(6 of 7)
With verbal bows of exquisite politeness all round, the Imperial Government finally announced: "The mutineers behaved with moderation and did not indulge in excesses. . . . National sentiment would have been shocked by a combat between the armed forces of the Empire. ... A revolt of unprecedented gravity has thus been suppressed without a shot having been fired and without order in the capital having been disturbed."
It presently came out that U. S. Ambassador Joseph Clark Grew and British Ambassador Sir Robert Clive. both of whom were sheltering numbers of their nationals under their flags, had refused to obey an order from the Imperial Government that all diplomatic missions must move out of the swank residential quarter, the Government having been minded at the time to shell the rebels out of this part of Tokyo. Other diplomatic missions skedaddled or at least sent their womenfolk elsewhere. Thus the Grews, the Clives and numerous U. S. and British journalists had virtual box seats on their embassy hillsides, watched the whole agonizing Japanese show from start to finish, guarded at all times by General Kashii's troops.
Explanation. There is nothing unusual in the situation of Boy meets Girl, and in Japan there is nothing unusual in the situation of Boy kills Premier.
A clean, handsome Boy of the type who meets Girl is manly Konichi Nakoaka who killed Premier Hara of Japan and, after serving ten years in jail, recently emerged still a clean, handsome Boy, the pride of his mother (see p. 24). Japanese are accustomed to look upon acts of political assassination simply as acts of emphatic protest, and Japanese (by foreign standards) hold their own lives cheap. After the young mustards had surrendered, not only did several of them commit harakiri, but a Buddhist priest, who was no hare-brained boy. strolled up to the shrine of the revered Emperor Meiji. knelt down facing it and with a razor blade cut his throat from ear to ear. Beside the priest's bloody corpse was found this neat note : "I sacrifice myself for the peace of the nation. Humbly kneeling I pray for tranquillity."
The Japanese Ambassador in Washing ton, squirrel-bright Mr. Hiroshi Saito. occasionally speaks the unvarnished truth about Japan, and of the mustards His Excellency said : "It would be premature to discuss the direct motives of those deluded officers, but back of it all there must be discerned the general suspicion — though misdirected — among the young generation of Japan—as in many other countries— that the Cabinet and the Parliament have been greatly influenced by big business and other private interests and therefore corrupted. Such suspicion has been nurtured and intensified through the very hard living most of them and many others in Japan are eking out.
"There is a short poem by Takuboku, an ill-fated young poet. In English translation it would run thus: "I work. I work as best I can, "Yet for all that "My living "Is none the better— "Blankly I gaze at my hands."