JAPAN: Gypsy Trick

A familiar gypsy trick is to enter a grocery store, wait until proprietor and clerks are occupied with important customers, then tuck turnips, garlic, apples, other staples under the ample gypsy blouse. Japan, adept at this gypsy technique, last week took advantage of France's and England's busy dickerings with Italy and Germany to slip seven small potatoes—the Spratly Islands—under her kimono.

In 1867, while charting the South China Sea, Britain's map-making ship Rifleman found a circle of sandy coral reefs, each about 500 yards by 300 and rising only eight feet above sea level. The British named the islands for an obscure whaling captain—and forgot them. In 1933, French sailors from the surveying ship Astrolabe and the dispatch vessel Alerte, finding a handful of Chinese living happily on the reefs on coconuts, bananas, sweet potatoes and succulent turtles, hoisted a French flag on each island, blew a bugle call, buried bottles containing a French claim to the islands—and forgot them.

Last week Japan jogged British and French memories with a note announcing occupation of the islands for "protection and regulation of lives, property and enterprises of Japanese nationals there." Actually, aside from small turtle fisheries and idle phosphate works, the islands are practically uninhabited. As a heavy shipping base they are useless, for the surrounding waters are a rocky, treacherous graveyard. Japan's real reason for the snatch was to get a good airplane and submarine base (the lagoons inside the reefs insure sheltered landing and mooring) within striking distance of dependencies of Britain (Singapore, 640 miles away; Sarawak, 350; Hong Kong, 1,000), France (Saigon, in French Indo-China, 300), The Netherlands (Borneo, 500), the U. S. (Manila, 700). From the little Spratly Islands, Japanese planes or submarines could attack any vessel in the China Sea, and get back again with plenty of fuel to spare.

Of the four nations concerned, only France, the legal if doubtful owner, entered a formal diplomatic complaint. The Japanese, who can keep silence as well as steal like gypsies, said little when France complained about the snatch of Hainan in February. They were mum this week.