JAPANESE EXPANSION
[To the Editor of THE SPECTATOR.] Stn,-4n your last issue you say "Britain is not the only overcrowded country looking questioningly at her empty spaces. To her [Australia's] north is Japan, with a teeming, population which must expand or perish."
May I remind you that whatever else may be Japan's ambitions, territorial aggrandizement is not one of them; for the simple reason that the Japanese are not an emigrating people?. Her .present total emigrant population is only one-half her annual natural increase. As Dr. Nitobe points out in his book Japan : "The Japanese are by nature and by tradition a stay-at-home people. They . . ..do easily make up their minds to cross the seas, and such as are ready, to move will probably not stay abroad to the end of their lives." In recent years Brazil has thrown open her doors to Japanese colonists. The climate is congenial, a big factor in the Japanese mind. There has been an intensive Government propaganda to encourage such emigration. , The shipping companies have offered low rates. The most that have gone in one year is about 50,000.
During my years in Japan I never heard a speech or read an article in Japanese suggesting- territorial acquisition in Australia. The "white Australia" cry is a political cry in
Australia only. „ Japan looks to _industrialization for the solution of her population problem ; and with a population of 2,774 to the square mile, of arable, land, and an annual increase of one million population, it is a problem. For this reason a con- certed plan of erecting tariff walls against her goods is like sitting on a safety-valve. This is one of the reasons why Japan at present is so anxious to be on good terms with her big neighbour.—I am, Sir, &c., W. IL MURRAY WALTON.
The Vicarage, Broxbourne, Herts.
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