En route.

Dearest Mother and Father:

To take things up at the very beginning, my first sight of Japan was
too soon after six o'clock the morning of the tenth. We were lying at
quarantine, just inside the outer Yokohama breakwater. As I stepped out
on deck, sleepy and a little angry, one of the first persons I saw was the
incredibly lovely American-born but British-bred wife of the British consul
general in Nanking, Mrs. John Alexander. Even so early in the morning, she
looked as if she were just going off to a ball; every hair in place, her face
glowing, her eyes not at all puffy like the rest of ours; she was
still in some long grey pajamas and a blue satin dressing gown. Her youngest
child was still asleep in her arms; an older boy was romping around, exclaiming
at everything. "Just like any industrial port," she said, "except for the
sails."

I had no sooner gone to the rail and had one look at the smoke-stacks,
the factories, and the rusty-looking tramp steamers -- and the square, gracefully drooping sails which appear in every Japanese print and which did make
Yokohama a little different from Hoboken, but not much -- when Mrs. Alexander
touched my arm and pointed into the sky. All around us the people drew in
their breath, and looked up. Even the smartly uniformed young Japanese quarantine officers, at work not six feet from us, looked up. Marching across the
sky, in perfect formation, were twenty-six huge bombers, roaring the way those
Italian "good-will" planes led by Balbo did the time they flew down the Hudson,
remember? Every one was horrified except the little Alexander boy, who was
delighted. "Ooh, Mummy!" he shouted in full hearing of the Japanese officers,
"They're going over to visit China, aren't they?"

When the quarantine doctors were done with us (all we had to do was hand
them a little yellow card), we walked around the deck to see the sights. On
the starboard side we found Horace Whitmore, a tall, bald, worried-looking,
slow-moving, gentle mining engineer, on his way to Manila. He was fumbling with
his camera, just to make his wife nervous. "Horace," she said, "you mustn't.
We're in a fortified zone. There's no telling what they'll do to you." "But
look, darling," he said, "they've given me a little map showing me exactly what
to take pictures of." And he pulled out of his pocket the chart every passenger
had been given, with six heavily circled districts (Tokyo Bay, Kobe, Inland Sea,
Bungo Channel, Shimonoseki, and Nagasaki) and this notice: "We are now nearing
fortified zones, as is shown in maps below, where under Japanese Laws photographing, sketching and surveying of the topographical conditions, are strictly prohibited under several penalties. The Japanese Government very strictly enforces these laws, and Passengers are therefore respectfully requested to observe
the regulations most rigidly so as to avoid any untoward incidents occurring."

Besides the usual formalities connected with landing, we had been given
several other indications that we were entering a country in trouble. For
one thing, we had been obliged to fill out a complicated form declaring the
exact amount of foreign currency we were carrying into the country. The Pur-
ser told me that this was a brand new requirement, and laughingly said that soon
it would take longer to get into Japan than to cross the ocean. We had also
been given a Notification to Foreign Residents, which said that if we wanted to
stay more than a month, we must apply for permission to do so with the prefectural Governor concerned, send a report of residence to the police chief concerned, and enclose two photographs front view, bareheaded, bust, 4.5 by 6.cm., and not pasted on board. Besides, we had to fill out another form, declaring
with particulars the reasons for our visit to Japan. This form we had to present
to the passport officers. The one I drew wore very thick glasses, had fine,
arrogant features, and the manner which is common to all Japanese officials:

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he asked extremely polite questions, prefacing each with a deferential stopping sound; was violently amazed at every answer I made; and then was suddenly satisfied. "Ssssl. Who is this President Doumer?" I explained that it was the boat on which I planned to leave Japan. "Truthfully? Oh, I see." And: "You are a journalist? For which?" I explained that I work for Time. "Truthfully? For the Time. Oh, I see." And so forth, right down the list. With the customs it was just the same. We had wondered how many of our books on Japan, some written in a bitter anti-Japanese tone, would be taken away. The little inspector lit on my copy of Journey to a War, by the English poets Auden and Isherwood, because his eye was caught by the cartoon of a Chinese family being bombed, on the jacket. He took it in to the head inspector, who promptly sat down and started to read the book. It happens that the first section of the book is Auden's verse. I wish Winstan Auden could have seen the inspector trying for the life of him to make some sense out of those lines. Even funnier was the first inspector, when he came across the magazine True Story in the suitcase of one of the Southern tobacco men who had crossed with us. The center spread was a very much undressed picture of some movie star. The little inspector, who was being assisted at every move by the porter of the Imperial Hotel, took a long look at that picture, rifled on through a few pages, turned back to the center spread, looked at the Imperial Hotel man, went on for a few more pages, turned back again, looked at the Imperial man, and broke out into a broad grin. Together they spent a full five minutes with the magazine.

The secretary of the Japanese I.P.R., a young fellow named Tomohiko Ushiba, who studied at Oxford and speaks excellent English, had come down to the boat to meet us. Tomo is very nervous, and laughs at everything except what amuses him. He roared with laughter over the tedious way the customs men handled our things. He guffawed when he found that the only taxi was much too small for the four of us (Mr. Carter, his secretary Elsie Fairfax-Cholmeley, Tomo and me). He giggled over each sign of war along the road to Tokyo: school-boys in uniform, the shortage of pleasure cars because of the shortage of gasoline, the gay flags in front of homes indicating that a son had gone off to fight, the trucks all painted brown (Chinese mud brown) so as to be ready for sudden requisition, the hundreds of brown trucks with stars on their radiators loaded down with waste paper, topsoil, old tires, tarpaulin-covered masses, ugly metal cylinders, mat-insulated lumps, some with whole tractors, also brown. I was struck by the number of three-wheeled motorcycles with load-boxes and of miniature cars (Datsuns) like the small English cars; both save gas.

At one of the bridges along the way, Tomo told how the statesman Ugaki, when he had been trying to form a cabinet back at the beginning of the incident, had one morning driven across the bridge. At the far end a man jumped out into the road, and held up his hand. When the car stopped, the man jumped in beside Ugaki, and very quietly and gently knelt urged Ugaki not to try to form a cabinet. After he had gone along for a while, he asked the driver to stop the car, and got out again. In a land where murder is the rule, laughed Tomo, this was historic incident. In the end Ugaki was prevented from forming a cabinet by the refusal of the Army to cooperate, so the persudder was prophetic if nothing else.

In almost every architectural history-book I've ever seen, there has been a picture of the Imperial Hotel, a squat, over-decorated building of a style which could only be described as Red Indian. It looked awful, in those pictures. But the real thing is really quite beautiful. The texture of the materials is exceedingly rich, and for the building which is said to be the only one which will withstand any earthquake Tokyo gets, the effect is wonderfully fragile. And its violent emphasis on horizontals is really very restful. I later found that the influence of Frank Lloyd Wright is widespread in Japan. As soon as we had our rooms, I called up Cabot Coville, second secretary of the American Embassy, to see if he could lunch with us; and then we drove around to drop our cards on the American and British Embassies. I remember only four things about that drive: a contingent of fully equipped soldiers

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none of whom looked over eighteen; the unique sound of Tokyo auto horns (they are all the rubber-bulb kind, quieter even than London taxis' "wonk", very polite and apologetic); the salmon-pink and white carnations, just two of them, arranged with a sprig of fern in a little vase at the side of the taxi; and the deep bow with which the Japanese butler at the American Embassy sent us on our way. I could swear he touched his forehead on the Embassy steps, without bending his knees. There was unmistakably a war going on, and yet everything was quiet and polite and gentle; I wondered if Japanese pilots dropped their bombs with an apologetic "ssl" and an eye for the pattern they made on the ground.

Cabot Coville turned out to be about 35 and something like Art: an incisive mind, wonderfully articulate on the most complicated subjects, and a gift for the apt phrase. He explained very clearly the currency situation in North China; the reason the yen-backed Federal Reserve dollar can't stand up against the yuan, he said, is that "you can't legislate psychology." Then we got on the subject of mail censorship. He told us that one of the prize exhibits in the Embassy was sent in the other day by some one in the Philippines. A missionary in Japan had written a letter and mailed it off for his friend in the Philippines. The censors had opened it to see if it was all right, had found it so, and then, in sealing it up, had inadvertently enclosed a postcard from a Japanese mother to her son, gone to the wars.

After lunch we went to pay our respects on the Japanese staff of the I.P.R. Besides Tomo, there was Yaduo Yamakawa, an elderly man who served Japan at the Paris peace conference, and Kinkazu Saionji, grandson of the last remaining Elder Statesman, or Genro, who is now over ninety. Saionji, who is very thin because he never eats anything but soup and because he does a prodigious amount of work, is, besides an I.P.R. staff member, editor of a semi-monthly picture magazine, the Graphic, and compiler of a World Year Book; he always has a Penguin book or an American magazine under his arm. He also went to Oxford, and was in New College, where Maury Heckscher and Rupert Allen went. He said that New College is the "most virtuous" of the Oxford colleges. I asked him what he meant. "Whatever is both old and natural is virtuous; New College has its ancient wall and its new flowers; it is very virtuous."

From these three we got an ominous sample of the polite evasiveness we were to have for the next ten days. Mr. Carter asked a somewhat pointed question about the war, putting the question in the form of a statement that there had been reports in American papers to such and such an effect -- was this true? Obviously none of them liked the question: Tomo gave that away by laughing very loud, as if Mr. Carter had been witty; the other two smiled. Mr. Carter persisted. Yamakawa finally broke down and said: "There have been somewhat similar reports in the press of Japan." Mr. Carter still wanted to know if they were true. Ushiba stopped laughing long enough to say: "Where there is no smoke, there is no fire. We see only smoke." And that is all the answer we ever got.

Later in the afternoon I asked Frank Hedges, Tokyo correspondent of the Daily Telegraph and NANA, if he would join me for a glass of beer. He lives at the Imperial in a dark green suite which he has flitted every day. He is completely bald, and walks with his neck thrust forward. He was drinking nothing stronger than grape-juice for the time being, he said. Hedges is the second best correspondent in Tokyo, in the general view, the first being Hugh Byas of the Times. He was just as nice as he could be to me.

He said that it is perfectly remarkable how little censorship there is of newspaper material. He sends all his spot news by cable, and when he has a long story, part of which he thinks is liable, he sends two cables, with all the doubtful part in one, the safe part in the other. The censors, it seems, never delete part of a cable. They either pass it all, or kill it all.

I asked about issues of Time which had made a particular fuss. He said, as Ambassador Grew later also said, that Time would be perfectly popular if it would stay away from the subject of the Emperor, who is sacred and must not be talked of as a man. Apparently at the time of the Emperor's coronation,

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Time ran his picture on the cover. That would have been all right in itself; but under the picture they ran this caption: "He took his sword in hand and went to a crysanthemum party." The Japanese were furious. Around Christmas, 1935, when the crown prince was born, Time again ran the Emperor on the cover, over an innocuous caption. On the first inside page, the editors ran this notice: "The picture on the cover of this issue is of the Emperor of Japan. Subscribers are respectfully requested not to turn the magazine face downward." The Japanese were deeply gratified; most Americans were amused; and *Time*, as usual, had had its petty joke.

Maria Neubauer, Mrs. Alexander's companion and governess for her children, came up for the day in Tokyo, planning to go on to Kobe by the night train. She found that every single berth on the train had been taken for several days. It seems that every night some 200 fortune hunters, quack lawyers, discredited business men, disgruntled third sons, pickpockets and opportunists go on their way to the conquered parts of China, to see what they can find. Peking is said to be packed with these hooligans. Whenever the Japanese take a new city, a whole pack of the scavengers at once descends on the place and strips it bare.

Elsie Fairfax-Cholmeley, whom we call Cromwell for some reason, and I thought we might entertain Maria somehow. I asked Dennis McEvoy, the 20-year-old UP representative and quite the most brilliant of all the newspapermen in Tokyo, what we could do. He said we'd be lucky to be able to do anything, for there is a tremendous war boom going on, workers have cash to spend and spare, and everything from sumo wrestling (the fat men) up to the noh dramas are packed every night. Our best bet would be the Takarazuka Girls' Opera, a sort of musical comedy in which all parts are taken by girls. The theatre, huge and modern, was just across the street from the hotel; we found that we could get three seats high in the balcony.

We went first to have a snack at a brand new, ship's-architecture tea garden. The menu was grand. We couldn't decide whether to take Sousage Sandwich at 40 sen, a Fruit Concert at 30, or, for 40 sen, a Special Backed Apple. We asked, in the end, for Sousage, and got ham.

The Girls' Opera was superb. Since it was mostly gaudy like Rockefeller Center's, we could understand everything but the jokes, most of which, McEvoy said, were bad puns (for which the Japanese word sounds like "shoddy"). The costumes were colorful, the jazz orchestra first rate -- except for too much muted trumpet and bazooka -- and there were all sorts of very modern conveniences, such as microphones which rose and fell by some invisible power. But just the same there was such a pounding, dragging, and rolling of scenery backstage that part of the time we couldn't hear the singers.

The first half of the program was called *Album of Reminiscences*, and consisted of twelve scenes summing up the history of the troupe. The Opera was established at Takarazuka Hot Spring, near Osaka, in 1914; and the *Album* showed how its technique had improved and its popularity grown through the 25 years since. As the program notes put it: "Each of the scenes will numerous present to the audience old remembrances of the Takarazuka... to the adolescent... sweet memories of their childhood days; to the old... the dear scenes that once had been."

The second half of the program was Tokushan, a Grand Chinese Romance. An ambitious Chinese peasant boy named Ryusei forsook his sweetheart, Bika, in the first scene, and went off to the city, "to where his heart had always cried for," We saw Ryusei become a millionaire with the help of a hermit's magic, and then live lavishly, entertained by scores of sweet Chinese maidens doing a dance which was unmistakably a rhumba. Ryusei kept throwing them money so carelessly that we concluded it must be North China Federal Reserve dollars. In the end he threw everything he had away, and reduced himself to poverty. At this point the old hermit appeared again, and assured Ryusei that he would find happiness under a willow tree, ten miles away. "This place," said the program notes, "was nothing but his birthplace." There, under the willow, he found Bika, ardent still. And so Virtue triumphed, and a thousand Japanese, who could afford to go to the Takarazuka because killing Chinese is profitable, cheered and wept with joy.

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Thursday, 11 May. Art Smith had given me a note to Bunichiro Sugimura, who had been at architecture school with him. After asking many times, a taxi-man got me to his house, on a little side-street in what is called the kojimachi district of Tokyo. A narrow lane led away some distance from the street to a modest Western-style house, painted some dull color, and with its front door and back door quite indistinguishable to me. I picked the back door. Two girl-servants greeted me, giggling and bowing and altogether incapable of understanding my sign language. Finally I handed them Art's note, and motion altogether. They peered at it and giggled some more, and then suddenly turned and ran away. In a few seconds one of them returned and beckoned me around to the front door, where I was given a ceremonial reception: the two girls took off my shoes, put slippers on my feet, and bowed me into a little living room furnished, as all Japanese living rooms, even those of multi-millionaires, are (when they are Western style, that is), in awful sub-Macy, installment-plan furniture draped in white-and-cream slip covers. I waited there for an appallingly long time, until I began to feel that I was being initiated into some strange and sacred rite. But when Bunny showed up, I understood the delay: his head was bundled in bandages, and he had gotten up off his sick-bed to seem me. He was suffering from an abcess in his cheek.

At first he was scared, and I was, too. He hadn't used English for quite a while, and I was in unfamiliar territory. At first we exchanged polite questions. How were Art and Rob? How long since Bunny had seen them? Then he began to tell me about his job. He is working as construction supervisor on one of the two buildings which are being built in Tokyo just now. Building, he said, is very slow, because such materials as are free must go either into munitions industries or into the heavy industries of Manchukuo and Korea. And so at home they are carefully rationed, and sometimes, when they have run out of their monthly allowance, they have to suspend construction for a time. Although Bunny plans to go into straight architecture later, he thinks the best way he can learn about materials and stresses and heating and other practical aspects of his trade, is to be on the spot during construction for a year or two.

Soon he was talking freely, in excellent English; and so I asked him how he feels about the war. We are tired of it, he said. We feel that we have been dragged into something none of us wanted. No one dreamed that Manchuria and the petty incidents in North China would lead us as far in as we are. We all hope that it will be over by the end of the year.

I had several engagements, and so I had to excuse myself; we arranged to have lunch together the next day. Back at the hotel, I had a talk with an extraordinary individual named S. Boku. He was a Korean, leaving the next day for Warsaw to be Manchukuo consul general, actually to try to trade some economic agreement for Polish recognition of Manchukuo. The thing that made him extraordinary to me was his complete two-sidedness; later I found this was quite typical of liberal Japanese who have more or less sold out to the present order. Boku is 41, was imprisoned when a young man for activity as a Korean nationalist (the group which fought to the end against absorption into the Japanese state, and later pretended absorption into the Japanese race), later attended the Imperial University in Tokyo and Cambridge, having been a sensational pitcher in Japanese schools. Now he speaks Korean, Japanese, Chinese, English, French, and German, all as if they were native to him. And what he says is amazing. The day before I talked with him, he had made these high-sounding statements in an interview for the *Japan Times*: "To bring together heterogeneous racial elements in the East under the spirit of concordia as a step toward the realization of unshakable solidarity among Oriental races is the supreme ideal toward which Manchukuo and all races in the new States are earnestly working.... Such reports that Manchukuo is predominated by the Japanese or that the so-called ideal of racial concordia in that state is only maintained forcibly by the iron fist of the Japanese, are entirely mistaken...." But when Mr. Carter talked with him, and when I talked with him, both behind locked doors, he said exactly the opposite: "There is no such thing as racial unity in the East. The Japanese are forcing it down the throats of the Koreans and Manchurians to excuse their ruthless conquest.

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They have not a shred of understanding of Korean and Chinese psychology." And he went on to speak of a strong undercurrent of idealism in Japan, which wants the war ended as soon as possible for moral as well as pragmatic reasons. "This undertow, " he said, "may drown Imperial Japan."

Before lunch I had a short talk with Hugh Byas, the New York Times correspondent and one of the most universally respected foreigners in Tokyo. He is a wonderfully genial Scot with a small mustache, a ruddy face, and a perpetual grin. He enjoys everything he says so much that one has the feeling that he is very, very witty; actually what he says is rather commonplace, rather like what he writes for the Times -- which out here is thought to be always sound and accurate, but never particularly interesting. One thing he said, though, seemed interesting to me: it was another example of the two-sidedness of the Japanese. He said that there is an amazing difference between the soldiers at home and when they got in the field in China. In Tokyo they are always neat, modest, and well-behaved. On street-cars they pay their fares and give their seats to old men. They are never to be seen drunk in the streets. They hardly even swagger (it's apparently impossible for an Oriental not to swagger a little when he gets into a uniform). But over in China he's a different sort of man: overbearing, insulting, cruel. The behaviour of the soldiers in Nanking, which was really of an animal cruelty, was an extreme example. They slap Chinese, and make them bow, and spit on them. There seem to be two levels of behaviour and thought in Japan, one civilized, the other imperial.

