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 JAPAN BITES BACK:
DOCUMENTS
CONTEXTUALIZING PEARL
HARBOR

Edited By
Joshua Blakeney
 Copyright © 2015 Joshua Blakeney
All Rights Reserved.
ISBN-13: 978-1507785614
ISBN-10: 1507785615

www.nonalignedmedia.com
All photos/images are public domain unless specified otherwise.

Joshua Blakeney, pictured here at the National Diet Library in Tokyo, is a journalist,
radio-host and pundit based in Alberta, Canada. He has been Press TV's Canadian
correspondent since 2012. He is co-founder of Non-Aligned Media. His email
address is: [email protected]
 TABLE OF CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION Joshua Blakeney

1. THE SINO-JAPANESE CONFLICT: A SHORT SURVEY

The Foreign Affairs Association of Japan

2. THE BOLSHEVIZATION OF CHINA Hikomatsu Kamikawa

3. THE AMERICAN POSITION : CAT’S-PAW OR COMMON

SENSE Ujiro Ohyama

4. JAPAN’S CONTINENTAL POLICY Katsuji Inahara

5. TOTALITARIANISM VERSUS DEMOCRACY Kojiro Sugimori

6. THE ANGLO-AMERICAN COMMON FRONT

Kumataro Honda

7. THE THREE POWER PACT Nobumasa Suyétsugu

8. GENESIS OF THE PACIFIC WAR Kohsaku Tamura

 INTRODUCTION
Joshua Blakeney
The War on Truth

The publications contained in this book are particularly rare and

the powers-that-be hoped that they would never reach the eyes of you,
the reading public. In September 1945, just one month after the U.S.
had dropped atomic bombs on the people of Hiroshima and Nagasaki,
killing approximately a quarter of a million people in the process, The
Civil Censorship Detachment (CCD) of the newly installed General
Headquarters (GHQ) began a process described by scholar Nishio
Kanji as “book burning.” 7,769 publications were identified by the
CCD for confiscation, most of which favourably explained Japan’s
prior actions or critically questioned those of the Allied forces.[1] A
post-war propaganda film made for the consumption of U.S. occupation
personnel entitled “Our Job in Japan” (1945), written by Theodor S.
Geisel, expressed the ethos of the GHQ lucidly. “Our problem’s in the
brain inside of the Japanese head” the film’s narration proclaimed.
Zooming in on an image of a brain, it continued “there are 70 million of
these [brains] in Japan, physically no different than any other brains in
the world, actually all made of exactly the same stuff as ours. These
brains, like our brains, can do good things or bad things all depending
on the kind of ideas that are put inside.”[2]
In order to begin their process of psychological warfare against
the vanquished people of Japan, the GHQ would have to remove all
evidence of Imperial Japan having ever been involved in “good things”
while promoting narratives, irrespective of historical facts, which
depicted the ousted Japanese Government as having been solely a
fountain of “bad things”. This demonological process encountered a
hitch early on when Justice Radhabinod Pal expatiated his dissentient
verdict at the International Military Tribunal for the Far East which had
been convened on April 29, 1946 to prosecute much of the deposed
Japanese leadership. Pal, a subject of the British-ruled Indian
subcontinent, adjudged that Tokyo’s actions during the War did not
constitute a war crime and rebuffed many of the hypocritical
allegations levelled at the dislodged Japanese Government. He exposed
the principle of “victor’s justice” inherent to the Tribunal, with a burst
of clarity and justice that the German equivalents of those on trial in

1
Tokyo would not receive. “Thus, in a sense, the color lines that Pan-
Asianism emphasized were acted out in an ironic way on the benches
of the Tokyo Tribunal” writes Cemil Aydin.[3]
Pan-Asianists, such as Shūmei Ōkawa, the prominent
intellectual prosecuted during the Tokyo Trials, believed that Japan as
the most developed nation in Asia had had an obligation to lead
regional anti-colonial forces to liberation from Western and Communist
colonialism. He and his colleagues proposed the construction of the
Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere, an organic amalgam of
peoples, goods and services which would allow nations such as
Indonesia, Burma, India, Korea, Taiwan, China, Malaysia, Philippines
and Vietnam to develop symbiotically and without the depredations of
colonialism.
The proponents of this Asiatic regionalism were not initially
universally liked in Japan. Throughout the 1920s Pan-Asianism was in
fact a marginal and negligible tendency. However, by the early 1930s
its precepts had become governmental policy. The pro-British, liberalist
Japanese establishment of the 1920s clung to the hope that Japan would
be afforded a seat at the table of Imperialism by a process of accretion.
Multilateralism was embraced and those, such as Ōkawa, who proposed
that Japan operate outside the parameters of the (Western-dominated)
League of Nations and without regard for the West’s aspirations in
Asia, were deemed dangerously idealistic. In this vein, the 1926 Pan-
Asiatic Conference in Nagasaki was widely ridiculed by literati and the
chattering classes as fanciful and divorced from political reality. From
1926 to 1943, the year when the Japanese Government itself hosted the
Greater East Asia Conference, something unprecedented arose. The
realists within Japan, who had in 1926 firmly supported Liberal
Internationalist palliatives to Japan’s predicaments, metamorphosed
into Pan-Asianists, coming to terms with the inevitability of what
Gerald Horne has described as a “race war”[4] or what Ōkawa
characterized as a “clash of civilizations” between East and West.[5]
The scholarship of this radical shift in policy bifurcates into two
main groupings; explanations which focus upon domestic political
convulsions and those which emphasize the international context.
Frederick Dickenson has aptly dealt with the epochal domestic
factionalism which existed between the pro-liberal, pro-British

2
elements of the Japanese establishment and the Germanicist, Pan-
Asianist, illiberal elements, the latter of whom would come to the fore
in Japanese politics from 1933 when Japan withdrew from the League
of Nations in the wake of the Lytton Report which delegitimized
Japanese operations in Manchoukuo.[6] Other interpretations which
emphasize domestic social and political influences have been written
by Richard Storry[7] and Christopher Szpilman.[8]
The documents in the book before you do not emphasize
domestic variables as much as geopolitical ones. This, in short, is
because the preponderance of evidence suggests that international
developments impinged more greatly upon Japan’s actions by
compelling Liberal Internationalists to realize the fruitlessness of their
treaty-based approach to international relations relative to Imperial
Powers which broke treaties and stabbed nations such as Japan in the
back. In his essay “Totalitarianism versus Democracy”, contained in
this book, Kojio Sugimori observed “the intranational relationships of
the past are becoming less important than the international relationships
among countries.” Of course when viewing the clash of civilizations
that was World War II in Asia within a more prolonged historical
context, it was the global supremacy of the West (i.e. external factors)
which spawned the Meiji Restoration of 1868 and the process of
modernization which led Japan to emerge as a regional hegemon. This
further justifies an emphasis on supranational developments.
It is the politically-motivated distortion of contemporaneous
geopolitical happenings and the lopsided allotment of blame for Greater
East Asia War which this collection of essays intends to undermine.
Typically Western accounts, especially those emanating from popular
media sources in the U.S., begin the historical narrative on December 7,
1941 when Japanese planes appeared, as if out of nowhere, and
attacked naval targets in Hawaii. The Opium Wars, the imposition of
unequal treaties upon Japan by Commodore Perry and subsequent U.S.
diplomats, U.S. naval expansion in the Pacific, the funneling of arms to
the dictatorial Chiang Kai-shek regime, the Soviet, and by extension,
International Zionist meddling in Asia, the Franklin D. Roosevelt
Administration’s provocations against Japan and many other seminal
historical occurrences are concealed from Western audiences, obviating
the necessary contextualization of Nippon’s counter-hegemonic
activities as expressed in the Pearl Harbor operation.
3
 Old Themes, New Realities

Three of the documents provided in this text—“Japan’s

Continental Policy”, “The Genesis of the Pacific War”, and “The Sino-
Japanese Conflict: A Short Survey”—were retrieved from the archives
at the National Diet Library in Tokyo. Although the GHQ undertook a
mass eradication of pro-Japanese literature in the aftermath of the War,
according to Kanji “[o]ne copy each of approximately 80 to 90 percent
of the original total of 7,769 books that endured the ‘book-burning’ is
at present housed in the National Diet Library.”[9] The NDL, therefore,
houses a treasure-trove of priceless material which can help
demythologize the victors’ history of the era.
The other five pieces offered in this work were originally
published in Contemporary Japan: A Review of Far Eastern Affairs.
All of the documents are ultimately publications of the then Foreign
Affairs Association of Japan. My research indicates that the NDL
currently only possesses two editions of Contemporary Japan. I,
however, was fortunate enough to find an antique book dealer in
Connecticut who was willing to sell me a collection of eighteen
editions of the periodical. Of the twenty-eight publications I retrieved
from the NDL archives and of the countless editorials contained in the
editions of Contemporary Japan I had access to, I feel the eight pieces
contained in this book, in their totality, offer the best introduction to the
developments that led to the events of December 7, 1941, from a
Japanese perspective.
That being said, there are obviously many subtopics which are
either underemphasized or omitted in toto. I was forced to be
discriminating and censorious in order to make this book project viable
and in order to provide the readership with a basic overview of the
“Japanese side of the argument” of the period as opposed to a laborious
exposition of every nuance of Asian history. Most notably, the book
does not dilate sufficiently upon the architectonics of the Greater East
Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere. This is a subject upon which I hope to
focus in future works.
4
 Having served as Press TV’s Canadian correspondent[10] at a
time of artificially heightened tensions between Iran and the West, I am
all too aware of the import of the dissemination of counter-hegemonic
nostrums. The Foreign Affairs Association of Japan—as is currently
the case with Press TV—challenged skewed, Orientalist discourses
which apportioned all moral impropriety to those challenging Western
and Marxian-Zionist global totalitarian schemes. In bringing the
documents contained in this book back to life it is my hope that people
will, in Nietzschean terms, undergo a revaluation of values, or at least a
re-evaluation of their assumptions and question the epistemological
construction of Western “just war” discourses.
Japan after 1868 transformed into a developed, sophisticated,
regional hegemon and thus posed a challenge to the British Empire, the
French Empire, the Dutch Empire and indeed to the U.S. itself, which
after the Spanish-American War of 1898 had seized control of the
Philippines and expanded operations in the Pacific basin. Japan also,
via its staunch anti-Communism, ruffled the feathers of certain
influential Jews, who post-1917 viewed the Soviet Union as the polity
most amenable to Jewish upward mobility due, in part, to its State-
enforced philo-Semitism.
Indeed the pioneers of anti-Japanese propaganda in this epoch
were often Jews, the most prominent of whom was Wilfrid Fleisher.
Fleisher worked for his father’s outlet The Japan Advertiser which
propagated an Anglophile and pro-Chiang Kai-shek line and was
vehemently opposed to the kind of Asiatic regional-determination of
the Pan-Asianists.[11] The Japanese Government would bring the
Advertiser to an end in 1940, arresting and evicting much of its staff.
After his ouster from Japanese letters Fleisher returned to the U.S. and
would author a number of alarmist anti-Japanese works including
“Volcanic Isle” (1941), “Our Enemy Japan” (1942) and “What to Do
with Japan” (1945) [12] which attempted to neutralize anti-war
sentiment within the U.S.
Morris Cohen was another anti-Japanese personality of Jewish
lineage who incited war against Japan. Cohen worked as Chiang Kai-
shek’s liaison officer to foreign consulates during the period. He would
later be described by the South African Sunday Express as “the guiding

5
genius behind the War-Lords of China”, the very fractious elements
Imperial Japan was trying to suppress, ostensibly to bring peace and
stability to Asia.[13] Communist Harold Isaacs would also offer his
propaganda skills to the anti-Japanese forces, keen as he was to see
Asia bolshevized. His book The Tragedy of the Chinese Revolution[14]
would be introduced by Lev Bronstein, who was commonly known as
Trotsky, an ethnic supremacist responsible for the deaths of, arguably,
tens of millions of people.
Another influential agent of International Zionism involved in
pitting Asian against Asian was Adolph Joffe who was also a comrade
of Trotsky’s. He was head of the Soviet Mission to Sun-Yat Sen and,
along with Jacob Borodin, formed the Red Section of the Kuomintang,
later operating as political adviser to Chiang Kai-shek.
The Soviet-backed Chinese Red Army would operate under the
advice of Zionists W. N. Levitschev and J. B. Gamarnik. Additionally,
Jews Ludwik Rajchman and R. Haas were influential in the Nanking
Chamber of Commerce and would be unseated when Japan invaded
Nanking in December 1937. Rajchman would serve as China’s special
representative to the U.S. between 1940 and 1943.[15]
Tom Segev in a Haaretz article entitled “The Jews who fought
with Mao” outlines the phenomenon which arose whereby Jewish
members of the ethnically-skewed International Brigades, who had
fought against the New Spain of Francisco Franco, travelled to China to
fight alongside Soviet-backed forces with the professed goal of
absorbing the people of Asia into the Soviet totalitarian empire.[16]
Among the most prominent of those Jews who aided the inorganic
Communist takeover of China, which would lead to the deaths of as
many as sixty-five million people, were Israel Epstein, Frank Coe, Elsie
Fairfax-Cholmely and Soloman Adler.
It is also noteworthy that within the remit of U.S. politics that
Harry Dexter White—the son of Lithuanian Jews and a proven Soviet
mole who worked intimately in the U.S. Treasury with Henry
Morgenthau of the notorious Morgenthau Plan—contrived many of the
hostile acts of provocation, such as the asset freezes and economic
blockade that expedited America’s engagement in war with Japan.
These war-inducing policies of the Soviet-infiltrated White House are
discussed at length in the appended documents.

