JAPANESE HEALTH.

Manawatu Standard, Volume LVII, Issue 100, 30 March 1937, Page 7

JAPANESE HEALTH.

DETERIORATION OF PEOPLE. The alleged physical deterioration of Japanese is again discussed in the London Press. A Japanese Minister is said to have warned Cabinet in July last year. General Count Terauchi, former YVar Minister, reported that the proportion of men exempted from military service for health reasons had risen from 250 per IUOO in 1925 to 400 in 1935. This decline, according to Freda Utley, in the New Statesman, is due to the effect of five years of armed aggression, colossal expenditure on armament and the agrarian crisis. Replying to Dr. Clunies Ross, of Sydney University, who had declared that she had exaggerated Japan’s internal weakness, Miss Utley suggests that even he cannot disregard the reports of the Ministries of Education and Agriculture about starving schoolchildren and sales of daughters by destitute peasants. Miss Utley assigns Japan’s increased consumption of woollen textiles to army needs in Manchuria and Mongolia, not to the increasing ability of the mass of the people to purchase warm clothing.