INSIDE OF NIPPON

The yellow menace, especially to denote Japan, is often on the lips of Caucasian alarmists. The external formidability of Japan and the obvious straights of her population, so pent within narrow islands, have given her, in the words of social prophets a predatory future. They have seen the damn erected against the yellow millions by the coast states of America as only a truce and postponement of the inevitable inundation. The actuality of these dismal prospects is for scholars of the subject to ascertain. But a bit of recent news from Asia suggests that the armor of the east rings a bit hollow, that Mongolia and Siberia will receive the land hungry Japanese before there will be forced upon an unwilling west. This news is the information of a newspaper correspondent who has interviewed a number of prominent Japanese and finds them pervaded with pessimism.

He quotes an active politician. Tukio Ozaki, to the effect that martial success has impeded true progress. It has given Japan a sense of security, of a security which can be only temporary, and thus has removed the incentive to build carefully in politics, education, or industry. He divides the period of awakening and westerrization into two parts, the one extending through the Russian war and fraught with apt imitation: the other since that time and significant of decline.

Evidently Mr. Ozaki is a believer in thorough westernization. He is evidently irked by the fendalism remaining in politics and provincialism in industry. They who hold that Japan can do better by consciously rejecting unsuitable portions of western civilization might see more progress. Nevertheless, these suggestions place the far eastern question in a light that the ego-istic westerner seldom sees. They show Japan, far from single-minded and bent on onset against the west, in the throes of difficult and diverse evolution. Which all goes to show that the popular mind, if not the scholarly mind also, is ignorant of just where the yellow peril lies.