One of the brightest young men in Tokyo, I had been told, is Toshiro Shimanouchi, who works for Kokusai Bunka Shinkokai, The Society for International Cultural Relations. This is pretty frankly a propaganda outfit, and it is directed almost wholly at America. It has huge offices in Rockefeller Center. I think the man who invented K.B.S. is Count Kabayama, who believes that no matter how far Japan falls away from the rest of the world in political and economic matters, it ought to keep up its cultural relations. Count Kabayama, who is now 74, himself established cultural relations with America as a boy at Exeter. At Amherst, where he graduated in 1889, he was a great baseball star, and one of the things of which he is most proud now is that he can't straighten his index finger because of a baseball injury. He loves American culture almost more than Japanese. When he was in New York last year to try to figure out how K.B.S. would fill 7,000 square feet in Rockefeller Center, he went to I Married an Angel four nights running. Another of the founders of K.B.S. is an eccentric named Count Kroda. After mastering Japanese law in the Imperial University, he decided to throw it over and study Western music. He went to Paris, and before long he decided to throw music over, too, and devote his life to being a chef. But after a while he returned to Japan and music, and now he fosters competitions between young Japanese composers.

Shimanouchi himself is about 28 (though I never can guess the ages of Japanese; they all seem much younger than they are). He is more articulate in English than I am. He has a face rather like a cat's, and moves quickly. He is intensely ambitious; and so what he says is pretty much orthodox. For instance, when he talked about Shanghai, he said, "Shanghai is one of the gravest problems in the East now. Japan lost many men and much time during the Shanghai conflict because of the French Concession and the International Settlement. Instead of being able to drive straight through, they had to go around by the rivers, where they were vulnerable to attack by the Chinese. Instead of being able to use heavy artillery, they had to resort to bayonet attacks, which in built-up areas are very costly. The Japanese did not wish to disturb foreign properties, you see. Had it not been for this fact, the army might have swept through Shanghai in no time at all. And probably much less of Shanghai would have been damaged. For this reason, the Japanese are very bitter. They have not forgotten the inconsiderate behaviour of the foreigners in Shanghai. They will pay back in kind one day soon."

I asked Shimanouchi whether he might have to go off to war himself. He said he might, any day. He had been on the conscription lists since 1933. His class was called last year, but at the time he was in New York, and he had been left behind. Twice since, he has been called in for roöl call, and both times he thought

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it was the real thing. But each time he and a few hundred others were simply
drilled. The second time, after having been drilled from seven in the morning
until two in the afternoon without rest, the boys were lined up before the
commanding officer, who made a speech to this effect: "Japanese people like
the Chinese people, Japan is grateful to China. Japan got her culture from
China. Japanese characters are those which China gave her. We use chop sticks
just like those which Chinese use. Actually we are of the same race. You
young men must remember these things when you go to China. You are required to
be kind to the Chinese. You will be sent to China to help the Chinese people,
not to hurt them. Our enemy is Chiang Kai-shek, not the innocent people, who
have been duped by the Nationalist Government. In China, the army must always
behave with kindness and politeness." Later, when I told Frank Hedges about
this speech (which Shimanouchi thought insincere), Hedges said, "Yeah, and when
the same young men get into the Kwantung area in Manchuria for training, they
are taught not how to bow, but how to rip guts open with bayonets."

Late in the afternoon I went to see Wilfred Fleischer, editor of the Japan Advertiser and Herald-Tribune correspondents for Tokyo. He looks as if he might have gone to Yale and joined the Fence Club there, though I don't think he did; suave, very pleasant, sometimes preoccupied. While I was in his office, which might have been the office of an Ossining or White Plains newspaper, he got angry at his secretary two or three times.

He told me how he and the other correspondents piece the news together.
At the moment, the big question was whether Japan would sign a military alliance
with Germany. From government bulletins telling what conferences there had been,
it was possible to guess pretty accurately how negotiations were going. If there
was a full conference of ministers, that meant one thing. The council of five
(Ministers of xxxxxx Army, Navy, Overseas Affairs, the Foreign Minister and the
Prime Minister) was something else again. It meant something still different
if Konoye, keeper of the Privy Seal, should be visited by Foreign Minister Arita.
And if one or another had an audience with the Emperor, that put another shade
on the matter. The Emperor, Fleischer says, exerts a restraining influence on
his hothole ministers. For instance, during the Manchurian incident, his Ministers
were pleading one day for a strong hand. "Thirty million Manchurians," they
said, "want freedom from the bondage into which China has thrust them." "And what,"
countered the Emperor, "what if fifteen million Koreans wanted freedom from the
bondage into which we have thrust them? What would you suggest then?"

Fleischer told his secretary that since his father was arriving from the
States the next day, he would have to telephone the Herald-Tribune at noon
instead of eleven o'clock. I asked if he telephoned all of his news. Yes, he
did. But wasn't that frightfully expensive. Yes, it was the most expensive way
of all, but also the safest, he thought. In a year and a half he had only had
trouble once. When was that?

Just three weeks ago, he said, he had been phoning a story about the negotiations
over the anti-Comintern pact. Suddenly, in the middle of the conversation, he
was cut off. The operator apologized, and said that there had been a technical
hitch along the way. Of course Fleischer realized it was something more than an
accident. The next day he tried to call as usual. The company was very sorry,
the operator said, but weather conditions were not favorable for trans-oceanic
telephoning. The same thing happened the next day, and the next. Fleischer then
called up a friend in the Foreign Office, and said, "Look here, isn't it strange
that the weather has suddenly gone bad after having been fine for a year and a
half?" "Yes," said the Foreign Office friend, "it is strange. We will see if it
can be improved." But the next day the same thing happened, and Fleischer knew
that they had decided not to let him get through. And so he cabled the Tribune
to telephone him. They have been calling him every day since, and so far, Fleischer
says, the telephone people have been completely baffled. Not long ago the Foreign
Office friend called him up and asked: "Everything is all right now, no?"

It seems that there is no charge for the time which elapses in trans-oceanic
calls when sentences have not been heard and have to be repeated. On one occasion,
Fleischer thought he had been over-charged, and he called up the telephone people

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He told them that a large part of the conversation had been repeating. The operator said "We are very sorry if there has been a mistake. If you will come to the office we will play the record of your conversation."

Hedges said: "Please took us to dinner at the New Grand, which he says has the best foreign food in Tokyo. He considers it a place to get away from Japan. Mainly, I think, because it serves delicious hamburgers. Soon after we sat down the head waiter brought us a carnation. Hedges had just come from a press conference at the Naval Office where the spokesman had apparently accidentally divulged the size of the Central China Armies, and where they are posted. The figure he gave was 1,000,000 men in Central China, which is a larger figure than we later got from other sources. All the main China armies, Hedges says, are divided in three parts: in Central China, North China and Kwantung. The last army is presumably being held in reserve for action against Russia when that hypothetical war begins. To it go young recruits for equipment and training.

Hedges described the celebrations when boys go off to war. Some time before the departure all the boys' friends send ceremonial banners which are hung out in the street in front of the boy's home and which create a false air of carnival. The night before his departure his boy-friends give a big party which is apt to last all night. Shimanochi told me at lunch that he was still recovering from such a party which had been given five days previously. On the day of the departure, bands of girls go to the station to see the boy off, cheering and singing war songs. These bands of girls are organized into groups, and so, as often as not, do not know the boy they are seeing off.

From the New Grand windows we looked out on part of the Ginza and on the Asahi building, where one of the leading Tokyo papers is printed. Hedges said there were many less neon lights than usual. This was because of a thing with the high-sounding name of Spiritual Mobilization, which is an organized war spirit emphasizing self-sacrifice. Other ways in which spiritual mobilization is observed are self-sacrifice in food, entertainment and other luxuries. Actually, I found out later, spiritual mobilization is considered laughable by most of the intelligent people.

He said that Japan has a large secret gold reserve which has never been announced. He thinks it is held in foreign banks and he says that it is typical of Japanese psychology. The members of the Finance Ministry are, therefore, not nearly so perturbed about economic conditions as big business men who think they are being curbed rather more than they should be, and the public, which feels the pinch in shortages of cotton, gasoline, etc.

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At breakfast Hedges introduced us to Wills, editor of
Japan News-Week, an openly pro-Japanese English language
paper. Hedges said that Wills had told him that the paper
is supported by American money and that it had been capitalized
with ~~money~~ to last one year and would go on after that if
successful. Wills has been selling huge consignments of
various issues through the big companies. Matsui, for instance,
has taken 300 subscriptions, Presumably because Wills boosted
Matsui's ventures. The Japanese Silk Association bought up
several thousand to be used as a sort of hand-book at the
San Francisco Fair. Later in the day Ushiba roared with
laughter and said that Wills' paper is supported by the Navy.
This made me determined to have a *more* conversation with
Wills.

I had been told that before seeing anyone else in the
Foreign Office, it was necessary to talk with Kawai, the head
of the Intelligence Bureau. Unless I talked with him everyone
else would be suspicious of me. Fleischer said that a mysterious
character named Kumasaki, who had been in the agency, would be a good person
to get introduced to and so I arranged to have a conversation with
him in the Imperial lobby. He turned out to be the Hollywood
idea of a Japanese secret service agent. He was dressed in a
wing collar, dark suit, and striped trousers, and has a moustache
and wears very thin horn-rimmed glasses. He never speaks in
anything more than a whisper. He wrote several notes to people
in the Foreign Office. When I went over I was received by
Kawai's secretary who said Kawai was out. When I mentioned
Kumasaki's name the secretary bowed deeply and said that Mr.
Kumasaki was well known to him and was very well known to Mr.
Kawai. This left me completely mystified as to Kumasaki's job.

I had lunch with Buni Sugimura at a small Japanese restaurant. We had my first Japanese meal complete with geisha, raw fish and sake. The geisha was the prettiest I saw in my whole stay, and Buni said she is the mistress of a famous Japanese novelist.

I asked him about spiritual mobilization, and he said quite
flatly that it is the bunk. Superficially it is observed but
privately he and his friends go right on having a good time.
They even get drunk, stick their feet through paper walls of
the restaurants and often touch a match to them. The one way
in which they observe spiritual mobilization is not to roar
when they are drunk and in the streets. He said that spiritual
mobilization cannot be very extensively observed to judge by
the crowds at movies, sumo-wrestling, takaruzaka and classical
plays.

After lunch I went back to the Foreign Office. Kawai was
still out, so I saw his assistant, Harada, who served for many
years at the League Secretariat at Geneva. He speaks very good
English, is excessively polite, says 'yes' to every word and him-
self says absolutely nothing. I asked him if there was a

- 10 -

new unity of opinion or if there were still division between
those who favour and don't favour what the Government is doing.
"At all times," he said, "there is bound to be a division of
opinion in Japan, but it must be realized that at the present
time we are passing through a period of crisis, I will not
say a war period, and there is more unity of thought on these
questions than before this crisis began."

I asked him about Japanese feeling toward Britain and
he spoke about have-nots and haves and their natural
clash of interest. He included America among the haves, but
very politely spoke of "Britain and certain other nations."
"If you grant that Japan is to be the stabilizing influence
in China, it is inevitable that there should be a clash."

Mr. Carter forgot to tell Ushiba that I might be late
to an appointment with him, and so Ushiba was kept waiting for
an hour and a quarter. He laughed for almost five minutes
when I finally arrived. I asked him also about spiritual
mobilization. He said it had been regularly organised about
a year ago, mostly by ousted office-holders. The present
head is an old man named General Tsukushi who is just a
figure-head. They put up posters, persuade shops to cut
down on displays, issue pamphlets and send out a lot of
propaganda over the radio, but Ushiba thinks there is no
real effect and that the whole movement is terribly hypo-
tical.

Viscount Ishii, former Foreign Minister and Ambassador
to Paris, who is now the head of the I. P. R. in Tokyo,
invited us to dinner at the Hashigoaka Restaurant. Most of
the I. P. R. people were there including two or three
Imperial University professors and several younger men.
Hanako Iwanaga, the daughter of the head of Domei, the
Japanese official news agency, was there in Japanese dress.
Hanako was one of the few people in Tokyo who would speak
out against what was being done. I will tell some of the
things she said later on. The food demonstrated the
amazing Japanese capacity for imitation. We had apples which
originated in Minnesota which were four inches high, and
strawberries as big as pears, but both rather tasteless.

Next to me on my left was a man named Tsurumi, a member of
the Diet who is a terrific politician but also a brilliant
linguist. He kept asking questions and giving the answers
to questions other people asked. For instance, he knew better
than Mr. Carter and I which were the highest mountains in
America, exactly how big Lake Superior is and the names of
capitals of some of the western States.

Next to me on the other side was a younger man named
Matsukata who is about to go to Shanghai to take charge of
the Domei agency there. This is actually top position of
Domei in China, I gathered. He spoke about peculiar insular

- 12 -

consciousness. It is not so uncommon for a ski-player
to have such an accident. Last December I went to a
most snowy district & good skiing resorts (Seki & Akakura
of the Niigata Prefecture) with no less than a hundred
students of my school, among whom about a dozen boys had
their legs either broken or twisted, but then I could
not sympathize with them as deeply as I should now do,
for most of them were so young that their recovery was
pretty soon.

Anyway I can hardly go out and am very sorry
that I shall not be able to call on you at the Hotel.
The day before yesterday Mr. Norman's postcard arrived
here---only to make me regret that my leg would not
permit me to be of half a good friend to you as he hoped.

Only to go to school in a taxi which carries
me to the classroom and to give a lecture for 2 or 3 hours
is now more than a task for me, owing to the deplorable
condition of my leg, so will you please be satisfied
to know that I quite regret that I cannot be of any
use to you and that, were it not for my leg-disease,
I should be glad to show you both our school-building
& the students' life, for it would be now a good
occasion for you to see the school-life of those
promising youths who will be sure to have the future
of this country on their strong shoulders.

Yours very sincerely,
I. Nishisaki.

P. S. As I am a very bad speaker of English, I fear I
couldn't tell what I wanted to, when I called you by
telephone. On Saturday and Sunday I shall at home from
morning to night, as I am forbidden to go out except
to school (by the doctor, of course). Thank you for
your letter which I just now received when I have written
thus far. But I'm sorry that I cannot accept your kind
invitation to lunch or tea, due to the two difficulties,
one---my leg & the other---that I lost my father in
February.

13.

Saturday, 13th May

In order to get an authentic but outside view of the purely military possibilities, I went to call on Colonel Cresswell, the military attaché of the American Embassy. The Embassy buildings are, I found, as beautiful as any in Tokyo, perhaps because I was tired of cheesy Japanese imitations of western architecture. Actually these are probably cheesy western imitations of Japanese architecture but they are white and monumental and have very pleasing proportions. The grounds are beautifully kept and were brimming with flowers of all colours. Cresswell is a typical thinking soldier with deep lines in his face and a booming voice, but very articulate and clear minded.

I asked him what the American military dope was about the comparative fighting abilities of the Japanese and Chinese. He said that before the war, they had heard a lot about the consolidation of Chinese military forces and had heard that a really efficient machine was being developed. Then when the war broke out and the Japanese drove down two railroads from Peking and Tientsin without very much opposition; drove, after that, north-west from Peking equally rapidly; went from Shanghai to Nanking through carefully prepared defences at a rate which the American army would consider a forced march, they began to have their doubts. Later, when the Japanese succeeded in driving through country which should have been very easily defended, to Hankow, they began to feel that the Chinese just could not fight. Time and again the Japanese concluded landing operations, the most difficult of all military manoeuvres, with no apparent opposition. The American army people have finally come to the conclusion that Chinese inaptitude as soldiers approaches genius. He thinks, however, that they are rapidly improving and that many undesirable elements have been cut out of the army. In spite of this, he was very pessimistic about Chinese ability to resist further advances.

I asked him about the size of the Japanese army in China. He said their figures were that Japan has about a million men on the mainland, including all three divisions of the army, and have about 300,000 reserves ready at home. Then, besides, they have reserves who are trained, partially-trained and untrained to the number of over five million, so that there is certainly no shortage of men.

Another thing he said was that the guerilla fighting is really not significant from a purely military point of view. Guerilla warfare is altogether defensive and he expects no major victories from guerilla warfare. They may continue to bother the Japanese and hinder them economically but he thinks

14.

not enough to reverse the trend of the war. He stated that
guerillas must eat and without armies they are not guerillas,
and their weakest point is that they have no lines of communi-
cation on which they can depend.

I went over to the I.P.R. office to see if I was going
to have any luck about flying to North China. Kinkazu Saionji
had promised to see what he could do. When I got over there,
he said that the 'plane was full up for several days but that
he was still working on it. I asked him if he was busy for
lunch and he said that he would be delighted. I later found
out that he never eats lunch and went through with the whole
thing purely out of politeness. He took me to a 300-year old
restaurant near what I think was called Asakusa Temple and
Market Place. The restaurant was the prettiest I saw. We
walked through a complete maze of matted corridors to a small
room looking out on a garden, the stones of which, Saionji
said, the geisha girls scrubbed every morning, and had been
scrubbing for almost 300 years. Their smoothness testified to the
Saionji's statement.
the truth of

Saionji talked about the need for new blood and new life
in the government. He thinks that before long there will be
a really important social upheaval in Japan. It may not come
until the end of the war when the return of restless armies
to displace Koreans and women in jobs that they have taken over
during the crisis causes a labour jam. He sincerely hopes for
some restoration of common sense and of real ideals in Japanese
thinking. He says that his grandfather, the Genro, gets
furious with him whenever he talks this way, even though his
grandfather is said to be one of the few remaining moderating
influences in Japan. I asked Saionji what he thought would
happen to his own ideas if he was suddenly thrust into his
grandfather's position, as he may be. He admitted that he is
terribly afraid that he might, under responsibility and the
traditions of his grandfather's title, suddenly become quite
conservative and lose all his idealistic philosophy, but the
very fact that he recognises this, I think, indicates that
he would probably stick to his guns.

He told me who the mysterious Kamasaki is. He is
apparently a go-between for large munitions works and does odd
jobs for people in the government in return for favours to the
munitions makers. Saionji called him a "political pimp" and
said he is the sort of man who keeps the trouble going.

The sly Tsurumi took us to tea to meet Matsuoka, who
recently resigned as president of the huge Southern Manchuria
Railroad, a man who is said to be intensely ambitious to become

15.

premier, and who is constantly campaigning for that position. Tsurumi said that we could talk perfectly openly with Matsuoka, as he put it: "We ought to discuss human arrangements rather than flowers and arrangements." As it turned out, Matsuoka was not nearly as eager to talk as Tsurumi had indicated. Mr. Carter plunged right into things by asking when Matsuoka planned to become premier. That was greeted by an embarrassed silence, but after a while Matsuoka started talking.

