A BACKGROUND TO THE NEWS

Dominion, Volume 31, Issue 106, 29 January 1938, Page 9

A BACKGROUND TO THE NEWS

Japan And Great Britain Drawing attention to the hitherto friendly attitude of Britain to Japan, Baron Sonoda said that if Briain failed to respect Japan’s position in the Far East, Japan would be in no position to guarantee the existence of British rights and interests in China. "What Great Britain -requires to recognise,” says an authoritj, is I that, in view of her own position and interests in the Far East and Western Pacific, Japan ean be one of two things —a most valuable friend or an extremely dangerous enemy. ... It is only necessary to consider what would have happened in 1914, if Japan had failed to join the Allied cause, to realise the immense value of Japanese friendship, it, times of stress. Had Japan aligned herself with Germany . . . even if she had remained neutral . . . Great Britain would have been hard put to it to find sufficient warships and men to i dettl with the German naval and military forces in the Pacific and to protect Australia, New Zealand, and other important possessions in those waters, let alone convoy the Anzacs. . .'. "The value of ensuring the friendly co-operation of Japan and the danger of incurring Japanese enmity must be clear to all. Anxious as Japan herself may be to retain British friendship, she is, nevertheless, in a position to inflict grievous harm on British interests in East Asia—far greater harm than Great Britain can inflict on Japanese interests—and to offer a serious naval and military threat to British possessions in the Far East and ■Western Pacific. ... “To court Japanese friendship at the expense of some other country would, in fact, be to repeat the regrettable folly of 1922 when, in order to satisfy the' United States and ensure her friendship, the British Government of the day agreed to abrogate the AngloJapanese Alliance, despite the obvious sense of grievance it would create in Japan. . . . “What, of course, would provide the best safeguard for peace in the Far East would be an alliance of sorts between Great Britain, Japan and th< United States: but to this America . . would never agree.” Japan’s- Government It is stated that there is growing divergence between the Japanese Government and the army regarding China, Superficially, the Japanese Government bears a strong resemblance to that of one of the parliamentary States of Western Europe. There is an Emperor, who appears to be a constitutional monarch, governing through a Cabinet of Ministers. There is a Parliament of two Chambers —one largely hereditary and the other electe'd. This Parliament passes laws, which require the Emperor’s signature; and the popular Chamber passes the annual Budget, just like the New Zealand House of Representatives. There is also a Public Service. Actually, the Japanese political system is not in the least like that of a parliamentary country. It is not very much more parliamentary than Nazi Germany or Fascist Italy. The weakness of Japanese parliamentarism is not mainly the result of a failure on the part of the parliamentary leaders to use the powers conferred upon them by the Constitution, but of a deliberate withholding of the powers required for the real effectiveness of parliamentary government. Thus, while Japan possesses a Cabinet and a Parliament which votes the annual Budget, in effect the Cabinet is responsible not to Parliament but to the Emperor—which means the influences surrounding the Emperor. The Cabinet is usually composed mainly of Ministers drawn from the lea'ding parliamentary party; but this does not apply to the Ministers who preside over the fighting departments, since the fighting services are not under parliamentary control, but are within the exclusive domain of the Emperor. These services, responsible only - to the Emperor, can' put forward their own demands for expenditure, which the Cabinet has to accept; and a party Cabinet can have forced upon it, as Ministers of War and Marine, colleagues whom it heartily dislikes and of whose policy it disapproves. This alone would reduce to a farce the “power of the purse.” which is generally regarded as the keystone of (be arch of parliamentary control. But Parliament does not even possess this power in relation to the Public Service. The independent position of the fighting services is tbe key to the Japanese political situation. Of late the real controller of Japan's international policy has been far more the War Minister'than the Prime Minister. Botany Bay Almost exactly as it had fluttered triumphantly 150 years ago. the Union Jack of Queen Anne, which was used by Governor Phillip, was flown at Kurnell, on the shore of Botany Bay. In 1781 a Frenchman wrote that Captain Cook had sailed to the Pacific in order that the loss of an English empire in one hemisphere (North American colonies) might be retrieved by the discovery in tbe other hemisphere of men tame enough to bear the English yoke. Nothing was further from British thoughts at the time. The primary consideration in settling at Botany Bay was to find a place for convicts. The idea was Sir John Banks’s. The decision was made on August. 18. 1786; an Act was passed early in 1787, and Captain Phillip was made governor and autocrat of the new, colony, whose limits were defined as extending from Cape York on the north to South Cape (Tasmania) ton the south, and from the 135th parallel of longitude, just west of which the great telegraph wire runs to-day, to “the adjacent islands” on the east. In May, 1787, Phillip started with 212 marines under Major Ross, 28 marines’ wives, and 600 male and 185 female convicts (or thereabouts). Seven-eighths of the convicts had been sentenced to a term of seven years, which was the shortest term then known, and only one out of every 30 was a lifer. Two or three convicts were Africans. Three volunteers went with Phillip—namely Dudd, Daveney and Livingstone, two of whom were, consumptives. Two years’ rations were provided. A few cattle, sheep, pigs, poultry, goats and rabbits were shipped on board at the Cape of Good Hope. Phillip himself had a vision of empire and a plan for realising his ambition. “As I would not wish convicts to lay the foundations of an empire, I think they should ever remain separated from the garrison and other settlers that may come from Europe,” he said, and he classed ex-convicts as convicts.