JAPANESE EMIGRATION.

Dominion, Volume 5, Issue 1447, 23 May 1912, Page 8

JAPANESE EMIGRATION.

AN ACUTE PROBLEM. The "Round Table" for May, 1911, had an interesting article on "The Emigration Question in Japan." The writer of the article points out that the problem of overcrowding in Japan is Incoming acute, that the mean annual rate of increase is such that if this rate ,is maintained and emigration is no greater than it lias been, the population of Japan in forty years will bo ninety millions. He gives reasons for believing that neither Korea, the Liaotung Peninsula, nor the island of •Saghalien, or those portions of Manchuria which are accessible io Japan, furnish available fields for Japanese emigration; for in each of these fields the Japanese immigrant would come in competition with prices of labour and standards of living lower than his oven. The island of Formosa also fails to furnish a field for Japanese emigrants, both because its climate is unattractive, and because Chinese and Malay labour there employed can underbid Japanese labour. The result, the writer pjints out, will be a migration to the American coast. If not. " where are the Japanese to go?" asks the writer. "Not northwards, for we have scon the obstacles which lie in the way; not into tho tropics: not westward, for China is already fall lo overflowing. Must they not migrate across the oceans of the world, eastward* on their own lo.lHudo. or .-'OnllntarfN beyond the equator, lo the .South Temperate Zone?" If this writer is correct, the Japanese migration problem is likely to become a sonious problem' for the consideration of American';. We must either open our doors to Japanese immigrants, in winch case we must pursue the same course toward them thai wo have pursued toward other immigrants—naturalise them and make them American o'.tizens— or else we must close our doors to Japanese immigrants and keep thorn closed. Xo middle course and no combination of the two courses is practicable- We must either welcome them as equals in the American brotherhood or we must say to them that our race problem is already acute and complicated; we cannot safely complicate it with the addition of another race to our population. To receive ihcin into a territory and refuse to allow them to become Americans is neither just nor wise.