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"Yes, you will find the Foreign Office crowd pleasant," he continued. "But as a source of information you'll find them disappointing. Like all the rest of the officials, they are obsessed with the national mania for secrecy. All the officials seem to think that they may get into all kinds of trouble by telling the press something; that they can never get into trouble when they tell nothing. The great cry of the Japanese is constantly that they are misunderstood by the rest of the world, and still when we fellows who honestly want to bring about understanding try to help them along, they won't help us or themselves. Say, for instance, that some fool report against Japan crops up in Washington, or London, or Paris, and you come here to get the thing straightened out, to get Japan's side; you will, as a rule, find it is like pulling teeth, and often, when you do get the story, they won't let you quote the Foreign Minister, or even the Foreign Office generally. They want you to cable that 'it is reported,' or 'it is said' or 'there are indications that,' taking all the value out of the statement. Then, if you want to see one of the Ministers or some other big gun, they will probably arrange that you see him—they are tremendously obliging, I admit—but it will take a week or more before the interview can be arranged, and in the meantime the harm has been done abroad. Your story, Japan's version, has become old as Genesis, it has gone cold. And then they sit up and wail that the world misunderstands them. All this talk you hear about the infernally clever, insidious Japanese propaganda is plain rot. If there is one thing they don't know a thing about, it is propaganda. They have their propaganda newspapers, it is true, particularly in China, but everybody knows them, and they don't count. This talk about the Foreign Office handing out huge sums to writers and others is funny. The War Office people have the funds, and I daresay they spend them where they think it will do good. The General Staff, that is the secret force in the Japanese Government, and you and I never hear what goes on in there. See its headquarters, that old, gray building with the green copper roof; that's the last remaining stronghold of militarism, in its good old form, on this earth; and General Matsu, the chief, is the proper high priest, the simon-pure militarist, with ethics as primitive as those of a cave man. They are giving in now. They have to, for Japanese public opinion about spending great sums on armies is the same as it is in the rest of the world, but they are clever. They feel—it is probably their sincere idea of patriotism—that Japan can be great only by militarism, and where they reduce the army by two soldiers, they probably buy one machine gun, making up in strength in one way what they lose in the other. They probably feel that if they can't preserve Japan's strength openly on account of public opinion, they must do it quietly, for Japan's good. But there, under that green roof, lie the forces of old Japan, and there, on the other side of the city, in the students' quarter in Kanda, in the laborers' quarters of Honjo and Fukagawa, the forces of new thought are stirring and fermenting. It is medieval feudalism as opposed to modern industrialism, with a lot of more 'isms thrown in, Socialism, Communism, Sovietism even, new ideas, half understood, misunderstood, but grasped at with passionate eagerness, the young generation and the workers seeking such morsels of new thought, often the worse thought, that they can find, and swallowing them, half digested, or not digested at all.