In the Great War Japan more than confirmed her claim to high place among the nations. She was active in scouring the sea for German marauders of commerce, and very early in the war captured the port which Germany had occupied in the Pacific, and so eliminated any threat to her authority with which that occupation might threaten her.
Within so few years did Japan thus pass, from taking no part whatever in the Great Story, to be one of the foremost actors.
Southward of the Japanese islands, the next most important group is that of the Philippines, transferred, as we saw, from the sovereignty of Spain to that of the United States as a result of the Spanish-American war of 1897-8. Southward again, we come to those islands of the Malay Archipelago chiefly dominated by the Dutch, although Britain also has important possessions there and on the Malay Peninsula itself.
And so, working yet farther southward through innumerable islands, we arrive at the huge British colonial territory of Australia, with the two islands of New Zealand some twelve hundred miles away towards the south-east.
A STREET SCENE IN MODERN JAPAN.