DANGER AHEAD

Auckland Star, Volume LXXVI, Issue 254, 26 October 1945, Page 7

DANGER AHEAD

FUTURE OF JAPAN

CHINA'S IMPORTANCE

The opinion that the path to a representative government for a democratic Japan did not lie along the paths hitherto followed by General MacArtHur was expressed by Mr. J. M. Bertram, a former Auckland Rhodes Scholar, who spent three and a half years as a prisoner of war of the Japanese and who returned to New Zealand by the transport Andes.

Anyone who knew the Far East considered the idea of choosing Prince Konoye as the head of a democratic or representative Government absurd, said Mr. Bertram. Konoye was not a Liberal. He was the negation of Liberalism. He could better be described as an exclusive and aristocratic dilettante.

"There are no trained leaders for the upsurge of democratic nationalism and the American occupation method has apparently merely switched power from one feudal group, the army and navy, to another, the industrialists," stated Mr. Bertram. "When the occupation forces are withdrawn—if the present course is maintained—the internal political and economic position in Japan will be fundamentally unchanged."

Mr. Bertram emphasised that the best means for providing peace in the Far East and security for the Pacific lay in the establishment of a stable China. In his opinion, the pattern of future events in the area would be very largely determined by the success or failure of efforts to reconcile the Kuomintang and the Communists and to give China a single democratic and stable government. China and Russia, he considered, should be given a say in dealings with Japan. These two Powers knew the Japanese far better than the Americans or British.