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"There is a limit to the people's patience and endurance of hardship. . . . Present conditions are like a long-distance race without any fixed goal. Even champions become exhausted in such a race. . . ."
Last week Representative Haruji Tahara rose in the Diet and before the very face of Premier Yonai said: "We must have a strong man at the top, a Hitler, a Mussolini —" (the House drew in its breath, remembering the expulsion of a member last year for urging a Mussolini, Hitler, or Stalin) "— or a Roosevelt." The House relaxed.
Mitsumasa Yonai, a confident man, smiled. He knew how to take criticism. He was born to debts, weaned on trouble, schooled in adversity.
His father was a samurai—one of those ferocious retainer-warriors who wore two swords sharp enough to shave with, who scorned money because their liege lords supplied them with houses, clothes, food, concubines, whatever else they needed.
But a few years before Mitsumasa was born Japan was suddenly turned from a feudal to a capitalistic state. The elder Yonai, given an inadequate political job, cracked up and deserted his family when Mitsumasa was 6.
Yonai's mother, also of samurai blood and, being a woman, even less prepared to earn her daily rice than her husband had been, nevertheless buckled down as a seamstress and sewing teacher. While Mitsumasa was in school, he got a job copying documents, each week gave his pay envelope to his mother, unopened. He went on to the Naval Academy, where he was a popular mediocrity. He finished at the centre of his class — 60th among 125 cadets. At 21 he wrote, in clumsy, inept calligraphy, a pathetic little self-portrait: "My strongest characteristic: gluttony—I never get enough to eat. My credo: self-respect—I believe in myself. My weak points: none. My favorite book: Momotaro [a heroic fairy tale]. My favorite dish: boiled millet and soup with dry leeks [a poor peasant food]."
Up through the Navy Yonai plodded, pushing himself ahead with alternate fits of rebellion and unctuousness, in alternate shifts of deck and desk duty. He lost the hearing of his left ear in target practice, and quickly learned the political uses of deafness. In time he became chief of the big naval bases at Sasebo and Yokosuka, then Commander in Chief of the Combined Fleets. He was Navy Minister when Japan went to war, when the Navy let itself be sucked into the battle of Shanghai, when the Panay was bombed. He is said to have torpedoed an open military alliance with Germany last year with the remark: "The Japanese Navy belongs to the Emperor. It is not for hire by Hitler, or anyone else."
At 60 he is steady, pleasant, strongwilled, plodding, articulate. He lives simply, unconscious of money. Long ago he donated the gold from his teeth to China war funds. He still delivers his paycheck —unopened—to his 80-year-old mother. He denies his reputation for being able to drink like a Cossack, says he has been drunk only three times (once he drew a blank, once he dimly remembers he downed two quarts of whiskey on a train in Poland, once he got drunk to help survive a Chinese feast of 100 courses), and insists that he drinks only "to celebrate a past event, to indulge the feeling of work well done, or to warm up for the future."