Japan’s March Across Asia – – A Growing Empire

Southland Times, Issue 23408, 15 January 1938, Page 11

Japan’s March Across Asia - - A Growing Empire

JAPAN is the riddle of the Orient. Seventy years ago, it was an unknown, strange small nation that lived in seclusion. Just another Siam, let us say. Now it is a ranking world power, with a great navy, a great army, a great air fleet. Aggressive, warminded, imperial-minded, seeking territory, markets, raw material for its industries and its crowded population, Japan at the moment is one of the world’s question marks. Will this new nation, eager for a place in the sun, take China in its grip? Does it mean to stop if it can grab a few provinces of eastern China? Is its plan to march across Asia? Does it seek not only Pacific conquest but world dominance? Is the Yellow Peril at last on the world war

path? Many nations would like to answer the question: Where does Japan mean to stop? And the further question: How can we stop her? Most nations are too far away to make effective war on her. Only Red Russia can, for the Soviet Union has Siberia and is Japan’s neighbour. But will Red Russia tackle Yellow Japan? And what would the other nations say if she did? They may not wanf Japan conquering China and shutting China’s “open door” to their trade, but would they want the Soviets, as saviours of China, the big boss there? These are some of the questions that arise out of Japan’s “undeclared war” in China. It is modem war at its ruthless worst. Seventy years ago the Japanese were a bow-and-arrow nation. Now they use the most up-to-date engines of war and slaughter. Their great warships sweep the China

seas. Their submarines sink Chinese shipping and helpless Chinese junks. Their big bombers smash at Chinese cities and kill thousands. A World Threat In two generations the unknown, quaint, sleeping land of Japan has turned into a world threat. Not only a war threat, but an economic threat Japan in this century established industries and jumped with cheap goods

into the world’s markets, challenging the preserves of such commercial nations as Great Britain and the United States and in many cases forcing them out. Since the start of the century Japan has marched from zero to somewhere near the top of the heap. She cannot be left out of the calculations of Europe or (jtaisirica. The world has contracted in that time and Japan cannot be treated as a mere faraway noise. She is only two days’ flight from the coast of the United States and the coast of Canada’s British Columbia.

The threat of Japan lies across Britain’s Hong Kong and Singapore, the Philippine Islands, the Dutch East Indies, French Indo-China, and Australia and New Zealand. They all watch her march in China and squirm every time she kills another thousand Chinese. Let us look at the giant strides made by this mighty atom of a far eastern nation that arose from a thousand years of sleep to make the world sit up and take notice. Forty years ago the Japanese were called “quaint,” says Fortufie magazine. Even early in this century they were viewed as odd little yellow men who lived in odd little paper houses and bowed odd little grinning bows in

kimonos which were dressing gowns. In those days we thought of the Japanese as they were pictured in Gilbert and Sullivan’s opera, ‘The Mikado.”

World Takes Notice First they were quaint, and then in a few years they were amazing. That was the word for them. The world

rather admired the cocky little beggars. A funny lot, all right, who left their shoes on the porch. But they licked the Russians decisively in 1904. That made the world sit up and take notice. A lot of nations feared Russia then as now, the “bear that walked like a man.” Great Britain did. France respected her. Had not Russia beaten Napoleon? And now these amazing little Japanese not only beat Russia, but took Port Arthur. It was in the 60’s and 70’s that Japan began to become a nation of outside interests and to start a navy. She quickly began to make up for lost time. As early as 1895 she had learnt enough from her European teachers

to take her first steps in conquest and imperialism. That year she grabbed the considerable Chinese island of Formosa. That was when the Japanese march of conquest really began. She had sunk her claws into China for the first time. She had served notice on the world that Japan was prepared to take a hand in the international game. In 1895 she took Formosa from China; in 1904 she beat the Tsar’s Russia; Japan was on the march. She began to dream imperial dreams and to plan conquest. In 1910 she took Korea. In the Great War she threw in her lot with the Allies, did little fighting, but won further' prestige and power as a nation to be reckoned with. Then in 1931 she launched her longdreamed of attack on China. The League of Nations was weak, it was hard to interfere with her, Soviet Russia was in the midst of her first H — cfrti 51WPV

five-year plan—and Japan got away with her first big continental conquest. She over-ran Chinese Manchuria and set up in 1933 the puppet state of Manchukuo. Attack At Shanghai Then she rested, until July last, when on a pretext of an unfair attitude on the part of China but without de-

claring war, she attacked at Shanghai and Peiping, and began blasting with full force at Chinese cities and the Chinese coast. How far will she go with it? How far does she hope to go? How far will she be allowed to go? Japan is a small country. But she has an air force of 4000 fighting aeroplanes, an army of 7,500,000 highly trained men and a'spirit of conquest inflamed with the successes of the past 33 years and farmed by the social and economical need of territorial expansion. During those 33 years she had won an empire four times as large as Japan herself with a population larger than

