JAPANESE AMBITIONS.

Taranaki Daily News, 26 February 1921, Page 12

JAPANESE AMBITIONS.

PROFESSOR SCOFFS .AT AUS- . TRALIAN FEARS. Sydney, Jan. 27. The current belief in Australia, that Australia must expect and pivpare for Japanese aggression, is scoffed at by Professor Murdoch, of Sydney University. Professor Murdoch is our greatest authority on Japanese affairs. He speaks the language, knows the people, and has been seven times to Japan in the last four years. The Japs, says the Professor, do not want tropical Australia, because they are. a less tropical race than the Australians themselves. The climate of Japan is almost exactly the climate of Britain. Latitude, the amount and character of rainfall —all are comparable to English conditions. In the second place, Japan’s colonial empire, to provide for the emigration of surplus population, is already well provided in Formosa, Korea, and Manchuria, and these, with her interest in China, will keep her statesmen and capitalist's busy for a long time to come. Although the Australian coastal belt, thousands of square miles in extent, between Darwin and Broome, will never be a white man’s country, so far as close settlement is concerned, it could be used to run cattle. But the Atherton Plateau, in North Queensland, which rises behind Cairns to a height of 3000 ft., and has occasional snows' in winder, and has a good rainfall and chocolate soil 30ft. deep, is emphatically a white man’s land, and, says the professor, could support 4,000,000 in close settlement. The Barcley Tableland, south and th-west of the Gulf of Carpentaria, could support fully 1,00U,000 people in pastoral pursuits. The great Arnheim District, at the northwest oT the Gulf o>f Carpentaria, could also support a considerable population in conditions agreeable to white people. Summing up, Professor Murdoch says the Japanese have neither the need nor the desire to interfere with Australia. The racial equality demand at the Peace Conference was a diversion created to prevent discussion of the Shantung question, and therein was successful. The educated Japanese wants social equality ; but he recognises that the emigration of his o—<lie classes is an economic problem for the country that receives them, and is not a racial question at all. The educated Japanese will not himself associate with his coolie classes, and he does not want to see them in Australia any more than he wants to see Chinese coolies in