COULD YOU EVER GET TO LIKE A JAPANESE?

New Zealand Listener, Volume 12, Issue 290, 12 January 1945, Page 12

COULD YOU EVER GET TO LIKE A JAPANESE?

, Under the above heading, the "ABC Weekly" published the following article by PROFESSOR |. CLUNIES ROSS, who recently visited New Zealand. He is on the staff of Sydney University, and since the war has been Director of Scientific Personnel in Australia. * ue x HE tempo of war in the | Pacific is quickening, With gigantic strides the Allied Forces are approaching the mainland of Asia and Japan. Overwhelming American and British naval and air forces are massed in the Pacific so that the mainspring of Japanese power may be destroyed not many months after the end of hostilities in Europe.

With the extinction of Japanese military power will come-what? Peace for 1,000,000,000 people at Australia’s back door? Peace for how long, and what sort of peace? These are the questions that will face us in Australia with a greater urgency than any other peoples. For the next generation of Australians and New Zealanders are going to learn what it is like to live in the ultimate outposts of Western civilisation on the threshold of an awakened Asia. Never again in this Asia will the white man have the same prestige he has enjoyed for the last 100 years. For Asia ‘has witnessed an Asiatic Power defeat, even though temporarily, two of the greatest Western Powers; has seen that Power acquire a vast empire at the expense of Britain and America. Asia has learnt that she, too, can use successfully the weapons and tools of the scientific age. Even when Japan is ultimately defeated, those lessons will never be forgotten. Two Courses Are Open What, then, is Australia’s policy to be in relation to this awakened Asia? All our petty domestic issues fall into insignificance before this overshadowing problem. Unless we find the solution, there will be no high standard of living, no 40-hour five-day week, no week-end holiday-with its lotus-eating surfing and racing-no security from want, sickness or old age, no time to build up our population to 20,000,000, and still no security if we do. There are two courses open to us: one inspired by selfishness and fear, the other by magnanimity and hope. _ We can support a policy which seeks to destroy not only Japanese military power but the Japanese people as well, which would shatter Japanese industry. We can seek to condemn the 70,000,000 Japanese people-disciplined, hard-working and skilful-to a subsistence standard of peasant farming in a world in which they find neither friendship nor hope, in which their only re"course would be fo rise, as they would rise, to fight again. We can seek to perpetuate a weak and disunited China, whose people struggle

to win from their overtaxed soil sufficient food to prevent too many millions from dying of starvation. We can hinder that industrialisation of China without which the standard of living.of her people can never rise. We could look forward to the continued exploitation of China as a limited market for a small range of cheap and shoddy goods, a few bales of wool, a few tons of wheat. Similarly, we can absolve ourselves of responsibility for India’s problems, for her bare subsistence standard of living, her recurrent famines, her appalling death-rate, her illiteracy. "The Cockpit of the Future" Given such a policy, the Western Powers would enter once more into a bitter struggle for controlling world markets; they would fight for the advantage not of the peoples of Asia but of themselves. And Australia is inescapably so placed as to become the cockpit of the future, unless the world becomes one in which the strong help the weak, unless it becomes a more moral world in which the weak find security because the strong are just and magnanimous. What, then, is the alternative before Australia in place of this policy of fear and caution and selfishness? By all means let us back every attempt to build a system of Pacific and international security. By all means let us see that Japan is disarmed and stays that way for many years to come. Let us ask that China demonstrate that the objective of her policy is the well-being of the mass of the Chinese people, not of this or that interest or clique. Let us ask that the Indians demon- _ strate that they can live together as one united people, or as two friendly people, Moslem and Hindu. But we must do more than look for security for ourselves. Security for Australians can only be assured, can

only be deserved, in so far as we make it possible for the people of Asia to hope for, if not thé luxuries at least the necessities of life. Long-Term Investment We must be prepared to play our part in making available to China, to India, in the form of long-term loans, those resources whjch will assist and accelerate the development of Chinese and Indian industries; the capital goods required to establish and equip factories to provide the ‘means of communication, roads and railways, engines and trucks; the technical advisers necessary to rehabilitate and improve agricultural production. This would be a long-term investment in human happiness, in rising standards of living, in lowered death-rates, from which will come eventually release of that latent purchasing power, of that demand for goods and services of which the world stands in such need, if its great productive resources are to be used and its people employed. Similarly, the world cannot afford a poverty-stricken Japan. Japan for some years will remain the most highly ipdustrialised Eastern country. A divorced from her military bureaucracy, purged of her will to aggression, and shorn of the fruits of that aggression, must be assisted to make once more an important contribution to world trade, and capable, since her resources will no longer be wasted on arms and munitions, of providing higher standards of living for her people. But our obligation does not end with material contributions. We need to give something of which in the past we have been pretty parsimonious, and that is just sympathy and understanding of Indians and Chinese-yes, and Japanese, too-as individuals, not so different to ourselves — individuals, sharing the same hopes and fears, having the same affections, wanting the same security for their children, capable of the same courage and generosity.