6
 Japan’s alliance with National Socialist Germany and Fascist
Italy, reified in the Tripartite Pact of September 1940—about which
there is an essay in this book—motivated Jews to turn against Japan.
Ralph Townsend, a U.S.-based journalist who was imprisoned for his
pro-Japanese thoughts, on the personal order of Franklin D. Roosevelt,
noted how within foreign policy circles “Liberalist Jewish writers, who
are rather numerous. . .favour Russia.”[17] Such pro-Soviet Jews, it
logically follows, viewed the spread of Communism to Asia as a
positive phenomenon and the Nippon-led anti-Communists as thus
deleterious to Jewish interests. John Koster’s book Operation Snow:
How a Soviet Mole in FDR’s White House Triggered Pearl Harbor
(2012) explains how such pro-Soviet Jews created circumstances
wherein the prospect of a German-Japanese, East-West attack on the
philo-Semitic Soviet regime was thwarted via the dragging of the U.S.
into war with Japan.[18]
I mention the Jewish role in fomenting hostility toward Japan
for numerous reasons. Firstly, certain Jews have been instrumental in
promoting “hate speech” legislation and anti-revisionist laws in the
West—and latterly in Japan[19]—which have enabled the official
histories of World War II to be exempted from universally accepted
standards of scientific inquiry. For example in France, the Gayssot Act,
enacted in July 1990, enables the French State to imprison for up to
five years anybody who openly disbelieves the official history as
proffered by the Nuremberg Tribunal. Such legislation is particularly
Orwellian when one factors in the reality that Article 19 of the
Nuremberg Charter conceded that “[t]he Tribunal shall not be bound by
technical rules of evidence.”[20] The zealous lobbying by certain Jews
for laws which proscribe revisionistic historical interpretations is
evidently a case of “they who doth protest too much”, but this can only
be understood, ironically, when historical interpretations are written
revisionistically, in violation of State-imposed, Jewish-exceptionalist
strictures. This requires a sort of kamikaze intellectual; persons who are
willing to, if necessary, relinquish their liberty and freedoms in pursuit
of historical truth. Ernst Zündel, Fredrick Töben, David Irving, Germar
Rudolf and Robert Faurisson are some of the more prominent of these
kamikaze intellectuals, who were brutally assaulted by the State for
their historical analyses.[21]

7
 It is the de facto mandatory presupposition in Western
historiography that Jews have done no wrong, that Jews, Judaism and
Jewish culture should be exempted from criticism, that Jews have
throughout history been powerless and persecuted, as opposed to
powerful and, in the case of certain Jewish political actors, persecutory,
that must be overcome.[22] Hence, the fact that Jews played a
significant role in fomenting war between Western powers and Japan
ought to be included in histories of the period, not merely because the
dissemination of truthful historical accounts is necessary and important
but because Jewish-exceptionalism and State-imposed historical
amnesia is enabling contemporary wars to be waged on behalf of the
same forces based on the widespread misconception that the West only
wages just wars.
It is noteworthy that the process by which pro-Communist
elements were able to veer the isolationist U.S. in a war direction
against Japan[23] is closely analogous to the methods by which pro-
Israel lobbyists and largely Jewish neoconservatives have, in the post-
9/11 world, engineered wars against Israel’s adversaries. Many of the
public relations techniques which were honed by the enemies of Japan
to demonize her, have been applied on a grand scale to foster ostracism
toward, most egregiously, the Islamic Republic of Iran in the
contemporary world.[24]
The provocative policies implemented against Japan have also
been reutilized contemporarily. The imposition of economic sanctions
—an act of war itself—is one example of a policy applied both to
Imperial Japan and to Israel’s enemies in the Middle East, such as the
Islamic Republic of Iran and the Syrian Arab Republic. The Western
sponsorship of warlords and terrorist zealots as agents of destabilization
is arising today within the Middle East—à la the infamous Oded Yinon
Plan[25]—and, as noted, occurred in relation to mainland Asia in the
1930s and 1940s. Political analyst Mark Dankof has not missed these
symmetries. He writes: “the political forces operating behind and
through Franklin Roosevelt, are identical to those in play in the
American political power elite now: International Central Bankers and
the disproportionate role of Jews in that milieu; Zionists and the Jewish
and Israeli Lobby organizations; and in the case of the Roosevelt
Administration, the pro-Soviet foreign policy agenda of key Jewish

8
agents in their midst, the 20th century counterpart to the Israel First
Fifth Column operating in the Bush and Obama Administrations in the
21st.”[26] In September 2000, just one year prior to the false-flag
operation on 9/11, the Zionist think tank The Project for the New
American Century cited the perceived need for a “new Pearl Harbor” to
enable their desired policies to come to fruition, an indicator of the
saliency of comparisons between the demonization of Imperial Japan
and the manufacturing of Middle Eastern enemies prior to and after
9/11.[27]
I have clarified the above facts because the Japanese analysts
whose writings I offer in this text employed more nebulous phrases
such as “Anglo-America” to categorize their enemy. As with the post-
9/11 wars of aggression, attributing the epochal strife to a generic
“Anglo-America” provides only a partial picture of the political reality.
Of course, there were numerous non-Jewish cheerleaders for war
between Japan and the Allies, as is also the case vis-à-vis the so-called
“war on terror”. As Ralph Townsend lamented in his writings,
Christian missionaries, who had a working relationship with the anti-
Japanese factions in China, often misreported and romanticized the
facts on the ground. Townsend observed that in order to provide a
perception to their Western benefactors that they were improving the
lot of the average chinaman, Christian fundamentalists suppressed
evidence that China was rife with privation, warlordism and societal
fissures and that the most stable, prosperous territories were in fact
those controlled by non-Christian Japan. This loosely mirrors the
myopic support of certain Christian fundamentalists for Zionist pro-war
policies within the contemporary context.[28]
Similarly, pro-Chiang Kai-shek lobbyists in America were
adept at playing on the anti-monarchical undercurrent within the U.S.
national sensibility, depicting the Kuomintang forces as pro-democracy
republicans besieged by Japanese monarchists akin to King George
III’s British redcoats. Many besuited warlords would be brought to the
U.S. for speaking tours in which they extolled the virtues of freedom
and democracy before returning to China to continue their raping and
pillaging.
These additional pro-war elements notwithstanding, there can
be no doubt, however, that International Zionism and Jewish pro-

9
bolshevist elements were decisive in winching the U.S. off its
isolationist footing. The noxious combination of Hollywood films,
uncritical establishmentarian “scholarship”, biased documentaries and
anti-revisionist laws have managed to keep from public knowledge the
provocations that the Land of the Rising Sun was subjected to prior to
Pearl Harbor which forced her to retaliate. Indeed even to refer to the
Pearl Harbor operation as retaliatory is heterodox in academic and
journalistic circles. That European Powers, the Soviet Union and the
American Empire were meddling in Asia on a far larger scale than
Japan was prior to the 1930s is not emphasized in modern
historiography. Neither is the proposal for the Greater East Asia Co-
Prosperity Sphere and a non-Communist Asia, situated within the
context of the subsequent murderous regional developments such as the
Communist atrocities in China, the Korean War, the Indonesian Civil
War and the Vietnam War, which collectively may have taken the lives
of over one-hundred million Asians.

Revisionism and Liberty or Subjugation and a World Based on

Myths?

I have coined the maxim holocaustianity is the opium of the

masses and it is ultimately—and somewhat bizarrely—the case that it is
the sanctity of the holocaust narrative which psychologically,
politically and scholastically precludes the Japanese side of the
argument, as expressed in this book, from being aired.
The holocaust narrative has castrated Western man; it has
prevented us from placing our national and ethnic interests over those
of our hostile elite. It is a cardinal variable impinging upon the foreign
policies of Western nations, compelling us to fight wars for Israel
which jeopardize our national interests. Gentiles are made to feel that
they owe something to Jews because of the uncritically accepted belief
that Adolf Hitler personally ordered the mass execution by poisoned
gas and other means of at least six million Jews. That narrative, despite
evidence existing to undermine it, operates at the level of religious
myth in an otherwise secularized, post-Christian West. To question it

10
will lead one to be “burnt at the stake”, to metaphorize, or to be thrown
into a dungeon, to be literal, in most Western nations.
Japanese revisionists, such as those involved with the
impressive think-tank Society for the Dissemination of Historical Fact,
appear to be bemused as to why it is deemed heretical, seven decades
after the culmination of the War, to question the propagandistic claims
made about the Japanese role in Asia in the epoch.[29] Even though, as
mentioned above, Jews do have certain skeletons in their closets when
it comes to the Asian theatre of the War, it is primarily the necessity,
from the perspective of many influential Jews, of stigmatizing
historical revisionism per se which spawns the flurry of excoriations of
Japanese historical revisionists one can witness, in particular, in the
English-language Japanese press.
It was highly stimulating and somewhat amusing observing the
hysterical response to the 2014 book Falsehoods of the Allied Nations’
Victorious View of History, as Seen by a British Journalist authored by
the former Tokyo bureau chief of The Times, The New York Times and
the Financial Times, Henry Stokes, in which he questions the notion
that a massacre took place in Nanking in 1937-38. The English-
language Japanese media initially falsely claimed that he had recanted
his controversial statements—in other words they resorted to
disinformation—which compelled Stokes and his publisher to reaffirm
that “the author’s opinion is: The so-called ‘Nanking Massacre’ never
took place. The word ‘Massacre’ is not right to indicate what
happened.”[30]
A foundational claim of World War II revisionists is that
because all of the belligerents in World War II committed atrocities and
engaged in immoral acts, that the victors had to concoct narratives of
unprecedented mass executions, ex post facto, which would distinguish
the killings of the Axis forces, morally, from those of the Allied forces.
Imagine, for example, the average Briton asking: why did the British
Government declare war on Germany, ruin our Empire, bankrupt our
country and render us a de facto colony of the U.S. and Israel, merely
to defend Poland, which after the War was under the jackboot of
Stalin? Without emotionally charged mass killing narratives, which
have largely been produced cinematographically via Hollywood, such
queries would be hard for officialdom to stultify.

11
 It is compelling to see how the same fault lines which existed
when Fleisher was foisting the agenda of his cabal upon the people of
Japan are in existence today, with the English-language Japanese press
—much of which the CIA, Japanese Communists and the Zionists
seized control of after the War—demonizing the more nationalistically-
oriented politicians who refuse to enact legislation which would
proscribe Japanized historical narratives which undermine post-1945
victimologies. It is germane that the English-language The Japan
Times, was actually founded partially as the result of a merger with
Fleisher’s The Japan Advertiser, and today publishes articles
sympathetic to “hate speech” laws, thus moving Japanese discourse in a
direction Fleisher would no doubt have approved of.[31]
The central claim of the censorious proponents of “hate speech”
legislation and anti-revisionist laws is that there are genocidal
implications if such legislation is not enacted. But Japan is a peaceful
and quiescent nation today in which no such radical outgrowths of
unfettered free speech can be witnessed. In fact, a case could be made
that the opposite of the aforementioned metaphysic is true, namely that
there is a correlation between the lack of criticism allowed of ethnic
minorities and ethnicized victimologies in a country and the level of
warfare and State-murder committed by that nation. Japan poses a
problem, therefore, for the enemies of truth; those of us who live in
Western nations which do criminalize revisionism and non-Jewish-
exceptionalist interpretations of history and politics are able to cite the
Japanese dispensation as an alternative to our own. Hence, in their lust
to bring to fruition a Zionist New World Order, a preliminary step for
its proponents has been to attempt to have all criticism of Jews and all
historical revisionism about the main historical event which enables
Jewish exceptionalism, the holocaust, and World War II more broadly,
to be legislated against.
My book therefore, in providing contemporaneous, indigenous,
Japanese analyses of the geopolitical convulsions prior to and during
the War, is intended to eviscerate the mythological edifice which
enables contemporary wars and a supranationally-oriented police state.
The book is intended to be cathartic in the sense that it can liberate the
people of Japan, and by extension Germany, of some of the guilt they
have been compelled to emote without warrant. It can, I hope, act as an

12
indication to Japanese historical revisionists that they have friends and
allies outside Japan who are keen to see the ongoing psychological
battle to control the Japanese mind won by the beautiful people of the
Yamato race.

THE SINO-JAPANESE CONFLICT: A SHORT SURVEY

The Foreign Affairs Association of Japan

Originally Published: October 26, 1937

1. The Beginning

Great events may have very small beginnings, and the present
armed conflict between China and Japan is no exception. It originated
in a very small thing—just a few shots fired by Chinese soldiers upon a
small body of Japanese troops near Lukouchiao in the outskirts of
Peiping. The shooting took place on the night of July 7th, when these
Japanese soldiers, only 150 strong, were carrying on some inoffensive
maneuver in the locality in preparation for a forthcoming inspection.
The attack was altogether unexpected, and the Japanese could not reply
to it until some reinforcements had arrived from Fengtai.
This was the first clash, and it might have been the last. For the
Japanese made several attempts to localize the affair and arrive at a
peaceful settlement. Promises were made on both sides, but, on the

13
Chinese side, no sooner were the promises made than they were
broken. Such strange and unsatisfactory dealing may not indeed have
been due so much to the duplicity of those in the highest command as
to insurgent younger spirits in the lower ranks, who either refused to
obey orders entirely or usurped the command in order to accomplish
their own ends. This hypothesis takes on greater substance when we
take into consideration the fact that the offending Chinese troops were
formed by part of the 37th Division of the 29th Army, which division
[sic] was composed of remnants of the notoriously anti-Japanese forces
of General Feng Yu-hsiang. But whatever the cause of this double-
dealing, the fact remains that this first armed clash rapidly took on a
form where a peaceful solution became impossible.

2. China’s False Statement

As soon as the news of the armed conflict in north China

reached Nanking, the Chinese Government immediately launched upon
a vigorous propaganda in the usual Chinese style.
False Statement No. 1 In the first place the Nanking
Government alleged that the Japanese troops were illegally stationed in
north China, and that their holding any maneuvers constituted an
encroachment on China’s territorial integrity. How entirely false such a
statement is becomes obvious by a glance at the Boxer Protocol of
1900 and the Notes of 1902 exchanged between Japan and China in
regard to the return of Tientsin. These documents not only give Japan
the right to station troops in north China, but also the right of holding
maneuvers. But the Chinese did not tell their lies in vain, for they
appear to have been believed in certain foreign countries who actually
have their own forces in China in consequence of the same Boxer
Protocol.
False Statement No. 2 The Chinese Government also laid the
blame for the first clash upon the Japanese soldiers who had been taken
by surprise by the Chinese fire, and alleged that the Japanese were
carrying out some premeditated plan for seizing certain strategic points
in North China. This is a typically Chinese allegation, made in the
knowledge that, although it may masquerade as the truth only for a
while, it will yet do harm enough before it dies a natural death. Yet the

14
allegation quickly evaporates in face of the two following common
sense questions:

(1) Supposing that the Japanese really had an ulterior

motive such as the Chinese declare, would they have done
anything so fantastic as to leave its execution to a small
unsupported force of 150 men?
(2) And would they have chosen for so important a
proceeding the very night when their Commander lay on
his deathbed, and the officer next in command was absent
on a tour of inspection in Shanhaikwan?

3. The Background

Among the various causes that have given rise to the outbreak
of hostilities in north China, the outstanding one is certainly of an
economic nature. A glance at Japan’s remarkable industrial and
economic development during recent years would be instructive. Take,
for instance, her manufacturing industry and compare its development
with that of Great Britain and the United States of America during the
last twenty years, taking the year 1913 as the index for each of the three
countries.

