Matsuoka Takes a Trip

In the years when he used to confuse fellow delegates to the late League of Nations with such phrases as "China is not a nation," talkative, persuasive Yosuke Matsuoka shuttled comfortably back & forth between Japan and Europe by boat. Last week there was little comfort to be had traveling anywhere in the Eastern Hemisphere, and a boat trip from Japan to Europe was hazardous and well-nigh impossible. For his much-publicized trip to Berlin, Japan's Foreign Minister chose the creaky, dirty, uncomfortable Trans-Siberian Railroad, and he let it be assumed that he would stop en route in Moscow. Just after Yosuke Matsuoka had departed, however, it was announced that he would not stop in Moscow.

This narrowed the speculation about the Foreign Minister's trip to the question of what was being planned for Berlin. In Berlin and in Rome the newspapers were full of vague portents as to Japan's part in the coming grand offensive (see col. 2). Yosuke Matsuoka chose to treat his trip more as a holiday. On his first day out of Tokyo, at Yamada, he walked down the street to a barbershop and had his hair trimmed around the neck and ears. Later he met reporters and told them that he had given up wearing his hair Prussian-style, an affectation he assumed when Japan resigned from the League of Nations in 1931.

Rattling on, Yosuke Matsuoka told the reporters everything about his trip except the things they wanted to know. "I have been through a whirlwind of official duties. Now I have some leisure and I am taking this trip to Europe. . . . Hitler must be desiring to see this face of mine, though it is an uninteresting one. ... I must return as soon as possible, as the Japanese nation seems to be looking forward to what presents I will bring back."

The Japanese nation was looking forward to these presents with some apprehension. The official news agency, Domei, assured the people that "his mission to Europe is as peaceful as peaceful can be." Asahi thought it necessary to warn the Foreign Minister that "great prudence and mature consideration are required." Rear Admiral Tanetsugu put Japan's fears in a nutshell: unless Germany and Italy can trap the British Fleet in the Mediterranean, the Admiral wrote, the British Navy will command the Atlantic and the U. S. Navy the Pacific. Then "the new strategy to blockade Japan at a distance may be brought into play."

With Great Britain and Greece, as well as pro-British Turkey and wavering Yugoslavia, taking heart from the passage of the Lend-Lease Bill, it looked as if Yosuke Matsuoka's trip would be a race between German power politics and time. If Germany could outmaneuver Britain and prevent the formation of a four-power front in the Balkans, then the demands on Japan might be limited to expressions of amity. But if things went badly for Germany in Europe, Japan might be called on to create a diversion for the U. S. in the Pacific. And that is what Japan is afraid of.

The U. S. had profoundly altered the war's outlook in a week. Even Adolf Hitler admitted it in his speech defying "plutocracy" to a fight to the finish (see below). The balance of power with which Europe's war began in 1939, which the fall of France and Poland and Italy's entry had altered, was restored on the eve of the war's extension. Whether or not Japan came in to tip the balance once more Axisward, everywhere the conviction grew that the war would be truly a world war and a long one.

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