The movement for the conservation of timber has taken hold in Japan, reinforced cement poles, as well as creosoted poles, being used. The largest creosote works are at Osaka, and the preserved wood is now used for Japan’s famous light buildings, railroad trestling, ties, bridges, etc. Japan has an exceedingly rich treasure forest (one of the world’s last) east of the South Manchurian Railway, and also bordering the Fusan-Mukden line. Much of the hard wood of Japan and her colonies is being brought to America for furniture-making at present.
Japanese steamers will doubtless run to the east coast of America through the Panama Canal. Micki Shonzo talks of sending twenty of his vessels through. A Japanese line now carries nitrates, hides, salt, horses, beef, wool, fish, grain, etc., from Chile, and coal, rice, tea, silk, oils, bean cake, manufactures, matting, etc., to Chile. Japanese shipping in 1912 amounted to the enormous tonnage of 1,000,000, as compared with 170,000 tons on the day before the Chinese indemnity was paid to Japan in 1895.
Perhaps the rich dividends made by the Oriental Consolidated (gold) Mining Company, at Unsan, in the Yalu district of Korea, made Japan as anxious commercially as diplomatically to secure Korea. This American company, with which Leigh Hunt was connected, and whose concession was obtained through the offices of United States Minister Allen, has made in a concession 500 miles square 4,000 per cent. in ten years. One hundred thousand dollars was put into the gold mining plant, and $4,000,000 has been paid in dividends, the mines themselves, instead of added capital, paying for their own development. The Unsan plant is largely self-contained, having crushers, a foundry, machine shops, a fleet, a railway and lumbering plant, hospital and barracks. The mining costs only one dollar and forty cents per ton, hand labor, the Koreans being the best miners in the Far East, owing to their docile patience. Some of the mines are one thousand feet deep. The Korean Exploration Company (half American and half Japanese) has a gold mining concession at Chicksan, south of Seoul. The new terms that will probably be imposed on foreign mining by Japan will be at least twenty-five per cent. royalty on the net profits, machinery imported and ore exported to be duty and loti taxes remitted, respectively. If Japan can do the smelting, of course ores must go there for treatment.
In Formosa the three largest Japanese sugar companies are the Niitaka, the Taihoku and the Minami Seito (Southern Sugar Company), capitalized at about $2,000,000 gold each, with an output of 300,000 tons a year. Japan can increase this, and supply the world. The government grants subsidies to the cane growers for fertilizer, and money prizes for model plantations, the high tariff against Hongkong, of course, being a subsidy for the Formosan sugar mills, as far as supplying Japan is concerned.
Japan has opened an electric-driven cotton mill, the Naigai Wata, at Suchow Creek, Shanghai, sending to America for the boilers, to Germany for the dynamos, and to England (Oldham) for the spinning machinery. The owners and foremen are Japanese, the workers Chinese. Eighty-five per cent. of the material is local grown, and fifteen per cent. comes from India in Japanese steamers. The finished product, mainly yarns, is sent up the Yangtze River and along the coast in Japanese steamers, and is admitted into Japan preferentially as far as foreign products are concerned. The Japanese are extending their ownership of cotton mills erected in China, for the Mitsui Bussan Kaisha has bought the Hua Hsuan, the Shanghai and the San Tai mills at Shanghai, and the Wuchang Spinning Mill at Wuchang. The Mitsui Bishi Kaisha has bought the Chen Hua mill at Shanghai, and the Nippon Mill Company has bought the Jih Hsin mill in China. There is much food for thought in this situation. The Japanese also own one-third of the largest translating press in China, the Commercial Press of Shanghai.
The Japanese firm of Mitsui has established a refinery at Hankau to handle the famous nuts of Szechuen province, which produce the oil known as China wood oil. The Mitsui firm also handles the production of soy-bean oil in Manchuria, shipping the oil and the cake in great quantities in their own steamers to Europe and America. The Mitsuis do their own banking. The soy-oil is used for cooking, soap making, and as a substitute in paints for linseed oil, which is becoming scarce. The cake is used as a milk food and a fertilizer in Europe and America. To what proportions the industry has grown can be judged by the following figures: Newchwang (Chinese) shipped 230,000 tons of beans and 400,000 tons of bean cake in 1911. Dairen (Japanese) shipped 450,000 tons of beans and 300,000 tons of bean cake. Vladivostok (Russian) shipped 250,000 tons of each. The soy-bean oil amounted to about 700,000 hundredweight. This immense crop speaks eloquently of the richness of the black soil of the three provinces of vast Manchuria. The bean is also now being planted in Szechuen province in the rows where the nefarious poppy once bloomed, and America is using quantities of seed in the southern states in connection with enriching land which has been impoverished by cotton. The soy-bean, being nitrogenous, adds to, instead of taking from, the life of the soil. One ton of beans, besides two tons of soy hay, can be produced per acre.
Canadian and South African railways may own hotels, express, telegraph, telephone and land companies, but here is what the charter of the South Manchuria (Japan owned) Railway Company permits them to do: operate railways, cities, steamships, hotels, mines, electric light and gas plants, tramways, laboratories, laundries, shops, dormitories, go-downs (warehouses), hospitals, Y. M. C. A.’s, schools, libraries, mills, selling agencies, stockyards, forests, sawmills, farms, kaoliang distilleries, etc. This reminds one of the ancient East India Company’s powers before Warren Hastings was impeached, or of the ambition of Incoporator Dill in the palmy days of the incorporation laws of New Jersey State before the Interstate Commerce Commission got into its stride.
The pernicious influence of the yoshiwara and the demi-monde in Japan and the Japanese settlements and colonies throughout the Far East, is fully covered in the tenth chapter of Price Collier’s The West in the East. If the fire which destroyed the extensive, obtrusive yoshiwara quarter in the Susaki section of Tokio in 1911 had swept the whole institution away, womanhood throughout the world would not have the grievance against Japanese society which it now has. Neither China nor India ever sank this low in morals, despite all the talk about concubinage and slavery. The fault lies in the inherent weakness of religion in Japan. The Buddhism and Confucianism (Shintoism) which Japan imported, have degenerated and lost soul in the exotic state. If China needs Christianity, Japan needs it more. The Japanese women are delightfully vivacious; it is a pity so many should lose their self-respect. Possibly some of it substantiates the eternal teaching that no nation can persistently ignore poverty and not suffer in morals. The Japanese government is now doing something to remedy conditions and raise the moral tone. The fault lies largely with the people themselves; too great a love of money and too little a love of real religion, with the usual result that sacred womanhood is the first to be driven down at the wall.