Year Japan U.S.A. Britain

1913 100 100 100
1925 222 151 87
1929 297 170 97
1933 346 109 87

From the above it is seen that during the twenty years, 1913-1933,

15
while the manufacturing industry of the United States has only an
increase of 9 per cent. and that of Great Britain actually a decrease of
13 per cent. Japan’s development has been nothing short of remarkable,
registering an increase of almost 250 per cent. over the same period.
Therefore Japan must ask herself the very searching question, where
can she find markets to absorb this astonishing increase in her
manufactured goods?
Japan had attached the greatest importance to her
industrialization as a means of solving her population problem and
other problems arising therefrom, and also of affording her the
wherewithal to buy foodstuffs and raw materials; but it has proved to
be almost futile. The hard fact she is called upon to face is that since
the world depression of 1929 almost all her former markets are either
closed to her or protected by such high trade barriers as to make the
entrance of her goods well-nigh hopeless. Indeed, it has involved her in
a serious dilemma: she must either submit to be stifled within the
narrow boundaries of her Island Empire or go forth in search of fresh
markets in place of those that have been closed to her.
She refused to be stifled and accordingly chose the latter
alternative. The new market that she fixed on as her objective appeared
to be most promising both by reason of its geographical proximity and
on account of the position Japan already occupies there. This was north
China which, with its population of 76 million, offered almost as many
prospective buyers of Japanese goods as Japan’s entire population. This
means that Japan’s main economic advance has got to be made on the
Asiatic continent with the inevitable corollary [sic] that any obstacle
placed in her way will have to be removed if she is to continue to live.
Absence of war alone is not peace. Fierce compaign [sic] of violence
and hostility may be waged under the mask of peace, depriving nations
of their very means of subsistence and their people of their lawful
rights. Such has been, for years, China’s actions against Japan.

4. Japan’s Aims in The Present Conflict

Japan’s aims are to bring about true peace, which is understanding,

order and co-operation. If one would have an accurate and official
statement of these aims and attitude to China, he cannot do better than

16
turn to the address delivered by the Premier at the 72nd Session of the
Imperial Diet on September 5th, 1937, from which the following is
quoted:

The fundamental policy of the Japanese Government towards China is simply and
purely to seek a reconsideration on the part of the Chinese Government and the
abandonment of its erroneous anti-Japanese policies, with a view to making a basic
readjustment of the relations between the two countries. . . . The Chinese people
themselves by no means form the objective of our actions, which are directed rather
against the Chinese Government and its army, who are together carrying out such
erroneous, anti-foreign policies. If, therefore, the Chinese Government truly and
fully re-examines its attitude and in real sincerity makes an effort for the
establishment of peace and for the development of culture in the Orient in
collaboration with our country, our Empire intends to press no further.

5. The Trouble Spreads to Shanghai

Those who were inclined to regard the shooting at Lukouchiao

as merely one of those incidents that are always occurring in China
were soon to be disillusioned. For it quickly became clear that the act
was nothing less than the signal for an outburst of the hatred against
Japan which had so long been cultivated and encouraged by Chiang
Kai-shek and his colleagues in order to confirm themselves in power.
Immediately in the wake of the Lukouchiao shooting, tens of thousands
of soldiers under the Nanking Government were poured northwards
obviously intent upon a major conflict.
Meanwhile, in Shanghai, the ranks of the special police or the
Peace Prevention Corps, whose number was fixed at 5,000, rapidly
began to swell until it contained more than 10,000, whose various units,
moreover, were fully armed with trench mortars, field pieces, armored
cars, and light and heavy machine guns. The Chinese had also
concentrated large bodies of regular troops at strategic points in and
near the demilitarized area, although to do so was a flagrant violation of
the Sino-Japanese Truce Agreement of 1932. An investigation of
October last year revealed that at that time 73,000 Chinese troops were
massed in the Shanghai area. By early August this year the number had
increased to about 100,000, of which 9,450 were stationed in the
demilitarized area.
It was under these threatening conditions that on August 9th

17
Sub-lieutenant Ohyama and First-class Seaman Saito were ruthlessly
murdered on Monument Road by Chinese troops belonging to the
Peace Prevention Corps. The Municipal Council, whose function it was
to deal with the case and punish the murderers, confessed that it was
utterly unable to do so. The Chinese troops had clearly got out of hand,
and the Council, in the words of Dr. Fessenden, secretary-general of the
Council, had “no power to enforce obedience” upon the Chinese.
Chinese troops pressed hard upon the part of the Settlement where
30,000 Japanese men, women and children live. They prepared to
overwhelm the force of 2,500 of [sic] Japanese marines stationed there.
A hundredfold Tungchow massacre was in view, if they succeeded in
so doing. So 1,000 Japanese marines were landed.
Japan had entered into negotiations with Mayor Yui of the
Greater Shanghai for a peaceful settlement, but nothing came of them.
Nor did Japan’s appeal to the Joint Commission for enforcing the Truce
Agreement of 1932 produce any appreciable result.
Then, on Friday, August 13th, Chinese soldiers in plain clothes
made a surprise attack on a patrolling unit of Japanese marines on
Szechwan Road. The fighting began in earnest. Even after that, at noon
on the 13th the Japanese Consul General at Shanghai, through his
American, British and French colleagues, proposed to the Chinese
Mayor of Shanghai the mutual withdrawal of reinforcements. No reply
was made by the Chinese thereto. On Saturday, August 14th, Chinese
warplanes attacked, dropping bombs on the Settlement and killing and
maiming [sic] more than 3,000 of their own countrymen.

6. Chinese Propaganda

Atrocity Photos and Manipulated Films

China immediately resorted to the weapon she so skilfully

wields: deception and propaganda. For example photographs of
Japanese soldiers bayonetting [sic] Chinese helplessly tied on a pole are
being circulated in America. But upon examination of the alleged
photos, a Japanese naval officer in New York pointed out flagrant
discrepancies: the uniform of the bayonetting soldiers was Chinese and
the way of handling the weapons shown in the picture was entirely

18
different from that of the Japanese soldiers. Investigation made in
Tientsin showed that photographs of the sort were fabricated and sold
in packs by Chinese dealers.
Falsified news films are also used. First, splendid formation
flights of Japanese bombers are shown, then the scenes of the
pandemonium in Nanking Road or Great World Amusement Centre in
Shanghai, where thousands were killed as the result of reckless
bombing by Chinese bombers on the “Bloody Saturday” (August 14th).
But the title makes no mention of who dropped those missiles, willfully
creating impression [sic] that the Japanese did so in the midst of a
throng of noncombatant Chinese.

Bombing of Nanking and Canton

The Japanese planes bombed Nanking and Canton. This is

represented as attacks on defenseless cities, causing thousands of
civilian casualties. However, they are not only heavily garrisoned and
defended with fortresses and anti-aircraft guns, but are the very
strategical centers of the Chinese operations. The attacking bombers
took all the care in their power to obtain accurate hits even risking to
fly at low altitudes in the face of anti-aircraft guns.
Present international law recognizes the right to attack armed
towns at any time, yet the Japanese naval authorities took the trouble of
issuing warnings to the foreign diplomatic representatives in Nanking
and to all the Chinese noncombatant residents to enable them to seek
shelter. The conduct of Japanese planes calls for no reproach.

The So-called Submarine Menace

It was reported that Japanese submarines were working havoc [sic] in

the South China Sea. Chinese fishing boats were reported to have been
attacked off Hongkong. To give credence to the story, the captain of the
German liner Scharnhorst was cited as having given an interview to
this effect at Hongkong. The report was personally denied later by the
captain himself at Manila, the ship’s next port of call.
We will not mention the “poison gas,” “dumdum bullets,”
“wilful choosing of hospitals and schools for targets,” or “flying with

19
Chinese insignia on airplanes”—all “classic” propaganda stories.
We will only recall that a foreign press correspondent
telegraphed last September from Nanking that General Chiang Kai-
shek himself called together the heads of his different services and gave
orders that only correct news should be published, as the reputation of
the Chinese had been badly damaged by the inaccuracy of the
information given out by officials!

7. Communism in China

Who governs China today? This may seem a strange question to

ask, but, none the less, it is an important one, since the answer to it will
explain, as nothing else will, the genesis and true meaning of the
present conflict. The answer that most people would make to the
question is that General Chiang Kai-shek governs China, for to all
appearances he reigns supreme at Nanking. But, as is so often the case,
appearances are deceptive. As a matter of fact, it is not he, but the
extremest elements of the Kuomintang Party allied to the Communists
that actually hold the reins of power both at Nanking and all over the
country.
To give a brief historical summary, it was some twenty-five
years ago that Sun Yat-sen administered the final push to the tottering
structure of the Chinese Empire. Thus the National Party entered into
power, but it experienced grave difficulties in coping with powerful
warlords. In its emergency, the Kremlin came to its assistance. This
was in 1927.
Evidently Russia saw here a supreme opportunity of
bolshevizing China, or, at the least, of throwing out of gear the
international machinery working there; for Sun Yat-sen’s three
principles included the demand for the abolition of unequal treaties and
foreign rights alleged to have been acquired by force.
With the aid of Russian men and money the National Party was
able to overcome its opponents, but when Chiang Kai-shek felt that he
and his party were well entrenched in power he broke away from his
Communist associates, including Borodin and Galen (Bluecher), who
had been serving him as supreme political and military adviser
respectively. Thus, for the time being the bond between Nanking and

20
Moscow was severed.
It was very soon destined to be renewed, however. The Seventh
World Congress of the Comintern held at Moscow in 1935 decided
upon a reorganization of its methods. Propaganda in favor of direct
revolution was abandoned and in its place the more indirect method of
rallying the radicals and socialists in various countries into a People’s
Front, which would seize control of their respective governments and
thus eventually consummate the revolution. Moreover, Poland and
Japan were singled out as the two countries against which special
efforts should be made. The Chinese Communists carried out
thoroughly the instructions received, and began to win the people of
China to their side by means of the slogan, “Fight Japan!” As is
evident from his long campaign against Chinese Red Armies, Chiang
Kai-shek was at one time intent upon suppression of Communism in
China—a force which used to be antagonistic to his supremacy. But
after he was taken prisoner by the communist elements during the Sian
incident last year, he accepted to co-operate with them. The evidence of
this understanding is seen daily. The pact suddenly signed with Soviet
Russia on August 21st is but one example.
Since the mainspring of this combination is complete anti-
Japanism, it is not difficult to realize how it is that the little incident at
Lukouchiao has been so quickly magnified into the conflict of the
present scale.

8. The Possibility of Protracted Hostilities

China’s Position: Whether or not it will be possible to carry on

protracted hostilities is much more China’s problem than Japan’s as a
glance at China’s budget will quickly show. Her 1936 budget amounted
to 769 million yuan, of which 318 million yuan came from customs
duties, and 189 million yuan from salt gabelle. This means, in
percentages, that nearly half the Chinese revenue is derived from the
customs duties, and that the customs duties and the salt gabelle together
account for as much as 75 per cent.
When hostilities extend and China’s main seaports, by the
stoppage of coast navigation enforced on Chinese vessels, become
incapable of carrying on their usual trade, there will inevitably be a

21
considerable reduction in the amount of customs duties flowing into the
Chinese coffers. This in itself constitutes a formidable blow to China’s
finance. But when the salt gabelle is also lost, as is very probable, then
China will be mulcted of some 75 per cent. of her revenues. One can
conceive no other result then than the complete bankruptcy of the
Nanking Government.
Japan’s Position: There are some, however, who apparently
prefer to doubt Japan’s position rather than China’s, and these have
raised the question whether it is possible for Japan to stand the strain of
her emergency budget of 2,600 million yen without serious difficulty.
Such people evidently forget Japan’s past record in such matters. They
forget that 30 years ago, when Japan’s national income was not quite
1,100 million yen, she was able to put 2,000 million yen into the
Russo-Japanese War. In other words, she was then able to spend twice
her national income, and come successfully through the ordeal. But
now Japan’s national income has multiplied considerably, and stands at
14,000 million yen at least. So taking the war budget of 1904-5 as an
index, a simple process of arithmetic proves that she is quite able to
finance a war to the point of 28,000 million yen. If we compare the
present emergency budget of 2,5000 million yen with that figure, we
shall see that Japan is so far committed to an expenditure that is a mere
one-tenth of what she could do. Therefore any misgivings about
Japan’s capacity must forthwith be dissipated.

22
 THE BOLSHEVIZATION OF CHINA

Hikomatsu Kamikawa

Contemporary Japan: A Review of Far Eastern Affairs, VOL VI NO.3

Originally Published: December, 1937

The Sino-Japanese affair, for which the Lukouchiao incident

supplied the spark, is now in fact spreading into a general armed
conflict between Japan and China on all fronts. The affair has already
affected not a little the course of general international relations
affecting the two countries, one of the most notable instances of which
is the conclusion at Nanking on August 21 this year of the Sino-Soviet
Non-Aggression Pact signed by the representatives of the two
countries. The conclusion of the pact marks a turning point in the
relations between China and the Soviet Union and is one that not only
has a great significance in Sino-Soviet relations but is destined to
exercise far-reaching influences on the relations of various Powers
having interests in the Far East.
It is quite natural that China and the Soviet Union should come
into a closer relationship and co-operate with each other since they
suffered a heavy blow from the outbreak of the Manchurian incident
and were placed in a position in which they had a common interest
regarding Japan. There must be plausible reasons, therefore, for the
failure of the two countries to effect rapprochement from the beginning
of the Manchurian incident until recently. The Soviet Government with
its diplomatic relations ruptured since the expulsion of the Communist

23
Party in 1927 by Chiang Kai-shek's régime was in no position to take
common action with China. Moreover, that Government deeming the
maintenance of international peace absolutely necessary for the
accomplishment of its first Five Year Plan sought to conciliate Japan by
proposing a Russo-Japanese non-aggression pact. Not only that. The
inauguration by Germany, after Hitler came to power at the head of the
Nazis, of the campaign for the extermination of Communism meant for
the Soviet Union the appearance of an irreconcilable enemy in the west,
while at the same time it was forced to assume a defensive attitude on
the east. Later, finding the anti-Communist campaign increase in
strength and vigour, the Soviet Government as well as the Comintern
felt constrained to make a revolutionary turn in their foreign policies.
Accordingly the Seventh Comintern Congress, held for the first time in
seven years at Moscow in July 1935, decided to abandon its policy of
world revolution and adopted instead a policy of forming the so-called
"people's front" with all sorts of anti-Fascist camps. It began not only to
befriend the Social-Democratic parties, its arch enemies, but to unite all
liberal and pacifist and various other elements which were opposed to
Fascism and organize them into a common anti-Fascist front. This new
policy of the Comintern and the Soviet Government must be credited
with an outstanding accomplishment in the victory of the people's front
in both Spain and France; but something more remarkable was
achieved in the Far East.
At the Seventh Comintern Congress, the policy toward China
was completely changed from that of overthrowing the Chiang Kai-
shek régime and establishing a communist régime in its place to that of
aiding the régime of Chiang Kai-shek, temporarily abandoning the
policy of bolshevizing China. At the same time the Congress selected
Germany, Italy and Japan as leading Fascist countries and, with a view
to making China one of the links in the chain of the anti-Japanese front,
set up for the purpose of overthrowing Japan, adopted the following
resolution with regards to the policy to be pursued toward China.
The expansion of the sovietization campaign as well as the strengthening of
the fighting power of Communist armies must be linked together with the
development of the anti-imperialist people's front. The anti-imperialist people's front
movement must be carried on under the slogan of a revolutionary fight of an armed
people against Japanese imperialism and the Chinese who are serving as its tools.

