jAPAN AND THE WORLD-I : THE POPULATION PROBLEM
By A SPECIAL CORRESPONDENT
THE world stands against Japan ; therefore Japan must stand firm against the world." That seems to be the fundamental feeling of the Japanese people as they look across the painfully narrow borders of their island home towards a spacious, wealthy, but forbidding world. How far that feeling is justified, how far it is not, and what are the implications of that fateful juxta- position ." Japan and the world," for her as well as for us, will be examined in this series of articles.
Over-population, as the fundamental cause of Japan's material difficulties, and a main influence on her national mentality, will be dealt with first, together with the conditions of Japanese agriculture, which is still the country's chief industry.
Japan has always been over-populated. Down to 75 years ago fewer than 80 million people, tilling the soil by ancient methods, succeeded with difficulty in eking out a precarious existence. Today modern agricultural methods enable 65 million people to subsist ; but they are as poor and overcrowded as their forefathers were, and are crying for space and food. The scientific means by which even more might be extracted from the soil—only 15 per cent. of which is cultivable—are either not yet discovered or too expensive to be applied in the modern competitive economy. Yet the population continues to grow by- about a million a year.
Birth control has been practised in Japan for centuries : more resolutely, efficiently and drastically than could be imagined today. The desire to be free of this tyranny was a powerful reason—together with the results of the growing use of money, which enforced an expansion of industry and trade, and destroyed the feudal village system—why Japan was quite ready to take her part in international trade when, in 1853, the guns of the American Commodore Perry forced her to abandon her centuries-old isolation. Today birth control, thanks both to the upper classes' love of comfort and the lower classes' poverty, is again rather more in vogue than during the first decades of liberation and modernization, and families are gradually diminishing in size. But to be forced to return to birth control as a national policy, instead of allowing it to develop as concomitant of a rising standard of living, as in the West, would mean for Japan the final defeat in her passionate struggle for national rehabilitation.
In any case, birth control would do very little to relieve the pressure for the next few decades. Firstly, the huge annual increase of population is no longer primarily due to a large birth-rate (which has indeed fallen from an average of 84.6 per thousand in 1921-25 to 32.2 per thousand in 1931, and should continue to fall), but to a decrease in the death-rate resulting from the hygienic modernization of the country (it fell in the same period from 21.8 to 19.0 and is expected, like the birth-rate, to decrease further). The excess of births over deaths, incidentally, amounted in 1981 to 13.2 per thousand, against 3.8 in Great Britain, where the birth-rate was 16.3 and the death-rate 12.5 per thousand.
Secondly, the ten million workers who will be added to Japan's employable population between now and 1950 are already born. They are growing up, generally speaking, healthier than previous generations ; they receive better education, and will be more articulate in their demands for work and rice. This immediate problem is, of course, far more pressing than a more distant future which might be rendered a little less hope- less by systematic birth control. "By that time we shall either win sufficient elbow-room to be able to support these few million extra children, or we shall be ruined whatever we do," says the average Japanese, if not in so many words ; if he does not say it he thinks it.. Moreover, there are many who actually welcome the tremendous pressure of the growing population on account of the impetus it gives to the struggle for " equality of rights " in international affairs.
In considering Japan's population problem, only one figure is important : ten million more men and women will need employment during the next fifteen years ! What that means can only be realized in the light of the fact that the total of all workers, both men and women, at present employed in Japanese industry, transport and communications, after all the immense expansion of its rationalized mechanism is no more than five million. And every fresh expansion of productive capacity results— thanks to the high degree of rationalization—in only a small increase of the hands employed.
Of these ten millions the women at any rate, it may be contended, could stay at home instead of seeking work. But to remain at home means to lead a far from idle but barely productive existence in the diminutive and already overcrowded family enterprises of agricul- ture, handicraft or retail trade. It means dividing among more mouths the miserable profits of such units, working side by side with the most highly rationalized factories in the world. It means, finally, perpetuating within the national economy a disastrous antithesis between modern monster units and primitive struggling and unproductive enterprises on an exiguous scale.
These millions of stay-at-homes represent one of the chief problems of Japanese agriculture. For first of all they have to be fed. In the second place, the soil has had in the last few decades to be divided and sub-divided for their benefit into uneconomic plots, and in countless corners of the hilly country marginal plots arc being cultivated which can hardly ever be made to pay. The result is that some 50 per cent. of Japanese agriculture, which is almost as intensive as pure gardening, is carried on by fainilies averaging five heads and possessing no more than 50 by 100 yards of land per family. Under such terrific pressure the whole nation can live on home-grown products, supplemented by comparatively small imports. In favourable years, such as 1933, excess stocks of rice may even reach an alarming volume. In spite of that, agriculture as a whole is working at a loss and finds itself faced with grave and recurring crises. The farmers plight is increased by the heavy tribute, both in kind and money, demanded by the landlords (nearly one-half of the soil is worked by tenants), who are in turn heavily taxed by the State ; prices are bad because the pur- chasing lower of the urban population remains low ; several sections of agriculture, particularly the important silkworm industry, are hard hit by the world depression. With all these handicaps the total indebtedness of Japanese agriculture has gradually grown to three times the amount of its annual income. The safety:valve of emigration, . moreover, remains closed, and even Man- chukuo, for reasons to be described later, will hardly be able to afford relief.
Faced with this misery, so deeply founded in topo- graphical and economic circumstances, all attempts of the State to case the pressure are bound to be mere palliatives. Real help, as far as could be given at all within the framework of the present State, would pro- bably demand a wholesale reconstruction of the social and economic structure of the country, quite apart from immense financial sacrifices. For that the Japan of today, engrossed in the struggle for external expansion, has neither the inclination, nor the strength, nor the means. Thus the agrarian crisis, like the problem of over-population, remains in suspense. Japan is looking beyond the confines of her beautiful but impoverished islands, hoping to solve those problems just as England, long since, solved hers.
`The traditional long-suffering and patience and the proverbial patriotism of Japan's peasantry, in spite of all the hardships in the villages, leaves the State some respite still. The peasant bears the chief burden of national " modernization "—and still waits. It is true that the peasants—and the tenant farmer in particular— have begun, especially since the War, to stir, to make claims, to protest, to organize. But it would seem that all leftward tendencies have been transmuted into patriotism. At any rate, they have been closely linked up with it. Agrarian radicalism, in fact, is today one of the strongest driving forces behind Japan's active foreign policy ; and military radicalism, more articulate than the agrarian, finds its firmest support in the growing dissatisfaction of the peasantry and in the universally increasing recognition of the dangers of growing popula- tion-pressure.
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