Carter asked how long he thought it would take to stabilise the North China provinces to the extent that Manchuria has been stabilised.

Matsuoka said: "If they would listen to my advice I think it could be done in a year. It took five years in Manchuria but I think it could be done in one, perhaps two, in North China. The method I would use would be to enlist the help of Chinese to boss Chinese. It is an old and crafty plan to use Chinese to beat Chinese."

Carter: "Will Japan sign a military alliance with Germany?"

Matsuoka: "That is a hard question to answer. Some days ago the premier called a number of us together and spoke to us on the subject. He said that Japan's policy would be decided partially in deference to Japan's interests but principally according to how Japan's decision might affect world affairs. Our first concern is the peace of the world, not material ambition. We feel that the world has gone mad and that it may find itself in a conflict in which nine-tenths of what we call civilisation is blotted out. Sometimes I think that the sooner such a conflict comes the better so that the surviving one-tenth may then start afresh on a sane humane basis. I told the premier that if Japan decided her policy on a purely selfish basis which might get us into war, I would appeal to the people personally and get such a following that Japan's policy would be defeated."

Carter: "Does anti-British feeling run strong now?"

Matsuoka: "It does, and with some justice, I think. Japan would have been able to finish off this whole unhappy business had it not been for the fact that Great Britain has done all in its power to help Chiang Kai Shek. The attitude of Britain has been very stupid. Feeling here is so strong now that were I to announce that I planned to go to London to help Japanese-British relations along, I would never get out of Japan, but if I were to make the same announcement with reference to the United States, I would be praised from one end of Japan to the other and a brass band would see me off at the boat. If Great Britain signs an alliance with Russia

16.

there will be no retrieving Japanese opinion against Britain."

At this point, Mr. Carter played a somewhat dirty trick on Mr. Matsuoka. Seeing that Matsuoka had not realised that Elsie is English, he said "It would not be wise then for you to let the Tokyo papers know that you have entertained an English lady to tea." Matsuoka practically went through the floor. He hurriedly said: "In justice to present company, it must be said that no thinking Japanese holds these views. I refer only, of course, to the mob."

Carter: "Do you think war is apt to break out with Russia?"

Matsuoka: "I am badly afraid of it. Any hotheaded young lieutenant is apt to start hostilities by a show of spirits - a quick raid into Russian territory and back again. Some would say that the war with Russia has begun already anyhow. That is what all Americans refuse to understand about the incident in China. We are not fighting the Chinese people. We like the Chinese people. We want to help them. What we are fighting in China is Russian influence and the threat of communism. You may think that China could never become communist but you are wrong. Right now, Chiang Kai Shek is a tool of the communists. Perhaps it is true that China could never become completely Sovietised, but it is equally true that only a miserable minority in Russia are members of the communist party and yet they are led by a few intellectuals into a communist state. The same thing could happen and is happening in China. That is what we are in China to stop and our task would be much easier if Britain and America would try to understand."

Having delivered himself of this series of Japanese cliches, Matsuoka went on to really incredible perorations, somewhat as follows:

"Unless Britain and America cooperate and let us persuade China to work with us for our common needs, I can see no way out but continued struggle. In fact, I am intensely pessimistic for the world at large. When I retired from the S.M.R. I told newspaper men that from then on I planned to live quietly, reading and contemplating. I think that our only hope is a revival of religion all over the world. Sometimes I dream of wandering in many countries looking for a young man who could, by his dynamic leadership, start such a revival and restore to the nations the principles of brotherhood and love."

This, in the light of what we know Matsuoka represents, is a pretty amazing statement.

17.

In the evening, Mr. Iwanaga, the head of Domei, gave us a dinner at the very stuffy Tokyo Club. One of the people there was a young man named Shirazu, who was an old Clare man. In fact he had on his old Clare tie and if he had been English he would have been one of the so-called "old school tie" type. He is in charge of the fishing enterprises of Aikawa, who is the lord of all Manchurian business enterprises all the way from the building of locomotives down to the freezing of green peas.

Aikawa's empire is one of the most amazing monopolies in the world and is a twentieth century version of Japanese family businesses like Mitsui Eishi and Sumitomo. His enterprises are the result of a division of the S.M.R. into, purely transport businesses. Practically everyone at the dinner had some interest in the Aikawa enterprises. A young fellow named Uramatsu works for the Nippon Mining Co., which is also an Aikawa venture.

There was conflict between Shirazu and Uramatsu all through dinner. Uramatsu is a liberal, Shirazu a ruthless business man. For instance, Uramatsu would say: "We are raising the standard of living of our Korean miners and consequently make much less profit than the American mines near us." Shirazu would say: "Fool! You ought to lower the miners' standard of living and make some money." When he got on to the subject of the German military alliance, Shirazu said: "You have got to look at it as a business proposition. On the one hand, from certain nations, which I need not name, we have nothing to gain; on the other, we have plenty to lose. Now which would you choose?"

Mr. Carter, speaking about American public opinion, said that anti-German feeling in America is very, very strong, and yet it is not Germany but Hitler we hate. Shirazu said, perfectly seriously: "Would you prefer to Hitler's Germany, the Germany which preceded it - Bolshevik Germany?"

Iwanaga said that during the war, even though Domei has a complete monopoly, it has not been making much money. This, he said, was because they have to maintain with every army division two pilots, an aeroplane, two reporters, two photographers and a radio operator, all this so they can get news and pictures of "successive victories" back as quickly as possible.

18.

Sunday, May 14.

After breakfast I got Wills in the lobby and started
plying him with questions to find out what he would say
about his backing. He claims that the subscriptions are
now running to 10,000---far ahead of expectations. After a
while I asked him bluntly where he had got his backing. He
said that there were seven people who had put up the money
and he named four of them, a woman in California, an American
living in Japan, and so forth, and said the others were similar
people. Was there any Government backing? Lots of people, he
said, had been trying to accuse the paper of being a Government
held, but was not true. He cited an instance in which they
had been sharply called down for an anti-Government editorial
on the pact with Germany. Actually, I found out later, the
editorial condemned the pact, and it seems now that Japan
is not apt to sign it, so actually he was just expressing
the Government's view. It was not until the very end of the
conversation that Wills gave himself away. I was talking
about how hard it is to get a seat on a plane to North China,
but that I was working through Major Akiyama in the War Office.
He said if I had no luck with the War Office, to come and see
him because he has some very close friends in the Navy who
might be able to arrange it for me. He was in constant touch
with the Navy people, he said.

In the afternoon we went out to visit Uramatsu in a
suburban home. Uramatsu's house, like Matsuoka's, was in
western style, but in terrible taste. Matsuoka is probably
one of the richest men in Tokyo, but the house he lived
in was like any of ten thousand in Scarsdale and Bronxville.
Uramatsu has a charming American-educated wife who must
lead a dreadful life; having been exposed to the freedom of
an American woman, she has now returned to the rigid confine-
ment of a Japanese wife. She apparently never gets outside
the walls of the garden. She has two children to whom she
talks all the time in English. The three-year-old speaks
better English than a number of my classmates at Yale did
when they graduated. Uramatsu told about his mining and
was very bitter about the neighbouring American gold mine.
There, he said, Americans from the company/president's down
to the lowest technicians, went to work at 10 o'clock in
the morning and stopped at lunch and then spent the rest of
the day drinking cocktails or playing games. Out of their
mine they make a huge profit, partly because of exemption
from all taxes and very favourable extraterritorial rights
left over from the days of the Korean Kingdom and Empire.
In his own mine, by contrast, every one from top to bottom
works from 7 in the morning until 7 at night. They have no
pleasures---and no profits. This contrast is one of the few
things that makes Uramatsu believe in Japan's adventure in
China. It makes him really think that Japanese industrialists
can serve as well as exploit China.

19.

That evening Ushiba gave us a geisha party. The geisha girls clustered round Elsie to see how she fixed her hair, what her dress was made of, what lipstick she used and all the rest. The girls made polite conversation, sang war songs and did some formal dances and were hardly more noticeable in the evening's pleasures than various courses of indesible food. After about two hours of sake, Ushiba began to make some extraordinary statements. Since he has a reputation as a sincere liberal, we were not sure whether he was saying them in bitter irony or whether his liberalism is only skin deep. Out of the blue, he would say, "You have everything, and we have nothing" and then sink into morose silence for several minutes. Then again, "We are going to finish this business. We are going to fight it out to the end;" and several more like that.

Monday, May 15.

On the recommendation of Ushiba, I called on Hirota, Chief of the First Section of the Intelligence Bureau of the Foreign Office. The reason Ushiba wanted me to see him was that Hirota is not only a brilliant person, but is a spectacular example of a young officer in the Foreign Office. Every Japanese organization, whether it be business concern or Government bureau, is sharply divided between young officers and elder statesmen. The younger men always think that the elder ones are being too cautious and ought to take a stronger hand. Their influence, Hedges says, is really quite strong although indirect. One of the first things I asked Hirota was about this phenomena. He said the young officer group was the product of the world depression after 1929. All the young men who were in school at that time saw that there was no way out for Japan within Japan and that something violent would have to be done. It was the young officers who provoked the incidents in Manchuria and North China which actually started the war, and it would probably be the young officers who keep it going. In accordance with this division, Hirota's private opinions were pretty violent. He declared himself all in favour of the German Alliance. He said that the reason he was for it was that he is confident there will be no war for two or three years anyhow. But when it does come, it is essential that Japan is guaranteed German assistance on the western border of Russia. He does not think that Germany will make unreasonable demands on the Navy such as Shimanuchi had said he fears. Shimanuchi had said he thinks the Germans want the Navy to go right into the Mediterranean in case of war, and he also said "Our Navy certainly won't go further than Suez. They make take the Suez Canal, but they won't go any further." Hirota says he doesn't see why the Navy should have to go further than Singapore, but he said that most important reason for joining the alliance is that it would finish the China incident in this way: Britain seeing that Germany and Italy are cemented with Japan will see the futility of trying to maintain economic power in the

23.

"The Flowery Way." The curtain is striped blue, green and brown, the distinguishing colors of Kabuki. After the wistaria dance, we were taken back stage where we saw a fascinating maze of dressing-rooms consisting merely of blue, green and brown curtains around matting. There the actors were making themselves up in fantastic formal costumes. Underneath the stage we found that there was a mechanism for a revolving stage which was, in said, almost five hundred years old; so the stages of New York theatres are by no means original. This one though is turned by coolies who lay their shoulders against smoothly polished turning posts and push it around at a cue from the actors above. Salonji says that they once tried electricity, but the stage always began revolving at the wrong time, sometimes in the midst of performances, and so they reverted to the more primitive and dependable way.

23a.

Tuesday, May 16.

At lunch we underwent the most formal of Tokyo parties. We were invited to lunch by Sawada, the Vice Foreign Minister. I sat next to him and to Kawai, the man in charge of the Intelligence Department at the Foreign Office whom I had missed during the week. Kawai turned out to be something of a dilettante whose hobby was collection of Chinese curios. When he found that I was interested in cartoons of animals done by an early Japanese artist, he insisted on taking my name down so that he could get me some. I never heard from him later though. Sawada was a very meek, little man who said practically nothing. He told me one story about the time of the Versailles Treaty when he was in Europe at a lunch given by Stresemann for Chateaubriand. The menu list had the French wine called Chateaubriand. The next day Chateaubriand returned the lunch and put on the menu a Rhine wine, Schloss Stresemann, but Sawada had forgotten that they were wines and had gotten into trouble because of Chateaubriand on his own menu. It was not until the end of the story that he realized the mistake. His own menu was exceedingly elaborate in the western style, but Oeufs Aurore and Asperges Vertes had exactly the same reaction on them.

In the afternoon I called in at the office of Newsweek and had a talk with Vere Redmond, a very clever journalist who has apparently sold out completely to the Japanese. Like Shirazu, he takes the business man's point of view to everything, and he told me the principal business objections to Akawa and his upstart ventures.

Ambassador Crew had invited me along with some forty others to tea. I only had a chance to shake his hand and to be told that TIME would be perfectly popular in Japan if it would only lay off the subject of the Emperor. Crew is very handsome, tall, quite dark, and has the very attractive manner of a Groton Harvard man and the very vagueness. Most of the time I talked with Cabot Caville about sailing off Japan. Some young lady entertained on the piano.

In the evening Elsie and I went to a Japanese movie which turned out to be pure Hollywood with an emphasis on tears and sighs and ending up by the heroes going off to war with a very patriotic morale. The audience was very emotional and several men near us broke into tears.

24.

Wednesday, May 17

Elsie and I, having decided that we had reached an absorption point as far as Tokyo was concerned, asked Hanako Iwanaga to come with us to the mountains near Tokyo. Mrs. Frank Ferrell went with us. Her husband is a young tobacco man coming to the Orient for the first time. She had nothing to do all day while he worked and so was as bored with Tokyo as we were. Hanako was a wonderful guide because she talked all the time and told us the things we had been so eager to hear, namely, that not everybody *believes* the formulas which the Government hands out about the China incident. She called the incident a war. She said it was frightfully brutal and that no-one really liked it. Practically every statement which her father and various people in the Foreign Office and even such liberals as Saionji and Uramatsu had made, she answered with a very sensible and honest statement.

We had to go by train from Tokyo to Odawara and on the way we talked and read the paper. In the "Japan Advertiser" that morning we found the best example yet of Japanese *genius* for imitation. A whole ring of artists had just been arrested for having done imitations of antique art works so successfully during the last four or five years that not only did they pass as originals but they fetched higher prices than the originals, because they were better. From Odawara we took a bus which was jammed with mothers and children and Japanese tourists up to Myanoshita, where there is a famous resort hotel. Quite the most beautiful building I saw in Japan with a very tasteful combination of authentic Japanese and utilitarian western styles. But the place was a disappointment because it was so obviously a tourist stopping place. For instance, beside a pool in which huge *carp* over a foot long were swimming, was a sign in English rather than in Japanese: "Please do not feed the fish".

We had lunch at the hotel and then Hanako asked if we could hire a car to drive far up into the mountains to try to get a view of Fuji. One of the recent reforms in Japan has been a change in spelling under which Fujiyama is now spelt Huziyama. The hotel people told us that because of gasoline it is very difficult to get cars but they would see what they could do. In a very short time a car showed up which only had three gallons of gasoline in its tank, but we set out anyhow.

25.

We climbed first to Ojigoku, which, translated, means "Big Hell", and is an active volcano. I have never been so disappointed in my life. From my view of Stromboli, I had a very glamorous picture of volcanoes. This turned out to be just a smoking pit on the side of a hill and might have been the remains of a forest fire. There was an overwhelming smell of sulphur and you could see lumps of yellow on the underside of stones.

From here we were supposed to get our view of Fuji but it was shrouded in clouds. Hanako was bitterly disappointed at this because she really wanted us to see the mountain. She nearly broke into tears when she found that we were not going to be able to see it. I wasn't waged her that we would not be able to see it, because I had begun to think that Fuji is a myth and nobody really ever sees it. This made her very excited and she said that she would bet anything I wanted. Then she changed her mind and said that she wanted to bet an issue of "TIME" and would put up against it an issue of Saionji's picture magazine. I won, and the next day she promptly paid her debt.

From "Big Hell" we drove to Lake Hakone, which nestles in an old crater. There we got out of the car and walked up to a Shinto shrine. A very long series of steps between huge trees took us up to three small buildings, one of which housed the image which hundreds of people were coming at the time to worship, the second of which was a sort of storing place for all sorts of ceremonial images used at the time of festivals, and the third of which was a mere warehouse where sacrificial gifts could be left. In this warehouse was a huge pile of crates containing wine which one of the big Japanese vintners had apparently given.

On the way back to Myanoshita we saw a great number of both Koreans and Japanese women working on the roads crushing stone. Hanako said that this was a noticeable result of the drainage of man power which the army has caused. It is entirely new, she said, for women to be doing this heavy work. Later we saw women ploughing the fields. One of the most beneficial results of the war, said Hanako, is the new freedom which women are experiencing. Many of them have to go out on the parties saying goodbye to soldiers going off to war and since a lot of these in the evening when, by tradition, they are supposed to be at home, they have realised for the first time that they don't have to stay in their houses and so more and more they are getting out and are to be seen alone in the streets. In other ways, too, they are feeling their freedom and several people

26.

told us that this would one day become an important political factor. We went back to the hotel at Myaneshita for tea and then got a bus and a train back to Tokyo.

In the evening, Ushiba came in to report on the progress of I.P.R. negotiations. What Mr. Carter had been trying to do was to persuade the Japanese to participate in a study on the effects of the war on both China and Japan and also to take part in a conference at Victoria next Fall to discuss the same questions. Even the intellectuals and liberals who belong to the I.P.R. do not dare commit themselves on anything which may be construed as anti-government activity and so they have been unwilling to join either project. Ushiba in the next room laughed by the hour, louder and louder, and I knew that the discussions were going badly. Sure enough, next morning Mr. Carter told us that he had had to send a telegram saying "Negotiations complete failure but have not given up hope". He said that when he came up from sending that telegram he found in the lobby Colonel Minor, a Virginia tobacco man who had been carrying on equally strenuous negotiations to try to maintain such tobacco business as he has left in Japan. Mr. Carter told him what he had had to send in his telegram and Colonel Minor took out his pencil and a piece of paper saying "Will you repeat that? I have got to send one exactly like it".

These two telegrams indicate that both free thought and foreign business interests are being squeezed out as rapidly as the Japanese can accomplish it.

Thursday, May 18

Dennis McEvoy of the United Press had put me on to a young fellow named James Stewart, as an outstanding possibility for sending material to "TIME". I had a talk with him and found him a very bright man, just the sort of person "TIME" wants. He is about 25, was born in Japan and has lived there all his life except for four years which he spent at Duke University. He works for an outfit having the forbidding name of "The Grand Brazilian Coffee and Sales Propaganda Headquarters" which, however, has the natural innocent purpose of persuading Japanese to drink coffee instead of tea. They might be able to accomplish their purpose, Hedges said, if they could only teach the Japanese how to cook as well as how to drink coffee. Stewart's advantages are that he talks Japanese like a native, has a great number of friends among

27.

the younger War Office and Foreign Office people, has never-
theless kept his American point of view as to what is going
on in the Far East and can write well enough for the Associated
Press to try to get him to work for them.

