Word: tientsin
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...Fish, vegetables, rice-the staples of Japanese diet-were crucially scarce. The rice shortage was beginning to affect the supply of sake (rice wine). Enough rice had been plundered from North China, already hard up because of severe floods, so that in Tientsin the price of a sack of rice-two months' supply for one person-had gone up from $12 (Chinese) to $100. Food riots broke out in Tientsin and Peking. In Tokyo, according to the Agriculture and Forestry Ministry, so many Japanese were eating the bean curd waste usually fed to cattle that cows were giving only...
...Japan's Foreign Office handed British Ambassador Sir Robert Leslie Craigie a flat note demanding that Britain hand over the 21 Germans taken three weeks ago from the Japanese liner Asama Mam. Britain sat tight on her rights. In Tientsin, U. S. citizens as well as Britons suffered from renewed tightening of the British Concession blockade, Japanese military planes roared angrily back & forth 500 feet above the Concession's buildings...
...calm coat-&-pants language of international law. It set off new Japanese frenzies. It was "legalistic," said the Foreign Office, and did nothing to assuage Japan's dignity, injured by this insult "right in her front garden" - "on her very doorstep." Properly angered, Japan tightened the Tientsin blockade - stopped the passage of food into the British concession, turned on the juice in the encircling electrified barbed wire. None but Italians and White Russians were allowed to take food into the concession. Concession prices rose sky high, while the Tientsin American Chamber of Commerce prepared to appeal to Washington. This...
Nevertheless "a sword of Damocles," as the Tokyo Asahi said, "was raised over Japan's head." The country reacted, as always under pressure, with threats and recriminations. Commander Masaharu Homma of the Tientsin Garrison, an old hand at talking out of turn, warned that the Japanese Army might have to "reconsider appropriate steps." Japan's Army spokesman told a fantastic cock-&-buller about a Chinese plot against the life of U. S. Ambassador to China Nelson Trusler Johnson. The Japanese press said it was time to stop "courting favor" with the U. S. In private, statesmen loudly complained...
...pressing her in North China. This week the British delighted Japan by announcing imminent withdrawal of British troops from North China, on the flimsy pretext that they are needed in Europe. The British force, which has been a whole lot of cold water on the hot Japanese garrison at Tientsin, will be only a tiny drop in the B. E. F. bucket...