WAR WEARINESS

Waikato Independent, Volume XLI, Issue 3891, 13 August 1941, Page 3

WAR WEARINESS

FEELING AMONG JAPANESE

EFFECT OF CHINA “INCIDENT”

Four years of warfare in China have reduced the standard of living of the Japanese people by one-half and generated increasing warweariness, discontent and apathy, according to a detailed study of Japan’s present condition made by the Chinese Council for economic research at Washington (says the Christian Science Monitor). ** This discontent, in the belief of the Council, has brought Japan to a point where a refusal of the United States and the British Empire either to buy from or sell to Japan would bring about a widespread ’popular movement against continuation of the war.

“The rising trend of strikes during the war . . . the unmistakable tinge in the ‘new structure’ idealogy of a recognition of the need of appeasing the masses, and above all the increasing suspicion and doubt of the success of the ‘China incident’—these are some facts and factors indicative of restless uncertainty in the present political scene and suggestive of probable courses of future development,” the study finds.

Among the signs which the Council finds indicative of Japan’s worsening condition, is the recent imposition of rice-rationing, the increase in labour turn-over, the decrease in the production of consumer goods and the steady rise in prices unaccompanied by a corresponding rise in wages. “Rationing or a strict priority system for war-essential goods is, needless to say, universal,” said the Council. “But since the spring of 1940, rationing has invaded Japan’s proud citadel of the food-stuffs sector, and now it covers such daily necessities as rice, sugar, matches, charcoal and towels. There are reasons to believe that if rationing of daily necessities has been somewhat slow in becoming universal, it is less because of their abundance than because of such absolute shortage as to make impossible even the minimum distribution.

“At least until August, 1939, the general trend of output was upward, but then industrial production toppled with a 13.4 per cent drop in six months and only a faltering recovery thereafter. Similarly for the first time in six years the gross income from agricultural products declined in 1940, in spite of the general rise in prices.” T. Y. Hu, who prepared' the report, holds that while a shrinkage of consumer goods is natural {in wartime, “the absolute decline in the supply of these goods for which war demand is particularly urgent is clearly symptomatic of growing difficulties.

“It is apparent that Japanese industries are falling in the very task foy whose success all other considerations are sacrificed,” he writes. A close study of such statistics as Tokyo permits to be published discloses, according to Dr Hu, that the proportion of national income spent by the Japanese Government rose

from 40.0 per cent in 1936 and 50.4 per cent in 1937 to 68.1 per cent in 1940. Dr Hu adds, moreover, that such figures are more significant in Japan than they would be in a country such as the United States, since the great bulk of the Japanese people were found to be living on an extremely low standard even before the beginning of the so-called “China incident.”