COAL AND IRON IN JAPAN.

Otago Daily Times, Issue 18325, 16 August 1921, Page 3

COAL AND IRON IN JAPAN.

TO THE EDITOR. Sir, —The most brilliant nation of our lime cannot expect, human nature being what it is, to escape envious depreciation; but some of the statements concerning Japan which have recently appeared in our British press are too preposterous to be left unnoticed. A few weeks ago a resident of our dominion who had returned from Japan was reported as having said that an honest Japanese was yet to bo found, or something to that effect—that of the Asiatic nation which stands out preeminent for its immemorial high sense oi honour and its unique freedom from official corruption! Notwithstanding the debasing effects of European commercialism, Japanese chivalry, as General Sir lan Hamilton has recently happily remarked, is not yet dead. Then this week wc have a report of a European professor in China who declares that Japan has neither coal nor iron. I at once bethought me of my interesting visit, many years ago, to the great coal mine of Takushiina, an island off the harbour of Nagasaki, with its many miles of underground passages—l forget how many, but I think they ran into scores. The fact is that recent writers on Japan declare coal to stand prominently forth as Japan’s most valuable underground property. At Miike, in Kiushiu, it has been mined since the year 1468, if wc may trust a credible tradition; while New Japan has prosecuted coal-mining so vigorously in accordance with the most up-to-date methods that, at Nanaura, a town of 20,000 inhabitants, has grown up around the mine. The Miike mine had a good many years ago an annual output of nearly three-quarters of a million tons, and in quality the coal was reputed to bo equal to the best Australian, and excelled only by the Welsh coal shipped from Cardiff. Coal areas are being increasingly worked in province after province from Kiushiu to Hokkaido.

As for iron, there is ovidonco of its 1, being mined as early as the tenth century of our era. Where did the iron and steel of feudal Japan come from? The steel-tem-pering of Japan in its most exclusive days was so fine that to this hour it baffles the best cutlers of Sheffield to surpass it or explain it. Amid all the recent changes, the Japanese soldier clings, with some modifications to the swords of his ancestors, the swords made of the native metal tempered by the native smith. As with coal, so with iron, vast fields await development, and the latest news holds out the prospect of Japan becoming independent in respect of iron of all the world through a local invention for the treatment of ironsand.

i±ow much wo need the League of Nations for the circulation of international knowledge, the development of international sympathy and magnanimity, and the suppression of international envy, malice, and all uncharitablencss! —l am, etc., W. Gray Dixon. St. Leonards, August 12.