Japan Faces A Year of Crises

THE month, for students of the Pacific scene, has held much of significance, and something of hope.

The new year opens with the sinister shadow of Japan no less sinister. The picture grows uglier, as we see more clearly the ceaseless, thrusting activities of the Japanese in the Pacific, driven on by their fana tical belief that it is their ordained mission to control the Western Pacific, direct civilisation and regenerate mankind.

To those who do not see below the surface, Japan’s Chinese adventure seems to have gone sadly awry. But the present military inactivity in China is due to winter conditions, as much as to the continued resistance of the Chinese. It is true that Japan has poured a huge army, and enorm ous treasure into the campaign in China, and China still is fighting back. But the actual, literal facts are that Japan now holds the whole of the eastern, and by far the more valuable portion of China; that she has thrown out European economic establishments and trade of almost incalculable value; and that she is actively and steadily consolidating her gains, so that Japanese home economy may quickly get the benefits of her conquests.

Because of the cleverness of Japan

in making the Pact with Germany and Italy, the democratic countries (Britain, America and France) have been out-manoeuvred. They can do little more than stand by, while Japan captures or annihilates their com mercial empire in China. Had it not been for the “Berlin-Rome-Tokio axis”, it is certain that British forces would have gone to China, long ago, to save British property from de liberate and planned destruction. But, so long as Germany and Italy remain obedient to the immediate whim of incalculable dictators, Britain and France dare not remove their forces from Europe; and meanwhile the great American navy has remained, as always, at the command of the queer combination of Washington chatterers, cigar-chewing ideologists and egoistic press magnates, which masquerades as a democratic Govern ment.

That is the depressing side of the picture. It is not all gloomy.

Britain, France and America, though out-manoeuvred, are by no means beaten. Time, definitely, is working on the side of the democracies. The latter are assisting China to keep on fighting. If China collapses now, the Japanese will get away with spoils of fabulous richness—territory, trade, raw materials, vast reservoirs of food

stuffs and man-power—from which they will build the machine that is to destroy Western civilisation. But Japan to-day is horribly near to economic collapse. The strain of the China campaign has been terrific; early in January, the Japanese Gov ernment resigned. If the Chinese continue to fight, and if the demo cratic powers use the facilities which are at their command to cripple Japanese trade in the world, it is just possible that 1939 will see Japan in volved in disaster so great that the menace of her southwards thrust will cease to cast its shadow over this and the next generation of Europeans in the Pacific.

We can only wait and see. The portents are good. The United States, throwing off, at last, the shackles of the traditional isolationist policy, early in January, condemned the Totalitarian States—and, inferen tially, the Berlin-Rome-Tokio axis— in the most startling Presidential speech of the decade; and the British Prime Minister immediately sup ported the American utterance.

America is now considering plans to strengthen enormously her line oi naval defence in the Pacific; and she says she may advance that line west ward to include the fortification of Guam. Guam is right in among the Japanese mandated islands; and any fortification there must be linked up with a new defence plan embracing

the Philippines. American strategy, up to the present, always assumed that Guam would be gobbled up, and the Philippines abandoned, while the U.S.A. forces retired to their Central Pacific line (based on the Aleutian islands, Hawaii and Samoa). But this more aggressive America apparently is prepared to meet Asia (if Asia must be met) much farther westward— which means, of course, that an effort would be made to keep the Philippines out of the Japanese maw.

The month’s developments are: Political confusion in Japan, as a re sult of the economic strain; a more aggressive spirit in America, and an apparent, growing willingness to line up with the democracies in resisting Hitler-ism—which means, in turn, greater freedom for the democracies in dealing with Japan in the Far East; and a growing realisation that the democracies, by unitedly using their enormous economic strength, can cripple Japan and save China, without firing a shot. Meanwhile, there is not a word of Russia; she re mains in the background, a mysteri ous, imponderable force.