JAPAN'S THREAT TO TRADE ROUTES
By GUENTHER STEIN
Hong-kong, April.
WHILE the Japanese Army is embogged in China, the Japanese Navy, almost unnoticed by the world, has made an advance far into the South Pacific, where Britain, France, the United States and Holland have important colonial possessions. The first step was the occupation, in 1937, of the Pratas Shoals, a group of small islands, some 150 miles off Hong-kong, where the Chinese Government used to maintain a meteorological station to give typhoon warnings to ships at sea. The islands have since been used as a minor base for Japanese men-of-war and naval planes.
The second step, in February, 1939, was the occupation of the big Chinese island of Hainan, in Tongking Bay, some 200 miles to the south-west of Hong-kong. It faces the Important French Indo-Chinese port of Haiphong on the one side, and the French Leased Territory of Kwang Chow-wan on the other. Chinese guerrilla forces are still resisting the Japanese invaders in the interior of Hainan, and the Japanese are retaliating with occasional bombing ex- peditions. But the coastline of Hainan is firmly in their hands. They have already begun to build several airfields on the island, to install shore batteries, to import cement and other materials for fortifications, and work has been started on one or two undeveloped ports in the south of the island, which are bound to acquire considerable strategic import- ance. There is every indication that the Japanese have come to stay in the island, the military and economic importance of which the Japanese Navy had been emphasising for many years.
The third step, taken in the same month, without any publicity, was the raising of the Japanese flag on the Paracel Islands, a hundred miles south of Hainan, and off the coast of French Indo-China. This group had been nominally under Chinese sovereignty. But France, some time ago, had tried to forestall the Japanese occupation of a foothold so precariously near to its colony and so easily convertible into a strong naval base, by sending a party of Annamite police- men to the Paracels. Japan's " retaliatory " action against that move ignored former assurances given to France that Japan had no designs on the islands.
The fourth step, late in March, was the outright annexa- tion by Japan of the Sprattley Island group, another five- hundred miles further south than the Paracels. The islands, which are uninhabited, had been regarded as British until 1933, when they were claimed and occupied by France, on account of their strategic position near French Indo-China. At that time, neither Britain nor Japan, which had both been notified, protested against the French action. Here, too, a few Annamite policemen had, until recently, maintained the French claim. They had now to be withdrawn.
Meanwhile, a further number of reefs and islands, widely dispersed between the coasts of French Indo-China, British Borneo and the Philippines, have been occupied by the Japanese Navy, and it is known that it is Japan's intention immediately to develop them into an important strategic base. Although all of these islands are small and almost uninhabited, their coral-reef formation, and the fact that they are closely surrounded by deep water, make it possible to use them as supply stations and as shelters, at least for naval planes, submarines, and small naval craft.
It is feared in French and British circles that Japan's next move may be the occupation of the fairly big and wealthy, but entirely undefended Natuna Islands, an outlying, isolated part of the Dutch East Indies, another four to five hundred miles further to the south, and within less than one flying hour of Singapore. If Japan should not attempt to take them in the immediate future, she might at least do so during another acute European crisis, or during a war in the Old World, which would make it unlikely for Britain to fight, or to take any other action against Japan, for the sake of such a minor group of Dutch-owned islands.
However that may be, Japan has already advanced her naval position by some ',too geographical miles to the south- west of her colony, Formosa. She is already within t,000 miles of Singapore and the Equator, only some 250 miles from British Borneo, and within the same distance of the Southern Philippines, to the northern and eastern parts of which she is near enough from Formosa and from the South Sea Islands, which used to be German. Japan already con- trols half of the vast coastline of French Indo-China, and the highly important international shipping route from Singa- pore in the south to Manila and Hong-kong in the north. It is now much easier for japan than it was before to cut off these two centres of American and British interest in the Far East, and it is infinitely more practicable for her than formerly to attack either French Indo-China, British Borneo, or the Philippines.
None of these recent moves has resulted in any more than diplomatic protests, such as became a matter of almost weekly routine for the Tokyo Ambassadors of the demo- cratic Powers. The pretence of "military necessity in connexion with the war against China," which Japan still used to justify the first two moves, was dropped in the later ones. Another, even more transparent, excuse was deemed sufficient to be given to the Western Powers of whom Japan knows well enough that they are not in a position to challenge her at present: Japanese economic interests in those island groups had to be safeguarded.
These "economic interests" are represented by a number of Japanese fishermen and other Japanese subjects who are supposed to work whatever guano deposits there are in these islands. It has long been a favourite policy of the Japanese Navy to send groups of men, led by Navy officers, to all the out-of-the-way islands, not only in the south, but in the whole of the Pacific, in which it seemed worth their while to take a tentative interest. They were equipped with wire- less and meteorological instruments and regularly supplied with all their needs by men-of-war. If necessary, Japan would have her Robinson Crusoes in such places, to be " protected " by means of annexation. By that time, the essential surveying and observation work in preparation for the eventual naval use of such new outposts would have been done by them. The world may hear still more in the future of islands far away from Japan which will suddenly be claimed as the " discoveries " or the objects of "vested c.:3aomic interests" on the part of Japanese nationals.
But Japan has real economic interests, of a potential kind, i-r that part of the world. Such interests provide at least an 11:tional, if not even the main motive for that long- intended southward move which the Japanese Navy, at last, seems to be preparing in earnest. For all the territories which the new spearhead of Japan's expansion is threaten- ing are very rich in raw materials such as Japan is lacking and as even the ownership of the whole of China cannot give her. British Borneo has important oilfields which, in their present state of no more than superficial development, already produce about twice as much oil as Japan's own wells at home ; and the adjoining Dutch Borneo is even wealthier in oil resources. Borneo and French Indo- China, too, already produce much rubber, and could yield infinitely more of it than they do at present. Borneo has tremendous resources of timber, some of which Japan is already working on concession. It has good coal, and gold, and its mainly undeveloped and partly even unprospected territories offer many other temptations to the naval empire- builders of Japan.
French Indo-China is rich in metals, coal, tropical pro-. ducts, and rice. The Philippines, too, apart from having much desirable land for the settlement of Japanese, or at least of Chinese farmers who might be made to work there for the masters of a New East Asia, would also give Japan very great advantages with regard to raw material supplies.
Whatever her immediate intentions may be, she has now established exceedingly important advance posts in the South Pacific. And the Western Powers may be late in realising that the Japanese agitation for a "Southward Push" which went on for years, was meant quite seriously, and that it may at last have come to materialise, while their own defences in those areas are still pitiably weak.
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