What is the comparative strength of the American and Japanese navies? The German specialist, Count von Reventlow, and the American, Homer Lea, who accompanied Sun Yat Sen to China as military adviser, though he is not a military man, have in several books prophesied that Japan will and can defeat America. Japan has four dreadnoughts, the Settsu, Kawachi, Aki and Satsuma, completed since the Russia War, but they have only half the gun-power of the ten American superdreadnoughts. Japan has eight battleships of the 15,000-ton Mikasa type, including the salvaged and repaired Russian ships, against America’s thirty battleships of the first class. America can therefore patrol the Pacific from a Philippine base as soon as she has docks enough, and if America and Britain ever approximate on world questions, the British navy can be drawn to the Atlantic and waters west of Ceylon. Two things are sure: first, that America and Britain will never fight each other; and second, that Britain’s and America’s commercial and political policies in the East are identical in destiny. As long as America maintains a two-power standard on the Pacific, that is, two ships to one of Japan’s she need fear no opposition from Japan, and Japan has certainly nothing to fear from America, as China ceaselessly praises the altruistic and non-land-grabbing policy of America over the world. It is true that Japan has an almost irresistible army, but sea power dictates, as Admiral Mahan’s brilliant books show. Japan whipped Russia because she controlled the sea. If America controls the Pacific, the Japanese army could do nothing in Korea or Manchuria.
Now, as to Russia, the navies of America and Britain pounding on the Baltic door, if necessary, as a last resort, could make Russia behave in Manchuria; but if this did not prove wholly effective, a reformed Chinese army, trained by American and British officers, could in time do to the Russian battalions that were left what Oyama’s, Nogi’s and Kuroki’s regiments did. China should not yet be called upon to waste her money on a navy, as she has no interests for a century beyond the great countries of Turkestan, Mongolia and Manchuria, which America and Britain, with their navies, desire to enable her to retain. Britain and America should have a persistent, consistent policy, and there will be no naval war, the whole world over; and Germany can reduce her navy and army charges, which are a curse to her people. If Germany wants to do a noble work, let her use her army to influence parliamentary and sociological reforms in tyrannical Russia, where men are blighted by the curses of opinion-paralyzing detectivism and oligarchism. If a consistent, persistent policy is maintained there need no more be an Anglo-German feud on the Atlantic than an American-Japanese feud on the Pacific.
England needs a two-power navy because she has Africa, India and Atlantic Canada to defend. America needs a two-power Pacific navy because she has, as a foster mother of civilization, to help defend Australia, South America, the Philippines, Pacific Canada and republican China. Looked upon in this way, a navy becomes a policeman, and not a swashbuckler. Money is going to be invested to develop all these countries, and property should be protected, not looted. Those nations which have the most efficient naval police, and the most altruistic policies, are the nations which should patrol, and they are America, Britain and possibly Germany, if the last nation advances, as it seems now to be doing, in parliamentarism to real representation. America and Lloyd George’s Britain alone are essentially democracies, and therefore qualify in international altruism. With Britain’s control of the Suez Canal, and America’s ownership of the Panama Canal, efficiency is assured in these two nations effectively standing by to protect political progress and world commerce on a fuller and freer basis than it has ever been. In amenability and high mechanical intelligence, Britain, America and Germany alone have qualified in the management of navies.
Japan and America will not fight on the Pacific, as Count von Reventlow and Homer Lea prophesy, but America will overbuild Japan instead. Japan has been more carefully reading the new lesson taught by America and Britain that there must be no absorption of old China, and she is now thinking of a possible new rôle, as the interpreter of the East to the West, and the West to the East. The head of the First Imperial College, Doctor Nitobe, the coiner of “Bushido”, is foremost in propagating this idea. Japanese school-teachers are most numerous in Chinese government schools, especially as teachers of English, in learning which, however, they are not half so expert as the Chinese themselves. Doctor Nitobe is a Christian.
At the time of the Japanese War, Professor Nitobe, then with the Tokio University, wrote a fanciful book on the theme, Bushido (Japanese pronunciation of “Wu Shih Tao”—way of warrior). It was quite on the style of Lafcadio Hearn’s apotheosis of the Japanese. Its effect in Japan was to produce some hysteria and not a little conceit. Foreigners were led to believe that the Japanese must be right because they were reckless. The Japanese bureaucracy of the Choshiu, Satsuma and other clans used the fetish to entrench themselves. No one can say that Japan has real representative government. Her government is exactly the government that Russia has. Her Diet is no more representative than is the Duma. The ministry decides on the budget, and it is put through by steam-roller when necessary, and ready-made opinion is given to the press. There is no such thing as the British parliamentary system of the commons absolutely controlling supply bills, or the American principle of the Lower House being finally supreme. The extensive press bureau which was established to popularize the Japan side of the Japan-Russia War, encouraged hara-kiri and telegraphed over the world in exaggerated terms the details of every hysterical and self-advertising suicide. For instance, if the warriors could not take the fort, instead of trying again, they were to march up and blow their brains out before the moving-picture film, so to speak, leaving a letter for the Mikado as follows: “We could not do what you asked us; it is our fault. Therefore in shame we hara-kiri. Bushido! Banzai, etc.” This thing is being kept up to a degree, and as long as it is encouraged by the bureaucracy, constitutional government in Japan will be postponed, the emperor being worshiped in his old office of pope of Kioto instead of constitutional emperor at Tokio.
