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From Socialist Appeal, Vol. IV No. 3, 20 January 1940, pp. 1 & 2.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for ETOL.
The fall of the Abe government in Japan reflects symptomatically the acute strain in Japan’s internal and external position.
The cabinet of Admiral Yonai which has been substituted for it is nothing but another stop-gap and will fall heir to the many- sided pressures which drove General Abe to cover. For the main difficulty is that Japanese imperialism has created for itself obstacles which it lacks the power to surmount.
It has won grandiose “victories” in China but it has not won and cannot win the war.
To win those profitless victories it has strained its frail economic structure far beyond its capacity to withstand.
And in this weakened, bogged-down condition, it faces the implacable pressures of a world at war.
Above all it faces the dangerously insistent pressure of its greatest and most powerful rival, Yankee imperialism.
From all evidence, the Japanese war machine has reached its maximum limits in the Chinese war. It holds thin lines flung over half of China, but the territory within those lines remains unconquered and the territory beyond them unconquerable. Every attempt made in the last six months to extend those lines has met ignominious failure. It is this impasse that has colored the negotiations between the Japanese army chiefs and their puppet-elect, Wang Ching-Wei. From the terms they are offering him, it is obvious that the Japanese are losing hope of completing their conquest by arms alone. Their main anxiety is to restore “peace” and through the Wang regime to begin realizing on their heavy investment.
Meanwhile in Japan the masses are paying with their mortgaged lives for the investment the generals have so recklessly undertaken. Soaring prices and deepening economic stringency have defied the artificial controls set up by successive Japanese governments. The dissatisfaction of the masses – indeed of almost all strata .of the population except the tight small, band of superfinanciers at the top – has grown so great that the politicians who have clung so impotently these past eight years to the militarists’ tails have grown bold enough to offer a half-frightened challenge to their acknowledged masters. The protest itself was a feeble enough demonstration. But the unmistakable discontent of far more powerful forces that lay silent behind it was enough to unseat General Abe.
But if the nether millstone on which Japan is ground bears the ironic label, “Made in China,” the upper millstone that completes the dilemma was “Made in the U.S.A.” and the hand that turns the wheel is the hand of U.S. imperialism.
This is no exaggerated figure of speech, for the war in Europe has largely closed to Japan all other sources of vital supplies; even before the war Japan bought in this country 90 per cent of its scrap iron and steel, 91 per cent of its copper, 83 per cent of its ferro-alloys, 76 per cent of its airplanes and airplane parts, 65 per cent of its petroleum, 65 per cent of its automobiles, 45 per cent of its lead, similarly large percentages of other indispensable war materials – an aggregate of 56 per cent of all the war-making goods that Japan imports! In return the United States takes the bulk of Japan’s silk – its lifeline export.
Taken together with the U.S. Fleet, this provides the man in the White House with a big stick of no mean proportions to hold over Japanese heads. And on both counts he is making it bigger. The demand of the U.S. Navy for more than another $2,000,000,000 to double its present size is a demand aimed straight at Japan as a fearful warning. The revival of agitation for the fortification of Guam, 5,000 miles out in the Pacific from our shores is another. Still another is the clamor led by Col. Henry Stimson for an embargo against Japan to be applied right after expiration of the trade treaty on Jan. 26.
These pressures to an important degree contributed to the switch of cabinets in Tokyo. During the last five months, Rooseveltian diplomacy has been putting the screws on in Tokyo. It has held a stop signal on the war in China and has waved under Japanese noses a “deal” at China’s expense in return for Japanese collaboration in the anti-Soviet bloc that has become Roosevelt’s dearest dream.
Since Japan’s obvious strategy has been to maneuver between the warring camps in the world war in order to ensure to itself the maximum gains in Asia at the expense of all of them, the Abe government has been trying to play both sides to the middle, conducting negotiations simultaneously with Moscow and with Washington. That’s one reason it fell in the middle and left to its successor the hopeless task of trying to keep aboard two trains going in opposite directions.
With the American pressure growing daily stronger, and the attractive force of the Kremlin weakening progressively in the land, Japan is being forced to a decision.
It is not at all surprising that the new Japanese premier, Yonai, and his foreign minister, Hachiro Arita, are looked upon as men of the “western orientation” bloc which favors a deal with the U.S. involving some division of the spoils in China and a joint offensive against the Soviet Union. But counsels are still divided in Tokyo’s ruling circles and Yonai’s main task will be not to bring the deal to fruition but somehow to put off the day of reckoning.
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