24
The Soviet must be the central force in the unification of all the Chinese people in
the campaign for the liberation of the Chinese race.

In order to carry out the instruction indicated in this resolution,

the Chinese Communist Party, a branch of the Comintern, issued in
December of the same year a proclamation regarding the establishment
of the "united anti-Japanese people's front" and also made public the
following resolution.
The people of China must oppose Japanese imperialism and its tools by all
means regardless of what they are, whether they are armed forces or whether they
belong to any party, faction or class. In order to expel Japanese imperialism from
China, overthrow the rule of its agents over China, acquire complete freedom for the
Chinese people, and thereby secure the independence and territorial integrity of
China, the people must rise in unison and develop the anti-Japanese people's front.
Our duty is to get not only all possible basic forces of anti-Japanism but all possible
anti-Japanese allies united, and to urge the entire Chinese people that influence be
exerted by those who have influence, money given by those who have money, guns
by those who have guns, knowledge by those who have knowledge, thus enabling
all patriotic Chinese to participate in the anti-Japanese front.

In accordance with this proclamation, the Chinese Communist

Party subsequently decided to discard its previous policy, and to
conclude as promptly as possible a truce between the Communist army
and the Kuomintang army. The party further planned to expand the
movement for the salvation of the people, and asserted that the purpose
of the anti-Japanese campaign should be achieved through the general
mobilization and arming of all the people. All political prisoners should
be freed and a federation of anti-Japanese national salvation
associations organized with the establishment of national salvation
associations in industrial, commercial, military, political and
educational circles, and also by organizing the people of each circle for
participation in war and arming and training them. Furthermore,
advocating joint action of all anti-Japanese and national salvation
organizations, the Chinese Communist Party issued a statement that the
Chinese Communist Party would co-operate with all other parties and
organizations in the task of opposing Japan and saving the country,
declaring that the party hoped to work conjointly with the Kuomintang
and anti-Japanese and national salvationist elements in the Blue Shirts
Society.

25
 In spite of the fact that the Chinese Communist Party and its
army effected a turn in their policy in accordance with the complete
reversal of that of the Comintern, decided on collaboration with the
Nanking régime and the Kuomintang army and proposed the formation
of a united anti-Japanese people's front, the Nanking Government did
not readily make a favourable response. The Chiang Kai-shek régime,
even after concluding the Tanku Armistice Agreement in 1933,
continued its policy of resistance on the one hand and negotiation on
the other, thus leaving room for negotiations with Japan, and devoted
all its energies to the firm establishment of its dictatorial power. Since
the Nanking Government is essentially a régime of the nationalistic
bourgeoisie representing the rising capitalism and bourgeois class, it is
needless to say that the government can never tolerate the Moscow
Government and the Comintern, which are international powers
founded on Communism and the proletariat, nor yet the Chinese
Communist Party and its army. However cleverly the Comintern and
the Government at Moscow change their colours for their own
protection, however the Chinese Communist Party and its army repaint
their signs and propose the formation of a united front of anti-Japanese
national salvation, the Nanking Government cannot see eye to eye with
them. It has been the traditional policy of the Soviet Union and the
Comintern from the days of Lenin to take advantage of the anti-
imperialist movement and the struggle for national liberation in China
as a transitory method of giving substance to the principles of world
revolution. The Chinese Kuomintang once fell victim to their
machinations and had to drink a bitter cup, and therefore, though the
Moscow Government and Comintern together with the Chinese
Communist Party are trying once more to mislead the Nanking
Government by the same wily methods, Chiang Kai-shek can hardly be
won over to their side.
Of course a faction in the Nanking Government known for its
pro-Soviet inclinations and comprising such men as Feng Yuh-siang,
Sun Fo, Sun Ching-ling, Yu Yu-jen, Tsai Yuan-pei, Yen Hui-ching and
others, had long been advocating co-operation with the Soviet Union
and demanding the conclusion of a Sino-Soviet non-aggression pact.
But the distrust and fear of the Soviet Union and the Comintern with
their policy of sovietizing China made the Nanking Government

26
reluctant to take any steps to that end. Moreover, there existed an even
greater obstacle. The Soviet Union had long had Outer Mongolia under
its influence; and in 1934 it entered into an alliance with Outer
Mongolia in order to counter the advance of Japan following the
Manchurian incident, and later, in March 1936, it concluded the treaty
of mutual aid with Outer Mongolia pledging itself to extend military
assistance in case the latter is attacked by a third country. Thus Outer
Mongolia became essentially a part of the Soviet Union while
remaining nominally a part of the Chinese Republic. The Soviet Union
extended in the meantime its Turksib Railway to the border of
Hsinkiang and steadily increased its economic and political influence
over that outlying province of China. In view of these increasing
inroads of Soviet influence into her territory, China must [sic], if she
desired to co-operate with the Soviet Union, formally recognize these
faits accomplis, which it was quite natural for the Nanking
Government, standing as it had been for the unification and the
maintenance of territorial integrity [sic] of China, to find impossible to
do. No less would it be a matter of course that once China approached
the Soviet Union, the influence of that country and the Comintern
would infiltrate into China. In the light of the bitter experiences which
the policy of co-operation with the Soviet Union and toleration of
Communism had produced in the past, the government of Chiang Kai-
shek could not of course light-heartedly take the hand extended by the
Soviet Union.
However, the Sian coup d’état in November last year brought
about a radical change in the situation. The intrigues of the Chinese
Communist Party and Chang Hsueh-liang, by which Chiang Kai-shek
was placed in confinement under duress, proved a signal success and
virtually caused a complete reversal of the policy pursued by the
Generalissimo toward the Communist Party. As described above, the
necessary foundation had already been prepared for an alliance between
the Kuomintang and the Communist Party, inasmuch as the Communist
Chinese Party [sic] and its army had changed their policy since August
1935 and had been declaring their support of the Chiang régime and
abandonment of the policy of sovietizing China, under the banner of a
united anti-Japanese front. The alliance came into being at last in
March this year, and by it the Communist Party and army, abandoning

27
their principles and policies, allied themselves with the Kuomintang as
a matter of form, but in fact the Kuomintang and the Communist Party
worked together for the establishment of an anti-Japanese and national
salvation front.
It is clear from the foregoing paragraphs that one of the two
great obstacles to rapprochement between the Soviet Union and China,
namely, the problem of the Communist Party and the policy of
sovietizing China, had been eliminated before the outbreak of the
present Sino-Japanese affair, while the other obstacle, that is, the
question of the Soviet sphere of influence in Outer Mongolia and
Hsinkiang, remained to prevent such rapprochement. Soon after the
outbreak of the Sino-Japanese hostilities, however, the two countries
approached each other, and on August 21 this year, the long-pending
problem of the conclusion of a Sino-Soviet non-aggression pact was
successfully solved. The pact signifies a fruition of the China policy
which the Soviet Union has pursued since August 1935 and is evidently
a diplomatic victory for their Government. As the Far Eastern policy of
the Soviet Union for the past several years has aimed at driving the
anti-Japanese forces of China into an armed conflict with Japan, the
scheme has attained a successful result. China playing into the hands of
the Soviet Union has opened hostilities with Japan. Once China has
entered into a war with Japan at the instigation of the Soviet Union, it is
logical that she should move at the beck and call of that country.
Why has China allied herself with the Soviet Union so hastily
within a month of the opening of hostilities? The answer is simple and
clear. The only Power which has the intention and ability of backing
China with force is Soviet Russia. Great Britain, the United States and
France though they support China morally and diplomatically with their
vociferations, have no intention of risking a war with Japan and
consequently there is no prospect of their armed assistance to China. It
is clearly evident that China cannot cope single-handed with Japan. She
must by all means obtain armed and substantial foreign assistance for
the purpose. The only power that can supply it is the Soviet Union. It is,
therefore, more than natural that the Nanking Government, with no
time to consider future troubles, has swallowed the dose and grasped
the hand of that Power.
In view of the foregoing reasons and motives, it is impossible to

28
grasp the true significance of the Sino-Soviet Non-aggression Pact in
international politics by trying to interpret only the letter thereof. A
thorough study must be made of the pact with the Soviet’s China policy
and China's internal and external circumstances as its background. At a
glance the Sino-Soviet Non-aggression Pact appears no different from
many non-aggression pacts which the Soviet Union has concluded with
her neighbour countries as well as with such countries as France and
Italy: no distinctive feature is observable on the surface of the text.
The pact is a simple one consisting of four articles. Under the
first Article the two countries reaffirm their adherence to the Kellogg-
Briand anti-war treaty and agree, in order to observe the pledge made in
that treaty, that each of the contracting parties will refrain from all
aggression against the other. Under the second Article the two parties
agree that, in case either one of them should become an object of
aggression by a third country, the other party will refrain from
extending directly or indirectly any aid thereto, and also from taking
any action of which advantage might be taken by the third country
against the party subjected to the aggression, during the period of the
trouble. The third Article provides that the present pact should be
interpreted so as not to affect in any way the treaties and agreements
already subsisting between the two contracting parties.
The last point refers apparently to the Basic Treaty concluded
in May 1924 between the Moscow Government and the Chinese
Government at Peking, whereby the Soviet Union re-recognized the
sovereignty of China over Outer Mongolia and promised not to engage
in propaganda and other activities for sovietization [sic] of China.
These written promises of the Soviet Union have long ago been turned
into a scrap of paper [sic] as is now widely known. That such promises
are specifically emphasized in the third Article is only to deceive the
people of China and the other nations, as any one can see.
The whole world entertains no doubt as to the existence behind
the Sino-Soviet Non-aggression Pact of various secret agreements or
understandings. These are widely understood to contain the following
provisions:—(1) supply to China by the Soviet Union of aeroplanes,
and other arms and ammunition, (2) sending to China of Red
volunteers, military advisors and political and diplomatic instructors,
(3) formal recognition by the Nanking Government of the Chinese

29
Communist Party and the political enfranchisement of its members, (4)
the Nanking Government is not to conclude any agreement with a third
country against Communism, (5) provisions for mutual assistance
under which the two countries are not to work in military co-operation
in case Inner Mongolia and Outer Mongolia are threatened with
aggression by a third country.
Of these agreements, the one concerning the supply of arms
leaves no room for doubt. It is a fact now generally known all over the
world that the Soviet Union furnished the Leftist government and the
Catalonian government in Spain, since the outbreak of the internecine
war in that country in July last, with numerous aeroplanes and vast
amounts of arms and ammunition. It must, therefore, be a matter of
course that the Soviet Union, which could supply arms on so generous
a scale in the case of the civil disturbance in Spain, should send similar
supplies to China to the greatest possible extent in the current Sino-
Japanese hostilities in which Japan is the common enemy. And even if
there were no agreement with the Nanking Government, it would be
natural for the Soviet Union to extend to China as much material
assistance as possible. No less understandable is the dispatching of
military and political instructors to China. One may easily reach a
conclusion regarding such Soviet aid in view of the fact that the
Spanish Leftist government and the Catalonian government have both
received the services of instructors said by the Soviet Government.
Furthermore, it is natural for China, which has been enforcing the terms
of the Kuomintang-Communist alliance since the end of last year, to
give formal recognition to the Chinese Communist Party, whose
members have already been given important posts in the Nanking
Government. There is no doubt that China, in spite of the provisions of
the third Article of the Sino-Soviet Non-aggression Pact, has
recognized the position which the Soviet Union has already established
in Outer Mongolia, the region now virtually a part of the Soviet Union.
There is, however, a doubt as to whether or not the treaty of
mutual aid between China and the Soviet Union has been concluded.
Recent report state to the effect that at Nanking there have been
negotiations with a view to concluding such a treaty, between Feng
Yuh-siang and a military attaché to the Soviet Embassy there. The
doubt remains. But setting aside the question of a formal treaty, there

30
cannot be the slightest doubt as to the existence of an understanding of
mutual assistance between the two countries. The Soviet Government
entered, as above mentioned, into the mutual assistance treaty with the
Outer Mongolian Republic in March last year. Having once concluded
the military alliance with Outer Mongolia directed against Japan, it is
certainly a logical development that the Soviet Union should enter into
an alliance against Japan as their common enemy.
It has long been the policy of the Soviet Union to convert China
into a part of her anti-Japanese front, because joint operations with
China are absolutely necessary for the Soviet Union to encircle Japan
and Manchoukuo. In view of the fact that, with the Soviet armies
300,000 strong concentrated on the Soviet Manchoukuo frontier, where
they are face-to-face with the forces of Japan and Manchoukuo, the
situation along the border is extremely critical, and moreover, now that
China is at war with Japan, it is as clear as day that the Soviet Union
and China should conclude an understanding or treaty with regard to
mutual assistance.
Thus the Soviet Union has realized its long-cherished ambition
and succeeded in placing China under its thumb. Fearing, however, that
the association with the Soviet would adversely affect its relations with
Great Britain, the United States and other Powers, China has been
striving as best as it can to prevent such an eventuality. Great Britain
most intensely dislikes rapprochement between the Soviet Union and
China, for it is that Power that has been in deep collusion with the
Chiang Kai-shek régime. For the past several years Great Britain, by
extending support to, and joining hands with, that régime, has been
trying to maintain and extend its rights and interests in China. That the
Chiang régime has become the protégé of the Soviet Union through
alliance is, therefore, a fact most disadvantageous to Great Britain, as
can easily be perceived.
The Nanking Government, foreseeing the British displeasure,
accordingly has taken every precaution to mollify it, and adopted the
harmless and inoffensive form of a non-aggression pact. Even in the
Kuomintang-Communist alliance, it is claimed that the Kuomintang has
not gone into co-operation on an equal footing with the Communist
Party, but that the latter, has begged to be joined with the former. The
Kuomintang and the Nanking Government, will, in order not to be

