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Every telephone in Tokyo was dead, every street car still, and amid the snow Japanese soldiers with their greatcoats buttoned over the divisional numbers on their collars looked all alike. Scared as rabbits, Japanese civilians learned by grapevine rumor that, if a coat blew open revealing its wearer to be of the First or Third Regiment of the Tokyo Division, he was probably one of the dastards and not a regular army man. With the Empire cut off from the world as Japanese censors clamped down on cables and radio, the August Land of the Rising Sun or Dai Nippon (as Japanese poetically call their Empire) faced the World with a blank wall of sheer Mystery. In Washington the State Department, for all the erudition of its Far East Section, knew nothing for certain, was as much out of contact with Joseph Clark Grew as though he had been U. S. Ambassador to the Moon instead of Ambassador to Japan. The Department busied itself writing a note to express the grief of the Roosevelt Administration at the death of Premier Okada.
"This Incident." Japanese listeners heard the War Office Radio announce that the Premier had been "killed" (not "assassinated") and the official broadcast continued in so moderate a vein that Japanese censors later passed dispatches in which it was called an "implied defense" of the killers. They, according to the War Office, "decided to rise for the purpose of removing corrupt elements around the throne who, they considered, should be charged with the crime of destroying national policy, in co-operation with Admiral Okada, the Premier, senior military and financial factions and bureaucrats, at this juncture when Japan, is confronted with various difficulties.
"The officers concerned say in their manifesto that their purpose was to protect national policy, thus fulfilling their duty to the throne."
Not since Adolf Hitler dismissed in a few broadcast phrases the butchering of scores of Germans in his "blood purge'' has there been a broadcast so scandalous. The Japanese War Department seemed to wish to make known to the public the vague excuses of bloody rebels for monstrous killings as though the motives of such dastards might be worthy of respect.
"By Command of the Emperor." Not only last week but at all times the Imperial Palace of the Son of Heaven, standing in great wooded gardens encircled by high stone walls and a deep moat in Tokyo, is cut off from any newsy intercourse with the rest of the world. Into this sanctuary bolted the surviving members of the Japanese Cabinet and every subject of sufficient consequence to rate such proximity to the Son of Heaven.
His Majesty is a weak-eyed young man whom most Japanese reverence without knowing or asking whether Emperor Hirohito is either strong or clever. To such questions from a foreigner, Japanese of high station are apt to reply blandly, "The Emperor is young." (He is 34.)