PLUM OF THE PACIFIC PIE

New Zealand Listener, Volume 6, Issue 141, 6 March 1942, Page 10

PLUM OF THE PACIFIC PIE

Why Java May Be Japan’s Richest Loot

6 OU won’t find any government figures on the subject, and Ill be surprised if knowledge of it squeezes into the news anywhere, but I have seen warehouses and silos of rice stored up against a war and guarded against the people by machine guns." So I was told a full year before warthe European war-began, by the New Zealander who for the last eleven years has held Tim Conroy’s former post in Japan. (Incidentally his opinion both of "Sean O’Conroy" himself and of his Menace of Japan was below printing standard.) How to feed her people when events in Europe should give weak but ambitious Japan the once-in-a-million chance to fish in troubled waters was in truth the insoluble nightmare of Japanese statesmen in those days. Their virtual annexation of French Indo China brilliantly solved it, providing at the same stroke a tropical training ground and a spring-board for invasions west, south, and east. Later, their virtual occupation of the Philippines, undertaken to protect their lines of communication, provided inexhaustible copra for explosives. Occupation of Malaya, trans ferring from Allied to Axis use half the world’s rubber and tin, at the same time put them in a position to strike at

China’s life-line (yes, and at Egypt’s too). By taking over various island ports from Sarawak to the Solomons, they have gained oil to burn-when they can "descorch " wells and refineries-as well as bases for attack on Australia. An economic plus a strategic advantage at every hit: yet the plum of their stolen cake they are only now (at the time of writing) ready to reach for. & The Dutch Know Better " Australia," suggests Mr. Curtin. "A hemisphere-wide pincer-movement from Burma to Libya and the Caucasus," says Dr. . Wellington Koo. But the Dutch know better than both. For they know that nearer than Australia or the Indian Ocean lies an island, tiny by Australian standards but so rich that it holds seven times the entire Continent’s population. (It is rather smaller than our South Island; its population sixty-four times as great). And they know that this island, though a mere seven per cent. of the area of the Indies (but holding seventy per cent. of their peoples) is worth more at the moment to Japan than the whole of Australia. Tea, sugar, chocolate (an essential of armies indeed), tobacco, timber, tapioca, more copra, more rice, and more oil it would give them, What is more, it would place in their hands almost the entire world stock of quinine, without which soldiers in tropical lands cannot fight, or even farmers farm in

the southern states of America. And it would leave all the world except Japan to bump along on the mere sixteen per cent. of our planet’s rubber supply which she did not control, Last of the Five Fortresses java is indeed the prize of this Pacific war. Militarily, also, its forty-seven million inhabitants, to whom a change of tule is only a change of masters, can be expected to give little resistance-much less than, for example, six million Australians with some stake in their country to defend. Surabaya on Java, too, is the last of the Five Fortresses-Hong Kong, Corregidor, Ambon, Singapore, and Sura-baya-to be taken or neutralised. White rule throughout Island Asia could hardly survive its fall. But in addition to Java’s military importance as the heart of the Indies, and to the value of her food and raw materials for war and for peace (and even to her value as "putting in bad" Britain, Russia, and the United States for lack of her essential products), she has two gifts that Japanese statesmen would value as permanent possessions even more highly. The first is the purely agricultural pursuits of her sixty-odd races-providing the perfect market for an industrial country. The other is her healthfulness for non-tropical merchants and administrators-providing a centre (Continued on next page)

THE RICHEST PRIZE (Continued from previous page) from which the entire steaming, sweating Indies can be exploited at a maximum. of efficiency and a minimum of human cost. Nearly Fifty Million Farmers! For it is not that Java supports approaching fifty million people that is the miracle-though this does make her the most thickly-populated land-mass in the world-but that the fifty million are virtually all farmers. Nearly 900 persons to the square mile (including jungles, voleanic deserts, and mountains)! Over 15,000 farmers and dependants to the square mile in eleven purely agricultural districts !! Over 2,500 to the square mile in five!!! Over 5,000 in one!!!! Yet the country is anything but one vast drab market-garden. Its two harvests per year of rice, with other crops in the inbetween seasons, grow in mud-walled paddy-ponds called sawahs. On flats, on hillsides, every terrace, every fieldlet, is a different size and shape, with some scintillating water, some golden grain, some brilliant young emerald, some bare brown harvested mud. Huge-eaved kampongs (villages) of brown and golden "mats" hung on giant bamboo frames appear half-hidden where the jungle remains in tiny patches, in bamboo brakes, in single giant trees, in great swathes and belts. Behind, blue and dark purple, rise the volcanoes. The occupations of Manchukuo and China have benefited Japanese capitalists, not the Japaneses masses whose blood and toil bought and retains them. For the proletariats of the occupied lands, escaping from hunger into factories erected with their new owners’ capital, and working on wages as far below the Japanese workers’ as the latter are below ours, have depressed rather than improved living standards in Japan. But with forty-seven million farmers and wives, each already saving to buy her Tokio sewing machine and his £1 Osaka feetz (bicycle) no one can go wrong. Java is "Home" Those volcanic mountains, everywhere within short rail of the coast, together with the Dutch efficiency that has redeemed Batavia from its eighteenth century plight of being the deadliest city in the world, have made Java so attractive to Europeans that whereas there is only one Briton in India to every ten thousand inhabitants there is one Hollander in "Indie" to every two thousand! And, while the club haunting British have their eyes fixed forever on four-yearly furlough and final retirement " at Home," "home" for the Java Dutchman who may make only one trip to Europe in a lifetime, is his white-walled, red-tiled bungalow at Batavia Centrum or weekend mountain cottage at Bandoeng. His children had their whole education here, and his wife (though you may not mention it) has a faint dash of Indonesian blood. One person in seventy has it in Nordic Holland. And Batavia with a mere half-million population all told, has the largest white population in all the East. The Japanese, as temperateblooded as ourselves, no doubt are counting (among their various chickens) on themselves using Java thus.