JAPAN'S "FORGOTTEN MAN"

New Zealand Listener, Volume 5, Issue 120, 10 October 1941, Page 7

JAPAN'S "FORGOTTEN MAN"

(Written for "The Listener" by

MARC. T.

GREENE

HOW MUCH LONGER

SUZUKI-SAN ?

APAN’S war with China is at the end of its fourth year. The "incident" has dragged itself out far past anything anticipated in Japan or anywhere else. It is filling years where it was expected to demand only months of the efforts of Japan’s much-touted military forces, and there is no end to it in sight. Already it has cost Japan a quarter of a million men killed and more than 20,000,000,000 yen. Out of the current budget of sixteen billion-a sum altogether unprecedented in Japan’s history and sure to meet with great difficulty in the raising-68 yen of every 100 are allocated to military expenditure. The living standard of the masses is the lowest ever reached and steadily getting lower. The restiveness of the people increases daily and is kept in check only by intimidation and the most rigorous measures of repression. Rising Prices And Taxes Only the fact that the Japanese are the most docile, the strictest disciplined, and the most fearful of authority of any people in the world, East or West, has kept them in line until now. Anywhere else there would have been revolt on a large scale. For the people are not permitted to get the least inkling of the truth about the position abroad or conditions at home. The masses of no nation are kept in more abject ignorance of everything vital to their country’s welfare than those of Japan. That has been the policy of the leaders ever since the waning, or rather the crushing, of the democratic sentiment that followed the Meiji Restoration seventy-five years ago. But what the people do know is that they have to get along with less and less of the very essentials of their existence because the price of them is ever on the increase, with a new tax appended every other day. The Case of Suzuki-san Take, for example, the case of Suzukisan. Now "Suzuki" is the commonest of Japanese surnames and approximates our "John Smith." The appendage "san" is customarily added in Japan to indicate something like regard, respect, consideration, a kindly feeling, any one of those. It is not susceptible of a perfectly literal translation into English. However, Suzuki-san is the Japanese forgotten man, more and more forgotten every day as the China "incident" refuses to be liquidated. In one way or another a good deal of the aforesaid record budget of 16,000,000,000 yen has got to come out of him. If it can be raised at all, which is problematical, increased taxation must be the chief resort. That taxation involves an additional twenty per cent. on tea. This atop the ten per cent. assessed when the SinoJapanese war began. It involves another ten per cent. on the cheap tobacco which is one of the few consolations of the Japanese peasant

and coolie. Like tea, tobacco now becomes almost beyond his reach. With the next increase it will be entirely so. Pets, Trees-And Baths! Taxation goes even further, and to really fantastic extremes, Thus every Japanese must now pay a tax on his furniture. More than that, he is assessed for the value of the little pets which are his children’s only sources of diversion, the cat and the dog, even the birds. And, incredible as it seems, there is now a tax on everyone of the cleverly-

grown dwarf trees so carefully tended by his wife. Yes, there is even a tax on the pair of cherished cloisonne-ware vases which ‘have come dewn from the sacred ancestors, P But the thing that may prove the very last straw, that is more likely than anything else to stir the Japanese to revolt if anything can, is the restriction of his hot bath. The Japanese are as cleanly a people in their bodily habits as there are in the world, and even the humblest coolie and field-worker must have his hot bath at night. And he means hot. No lukewarm showers for him. He gets into the water that would parboil you and me and likes it. It soothes away the cares of the day and brightens the prospects of an otherwise cloudy morrow. But the water obviously requires fuel for fires, coal, charcoal, or wood. All are scarce in Japan and getting more so. "Essential industries," that is to say, war industries, require the major share of all fuel resources. Suzuki-san has had little or no warmth in his house these past two winters. — But he has been able to go to the public bath-house of which every smallest village has at least one. There he could steam and boil away in biting hot water, discuss very guardedly with his friends

the ever-worsening position and speculate on the drab prospects for the future. And now even that small-and last re-maining-boon is in danger. Already the bath-houses are closed on certain days and open only during much restricted hours on the rest. If things go on as they are, maybe before long they won’t be open at all. It is the lack of fuel. Bathhouses must have coal, or at least charcoal. But war industries are demanding more and more. Broadly included in such classification are, of course, industries that provide the

export goods which shall secure the badly needed foreign exchange for the purchase of steel and oil. Lacking those, the "China Incident" would have liquidated itself long ago, but not to the advantage of Japan. The food staples of Suzuki-san and his 70,000,000 compatriots are rice and raw or dried fish. The cost of these has gone up so materially during the past two years that, on the average, he can afford but about half as much as he was accustomed to before the war. Tobacco and tea, once his easily obtained solaces, are now as much luxuries for him as a Shepherd’s Hotel cigarette to an Egyptian fellah or rare orange-pekoe to a London charwoman. Body and spirit alike are weakening and in company. The point is approaching, perhaps is already at hand, at which he is too broken and discouraged so much as to think of revolting. He will just go slogging along, like a dehumanised slave of the Ptolemies, until his bodily organism will function no longer. Under the Mobilisation of Resources decree Suzuki-san is really little more than a slave anyway. He can be taken away from his usual work, whether it is in factory or field, and put at anything else "the emergency requires." The most frequent shift is, naturally, to the muni-

tions works. There, working at high pressure from twelve to fourteen hours every one of the seven days of the week, he is paid perhaps twenty or twenty-five per cent. more than in the toy or the textile factory whence he was taken. He doesn’t like the new, filthy work. He has had to shift his home and family, maybe across the city, maybe half across the country. He must reorganise his domestic economy entirely. And when at the end of the week he goes to buy his living essentials for the next week he finds the price has jumped up three or four per cent. Insufficient Clothes Suzuki-san can have no warmth in his house and no clothes sufficient to protect him. Cotton is a "war essential " and none too plentiful at that. So the cotton content is shirts, kimonas, towels, and the flimsy cotton slippers that are the sole feet protection of the Japanese common man in any weather, has steadily decreased and been replaced by wood fibre until much of the textile stuff the average Japanese gets to-day has no more than ten per cent. of cotton in it. Wool, of course, has disappeared en- tirely. But the Japanese coolie and peasant never had much acquaintance with that anyway. The wood fibre is poor stuff. And, to add to his fast-multiplying difficulties, the Japanese countryman finds that the locust takes kindly to it as food. Imagine hanging your kimona and shirt out on a line over night and finding half of them eaten up in the morning! Such is life in‘ Japan for the average Japanese, and it is not so simple for a good many above the average either. Even silk goods now have a large proportion of fibre in them. But not the silk goods that are exported. Oh no! That wouldn’t do at all. They are as good as ever, or pretty nearly so. They must be, or Japanese foreign trade would soon go to pieces and there would be no good foreign exchange with which to buy the means of slaughtering a few thousand more Chinese women and children. It is the folks at home who must make the sacrifices. And they are making them, in measure perhaps without precedent in any country of modern times. Curb on Criticism How long can it continue? It is a question that has been asked many times. Those acquainted with the serious economic conditions in Japan before the conflict with China even started would have said two years at the most. But they would have under-estimated the hold of the Japanese military leaders on the country and the capacity for endurance of the docile, thoroughly disciplined masses. The militarists have the situation so "well in hand" that they are instantly aware of the faintest murmurings of discontent anywhere and stifle them as quickly as the Gestapo stifles criticism of Hitler. Beyond that a respect for authority amounting to abject fear prevails in Japan in a measure inconceivable to the West even to-day. Nothing short of desperation through exceeding hunger is likely to break it down. That point may not be reached for some time yet, \