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From Socialist Appeal, Vol. IV No. 27, 6 July 1940, p. 1.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for ETOL.
Japan has now formally announced its intention to convert all of East Asia and the South Seas into “a single sphere” under Japanese authority.
To this end Japan’s army and navy are already in motion. Hongkong, Britain’s South China fortress, is to all intents and purposes a besieged city. During the last week, Japanese troops have formed an iron circle around the city for the openly-announced purpose of cutting it off from the South China hinterland. In panic, the British have begun evacuating women and children from the island metropolis. Farther south, the Japanese have established themselves on the China-Indochina border as a preliminary to the eventual occupation of the French colony. Finally, the Japanese await the crushing of Britain to press through the demands they have already made to cut the route from Burma to the unoccupied portions of China.
That these steps are all preliminary to assumption of power throughout East Asia, the Western Pacific and the South Seas was made plain by Foreign Minister Hachiro Arita in a speech on June 29 in which he pictured the organization of a group of satellite states revolving around Japan. Toward British and U.S. resistance to this plan the Japanese now adopt a contemptuous tone. The British they expect shortly to go down before the German war machine. The Americans, they know, will thereupon be incapable of making a single move in the Pacific to checkmate Japanese aims. The U.S. Fleet is back in Hawaii but it can’t stay there for long. Its return to the Atlantic is a foregone conclusion.
This is all but admitted in Washington. Officially, American policy of resistance to Japan in the diplomatic domain is Still “reaffirmed” by Cordell Hull, the Secretary of State. But it was painfully apparent that Hull dared make no specific reply to the Arita speech. He “did not care to say anything on the subject,” according to the July 2 New York Times. The new two-ocean, four billion dollar fleet voted for by Congress will take years to build. Until then, Japan’s hands are all but free. And long before then, much will have happened.
This does not mean that Japan has a push-over. The welding of all East Asia into a single Japanese empire requires not only the elimination of rival imperialists. It requires also the subjugation of the colonial peoples of Indochina, the East Indies, the Philippines, Malaya, and of India. The Japanese army has already more than half-choked itself trying to swallow China. Unable to conquer by direct assault, it is now attempting to force a victory by successively cutting off all sources of arms supply for the Chinese armies. That attempt has been greatly facilitated by the Allied defeats in Europe, but will still require considerable Japanese effort to succeed.
Then first they face the task of “stabilizing” the peoples who for decades have been fighting British, French, Dutch, and U.S. rule and who are not at all likely to surrender supinely to the new would-be master of Asia. And even assuming the big guns of the Japanese fleet and the bombs of the air force establish an early armed superiority, the problem of economic organization and consolidation only then begins. The Japanese have held the Yangtze Valley and North China now for nearly three years and have still been unable to make it work profitably for them.
Japanese dreams of empire are certain to be broken by more than one harsh awakening.
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