Soviet Envoy's Unwillingness to Accept any of the Japanese Suggestions From Our Own Corresponitent, Tokio, July 7.
Although it is now nearly two weeks since Comrade A. A. Joffe and Mr. Kawakami, delegates for Russia and Japan respectively, have been holding conversations, nothing tangible has as yet taken place. The meetings have been especially noteworthy for one thing, namely, the ready ability of either diplomat to differ from his colleague.. If agreement has been reached at all, it is that whenever any question came up for discussion, both Mr. Joffe and Mr. Kawakami readily agreed to disagree, and their points of view were so removed that anything like a compromise without the humiliating admission of surrender, was impossible. Yet another point on which the two representatives agreed was to declare a week-en holiday from Saturday afternoon till Monday morning.
There is a marked coolness on the part of the press towards the Russian representative that con-trests vividly with the enthusiasm and the benediction; oured on Mr. Joffe before the actual preliminary pourparlers started. One of the principal.reasons for this is the unbending attitude that Mr. Joffe has assumed. It was generally thought that Moscow's delegate would say Aye Aye" to most of Japan's suggestions, and that in a short space of time Kawakami would come hack covered with glory and heavy with concessions from the Soviet. The opposite is actually the case so far. Mr. Joffe has been unsparing in his out-spoken condemnation of the ultra-imper-laiist tendencies that prompted the military clique a short time ago, and virtually told Mr. Kawakami that the Russian memory_is not so bad as to forget in the space of a few months that Japan nursed! the ambition of planting the Rising Sun in the Trans-Baikal and practically annexing Russian territory east of Lake Baikal to the Japanese Empire. When he added that this was done just at the time that Russia was in the shadows, he waxed more than ordinarily bitter. This attitude of the Russian politician is partially responsible for the reaction in the Japanese press, while it is also due to an incident of a private nature that should hardly be a matter for the press of a first-class Power and the accredited delegate of another big country to wrangle over.
PERSONALITIES, On the gui vive for scoops, so "dear to the newspaper man's heart, the reporters of certain Japanese papers practically made
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