The Evening Star THURSDAY, FEBRUARY 24, 1921. Japanese Trade.

Evening Star, Issue 17594, 24 February 1921, Page 4

The Evening Star THURSDAY, FEBRUARY 24, 1921.

Japanese Trade.

An unpromising endeavor to retrieve a great lost opportunity is

suggested by the report of a scheme now being

organised for the dumping of Japanese manufactures in other countries. Tho manufactures will require to be cheaper than anything that has come hitherto from the land of cheapness to bo attractive. A magnificent opportunity was given to Japan to increase her permanent export trade out of measure when half the countries of the world, including British Dominions, were eager to take her goods, because they could get nothing, or nest to nothing, from the countries that were making shells instead of utilities. Japanese factories were set to making things they had never made before, and they made them very well—for a time. The following table shows how imports of New Zealand from Japan increased by leaps and bounds in a few years:— .1908 ... £44,000 1914 ... ... • 187.500 1915 304,300 1916 ... ... 563,000 1917 ... ... ... 629,000 1918 ... 1,215,000 The value of imports in the last year of the war was more than six times their value in its first year, and a similar expansion was shown-by the Japanese export trade to Australia and other countdies.

It was inevitable that Japan should lose the greater part of this phenomenal increase when British and other factories were in a position to supply their old customers over again; but she might have retained a much larger proportion of it than has been preserved if the methods of her traders had been different. They did ill service to their country when they made tho description “Japanese” synonymous with “ gimcrack ” in respect to a wide variety of articles which her manufacturers were able, when it pleased them, to produce of a quality equal to any in the world. Trade commissioners from the Eastern country, who understood the conditions necessary to a permanent trade, visited other shores. They talked about new steamer services, and did their best to ensure that the golden harvest would be a lasting one. But their plans were 'mined by the trading methods which made “never again” the verdict of the purchasers of knives £hat would not cut, matches that would 1 not strike, and too many other articles from Japan. Now the Japanese are lamenting that their exports do not balance imports, and are planning a new stimulus to their export trade which should never have been required The defects of Japanese trading methods, which have met with such heavy punishment, will repair themselves in time. In the old days trading for profit was despised in Japan. “The old-time Japanese trader,’’ it has been explained, “ knowing that his neighbors looked on him as a scoundrel, thought that he might as well make his scoundrelism as profitable as possible. This feeling remains in some quarters in spite of every effort of the Government, the great merchants, and the financiers, by education and precept, to remove it.” The big Japanese houses, by British admission, conduct their business on the most scrupulously honest lines, and. Japanese national finance is beyond suspicion; but the smaller dealer lias to be watched all the time—and it is not easy to watch him over of miles of sea.

We have not the post-war figures for Japanese imports into New Zealand, but no doubt they would show a heavy drop from those which have been displayed j and it will be many years before Japanese supplies to the British Dominions regain anything like the dimensions which they had in war time. It is said, however, that great efforts are beintr made by the Japanese to develop new markets in the Central European countries that have been most hurt by the war. According to a recent writer, their emissaries have been telling Germany and the other defeated countries that they have not a dog’s chance in the struggle for trade against the victorious nations of the West. Their commercial future lies in the Far East. Thera they can obtain abundant raw material and plenty of tonnage to transport it, It is a trade campaign that does not promise much for the immediate future; but British merchants are not without their fears of what may result from it, if it is not combated, when the Central States are powers in the world once more.