THE JAPANESE POPULATION PROBLEM

Hokitika Guardian, 29 August 1931, Page 6

THE JAPANESE POPULATION PROBLEM

* DEVELOPMENT OF A CRISIS. The population of Japan has doubled in the course of 50 years, and already her resources are strained almost to breaking point. Mr Crocker estimates that the present population, 60,000,000, will have increased to 80,000,000 in 25 years at most. This seems; tu he a conservative estimate and one Japanese authority believes that by 1965 the population will touch the 108,000,000 mark. The question is how a certain large increase in the population is to be supported by a country more densely populated than any European country, and depending moreover, for her economic welfare on her trade with the rest of Die world. Japan is unable to grow sufficient rice—the staple food —- or her present needs, and any attempt to reform the exsting system of rice producton will drive numbers of Japanese now meagrely existing by agriculture into the towns. That would merely intensify the problem. Every year Japan buys more food from foreign countries, and to pay for this she must export her own products—namely, raw silk, and cotton manufactures. Thus to-day the position may he summarised: Japan is raising raw silk to sell abroad, mostly to the United States, and using the money to buy raw cotton which js made into yarn and cloth and sold, in turn, abroad (a great deal to China), to pay for food imports. It is a delicate and dangerous adjustment: “Two staples, silk and cotton, amount to 70 per cent, of the total axnrv+s;; and two countries, the United States and China, are the markets for more than two-thirds of the exports.” Were America, for instance, to impose a stiff

duty on raw silk in order to give protection to the artificial silk industry, a crisis would be precipitated. Mr Crocker believes that home resources might lie developed hv the expansion of industry, hut this- would have to h© done by the importation of larger quantities of food, and of heavy metals (which Japan lacks). Even if sound policy can secure this result, he warns, a guaranteed outlet for “50,01i0 to 100,000 people by emigration *-nch

j year for the next generation may be necessary to save the country from social collapse.” Emigration may he a , palliative, hut it appears to he a neci essai'y palliative. Where are these hundreds of thousands to go? Brazil offers room for j some, and the South Seas and the I East Indies might provide areas for settlement. The Powers, he says, must, at the fitting time, if only in their own interests, combine to provide an outlet for the surplus Japanese population'. He is himself an Australian, but he considers, while sympathising with the basic motives of the “white Australia” policy, that it will become impossible for the Commonwealth to continue to exclude emigrants from the congested countries such as Japan and Italy. What Australia really wants is not a white Australia, hut a minimum basic wage Australia. That safeguarded, the rest can he treated as nonessential. Bv careful stipulations and wise handling, the Australian standard of living would 4 not necessarily lose anything by having a non-Bri-tish, even a non-European, people making use of the now unutilised, and by Australians unutilisable tropical land. Mr Crocker does not, by the way, support the view that the ‘ Pacific is destined to become the storm centre in international affairs. “The Pacific region is to-day,” he ,>says, “and for the ’immediate future, from every point of view unusually pacific.” Pressure of population lie regards as the basic factor in the foreign politics of the Pacific region; ,a problem which besets the whole of the Far East and dictates the domestic and foreign policy, of Japan. After an intensive study, in which he

has been assisted by the American Commonwealth Fund,, he concludes that the population problem of Japan is “the dominant issue” in the politics of the Pacific Ocean, and his object is to indicate that in a very few years the attempt to cope with it will strain Japan’s resources to the limit, and beyond, if she is given no assistance. “The Japanese Population Problem” is a, much more interesting hook than its title might suggest to the average reader. Mr Crocker has travelled widely in the East and observed closely, and his chapters are so arranged as to lead the interest always on to the next phase in an important discussion.