that of North America. At the same time she has been carrying out an economic penetration of the worlds markets no less remarkable than her physical conquest , Japan’s greatest yet cheapest asset is her people, of whom she has pknty. They live under conditions of pay and labour that would appal the people of most great nations. In tiny valleys set between rocky, mountam-covered territory, half of her people still eke out a living from the soil. They are jammed tighter to the square mile than any farmers anywhere in the world, living on the merest plots. Eight millions of her 92,000,000 live water lives, fishing or operating Japan s merchant marine, third largest in the world. And her pinched population continues to grow apace; m 15 years it has increased by 20,000,000. It would seem almost at times as if Japan must expand or burst. Millions of Japanese work cheaply in the mass industries which have been created to take the raw materials of other countries and turn them into finished products for shipment to the ends of the earth. And remarkable results have been attained. It is said that you can buy Japanese-made cotton shirts cheaper in London than you can buy a shirt of English-made cotton. In Italy she can sell silk more cheaply than the Italians, who grow silk, can. Africa and North, and South America have been flooded with her goods. Japan’s Excuse

Small wonder that this aggressive race turned eyes across the water at the vast giant of an undeveloped China. There was land for population; there was raw material and minerals; there was space to grow food; there were markets. Japan attacked China without declaring war, but she had an excuse for doing so. It was to civilize China and teach her respect for her betters, meaning Japan. Japan complained that China had adopted artillery, tanks and machineguns. Japan seemed to think that was hardly fair. China should have remained a defenceless punching bag unable to strike back when Japan jabbed.

But China has been finding unity since the 1920’s when there was a lot of civil war and dictator-generals were running their own shows each with their own poorly fed, poorly clothed, poorly equipped and seldom-paid armies. True, then there was Marshal Chiang Kai-shek the Nationalist Government and the national capital at Nanking, controlling China. But it was control only in name and had little real authority over the various sections and provinces. When Chinese, whether alleged bandits or real patriots, raided Japanese factories and killed Japanese business men, Tokyo might protest to Nanking and Nanking could do little but say, “We’re very, very sorry.”

That was the Japanese story. And so the Japanese took Manchukuo to “establish law and order”—for the Japanese. And the Japanese claim that since that time 300,000 Chinese, unable to live peaceably elsewhere, have gone to Manchukuo to settle. A Different China

Since then, though, China has changed to a degree and Japan finds herself facing today a China, which, if not altogether a uniform united country, is nevertheless a considerable advance on the Chinese chaos oi the past generation. Roads • were built, schools established and some central control established. Marshal Chiang Kai-shek has won the co-operation of the former dictator-generals and has made a peace with the Chinese “Red” army of 200,000 Communists.

Can Japan win in China? Some authorities say that Japan can never conquer China, that in the _ long run the age-old Chinese race will swamp the Japanese and swallow them up. That is not the immediate question, which is: “Can Japan win now?” According to many experts, Japan’s economic structure is such that she

cannot support a major war of more than six months’ duration. And the Chinese have certainly made this a major war. Japan possibly thought she would walk in and walk over in three months, but she has had to vote enormous credits and mobilize huge forces to conduct war against the brave, stubborn, well-armed Chinese.

So Japan may collapse! So the forecasters say. But war has before this proven the predicters wrong. The Spanish civil war, which they said could not last long, is well into its second year, still going strong ana threatening to spread. It may spread to Russia. The Soviet Union is already said to be supplying artillery, machine-guns, aeroplanes and technicians to the Chinese armies. Their intervention may take more active form. Along the north of Japanese-conquered Manchukuo stretches Siberia. Many incidents have already occurred on the Amur river between Soviet and Japanese troops. At any time the RussoJapanese rancour may burst into flame. The Soviets are said to have big armies massed in the eastern part of Siberia ready to strike if Japan goes

too far. Gamecock and Ostrich And so the war goes on between Japan, the arrogant gamecock with its steel spurs sharpened viciously, and China, the big soft ostrich. Will the gamecock jab the ostrich to death or will the ostrich in the long run give the gamecock a mighty kick that will end its career once and for all? China, some experts say, can only have one strategy; to engulf the Japanese in a long-drawn war, to wear them down, to go on being defeated here and there but never admitting defeat. It is a strategy which China can afford since it costs little but

Chinese lives and Chinese lives are, in brutal terms of manpower, beside the point under discussion. One million, two million, five million Chinese — there are countless millions more. You know how year after year millions of Chinese lives are wiped out by disease, famine or flood and no one seems to worry, least of all the Chinese.

And if Japan wins this round against China—what comes next? Will she go on further a few years hence to carve off and gobble up still more of China? Will she turn from China to strike out along the Pacific at the Philippines, at the Dutch or French possessions, at Australia or New Zealand? Will she then, enriched by her Chinese possessions and raw material, seek to dominate the world? It has been charged that Japan has had a plan for years of Asiatic conquest, of world conquest. It is said that in all her recent adventures she is merely following the course of a long-dreamed march. China first, then Siberia—and then! Will she some day be overlord of the Pacific, across the ocean from the United States and Canada?