31
deprived of the favour of Great Britain and other Powers, continue their
efforts to keep undercover the influence and bolshevizing activities of
the Communist Party and try to set those countries at ease. They will
also exert themselves, even though they cannot expect armed assistance
from Great Britain, America and France, etc., to obtain supplies of arms
and goods as well as loans, and further will continue to manipulate
those Powers, in order to make the League of Nations and other
international conferences aide China and condemn Japan.
All these activities notwithstanding, China, by betraying the
expectations of the other Powers, cannot help becoming steadily a
puppet of Soviet Russia. Is not the Nanking Government, forced by the
clamorous call of the Communist Party for the united anti-Japanese
front, declaring that China must fight to the last man under the banner
of the so-called “long period resistance against Japan”? Moreover, is
not that government, under the pretext of punishing traitors, killing all
patriots who sincerely believe in the necessity and desirability of
friendly intercourse with Japan? A protracted war between Japan and
China is exactly what the Soviet Union wants. That country is
undertaking every conceivable scheme to cause China to be engrossed
in a protracted war with Japan. The rounding up of the so-called
“traitors” is only a part of the sinister design of the Soviet Union to
render impossible the restoration of friendly relations between China
and Japan. Indeed, the Nanking Government is now a tool of the
Chinese Communist Party and the Comintern as well as of the Soviet
Union. By declaring for a long war against Japan, and by stimulating its
people to a determination to fight to the last, China is closing the doors
to reconciliation with Japan, and is falling step by step into the trap of
the Soviet Union. And since Great Britain, France and America, etc.,
are not in a position to aide China by force, China cannot but rely on
the Soviet Union which can give it such assistance.
The more the present hostilities are protracted and the more
China is exhausted, the greater will be the Chinese reliance on the
Soviet Union. Whatever the intention of the Nanking Government
authorities may be, China cannot help becoming more and more
dependent upon the power and influence of the Soviet Union and
subject to the control of the Communist Party.
The longer the present Sino-Japanese hostilities are continued,

32
the more thorough will be the bolshevization of China. It is a fact
recognized by the whole world that the reason the Spanish civil war
does not come to an end after more than a year is because of the sinister
activities of the Soviet Union and the Comintern behind the
governments at Valencia and Catalonia, both of which are widely
known to have been completely sovietized. It must be considered as
only a question of time for the Nanking Government, which has entered
into an alliance with the Soviet Union, to become converted to
Bolshevism and a vassal of that country. The Soviet policy toward
China has been a remarkable success. That policy will be pushed on
further and further under favourable circumstances and will not be
stopped before China is completely bolshevized and the Chinese
Government is made an essential element of the “Common Front” of
Communism.

THE AMERICAN POSITION : CAT’S-PAW OR COMMON

SENSE

Ujiro Ohyama

Contemporary Japan: A Review of Far Eastern Affairs, VOL VI NO. 3

Originally Published: December, 1937

That the convening of the Nine-Power Treaty Conference has

been the joint work of Great Britain and the United States in generally
conceded. The British Foreign Secretary, Captain Anthony Eden, stated

33
in the House of Commons on October 21: “The British Government has
maintained close contact with the various countries concerned, notably
United States, in an effort to settle the Far Eastern situation, the result
of which you see in the decision to convene the Nine-Power Pact
Conference.” Similarly, the invitation to attend the conference issued to
Japan by the Belgian Government states that the conference is being
called: “. . . in accordance with the request made by the British
Government with the consent of the United States.”
In tracing the sequence of events prior to the convocation of the
conference, it is to be observed that Britain, from the very outset of the
present affair, has taken an attitude of antipathy towards Japan, and by
various methods has sought to impede the actions of Japan in China.
Simultaneously she has endeavoured to create world opinion hostile to
Japan and has made particular exertions in this regard to the United
States in order to induce that nation to join her in a campaign against
Japan.
Consequently, the United States Secretary of State Mr. Cordell
Hull, on July 16 issued a statement tantamount to a warning to Japan;
when the North China Incident spread to Shanghai, he issued an
additional statement on August 23 emphasizing that warning. On their
surface these statements described the diplomatic policy of the United
States in general and mentioned no particular incident or country,
indicating in their phraseology great care and discretion. Yet they were
obviously directed towards the China Incident and were intended as a
warning to Japan on diplomatic principles, condemning as they did
recourse to armed action and intervention in the domestic
administration of outside countries and emphasizing the sanctity of
treaties and the necessity of observing treaty obligations. On this
interpretation, all observers concur.
Subsequently, when the China Affair came before the League of
Nations, the League, accentuated by the desire of Great Britain to
secure the consent of the United States to participate, treated it as a
continuation of the Manchurian Affair of 1932 and turned it over to the
advisory committee of 23 which was appointed League of the
settlement of the incident. Not only did the United States send an
observer to Geneva, in response to the European actions, President
Roosevelt, as if in correspondence with the resolution of the League of

34
Nations, delivered a speech in Chicago on October 5, violently
denouncing Japan.
On the following day the American State Department roundly
stated:
“Japan’s actions in China are inconsistent with the principles
that govern international relations and violate the Anti-War Pact and
the Nine-Power Treaty.” The same statement declared that the
conclusion reached by the United States “agrees on all points with the
decision arrived by the League Assembly.” To be sure, President
Roosevelt, surprised by the unfavourable reception accorded his speech
by public opinion, moderated his tone in his “fireside” address of
October 12, saying that his intentions were nothing more than those
which would conduce to the achievement of peace. But the dangerous
attitude which he adopted filled the Japanese with grave concern.
Of particular import to Japan was the fact that League of
Nations, under the direction of Great Britain and with the co-operation
of the United States, transferred the China Affair to the Nine-Power
Treaty Conference. The League Covenant provides for both economic
and armed sanctions. If it continued to deliberate on the Affair, the
League stood in danger of being forced to invoke such penalties,
although neither Britain nor the United States dreamed of exercising
armed sanctions against Japan, nor had they any confidence in the
efficacy of economic sanctions. Thus the conclusion was reached that
because the Nine-Power Treaty does not provide for sanctions, it would
be safer to turn the matter over to a conference called under that pact.
This, doubtless, was the reason for the transfer of the issue to the Nine-
Power Conference.
When Great Britain saw that the United States was becoming
more and more deeply involved in the affair, she sought to shift the
responsibility for the settlement of the Incident to American shoulders
by receding into the background. Thus she allowed the conference to be
conducted by the United States and even tried to make the city of
Washington the venue. Finally, it was decided that the conference
should be held at Brussels, but inasmuch as the Belgian Government, in
its invitation to the Powers to participate in the Conference, stated that
it was to be convened at the instance [sic] of Britain with the consent of
the United States, it is on record that the principal actors of the meeting

35
were the United States and Great Britain. This is sufficient to show that
the United States has been once again led by the latter.
What are the points on which the United States condemning
Japan’ actions in China? The stipulation of the Anti-War Pact which
the State Department has cited is that war as an instrument of national
policy shall be renounced and that all international disputes shall be
settled by peaceful means, as provided in Articles 1 and 2. The
stipulations of the Nine-Power Treaty invoked are to be mainly in
Article 1 which provides that the sovereignty and the territorial and
administrative integrity of China shall be respected. To apply these
stipulations to Japan’s actions in China, however, would be to
misconstrue entirely the significance of the present conflict.
In the first place, the Anti-War Pact only constitutes a promise
among the signatories not to resort to war as an instrument of national
policy; it contains no promise that such war as is inevitable for the sake
of national existence or one waged in order to defend oneself against
grave danger shall also be renounced. Such exemption need not be
stipulated in the text of a treaty, for it is implicit in all treaties. In fact,
the American Secretary of State, Mr. Frank B. Kellogg, stated in his
note of June 28, 1928, addressed to the Powers concerned, that the
Anti-War Pact which is proposed by the United States does not restrict
or damage the right of self-defense of a nation, and that the competence
to decide whether war should be resorted to for the sake of self-defence
rests entirely with the parties to the dispute. Now the present Affair was
stated by the unprovoked attack of the Chinese troops on a Japanese
garrison stationed in North China in accordance with rights clearly
provided by the treaty. The action of the Japanese troops consequent on
the firing was entirely unpremeditated and absolutely inevitable if the
right of self-defence was to be ensured. To call such an action a
violation of the Anti-War Pact would be to distort the meaning of the
treaty beyond all legitimate bounds.
It is precisely because certain necessities for self-defense
measures arise which make application of the Anti-War Pact
impossible that the United States, the proponent of the treaty, on her
own initiative expected, from the outset, the American continent from
the application of its terms. Has not Great Britain, too, reserved
freedom of action in regions whose defense and security have an

36
especial and urgent bearing on the interests of the Empire.
In regard to the Nine-Power Treaty, as in the case of the Anti-
War Pact, Japan promised not to violate the sovereignty, territory or
independence of China, but she made no promise to bear all things
from China even when subjected to provocations, exposed to grave
danger and confronted with the urgent need to self-defence. The present
action was forced upon Japan by the lawless attacks on Japanese lives
and interests, as clearly shown in the statement of the Imperial
Government of October 27. Thus the Nine-Power Treaty is entirely out
of place in the present imbroglio.
This is not the first time that such an incident has arisen. Great
Britain, the United States and other Powers have frequently had to take
similar steps to safeguard their own interests. Japan has merely
followed in their footsteps when confronted by dire necessity. For
example, excluding from mention the various cases of intervention by
the United States in the affairs of Central and South American countries
or British actions in Tibet, one may cite the threat to China exercised
by Britain in January, 1927, by the landing of 15,000 troops at
Shanghai in order to counter the anti-British movement among the
Chinese which movement [sic] was at its height at the time. On that
occasion Japan refused to send troops though persistently urged by
Britain to do so, thus incurring the condemnation of British public
opinion, which is now denouncing Japan precisely for sending troops.
All this is fresh in Japanese memory [sic].
Again, in February, 1927, riots broke out in Nanking and
various nationals as well as foreign shipping interests were subjected to
serious danger. On the 24th and 25th, war ships of the British and
American fleets bombarded the walled city of Nanking from the
Yangtze. China, as usual, appealed to the League of Nations but the
appeal was not taken up. Thus, if the right of self-defence is not
recognized as regards China, then all these actions must be said
flagrantly to violate the Nine-Power Pact. Will Britain and United
States recognize their own acts to be violations of the Treaty? The very
fact that Great Britain, the United States and other Powers maintain
powerful garrisons in Shanghai, Tientsin and Peking clearly shows that
they are determined to use armed forces in cases of emergency.
Recently, newspapers reported that on October 22 a unit of

37
British troops on being attacked with hand grenades by Chinese troops,
responded thoroughly with machine-gun fire. Again on the following
day, October 23, the same unit, being similarly attacked by Chinese,
retaliated with similar fire. The commander of the American Far
Eastern squadron is also said to have ordered that Chinese aircraft
flying over American warships be fired upon.
The foregoing reasoning is based on the assumption that the
Nine-Power Treaty is still effective in all its former force. Since the
Treaty has not been abrogated by any country, it cannot be regarded as
having ceased operate. But the conditions in China, which, after all, are
the basis of that Treaty, have undergone considerable changes since its
conclusion, making it impossible to apply the same pact now in its
original form. When the Nine-Power Treaty was concluded, Soviet
Russia was still in the midst of its revolution, even the fate of the
Revolutionary Government was considered in doubt. The existence of
Soviet Russia, in a word, was ignored. Thus the Treaty did not include
that country among its signatories. Today, however, Soviet Russia
numbers among the great Powers of the world, while its relations with
China occupy an important position in Far Eastern affairs.
The main stipulation of the Nine-Power Treaty is to guarantee
the territorial integrity of China, but Outer Mongolia and Sinkiang
which occupy more than half the territory of China, have been placed
under the control of Soviet Russia. The pact has been able to do
nothing in this regard.
Another factor worthy of attention in this connection is the
attitude of China toward the Nine-Power Treaty. Assured of her
sovereignty and territorial integrity as accorded by the treaty, and made
still more confident by the Anti-War Pact later concluded, China has
pushed forward her traditional anti-alien movement; under the pretext
of recovering foreign concessions, she has trampled underfoot the
treaty rights of all the Powers. During the last ten years Japan has been
the chief victim, but previously it was Great Britain and the United
States that were similarly victims of this irresponsible Xenophobia.
And no one can guarantee that the same thing will not occur again
hereafter. In this way, China herself is destroying the sanctity of
treaties.
There are, in fact, many instances of Chinese violation of the

38
Nine-Power Pact. One glaring instance is that China is ignoring the
obligation under the annexed resolution to the treaty concerning the
Chinese standing army. This resolution provided that the Chinese
standing army should be limited to some 1,000,000 men, but the
present Chinese army, not counting irregulars, numbers some
2,500,000, of which General Chiang Kai-chek’s own troops number
more than 1,000,000.
These few facts suffice to show what changes have taken place
in the Far Eastern situation since the conclusion of the Nine-Power
Pact, and how unreasonable it is to try to apply the Treaty in its original
form to the prevailing situation. If the United States, despite the
circumstances here surveyed, persists in its ungrounded abuse of Japan,
branding Japan as a violator of treaties and persists in considering the
actions of China to be justified, then she is rash and frivolous indeed.
The League of Nations condemned Japan’s actions as violating treaties
and at the same time expressed its morale support for China. It passed a
resolution recommending to the League Powers that they refrain from
any actions that would weaken the power of resistance of China and
give it assistance, thus manifesting an attitude of hostility towards
Japan. Simultaneously, the President of the United States and the State
Department violently attacked Japan, while the State Department, in
particular, declared that the conclusion reached by it agrees in all
respect with the resolution of the League of Nations. Such actions on
the part of the United States appear to Japanese to be extremely rash
and ill-advised. Although it is fully understood that this attitude on the
part of America is largely due to the skilled diplomatic maneuvers of
Great Britain, the United States cannot escape at least partial
responsibility.
We firmly believe that the Americans in general are advocates
of peace, but we must note that the there are two main currents among
the pacifists. The one is negative pacifism and the other positive
pacifism. The negative pacifists advocate isolation while the positive
ones urg intervention. While the former group of peace-loving
Americans would insist on isolation in order to avoid a clash with a
foreign country and would concede much even if American interests
were menaced, in order that peace may be maintained, the militant
pacifists would incite the Administration to take firm steps in order to

