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After expertizing at the Washington Conference on the Limitation of Armaments and after a grand tour of the East as Consul-General-at-Large, Nelson Johnson was called home again. On his way he stopped in Japan, just after the great Yokohama earthquake of 1923. Cardinal requisite of any foreign service diplomat is that he shall be able to write clearly, vividly, movingly. Of the earthquake Nelson Johnson reported: "I found Yokohama in ruins. I left it busy removing the last vestiges of the confused masses of brick, a city of small galvanized iron shops and houses looking for all the world like a crude mining town in Alaska or a boom town of the prairies, and no longer the oriental city of Kipling and the whaler.
I shall go back presently. But whatever Yokohama becomes I shall always see in it and behind it the ruined city, the piles of confused brick and heat-twisted iron, the china doll's head lying beside the whitened incinerated bones of the child, here where two were killed, there where two hundred were roasted alive, and it will always be a city of ghosts."
His new Washington appointment was as Chief of F. E.—most important link in the chain of policy, the agent who boils down for President and Secretary of State the mass of reports from the field. Here Nelson Johnson was so useful that in 1927, at 40, he was made Assistant Secretary of
State, and, two years later, Minister to China.
Johnson On the Spot. The occasion on which he was welcomed to China as Minister was a landmark in the course of U. S.-Chinese relations. At a vast, formal tea at the Grand Hotel in beautiful Tsingtao, the city's acting mayor rose, rustled his black silk gown, made a pretty, set speech in Chinese. An interpreter laboriously translated. Then Mr. Johnson got up, paused, bowed to hosts and guests. The audience set itself for a weary, long-winded speech which most of them would not understand. With a grin, Nelson Johnson proposed a toast and made a short speech in perfect Mandarin. From then on, he had no need of paper airplanes to make friends. Here was a white man who treated his yellow hosts as equals—as superiors, sometimes.
Through trying times—civil war, Japan's invasion of Manchuria, the Shanghai warfare of 1932—he was Johnson on the Spot. He watched the Shanghai bombings from the roof of a cotton mill. He liked to call himself the Commuting Minister, and preferred the hinterland ton Westernized coastal cities; only went to Shanghai, he said, when he thought it was time to change his shirt. Almost everywhere he went, his favorite book, Alice in Wonderland, went with him.
Until he was 43, he lived alone. In 1931, a tall, pretty, quiet, 30-year-old schoolteacher from Cody, Wyo. named Jane Beck arrived in Peking with her brother on a round-the-world tour. The Becks and the Johnsons had been friends for three generations, so Jane and her brother stayed at the Embassy mansion. The guests stayed on & on, but since that is the way of Peking, no one was surprised —till one day the bachelor diplomat quietly told his friends that he and Jane Beck would be married the next day at six.