The Daily News. SATURDAY, DECEMBER 17, 1912. JAPAN AND THE PACIFIC.

Taranaki Daily News, Volume LIV, Issue 197, 17 February 1912, Page 4

The Daily News. SATURDAY, DECEMBER 17, 1912. JAPAN AND THE PACIFIC.

In estimating Japan's chances of supremacy in the Pacific and therefore the decadence of British or American influence, one is too apt to see the purely mechanical aide of Japan's aggression. Japan has no other reason but aggression and desire of new territory in her intention during the next seven years to spend thirty-five million pounds in Dreadnoughts. Japan has little revenue, except that which she produces within the confines of her small and very harshly treated country, for intense cultivation has been the custom for ages, and soil exhaustion is one of the great problems she has to face. In order to raise money to fight hard enough to get new lands, Japan has either to make the 'money in her own islands or possessions or borrow it. She may raise money by loan on very frail security; she may sink her present infinitesimal credit balance—less than two million • pounds —or she may pawn her available assets to some country willing to do business with a bad and not altogether trustworthy customer. To raise money necessary to embark on a great building programme, Japan has to tax its already exceedingly oppressed workers. There are no better workers in the world, none more skilful, none so faithful. But Japan has changed, just as China has marvellously changed. Western ideas have permeated many Japanese, and there is already a peculiar caricature of socialism abroad there, which is in marked contrast to the "die for the Emperor" idea Westerners suppose every Jap has. Japan has no possible chance of entering on a prolonged and costly war. If Japan could bring an enemy country to heel by pounding it for a sihort time it might re-establish its emaciated Treasury and flood new territory with little brown sinilors. On the other hand, if Japan is allowed to pour all her revenue and the money she is able to raise on the problematical labor of her peasants and is then drawn into a long conflict, that will be the last of Japan for a few generations, for prolonged war means prolonged expenditure, and Japan's .pawnbrokers can have no possible object in financing n brown race so that it will triumph over a white one. War and aggression is popular among a small section of the Japanese public, the men who were made rich by the conflict with Russia, but Japan as a whole has no more desire to go swash-buckling than has New Zealand. The people know that in order to prepare for war, the result of which is problematical, they have at the moment to pay huge prices, in comparison to old-time prices, for everything they eat and wear and use. They have near at hand the example of a great country, immensely more imp«rt»nt than a thousand Japans, quarrelling with aris-

tocratic privilege and demanding a republic. There is infinitely more incentive in Japan for the establishment of a republic than there is in China, because China does not expend countless millions on the upkeep of a navy and army for problematical use. The germ of revolt in both China and Japan has been dropped by those brown and yellow men who have travelled and who have assimilated Western notions and ideas. It is the ambition of these aristocrat Japanese to equal in all ways the people they imitate, but in order to attain their ambition they must grind the face of the coolie and wring from his sweat the money to pay the piper And the coolie? He will presently revolt. Japan's big navy is being bought by him, but he is getting no dividend out of it, and there is little chance that he will get anything out of the expenditure of this promised thirty-five (millions, although he will be taxed and driven and starved to make the cash. Wsen Japan revolts, the Pacific will be 'safe'tfbr some time from our cocky little friends, and the Mikado would have a more comfortable time working as a coolie'ih the rice fields when the little brown*man breaks out than he will have trying to justify his occupancy of-the throne and the upkeep of a national state wholly.grotesque and deeply humiliating to those Western Powers with which Japan claims equality.