Browning Chief

Jitters in Japan
By Joseph Newman

(WNU Feature—Through special arrangement with The American Magazine.)

Japan is getting the jitters. We have it on no less an authority than Emperor Hirohito and his No. 1 war lord, General Hideki Tojo. Hirohito has told his pugnacious people that the outlook for Japan is now "truly grave," and Tojo underscored the divine insight of the god-emperor by adding that the war situation is "very complicated."

This, in the customary Japanese manner of speaking by indirection, is another way of saying:

"The Yanks are coming."

And the Japanese man in the street, whether he shuffles along in his wooden clogs and traditional kimono or wears the pinching leather shoes and tight-fitting sack coats copied from his occidental enemies, knows what that means. It means that the despised Yankees are on their way to the heart of the Japanese Empire—and that they're coming with skyfuls of bombs for the industrial nerve center from which stems the terror and destruction spread by the Japanese throughout Asia and the Pacific.

The Japanese, far better than their enemies, know just how vulnerable they are. They know that once their outer ring of defense is cracked, the heart of the empire will be exposed to a deathblow.

That's why the Japanese, in their opening stroke of war, pushed as hard and as fast as they could go to the north, south, east, and west, so as to shove the Americans from all bombing bases within reach of the main home islands.

And that's why, now that the outer rim is crumbling, Hirohito, Tojo, and the shuffling Japanese man in the street are very unhappy. They have heard what round-the-clock bombing has done to Berlin, Hamburg, Essen, Frankfort, and other industrial centers of their retreating German partner. They know, as do Americans who have lived in Japan for any length of time, that the six key industrial cities of Japan will burn as fast as—if not faster and more furiously than—their Nazi equivalents in Germany.

Most Vulnerable Country.

The six key centers are Tokyo, Osaka, Nagoya, Kyoto, Yokohama, and Kobe. I have had a good look at all of them—the industrial Ruhr of Japan—and I was often impressed by the thought of how quickly Japan could be snuffed out as a world power by igniting the huge, sprawling fire-traps from the air. A good, stiff wind, which invariably blew over these coastal centers from the sea, strengthened this thought and suggested how nature, combined with feverish, careless construction of these cities served to make Japan the most vulnerable country in the world.

The construction was careless because the Japanese had neither the time nor the money nor the desire to change the basic layout of their cities from a feudal to a modern one.

Thus there was a mushroom growth of sprawling factories among the flimsy, wooden, boxlike houses packed tightly together in areas through which there are often only dirt alleys or footpaths instead of paved streets.

After the devastating earthquake and fire of 1923 some streets were enlarged and some modern innovations were introduced. But this was limited to the business sections of Tokyo and Yokohama. The layout and structure of the greater part of the Japanese capital and the key eastern port of the country are about as primitive as they were 2,603 years ago.

In Nagoya, Kyoto, Kobe and Osaka conditions are similar to those of Tokyo and Yokohama. The downtown business areas are full of concrete and steel, but the larger sections of the cities, where most of the homes and many of the factories are located, are covered with a forest of wooden boxes, which millions call home. So that even the fire-proof structures are trapped in the forests of wood and paper houses which, when touched off by American bombs, will turn into infernos.

The heavy concentration of industry and other military objectives in the six leading cities provides something of a bomber's dream.

Plenty of Targets.

If he comes in from the east and flies westward over the main island of Honshu toward China, as the Doolittle raiders did, the first target he will find in his bombsights will be Yokohama. Here the principal targets are the harbor, one of the two largest in the country, shipbuilding yards, warehouses, metal, machine-tool, and chemical plants, textile and rubber mills, and an automobile factory. The 18-mile strip between Yokohama and Tokyo is packed solid with industries turning out machines and machine tools.