Some students of Far Eastern affairs, like J. O. P. Bland, urge that Japan has a right to the occupation of Siberia; and none will gainsay that. But the fact is that though free to go both to Korea and Manchuria, Japanese have not gone to these regions even to the extent of one year's increase in population during the last ten years. Where, then, is the argument? As has been shown, they do not go as settlers because cheap continental labor makes it unprofitable. They go as business-men, as the advance-guard of the empire, as the rear-guard of the army. No one has ever raised a voice against the migration of Japanese to these unpopulated regions—with the exception, perhaps, of the natives. But ever and always one feels the hand of imperial Japan behind each little man from the empire, and that hold on her nationals is the thing that vigorous nations resent, because it threatens to impair their status.
That is what California and the sixteen other states who share her views feel. They are conscious of some subsidy behind every extensive purchase of land. From somewhere Japanese get enough money to buy anything they want. It is always the paternalistic arm of the Government round every little son of Nippon, or the embrace of his family. That is where the problem begins and that is where it ends. If only some chemical substance could be discovered that, when poured over the Oriental, would separate him from the mass, he would be as good a fellow as can be found anywhere in the world. But that was what always irritated me in my relations with Japanese in Japan. I never met a man I liked but that in order to enjoy association with him I had to tolerate his group. If I started off anywhere with one, I soon had a retinue. That racial clannishness is to be found everywhere, but nowhere is it more sticky than in ancestor-worshiping Japan.
Consequently, in whatever manner the problem is finally solved here in America, one thing is agreed upon by both Japanese and anti-Japanese,—that those here will have to be redistributed over the country, their clannishness broken up. That is a problem which affects not only the Japanese. However, nothing that is now done should in any way be retroactive so as to deprive any single Japanese of the fruits of his labor. Whatever solution is found for the Japanese problem in America, one thing is certain,—that no war will ever be fought because of Japanese immigration to America. Japan, as has been shown, would have to readjust her own political thinking to such an extent as virtually to revolutionize conditions in Japan in order to make an issue of the citizenship problem and the matter of alien landownership here. Such a revolution would considerably reduce the scope of the issues, they would fall apart and virtually cease to exist.
If we are looking for the causes of a possible conflict in the Pacific, they must be sought not in California but in China. The dovetailing of the angle of our triangle in America is contingent upon the dovetailing of the angle of the triangle in Asia. The one in America can be dislodged only by a wrenching apart of the angle in Asia.
Japan's hegemony in Asia is a serious matter. Japan is an industrial nation now. She is entitled to access to unused resources in China. Propinquity accedes this, but propinquity precludes the necessity of submerging China in the process. The Open Door in China means peace in the Pacific. We leave it to time to determine what the walling up of that door would mean.
CHAPTER XXII
AUSTRALIA AND THE ANGLO-JAPANESE ALLIANCE
1
The tempest in the European teapot has become a tornado in the Pacific. Small as the Balkans are, they were the stumbling-block in the way of the downward expansion of the European powers.