Last week, with the U. S. Pacific armada war-gaming nearer Japan than ever before, with U. S. textile men tearing their hair about a Japanese commercial invasion, with William Randolph Hearst pumping the U. S. full of what a shame it is that all sorts of Japanese goods sell so cheap, the two nations continued to offer each other the handclasp of friendship in many a place and many a different way:
¶ In Tokyo Japan's divine Emperor graciously received goodwill-touring Admiral Frank B. Upham of the U. S. Asiatic Fleet, 50,000 of whose seamates on 160 vessels were maneuvering four days' sailing away. The Emperor professed himself "delighted to receive the representative of a friendly nation."
¶ Japanese horticulturists were scoring a peace smash by escorting around their country a "friendship group" from the Garden Club of America, sure to return in ecstasies, since Japanese flower arrangement is unsurpassed.
¶ Batting about western U. S. states was a baseball team of 16 Japanese former college stars, a Japanese golf team and numerous unobtrusive "delegations." The Japanese athletes were not letting nine straight defeats dim their toothy smiles.
¶ The Yale baseball team was preparing to embark for a goodwill sporting tour of Japan as the guests of Tokyo's Six-University Baseball League.
And Prince Konoye, a Princeton Freshman, had invited the golf teams of his own university and Yale to be his guests at home this summer.
¶ As he boarded a train in New Jersey en route to Japan where he expected to open a six-day bicycle race track. Reginald ("Iron Man") McNamara was arrested on his wife's charge of desertion.
¶ Agitated was a Tokyo visit of the 65 five-to-nine-year-old moppets of Kansas City's famed ''Toy Symphony Orchestra," children whose tootling might soothe Japanese breasts and help spread happy impressions of Japan when they returned to Missouri.
These were but the most immediate of many recent and amiable overtures (chiefly initiated by Japan) to make U. S. and Japanese citizens like each other more & more, to turn the black tides of circumstance which have made them like each other less & less ever since Japan bolted into Manchuria in spite of Secretary of State Henry Lewis Stimson's ineffectual "Whoa!"