Meanwhile the effect in Tokyo of these happenings had been
electrical. Relying on the well-known Japanese police axiom, that
the man who gets in his story first is the prosecutor and the
accused the guilty party, irrespective of what the evidence may
be, the newspapers all came out with the same account of a
calculated attack by "ferocious Chinese soldiers" on a Japanese
detachment and the general public were asked to believe that a
number of their enlisted nationals had been deliberately and
brutally murdered. It was not, however, until more than a week
after the incident that an official report was published by the
Tokyo Foreign Office, when the following garbled account was
distributed far and wide as the Japanese case:--
"When one Kiyokishy Yoshimoto, aged 27, an employee of a Japanese
apothecary at Chengchiatun, was passing the headquarters of the
Chinese troops on the 13th instant, a Chinese soldier stopped him,
and, with some remarks, which were unintelligible to the Japanese,
suddenly struck him on the head. Yoshimoto became enraged, but was
soon surrounded by a large number of Chinese soldiers and others,
who subjected him to all kind of humiliation. As a result of this
lawlessness on the part of the Chinese, the Japanese sustained
injuries in seven or eight places, but somehow he managed to break
away and reach a Japanese police box, where he applied for help.
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