of the U. S. S. Panay by Japanese bombers, notified British Ambassador to Japan Sir Robert Leslie Craigie that the Asama incident was "a serious unfriendly act," and demanded "a full and valid explanation promptly."

London did not answer promptly enough to suit the Japanese. What Sir Robert said on his own hook only made them angrier. There was nothing extraordinary, he pointed out, about the boarding. In World War I, Allied cruisers boarded 64 neutral vessels and took off 3,500 subjects of the Central Powers. Britain certainly intended no affront to the Japanese in this case, he said -- no greater affront, in any event, than the Japanese had intended in boarding over 191 British ships in China seas since 1937.

That was beside the point, snapped the Foreign Office. Britain had deliberately insulted Japan by halting a vessel "almost at the base of Mount Fuji" -- i. e., 35 miles off shore. The Asama's unfortunate Cap tain Yoshisada Vatanabe was relieved of his job for "misconduct" -- i. e., stopping his ship when the British cruiser fired a shot across his bows. Japan promised to "take steps" against Britain and got around to discouraging Germans from traveling on Japanese ships. As if deliberately trying to remove the last vestige of consistency, a Japanese cruiser stopped a British coastal steamer, asked her captain if he had heard of the Asama incident, detained him 15 hours on no other pretext than that he had not.

Britain's reply when delivered was tailored not like a kimono but in the calm coat-&-pants language of international law. It set off new Japanese frenzies. It was "legalistic," said the Foreign Office, and did nothing to assuage Japan's dignity, injured by this insult "right in her front garden" -- "on her very doorstep." Properly angered, Japan tightened the Tientsin blockade -- stopped the passage of food into the British concession, turned on the juice in the encircling electrified barbed wire. None but Italians and White Russians were allowed to take food into the concession. Concession prices rose sky high, while the Tientsin American Chamber of Commerce prepared to appeal to Washington. This week the Japanese Cabinet met to discuss what must at length be discussed in every Japanese crisis: how to back down, save face, win new popularity with the Japanese people, leave the way open for renewal of friction.

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