JAPANESE MIGRANTS.

Auckland Star, Volume LXVII, Issue 235, 3 October 1936, Page 15

JAPANESE MIGRANTS.

MANCHUKUO PUNS. FIVE MILLION SETTLERS. TOKYO. The Overseas Ministry here has drawn up a 20-year programme of Stateencouraged emigration to Manchukuo, designed -to place 5,000,000 settlers at an estimated cost of two billion yen (over £100,000,000 sterling). The plan provides that 800,000,000 yen should be furnished by the Government; the remainder will presumably come from the emigrants themselves, and from railway and shipping companies and other corporations which are interested in promoting large-scale settlement in Manchukuo. Government Subsidy. The Ministry is expected to request an emigration appropriation of 8,000,000 yen for the next fiscal year. With the aid of this, 10,000 families, or 50,000 persons, will be settled. The region which is marked out for colonisation is along the line of the new Harbin-Lafa railway and, in general, in the eastern and northern part of Manchukuo.

Japan has borrowed from Russia the habit of reckoning in five, ten, and twenty-year plsuis. Sometimes these future projects represent wishful thinking rather than a precise estimate of real possibilities. It is, however, quite probable that there will be an effort to speed up settlement in Manchukuo, because, up to the present time, that country has conspicuously failed to absorb any considerable proportion of Japan's surplus agricultural population. The few colonists who have been established in northern Manchukuo have been harassed by bandits. Two Obstacles. There seem to be two formidable obstacles to any large movement of farmers from Japan's congested areas into the rolling plans of Manchukuo. In the first place, the Manchukuo climate is much too severe for the Japanese taste. When Japanese leave their native islands they prefer to live in warmer, not in colder, regions, as the relatively large emigration to the South Sea mandated islands and to the Davao region, in the Philippines, clearly indicates. Moreover, the Manchukuo standard of living is lower than the Japanese; and this makes it difficult for new settlers to compete successfully, especially when they are struggling with all the initial difficulties of colonisation. Some Japanese who have studied the problem believe that only a mass colonisation movement will be successful. They point to the gregarious instincts and deep-rooted family life of their countrymen, and contend that the Japanese who would be happy in a fairly large community of his own quickly becomes lonely and discouraged in a small frontier settlement. It is some such scheme of large-scale colonisation that the Overseas Ministry apparently has in mind.