CONGESTION IN JAPAN.

Stratford Evening Post, Volume XXXIX, Issue 14, 7 May 1914, Page 2

CONGESTION IN JAPAN.

AN AUSTRALIAN'S IMPRESSIONS. "There can be jig two ways about it. Japan will have to spread. I .saw a great deal of congestion in a number of places .there, and with this I might say that the Japs are no wasters of ground. They make use of every available inch of space. There is no doubt that, in a lew years Japan will be looking for other lands to which to send surplus population. It is not a question of wanting to do it or not wanting to do it. It is a case of 'got to,' because Japan has an area of only 147,655 square miles and a ' population of about 50 millions. That certainly sounds like closer settlement when you turn to Australia's figures and find that our area is nearly ;),()UU,OOO square miles and our population only about 4,000,000."

The foregoing remarks were made by Mr S. Beer, a Sydney jeweller and precious stone merchant, who has just returned to New South Wales from a year's tour, during which he travelled over 50,000 miles, and visiteft the chief countries of the world. In Japan he was impressed with the way the country is becoming modernised. He found that English was spoken to a very large extent, and ',the schools and other institutions were making great efforts to spread , the knowledge of the language. "People talk about Americans being speeders-up," continued Mr Beer. "Xo doubt they are all that; but you ought to see the Japanese. They work like demons—seven days a week, and from 6 o'clock in the morning till. 11 at night. I travelled 2000 miles in Japan, and had a good chance of observing what regular terrors they are for hard toil. You see, the Japs are very keen on becoming a great commercial nation, and they are determined that want of a little bit of extra exertion shall not prevent them from attaining their object. "The Japanese recognise that to figure permanently in the commercial world it is necessary for them to have a grip of the English language, as their own will never be employed to a large extent among the nations. The fact that they are largely using typewriters shows this. Their own language could not be applied to a typewriter, because they have] many hundreds of characters. An experimental machine in this direction recently proved a failure. I combined business with pleasure on my trip, and found that all the big firms sent out their correspondence typed in English. To get on in his own country now ih is very necessary for the young Jap to have a thorough knowledge of English. There are any amount of .white typewriter agents doing | good business in Japan. The Japs, however, are resolutely opposed to doing business with American agents because of the California!! land trouble. There were no anti-American demonstrations in Japan that I saw; they were simply boycotting American goods as much as possible. In consequence of this many American agents are returning to the U.S.A., despairing of doing business in Japan. "On all the railway stations, and in many other places, the names are posted up in English as well as Japanese. By the way, a few years ago there were many Englishmen employed in running the Japanese railway services, but there are now none. The little brown fellows have learned the whole business, and do- everything for themselves. They are wonderfully quick at picking tip the manufacturing part of the programme, and there is a saying that if you go to Japan to do business with the natives, selling them manufactured articles, you may do well for six months, but at the end of that time they will be manufacturing the goods for themselves. They have an absolute craving for manufactures. Their railways are like Australia's, only electrically run. They are great purchasers of bicycles, and here again they have carried out their anti-U.S.A. boycott. Last year Japan imported £50,000 worth of bicycles from England, and only £IOOO worth from America. "Across the way from Japan, as it were, is China, the remarkable point about which country is its tremendous confidence in itself. The more civilised Chinese state that their country is awakening, and that it will go after Japan's quirk-civilisation record with a bang and beat it hollow. Everywhere in China I found great enthusiasm over the country's future. One thing that impressed me was the peculiarity of the currency system. The value of the coins rises and falls according to the scate of the metal markets. Wealthy Chinese buy up great quantities of dollars when the silver market is low, hold them, and then sell out at profit when there is a rise."