To the Editor of the "Norta-Cuma Dairy News'
Sin,—According to a United Pr message from Brussels, dated November 2, the Japanese Ambassador to Belgium, Mr. Kurusu, has made the following statement.
Japan and Chi: are grown-up nations with thais own culture and able to straighten out their difficulties themselves. It is an insult to the ideals of civilization to suggest they cannot.
This statement contains an explanation of the causes of the present Nippo-Chinese conflict, which should. be carefully studied by all those who want to understand what is happening around them and who are dissatisfied with the petty recriminations and accusations which are in vogue and, day by day, more and more clouding the real issue.
The present war between Japan and China is an attempt at cultural readjustment and a symptom of the awakening of the self-consciousness of the Far East. Japan is trying to pull China away from contacts which China is culturally unfit to absorb.
China, originally, was a nation of artists. Her civilization was one-sidedly easthetical. Her only and most significant cultural inventions were poetry, painting, sculpture artistic handicrafts and music. She has lived on brain alone and lost the sense of reality together with what, in the modern world, is called manual efficiency worships face and neglects facts. She is a talker and for a doer. She is carried away by slogans and relies for her advancement on propaganda, With pro paganda, she endeavours to mobilize the world against Japan and expects to be victorious in war fought without military and medical equipment, and even without a commissariat, Her known in Shanghai, is now presenting an exhibition of portraits of Tibetans and enlargements of photographs from Eastern Tibet, on the fourteenth fider of the Park Hotel from 10 am. to 6 p.m. to-day, tomorrow and Wednesday. Admission is $1, and half of the proceeds of the exhibition will be donated to the Chinese Women's Club war relief fund.
This unusual display will appeal along several different lines.
First comes the beauty and interest of the magnificent Tibetan scenery as seen in the exceptionally fine photographs, then the vital appeal of the portraits of different Tibetan types, men and women, Miss Dorf works in pastel with a good command of her medium has been particularly successful in making her sitters really live before us. She that she had to work rapidly, for her subjects were shy and could hardly be persuaded to pose for twenty or even ten minutes, Still again there is the fund of ethnological information which pictures and photographs convey, so many di ferent types being seen, amongst them the "Kaifeng Jew.
Miss Dorf was a member of the scientific expedition headed by Dr. Anderson which spent some months on the border of Tibet and has just returned. She expects to continue her studies and practical research into etisclony and in and philology.
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.