AMERICA AND JAPAN

Otago Witness, Issue 3500, 12 April 1921, Page 57

AMERICA AND JAPAN

“THE RUSSIA OF THE EAST.” TIIE ANGLO JAPANESE TREATY. (Feom Oub Own Correspondent.) T 1 11) T WELLINGTON, April 6. that the Japanese are preparing actively for war with the United States is the opinion of Mr Marcus S. Hill, an American business man, who is in Wellington at the present time. Mr Hill speaks with knowledge of the affairs of the Far East. He has spent over six years in Japan and enma, and four years in Northern Russia. He is now making his twentieth trip across the i acifac, and He is more than ever convinced, after his latest visit to Japan, that the men who rule that country are pursu. ing a policy that will bring them into conflict with the United States. “Their naval and military officers openly boast in uewspaper articles that they are preparing to ligfit America, said Mr Hill to a reporter. ‘Diplomats and officials may deny that but the army and the naiv are getting ready 1 speak Japanese, and I have been able to make my own observations. All the white people in the Far East know what is going on. Ihe Japanese are not friendly to "New Zealand and Australia ; they have their knife out for the L ruled States. They believe, rightly or wrongly, that America is standing 111 the way of their ambitions. It is true that if they light they are going to get an outrageous thrashing, but they do not believe that yet.” Air Hill proceeded: Ot the _ anti-Japanese agitation in California there was no justification at all for any suggestion that the people of the State of California were acting in this mallet vitiiout ilie support of the- American nation. "I learned a good deal about the Japanese while 1 was living in their country with my family,” said Air Hill. “Those of us who have lived in the Orient, and not merely toured there, know that the first honest Japanese has not yet been born. I won't say that the Japanese are immoral, but I will say that according to our standards they are unmoral. They know nothing about life from | our viewpoint. Their middle class and 1 wo: king families think nothing of leasing i their young daughters for fixed periods to | houses of prostitution. The girls return ] to their homes afterwards, and are not conI sidered to have suffered in reputation at all. j J be Japanese carry their own notions with I-them when they go into another country, j and obviously their presence in large num- - bets in an English-speaking community is intolerable. Y'ou people in New Zealand and Australia have prohibited the Japanese from entering your countries, and the Japanese have not protested seriously, because Great Britain is their ally. Americans are using the same light that you are rising—the right to say who shall enter their country—but in our case the Japanese make a great show of offended dignity, simply because rile attitude suits their policy. They won’t admit Chinese coolies to Japan, because the Chinese labourer can live on a smaller wage and less food than the Japanese labourer. They have control of Korea, which would hold another 20,CC0.000 or 20,000,C00 people, but they cannot compete with the Koreans any more than with the Chinese, so they want t.o settle in California, where they would enjoy the economic advantage that the Chinese coolie would enjoy in Japan. We are not going to have them in our country. The Californian people are enforcing their antiJapanese laws, and nothing that the diplomatists and the lawyers can say will make any difference.” “I pray from the bottom of my heart that Great Britain will not renew the Anglo-Japanese Treaty,” added Air Hill. “ I say that in all seriousness, because the treaty is a threat?to the friendship between Great- Britain and the United fitates. The Japanese are boasting openly that in their coming war with the United States that, they are going to have the support, or at least the benevolent neutrality of Great) Britain. I have told Japanese that they are wrong; that they have made themselves the Prussia of the East, and that they have not a friend in the world. I hope sincerely that the statesmen of the British Empire are going to see the wisdom of letting that, treaty lapse. The salvation of the world depends upon Great Britain and i lie United States standing together.