WISE MEN FROM THE EAST

New Zealand Times, Volume XLIV, Issue 10291, 28 May 1919, Page 3

WISE MEN FROM THE EAST

CAPTURING THE WORLD’S .MARKET.

During a week’s tour of the industrial towns of the .Midlands I have been struck with the constant iteration of one phrase—J apanese competition (says Janies Dunn in the “Daily Mail”). The ironworker® of the Black Country, tho leather merchants Of Walsall, the hardware manufacturers of Birmingham , as well as the small dealers in sundry products, all regard with deep anxiety Japanese encroachments on the markets of the world. The wise men from the Ea»t- have Deen learning- in the best European ■schools .for more .than twenty years, and they are now garnering the harvest of their foresight and enterprise. Years ago • the best commercial schools of Manchester were packed with Japanese studying the intricacies of cotton spinning. In .Germany and Austria right up to the war Japanese were learning how to make those wonderful toys which have been the joy of children and the problem of our own manufacturers. Where to-day can they make the porcelain face of a. doll such a« they turned out in Vienna for half a crown? And where in the wide world do they make those ingenious mechanical toys of tin that came from Nuremberg? The answer to these -questions is— Japan. From iron plates to toy motorcars, from cotton goods to fancy leather articles, Japan is capturing the markets of the world.

Labour is cheap in the “England of the East.’’ No strikes or rumours of strikes interrupt the even tenor of the business way. The Japanese ironworker is content with ninepence a day, hence the ridiculously cheap prices charged for i J a'panose iron in Canada, where once the Black Country held undisputed sway. During the last six months not more than a score of tons of Black Country iron have been exported to Canada. From South Africa comes a simitar story. Japanese prices are so low that only- by transplanting industries from this country can our manufacturers hope to compote with the abnormal exports from the East.’ At one time the average British housewife stocked her homo with cheap articles from Germany; today almost every domestic article is made in Japan, evCn to boot-' laces.

Those silent, , studious, observant young Japanese who thronged Our commercial colleges a quarter of a century ago are the builders of the new Japan. They were the Japanese prosperity, the commercial supplantcrs of the old-time Samurai.' Cheerfully we taught them, eagerly they learned, and now when onr trade is weighed down - by taxation and baulked by strikes the quiet little man ;from Nippon is playing the master where once he was the scholar. ■