JAPS AND CALIFORNIA.

Taranaki Daily News, 11 January 1921, Page 5

JAPS AND CALIFORNIA.

A NATIONAL QUESTION. By Telegraph.—Press Assa.—CQpyilgbt. Received Jan. 10, 9.55 p.m. New York, Jan. 9. Representative Kahu, of California, interviewed, said national considerations' Were compelling Japan to bar Chinese and Korean labor, and why then, he asked, should not the United States bar Japanese immigration for the same reason. Mr. Kahn declared that the Japanese question in California was not local, but national, just as the negro problems became national sixty years ago, and sooner or later the American-Japanese question would be thus considered.— Aus.-N.Z. Cable Assn. NEED FOR “ELBOW ROOM.” LOOKING FOR AN OUTLET. The most difficult problem facing Japanese Statesmen is how to find vent for Japan’s surplus population, now increasing at the rate of three-quarters of a million a year. The cry of a White Australia, says the Tokio correspondent of the Morning Post, is echoed, by Canada and the United States. Where, then, is Japan to find an outlet for her people, now more than 350 to the square mile? As most of the more sparsely settled lands of the world are under British or American rule, Japan naturally looks towards us to assist her out of the dilentma; and because we hesitate to offer any solution to the problem, and at the same time bar the door against Japanese, while admitting Germans and others, Japan cannot understand our avowals of friendship. She holds that race prejudice must be hopelessly ingrained when it refused to find relief for labor troubles by welcoming the more efficient and strenuous toilers of the Far East. Japan regards the immigration problem as something more than a question for her or for any one nation, as a matter that should concern humanity. It may be that she will find some measure of relief in the new fields being opened up in Manchuria, Siberia and Saghalicn, but the Japanese are not naturally a northern people; they do not like a climate of iow temperature, and so are not likely to immigrate unless there is abnormal profit in it, and even then but temporarily. After the forests and mines are fully exploited it is improbable that the Japanese will care to remain Moreover, in the view of Japan, this policy would but retard for centuries longer the evolutionary process that must needs bring East and West together if humanity D to attain ultimate unity and its highest development. The longer that* blending of the higher races is delayed the greater will be the dash, she holds, when they are forced to meet by sheer congestion. A harmonious intermingling of Fast and West bv gradual immigration would ensure a more humane result.