(See front cover)
A keen little Japanese general, trim if tubby, bustled about Hongkong last week, the confident swish of his great-coat followed by hate-glinting Chinese eyes.
Japanese explain General Kenji Doihara to Occidentals as "our Lawrence of Manchuria." It was perfectly all right, they say, for Great Britain to detach Arabia from Turkey during the War by sending Colonel T. E. "Lawrence of Arabia" to stir up the tribes. Therefore has not General Doihara's work in Manchuria, Japanese ask, been equally all right?
Subtle Doihara may or may not have provoked the "incident" at Mukden (TIME, Sept. 28, 1931) which enabled Japan to set up Manchukuo as a puppet state. He was chief of the Japanese Army Secret Service in Mukden at the time— the service which makes incidents. Few months later Doihara was in Harbin before those unfortunate outbreaks of "banditry" which caused Japan to take that strategic city on the Chinese Eastern Railway (TIME, Feb. 22, 1932). Later it was perhaps Doihara who fomented enough "unrest" in Tientsin to excuse the bringing in of Japanese troops who imposed the humiliating Tangku Truce (TIME, June 5, 1933).Today, so great is Spy Chief Doihara's reputation that he can be as modest as Colonels Lawrence and Lindbergh. Toothily last week he smiled: "What have I been doing this year in Peiping, in Tientsin, in Shanghai, in Nanking and here in beautiful Hongkong? Really, gentlemen, I am but a general! What has a general to do in time of peace?"
In the Japanese Diet nervous politicians have also been asking what General Doihara is doing in China. In effect Foreign Minister Koki Hirota, author of Japan's notorious Twenty-One Demands on China a generation ago, has been obliged to admit that the Japanese Army has sent General Doihara as its own independent negotiator in the Sino-Japanese diplomatic haggle now being conducted as a repetition of the "demands" maneuver (TIME, Feb. 11). The Japanese Army apparently does not trust the Japanese Foreign Office or Japanese diplomats. With something as big as the Empire's future in China at stake, the Army has sent to the diplomatic front that Japanese general who knows best how to make himself useful in peace time, Doihara.
Hongkong Hu. General Doihara, in his role of the Japanese Army's diplomatic Shanghai Lily, matched wits last week with Hongkong Hu. It is Mr. Hu Han-min's distinction that he was the late, sainted Dr. Sun Yat-sen's Chief Secretary and that today his influence in Canton is worth a $200,000 bribe proffered him last year by the Chinese Government (TIME, July 23). It would be cheaper to jail or exterminate Mr. Hu, but he is careful to live in British Hongkong, with strapping Sikh police posted day and night before his strongly built house, all doors and windows of which are barred with elaborate iron gratings.
If Canton and its clique of South Chinese generals can be sold, Hongkong Hu is the man to make the sale, discreetly. Last week he received General Doihara behind his iron gratings, then puffed an impressive smoke screen of anti-Japanese fulminations.