Ashburton Guardian Magna est Veritas et Prævalebit TUESDAY, JANUARY 30, 1934. BRITISH AND JAPANESE TRADE.

Ashburton Guardian, Volume 54, Issue 93, 30 January 1934, Page 4

Ashburton Guardian Magna est Veritas et Prævalebit TUESDAY, JANUARY 30, 1934. BRITISH AND JAPANESE TRADE.

The negotiations that have been in progress recently between Japan and Britain in regard to trade relations invests with particular interest the latest report by the Yokohama and Tokio Foreign Board of Trade. This body has on its committee representatives of some of the leading European and United States concerns interested in the import trade of Japan and the report deals in a practical way with the varying aspects of Japan's competition in world trade. The success that has attended v this campaign is ascribed, inter alia, to the fact that the last three years have been marked in Japan by definite constructive action; encouragement of Japanese industries is a policy born .of the necessity to cope with the increase of population. The Japanese outlook, we are told, is animated by youth, and Japan's motto is "forward." But while expressing appreciation of Japan's difficulties and admiration of her courage, the board remarks that "her business fraternity have yet to learn to practise the principle of live and let live." The board doubts whether the merchants' export campaign abroad has been conducted with the same judicious foresight as were the preliminary surveys; and whether exporters have shown sensible businesslike appreciation of the susceptibilities and economic necessities of the foreign nations concerned. An idea of the kind of nationalist propaganda that is being spread in Japan may be gained from the following extract from an article by Mr R. Nagai (Minister of Oversea Affairs): "The Japanese attempt to establish a new self-supporting and self-sufficing economic system on the foundation of the great natural sources of Asia and to cultivate a new land, where workers will never starve, in co-operation with Manchukuo, which is the same with Japan in blood and in the system of civilisation, must be said to be a proper move to maintain the right to exist, at the present moment when the world's peoples are struggling for the same object with those of the same interests. I am not absolutely opposed to the establishment of economic blocks, and the severer struggle for existence among the worlds peoples. It is rather natural that every nation or every race should try self-support by an indepndent economic policy, if the world cannot save itself from great economic confusion. But the Indians, who have been groaning under'the coercion of the-white race for years, have now had to denounce the Commercial Treaty with Japan, whose people belong to the same race, in an attempt to oust Japanese products from the Jndian market, not ot their free will, but by the order ot their dominator, for the purpose ot establishing an economic block. What a tragedy in human history!