Hedges took me to lunch at the American Club, which I found packed with both Americans and English. He told me about his experiences in Japanese earthquakes and how fierce earthquakes upset some foreigners to the extent that they have to leave. With him, earthquakes are a matter of course. They make him slightly ill for a short time, on much as other people get seasick. He missed being in Japan in 1923, but he has been in some pretty heavy ones since. Once he was staying in the Imperial Hotel, which is the one really solid building in Tokyo, and yet the feeling that he had to get out-of-doors was so overwhelming that he jumped out of the window into a tree, but he was soon shaken out of the tree on to the ground. The terrible helpless feeling that he experiences in earthquakes results from the fact that there is no place to be found on earth or water which is not shaking and there is just no refuge.

He introduced me at lunch to Pat Moran, the representative of the Associated Press in Tokyo, a youngish easy-going athletic man. Later in the afternoon I went to see Moran, who gave me a view of his ideas about the war in China and who talked, as other correspondents had, of the difficulties of getting news out. On one occasion a friend of his in the Foreign Office called him up at dinner time saying that he had just heard from somebody in the Navy that the Navy planned funerals with Navy honours for the victims of the Panay accident and would also pay compensation to the victims' families. This was just after the Panay had been bombed. The Foreign Office friend said that the news would not be released until the next morning but that if Moran wanted to anticipate the other news agencies, he would authenticate the statement. So Moran sent off a telegram to the A.P. in New York. Next morning, in the course of exchange of wires, A.P. cabled that they had not received the message about the Panay. Moran investigated and found out that the Home Office, a still different organisation from the office concerned with the story and the office which had given him the story, had stopped the message until hearing from Domei that it was O.K. He said that there are hundreds of examples of this sort of rivalry between the various departments of the government.

I had booked a berth on the train for Kobe three or four days previously to make sure of getting down in plenty of time for the boat for Shanghai. Before leaving, I had dinner

28.

with Elsie and Hanako, and after dinner Elsie went off to do some work. Hanako sat with me in the lobby of the Imperial for a few minutes. After a while her father, Saionji and Ushiba came in. Her father was visibly quite angry with Hanako for dallying in a public place with a man and he scolded her and sent her off to bed. The next day she told Elsie that she had been very much ashamed of her father for his "archaic behaviour".

Saionji went to the train with me, for which I was very grateful, for I would never have gotten on to the right train had it not been for his help. In the station were several boys going off to war with circles of girls standing around them singing songs. This was really a very moving sight. Hearing about it, I had dismissed it in a rather matter of fact way, but seeing it first hand, I got on the train, some idea of what it must be like both to go off to war and to see friends go - possibly never to come back.

The train was very dirty and my bunk hard, with nothing to put over me but a single sheet-covered blanket which was much too heavy for the warm night, but without it, I would have been much too cold. I had a compartment mate who made strange animal sounds all night long and it was he who woke me up next morning with his throat-clearing and coughing.

## Friday, May 19

When I opened the window shutter I discovered that we were passing through wonderful mountains covered with trees of many different brilliant shades of green, and in the flat valleys, farms, utilised every inch of soil - even the space between the four supports of high tension standards; each farm making a little pattern of its own with wheat, hand-planted in precise rows, and each field surrounded with a band of the crop which the field contained.

The dining car was absolutely packed and there were several men waiting. Whenever one of the people in the car got a seat, one of the people who was waiting ran for the seat, and after five or six who came after me had run past me, I learned that the only way to get a seat myself was to run fast. When I finally did get a seat, I found that breakfast was pretty unedible - sooty bananas, puffed rice with spoiled milk and some dried fried eggs. I was glad to get back to my compartment to watch the mountains go past.

29.

In Kobe, I took a taxi to the Oriental Hotel, which is huge and very old, and which had a great number of business men sitting in clumps in the lobby talking low as if what they had to say was secret. I asked the man at the desk for a single room in which to write some letters, and they gave me something which must have been a bridal suite. It measured at least 40 by 50 feet, had two huge beds, a teak table and several chairs draped in the white slip covers which appear in almost every Japanese room.

After writing a number of "Thank you" notes to people in Tokyo, I got out two letters of introduction which Art Smith had given me for Osaka.

Osaka is about half-an-hour from Kobe by electric car. On the way I read the "Japan Times", which reported that Japanese naval airplanes had the day before carried out what was called "spirited raids" on Swatow, and that the Tokyo Clearing House had reported that bank deposits had gained 131,000,000 yen as compared with the month before and two billion yen as compared with the year before.

The papers are filled with devastation in China on the one hand and prosperity in Japan on the other.

I also learned in the paper that the airplane which I had been trying so hard to get a seat on to North China crashed the day before at Fukokua, killing six people and injuring five others. I was certainly thankful for Major Akiyama's inability to get me on the 'plane.

At Osaka Station I stopped at the information desk to ask how far the first address was from the station. None of the men in the Information Bureau could speak English and for a moment I had the dreadful sinking feeling I once had in a temperance hotel where I stayed in Scotland - completely alone with no contact with anyone in the world whom I knew, but that was over in a second and I went out, got a taxi and rolled off the address in Japanese like a native. The driver came back at me with a flood of Japanese which, of course, I could not understand, but eventually he got me to the general neighbourhood and by asking several people, finally got me to the address of Mr. Kishimoto, a steel magnate whose acquaintance Art had made when he was in Japan. I was received by a man named Saito, who is apparently an employee, although it was never made clear. Saito said that Mr. Kishimoto was in Tokyo and would be very sorry to miss me. He had me in the house to write a note to Mr. Kishimoto.

30.

The taxi took me on to the Asahi Building, the address of Art's other friend, an architect named Iida. I handed the letter to the receptionist opposite an open office. The man at the desk and several others hovered around and tried to explain to me where Mr. Iida was in Japanese. No-one in the whole place could understand English. Finally a messenger boy ran off and brought back a very handsome young man, who said in French that he understood a little English but could not put a sentence together to save his neck, but he did know French pretty well. Could I speak French? I said I would try. I explained to him I didn't know Iida myself but a very good friend of mine was also a friend of his and I wanted to pay Mr. Iida his respects. He told me that Iida no longer worked in this office but that he was "tres tres gentil" and would doubtless like to see me.

The young man took me to a reception table, ordered two cups of tea, and we sat chatting about each other while various people tried to reach Mr. Iida on the telephone. He told me that he had studied architecture in Paris for two years, that he had travelled literally in every part of the world except South America and, for some reason, Persia. After a time, he was told that Mr. Iida was not at his other place of working either, and at his home a servant said he was out for the day but that he had received a letter from Art and was expecting me to stay with him for several days. At that, my young friend said that we should do everything in our power to find Mr. Iida. That was the beginning of a long and very pleasant day in the young man's company in pursuit of Mr. Iida.

The young man went in and got his hat and coat and we went to a grill on the top floor of the Asahi Building. A huge curving glass window on the corner of the building looked down over all of Osaka and in view of Osaka's dirty roofs, we did our best to converse in French. He told me more about himself, always modestly and humourously. His name was Yamaguchi. "Yama" meant mountain, "Guchi" mouth, together he supposed they meant "Mountain with a mouth" or volcano, but, he said, "If I am a volcano, I am extinct".

He took a cup of tea to keep me company while I ate. I asked him what places he had visited in the United States. He had been in New York, where he remembered affectionately "Le Theatre Minsky"; Niagara, but it was in winter and "tout gelé"; Chicago, a dirty city; and California, where "toujours il faisait beau".

31.

After lunch, he took me downstairs to the Asahi Building Club where he made further efforts to get in touch with Iida and where we talked on. He said that in Paris he had had many kind American friends. He liked the Americans better than the English because he could always tell exactly what they were thinking. He lives now in a suburb of Osaka near Kobe. He is married but has no children since he has been a husband for only six months. While in Paris he said he was always having to fly to London to take over Japanese friends who could speak English but no French, and show them the town. I asked him if he had been to the Opera much and he said he had taken everyone of the Japanese friends. He liked the comic opera but "Wagner - Bah! Gros". Like Sugimura, he said there was very little doing in local architecture. There is plenty to be done and there were plenty of materials to do it with but all the work and all the goods were going into Manchuria.

After a while an English-speaking friend came in and Yama went off to telephone. The friend, who works for a Canadian aluminium company, which has an absolute monopoly of the Japanese market ("business is naturally not bad just now", he said), told me that Yama is very kind, a very exceptionally talented person and the son of a baron.

Yama came back saying that he had been unable to reach Iida again but would send a telegram to his house. Meanwhile, we might as well go out and see the town.

We got into a taxi and Yama asked the taxi man in Japanese what there was in Osaka to show a visitor. Very disgustedly, the taxi man answered that Osaka was a barren city with nothing to show. This made Yama, who was dedicating himself to architecture in Osaka, laugh very happily. I knew better than the taxi man and asked if I might be taken to see the castle. Yama said he had not been there since he was a little boy and that it was a place for children and tourists to go. As it turned out, he was as fascinated by it as I, and I was delighted to show him his own city.

The walls of the castle both outside and inside the moat are made of incredibly big stones, some of them 30 to 40 feet across, and when the building was built there were no machines to set them in place. The castle itself is a huge tower something like the gates of Peking. It was partly ruined at the time of the Revolution in 1868 but has been restored with modern materials.

32.

On the way back to the Asahi Building, he walked me through the entertainment quarter and we stopped in a cabaret run by a man who had operated a Hamburger stand in Seattle for fifteen years but was now one of the entertainment kings of Osaka. There two geishas fed us beer, and said the few English words they knew: "Hi Big Boy", "You are very handsome" and "We are very sorry". This last phrase, perhaps because the government has had to use it so frequently lately, appears in almost every Japanese's vocabulary.

Afterwards we walked through the principal shopping street where there were huge crowds and gay banners advertising each shop's merchandise. Here, as elsewhere, the girls who were in western dress looked much less attractive than those in native dress. Almost every man was dressed western style.

At the Asahi Club we found that Iida would not be back until late at night. Yama was far more disappointed than I for I was having a fine time with him. At this point it developed that Yama had promised to meet his wife at the theatre at 5.30 and it was already 6.30. Nevertheless he insisted on taking me to the train and seeing me off, demanding that I return next time with enough advance notice so that he could take me to Nara and Kyoto. He apologised for ugly Osaka.

Before we parted, Yama said that he was very sad every time he thought of his close American friends and French friends and then thought of politics and war, but this day had made him very glad that he could still be so friendly with an American. I myself have seldom found anyone with whom I could so quickly establish friendship. All day long he had bought my tickets, my meals and paid my taxi fares and when I protested, said that his American friends had done the same for him many times.

Monday, May 22.

When I woke up at 6 o'clock we were already going up the river. After breakfast I went out on deck and found every junk and every freighter flying the Japanese flag. But the most horrifying sight I saw was a big black freighter being loaded up with Chinese scrap steel, obviously to be taken home to Japan. Later in the day John Morris, the United Press correspondent, told me that most of that had been stolen from front-yards and from old houses which had been bombed and from scrap dumps, and he said that "it would be dropped in China again in quite a different form." Every foreign vessel in the river had its national flag prominently painted on both sides and on the deck houses. When we finally docked we drove into town from the Hongkew side, where the devastation from the time of the war was still very visible. Hundreds of houses still stand in ruins. At the bridge, across Soochow Creek, which has been one of the most controversial spots, we saw every Chinese presenting a card of identity, take his hat off and bow low to the arrogant officer on duty. This humility is one of the most tragic sights in all Shanghai. We had a suite reserved for the day at the Park Hotel, looking down at the Race Course where we saw that no matter how the native population might be shaken, the foreigners were still going strong. Various clubs were marking out and rolling tennis courts for the afternoon's play.

Fred Sze of the Joint Savings Bank came to meet us shortly after our arrival. He told us of the superficial boom in Shanghai which was caused by number of refugees. Because the city is so crowded, for instance, his bank deposits are improving, but they are not yet at the pre-war level. He told us how the Japanese had been struggling to penetrate south and central China economically. Their Hua Hsing (Central China Development Co.) has issued currency like the Federal Reserve Dollar in the North, and the Japanese announced that this money would be pegged not against the Yen, but against Chinese dollars in the hope that they would be able to maintain parity, but the new Japanese currency in Central China has proved hardly more successful than the North China dollars. The day we were in Shanghai the Yen was falling fast. Probably simply because there was a surplus of Yen on the Shanghai market, but Shanghai business people were all exulting to see Yen falling to five and six per cent below the value of the Shanghai dollars.

Sze said that virtually all of Shanghai has moved into the International Settlement and French Concession. Consequently the streets are crowded and the city looks very prosperous. He told also how the Japanese have been carrying Chinese goods out of China all the way up the river as far as Hankow and have,

34.

in fact, not been able to cope with all the goods which they have been able to buy. All along the banks are to be seen piles of merchandise waiting for transportation.

The Chinese are famous for their susceptibility to bribery, but Sze told a few Japanese as well who were not altogether incorruptible. He cited a case in which Japanese had sold munitions to guerillas for use against their own troops.

I had a letter to Sam Chang of the Asia Life Insurance Company from C. V. Starr, a business man who is a friend of Henry Luce's. He reiterated what Sze had said about the superficial boom and said he thought there were a million and a quarter living in Shanghai who had not been before the war. Among these are a great number of Jewish refugees from Germany who are estimated to run to between six to ten thousand, with 20 or 30 thousand expected by the end of the year. There has for many years been about 25,000 Russians in Shanghai.

Chang said that the reason the Federal Reserve Dollar failed in North China was because the Japanese were out for quick profits. In Central China they have taken longer to plan their currency and they may take a long view which will keep them in a stronger position than they have been able to maintain in the North.

Next I called on *Maurice Harris* of the Associated Press. He is an old-styled newspaper man, cynical, out-spoken and worldly. I asked him what he thought would come of the Japanese attempt to get into the foreign parts of Shanghai. He said that crises come and go and that after a while one is apt to get hardened to them. For this reason he couldn't take a Japanese pressure on foreign settlement very seriously. But many of his friends think that Shanghai will be the next real crucial spot in China. The Japanese army has not scored any sweeping successes lately and if it becomes necessary for them to keep in favour with the people at home, they may very easily take the initiative in Shanghai and blunder in by force. He thinks the landing of marines at Kulangsu will deter such action though for sometime to come.

At the United Press office nearby John Morris told me how Jardine Matheson, the huge British catch-all company, has been gaining by every event in the war. For instance, Jardines have never been allowed to have their own wireless system by the Chinese Government. After the war began, however, they installed wireless not only on their own ships which had never had it, but also at Hankow, Soochow, Nanking, Shanghai and various other stations. Someone in the company had the bright idea that perhaps outsiders might also like the system and before long, Jardine's Telegraph

36.

Before the war, according to his report, it had a population of a million and it is now barely half that. All the educated and professional people have left the city and what is left is poverty-stricken and helpless population. The city is being governed by the so-called Reformed Government in control of the Japanese. This group, Bates says, are decades behind previous Kuomintang administration. Most of its prominent officials are left-overs from the old war-lords or discredited and disgruntled cast-offs from the Kuomintang. Communications are almost completely broken down. The only one of three railroads formerly in operation is the Shanghai line which now accommodates only about 30 per cent of its former passenger traffic and a few buses inside and near the town which carry perhaps one-eighth of its predecessors. Air and mail service are used almost exclusively by the army. There is no telephone service. Water and light services were first wrecked, then confiscated, then partially restored — which, Bates says, is the usual formula for Japanese "development" to date. Thousands of persons have had their meters stolen and then sold back to them. In the schools which used to have tens of thousands of students, there are now perhaps a thousand being taught. No new books except Japanese have entered the city in a year and a half and there is a complete cultural and mental stagnation. Harlots, opium and heroin are to be seen everywhere. He reported one poster advertising a brothel which was called "An Institution for the Development of Friendly relations between Japan and China." The drug business which is now licensed by the Japanese and which provides 125 establishments for the sole business of supplying opium, has increased tremendously over the pre-war period.

Bates told us that whenever residents/say "that is the bunk", they now say "that is a complete Domei." "Fred Sze arranged a luncheon with W. W. Yen who was formerly Chinese Ambassador to America and Russia, Alfred Sze (Fred's uncle) who also represented China in America and in London and who served the League all through the Manchurian incident, Kan Lee of the National Tariff Commission, C. S. Shen. The calmness and dignity of Yen and the older Sze was most impressive. Neither of them talked with any bitterness about the war. In the afternoon I called on Randall Gould, the managing-editor of the Shanghai Evening Post & Mercury, who was in the midst of a conflict with Miura, the Japanese Consul-General in Shanghai. The International Settlement and the French Concession authorities have been suppressing anti-Japanese Chinese language newspapers. One of the papers which they shut down was the Ta Mei Pao, which the Mercury owns. Gould and his backers, feeling that suppression may serve the Japanese as an important precedent for suppressing other foreign business enterprises, have been fighting the case tooth and nail. When I arrived they had just sent off a telegram appealing the case to Cordell Hull.

37.

Gould outlined the story from the very beginning. Apparently the law is on his side because American enterprises in the International Settlement are under the jurisdiction of an American Court. So far the Court has not taken up the case and Gould appealed to Hull to see that the paper's rights are upheld. Four papers were suppressed; two of them American owned. In order to keep the Evening Post's legal position clear, they published one edition after the French Concession ordered them to cease publication. Of course the Concession authorities seized copies of the paper. This establishes the fact that Concession authorities, rather than the American Court which has jurisdiction, acted against the paper.

Mr. Carter talked with Godfrey Phillips, who is the Chief Administration Officer of the Municipal Council and who is fighting against the steady encroachment of the Japanese as hard as he can. The position of the Municipal Council is exceedingly weak. Apparently the Japanese, who are gaining more and more positions by-passing within the International Settlement, will very soon be able to vote themselves into the Council. Phillips thinks that the Japanese do not realize that this is the case and is, therefore, anxious to keep it quiet. He hopes that the Japanese will try to move in not by this legal means, but by some violent means which will put them in the wrong. Phillips and every other foreigner was guessing whether the landing at Kulangsu was really intended as a warning against further encroachment in Shanghai.

Late in the afternoon John Keswick, one of the brothers who has inherited the Jardine empire, came to call at the Hotel. He told how the Japanese are trying to work themselves in into the Jardine Matheson set-up. He has spent at least an hour every day talking with some Japanese or other who says he has a plan for co-operation. One recently came in and said, "Let's expand the Jardine brewery," and presented a plan as follows: He suggested expanding the company's present capitalization of $8,000,000 to $12,000,000 to finance expanding the brewery. When Keswick asked where the extra money would come from, the Japanese said, "You put up $4,000,000 and I, for my part, will put up a mortgage on a sugar plantation in Formosa which is worth $6,000,000." In other words, Keswick's money would do the work and the Japanese guarantee would be an extremeley doubtful mortgage on Japanese property. In keeping with the tradition in Chinese and Japanese cotton mills, Jardine Matheson still maintains a 12-hour day. Its ships, manufacturers, and traders in every conceivable commodity, its interlocking relationship with the Hongkong & Shanghai Bank and now the wireless system which Morris described, make Jardines an example of British financed capitalism in its most extreme form. It has come pretty nearly to be an instrument of political conquest - the East India Company was in British India. It is no wonder that the Japanese wanted to move out. While I was busy with Gould, Miss Eleanor Hinder of the

Thursday, May 25.

