Japan's Expansion One or two competent writers on Japan having
announced lately, with some confidence, that the popula- tion question in the Japanese Empire would settle itself because the rate of increase was steadily slowing down, the figures of the 1931 census now emerge to shatter that comfortable doctrine. The birth-rate in Japan is not going down. It is going up. And the population is increasing at present by nearly a million every year. That fact may not be as disturbing to the rest of the world as it sounds. The Japanese, for all their apparent need for emigration grounds, still show little desire to emigrate on any considerable scale. But the alternative is to convert Japan systematically from an agricultural into an indus- trial State. That process, of course, has been carried some way already, and it must inevitably be carried much further. But expanding production means expanding markets, and unless new demands can be created on a substantial scale Japanese competition in China and India will become increasingly intense. Japan's birth- rate may not create a military problem, but the economic problem it creates is grave.
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