There has always been a good deal of bribery in Japan, it being one of the strange features of public life in this country that, While on the one hand there are splendid and heroic examples of abnegation and sacrifice for the interests of community and the country, there have also been, Side by side some of the most impudent squanderings and pecu ins of public funds. Some three years ago, one-half of the City' Fathers of Tokyo had to be clapped behind iron bars. Bribery and cor~ ruption had simply eaten into the Tokyo Mu ud bribes were given and taken right and left in connection with the reconstruc tion of the capital. A good number of contractors and the like also fell into the meshes of the law's net, and the echoes of this scandal were just about dying away, when others came to light, the principal of these being the bribing of Cabinet Min-tsters by white slave dealers in order to have a new segregated area established in a certain Osaka district.
On the heels of this came other revelations of a most disgraceful nature and, to cap it all, the allegations against General Yama-nash. Th baron Cenc! Tanaka was then Premier and his level best to shield General Yamanashi who was a particular friend of General Tanaka. Efforts were actually set in motion t> stay the haad of the judiciary. but the latter refused to be sidetracked and ted that the executive and the Judiciary must not infringe on each other's province and threatened that, if the Government sought to thwart the wx in the proper prosecution of its duties, it would appeal to the Throne. Matters became very acute. Tin god after tin god, who had made marvellously pious summaries at the recent general election of their services to the state, were ruthlessly exposed and the grand climax came when Baron: Tanaka suddenly died, a suicide in the arms of his Geisha concubine some of the papers declared; while others said that it was the result of being too much of a Jon vivant. At any rate, the end followed the sensational disclosures of downright bribery and corruption amongst some of the former Pre-mice's closest associates and friends and came at the conclusion of an all-night drinking party in a teae house at which Baron Tanaka is said to have wished all his friends "Goodbye.
The public _were shocked and the press intensified its demand that the scandals be probed to the limit, regardless of whom the law's draw net might catch in its meshes, while the judiciary went to work with that inexorable relentlessness that is associated with the workings of the judicial machinery.
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.