POVERTY IN JAPAN.

Ashburton Guardian, Volume 59, Issue 39, 25 November 1938, Page 7

POVERTY IN JAPAN.

INCREASED BY THE WAR.

FREQUENT SPY HUNTS. War is changing Japan into a grimly fatalistic nation, scarcely recognisable as that of two years ago, writes Hallett Abend from Japan in the “New York Times.” Everywhere there is evidence of stringent economies. Business buildings, homes, shops and streets are not being repaired. A general air of pinching poverty, and spreading shabbiness sharply strikes observers who knew Japan before the hostilities. Newspapers blazon only victories, usually exaggerating their importance, and suppress tidings of checks, disasters and guerrilla, activities, but despite the rigorous censorship and police, precautions that are so strict the people seldom dare discuss the war, the knowledge is slowly spreading that all is not going well. To one familiar with conditions in China and thoroughly conversant with the powerlessness of the Peking and Nanking amalgamated regimes the manner in which these developments are handled in the Japanese newspapers is pitiful and ludicrous. For the first time in many visits, extending over nearly 13 years, I was followed and importuned by many beggars, including men who were legless, armless or otherwise badly crippled. The Japanese say these are industrial casualties, hitherto charitably cared for, their appearance as mendicants is ominous. On many busy street corners are women beggars, sitting on the cold concrete and whining for alms, two or three crying babies with each one. Japan has a spy mania of .such an extent that visitors are constantly annoyed and subjected to irritations. Passport examinations, always ridiculously detailed, at present are farcial, but the worst comes after landing, when the shore police and plainclothes men take up the trail. d. twice caught a hotel room boy admitting a plainclothes man to my room with a passkey, and once returned to find a plainclothes man searching the pockets of my clothing. My mother, who had been spending the summer at Uden-dako, a. mountain resort, made a 20-hour railway trip from Nngaski to Kobe, crossing the straits from Moji to Shimonesiki at night, was constantly bounded and questioned as to the reasons for her journey, where she was going and what kind of news her soil wrote for the “New York Times.”

The worst feature of this shadowing, which amounts almost to persecution, is the fact that it is done by ignorant, arrogant men who speak little English and are able to understand only the simplest answers, phrased in words of one svllable.

All foreign residents in Japan, except Germans and Italians, also complain of the constant espionage, interference with their letters and telephone calls and bribery of their servants.