While it would be a mistake to describe Sapajou or the North-China Daily News as ever having been pro-Japanese, neither could it have been described as anti-Japanese, any more than was general Treaty Port sentiment towards Japan. Japan had been widely admired for the success of its modernisation efforts since the Meiji Restoration, it had been joined in formal alliance relationship with Britain before and during World

War I, and it had actively participated in the anti-Soviet allied intervention following the Boshevik revolution (as it had in the suppression of the Boxers in China by the Eight Allied Armies at the turn of the century). In Shanghai, Japanese industry was of considerable significance. There was a large Japanese community, represented on the Board of the International Settlement and the Rate Payers' Association. It is fair to say that for well into the 1920s, there was at least grudging, and sometimes more than grudging, admiration for Japan's efforts in maintaining order, if not law, in the chaotic conditions of China at the time (Figure 51), and for its tough line on the "Unequal Treaties" (Figure 52).

The divergence between Japanese and Western interests in China started to become more clear as Japan strengthened its position in the North East, particularly following the establishment of Manchukuo (Figure 53). From the treatment of the Sino-Japanese hostilities in Shanghai in 1932, one can see the beginnings of a more sympathetic attitude towards China, reflecting in part at least the surprisingly (to both the Japanese and other foreigners) brave and stubborn resistance put up by the Chinese (Figure 54). Overall, however, the fighting was seen more as a nuisance than a real threat, or as a matter in which the interests of the foreign community were clearly engaged on one side or the other (Figure 55). As the decade advanced, the lines gradually became more clearly drawn and the danger posed by Japan to the maintenance of the order that had served "Shanghai" interests so well became increasingly obvious (Figure 56).

Between the recommencement of hostilities in Shanghai in 1937 and the eventual takeover of the International Settlement by the Japanese, the fighting and its effect on Shanghai and China more widely were the subject of many of Sapajou's cartoons, including some of his most striking, of which space allows only a few in this small essay. The first deals with the tragic incident in which Chinese aircraft, attempting to attack the flagship of the Japanese fleet anchored in the Huangpu, the Idzumo, instead succeeded on three separate occasions in dropping their bombs on the streets of Shanghai, most notoriously on Nanking Road, not far from the Cathay Hotel (now the Peace Hotel), with great loss of life (Figure 57). The second portrays in a particularly powerful image the heroic resistance put up against overwhelming odds by the Chinese soldiers who became known in English as "The Lone Battalion," and to the Chinese of the time as "The Eight Hundred Heroes" (Figure 58).

While Western governments would not become directly involved in the conflict for some years, many sympathetic individuals and non-Government organisations did what they could for the growing numbers of Chinese civilian victims of the hostilities, one aspect of which is reflected in Sapajou's portrayal of the non-combatant safe zone which a French priest, Father Jaquinot, managed to negotiate with the Chinese and Japanese authorities:managed with considerably less than total success, nevertheless saving lives that would otherwise have been lost (Figure 59). As the conflict broadened, Shanghai was not the only part of China where Western, particularly British, interests were threatened, as is graphically demonstrated in Sapajou's cartoon of Hongkong about to be engulfed by a tidal wave (Figure 60).

While sympathies were largely on the side of the Chinese by the late 1930s, however, foreign Shanghai could still see itself as the victim of pressures from both the warring parties, as is shown by a cartoon published in May 1939, at which time the wish that the ratepayers of the International Settlement could simply be left alone to get on with the serious business of making money was as strong as ever (Figure 61). That this was not to be, however, and that the Shanghai of the Shanghailanders was coming to an end, was presaged only a fortnight later in another cartoon which showed perhaps greater foresight than either the artist or the Japanese gentleman portrayed realised (Figure 62).