Pacific Urged

Japs Want Living Space

Mass Migration to South Pacific Urged

IT is unlikely that the idea of mass migration of 20,000,000 Japs to the South Seas, recently put forth by an English language magazine in Tokio, will be greeted enthusiastically by either the Dutch (in whose territory they hope to settle) or by the Australians who also have a stake in that part of the world.

It is proposed (by the magazine) that most of the Japs will go to Dutch New Guinea where, they say, there is abun dant water and snow-capped mountains and (probably) fertile plateaux.

They have quaint ideas about some as pects of the country, however—one being the “prevalence of dangerous epidemics; ’ but they feel that they might manage to overcome these by spraying DDT pow der from the air to “lessen the ferocity of these pestilences.”

The migrants, it is proposed, would lose their Japanese nationality and acquire that of the country in which they were living. But they would establish them selves in small groups and live as if in their own villages in Japan.

The magazine urges the Japanese Gov ernment to consider the project immedi ately—before any peace treaty is signed, as that, it is thought, would automatically delay proceedings.

Nothing is said about obtaining the consent of the Governments of the countries to which it is proposed the migrants will go. It is unlikely that Holland would look with favour on millions of Jap migrants flooding into Dutch New Guinea. And, even if they did, the howls of protest that would rise from every section of the Australian

population would be sufficient to block it effectively.

There is, in fact, nowhere in the South Seas where Jap settlers would be wel comed. Yet where are Japan’s surplus millions to go?

The population of Japan now is in creasing at a greater rate than ever before in her history. Over 1,000,000 Jap babies are coming into the world each year, and there is no room for them in Japan. In an endeavour to put some sort of brake on this extraordinary fecundity the Jap anese Government recently went to the previously unheard of length of putting a tax on babies. Whether or not this will

induce Japanese parents to practice birth-control remains to be seen.

It is a well-known fact too, that the ordinary Japanese is reluctant to migrate.

Before the Pacific war, when several avenues were open to him, the Japanese Government had great difficulty in find ing sufficient pioneers to populate their various colonies. The war, of course, may have changed all that.

Japan’s overpopulation will have to be solved sooner or later. A solution, how ever, does not readily present itself—un less it is the introduction, into Japan, of one of those “pestilences” from Darkest New Guinea,