In 1911 Japan’s tariff agreements expired and a new high tariff was put into effect in the effort to raise $300,000,000 a year as the state’s revenue. The same result was experienced as in India. Home manufacturers operated in the smaller industries, and many larger foreign capitalists opened Japanese branches. For instance, the Lever Soap Company, of England, came to Osaka, and the Armstrong-Vickers-Maxim Company, of Newcastle, the gun-founders and warship builders, came to Muroran in Ezo Island, to be near the coal mines, the iron ore being imported largely from Tayeh, China, and much of the pig iron from Hanyang, China. Prices of living have advanced beyond wages, and in 1912 the municipalities of Tokio, etc., had to open free rice kitchens to feed crowds of the impoverished and unemployed. The poor bear the heaviest share of the new taxes and the increased prices levied by the trusts. The profits of some of the large trusts go out of the country. There is the same complaint as in China, that foreign capital and home monopoly are exploiting franchises, subsidy chests and tariffs. The new high tariff is a success for the monopolists, just as the American tariff was from 1865 to 1911. The complaint among the people of the privilege-made-wealth running the government and burdening the taxpayer is as bitter as in some other countries. The suffrage being limited in Japan to five millions out of sixty million people, this discontent does not yet show itself so quickly as in America and Britain. American and British newspapers, magazines and books which voice reform, and real and not deputized representation of the taxed, are translated, and widely read, not only in Japan, but in China.

The world knows the effective work of the Japanese press bureau, organized with the aid of foreign advisers, before the Japan-Russia War. This included the publication of Professor Nitobe’s book on Bushido in Philadelphia, glorifying to the highest pitch of the warm Oriental imagination everything Japanese. This had much to do with preparing the way for the Japanese advance in Manchuria. That press bureau has been strengthened, and has its inspired organs in some of the large cities of the Occident. No other country is able to color the news on occasions as Japan is able. With the cry of lèse majesté, Japan, Germany and Russia seem to be successful in stamping out much of the independent criticism of the taxed, or those to whom equal opportunity has been denied. There seems to be only one hope for real liberty in Japan and elsewhere, the rise again, as in Bunyan’s, Milton’s and Franklin’s time, of the independent pamphlet and book, whose one motto shall be, “No taxation without real representation.”

The Japanese have appointed the Koreans, Count Yi and Viscount Cho, to represent the absorbed Korean people, and these two men are expected to sign every document praising the rule of the Japanese, which document is then wired over the world by the thoroughly organized press agency. The former immense missionary influence of the Americans among the common people is slowly being choked out, and the large foreign gold and other mining industries of Korea, which promised so well, are also now under strict watch. In other words, the system of dummification has been applied to Korean politics, and the famous American teachers and political advisers have found it well to leave the peninsula. I would instance the long articles in the New York Times of June 6, 1912, and the New York Herald of September 1, 1912, in which the American Presbyterian and other churches charge the Japanese bureaucracy with wholesale persecution, “planting” of evidence, imprisonment and torture of thousands of Korean political prisoners as late as 1912. Two methods of colonization face each other in contrast at the threshold of China—the Japanese method in Korea, and the American method in the Philippines. Both are progressing commercially, but the latter alone is progressing educationally and altruistically, so far. It is noticeable in Korea that the Japanese are breaking down many beautiful walls and temples to build in their place ugly utilitarian houses. They pay very little respect to those whom they have conquered. They are obliterators of art, where art detains utility. The name of the land has been changed to Chosen. In Manchuria, despite conventions, the Japanese maintain ten times the railway guard of soldiers agreed upon. Japan will bear friendly watching everywhere, as the American writers, Millard and Homer Lea, are constantly urging. Her armaments cost her a heavy taxation and she is searching for ways to recoup herself. If Manchuria is to be saved to China, it will be owing more to America’s insistence than to Britain, for Britain at present is tied up to Japan, and Britain in India has given a hostage to the East. Perhaps the best way to save Manchuria is to encourage Chinese emigration, and this plan is now working out, tens of thousands of Shangtungese leaving yearly for the three rich Manchurian provinces. The American suggestion that the Russian and Japanese railways in Manchuria should be made international is possibly not so good a plan as to sell those roads to China with money loaned for the purpose, and clean Manchuria of Russian and Japanese troops. There seems no permanent reason why China should not run Manchurian railways and mines as well and as profitably as she has run the North China Railway and the Kaiping mine of Pechili province. To illustrate how Chinese officialdom looks upon the general subject, I quote from Viceroy Liu Ming Chuan’s memorial, approved by Li Hung Chang, written in 1893: “Japan attempts now and again to be arrogant—like a mantis when it assumes an air of defiance—and to despise China, and gives us no small amount of trouble on the smallest pretext.”