I ended my last letter with our boarding the President Doumer in Shanghai. The trip from Shanghai to Hongkong was a very quiet one. I talked only with a Russian woman named Helen McBain, a friend of the Desborough's, and with a fantastic Cold-stream guardsman, tall, moustached and athletic. He claimed he was carrying a million yen from Shanghai to Hongkong so that some Hongkong business man could benefit by a small difference in exchange.

The day we arrived at Hongkong was a miserable one, but through the heavy rain we could see something of the beauty of the port. Standing on the dock to meet us, soaked to the skin, was Wellington Liu of the China I. P. R. and Chen Hanseng, a scholar and an authority on agrarian problems. Wellington Liu as soon as we docked told us about plans for the next few days. He said he had arranged for a seat on the plane for Mr. Carter, but was doubtful about my seat for the time being. He had just come back from Chungking and had some lurid tales to tell about the bombings there. During one of the bombings Tillman Durdin, the New York Times correspondent, was foolishly exposing himself on top of the building trying to get some photographs. A policeman shouted up to him to get down before he was hurt. Durdin shouted back "man-man-ti---take it easy." He turned round and was in the midst of taking a picture when there was a terrific crash. He turned round and saw in the place where the policeman had been standing nothing but a gaping hole.

We went first to the Peninsula Hotel which is on the Kowloon side of the harbour across from the main part of the city. After we had arranged about rooms, Wellington Liu took me across to the Hongkong & Shanghai Bank Building, a near-skyscraper which is air-conditioned. There I met Mr. Wen Yuan-ning, editor-in-chief of the T'ien Hsia Monthly, a cultural magazine published under the auspices of the Sun Yat-sen Institute for the Advancement of Culture and Education, and Mr. C. H. Lowe who helps Mr. Wen and also does some work for the Central Publicity Board. Lowe used to be in the Y. M. C. A. and remembered father very well. He took me to the American Consulate in the same building to get a Chinese translation of my passport and vise so that Chinese officials would be able to pass me without trouble. While I was there, I dropped in to see Consul-General Southard who spoke of how unsuited to war the Chinese nature is. He said that most Chinese would much prefer to comply with mild unpleasantness rather than expose themselves to violent unpleasantness. This characteristic, he thinks, accounts for the number of men who have become puppet officials and also for the weakness of Chinese resistance. In Hongkong there are a great many such men who are wealthy and selfish and who are working hard to make

2.

as much money as they can while their country is in serious
trouble.

Wellington found that the plane would not fly that
night because of the weather and he also discovered that I
had a good chance of getting on the plane when it would go.
Apparently Wellington had talked with P. N. Chung of the
Central Bank who has two seats at his disposal each flight.
He was willing apparently to have a Central Bank official,
who was to have gone to Chungking, wait a few days so that I
might go. When Wellington told him I had a letter to T. V.
Soong that more or less clinched the matter.

Mr. Carter entertained at dinner at the hotel Liu,
Chen, their wives, Elsie and me. Chen said that the Japanese
bombings in Chungking had been quite definitely for purposes
of terrorism rather than for military objectives. The Japanese
had bombed only the civilian sections knowing perfectly well
that the Government buildings are at the upper end of the town.
Actually the effect of the bombings is quite the opposite from
that intended, namely, to terrorise the population and make
them agitate for peace and submission.

Chen said that China's two most pressing non-military
problems are transportation and idle capital. Of the few arteries
which can supply the capital with its necessities, the Burma
Road, the Kunming-Chungking Road and all the other main lines in
the South-west are apt to be damaged by the rains. He said it
costs $3,000 a ton to get things from Rangoon to Chungking, $1,000
per ton from Kunming to Chungking, and of course in war-time the
time element is tremendously important. Over rough roads trucks
have to take it slowly. As for the idle capital, he reiterated
Mr. Southard's remarks about the rich Chinese who have taken to
Shanghai and Hongkong and who will not put their money behind the
Government's cause. He estimated that over U.S.$3,000,000 are
being used in Hongkong for speculation in American bonds.

After dinner Edgar Snow came in. He is extremely
attractive, a great lover of causes and yet not overly earnest.
He had talked with Ambassador Clark Kerr just the day before and
told of Clark Kerr's narrow escapes in the Chungking bombings.
Just as he got inside the front door of the Embassy, a high
explosive bomb landed in the front garden only a few feet away.
It failed to go off. An incendiary bomb landed right beside it
and went off, but had no effect. In a moment another bomb landed
behind the back door. It was also a dud. One bomb landed in
the tennis court and did go off. One of the Embassy secretaries
was outside the rear compound gate trying to get in. The tennis
court bomb didn't knock the wall down, but loosened some bricks
from the top, one of which fell on the secretary's head giving
him a nasty cut. Clark Kerr said to Snow, "God, how I wished
that brick had hit me. I would love to carry a scar from this
business."

(Edgar Snow)

3.

He told us about the work of the Industrial Co-operatives. Over a thousand groups of seven to twenty workmen in various numbers have been organized into small co-operatives to afford a sort of guerilla industry as a war-time emergency. They are doing wonderful work, thanks principally to the energy of Rewi Alley, a former engineer-advisor to the Shanghai Municipal Council who has travelled around the country organizing co-ops. In a few minutes Ida Pruitt, an old China-hand in relief and missionary work, and James Bertram, who is Communist and author of "Crisis in China" and "Unconquered", came in also to talk about the co-ops. They are badly in need of fresh capital and of certain materials like tires, gasolene and looms. Mr. Carter and I are very enthusiastic about the Co-operatives and hope we may be able to get such people as Mr. Luce to give them some help.

Friday, May 26.

It is necessary to register with the Hongkong police within 48 hours of arriving in Hongkong. I went over in the morning to the office to register both for myself and for Mr. Carter. In the five minutes that I was there, two Czechs came in and announced their intention of staying on in Hongkong. I asked the clerk if there were a great number of Czechs who had come to Hongkong recently. He said that my seeing two of them was merely a coincidence. Hongkong is, however, flooded with refugees, on the one hand Chinese and the other German Jews. Two American girls came in very angry at the inconvenience of having to register and annoyed that Great Britain could not trust American citizens. The man patiently explained that such nations as Japan are obliging nations with the best of will to resort to tactics of suspicion and caution.

Mr. and Mrs. Guenther Stein came to lunch at the hotel. Mr. Stein is a very distinguished economist who has been 12 years in Japan but who left about two years ago because he could no longer find out what he wanted to know or write what he did know. Stein is just starting a fortnightly news letter to which TIME must subscribe. Also he is so well informed and has such a good sense of humour and likes TIME's sort of stories so well that I hope to persuade him to send us occasional letters. He suggested, for instance, that I should without fail see two broken down old hangers-on called One-armed Sutton and Two-gunned Cohen previously advisory generals with the former war-lords.

Stein had just heard that the Japanese intended to set Wang Ching-wei up at the head of a super-puppet government in Hankow with control over the secondary puppet governments in Peking and Nanking. The present whereabouts of Mr. Wang Ching-wei are a matter of gossip. Apparently he sailed from Haiphong by a British freighter. It stopped in Hongkong for a few hours and was joined by a Japanese cruiser which escorted it to Shanghai. There Wang Ching-wei is said to have gone ashore and

4.

called on the French authorities to thank them for the asylum
in Indo-China. After writing two poems, he went on board the
Japanese cruiser on which he is said to have visited Japan
at least once, perhaps twice.

I went to have a talk with Yates McDaniel of the
A. P. He is a man of about twenty-eight with snow white hair
round the temples. I wondered whether the China war gave him
the white hair and his trembling hand. He is dreadfully pessi-
mistic about China's chances, but admits that it may be because
he is bored with his job. He has not been in America for 12
years and has been working night and day in the grimmest of
conditions and thinks it is about time for a vacation. He
went through the fall of Nanking and stayed in the city a few
days after its fall. He was appalled at the rapidity with
which the defences which had been built with more than a
year's labour and with millions of dollars fell before the
Japanese advanced. He said that he went outside the city
before it was taken and sometimes found himself behind the
Japanese lines because the Chinese were running away so fast
and the Japanese after them so fast. He thinks, though, that
Chiang has improved the army a thousand per cent since Nanking
by getting rid of undesirable elements and by improving the
spirit but there is still such a material difference between
Japanese and Chinese troops that he thinks the Japanese could
make any advance they wished. He thinks as Colonel Cresswell
did that the guerillas are not tremendously important.

We had Chinese dinner in the evening with Liu and
his wife, Lowe and his, Chen and his, and a professor William
Johnston of George Washington University who knows Anita of course.
My first Chinese meal took me back to Tientsin days, what with
shark fins, stuffed duck, paotzes, highly seasoned fish and the
rest. Chen said that Japan is doomed because he thinks it bound
to have a social revolution if not right away at least when the
war is over. The flood of returning troops displacing temporary
labour, attempt to restore pre-war conditions, and a return to
calmness after the excitement of war-time, will produce an upheaval
which is apt to change the whole structure of Japanese society.
A knowledge that this is bound to happen is one of the main
reasons why Japan cannot stop what it already realizes is an
indiscretion in China.

Chen and his wife took us to a dance for the Co-
operatives. Most of the guests were Chinese. Because of the
differences in dialect many of them found it easier to speak
to each other in English. Chen pointed out that Chinese women
have westernized their style of dress from the ground up,
and with an intellectual love of symmetry, he likewise argued
that the Chinese social structure had been modernized from the
top down. First the women unbound their feet, then they wore
stockings instead of socks, fitted their long gowns first to

5.

their hips then to their busts and finally cut their sleeves off and decorated their faces. In politics China started with the Opium War in 1842 which was caused by foreign pressure. The Taiping peasant revolt in 1860 was actually caused by the pressure of the Manchu Court and was not a real revolution as it had no leaders from the ranks. Then the Boxer Rebellion at the turn of the century was really a fight between bureaucrats and foreigners and again had no leaders from the people. The revolution in 1911 was fostered by liberal intellectuals and actually put off by military opportunists; this one for the first time had a nationalistic phase. Not until 1919 with the beginning of the Student Movement over the Shantung question did a really popular uprising appear. Then, of course, in 1925 nationalism really began to take root among the people. Since then, Chen thinks, the modernization has really reached its important stage at the bottom.

Saturday, May 27.

I had lunch with Israel Epstein, the same Izzy with whom I went to school at the American School in Tientsin. He is working with the Industrial Co-operatives while waiting for a newspaper job. I remember so well the time he broke his leg and was propped up in bed with weights and counter-weights. He planned at that time a history of the world in three volumes and I remember how jealous I was of him when the North China Daily Star ran an article about his plans on their front page. Another vivid memory I have of Izzy is of sitting on the see-saw in our yard one day and asking him what his nationality was. His answer has become a perfect description of present-day Jews. "I have no race," he said, "and I am of all races. My people are wanderers." At the time, of course, I could not understand what he was talking about. He has worked with the U. P. in Tientsin, Nanking, Hankow and Canton. Recently he has finished a book about his experiences which the Left Book Club is going to publish. He gave me quite a different picture of China's possibilities than McDaniel did. Epstein thinks that not only is the spirit enough to resist Japan's advances, but combination of topography and foreign help is putting China on her feet. He thinks Japan has gone about as far as she can.

Graham Peck had asked me to see if I could find him some sort of job out here. I talked with Ida Pruitt on the subject and she said that there might be room for Graham in the new transportation section of the Industrial Co-operatives, but since the co-operatives are purely a war-time proposition at the moment, she can't promise him steady work. She said, however, that he ought to come out and then find something when he gets here.

6.

We had tea at the home of Wen Yuan-ning. One of his guests was a great lawyer, Dr. John C. H. Wu, a close friend of the late Justice Holmes. Dr. Wu explained the difference between the spirit in Tokyo and that in Chungking by this parallel: "The Japanese are like a family whose father has committed a crime and is about to be physically punished for it. Naturally they rally to his defence, but their conviction is not strong. The Chinese are like a family, one of whose female relatives is being raped. Their defence is, of course, a much more wholehearted thing." Mr. Wen studied at Cambridge and we exchanged numerous anecdotes about our experiences there.

News of a severe bombing in Chungking delayed the plane another day.

Sunday, May 28.

All day long until 4 o'clock I worked with Mr. Wen's secretary on the last letter. She has been most efficient and helpful.

For tea I took the cable car to the top of the hill to the Peak Mansions where I had tea with Stein. He has a magnificent view looking down over the hills on the other side from Hongkong down on the wild inhabited hills running down to the sea which is crowded with small islands and tiny junks. He said he would be glad to write occasional letters for TIME. He gave me a tip about the possible visit to China of Hjalmar Schacht who apparently believes that there will be no war in Europe and that Germany will need some economic safety valve and that China is her best hope. He is himself something of a sinologist and wants some day to settle down out here. He has been visiting India and has recently come as far as Rangoon which is now China's threshold. However, he has had some difficulty persuading his own government to let him come and Japan's government view such a visit with a passive eye. If he does come it will indicate that Germany is using the Japanese alliance merely as a matter of convenience, that some factions in Germany would like to see Japan beaten in China and a free China left for German business enterprises to deal with. I asked Stein how much official backing Schacht has. He said that Hitler himself is still behind him, but that Nazi Party officers are very much against him. He has the backing of bankers and financiers, however, to whom the Party is obliged to kowtow. Schacht believes himself that the Nazi regime may be replaced soon by a Reichswehr Government with Hitler kicked upstairs into a figure-head position. If this happens Schacht will be back in power and any overtures he may have made in China will prove effective.

In the afternoon the coastal station began flying typhoon warnings at first only warning 1, which means that there was a disturbance in the neighbourhood which might affect Hongkong. Then later warning No. 7 "Gale expected"

7.

from North North East." Naturally the plane trip to Chungking was cancelled again. We began to find the business of expecting to go each day and then finding that we could not a bit nerve-racking.

Monday, May 29.

When we got up the typhoon warnings were still flying and the Peninsula Hotel had boarded up the big windows of its dining room. Nevertheless the officer of Eurasia sent word that the plane would leave early the next morning.

I lunched with Snow in the Hongkong Hotel. We talked principally about the Co-operatives and Rewi Alley. I hope to persuade TIME to put Alley on the cover because he is a colorful personality and the Co-operatives are really the big story of the last few months.

After finishing my work on my letter, I had a talk with one of the hangers-on, General Sutton. He was more than willing to talk.

He is a huge, burly man of 55 with an English accent just one step above Cockney. He spent ten years before the War engineering in the Argentine and Mexico. He lost his right arm in the Gallipoli campaign and was invalided out of the army. He went to the States in 1917 to sell the Stokes Gun to the American Government. At first he tried to arrange a royalty contract, but then the Government persuaded him to take a $500,000 down payment for rights on the gun. "When I went home," said the General somewhat pathetically "they took it all away from me."

His next adventures were in Siberia. He went 2,000 miles up the Amur river to set up a gold mine and had to carry with them 300 tons of machinery. He took also 15,000 barrels of nails, 10,000 shoes and hundreds of horse-shoes because he thought those were commodities he could sell with no trouble at all. He had one difficulty after another. For instance, he found that Siberian horses were so small that he had to have each horse-shoe cut in two and made into a pair. He got his materials as far as Blagovestchensk. Every year on Guy Fawkes Day the Amur freezes over and from there on for 500 miles, using forty sledges drawn by 300 horses, he had to transport all his stuff over the ice. When he returned to Blagovestchensk, he had to make some arrangements with the new Governor of the district, a former school teacher whom the General had previously known. The Governor said that the General could have anything he wanted. One thing he wanted badly, said the General, was a house, a brick house, if possible, for there was at the time fighting going on around the town and many of the houses had burned down. The governor

8.

said he would go out and find a house fit for the general's use. Out in the street, they got into an old Chandler which had been the general's car and which he had to leave behind when he went up the Amur. It was now the general's private car apparently. Sutton presented it to him formally and in return the governor picked him out the best house in town in the Russo-Asiatic Bank, a tremendous building covering a block and a half.

Within two months the gold mine had produced $60,000 worth of dust. However, his miners began to get revolutionary ideas. One day at noon they came to see him armed with rifles, demanding to work the mine on shares. Since they did the work they saw no reason why they should not get as much as he. During that night, Sutton, his foreman and a Spanish cook packed up a few things and hurried away down the river. Sutton managed to get a little of his gold which he had stored up in Blagovestchensk out to China and after a while he managed to sell his dredge. His 10,000 shoes were stored in a godown in Blagovestchensk and the Reds knew about it. He wanted to advertise in the newspaper to sell his shoes. A Greek friend told him that the place to advertise was on the local newspaper in the third page because it was on that page that the list of prisoners who had been executed each day was placed and everybody read the list to see if friends or relatives had been killed. Before long his advertisement got results. A committee came to negotiate with him for the purchase. He offered the shoes at U.S.$7 a pair. A soldier hurriedly dismissed the meeting and told Sutton that he would come and call on him that night. When he came he said that if they bought the shoes at U.S.$7 a pair all the commissars would be shot for their pains because they had never bought shoes for anything less than $15 a pair. Sutton suggested they might as well pay $15 a pair and keep for themselves $3 a pair. So with $30,000 of squeeze, he sold his shoes at a monstrous profit. As it turned out, Russians have a very high instep and all the shoes had to be split open and given extra large tongues to cover the gap.

Sutton lived high those days. He and his Greek friend stole stocks of wine from White Russians who had been executed and every night he and the Greek entertained commissars.

In 1921 the general went to Chungking and started making trench mortars for a war-lord named Yeng Sen.

9.

After 18 months of that, he moved up to Mukden where he went
to work for Chang Tso-lin. He stayed with the old hung hou-tze
until just a few months before he was killed. Now he is free-
lancing as a military adviser. He would like to go to Chungking,
but really hasn't the courage to face the bureaucrats. In the
old days he could go straight up to a bandit, slap him on the
back and get a job. Now, he says, you have to talk with three
hundred people before you can see the right man. He has some
rather fantastic ideas as to what China should do to strengthen
herself. One is to introduce glass instead of steel for shells.
He says that experiments are being made in one of the Scandina-
vian countries on press glass shells. Their advantage, of
course, is that they could be made on the spot without importa-
tion of any raw materials. Wherever there is silica the Chinese
could manufacture shells. Another of his ideas is to use
cheaper artillery equipment. He has a simple formula. You
compute the number of men to man a gun, multiply by their
annual wage, divide by ten and you have the amount you should
spend on a gun for those men. In England or America, you would
rate six men at about 12,000 dollars which would make your field
piece worth about 1,200. A Chinese crew of six, General Sutton
would value at about $600, making the field piece worth $60.
The General's mathematics are, of course, a bit simple.

