ABSTRACT
A combination of officers and gangsters was a new and sinister development. The personal safety of statesmen depended largely on strict enforcement of the police regulations controlling the sale of revolvers. Since the exaggerated communist scare of 1928 it had become impossible for any ordinary Japanese to obtain firearms. The few foreigners who possessed sporting guns were regularly inspected. A British ex-officer who had kept the army revolver he carried on the Somme had to show it so often that he asked the police to take it away and keep it for him. They were astonished and refused. But if the army was munitioning the gangsters the police were helpless and the restrictions useless. Japan Was making war in Manchuria and Shanghai, and officers (as was proved in court) could go aboard warships or into barracks and come out with suitcases filled with grenades and automatics. It was certain that in a land where “face “counts for much, the patronage
of officers and gentlemen would inject new life into the death bands and blood brotherhoods of the socalled patriotic societies. Until then assassination had been an occasional risk of statesmen in Japan; thenceforward it was a constant fear, staying with every civilian statesman like his shadow and haunting the minds of mothers, wives, and children.