The advance party has its critics in Japan. The Tokio Nichi, the Osaka Mainichi, the Tokio Jiji and the Tokio Yorodzu take the nation to task for attempting to compete with America’s navy. They cry out against the expansionists’ slogan of “Japan’s supremacy on the Pacific”. Here is the Yorodzu’s plaint against the heavy taxes involved: “Go to the hamlets and villages, and you find the sons of our soil wearing the sad and worn appearance of the ‘man with the hoe’. Ask the shopkeepers and merchants, and they tell you that they are at a loss to know how to make ends meet. So do small manufacturers and men of moderate salaries, and in fact all who come under the general term of the middle class. Why? What else but that their taxes are too heavy, and because the price of commodities has risen too high since the war? The war has increased the wealth only of the contractors, speculators, and a small group of millionaires, which accounts for the sudden rise of the prices of the necessaries of life. Thus the chasm between the poor and the rich is widening every day. What will become of the country if the government does not bend all its energies to the recuperation of our national strength, which has been overtaxed during and since the late war? The only course which the government should follow at this critical moment is to curtail all the unnecessary expenses of administration, most of all, those of the army and navy.” This succinctly covers what volumes could not cover better. The average Japanese income is twenty-three dollars gold a year, out of which one-fifth goes to taxes.

Freight rates and tariffs are in some places as powerful as battleships and battalions in keeping out the commerce of a rival. When Japan and Russia rejected America’s proposition for an international control of Manchurian railways, so that the commerce of all nations would pay the same duty and receive the same car supply in Manchuria, Japan and Russia made a secret treaty regarding Manchuria on July 4, 1910, and another agreement in 1912. Among other points, it covered interchange rates. The Russian railways can by high rates keep out competitive Japanese goods, and the Japanese railways can retaliate. On non-competitive goods needed for local consumption, low through rates are accorded, Japan favoring the famous Harbin flour, timber, kaoliang spirits from the Harbin distilleries, and Amur salmon and fish. Russia accords low rates northward to Japanese (i. e., Fushun and Yentai) coal, cement, fresh food, etc. On export competitive soybeans, for instance, by low rates Japan tries to coax Russian shipments southward via Dairen, and Russia makes a similar effort to route Japanese-controlled beans via Vladivostok, but should a Russian shipper try to send ten miles in the direction of Japanese-owned Dairen he would find the soy rate higher than all the five hundred miles to Vladivostok.

By indirect methods, such as loans at low interest, rebated godown charges, rebated rates, and what not (for where there’s a will there’s a way) Japan can militate against the competition of American and British cottons, woolens, machinery, etc., in Manchuria. When the Chinese junks on the Liao River compete in the open season for the soy-bean traffic for Newchwang, the Japanese railways quote as low a rate as five mills per ton mile to Dalny, as compared with the lowest rate in America of eight mills. Japan is a David when she goes out to slay! Japan was the whole cause of the denial by China of an American-financed and constructed railway from Chin Wang Tao through Manchuria northward to Aigun. Yet she says she doesn’t mean to stay in Manchuria! She did not broad-gage Kuroki’s difficult Antung-Mukden railway recently in such a permanent way as to suggest that she ever intended to retire or sell out, “treaties and conventions notwithstanding,” to use the apt phrase of the London Times. Though America would under no circumstances accept a square foot of land in China or Manchuria, except on lease in an international municipal settlement, America must protect her growing and potential trade in Manchuria and in China, and that trade will always be withstood in one way or another by Japan. There is nothing now to go to war about, but there will always be a good deal to argue about, and Japan, as well as the Manchus, knows a dozen ways of presenting a smiling evasion. Have you ever proposed a difficult question to a Japanese at a curio auction, and watched his face! We have all voted that he was a success in making language hide thought; a born diplomat.

The Japanese government debt outstanding is £300,000,000, as compared with China’s debt of £93,000,000, and Japan’s industrials have borrowed privately abroad an added £60,000,000.

Japan’s Debt
in £.		Annual
Interest.		Due.
4% sterling£10,000,000
4½% sterling29,750,000
4½% second series29,750,000
4% 1905 Russia war25,000,000 After 1921
5% 1906 Russia war,
railways, ships,
Manchuria, Korea,
Formosa, Saghalien,
etc.		183,000,000
5% 190711,500,000 After 1922
4% 191011,000,000 After 1920
Total Japan’s debt£300,000,000£12,000,000
Total China’s debt93,000,0004,642,000
Total India’s debt170,000,000

Great as is Japan’s debt, she can make heavy payments on it because she owns her railways, and can allot the railway surplus to the diminishing of the debt, which China and India can also do because of the nationalization of most of the railways.

In April, 1912, the Lodge Resolution in the American Senate brought out the fact that a Japanese trans-Pacific steamship company, acting doubtless on behalf of the Japan forward party, had long been endeavoring to obtain from Mexico a strategic base on Magdalena Bay, which could, as a coaling station, threaten the whole Pacific coast. How would Japan like it if America obtained a coaling station in Manchuria? She and Russia compelled China to refuse America a railway franchise in Pechili in 1910.