ABSTRACT
WE are considering a period when not only in Japan, but throughout the world great problems clamour for solution. There are population problems, for instance, including that of Japan; the problem of supplying demand without economic disaster resulting; the problem of using collective force without making the individual subhuman; and the problem of successful manufacture. That Japan offers a field for study in the first three is obvious. That success in manufacture is one of the world’s major problems may not be uppermost in the reader’s consciousness until he considers the craze for “protection” and for “economic nationalism.” This being a chronicle of events rather than a philosophic treatise, no attempt will be made to answer questions with which many great minds are wrestling, but it may be pointed out in passing that the beating of the war-drum, audacious yet easy conquests, and a patriotic call to close the ranks against a hostile world coincided with a forward stride in successful manufacture such as had been striven for in vain for a generation. But the reason for this sudden success may lie elsewhere. The great American slump of 1929 was felt all over the world. Professor Irving Fisher, the prophet of the Permanent Boom, begged his countrymen in vain to keep on; President Hoover, casting aside three centuries of Quaker economics, exhorted them to spend their way into prosperity. Echoes of such doctrines were naturally heard when the Hamaguchi policy of thrift seemed only to increase the depression in Japan. But it may be that, without those years of sound finance and intensive propaganda for the improvement of manufacture, the expansion which seemed to scare the whole world could not have taken place. Historians will dogmatise on this point according to the experiences
of the next few years. We may remember here that Baron Shidehara, the Foreign Minister in the Hamaguchi Cabinet, in an announcement of policy, said that Japan intended to deal with the population question by industrialisation, which would absorb the increase.
