ABSTRACT
I cannot help feeling that this attitude is a perfectly comprehensible one. It is natural enough for people to understand by “Empire” as applied to other people the same thing, or at least the same things, as they understand by it when applied to themselves. The Japanese understand two kinds of Empire: the open and the veiled. Korea, Formosa, and Karafuto are to all intents and purposes integral parts of Japan. Not only is there no local autonomy but, except as far as administrative machinery and geography are concerned, these territories have no separate entity. Nothing reveals this more clearly than the colonial budgetary system. These budgets are compiled locally, that is to say the actual work of estimating revenue and expenditure is done in the colony, but they are transferred finally to the estimates of the Imperial Overseas Ministry, of which they become a part, and as such they are discussed, amended, and passed by the Imperial Diet. It is a frequent accompaniment of such budgetary discussion for an official of the Colonial Government (usually the next in importance to the Governor or Governor-General) to defend and explain these estimates before the Houses as an Imperial Government “delegate.” Moreover, there has never been any attempt to apply the principle of administrative self-support to the colonies. Formosa, except in so far as, like old Japanese colonies, it contributes nothing to the cost of its defence, has been self-supporting since 1904, but Korea has never achieved even that
measure of administrative self-sufficiency, the average grant from the Imperial Treasury to the Korean Government-General for the past ten years amounting to over 14,000,000 yen in round figures.
