PROVING TOO MUCH.

Auckland Star, Volume LXVIII, Issue 49, 27 February 1937, Page 2 (Supplement)

PROVING TOO MUCH.

u JAPAN'S FEET OF CLAY."

"Japan," says Freda Utley, in the chapter introducing "Japan's Feet of □ay" (Faber and Faber), "is putting up a big bluff to the world. She started the game of world politirs and military aggression with the scantiest of resources, but unless her bluff is soon called she may actually achieve success which could still easily be prevented." The spirit of these words is not such as to promise that the chapters following them will set before the reader a fairlydrawn picture of the State and people in which all the world is interested, nor do they. Miss I'tley, who knows a deal about Japan (and dislikes what she knows) seems concerned only to prove that things are not what they seem, and, specifically, that the nation's industrial and economic organisation is precariously based, that its farming industries are in a hopeless state of debt-ridden povfflty and that the country is led by the nose by a self-perpetuating oligarchy intent upon Imperialistic expansion. In support of her thesis she quotes, so often as to tire anybody except a statistician fresh from a holiday, official or semiofficial statements and figures which the layman, while feeling against them a dull resentment, would find difficult to disprove. Dependence on U.S. Market. Japan's only really successful industries, the author contends, are the textile industries, and the only raw material which she produces in abundance, silk, is mainly exported. "Japanese economy is forced to adapt itself at whatever cost to the demands and restrictions of the U.S.A. Thus she exports her own raw material to the U.S.A., which produces no natural silk, and imports raw cotton from the U.S.A. "Even so, her silk sales no longer realise enough to buy all the cotton she needs. . . . But whereas B."> per cent of Japan's silk goes to the American market, only 18 per cent of the U.S.A.'s cotton production goes to Japan. Nothing could more clearly illustrate than this unequal trade the dependent position—the almost colonial position—of Japan in relation to the U.S.A.; Japan desperately needs the U.S.A. as both seller and buyer, but the U.S.A. could dispense with Japan as either without catastrophic or even serious results." It is true, as the author remarks, that England and all the European cotton manufactuing countries import their raw materials, and that they also import raw materials, but "England has Her coal and her iron and her machinery to export in exchange, and Germany her vast metallurgical and machinery and chemical production: Japan has neither—only silk and goods manufactured from imported raw materials.''

Expansion of. Exports. The author declares that Japan's "feverish expansion of export* of cheap manufactures" has been made possible only "by means of inflation, reduced wages, a shrunken home market and acute agrarian distress." She has been "using up her human capital and the toll will be paid later in t C 3 nation, since the whole population is undernourished." Even so, her exports of all kinds of goods produced from cotton are ''not sufficient to pay even for the cotton she consumes for her own needs." There is a great deal of this, designed to show that Japan is sliding down a slippery slope, but the reader must beware. He must remember confident predictions, founded on statistical studies of Italy's economic plight during the sanctions campaign, that Italy could not last more than & month or two longer. It wm proved that collapse must come, but somehow it didn't. If the book represented the whole truth about Japan it is unlikely that it would have been written, for the nation could hardly have risen to the eminence on which it stands now; but as a corrective to j falsely romantic ideas about the Island | Kmpire it has its value.