Books: Four on Japan

(2 of 2)

Soldiers and Officers. Hillis Lory taught for three years at the Hokkaido Imperial University in Japan. Japan's Military Masters is his attempt to destroy U.S. delusions about Japan's weaknesses. Some of his points:

> Among every hundred Japanese soldiers whom U.S. troops fight, there are 15 who can read and write English. Every one of the hundred can read and write his own tongue.

> Japan has had conscription for 70 years. Each year the young men—minimum height, 4 ft. 10½ in., weight, 103 lb.—swarm into the Jap army and an equal number of trained reservists return to their rice paddies, fishing boats and factories, to keep the army close to the people.

> A first lieutenant gets $21.62 a month, a colonel $79.35. Officers report at 5 a.m. on cold winter mornings and fence, barefoot, in the cold regimental hall, for an hour before breakfast.

Modern Colonizers. The Japanese in South America is a 126-page factual study analyzing the strategic importance of Japanese immigration, crammed with little-known, alarming facts:

> In 1938 there were more Japanese residents in the U.S. and its possessions than there were in China. The figure was 257,460. Only Manchuria had more Japanese colonists. There were 418,315 there. Of the 1,059,913 Japanese now living abroad, about 200,000 are in Brazil.

> The volume and direction of Japanese emigration has always been under State control. In 1917 the 54 Japanese privately owned colonizing companies were combined into the Kaigai Kagyo Kaisha (Overseas Development Corp.).

Kaigai Kagyo Kaisha organized societies along the lines of the old Japanese Guilds —"groups with spiritual as well as economic ties," trained the colonists before they left, supervised their entire economic and social life afterwards. By 1934 it was sending approximately 20,000 Japanese to Brazil each year.

Japanese companies bought great tracts of land in Brazil: 1,250,000 acres (am area the size of Delaware) in Sao Paulo, 6,000,000 acres (an area the size of Maryland) in the north of Brazil on both sides of the Amazon.

Readers who investigate Japanese enterprises in the U.S. and Canada may find more sensational facts than Authors Normano and Gerbi found in South America. In Seattle, Japanese owned 206 of the 350 hotels in the city. In British Columbia, where before Pearl Harbor there were 24,000 Japanese, they owned 1,270 fishing boats that regularly patrolled the coast to Alaska. In Vancouver, B.C., there were 114 Japanese lodginghouse keepers, as well as barbers, wholesalers, dressmakers, apartment-house operators. There 45.1% of the Oriental men who were employed, and 69.2% of the women, were domestics. Japanese properties straddled the power lines, overlooked the shipyards, were adjacent to the water-supply lines, gas lines, bridges. Unlike U.S. students, British Columbia observers pay little attention to discussions of the difference between Nisei and Japanese born in Japan.