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Sanctions? As the mounting list of indignities reached the light of print in London, British ire rose. Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain, asked in Parliament what economic reprisals were planned, answered: "I do not think we have yet reached that stage." But the Prime Minister did refer to the "high-handed and intolerably insulting treatment of British subjects" in Tientsin and complained that the Japanese military had made the Tientsin incident a "pretext for far-reaching and quite inadmissible claims." The London Times cautiously recommended that the British Government at least look into the question of economic sanctions, and Conservative and Laborite M. P.'s joined in demanding firm action. There was even talk of retaliation against the many Japanese citizens living in the British Empire, and a Government spokesman broadcast the warning that Britain might be forced into "countermeasures for the protection of British rights." Foreign Secretary Viscount Halifax called Japanese Ambassador Mamoru Shigemitsu to his office and gave him the talking to of his life. At Tokyo Sir Robert Leslie Craigie, the British Ambassador, also protested, conferred for a half hour with Foreign Minister Hachiro Arita on a basis for negotiation of a settlement of the British-Japanese deadlock at Tientsin. One point upon which negotiations waited was the Japanese insistence on holding conferences, not in Tokyo, but in Tientsin, with the British holding out for conversations right in Tokyo. On this point it seemed unlikely that the Japanese Foreign Office of the mild-mannered, hard-working Mr. Shigemitsu, who has tried his best to keep good relations with the British, would be able to accede. For by last week it was even more evident that the Japanese Army in North China and not the Japanese Government in Tokyo, was solely responsible for the Tientsin blockade and that the Army leaders alone could order the blockade lifted.
Right Address. Although the British could not diplomatically recognize him, the logical man to have dealt with was General Gen Sugiyama, commander of the North China Army. Former War Minister, a thorough soldier who believes in "action before words," General Sugiyama (along with others of the military caste) feels himself responsible only to the Emperor. Fifty-nine years old, he was once a military attache at Paris, at another time a delegate to the Geneva Disarmament Conference of 1926. The prattle of diplomats, the explanations of foreign offices, the fine points of parliamentarians are not, however, for him. Last week he bluntly reiterated the Army's price for raising the blockade: Britain's recognition of Japan's Asia-for-the-Asiatics policy.