China and Japan: Their Antithetical Ideologies

Extract

“CHINA AND JAPAN must be good friends and, even though hostilities exist between them now, will become good friends in the long run. … We belong to the same race and we use the same language. Our philosophy, ethics, literature and other cultural aspects of our civilizations are the same. …” Thus wrote, for an American journal, Iwao Okai, University of Chicago student of international affairs, some weeks after the renewed outbreak of hostilities near Peking in the summer of 1937. In thus expressing himself Mr. Okai was but repeating theories, from time to time, inculcated in the youth of his native land — theories, the value of which, groups of his countrymen have attempted, on occasion, to impress upon their Chinese neighbors by means, alternately, of honeyed words and bribery, of bullets and bombs.