39
safeguard the rights and interests of the United States abroad. The
secretary of state at the beginning of the North China Incident issued a
statement to the effect that the United States policy is an intermediate
one between these two poles, but what he has recently adopted seems to
represent the dangerous policy of positive pacifism.
Granted that the United States Government has been made a
cat’s-paw by Britain, for what particular reason has it adopted its recent
attitude toward the League and has it undertaken, with Great Britain, to
become a principle in the Nine-Power Conference, which is merely an
extension of the League of Nations? The Nine-Power Conference, to
be sure, is not one of the League of Nations itself, but since it has been
called at the request for the League it has become a sort of branch
office of the League, so that in its very constitution it runs counter to
the avowed position of Japan in the present imbroglio. The United
States, as well as Great Britain, should have known that Japan would
naturally not consent to appear before such a conference which it
considers as a tribunal to try Japan as a criminal already condemned. It
should also have been fully anticipated that a Nine-Power Conference
in which Japan refuses to participate would yield no result whatsoever.
As a matter of fact, there are at present in United States various
private organizations advocating economic sanctions against Japan. But
since economic sanctions are but one step removed from war and from
some points of view constitute war itself, we cannot readily believe that
such a course will be adopted by the United States. Serious doubts also
exist as to the practicability of such sanctions. In the face of such
difficulties the conference can gain nothing. What, then, is the United
States seeking to accomplish through it? Unfortunately for the idealism
of the United States, Great Britain is extremely flexible and realistic in
its dealings. Just now that country, influenced by the magnitude of its
interests in China, is exercising extremely bad judgement and to all
appearances is backing the wrong horse. Yet as soon as Great Britain
realizes the impracticability of her current policy, she is likely suddenly
to display her wonderful flexibility and admirable realism. What would
then be the position of the United States? Is it not incumbent on her to
take care that she be not left in the lurch? Would it not be more prudent
from the point of view of her own interests that she renounce the
hopeless Nine-Power Conference and throw back the issue to the

40
League of Nations as quickly as possible?
At present the United States believes that the interest of Japan
and those of United States do not coincide, and that if Japan’s influence
over China expands, the principle of American Far Eastern policy, that
of the open door and equal opportunity would be destroyed and the
economic development of the United States in China will be obstructed.
On the basis of this serious misconception, the United States deems it
necessary to maintain a strong fleet in the Far East. Very probably the
naval policy of the United States is based upon this assumption, but the
assumption itself is based on gross error.
In the first place, it is a serious mistake for the United States to
think that Japan is opposed to the open door and equal opportunity in
China. On the contrary, Japan is advocating absolute freedom of traffic
and commerce throughout the world; she considers it her great mission
to strive for the realization of this policy and is demanding the open
door and equal opportunity in all countries. As a matter of fact, it is
Japan, above all other Powers, that most keenly feels the need for
opportunity for all in China. For it is Japan that has been made the
scapegoat of China’s anti alien movement during the past years; it is
Japan that has suffered most from the closed-door policy of China.
In the second place, it is a grave mistake to think that Japan’s
interests in China are incompatible with those of the United States;
American and Japanese interests in China as well as in all other parts of
the Far East roughly coincide. The staple goods which America wishes
to sell to the Far East are cotton, oil, lumber, wheat, tobacco and
automobiles. In these materials Japan is not only no rival of America’s
but is herself a good buyer of them. Moreover, the main buyers of
American cotton in China are Japanese spinning mills in Shanghai. The
raw material for the manufacture of cotton textiles, Japan’s greatest
export article, is for the most part imported from the United States.
Also, many transactions of the United States and other countries with
China are conducted through the medium of Japanese brokers and
banks. In these circumstances the interests of the United States must be
regarded as being in their relationship of mutual aid with the interests
of Japan in China.
Furthermore, the United States is an important buyer of
Japanese raw silk, and raw silk is one important raw material which the

41
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 CHAPTER XXVIII

A Weaver of Dreams

I
T took Emily several weeks to make up her mind whether she
liked Mr. Carpenter or not. She knew she did not dislike him, not
even though his first greeting, shot at her on the opening day of
school in a gruff voice, accompanied by a startling lift of his spiky
grey brows was, “So you’re the girl that writes poetry, eh? Better
stick to your needle and duster. Too many fools in the world trying to
write poetry and failing. I tried it myself once. Got better sense
now.”

“You don’t keep your nails clean,” thought Emily.

But he upset every kind of school tradition so speedily and

thoroughly that Ilse, who gloried in upsetting things and hated
routine, was the only scholar that liked him from the start. Some
never liked him—the Rhoda Stuart type for example—but most of
them came to it after they got used to never being used to anything.
And Emily finally decided that she liked him tremendously.

Mr. Carpenter was somewhere between forty and fifty—a tall man,
with an upstanding shock of bushy grey hair, bristling grey
moustache and eyebrows, a truculent beard, bright blue eyes out of
which all his wild life had not yet burned the fire, and a long, lean,
greyish face, deeply lined. He lived in a little two-roomed house
below the school with a shy mouse of a wife. He never talked of his
past or offered any explanation of the fact that at his age he had no
better profession than teaching a district school for a pittance of
salary, but the truth leaked out after a while; for Prince Edward
Island is a small province and everybody in it knows something
about everybody else. So eventually Blair Water people, and even
the school children, understood that Mr. Carpenter had been a
brilliant student in his youth and had had his eye on the ministry. But
at college he had got in with a “fast set”—Blair Water people nodded
heads slowly and whispered the dreadful phrase portentously—and
the fast set had ruined him. He “took to drink” and went to the dogs
generally. And the upshot of it all was that Francis Carpenter, who
had led his class in his first and second years at McGill, and for
whom his teachers had predicted a great career, was a country
school-teacher at forty-five with no prospect of ever being anything
else. Perhaps he was resigned to it—perhaps not. Nobody ever
knew, not even the brown mouse of a wife. Nobody in Blair Water
cared—he was a good teacher, and that was all that mattered. Even
if he did go on occasional “sprees” he always took Saturday for them
and was sober enough by Monday. Sober, and especially dignified,
wearing a rusty black frock coat which he never put on any other
day of the week. He did not invite pity and he did not pose as a
tragedy. But sometimes, when Emily looked at his face, bent over
the arithmetic problems of Blair Water School, she felt horribly sorry
for him without in the least understanding why.

He had an explosive temper which generally burst into flame at

least once a day, and then he would storm about wildly for a few
minutes, tugging at his beard, imploring heaven to grant him
patience, abusing everybody in general and the luckless object of his
wrath in particular. But these tempers never lasted long. In a few
minutes Mr. Carpenter would be smiling as graciously as a sun
bursting through a storm-cloud on the very pupil he had been rating.
Nobody seemed to cherish any grudge because of his scoldings. He
never said any of the biting things Miss Brownell was wont to say,
which rankled and festered for weeks; his hail of words fell alike on
just and unjust and rolled off harmlessly.

He could take a joke on himself in perfect good nature. “Do you

hear me? Do you hear me, sirrah?” he bellowed to Perry Miller one
day. “Of course I hear you,” retorted Perry coolly, “they could hear
you in Charlottetown.” Mr. Carpenter stared for a moment, then
broke into a great, jolly laugh.

His methods of teaching were so different from Miss Brownell’s

that the Blair Water pupils at first felt as if he had stood them on
their heads. Miss Brownell had been a martinet for order. Mr.
Carpenter never tried to keep order apparently. But somehow he
kept the children so busy that they had no time to do mischief. He
taught history tempestuously for a month, making his pupils play the
different characters and enact the incidents. He never bothered any
one to learn dates—but the dates stuck in the memory just the
same. If, as Mary Queen of Scots, you were beheaded by the school
axe, kneeling blindfolded at the doorstep, with Perry Miller, wearing
a mask made out of a piece of Aunt Laura’s old black silk, for
executioner, wondering what would happen if he brought the axe
down too hard, you did not forget the year it happened; and if you
fought the battle of Waterloo all over the school playground, and
heard Teddy Kent shouting, “Up, Guards and at ’em!” as he led the
last furious charge you remembered 1815 without half trying to.

Next month history would be thrust aside altogether and

geography would take its place, when school and playground were
mapped out into countries and you dressed up as the animals
inhabiting them or traded in various commodities over their rivers
and cities. When Rhoda Stuart had cheated you in a bargain in
hides, you remembered that she had bought the cargo from the
Argentine Republic, and when Perry Miller would not drink any water
for a whole hot summer day because he was crossing the Arabian
Desert with a caravan of camels and could not find an oasis, and
then drank so much that he took terrible cramps and Aunt Laura had
to be up all night with him—you did not forget where the said desert
was. The trustees were quite scandalized over some of the goings
on and felt sure that the children were having too good a time to be
really learning anything.
 If you wanted to learn Latin and French you had to do it by talking
your exercises, not writing them, and on Friday afternoons all
lessons were put aside and Mr. Carpenter made the children recite
poems, make speeches and declaim passages from Shakespeare and
the Bible. This was the day Ilse loved. Mr. Carpenter pounced on her
gift like a starving dog on a bone and drilled her without mercy.
They had endless fights and Ilse stamped her foot and called him
names while the other pupils wondered why she was not punished
for it but at last had to give in and do as he willed. Ilse went to
school regularly—something she had never done before. Mr.
Carpenter had told her that if she were absent for a day without
good excuse she could take no part in the Friday “exercises” and this
would have killed her.

One day Mr. Carpenter had picked up Teddy’s slate and found a
sketch of himself on it, in one of his favourite if not exactly beautiful
attitudes. Teddy had labelled it “The Black Death”—half of the pupils
of the school having died that day of the Great Plague, and having
been carried out on stretchers to the Potter’s Field by the terrified
survivors.

Teddy expected a roar of denunciation, for the day before Garrett

Marshall had been ground into figurative pulp on being discovered
with the picture of a harmless cow on his slate—at least, Garrett said
he meant it for a cow. But now this amazing Mr. Carpenter only drew
his beetling brows together, looked earnestly at Teddy’s slate, put it
down on the desk, looked at Teddy, and said,

“I don’t know anything about drawing—I can’t help you, but, by

gad, I think hereafter you’d better give up those extra arithmetic
problems in the afternoon and draw pictures.”

Whereupon Garrett Marshall went home and told his father that
“old Carpenter” wasn’t fair and “made favourites” over Teddy Kent.
 Mr. Carpenter went up to the Tansy Patch that evening and saw
the sketches in Teddy’s old barn-loft studio. Then he went into the
house and talked to Mrs. Kent. What he said and what she said
nobody ever knew. But Mr. Carpenter went away looking grim, as if
he had met an unexpected match. He took great pains with Teddy’s
general school work after that and procured from somewhere certain
elementary text books on drawing which he gave him, telling him
not to take them home—a caution Teddy did not require. He knew
quite well that if he did they would disappear as mysteriously as his
cats had done. He had taken Emily’s advice and told his mother he
would not love her if anything happened to Leo, and Leo flourished
and waxed fat and doggy. But Teddy was too gentle at heart and too
fond of his mother to make such a threat more than once. He knew
she had cried all that night after Mr. Carpenter had been there, and
prayed on her knees in her little bedroom most of the next day, and
looked at him with bitter, haunting eyes for a week. He wished she
were more like other fellows’ mothers but they loved each other very
much and had dear hours together in the little grey house on the
tansy hill. It was only when other people were about that Mrs. Kent
was queer and jealous.

“She’s always lovely when we’re alone,” Teddy had told Emily.

As for the other boys, Perry Miller was the only one Mr. Carpenter
bothered much with in the way of speeches—and he was as
merciless with him as with Ilse. Perry worked hard to please him and
practiced his speeches in barn and field—and even by nights in the
kitchen loft—until Aunt Elizabeth put a stop to that. Emily could not
understand why Mr. Carpenter would smile amiably and say, “Very
good” when Neddy Gray rattled off a speech glibly, without any
expression whatever, and then rage at Perry and denounce him as a
dunce and a nincompoop, by gad, because he had failed to give just
the proper emphasis on a certain word, or had timed his gesture a
fraction of a second too soon.
 Neither could she understand why he made red pencil corrections
all over her compositions and rated her for split infinitives and too
lavish adjectives and strode up and down the aisle and hurled
objurgations at her because she didn’t know “a good place to stop
when she saw it, by gad,” and then told Rhoda Stuart and Nan Lee
that their compositions were very pretty and gave them back
without so much as a mark on them. Yet, in spite of it all, she liked
him more and more as time went on and autumn passed and winter
came with its beautiful bare-limbed trees, and soft pearl-grey skies
that were slashed with rifts of gold in the afternoons, and cleared to
a jewelled pageantry of stars over the wide white hills and valleys
around New Moon.

Emily shot up so that winter that Aunt Laura had to let down the
tucks in her dresses. Aunt Ruth, who had come for a week’s visit,
said she was outgrowing her strength—consumptive children always
did.

“I am not consumptive,” Emily said. “The Starrs are tall,” she

added, with a touch of subtle malice hardly to be looked for in near-
thirteen.

Aunt Ruth, who was sensitive in regard to her dumpiness, sniffed.

“It would be well if that were the only thing in which you resemble
them,” she said. “How are you getting on in school?”

“Very well. I am the smartest scholar in my class,” answered Emily

composedly.

“You conceited child!” said Aunt Ruth.

“I’m not conceited.” Emily looked scornful indignation. “Mr.

Carpenter said it and he doesn’t flatter. Besides, I can’t help seeing it
myself.”
 “Well, it is to be hoped you have some brains, because you
haven’t much in the way of looks,” said Aunt Ruth. “You’ve no
complexion to speak of—and that inky hair around your white face is
startling. I see you’re going to be a plain girl.”

“You wouldn’t say that to a grown-up person’s face,” said Emily

with a deliberate gravity which always exasperated Aunt Ruth
because she could not understand it in a child. “I don’t think it would
hurt you to be as polite to me as you are to other people.”

“I’m telling you your faults so you may correct them,” said Aunt
Ruth frigidly.

“It isn’t my fault that my face is pale and my hair black,” protested
Emily. “I can’t correct that.”

“If you were a different girl,” said Aunt Ruth, “I would—”

“But I don’t want to be a different girl,” said Emily decidedly. She

had no intention of lowering the Starr flag to Aunt Ruth. “I wouldn’t
want to be anybody but myself even if I am plain. Besides,” she
added impressively as she turned to go out of the room, “though I
may not be very good-looking now, when I go to heaven I believe
I’ll be very beautiful.”

“Some people think Emily quite pretty,” said Aunt Laura, but she
did not say it until Emily was out of hearing. She was Murray enough
for that.

“I don’t know where they see it,” said Aunt Ruth. “She’s vain and
pert and says things to be thought smart. You heard her just now.
But the thing I dislike most in her is that she is un-childlike—and
deep as the sea. Yes, she is, Laura—deep as the sea. You’ll find it
out to your cost one day if you disregard my warning. She’s capable
of anything. Sly is no word for it. You and Elizabeth don’t keep a
tight enough rein over her.”
 “I’ve done my best,” said Elizabeth stiffly. She herself did think she
had been much too lenient with Emily—Laura and Jimmy were two
to one—but it nettled her to have Ruth say so.

Uncle Wallace also had an attack of worrying over Emily that

winter.

He looked at her one day when he was at New Moon and

remarked that she was getting to be a big girl.