10.

Tuesday, May 30

By the time it became light we were out of the typhoon area and the sun broke gloriously over scattering clouds. The scene which gradually unfolded was a magnificent one. We were flying at about 10,000 feet but the mountains reached up and around us. Soon the topography changed to those curious cone shaped hills which appear in Chinese prints but which have always seemed unbelievable to me. We landed after about three hours of flying at Kweilin, in a small valley completely surrounded by those hills. Chen Han-Seng said that Kweilin, in Chinese classics, is called the most beautiful place in China, and I think he is right. The landscape is fantastic and dreamlike.

A Russian in civilian clothes boarded the plane at Kweilin along with a young Chinese officer, the first visible indication of Russian influence in China.

We took off after loading up with gasoline (poured in by hand from familiar gasoline tins) and flew straight out over Kweilin town, which was badly bombed in the winter. The population of Kweilin was singularly fortunate in having huge caves in which they could take refuge during the bombings.

From Kweilin on, the landscape changed again. The mountains ran in straight rows with rivers between each row. Sometimes they were so neatly aligned that it seemed that a huge plough had been run down the hills by some gigantic force.

We arrived in Chungking, which lies at the meeting of the Yangtse and the Kialing rivers, at about noon. Naturally we were terribly anxious to see how much damage had been done by the bombings. We saw plenty. There were huge white scars where whole sections of the town had been bombed and burned. The landing field is on a sand bar in the Yangtse which will be covered by water in a few weeks when the river rises with the rainy season.

As we got off the plane a gendarme presented us with forms telling why we were coming, how long we intended to stay, etc. The Russian, when the gendarme offered him a blank, dismissed the boy with a smile and a shake of his hand.

A young man named Chou from the Central Publicity Office was at the field to meet us. We climbed some 300 stone steps up the steep face of Chungking to a main street and went from there by car to the Publicity Office, where we met Hollington Tong, the Vice-Minister of Propaganda, and some of his helpers.

11.

Not having had anything to eat since dinner the night before and having had no sleep, we were in fairly ragged condition. Nevertheless, we started right in seeing people.

Mr. Tong introduced us to Theodore H. White, who came to China on a Sheldon Fellowship from Harvard to study Village Government, and who found when he got here that mere studying was not enough, and who joined the Chinese Government publicity staff.

Mr. C. T. Kyi took us to see T. T. Li, who has been the spokesman of the Foreign Office and who is about to leave to be Chinese Ambassador to Cuba. This interview was at the Foreign Office, which was badly shaken up in the last bombing. The ceiling of Mr. Li's office had mostly fallen down and there were holes in the walls cut by bits of shrapnel. He told us that the spirit after the last bombing was extraordinary. The whole staff of the Foreign Office took refuge in a dugout until the all-clear signal was given at 9.30, then they came out and in the dark, cleared away all the rubbish and came to work the next morning at 8 o'clock as usual.

After seeing Mr. Li, we had a long interview with Mr. Hsu Mo, who has been Vice-Minister of Foreign Affairs for at least ten years. He, too, spoke about the wonderful spirit in Chungking and gave us our first idea that the Japanese bombings are really having exactly the opposite effect from that intended.

At long last at 1.30 we were taken by Hollington Tong and some of his staff to a feast at the Sun Sun Gardens, the only good restaurant left unbombed in all Chungking. It was literally jammed and we had to wait half an hour for a table. Part of the restaurant consists merely of temporary mat shedding to cope with the crowds who are eating there now. One of the people who was at lunch was Dr. Fenn, who taught Rob and Art at Tungchow. He is now teaching at the Nanking University, which has moved to Chengtu.

At 3 o'clock we attended the weekly press conference at which General Feng Yu-Hsiang spoke on the training of new recruits. General Feng is nominally second-in-command, though actually has little control over military decisions. His principal use is as an inspirational trainer for new soldiers. He said that peasants make the best soldiers. "They are like a piece of white paper" he said, "anything you draw on it stays there." He spoke in a salty mandarin with violence and the singing intonations of the Kabuki narrator we had heard in Tokyo.

12.

One of the things that was most noticeable in his description of training was the Chinese love of repitition. Many times a day his officers read out questions like these, which the men answer with a huge shout: "Who murdered our fathers and mothers? -- the Japanese devils", "Who occupied our northeastern provinces, Peking, Tientsin, Shanghai, Nanking, Hankow? -- the Japanese devils", "Who violated our mothers and sisters? -- the Japanese devils", "Who stole our valuables, our food, our homes? -- the Japanese devils", and so on for 38 questions.

The general's secretary was a young man of about 20, a read-headed Russian, son of one of General Feng's favoured advisers. He followed the general wherever he went with an adoring expression.

Mr. Kyi took us for a drive through the city so that we might see close at hand the devastation from the bombings. Some parts of the city are a dreadful shambles. There is no method to the Japanese bombing except to kill as many as possible. Not a single military or political objective has been bombed - only homes, banks, shops and parks. The whole banking district has been destroyed, one large section of the business district is completely ruined but worst of all was a huge swath of the crowded homes nearby the hill on which stand various foreign embassies (except the American, which is across the river). This section was as bad a sight as Guarnika and parts of Barcelona. In this section fire followed the bombs. Five hundred Chinese were caught by the fire and forced to move up the hill toward the embassies. A high stone wall separates their part of the town from the Embassies' and gradually they were forced flat against that wall. No help was forthcoming from the German Embassy just above - all five hundred were roasted to death against that wall.

In one of the dugouts which had not yet been completed with a secondary exit, three hundred people were trapped when the mouth of the dugout was blocked by a direct hit. Fumes of sulphur from the bomb suffocated the few people who were not killed by the concussion. When they came to open the dugout to remove the bodies, the man who entered first came out pale and trembling and said, "It is no use, we must use this as a tomb, one body cannot be distinguished from another."

One of the greatest difficulties in the bombings is the superstition of the people. They think, for instance, that if they get under a tree they will be perfectly safe. In the bombing just before our arrival over 100 had been wounded and killed in the open park on top of the hill. Scores of others thought that they would be safe in the sections of the town which were already devastated and clamoured inside the ruins but the Japanese bombs were dropped without plan, and so these scores were killed and wounded too.

13.

The sky that afternoon was crystal clear. When we got back to the Publicity Office, I chattered with White and with Pepper Martin, the United Press correspondent who had written the lurid description of the bombing which I had read in the Hongkong paper just two days before. Martin and White were convinced that the bombers would come that afternoon and were speculating as to what would be the best place to go, both for safety and to be nearest the bad news when it was made.

The Publicity Office wanted to put Mr. Carter and me up in the Foreign Office guest house. White said that as a journalist, I could hardly afford to be so far from town in such a safe refuge, I ought to take my chance along with the other newspaper men down in the Canadian Mission - on the tip of the tongue which Chungking makes between the two rivers - the point at which the Japanese bombers direct their sights. At about 5 o'clock I rode down to the Mission with Tillman Durdin, of the New York Times, and a Y.M.C.A. secretary named John. John said that bombers were reported coming along the road toward Chungking.

The Mission is right on the river at the foot of a fire line cut through the thickly crowded buildings by Chungking police. As soon as I arrived some of the people who were staying there took me downstairs into the basement to see their dugout "just in case". The dugout consisted merely of a pile of sandbags braced with some logs... it would hold, they thought, in every contingency except if the Mission should be directly hit. They told me that a warning syren blows about half an hour before each bombing. At about six they began to look at their watches - the last bombing had come between 7 and 9 o'clock. Apparently the Japanese planes are equipped for night flying so that they can return to Hankow, where they are based, after dropping their stuff on Chungking. The Chinese air force, on the other hand, is not equipped for flying in the dark and the Japanese had apparently found this out and had changed their schedule of bombing from mid-afternoon to evening. At about 6.20 the people in the Mission began to say "now is the time". No warning sounded, however, as the minutes ticked off to 7 o'clock. Durdin perfectly casually suggested a game of deck tennis on the compound court but no-one was interested.

At 7 o'clock we went in to a rather nervous dinner. A man named Gordon Jones, a husky old-style missionary, is in charge of the Mission. He only asks Chinese $5 a day of the people who stay there, that is less than US$1. How he makes the place pay with Chungking food prices as high as they are I could not guess. Among the others staying there were Arthur Allan, a Y.M.C.A. secretary who came to call on father about eight years ago: a young Australian named Baptiste, who is a wool salesman: a

14.

teacher named Vought, whose house had been destroyed in the
last bombing: an engineer named Lichtenstein, who is helping
the Chinese government with bridges and dugouts: and another
engineer named Meyers who is working on the shipment of trucks
which have come to China under the American credit.

The moon was full and everyone wondered whether the
Japanese would come during the night. But they didn't and when
dawn broke it was raining.

Wednesday, May 31

We were taken to call on the Foreign Minister, Mr. Wang Chung-Hui. I was struck by the contrast between this call and the one we made on Arita in Tokyo. For the Tokyo visit Mr. Carter dressed himself in a cut-away and the whole performance was terribly stiff and formal. In this case there was some question about whether I would have to put on my necktie or not (most people go around Chungking in shorts and tennis shirts). We were received in the Foreign Minister's house, which was modest and in much better taste than any Japanese house we saw. On the front steps were a number of pots of gardenias which scented the whole house - a delicate contrast to the horrible odours of death which Martin and White described to me. Mr. Wang spoke of his gratitude to the United States and Britain for their loan, their note on the Nine Power Treaty and their action at Kulangsu. He, too, talked about the new spirit in China - the determination never to give in to the Japanese.

Personally the Foreign Minister has a face which looks quite Japanese, he wears heavy glasses and has a bristling moustache. He is extremely polite but not in the offensive way in which Harada, for instance, was.

Next we called on Franklin Ho, of the Economics Ministry, who took us to lunch again at the Sun Sun. I sat next to two people in the agricultural section of the Economics Ministry. They said that the most pressing agricultural problems at the moment are fertilisers and transportation. The Chinese have so far been unable to produce any chemical fertilisers and have had to be satisfied with a bean derivative which is altogether inadequate. Beyond that, it is dreadfully hard to educate the farmers in the use of fertiliser. Transportation is so expensive that it is cheaper for Kwangtung Province to import its rice from Burma than to get it from the neighbouring Chinese provinces.

15.

The Economics Ministry is perched high on a hill above Sun Sun Gardens. Ho said that it has one of the best dugouts in the city, cut straight into solid rock in the hillside. As we climbed the stone steps up to the office we passed a number of women sewing sand into flour bags - for use in case of fire.

Ho gave us one of the most interesting talks we had on new south-west China. Back in September 1937 the Military Affairs Commission organised three divisions which Ho called the Agricultural Adjustment Administration, the Industrial Adjustment Administration and the Trade Adjustment Administration. Their duty was to develop south-west China and to move the resources of threatened areas into safer places. They at once began to work, moving factories from Shanghai and the northern provinces to Hankow, Changsha and Nanchang. After the government was moved to Hankow, the Generalissimo reorganised his Military Affairs Commission and farmed out the A.A.A. and I.A.A. to the Ministry of Economics and the T.A.A. to the Ministry of Finance. Because of the confusion in Hankow, no real work was begun until February 1938.

Since then the I.A.A. has received loans from the government of about sixteen million dollars. With the fall of Hankow it was necessary to remove the factories all over again to Szechuen, Yunnan, Kwangsi and Shensi. Coal mine equipment was moved in sufficient quantities so that now there ought to be enough coal available for all industrial uses in Szechuen. Electrical equipment has also been moved. If munitions factories could get into full swing, they would produce more ammunition now than was produced in all China before the war. One of the most active agencies in the moving of factories is the so-called National Resources Commission, which has directly supervised the moving of machinery, raw materials, and so forth, from the front, and has also helped in the purchase of raw materials.

The Trade Adjustment Administration has worked principally in the purchase of commodities for export for the acquisition of foreign currency. The principal commodities have been vegetable oil, tea, wolfram, hides, wool, antimony and tungsten.

For self-sufficiency in clothing, the new China needs five hundred thousand cotton spindles ... perhaps by spring there will be one hundred thousand. To produce enough cotton cloth there is need for 1,500,000 piculs of cotton. Now there are only about 200,000 on hand. Perhaps more can be imported from Shansi and Hopei but transportation again is so difficult that when a picul which costs $30 in Sian or Paoki

16.

has been transported to Szechuen it costs $150. Such silk as is produced must all be used for export trade. There is some hope that linen and wool can be further developed. Those two industries are well scattered through the free areas but there will be considerable difficulty getting production to anything like an industrial scale. Because of all this there is apt to be a very real clothing problem in free China after two or three years.

As to food, south-west China is very well off just now. There have been two excellent crops since the last famine and unless there is another drought, the supply ought to last out for the next three years. The Agricultural Adjustment Administration has been trying to keep the balance between supply and demand and has been working on increasing production by the development of irrigation, subsidising fertiliser, supplying warehouses and loaning money through cooperative banks. There were twelve such banks when the war began and now there are over one hundred.

All these departments of the Economics Ministry face the terrible problems of lack of trained personnel, lack of capital and difficulty of transportation. You will see that transportation comes up in almost every conversation. There are only these arteries for traffic: the Burma road - a rail-road being built from Burma which won't be finished until 1940: a motor road from Indo-China: a narrow-gauge railroad also from Indo-China; smuggled traffic through such ports as Amoy, Wenchow and even Soochow: and the road from Russia: through Lanchow, Sian and Paoki. It costs $3,000 a ton to transport things from Rangoon to Chungking, $1,000 a ton from Kunming to Chungking.

We asked how successful the new Chinese factories within the International Settlement of Shanghai were apt to be. Ho was very pessimistic about them. There are 400,000 cotton spindles set up there but he thinks they will all be driven out within a year for lack of raw materials and markets which are not controlled by the Japanese.

Next we called on Wang Wen-Hao, the Minister of Economics. About a year ago he was in a terrible automobile accident at Hangchow in which his forehead was smashed in. For many months his friends thought he would die but with amazing tenacity, he gained back his health and is now in one of the most responsible positions in the government. His come-back symbolises China's tenacity and her ability to recover from terrible set-backs. He spoke of the need for well-trained technicians in copper mining and of the work that is being done

17.

in developing chemical fertilisers in Szechuen and Yunnan.
Nitrates have been discovered in Yunnan which will be useful
for fertiliser after the war: for the time being they must
be used for munitions.

Back at the Publicity Office, Kyi told me that the
government had made a careful census after the last bombings
to see if they could establish the number of casualties.
Two or three days later Domei came out with the report that
there had been mass arrests of pacifists who were disheartened
by the bombings. This is how Domei takes a simple fact and
makes of it a story to its liking. Kyi had just come over the
Burma road and described the primitive way in which the new
railroad is being built. All the cuts which we would expect
to be made by steam shovels and blasting gangs are made by
coolies wielding picks and shovels in their hands. No wonder
progress on the road is slow!

Just before supper I received a cable from New York
Office giving me permission to stay on for an extra month.
The difficulty of flying in Japanese planes would have made
it impossible to get to Tientsin and Peking without such an
extension and I had cabled to question it. I shall return now
by the "Empress of Japan" arriving in Vancouver on 25th July
and reaching New York, I suppose, on the 29th. I plan to spend
three or four days in Shanghai and then to go to Tientsin and
Peking. I am not sure whether I will go to Yokohama by boat
or via Manchuria and Korea.

In the evening we were taken to a press party of
farewell to T. T. Li. Durdin is president and Rogoff, of Tass,
is secretary of the Foreign Correspondents Club. The party
was a hilarious one. Among the guests were Norman Soong, a
photographer who has done many pictures for "Life", Hollington
Tong, next to whom I sat, and who told me that he remembered
my father from the days when he was Chili River Commissioner
in Tientsin. Rogoff, who sat at our table, is a wonderfully
lusty Russian. He speaks very broken English. He had chosen
the food for the banquet and energetically forced everyone to
eat a little of everything. He had just visited the various
battle-fronts. In one place he ran across a lone guerilla.
"How many wars have you been in?" he asked. The man: "Two".
"What were you fighting for in the first one?" "I don't know,
I don't remember" "What are you fighting for now?" "Everybody
knows we are fighting Japan now".

He ran across 160 Buddhist priests who have left their
monastery to be guerillas. One of them clapped him on the back
and said: "You are Communist, I am Buddhist - same thing. We
are fellow fighters". Rogoff told this with great delight, as

18.

any good Communist would, but Hollington Tong, who has to
follow the official line that the Communists are playing a
minor part in the war, was not pleased by the story.

Rogoff spent a couple of days with one of the
guerilla bands. Each morning the band went out before dawn
and returned with rifles and food from the Japanese camps.
The general asked Rogoff to stay an extra day and see some
prisoners. They stayed up late at night in conversation and
while Rogoff was still sound asleep at 5 the next morning,
some soldiers blundered into his tent and told him to get up
and see what they had. They were carrying a number of rifles
and, to Rogoff's horror, two decapitated heads. They were
terribly disappointed when Rogoff declined to take pictures of
the heads for his newspaper.

A certain amount of orange wine was served at the
dinner. The Chinese were very crafty. At each table they
outnumbered the foreigners by about three to one. Each
Chinese would raise his glass in turn to the foreigners and
cry "Gambei" - the Chinese equivalent of "bottoms up". Since
the foreigners were so badly outnumbered, it was not long
before they became quite playful and soon the finger game,
which is a combination of stone, paper, scissors and matching
numbers, began to be played. Whoever lost was obliged to drink
a cup of wine. The poor foreigners, already befuddled, lost
game after game until the party finally broke up with wild
shouting and singing. Poor Durdin and Martin, their nerves
frayed by the successive bombings, finally went quite under
the water and Teddy White and I had to drive them home.

Thursday, June 1

Another cloudy day, to everyone's relief. I had
breakfast with Martin. He has been chafing under what he
thinks is rigid censorship. I assured him that it was nothing
compared with the situation in Tokyo. He said such censorship
as there is often accidental and is due rather to inefficiency
than to intent to influence the news. They had cut out a lot
of details which would appeal to the American reader and which
actually would help him to understand Chinese difficulties.
These are usually things which give the impression that some
elements in China are still backward. For instance, the
afternoon before a brick wall had fallen on 20 children who
were scratching among the ruins to see what loot they could find.
The Publicity Office let through the fact that the wall had
fallen but cut out the fact that the children were scavenging.
The night of the worst raid, on 4th May, there was an eclipse
of the moon. Even in the middle of the horrible fires and in

19.

spite of the suffering and destruction, the dragon had not bitten far into the moon before the population got out their tin pans, gongs and drums to drive it away. All mention of the eclipse was cut from despatches. Martin said there was no consistency in the Chinese Publicity Office. Just two weeks before they had officially released the fact that many government offices were moving out of Chungking. Now when the moving was completed they would allow any mention of the subject. Actually only a few offices are moving out, the rest are digging in with a determination to stay no matter how severe the bombings become.