I quote the following of many press despatches which constantly appear in the Japanese and world press: “To give his life as an atonement because the emperor of Japan had to spend an hour in a common waiting-room, Moji Shijiro Shimidzu, a trainmaster, threw himself under a train. Shimidzu had been in charge of arrangements for a journey the emperor made from Kyushu, after witnessing the army maneuvers. The imperial train was delayed by a derailment at a misplaced switch. Shimidzu left a letter saying that he considered it his duty to pay for the emperor’s embarrassment with his life.” The spectacular suicide of the immortal captor of Port Arthur, General Nogi, and his wife at the time of the funeral of the Mikado Mutsuhito on September 13, 1912, comes under the same category of godless savagery forbidden mankind by the Sixth Commandment of Sinai. It is time for Japan to cease posing through her press bureau. We all admire her for many sane and grand things done, and to tell the truth, we admire the Japanese people more than their present system of a privileged government where only five millions out of sixty millions enjoy the franchise. It is a government of the people, but not sufficiently a government for the people, and certainly not a government by all the people, all of which conditions Lincoln said should obtain if liberty was to be assured. That is the aim of the whole world, and it has been accomplished now in England, America, France, China, Portugal and Switzerland. The Shimidzus, who commit suicide, do not exhibit patriotism but hysterical conceit, and the thoroughly organized Japanese press bureau, and the Choshiu, Satsuma, and other privileged clans, in their own best interests, should discourage the nonsense; and instead of elevating the man as a god in the Shinto shrine, they should exhibit him in the foyer of fools. Christianity teaches that there is only one being for whom we should give our lives, and that anything else is idolatry. It is not the emperor or the president whom we are to serve, but the emperor’s men and women; the president’s men and women; that is, the state, and a real emperor and a real president must, too, serve the state, which is all the people. Such is the modern logic Japan should teach her people, and not the hysteria of Bushido. Japan is not ignorant of her disabilities, and each of the Seiyukei, Kokuminto and Yushinkai parties are endeavoring to extend the educational system which Guido Verbeck fashioned for the favored Satsuma, Choshiu, Fujiwara, Gen, Tosa, Hizen, Kago and other clans of five millions, to the forty-eight millions of agriculturalists, miners, factorymen and fishermen, and twelve million Koreans and Formosans. Success to Japan’s educational extension, is America’s and Britain’s hearty wish, for it “will calm a sea of troubles”.
Japan has been the first nation in the world to attack the land taxation question, and Germany and Britain have followed recently, a long way off, however, and America will probably also follow the example. Until recently the large estates held by barons and corporations have been taxed on the old feudal medieval system of an infinitesimal valuation, while the small holder has been taxed on the full selling value. This has now been changed, and large owners in Japan can not hold at little cost to await unearned increment. They must work the land or sell it. Until this system is adopted the poor of the nations will be decapitalized by tariff, food, clothing, building material, head, war, permit, excise, export, subsidy, educational and other high taxes. Land values are about one-tenth what they are in America, and the land tax is about eight per cent. on selling value. As in China under the Manchus, land in Japan is nominally the property of the emperor. Perpetual leases can only be owned outright by Japanese subjects, or by a company which is incorporated only in Japan. A foreigner in Japan can not own land, but his Japanese incorporated company can, as the land would then be at Japan’s command, Japan having no extraterritoriality exemption law favoring the foreigner, as has China, in civil and criminal matters.
As is well known, the police are an arm of the central government and not of the municipality, which savors of despotism and Russia’s example. There is therefore no really free press in Japan, for state trials may not be reported or commented on. The police exercise a censorship of news under their Marunouchi Club of Tokio. There could be no Roosevelts, Wilsons, Bryans and Lloyd Georges in Japan as in America and England!
They have their money trust question in Japan, for while there are thousands of small gathering banks, they all deposit in the trust banks, which thus control the use of “other people’s money”, i. e., credit. These large banks, whose presidents confer in the meetings of the “Eel Society”, are the Bank of Japan, Yokohama Specie Bank, Hypothec Bank, Japan Credit Mobilier, Hokkaido Colonial Bank, Bank of Formosa, Bank of Korea, and Mitsui’s Bank.
Japan must have its Gifford Pinchot somewhere. She has taken quick action against states’ rights when conservation was endangered. It was found that the provinces were selling water-power concessions to speculators and dummies of the monopolies. The central government in January, 1911, immediately suspended all provincial and colonial grants until a national survey could be made, and applicants looked into. It is proposed to harness several million horsepower of waterfalls on the Switzerland, and not the Niagara plan (so as not to mar the scenery), which, with cheap labor, will be a great asset of industrial Japan.