Saturday, 1 February

The reaction to Hitler’s speech in America can be well anticipated. Senator Glass advocates “shooting hell out of any who interferes with American shipping”. The more I study The Commentary of Zuo, the more I find the repetition of history. Besides cannon and bayonets to the fore, heads of nations enjoy themselves with beautiful phrases and figures of speech directed at one another. In the Orient too, we may enjoy the great huour of the Japanese Prime Minister, War Minister, and Naval Minister, each trying to curse himself harder than the other for the present Sino-Japanese war. In fact, none of them should be responsible, since none could have controlled the ill-disciplined “younger group” of the Jap Army who actually started the war. Matsuoka Yōsuke, in the Diet sub-committee recalled “that Wang Jingwei had offered to resign should his presence prove an obstacle to General Magruder’s Japanese peace”. That shows the position of a “puppet government”.