Martin told me some of the wild tales which spring up among the Chinese after each bombing. One bomb fell on a rock pile and threw rocks in all directions, destroying several nearby buildings. The next day the Chinese were convinced the Japanese planes were dropping rocks on the city. Another bomb hit a cigarette factory and scattered thousands of cigarettes in the street. The Chinese concluded that the planes were dropping poisoned cigarettes. There was also a tale of a secret airfield near the city from which the Japanese were carrying on their operations. This field was said to have been built by a band of English priests. Of course, there was no foundation for the story.

Martin said that no matter how fine the Chinese spirit becomes, the material difference between China's forces and Japan's will continue to make Chinese resistance terribly hard. "When you are rained with 5" shells and have no answer to make, it is quite natural that you should turn and run".

He gave another example of Domei's malicious invention of stories. Just before we left Japan, the Japanese newspapers made much of the supposed fact that Britain's Ambassador, Clarke-Kerr had taken the Generalissimo from Chungking to Chungtu in his private plane, thus affording him diplomatic protection from Japanese attackers. Well on the day the flight was supposed to have been made, Martin talked with Clarke-Kerr who was right there in Chungking and with the Generalissimo's adviser, Donald, who said that Chiang Kai-shek was also there.

Martin said that it is practically impossible to estimate the extent of Russian help. Both the Russians and the Chinese are anxious to keep it quiet. A certain amount of ammunitions are certainly coming into China from Russia. These are supposedly being paid for by the export into Russia of Chinese tea. A while ago Martin visited Sian in the north-west. While he was there a Eurasia plane arrived with only

20.

two passengers, a large number of small boxes were unloaded from the plane. Martin asked the Eurasia manager, a close friend of his, what was in these boxes. He said that twice a month Eurasia brought out $10,000,000 of paper money. Actually this is fiat money and represents nothing except the traditions to save the face of the Chinese in pretended payment of Russian arms.

We spent the morning writing up notes on previous days. At lunch there was a mix up about transportation up to the Publicity Office and we finally were obliged to go up by rickshaw. On the way we saw again a close view of the ruins and this time I was amazed how carefully they had been cleared up, with bricks neatly piled to be carted away or used again. We passed a band of soldiers whose uniforms were neat but who wore no shoes. As they walked along in the rain the usual martial tramp tramp was translated into a martial slip slip. Homes and shops were crowded and busy as if nothing had happened to the city at all. We passed several of the fire lanes which are being cut through the city and we also passed numerous new buildings being put up. This last is one of the amazing features of Chungking. Around the town and across the river hundreds of factories, big and small, are being built.

When we had almost reached the Publicity Office, its car caught up with us and took us to call on P.W. Tsou of the Foreign Trade Bureau, second-in-command to K. P. Chan. He talked to us about the difficulty of getting the American trucks in from Rangoon and Hanoi.

(Later in the evening Meyer told us something more of the difficulties. For one thing, the Chinese had not been astute enough to put a clause in the contract stipulating that the seller should assemble the cars which are being shipped across the sea in so-called "two car knock downs". The Chinese are now having to assemble the cars themselves at considerable expense. Another trouble is that there is no shelter for the trucks which have arrived in Rangoon and which are lying on the docks exposed to the heavy rains and rapidly deteriorating).

Next we called on Wang Shih-Chieh, secretary of the People's Political Council and Dr. C. H. Kan, a member of the Council. The Council is a semi-legislative body with members from all parties but dominated by the Kuomintang. Mr. Kan gave me a map of recent Chinese successes on the north-western front. Over a period of about a week the Japanese have first cut the Chinese lines, separated field headquarters from general headquarters and completed a flanking movement which would have annihilated the main Chinese force when the Chinese, with a resourcefulness which they have seldom shown, doubled back, cut the Japanese lines and accomplished a victory which the Chinese

21.

in Chungking considered as important as Taierchwang. The map
demonstrated the peculiar quality of this war - positional and
yet scattered and driving in all directions.

At dinner we had ice cream. It was just as great an
event as Bing Gih Ling used to be in Tientsin. We got some idea
of the hardships of living in a beleaguered city. All of Martin's
clothes except what he had been wearing at the time were stolen
after one of the bombings, most of Meyer's which had been sent to
the laundry were blown up, Vought's house was gone, most of the
clothing stores were wrecked so that it was impossible to buy
anything new. Desborough will be encouraged to hear that prac-
tically the only thing which is generally available is flash-
light batteries.

In spite of the hardships, life is going on with many
normal activities. After dinner the radio was switched on and
we listened to news broadcast from Manila and afterwards to some
light music from Treasure Island in San Francisco. While putting
Durdin to bed the night before, I found a violin which he some-
times plays and quite often he goes out to have a game of tennis.
These casual pastimes seem tremendously important in the midst
of bombings.

Friday, June 2

At breakfast, Allan and Meyer explained to me why there
were no mosquitoes in Chungking. The air is so bad that no decent
mosquito could stand it. Overnight the river had gone up 10 feet.
They tell me that sometimes it rises as much as 25 feet in a few
hours, sweeping away marginal huts and weakly anchored junks.

Mr. Carter got a note telling us that we would have an
interview with the premier, who was out of town recovering from a
slight illness, and later in the day, another with the Generalissimo
and Madame Chiang Kai-shek.

Hollington Tong supervised our trip and Carl Crow also
went along. Crow is doing a series of articles for "Liberty".
At the river which we were going to ferry, we were held up for
almost an hour. First of all, all military trucks had precedence.
One huge truck loaded down with artillery equipment and carrying
many other things, three or four dying rabbits which would presum-
ably be used for the detection of gas, came down the hill and
after it, a trailer with a searchlight or a pneumatic machine, we
could not make out which.

Crow, while we were waiting, said that much has been made
in the American press of the fact that H. H. Kung is a descendant

22.

of Confucius -- so is every Kung in China to the number of about three million. The only one who really matters is Count Kung, the eldest son of the eldest son for 77 generations. The only hereditary title was a similar count descended from Mentius, who has, Crow thinks, disappeared.

Crow described the extraordinary man who goes under the name of Mr. Ma, who is typical of a certain type of foreigner who becomes Chinese in his ways. His real name is McHorseland, from which the Ma comes. He was educated at Oxford, is apparently a well-informed Englishman, but now he wears Chinese clothes all the time, always speaks Chinese, has shaved off everything but a little Chinese-style goatee and has taken a vow never to wash himself until China wins the war. He works for the government in the Publicity Ministry. Crow wanted to have a talk with him. Hollington Tong took Crown to his room where they knocked on the door. "Who's there" asked McHorseland. Tong explained that he had brought Mr. Crow who wanted to have a talk. "This is no time to talk" shouted Mr. Ma "this is the time to fight for China".

We finally got across the river and soon found ourselves in beautiful agricultural country with farms crowding every hill and valley. The terracing makes the hills look like some architectural model, each terrace is brightly coloured depending on its grain. Along the road we saw thousands of trucks - some merely parked, some stuck in ditches, some under repair and a few feebly camouflaged by grain and branches.

After half an hour's drive we arrived at the South Hot Spring in a lovely valley. Since the house where Dr. Kung is staying was far up in the hills, we took sedan chairs. Laboriously the coolies carried us up stone steps along narrow earthen ledges and through avenues of trees, up past some beautiful waterfalls, to a house perched on the side of a steep hill. All along the way were new buildings, presumably for government departments and officials.

We asked to wash our hands. In the bathroom I chanced to look out of the window up the hill. There I saw, well-hidden in trees, a secret service man. I only saw him because he chanced to move while I was looking. When I looked again he was standing still and I could not find him.

We were shown upstairs to a study where Dr. Kung received us. He remembered the Hersey family very well. He asked what my two brothers are doing and how my mother and father were getting along. He asked where I had gone to college and it developed that he and I were both Yale men. He was there from 1906 to 1909. Before

23.

that he studied at Obelin. He went into a long anecdote about
his difficulties in reaching Obelin. In middle school in Peking
he had a radical room-mate who convinced him that China's
salvation depended on their murdering the Empress Dowager.
Together they befriended some of the eunuchs in the Forbidden
City and arranged to be let in one night to do their deed but
just before the appointed night, Kung was appointed secretary
to one of the government officials, who was later ambassador
to America, and his enthusiasm for the assassination cooled.
This official arranged a passport for Kung, which, it turned out,
was not sufficient to get him into California and he was held
there for three months waiting for the proper papers to return
from China. When they did come, he made the mistake of crossing
the continent by way of Canada and once he had gotten out of the
United States he could not get back in again and so he was
delayed once again on the Canadian border while his passport
was sent to Washington and back.

With admirable politeness Dr. Kung arranged an American
meal - chicken, Irish potatoes - procured with some considerable
difficulty - and green corn, suggested by his cook. He told us
the various Chinese names for corn all the way from the poetic
"Pearly Rice" to the local colloquialism "Sixth" - there are five
local grains and corn was introduced last, so became "sixth".
He said that oranges all over the world came originally from
China and the oranges of which Californians are so proud,
originated from China.

When the subject of the Japanese emperor's moderation
in the face of militarists came up, Dr. Kung said that the
last Chinese ambassador to Tokyo, when received for the first
time by the emperor, was greeted with an apology "I am tremendously ashamed" said the emperor "of what my country is doing". The
meal had not been dismissed two minutes before the emperor's
chamberlain, numerous ministers and advisers hurried up to the
ambassador trembling with anger and anxiety. They forced him to
promise that he would not tell what the emperor had said to
anyone because its repercussions within Japan might even go so
far as to cause a revolution. The ambassador kept his promise
until he resigned.

Dr. Kung expressed his displeasure at the way American
business men had been fighting Japan's battle by selling oil,
scrap and munitions even though they know that the American State
Department disapproves. He hoped that some legislation might
come out of Congress which would help China and hinder Japan.

24.

We asked Dr. Kung whether Shacht is coming to China. He said that Shacht was a personal friend of his, that he had often expressed his desire to settle down in China and had told him that he would like to see Germany trade with a free China. He added, however, that Shacht would probably be unable to persuade his government at home to let him come to China.

While Mr. Carter had a short talk with Dr. Kung, I talked with David, his son, who is about 22. David speaks excellent English, which he learned at St. John's in Shanghai. He has never been in America except in the course of a trip around the world with his mother. He is a very shy and sensitive person - not at all in the tradition of the Soongs and the Kungs. He wants to come to America to study history and art. "Too many of my family" he said, "are in politics". Before we left Dr. Kung reiterated what every prominent Chinese has told us - that there is a new spirit of resistance and a new determination in China. He asked me to make sure to give his warmest personal regards to you. He said he was very grateful for the things you had done for China.

As we rode down in our chairs we passed first a series of chairs, coming up in two of which were women loudly crying and behind them a huge coffin being carried by sixteen struggling coolies singing a mournful chanty as they struggled up the hill.

When we got back to the river we found that an automobile had become stuck in the mud so that the whole line was held up. We took a pedestrian's ferry, therefore, in order to make our appointment with the Chiangs on time. On the other side we had the terrific climb up to the city's streets and poor Carl Crow was left far behind. At the top we took rickshaws. We passed a band of soldiers squatting on the sidewalk and in the street eating rice. As soon as Hollington Tong's uniformed figure approached a whistle blew and the whole band stood up at attention until we passed. Farther on, as we rode by the biggest of the city's dugouts in the face of one of the cliffs, I saw three tiny ducklings waddling out of the cavernous hole. The signs of death and the signs of new life are about equally numerous in Chungking.

We reached the Generalissimo's house exactly on the hour of 5. In a few moments we were shown in to Madame Chiang. The usual procedure with foreign correspondents is for Madame Chiang to entertain them for a while and then for the Generalissimo to come in for a few minutes at the end. It is probably this procedure which has given so many romantic correspondents the idea that the Madame is the brains of the combination. Actually this is apparently quite unfounded. She is a great help to him as a buffer and her work among the women in China is spectacular but she has apparently little influence on his military decisions.

25.

She was breathtakingly pretty and no picture I have seen
has done justice to her. She wore a quiet black dress printed with
silver scales, a blue bolero jacket with a flaming red handkerchief
in its pocket. Mr. Carter said that he was encouraged to see that
while there was destruction by the score, there was also construction
by the square mile. Yes, said Madame Chiang, right here in her
house they were building. There had been a warning from the
Japanese that this particular section of the town would be the next
to be bombed. Nevertheless she was extending one room into a large
porch so as to cope with all the visitors which she and her husband
have. We asked her about the New Life Movement, the new spirit in
China and the Industrial Cooperatives. She suddenly became
tremendously vivacious and said "now you have got me started".
We certainly had, for she talked for half an hour about the reasons
why China cannot be beaten. The day of the worst bombing she went
out to find the 30 workers in her office about whom she was badly
concerned. On the way policemen stopped her and told her that
she could not possibly go in farther because there were three fires
all converging on the office she wished to reach. She insisted on
going through and made her A.D.C. witness the fact that she was
going on her own responsibility. When she got through, with smoke
all around, she found the 30 faithful workers calmly waiting beside
the files, correspondence and precious receipts for donated money
which they felt they could not afford to lose. Had they stayed there
they probably would have all been lost. Madame Chiang got them out
and put them for the night in a middle school. She made them promise
to stay there and not go away until she told them to. The next
morning she visited the school and was furious to find the office
workers all disappeared. She thought they had merely run away but
it turned out that they were busy evacuating the injured and find-
ing shelter for women.

She told them of an orphan's village where on the day of
one of the bombings the children, on their own initiative, offered
to help with relief work. They went to the superintendent of the
village and said that they wished to go out and find other children
like themselves to bring into the village and also to carry goods
for old people and injured people.

Just the day before one of the bombings 300 girls arrived
in Chungking. They had walked all the way from Shansi and Hopei
carrying their clothing and possessions on their backs. The trip
took six months.

Again, the day after the bombing, she was supervising the
evacuation of a thousand children from the city. They were all
exhausted and hungry towards the evening and she stopped them and
sent them on to the hill and told them to wait there while her
A.D.C. went for some food. He went to a nearby restaurant and
asked for food for the thousand children. At once the customers
all said "the food for the children was more important, we will

26.

not eat". The proprietors said"the food for the children is more important than profit, we will give you enough". When the children had been fed Madame Chiang stopped a line of trucks which had been driving all day long. The drivers were nearly as tired as the children but they immediately turned about and took the children to their destination.

These were some of the reasons she said why China cannot be beaten. She told of some of the things her women's organisations are doing. In each bombing there are scores of expectant mothers who suddenly give birth. Madame Chiang has supervised the formation of a village for pregnant women with proper medical care. In other places she is doing all she can to help with education. The way she gets women to come and study is first to round up the children of the village, teach them patriotic songs and games until they have such a good time that the mothers come to see what is being done. After that the mothers themselves begin to learn.

Finally the Generalissimo came in. He is meticulously neat. As you know, there is an old Chinese saying that outward neatness reflects inner neatness. His manner is exceedingly pleasant, though somewhat formal because he can speak no English. Hollington Tong became quite nervous when the Generalissimo came and began eagerly suggesting things to say. The conversation was principally an exchange of commonplaces. He repeated what he has often said - that China will never stop fighting until Japan is repulsed. "China will have to fight on until the democratic nations band together to restore security and reason in the world."

We were entertained at dinner by Mr. Tsou. He had as guests Pang Chou-Pei, Vice-Minister of Communications; Ching Fen, a distinguished mathematician, secretary-general to the National Economic Council and Vice-Minister of Economics; two members of the newly arrived French Military Mission - General Berger and Captain Nolde. Mr. Pang is said to have been Wang Ching Wei's chief assistant before Wang fled and apparently bought the tickets for his flight away from Chungking. He said he had just gotten a telegram from the Minister of Communications telling him that the wash-outs on the Burma road would probably not be terribly serious because of the large supply of labour on hand but that there was a new problem. The workmen, knowing from experience that malaria comes with the rains, have been running away. It is impossible for the Communications Ministry to persuade them that the serum and quinine which they have will be of any use. In Chinese malaria is called by a mysterious name and they think it is a condition of the air which causes the disease. It will take two or three years to educate the simple workmen to stay by their job.

27.

The members of the French Mission are supposedly on their own though all of them were officers in good standing in the French army right up to the moment when they joined the Generalissimo's advisory staff. There are seven altogether, an expert on general staff, two experts on artillery, two on aviation and two on infantry. The dinner passed in high good feelings - even the commonplaces, when carefully translated, came off as if they were witty remarks. We roared with laughter whenever all three nationalities finally understood a remark. Captain Nolde told of one thing which he had already been able to suggest. The Chinese in Chungking have an idea that if anti-aircraft guns stand near a particular building, they will defend the building. Consequently all their anti-aircraft batteries are in and right near the city. The time during which they can fire at attacking planes is actually about three minutes. Captain Nolde has suggested that they move them far enough out of town to be able to fire for over ten minutes. The guns are the latest German design. They have badly under-shot in the raids so far. Apparently the Chinese artillery men seriously under-estimated the range of the guns. They thought they would only fire 2000 metres. After examining the guns and their range charts, Nolde established that the guns will shoot 7,000 metres - 21,000 feet. The raiders have never come in higher than 3,000 metres.

28.

Saturday, June 3.

Lin Chi-yung of the National Resources Commission took Mr. Carter, Carl Crow, Norman Soong and me to visit some of the new factories which were springing up around Chungking. We drove out of town in a rickety bus. Along the road we saw as many houses as we had seen trucks the day before. In one little village we were stopped by the police because we didn't have a proper registration on our wind shield. Before the driver had had a chance to get out, a crowd of three hundred at least had gathered around to see what was happening. Mr. Lin said, "We will set them all to work one day." Farther on we passed the new building of Nankai which in three years has accumulated 1500 students. About ten li outside of town we came to Chungking University which has gathered around it the Szechuan College of Education, Central University and the Nanking Industrial Technical School. We got out of the bus there and walked down through the campus which is set high above the Kialing river. On one of the most beautiful campuses I have ever seen. As we passed the classrooms, lectures and tests were going on. Mr. Lin says that curricula have become much more practical than they used to be. On one of the blackboards in a room where twenty students were working on a quiz was the question: How is casein glue made?

About 100 yards from the campus is the Tsa Ping Pa Experimental Fuel Plant. Lin introduced us to K. Y. King the supervisor of the plant who took us around. One part of the plant is devoted to experiments in the cracking of vegetable oil. King says that he doesn't think experiments are being carried any where else in the making of gasolene from tung and rape seed oil. The laboratory was founded in Peking, later moved to Nanking and from there to Chungking. One bright spark is that its library which includes every Chinese book on chemical research, has been moved intact from one capital to another.

