Asian Current

Japan Sweep towards Empire Part V

A train journey or a cross-country walking trip gives abundant visual evidence that the rural districts of Japan are crowded to the saturation point. Every available inch of land is cultivated; the carefully terraced, irrigated rice fields on the steep hillsides are a monument of patient toil and ingenuity. Between 1920 and 1930, when the whole population increased by about eight and a half millions, the number of persons employed in agriculture slightly declined.

Three possible peaceful remedies for Japan’s population problem are birth control, emigration, and industrialization. Birth control is frowned on by the authorities and runs counter to the strong impulse among the Japanese and other Oriental peoples to conceive many male children in order to ensure the continuity of the family line. Its practice is spreading among the more Westernized and sophisticated Japanese of the larger towns, but it is not yet appreciably slowing up the number of births. The middle-class family with five or six children is far more frequently found in Japan than in America or Great Britain.

There is still room for settlers in the northern parts of the Island Empire, in Hokkaido and in Southern Sakhalin. But the absorption capacity of both these regions, so far as I could learn during a recent visit, is definitely limited. Hokkaido has reached its present population of about 3,000,000 over a period of sixty years. There is a twenty-year plan for the development of Hokkaido which calls for the doubling of this figure by 1956.

But experienced residents of Hokkaido, both Japanese and foreigners, expressed doubt whether this plan could be realized. The best land is already settled; Japanese coming from warmer parts of the empire find the climate of Hokkaido too cold and foggy; the percentage of assisted colonists who fail to stick out the rigors of pioneering in this northern island is already fairly high. The prospects in Sakhalin are still less promising. The Japanese part of this island now reckons about 336,000 inhabitants. It is questionable whether room can be found for more than 200,000 new settlers - a mere drop in the stream of population increase.

Manchoukuo is the uncertain element in Japanese emigration policy. The army dreams of solving two problems, relieving agrarian congestion in Japan and building up a solid human wall against the Russian threat, by settling millions of sturdy Japanese peasants in the northern provinces of Manchoukuo, where there is a considerable amount of untenanted land. But so far this is only a dream. Only a handful of Japanese agriculturists have settled in Manchoukuo, although there has been an influx of merchants, traders, artisans, employees, and other urban dwellers into the new state. It remains to be seen whether such unfavorable factors as a severely cold climate, chronic banditism, the lower living standards of the native Manchurian peasants with whom the Japanese settlers must compete, can be overcome or sufficiently alleviated to make possible a large-scale emigration movement.

The only other foreign country to which Japanese emigrants have been going or could go in any considerable number is Brazil. About 128,000 Japanese have settled there, the record figure of migration for any single year being 12,000. But a large immigration of Japanese settlers, like an inflow of Japanese goods, is apt to provoke restrictive measures. Japanese emigration to Brazil has now been placed on a quota basis, which seems likely to reduce it to small dimensions.

So emigration, like birth control, seems likely to make only a minor contribution to the solution of Japan’s population problem. There remains industrialization; and here Japan has made remarkable strides during the last few years, as will be shown in detail in later chapters.

There are two considerations, however, which prevent industrialization from serving as a panacea, smoothly and automatically absorbing the steady increment of the working population. In the first place, machines have been replacing men and women very perceptibly in the larger and better equipped Japanese factories. More output with fewer workers has been especially characteristic of the textile industry, which gives more employment than any other form of factory production.

Moreover, Japan’s striking progress in export trade has encountered more and more barriers in the form of tariffs, quotas, and self-limitation agreements, concluded by Japanese businessmen as a means of forestalling these restrictions. Industry, trade, and the traditional family system have thus far absorbed, after a fashion, Japan’s annual contingent of new mouths to be fed. Japan is a nation of shopkeepers; a stroll through the streets of Tokyo, Osaka, or any Japanese provincial town reveals an amazing number of people who depend for their living on the proceeds of some very small store. The family system is Japan’s substitute for the dole; it is taken for granted that the successful and prosperous members of a family will look after their less capable or less fortunate relatives.

But the sense of strain and tension is never absent. With its unusual combination of an Oriental birth rate and an Occidental death rate, Japan sees itself confronted with the alternative of expanding or exploding. So there is a direct line of connection between the numerous slant-eyed children whom one finds in every Tokyo side street, playing battledore and shuttlecock, or flying kites, or playing soldiers with sticks for guns and swords, and the patrols of real Japanese soldiers who are hunting down guerrilla “bandits” in Manchoukuo or parading along the Bund of Shanghai. Japan sees in empire a possible way out of its population impasse.

I have discussed at some length Japan’s pressure of population, not only because, along with the closely related problem of poverty in essential raw materials, it is a main driving force in the sweep toward expansion, but also because it affects very intimately many other phases of Japanese life. Many peculiar features of industry and agriculture are attributable in large measure to the fact that there are more people in Japan than the country can comfortably support. Population pressure is a dynamic and explosive force internally as well as externally. It feeds the ferment of dissatisfaction that occasionally finds expression in spectacular plots and assassinations.