Foreign News: Wings for Tigers

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Chinese Minister to the Court of St. James's is poetic Mr. Quo Taichi. His contribution to the London Naval parleys (TIME, Oct. 29, et seq.) to which he was not invited, is a bland little ideograph meaning "If you give naval equality to Japan you give wings to the tiger."

Last week the smile on the face of Mr. Quo would not come off. He rejoiced that the U. S. and Britain had decided not to give wings to the tiger. That the tiger was proposing to sprout wings anyhow seemed to Mr. Quo a fact which he could accept with poetic stoicism. No one else in the world received with more perfect aplomb the dread, though long expected announcement of Japan's Privy Council last week that the Imperial Government denounces the Washington Naval Treaty, thus causing it to expire on Dec. 31, 1936.

The Japanese people, for all the bravado of their present leaders, did not accept prospective rupture of the Treaty and its 5-5-3 ratio with either joy or equanimity last week. For 13 years 5-5-3 has averted a disastrously expensive naval race, and all thinking Japanese know it. Last week the Imperial Government, realizing that millions of the Son of Heaven's subjects were deeply troubled, sought to reassure them by one of the crudest broadsides ever fired from Rengo, the semi-official news service.

"At every opportunity the Roosevelt Brain Trust has been trying to intimidate Japan by bluff," boomed Rengo. "We have dealt a severe blow and stupefaction to the American Secretary of the Navy, Swanson. . . . The morale of Japanese sailors is far superior to that of American sailors. . . . Japan is ready to meet any contingencies and is sufficiently prepared for any changes arising from termination of the Washington Treaty. . . . The shipbuilding possibilities of America are far inferior to those of Japan,* and it would not be easy for the United States to rise to the Japanese level."

Estimating that Japan is now superior to the U. S. in aircraft carriers, Class B cruisers, destroyers and submarines, Rengo piped this further courage-priming whistle: "The American shipbuilding industry is notable for its crude technique, and ship-building is very expensive there. . . . If a race develops the Japanese Navy will be very economical." It is less than a month since the Japanese Navy saddled the Empire with the most gargantuan defense budget in Japanese peacetime history (TIME, Dec. 3). Undoubtedly with grave misgivings, Emperor Hirohito, the bespectacled Son of Heaven, signed his Privy Council's awful decision last week as the world's only other Emperor of consequence was polishing the London Naval parley off into oblivion. The delegates did their own adjourning, but for Prime Minister James Ramsay MacDonald, for Japanese Ambassador Tsuneo Matsudaira and for U. S. Ambassador Norman Hezekiah Davis the big moments last week were when each was called separately to Buckingham Palace. Each was questioned closely by George V, in his youth an active seadog, today primed with an amazing fund of naval knowledge and a still more amazing vocabulary of naval oaths.