Eventually the plant plans to produce 30,000 gallons of gasolene a month. The process is one of thermo-pressure, the simplest sort of cracking. It produces 50% gasolene and by-products of 20% kerosene, 10% fuel. The gasolene is 54-octane, which is rather low. American high compaction cars use 70 or 80 octane and aeroplanes used 100 octane. But when the process is perfected, the gasolene may be better. Just now the gasolene is more expensive than that refined from petroleum, but that is principally because the raw material is so expensive. King computes the price of his gasolene by multiplying the raw material price by two and adding 60 cents a gallon. If tung oil is produced in larger quantities then the price of the gasolene can be substantially reduced.

29.

In a second laboratory a lubricant was being made from tung oil by an oxydation process which produces 1.1 pounds of lubricant to every pound of oil simply by adding air. The specifications of the lubricant are close to that of gargoyle, but slightly more acid; the acid is inhibited by chemicals.

Another section of the plant is devoted to a coal washing experiment. Some Szechuan coal has a very high ash content with sulphur pyrite and iron so finely divided and distributed through the coal that it is very difficult to remove before burning. By using a process called the ReoL Lavoir method which is used extensively in the United States and which consists merely of the heated washings with water. This coal can be cleaned of its ash from 27% down to 9%.

There are 32 technical experts working in the plant, 16 of whom are chemical engineers and the rest straight chemists. A very encouraging fact is that only four of the experts were educated abroad, the rest all in China. The plant employs as well 33 technical labourers and over 200 non-technical work-men.

Right next to the fuel plant is the Yufeng Cotton Mill which has been removed from Honan first to Hankow and now to Chungking. The plant has in operation about 6,000 spindles and is setting up machinery all the time with the eventual goal of 58,000 spindles. The machinery has been brought helter-skelter from Hankow and dumped on the ground like an American junk pile---window frames, spindles, cogs, power plants, all in a jumble. But from that chaos, machines are gradually assembled and those which are set up go to work right away. The mill operates on Chungking's central power plant. Eventually it will have a 500 kilowatt plant of its own. It employs local girls except for foremen brought from Hankow and Hunan. The girls work on two eleven hour shifts with a six-day week. The plant supervisor said that Szechuan girls are much cleverer than the girls he has hired before. They learn how to operate the machines in three months compared with five the other girls took. They are paid 15 Chinese dollars a month, are given free quarters, but have to pay $4 a month for food. This leaves them a balance of $11 which is less than U.S.$2 on which many of them support a family. For the time being the plant is housed in mud buildings, but within three months the supervisor hopes to have brick buildings and full-time operation.

As we walked to the next plant, Mr. Lin told me that the National Resources Commission has loaned about $18,000,000 to plant proprietors to help them move their materials inland. The Commission only charges six per cent interest which is exceedingly low for China. The only demand which is made is that the plants should operate as soon as possible.

The next one we saw was the Taihsin Steel Plant, the smallest of four which have grown up around Chungking,

30.

one of two private mills. The other two are government mills devoted exclusively to munitions. The Taihsin was moved up from Shanghai and has been enlarged in process. The Shanghai plant was worth only $125,000; the Chungking plant is worth $700,000. All of the plant's equipment has been home-made---its crane, boilers, electric furnaces and steam hammers. The machinery was shipped by junks from Shanghai to Hankow in October and were about to be set up in that city when Nanking fell. Wang Wen-hao and Lin advised to move the plants still further from the front. By steamer and by junk, with various types of machinery distributed among the vessels so that if one vessel was lost it would not mean losing all of one type machinery, Taihsin moved again upstream. Along the way only one junk was lost and that was salvaged. A few workers arrived on the spot about New Year's and began setting up machinery in February and March. Now the plant employs three hundred pattern makers, molders, founders, lathe-turners, rivetters, carpenters and brick-layers. By August it expects to operate at full speed. Eventually the plant will roll and cut steel as well as produce it in order to help produce rails and material for wharves. The plant has bessengers ready in case electric furnaces are cut off for want of power. The plant has plenty of raw materials with iron, manganese and sillica all mined near by. As we walked through the plant, we saw old hand-grenades which will be melted over for new steel, Some tremendous boilers built on the spot for steam hammers, some old bombs among the scrap, a 9,500 lb. steel hammer anvil block and piles of raw iron. On the wall of the office hung a picture of the Yangtzepoo factory from which the company had been forced to evacuate. And above the whole plant, rose a huge structure of bamboo poles---a bomb catcher. This huge device will work if the enemy uses concussion bombs, but with delayed fuse bombs, they will serve only to keep the explosion far above the machinery.

We had lunch in a restaurant near the universities. One of our hosts asked the waiter if he could get us a table-cloth. He apologized and said that we would have to eat on the bare table because both the table-cloths were in the wash. The restaurant had over twenty tables. I sat next to Norman Soong who gave new examples of how difficult transportation is causing high prices in luxuries. Coffee brings $12 a pound and Carnation milk goes at $2.30 a tin. Mr. Lin ordered some ta chu, a very strong wine. In it he washed all our plates, spoons and chopsticks. When he had finished, we asked him the reason for the ritual. His answer was merely to touch a match to what remained of the ta chu. It burned like kerosene and must have been a good antiseptic.

After lunch we drove back to Nankai to call on Dr. Chang Po-lin. As we walked toward his house, Soong said the last time he had been there, a thousand soldiers were drilling on the foot-ball field. The campus is broad and splendidly planned with very simple buildings which are nevertheless very good looking. Chang Po-lin was wonderfully cordial. At first he didn't realize who I was, but when he

31.

did, he roared with laughter and then turned to Mr. Carter and
very gravely said, "His father is a great friend of China. His
mother is a remarkable woman." Then he showed me pictures of
all his family including the very tall son who was killed in an
aeroplane accident about a year ago. As we left, he said to me,
"Give your mother and father my warmest love and tell them
that we are building a new China. The crisis is passed."

We had arranged to see Chow En-lai, the Communist
general, at 8.30 in the evening. We went to his home set far
up on the hill. When we arrived, the general was out. A ser-
vant told us that he had been called to an important council,
but would be back soon. Actually he did not arrive until 11.30.
He is an amazingly gentle character for a military leader. His
hands are almost feminine and his eyes are wonderfully wide and
a little sad. He has a little trouble with English, but his mind
is so clear and his arguments so logical that he made better sense
than many who speak English well. He said that the war was divided
into two stages. The first, the stage of the Japanese advance
lasting about a year and a half and going as far as Hankow,
the second, the comparative stalemate since Hankow fell. The
biggest needs from the point of view of Chinese defence are to
attack the enemy from the rear, establish basis behind their
lines from which those attacks can be made, and above all kill
a few Japanese every day. He was trying to persuade every
guerilla band to kill ten men a day. With a hundred bands in
the field, a thousand Japanese would die each day, 365,000
in a year---not a bad killing!

Japanese tactics, he says, are first to watch for a
weak spot as they did in the case of Nanchang which was very
feebly defended; second, to watch European events (while
Europe was busy they took Hainan and stepped into Kulangsu);
and, third, to bomb civilians in the hope that they will agi-
tate for peace. He, like every other Chinese, is convinced
that the bombings are having the opposite effect.

Sunday, June 4.

In the morning I took a long walk around the city
wall of Chungking. The wall was built in the 14th century,
Durdin says, to replace older one then standing. I think
all I would have to do to love China would be to smell the
old smells: the smells of cooking, cloth-making, of wet-
matting, of mud walls and the somewhat less pleasant unmen-
tionables; or to hear the noises: hawkers, drums, the
melancholy minor third of coolies carrying bales of cotton.
In Chungking there is another noise: constant blasting in
the bombed dug-outs.

Chungking brought out in me one childish desire,
to own the cap of a young Chinese soldier. I got one by the
technique which Durdin suggested. I went into a clothing shop

32.

expecting to ask for a cap in English when suddenly the Chinese word mao-tze came back to me. I bought a cap and took it with me down to one of the sign-boards on which is posted a huge map showing the positions of the armies in the field. In front of this were a number of officers and soldiers. I had enough Chinese to find an officer who spoke a few words of English. He explained to me the signs on the map and then I proposed to him to exchange my store cap for the one he was wearing. He laughed at the suggestion and gladly complied since he got out of it a new hat and a story to tell his companions which he proceeded to do before I moved away.

On the way back to the Mission, I saw four small children hardly able to walk and make noises playing at bombing with bamboo aeroplanes.

Back at the Mission, I discovered a victrola and a huge collection of records. Having heard almost no music since I left, I had a long session listening to Beethoven's Emperor Concerto, Rachmaninoff's Isle of the Dead and a delicate Hyden Quartette. In the presence of death music is incredibly poignant. I think I shall never forget the second movement of the Emperor.

After lunch Durdin took me across the river and into the hills to call on a couple of the secretaries in the Embassy. The ferry across the river which two coolies propelled with the greatest of effort cost only three coppers. As we polled up the river to get a head start on the current, we passed under mat huts, set high on bamboo poles clinging against the cliffs. Just as we set out across the river, a dead child floated by in the water. None of the passengers paid any attention to it. The current was running so strong that we did not make the landing we were shooting for, but had to go ashore near some rocks. We started up the hills in sedan chairs. The lower hills are covered with more graves than even the cemetery in Valhalla. Many of the graves were newly turned and so carelessly were many of them made that for a time the chair-coolies refused to pass near them because of the fumes. Soon we came to a lovely stream which had cut a sharp gauge in the cliffs and which sometimes jumped for 20 feet at a time. After a while, we got out and walked for neither of us had the heart to let the coolies carry us all the way up to the top. We finally reached a very fine little house originally built by some Standard Oil man and occupied now by the Embassy's First Secretary, Drumright, and Third Secretary, Elliot Weil, a nephew of T. S. Eliot who taught for two years at the Scarborough School and knew the Mahonyais well. From their house, we had a spectacular view of the city. Durdin watched one of the bombings from that point of view, and then hurried down the hill before the all-clear signal to get across the river to find some news. On the way, he was stopped by gendarmes who muttered that he was a triator for turning on the flashlight before the all-clear, but he had to get down and at one point, called the

33.

bluff of the gendarmes who threatened to shoot him on the spot.

Back at the Publicity Office, I talked with Teddy White about the new spirit in Chungking. He showed me an unexploded bomb. It was a sinister looking thing and I could not help thinking of the damage and pain it would have caused had it exploded.

Monday, June 5.

I spent the night at the Publicity Office because my plane was scheduled to leave at 6 in the morning and transportation is complicated. Mr. Kyi took me down to the plane to see me off. In the little creek between the mainland and the island on which the airfield lies, was a junk on which was loaded a completely assembled aeroplane. The picture was a perfect one to illustrate the old and new. The day was a filthy one, the worst sort of weather for flying anywhere but near Japanese pursuit planes. How the transport ever found its way among the Szechuan mountains to that tiny airfield, I will never guess, but it landed promptly on time and half an hour later, took on its passengers and roared up into the mist.

All love,
Johnny

No. 124

The Indo-China Steam Navigation Co.Ltd
(INCORPORATED IN ENGLAND)

JARDINE, MATHESON & CO., LTD.
GENERAL MANAGERS.

Shanghai,

June 1939.

Dear Sir,

We regret to inform you that owing to disturbed conditions in Tientsin we cannot guarantee transportation further than Tongku.

Every effort will be made to convey passengers from Tongku to Tientsin by tug but they will be liable to severe searching.

It is considered that transportation from Tongku to Tientsin by train is impracticable owing to long delays at the barriers leading into the concessions.

If you desire to cancel your passage, we shall of course refund passage money.

Yours faithfully,
JARDINE, MATHESON & CO.LTD.

Per
General Managers, Indo-China S.N.Co.,Ltd.

EFR:STM

and I almost finished it before we set our feet ashore.

Far, far down the river -- where we used to go once in a while for picnics, past the glue factory whose bone-pile I hated so, and who was it played the mandolin so sweetly? -- we began to see junks and sampans loaded down with goods, and packing the river, gunwale to gunwale, so that there was just room for two vessels to pass in the channel: hemp, matting, lumber, cement, flour, tin, here and there an incongruous Ford chocked on a junk. And soon, as we approached the city (how my heart beat!), we saw signs of the New Order: gendarmes patrolling the banks; the electrified barbed wire fence, strung on porcelain insulators; Chinese being searched, from shaved head to sore feet, at river ferries.

At the edge of the so-called First Special Area, which is Japanese controlled, we were hailed by an anchored boat-load of gendarmes. Our skipper swore softly and bitterly in Chinese, then answered them loudly and politely. We dropped anchor and pulledover against the police boat. Several of the little men, most of them wearing absurdly oversized helmets and huge glasses, which, because they have no noses on which to set them, drooped insanely all over their faces, scrambled on board and began asking questions. Who were we? Where were we going? Where from? Any Britishers aboard (we had not one, as it happened)? Each question was asked three times, and there were pauses for meditation between questions; so that, to learn nothing, it took the police almost half an hour.

Again at the NKK wharf, and next to an NKK steamer, we were hailed; the skipper swore and answered; we anchored and pulled over. This time it was passport inspection, customs, and more gendarmes. The passportinspector was Russian, white. He was efficient and quick, and had finished with all of us in five minutes. Then there was more questioning: How many passengers? How many Americans? Russians? Germans? What were those two Frenchmen doing in uniform? How big the crew? How many of them boys and how many men? This time, what with interpreting (assisted by several of the crew of the NKK boat), repeating and passing, it took over half an hour.

At last the real excitement began! We steamed past the beginning of the British Concession, along the Bund. On the right the old Russian park, now the Third Special Area. It was there that I first saw the hammer and sickle fly; no longer there, of course. There we used to catch tadpoles in the Spring, and brew tea over little bonfires lit with no more than two matches. I wore some borrowed boots, hip length, there one day, and I still blush at my pride.

On the other side, British torpedo boats, just as they used to be. As we passed, a drowned coolie, many days old, bloated, drifted down arms and legs akimbo; but the sailors looked only at us.

At the Jardine dock we landed. On shore I was surprised to find that the river looked as wide as ever. I had expected (since I am twice as tall as I was when we left) that everything would look twice as small. That has been my most pleasant surprise; scale hasn't changed. I got into an Astor House bus.

Only one black to Victoria Road! Past the shops. How well I remember the day Quinn, the Eurasian boy in the American school, took me to the Kodak shop and made me a present of a Brownie; he had idly promised it to me almost a year before, and I thought he had forgotten. Gordon Hall! Where we gave the plays: Rob the Walrus (I didn't like the way he treated the oysters), Rob the Sandman; and I, Prince Charming, so embarrassed about waking Sleeping Beauty with a kiss that I kissed my own hand. Where prize-day was held: Art walking off with almost all the prize books. That big Exposition: Rob doing a Dutch clog in the costume which later won me "most original man's costume" on the boat going home (I was much prouder of being a man than being original); my prize for the huge collection of bottle-tops. One picture especially: coming out one afternoon after I forget what, coming out on the Victoria Road side (we usually went the other way) and seeing a sign advertising a coming prize-fight involving the

from the big tin on the third shelf of the linen closet -- to the tune of a gentle bawling out from The Eternal Fountain. What a wonderful man he was, with his bald head and good nature; nothing like Li, who drowned the kitten I found in the cellar, or Lau San, who used to get so angry with Marcus Aurelius Antoninus before he was run over. I'll never forget the day, five or six after Marcus's death, when I came heavily home from school for lunch, and tiny Patsy was there to greetme; Patsy loved me right away, and though she loved every one right away, I was convinced that she was a one-man girl. Do you remember the funeral Marcus got?

But I restrained myself from running; walked, instead, with what dignity I could keep under the circumstances, to the gate (the same gate) and rang the bell. A servant came in a few minutes, and when he opened the gate I wanted to slip in; instead he slipped out. I just got a glimpse of the yard. He spoke no English, but told me in Chinese that one Mr. Chin was the present owner of the large house. I tried to explain what I wanted -- just to look around: at the dark well by the stairs, at the swinging door from the dining room to the pantry, at the panel on the sleeping porch where, when I was put to bed before dark on Spring evenings, I used to pretend I was an undefined official writing letters: just to look around -- but I couldn't communicate what I thought, to say nothing of what I felt. "Wa hsiao hai-tze, djega wa-ti fantze." But no, how inadequate. The servant obviously thought I was Russian, and suspiciously he put me off. "Wa yao kan i'dyar; wa bu shih bu hao ren; djega shih iting wa-ti fantze." It was my house. It is my house. He had no right to keep me out. In that tree, of which I could see the upper branches over the wall, Randal Lee and I built a house; my tree. Many times we had made a summer tea-house of that umbrella-tree. The stairs were mine, by virtue of the marches upstairs after evenings of music. Partly mine anyhow; partly, mostly yours, of course -- and how I wished for you. You would have got me in.

In the end, beaten by my inability to express myself, and by the servant's lack of faith in what I could express, I had to go away. But I was determined to have a look; even though I was sure in my mind that the house would disappoint me in the end -- the furniture changed, no longer the beautiful tray with the humans, nor the forest scene with three deer you had to look long to see. But I would have a look, or never leave Tientsin.

Out Recreation Road, next, to the canal. The little rise to the bridge over the canal we used to consider a hill, the only hill within 60 miles of the house; after the hills of Hakone, and Corsica, and New Hampshire, it seems a bit small. Then along the canal. That house: a huge Chinese funeral, I remember, with paper figures for the grave; an ancient custom, but some of the figures were the deceased's auto, and his chauffeur in uniform, and other things not so ancient.

The Empire. How new it was when we left, and how tumble-down now. You took me, a future virtuoso, to hear Heifetz there; I fell asleep in the second movement (it was lulling) of his first sonata, and my sleepy head fell back against the seat so hard that it not only woke me, but made every one for rows titter; I was so ashamed. You took me to Aida, there, too. I was so impressed by the set for the last act -- the huge hall above, the dungeon below, all in one scene, like a Charlie Chaplin cutaway house -- that even now I cannot enjoy Metropolitan Aida for my disappointment.

The little park across the way, where we used to swing by the hour. How much time we wasted!

whereabout of the

Elgin Terrace; funny, I had no recollection of the lowrys' house, and yet I walked straight to it. Protected from the summer sun by exactly the same sort of mat shell as used to be 15 years ago. A servant let me in. Not a stick unchanged! The little house-smell so familiar, too. The bricks, the boards, the rugs, the foundations, the plaster and the people of a house must give it a special odor, small & nice, especially nice if your memories of the house are happy. And what memories of that house! Saturday School, weaving small colored paper mats, the oath of allegiance to the flag (so worded that it scarcely mattered what flag), the play Hansel and Graetl so vivid to me that I was really quite afraid of the ginger-bread house.