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What Japan would say should Patrick Jay Hurley write such an article for the Army & Navy Journal, U. S. citizens could only guess. Uchida. Count Yasuya Uchida, the man who kept all this boiling by his historic "fissiparous" speech in the Diet, is a gracious, grey-haired gentleman of 67 who dresses exquisitely, is very fond of a cup of hot sake (rice whisky), has a fine collection of Chinese silk paintings and likes to sing old Japanese utai (folk ballads) in the garden of his home with a group of cronies. Only to patriotic Chinese do his black-socked feet in their peg-bottom sandals look like cloven hooves.
Count Uchida is not and never has been a roaring militarist. In internal politics he is known as a great conciliator. Time & again he has been pushed into important offices because of his ability to smooth things over. A graduate of the Tokyo Imperial University, he was Ambassador to Washington from 1909 to 1911, Ambassador to Russia during the World War. In two separate Japanese crises he became temporary Prime Minister. He was created successively a Baron, Viscount and Count and served on the Privy Council from 1924 to 1929. In 1928 he signed the Briand-Kellogg pact for Japan. In 1931 just before the Manchurian question became acute he was appointed president of the South Manchuria Railway. Japanese regarded the appointment as an effort to lift that all-important job above party politics.
Outmoded Ethics. Before accusing Count Uchida of threatening the peace of the world, his critics should remember Japan's position—an overpopulated, earthquake-ridden string of islands faced with grave unemployment and a rickety currency, with little chance of squeezing her citizens through the immigration restrictions of the West. Hundreds of thousands of Japanese believe that rich, undeveloped Manchuria is their only hope of salvation. When Count Uchida was born, what Japan is doing now would not have excited protest. When Count Uchida was nine years old, the Prime Minister of Britain was a brilliant, dapper Jew, Benjamin Disraeli, later Earl of Beaconsfield, who preached exactly the same sort of utilitarian imperialism, made his Queen Empress of India, bought the Suez Canal to develop Britain's oriental trade and to protect her Manchoukuo: Egypt. Disraeli was just as convinced as any Japanese today that his country must be master of the East.