(See front cover)
In Shanghai such sniveling, furtive Chinese storekeepers as dared to offer Japanese goods for sale last week were roughly pounced upon by Chinese "police" of the self-appointed Anti-Japan Association and locked up in improvised jails.
Gibbering with terror, the unpatriotic storekeepers were flung prostrate on the floor before Anti-Japan Association "judges," kowtowing and howling for mercy. The "judges" imposed and actually collected "fines" up to $10,000 Mex. ($2,500) for the "crime" of selling Japanese goods. Convicted shopkeepers who said they could not pay were kicked back into Anti-Japan Association jails, kept there on persuasive starvation rations. This queer kind of justice, flagrantly illegal in every way, was everywhere upheld by Chinese public opinion, the opinion of one-fourth of mankind.
In hundreds of Chinese cities and towns, patriots routed out the whole community to swear such mighty oaths as this (sworn by all students and teachers in the schools of Nanking, Chinese capital):
"Before the blue sky, before the white sun, before our fatherland, before the graves of our ancestors, we, faculty and students, solemnly swear as long as we live never to use anything made by Japanese. Should we break this oath, may Heaven and men kill us!"
Chinatowns throughout the world took up the boycott of Japan. Whites in Windsor, Ontario, were startled by 400 Canadian Chinese who staged a sort of Boston Tea Party. Piling up $6,000 worth of Japanese tea, silks and sea food, they poured on gasoline. Windsor's venerable Fong Lee, cackling defiance at Japan, fired the protest pyre. On the Pacific Coast, U. S. shipowners assumed with glee that Japanese shipping lines had canceled sailings to China, scrambled to get the business.
China's international boycott was what tiny Japanese delegate Kenkichi Yoshi-zawa (who puffs huge cigars) had in mind when he told the League Council in Geneva last week that Japan demands—as her chief condition for withdrawing Japanese troops from Manchuria—that China's Government actively combat all Anti-Japanese demonstrations by Chinese (see p. 16). Shot back Chinese Delegate Dr. Alfred Sze in the general direction of Mr. Yoshizawa's aromatic stogie:
"I know of no international law by which a government, however autocratic, can compel its people to buy from people they don't like!"
Actually of course the weak Chinese Government at Nanking brandished boycott last week as their strongest weapon against compact, sinewy Japan.
Lord Abbot Emeritus. Japanese public opinion continued with honest simplicity to support the Japanese Army's action in Manchuria for what it was, a land grab. But Japan has her equivalent to an Archbishop of Canterbury. Voluminous in his sombre robe, the Buddhist Elder, Count Kozui Otani, Lord Abbot Emeritus of the Great Western Hongwanji Temple at Kyoto, summoned U. S. correspondents and sonorously declared:
"Red Russia is brooding over Asia, wherein Japan is the only stabilizing element. If America's moral support is refused to Japan in the present crisis the world may see Asia go Red. Give Japan a free hand to fight chaos and disorder."