"Never speak of it, but think of it always"--the adversary must be put
to sleep again, he must be lulled into security and his thoughts
directed towards the points where there was nothing to be seen, where no
preparations were in progress. He must be kept in the dark about the
true nature of the preparations, and on the other hand put on as many
false scents as possible, so that he might not get the faintest idea of
the real plan.
This is the reason why all those things were done, why the quarrel over
the admission of Japanese children to the public schools of San
Francisco was cooked up, why so much national anger was exhibited, why
the Japanese press took up the quarrel like a hungry dog pouncing upon a
bone, why so much noise was made about it at public meetings that one
would have thought the fate of Japan hung on the result. And then, as
soon as Washington began to back down, the dogs were whipped back to
their kennels and the "national anger" died out as soon as Japan had
"saved her face." The Americans were allowed to doze off again, fully
persuaded that the school question was settled once and for all and that
there was nothing further to fear in that direction. Then, too, Japan
apparently yielded in the vexed question of Japanese immigration to the
United States, but instead of sending the immigrants to San Francisco
and Seattle, as she had done hitherto, they were simply dispatched
across the Mexican frontier, where it was impossible to exercise control
over such things, for no one could be expected to patrol the sandy
deserts of Arizona and New Mexico merely to watch whether a few Japs
slipped across the border now and then. It was therefore impossible to
keep track of the number of Japanese who entered the country in this
way, more especially as the official emigration figures issued at Tokio
were purposely inaccurate, so as to confuse the statistics still more.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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