NATION SHOCKED

Nelson Evening Mail, Volume 80, 14 April 1945, Page 3

NATION SHOCKED

CLOSING OF JAPANESE SCHOOLS FAR REACHING EFFECT ON COUNTRY New York, Mar. 24. Walter Millis, assistant chief editorial writer for the “New York Herald Tribune,” said today that perhaps the most extraordinary of all the new • measures taken by Japan to meet the present crisis is the announcement of shutting down schools and colleges. Mr. Millis writes: Perhaps the most extraordinary of all the new measures with which Japan’s rulers are trying to meet the crisis was that announced March 18, ordering suspension of all schools, colleges and universities in Japan for a period of a year. Beginning with the seven-year-olds in the second grade, the entire school population, pupils and teachers alike, is to be wholly mobilized for “urgent” war work. This sudden snuffing-out of the entire educational system, one of the great prides of the Japanese people, must have come as a severe public shock. The shock seems, indeed, to have been so severe that the order had to be softened-on the following day. It was then announced that pupils would not immediately leave their classrooms; except as they were called out under the mobilization laws they would continue in their classes as before. But the orcter itself apparently still stands; the schools are to be sacrificed en masse to the desperate needs of Japanese fascism.

What this will mean to the Japanese people one can only guess. It is not always realized how great a part education has played in the modern i Japanese outlook. The school system was established in 1872, at the dawn of the modern era, and expressly as one of the basic pillars of the new society which the statesmen of the Meiji Restoration then designed. Primary education was made compulsory for all Japanese. Japan is today one of the few Asiatic nations in which literacy is all but universal. The school has been the great emanciptator for the individual and for the nation. It is now ruthlessly written off by Japan’s militarist leaders, ostensibly as a sacrifice for the devouring needs of the war crisis into which they were so foolish as to lead their country. In peremptorily suppressing the whole system now, are Japan’s rulers really driven by a manpower crisis so desperate that they must have the labour of the remaining children, that they must stop even the springs from which they draw their technical, medical and trained military personnel?.

Or are they acknowledging a general disorganization of the community so extreme that the educational system can no longer function? Or are they perhaps utilizing the crisis as an excuse for destroying what they—like all other Nazi-Fascist politicians —have long wanted to destroy: the last opportunity for any kind of intellectual expression, of any independent thought, of any glimmer of individual will among the masses whom they were trying to reduce, to a purely termite-like existence? ■ That is a matter of speculation. But this destruction of the schools—coming on top of the revolutionary change which added the civilian premier to the general staff: on top of the evacuation of millions from the Tokyo-Osaka area: on top of the confusion of transportation and something like a breakdown in the rationing regulatory-measures: on top of the rough and ready efforts to force anyone possible back to the land and to agricultural production—powerfully suggests the real gravity of the crisis. Fascism in Japan, like fascism in Germany, is reaching the inevitable catastrophe to which fascism must always lead.