“How old are you, Emily?” He asked her that every time he came
to New Moon.

“Thirteen in May.”

“H’m. What are you going to do with her, Elizabeth?”

“I don’t know what you mean,” said Aunt Elizabeth coldly—or as

coldly as is possible to speak when one is pouring melted tallow into
candle-moulds.

“Why, she’ll soon be grown up. She can’t expect you to provide for
her indefinitely”—

“I don’t,” Emily whispered resentfully under her breath.

“—and it’s time we decided what is best to be done for her.”

“The Murray women have never had to work out for a living,” said
Aunt Elizabeth, as if that disposed of the matter.

“Emily is only half Murray,” said Wallace. “Besides, times are

changing. You and Laura will not live forever, Elizabeth, and when
you are gone New Moon goes to Oliver’s Andrew. In my opinion
Emily should be fitted to support herself if necessary.”

Emily did not like Uncle Wallace but she was very grateful to him
at that moment. Whatever his motives were he was proposing the
very thing she secretly yearned for.

“I would suggest,” said Uncle Wallace, “that she be sent to

Queen’s Academy to get a teacher’s license. Teaching is a genteel,
lady-like occupation. I will do my share in providing for the expense
of it.”

A blind person might have seen that Uncle Wallace thought this
very splendid of himself.

“If you do,” thought Emily, “I’ll pay every cent back to you as soon
as I’m able to earn it.”

But Aunt Elizabeth was adamant.

“I do not believe in girls going out into the world,” she said. “I
don’t mean Emily to go to Queen’s. I told Mr. Carpenter so when he
came to see me about her taking up the Entrance work. He was very
rude—school-teachers knew their place better in my father’s time.
But I made him understand, I think. I’m rather surprised at you,
Wallace. You did not send your own daughter out to work.”

“My daughter had parents to provide for her,” retorted Uncle

Wallace pompously. “Emily is an orphan. I imagined from what I had
heard about her that she would prefer earning her own living to
living on charity.”

“So I would,” cried out Emily. “So I would, Uncle Wallace. Oh, Aunt
Elizabeth, please let me study for the Entrance. Please! I’ll pay you
back every cent you spend on it—I will indeed. I pledge you my
word of honour.”

“It does not happen to be a question of money,” said Aunt

Elizabeth in her stateliest manner. “I undertook to provide for you,
Emily, and I will do it. When you are older I may send you to the
High School in Shrewbury for a couple of years. I am not decrying
education. But you are not going to be a slave to the public—no
Murray girl ever was that.”

Emily realising the uselessness of pleading, went out in the same

bitter disappointment she had felt after Mr. Carpenter’s visit. Then
Aunt Elizabeth looked at Wallace.

“Have you forgotten what came of sending Juliet to Queen’s?” she

asked significantly.

If Emily was not allowed to take up the Entrance classes, Perry

had no one to say him nay and he went at them with the same
dogged determination he showed in all other matters. Perry’s status
at New Moon had changed subtly and steadily. Aunt Elizabeth had
ceased to refer scornfully to him as “a hired boy.” Even she
recognised that though he was still indubitably a hired boy he was
not going to remain one, and she no longer objected to Laura’s
patching up his ragged bits of clothing, or to Emily’s helping him
with his lessons in the kitchen after supper, nor did she growl when
Cousin Jimmy began to pay him a certain small wage—though older
boys than Perry were still glad to put in the winter months choring
for board and lodging in some comfortable home. If a future premier
was in the making at New Moon Aunt Elizabeth wanted to have
some small share in the making. It was credible and commendable
that a boy should have ambitions. A girl was an entirely different
matter. A girl’s place was at home.

Emily helped Perry work out algebra problems and heard his
lessons in French and Latin. She picked up more thus than Aunt
Elizabeth would have approved and more still when the Entrance
pupils talked those languages in school. It was quite an easy matter
for a girl who had once upon a time invented a language of her own.
When George Bates, by way of showing off, asked her one day in
French—his French, of which Mr. Carpenter had once said doubtfully
that perhaps God might understand it—“Have you the ink of my
grandmother and the shoebrush of my cousin and the umbrella of
my aunt’s husband in your desk?” Emily retorted quite as glibly and
quite as Frenchily, “No, but I have the pen of your father and the
cheese of the innkeeper and the towel of your uncle’s maidservant in
my basket.”

To console herself for her disappointment in regard to the

Entrance class Emily wrote more poetry than ever. It was especially
delightful to write poetry on a winter evening when the storm winds
howled without and heaped the garden and orchard with big ghostly
drifts, starred over with rabbits’ candles. She also wrote several
stories—desperate love affairs wherein she struggled heroically
against the difficulties of affectionate dialogue; tales of bandits and
pirates—Emily liked these because there was no necessity for
bandits and pirates to converse lovingly; tragedies of earls and
countesses whose conversation she dearly loved to pepper with
scraps of French; and a dozen other subjects she didn’t know
anything about. She also meditated beginning a novel but decided it
would be too hard to get enough paper for it. The letter-bills were all
done now and the Jimmy-books were not big enough, though a new
one always appeared mysteriously in her school basket when the old
one was almost full. Cousin Jimmy seemed to have an uncanny
prescience of the proper time—that was part of his Jimmyness.

Then one night, as she lay in her lookout bed and watched a full
moon gleaming lustrously from a cloudless sky across the valley, she
had a sudden dazzling idea.

She would send her latest poem to the Charlottetown Enterprise.

The Enterprise had a Poet’s Corner where “original” verses were

frequently printed. Privately Emily thought her own were quite as
good—as probably they were, for most of the Enterprise “poems”
were sad trash.

Emily was so excited over the idea that she could not sleep for the
greater part of the night—and didn’t want to. It was glorious to lie
there, thrilling in the darkness, and picture the whole thing out. She
saw her verses in print signed E. Byrd Starr—she saw Aunt Laura’s
eyes shining with pride—she saw Mr. Carpenter pointing them out to
strangers—“the work of a pupil of mine, by gad”—she saw all her
schoolmates envying her or admiring, according to type—she saw
herself with one foot at least firmly planted on the ladder of fame—
one hill at least of the Alpine Path crested, with a new and glorious
prospect opening therefrom.

Morning came. Emily went to school, so absent-minded because of

her secret that she did badly in everything and was raged at by Mr.
Carpenter. But it all slipped off her like the proverbial water off a
duck’s back. Her body was in Blair Water school but her spirit was in
kingdoms empyreal.

As soon as school was out she betook herself to the garret with
half a sheet of blue-lined notepaper. Very painstakingly she copied
down the poem, being especially careful to dot every i and cross
every t. She wrote it on both sides of the paper, being in blissful
ignorance of any taboo thereon. Then she read it aloud delightedly,
not omitting the title Evening Dreams. There was one line in it she
tasted two or three times:

The haunting elfin music of the air.

“I think that line is very good,” said Emily. “I wonder now how I
happened to think of it.”

She mailed her poem the next day and lived in a delicious mystic
rapture until the following Saturday. When the Enterprise came she
opened it with tremulous eagerness and ice-cold fingers, and turned
to the Poet’s Corner. Now for her great moment!

There was not a sign of an Evening Dream about it!

 Emily threw down the Enterprise and fled to the garret dormer
where, face downward on the old haircloth sofa, she wept out her
bitterness of disappointment. She drained the draught of failure to
the very dregs. It was horribly real and tragic to her. She felt exactly
as if she had been slapped in the face. She was crushed in the very
dust of humiliation and was sure she could never rise again.

How thankful she was that she hadn’t told Teddy anything about it
—she had been so strongly tempted to, and only refrained because
she didn’t want to spoil the dramatic surprise of the moment when
she would show him the verses with her name signed to them. She
had told Perry, and Perry was furious when he saw her tear-stained
face later on in the dairy, as they strained the milk together.
Ordinarily Emily loved this, but to-night the savour had gone out of
the world. Even the milky splendour of the still, mild winter evening
and the purple bloom over the hillside woods that presaged a thaw
could not give her the accustomed soul-thrill.

“I’m going to Charlottetown if I have to walk and I’ll bust that

Enterprise editor’s head,” said Perry, with the expression which,
thirty years later, warned the members of his party to scatter for
cover.

“That wouldn’t be any use,” said Emily drearily. “He didn’t think it
good enough to print—that is what hurts me so, Perry—he didn’t
think it any good. Busting his head wouldn’t change that.”

It took her a week to recover from the blow. Then she wrote a
story in which the editor of the Enterprise played the part of a dark
and desperate villain who found lodging eventually behind prison
bars. This got the venom out of her system and she forgot all about
him in the delight of writing a poem addressed to “Sweet Lady April.”
But I question if she ever really forgave him—even when she
discovered eventually that you must not write on both sides of the
paper—even when she read over Evening Dreams a year later and
wondered how she could ever have thought it any good.
 This sort of thing was happening frequently now. Every time she
read her little hoard of manuscripts over she found some of which
the fairy gold had unaccountably turned to withered leaves, fit only
for the burning. Emily burned them,—but it hurt her a little.
Outgrowing things we love is never a pleasant process.
 CHAPTER XXIX

Sacrilege

T
HERE had been several clashes between Aunt Elizabeth and
Emily that winter and spring. Generally Aunt Elizabeth came out
victorious; there was that in her that would not be denied the
satisfaction of having her own way even in trifling matters. But once
in a while she came up against that curious streak of granite in
Emily’s composition which was unyielding and unbendable and
unbreakable. Mary Murray, of a hundred years agone, had been, so
family chronicle ran, a gentle and submissive creature generally; but
she had that same streak in her, as her “Here I Stay” abundantly
testified. When Aunt Elizabeth tried conclusions with that element in
Emily she always got the worst of it. Yet she did not learn wisdom
therefrom but pursued her policy of repression all the more
rigorously; for it occasionally came home to her, as Laura let down
tucks, that Emily was on the verge of beginning to grow up and that
various breakers and reefs loomed ahead, ominously magnified in
the mist of unseen years. Emily must not be allowed to get out of
hand now, lest later on she make shipwreck as her mother had done
—or as Elizabeth Murray firmly believed she had done. There were,
in short, to be no more elopements from New Moon.

One of the things they fell out about was the fact that Emily, as
Aunt Elizabeth discovered one day, was in the habit of using more of
her egg money to buy paper than Aunt Elizabeth approved of. What
did Emily do with so much paper? They had a fuss over this and
eventually Aunt Elizabeth discovered that Emily was writing stories.
Emily had been writing stories all winter under Aunt Elizabeth’s very
nose and Aunt Elizabeth had never suspected it. She had fondly
supposed that Emily was writing school compositions. Aunt Elizabeth
knew in a vague way that Emily wrote silly rhymes which she called
“poetry” but this did not worry her especially. Jimmy made up a lot
of similar trash. It was foolish but harmless and Emily would
doubtless outgrow it. Jimmy had not outgrown it, to be sure, but
then his accident—Elizabeth always went a little sick in soul when
she remembered it—had made him more or less a child for life.

But writing stories was a very different thing and Aunt Elizabeth
was horrified. Fiction of any kind was an abominable thing. Elizabeth
Murray had been trained up in this belief in her youth and in her age
she had not departed from it. She honestly thought that it was a
wicked and sinful thing in anyone to play cards, dance, or go to the
theatre, read or write novels, and in Emily’s case there was a worse
feature—it was the Starr coming out in her—Douglas Starr
especially. No Murray of New Moon had ever been guilty of writing
“stories” or of ever wanting to write them. It was an alien growth
that must be pruned off ruthlessly. Aunt Elizabeth applied the
pruning shears; and found no pliant, snippable root but that same
underlying streak of granite. Emily was respectful and reasonable
and above-board; she bought no more paper with egg money; but
she told Aunt Elizabeth that she could not give up writing stories and
she went right on writing them, on pieces of brown wrapping paper
and the blank backs of circulars which agricultural machinery firms
sent Cousin Jimmy.

“Don’t you know that it is wicked to write novels?” demanded Aunt

Elizabeth.

“Oh, I’m not writing novels—yet,” said Emily. “I can’t get enough
paper. These are just short stories. And it isn’t wicked—Father liked
novels.”

“Your father—” began Aunt Elizabeth, and stopped. She

remembered that Emily had “acted up” before now when anything
derogatory was said of her father. But the very fact that she felt
mysteriously compelled to stop annoyed Elizabeth, who had said
what seemed good to her all her life at New Moon without much
regard for other people’s feelings.

“You will not write any more of this stuff,” Aunt Elizabeth
contemptuously flourished “The Secret of the Castle” under Emily’s
nose. “I forbid you—remember, I forbid you.”

“Oh, I must write, Aunt Elizabeth,” said Emily gravely, folding her
slender, beautiful hands on the table and looking straight into Aunt
Elizabeth’s angry face with the steady, unblinking gaze which Aunt
Ruth called unchildlike. “You see, it’s this way. It is in me. I can’t
help it. And Father said I was always to keep on writing. He said I
would be famous some day. Wouldn’t you like to have a famous
niece, Aunt Elizabeth?”

“I am not going to argue the matter,” said Aunt Elizabeth.

“I’m not arguing—only explaining.” Emily was exasperatingly

respectful. “I just want you to understand how it is that I have to go
on writing stories, even though I am so very sorry you don’t
approve.”

“If you don’t give up this—this worse than nonsense, Emily, I’ll—
I’ll—”

Aunt Elizabeth stopped, not knowing what to say she would do.
Emily was too big now to be slapped or shut up; and it was no use
to say, as she was tempted to, “I’ll send you away from New Moon,”
because Elizabeth Murray knew perfectly well she would not send
Emily away from New Moon—could not send her away, indeed,
though this knowledge was as yet only in her feelings and had not
been translated into her intellect. She only felt that she was helpless
and it angered her; but Emily was mistress of the situation and
calmly went on writing stories. If Aunt Elizabeth had asked her to
give up crocheting lace or making molasses taffy, or eating Aunt
Laura’s delicious drop cookies, Emily would have done so wholly and
cheerfully, though she loved these things. But to give up writing
stories—why, Aunt Elizabeth might as well have asked her to give up
breathing. Why couldn’t she understand? It seemed so simple and
indisputable to Emily.

“Teddy can’t help making pictures and Ilse can’t help reciting and I
can’t help writing. Don’t you see, Aunt Elizabeth?”

“I see that you are an ungrateful and disobedient child,” said Aunt
Elizabeth.

This hurt Emily horribly, but she could not give in; and there
continued to be a sense of soreness and disapproval between her
and Aunt Elizabeth in all the little details of daily life that poisoned
existence more or less for the child, who was so keenly sensitive to
her environment and to the feelings with which her kindred regarded
her. Emily felt it all the time—except when she was writing her
stories. Then she forgot everything, roaming in some enchanted
country between the sun and moon, where she saw wonderful
beings whom she tried to describe and wonderful deeds which she
tried to record, coming back to the candle-lit kitchen with a
somewhat dazed sense of having been years in No-Man’s Land.

