Foreign News: Women in Wartime

One of Japan's favorite excuses for the "China Incident" has been population pressure—so many people on such dinky islands. Nevertheless the Japanese Ministry of Public Welfare announced last week that it plans to distribute bonuses amounting to $60,000 among mothers who have more than ten children.

For the past ten years, Japanese women have been bearing between 2,000,000 and 2,200,000 babies a year. The net annual population increase (births minus deaths) has hovered around 900,000. Government statisticians recently got a shock when they audited vital statistics for 1938. Births had fallen by 230,000, were 210,000 below the ten-year average. Simultaneously the death...