She did not even have Aunt Laura to back her up in the matter.
Aunt Laura thought Emily ought to yield in such an unimportant
matter and please Aunt Elizabeth.

“But it’s not unimportant,” said Emily despairingly. “It’s the most
important thing in the world to me, Aunt Laura. Oh, I thought you
would understand.”

“I understand that you like to do it, dear, and I think it’s a

harmless enough amusement. But it seems to annoy Elizabeth some
way and I do think you might give it up on that account. It is not as
if it was anything that mattered much—it is really a waste of time.”

“No—no,” said distressed Emily. “Why, some day, Aunt Laura, I’ll
write real books—and make lots of money,” she added, sensing that
the businesslike Murrays measured the nature of most things on a
cash basis.

Aunt Laura smiled indulgently.

“I’m afraid you’ll never grow rich that way, dear. It would be wiser
to employ your time preparing yourself for some useful work.”

It was maddening to be condescended to like this—maddening

that nobody could see that she had to write—maddening to have
Aunt Laura so sweet and loving and stupid about it.

“Oh,” thought Emily bitterly, “if that hateful Enterprise editor had
printed my piece they’d have believed then.”

“At any rate,” advised Aunt Laura, “don’t let Elizabeth see you
writing them.”

But somehow Emily could not take this prudent advice. There had
been occasions when she had connived with Aunt Laura to hoodwink
Aunt Elizabeth on some little matter, but she found she could not do
it in this. This had to be open and above-board. She must write
stories—and Aunt Elizabeth must know it—that was the way it had
to be. She could not be false to herself in this—she could not
pretend to be false.

She wrote her father all about it—poured out her bitterness and
perplexity to him in what, though she did not suspect it at the time,
was the last letter she was to write him. There was a large bundle of
letters by now on the old sofa shelf in the garret—for Emily had
written many letters to her father besides those which have been
chronicled in this history. There were a great many paragraphs about
Aunt Elizabeth in them, most of them very uncomplimentary and
some of them, as Emily herself would have owned when her first
bitterness was past, overdrawn and exaggerated. They had been
written in moments when her hurt and angry soul demanded some
outlet for its emotion and barbed her pen with venom. Emily was
mistress of a subtly malicious style when she chose to be. After she
had written them the hurt had ceased and she thought no more
about them. But they remained.

And one spring day, Aunt Elizabeth, housecleaning in the garret

while Emily played happily with Teddy at the Tansy Patch, found the
bundle of letters on the sofa shelf, sat down, and read them all.

Elizabeth Murray would never have read any writing belonging to

a grown person. But it never occurred to her that there was anything
dishonourable in reading the letters wherein Emily, lonely and—
sometimes—misunderstood, had poured out her heart to the father
she had loved and been loved by, so passionately and
understandingly. Aunt Elizabeth thought she had a right to know
everything that this pensioner on her bounty did, said, or thought.
She read the letters and she found out what Emily thought of her—
of her, Elizabeth Murray, autocrat unchallenged, to whom no one had
ever dared to say anything uncomplimentary. Such an experience is
no pleasanter at sixty than at sixteen. As Elizabeth Murray folded up
the last letter her hands trembled—with anger, and something
underneath it that was not anger.

“Emily, your Aunt Elizabeth wants to see you in the parlour,” said
Aunt Laura, when Emily returned from the Tansy Patch, driven home
by the thin grey rain that had begun to drift over the greening fields.
Her tone—her sorrowful look—warned Emily that mischief was in the
wind. Emily had no idea what mischief—she could not recall anything
she had done recently that should bring her up before the tribunal
Aunt Elizabeth occasionally held in the parlour. It must be serious
when it was in the parlour. For reasons best known to herself Aunt
Elizabeth held super-serious interviews like this in the parlour.
Possibly it was because she felt obscurely that the photographs of
the Murrays on the walls gave her a backing she needed when
dealing with this hop-out-of-kin; for the same reason Emily detested
a trial in the parlour. She always felt on such occasions like a very
small mouse surrounded by a circle of grim cats.
 Emily skipped across the big hall, pausing, in spite of her alarm, to
glance at the charming red world through the crimson glass; then
pushed open the parlour door. The room was dim, for only one of
the slat blinds was partially raised. Aunt Elizabeth was sitting bolt
upright in Grandfather Murray’s black horsehair-chair. Emily looked at
her stern, angry face first—and then at her lap.

Emily understood.

The first thing she did was to retrieve her precious letters. With
the quickness of light she sprang to Aunt Elizabeth, snatched up the
bundle and retreated to the door; there she faced Aunt Elizabeth,
her face blazing with indignation and outrage. Sacrilege had been
committed—the most sacred shrine of her soul had been profaned.

“How dare you?” she said. “How dare you touch my private
papers, Aunt Elizabeth?”

Aunt Elizabeth had not expected this. She had looked for
confusion—dismay—shame—fear—for anything but this righteous
indignation, as if she, forsooth, were the guilty one. She rose.

“Give me those letters, Emily.”

“No, I will not,” said Emily, white with anger, as she clasped her
hands around the bundle. “They are mine and Father’s—not yours.
You had no right to touch them. I will never forgive you!”

This was turning the tables with a vengeance. Aunt Elizabeth was
so dumfounded that she hardly knew what to say or do. Worst of all,
a most unpleasant doubt of her own conduct suddenly assailed her—
driven home perhaps by the intensity and earnestness of Emily’s
accusation. For the first time in her life it occurred to Elizabeth
Murray to wonder if she had done rightly. For the first time in her life
she felt ashamed; and the shame made her furious. It was
intolerable that she should be made to feel ashamed.
 For the moment they faced each other, not as aunt and niece, not
as child and adult, but as two human beings each with hatred for
the other in her heart—Elizabeth Murray, tall and austere and thin-
lipped; Emily Starr, white of face, her eyes pools of black flame, her
trembling arms hugging her letters.

“So this is your gratitude,” said Aunt Elizabeth. “You were a

penniless orphan—I took you to my home—I have given you shelter
and food and education and kindness—and this is my thanks.”

As yet Emily’s tempest of anger and resentment prevented her

from feeling the sting of this.

“You did not want to take me,” she said. “You made me draw lots
and you took me because the lot fell to you. You knew some of you
had to take me because you were the proud Murrays and couldn’t let
a relation go to an orphan asylum. Aunt Laura loves me now but you
don’t. So why should I love you?”

“Ungrateful, thankless child!”

“I’m not thankless. I’ve tried to be good—I’ve tried to obey you

and please you—I do all the chores I can to help pay for my keep.
And you had no business to read my letters to Father.”

“They are disgraceful letters—and must be destroyed,” said Aunt

Elizabeth.

“No,” Emily clasped them tighter. “I’d sooner burn myself. You shall
not have them, Aunt Elizabeth.”

She felt her brows drawing together—she felt the Murray look on
her face—she knew she was conquering.

Elizabeth Murray turned paler, if that were possible. There were

times when she could give the Murray look herself; it was not that
which dismayed her—it was the uncanny something which seemed
to peer out behind the Murray look that always broke her will. She
trembled—faltered—yielded.

“Keep your letters,” she said bitterly, “and scorn the old woman
who opened her home to you.”

She went out of the parlour. Emily was left mistress of the field.
And all at once her victory turned to dust and ashes in her mouth.

She went up to her own room, hid her letters in the cupboard over
the mantel, and then crept up on her bed, huddling down in a little
heap with her face buried in her pillow. She was still sore with a
sense of outrage—but underneath another pain was beginning to
ache terribly.

Something in her was hurt because she had hurt Aunt Elizabeth—
for she felt that Aunt Elizabeth, under all her anger, was hurt. This
surprised Emily. She would have expected Aunt Elizabeth to be
angry, of course, but she would never have supposed it would affect
her in any other way. Yet she had seen something in Aunt Elizabeth’s
eyes when she had flung that last stinging sentence at her—
something that spoke of bitter hurt.

“Oh! Oh!” gasped Emily. She began to cry chokingly into her
pillow. She was so wretched that she could not get out of herself
and watch her own suffering with a sort of enjoyment in its drama—
set her mind to analyse her feelings—and when Emily was as
wretched as that she was very wretched indeed and wholly
comfortless. Aunt Elizabeth would not keep her at New Moon after a
poisonous quarrel like this. She would send her away, of course.
Emily believed this. Nothing was too horrible to believe just then.
How could she live away from dear New Moon?

“And I may have to live eighty years,” Emily moaned.

But worse even than this was the remembrance of that look in
Aunt Elizabeth’s eyes.
 Her own sense of outrage and sacrilege ebbed away under the
remembrance. She thought of all the things she had written her
father about Aunt Elizabeth—sharp, bitter things, some of them just,
some of them unjust. She began to feel that she should not have
written them. It was true enough that Aunt Elizabeth had not loved
her—had not wanted to take her to New Moon. But she had taken
her and though it had been done in duty, not in love, the fact
remained. It was no use for her to tell herself that it wasn’t as if the
letters were written to any one living, to be seen and read by others.
While she was under Aunt Elizabeth’s roof—while she owed the food
she ate and the clothes she wore to Aunt Elizabeth—she should not
say, even to her father, harsh things of her. A Starr should not have
done it.

“I must go and ask Aunt Elizabeth to forgive me,” thought Emily at

last, all the passion gone out of her and only regret and repentance
left. “I suppose she never will—she’ll hate me always now. But I
must go.”

She turned herself about—and then the door opened and Aunt
Elizabeth entered. She came across the room and stood at the side
of the bed, looking down at the grieved little face on the pillow—a
face that in the dim, rainy twilight, with its tear-stains and black
shadowed eyes, looked strangely mature and chiseled.

Elizabeth Murray was still austere and cold. Her voice sounded
stern; but she said an amazing thing.

“Emily, I had no right to read your letters. I admit I was wrong.

Will you forgive me?”

“Oh!” The word was almost a cry. Aunt Elizabeth had at last
discerned the way to conquer Emily. The latter lifted herself up,
flung her arms about Aunt Elizabeth, and said chokingly,

“Oh—Aunt Elizabeth—I’m sorry—I’m sorry—I shouldn’t have

written those things—but I wrote them when I was vexed—and I
didn’t mean them all—truly, I didn’t mean the worst of them. Oh,
you’ll believe that, won’t you, Aunt Elizabeth?”

“I’d like to believe it, Emily.” An odd quiver passed through the tall,
rigid form. “I—don’t like to think you—hate me—my sister’s child—
little Juliet’s child.”

“I don’t—oh, I don’t,” sobbed Emily. “And I’ll love you, Aunt

Elizabeth, if you’ll let me—if you want me to. I didn’t think you
cared. Dear Aunt Elizabeth.”

Emily gave Aunt Elizabeth a fierce hug and a passionate kiss on

the white, fine-wrinkled cheek. Aunt Elizabeth kissed her gravely on
the brow in return and then said, as if closing the door on the whole
incident,

“You’d better wash your face and come down to supper.”

But there was yet something to be cleared up.

“Aunt Elizabeth,” whispered Emily. “I can’t burn those letters, you

know—they belong to Father. But I’ll tell you what I will do. I’ll go
over them all and put a star by anything I said about you and then
I’ll add an explanatory footnote saying that I was mistaken.”

Emily spent her spare time for several days putting in her
“explanatory footnotes,” and then her conscience had rest. But when
she again tried to write a letter to her father she found that it no
longer meant anything to her. The sense of reality—nearness—of
close communion had gone. Perhaps she had been outgrowing it
gradually, as childhood began to merge into girlhood—perhaps the
bitter scene with Aunt Elizabeth had only shaken into dust
something out of which the spirit had already departed. But,
whatever the explanation, it was not possible to write such letters
any more. She missed them terribly but she could not go back to
them. A certain door of life was shut behind her and could not be re-
opened.
 CHAPTER XXX

When the Curtain Lifted

I
T would be pleasant to be able to record that after the
reconciliation in the lookout Emily and Aunt Elizabeth lived in
entire amity and harmony. But the truth was that things went on
pretty much the same as before. Emily went softly, and tried to
mingle serpent’s wisdom and dove’s harmlessness in practical
proportions, but their points of view were so different that there
were bound to be clashes; they did not speak the same language, so
there was bound to be misunderstanding.

And yet there was a difference—a very vital difference. Elizabeth

Murray had learned an important lesson—that there was not one law
of fairness for children and another for grown-ups. She continued to
be as autocratic as ever—but she did not do or say to Emily anything
she would not have done or said to Laura had occasion called for it.

Emily, on her side, had discovered the fact that, under all her
surface coldness and sternness, Aunt Elizabeth really had an
affection for her; and it was wonderful what a difference this made.
It took the sting out of Aunt Elizabeth’s “ways” and words and
healed entirely a certain little half-conscious sore spot that had been
in Emily’s heart ever since the incident of the drawn slips at
Maywood.

“I don’t believe I’m a duty to Aunt Elizabeth any more,” she

thought exultantly.

Emily grew rapidly that summer in body, mind and soul. Life was
delightful, growing richer every hour, like an unfolding rose. Forms of
beauty filled her imagination and were transferred as best she could
to paper, though they were never so lovely there, and Emily had the
heartbreaking moments of the true artist who discovers that

“Never on painter’s canvas lives

The charm of his fancy’s dream.”

Much of her “old stuff” she burned; even the Child of the Sea was
reduced to ashes. But the little pile of manuscripts in the mantel
cupboard of the lookout was growing steadily larger. Emily kept her
scribblings there now; the sofa shelf in the garret was desecrated;
and, besides, she felt somehow that Aunt Elizabeth would never
meddle with her “private papers” again, no matter where they were
kept. She did not go now to the garret to read or write or dream;
her own dear lookout was the best place for that. She loved that
quaint, little old room intensely; it was almost like a living thing to
her—a sharer in gladness—a comforter in sorrow.

Ilse was growing, too, blossoming out into strange beauty and
brilliance, knowing no law but her own pleasure, recognizing no
authority but her own whim. Aunt Laura worried over her.

“She will be a woman so soon—and who will look after her? Allan
won’t.”

“I’ve no patience with Allan,” said Aunt Elizabeth grimly. “He is

always ready to hector and advise other people. He’d better look at
home. He’ll come over here and order me to do this or that, or not
to do it, for Emily; but if I say one word to him about Ilse he blows
the roof off. The idea of a man turning against his daughter and
neglecting her as he has neglected Ilse simply because her mother
wasn’t all she ought to be—as if the poor child was to blame for
that.”

“S—s—sh,” said Aunt Laura, as Emily crossed the sitting-room on

her way upstairs.
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