(See front cover)
No Japanese juggler in any U. S. circus was last week keeping aloft a variety of balls, plates and fiery sticks more dexterously than Koki Hirota, Japan's Foreign Minister. In Britain President of the Board of Trade Walter Runciman could devote his entire time to the trade war he had declared against Japan. In Geneva a League of Nations strategy board could concentrate on a proper reply to the Japanese charge of League interference in China, in Nanking the Foreign Office could give its undivided attention to the new Japanese doctrine of a moral protectorate over China. But in Tokyo Foreign Minister Hirota had to keep all three issues in the air at once with one hand conduct the routine business of the Foreign Office with the other and wave the Japanese flag with his teeth.
Trade War. Aiming at Japan, Mr. Runciman announced last week that imports of foreign textile goods to Britain's Crown colonies would be limited henceforth to the average amount imported irom each country during the years 1927-31. While statisticians with slide rule and pencil last week figured out these quota restrictions, it was a fact that exports of Japanese cotton goods to all countries rose from 1,413,480.000 sq. yd. in 1927 to 2.090,228,000 sq. yd. in 1933 and surpassed the total British exports of cotton goods for the first time in history. Though tariffs on Japanese goods have been raised in a dozen countries year after year Japanese wages are so low and Japanese machinery so effective that in 1933 Japanese cotton goods exports increased by the millions of square yards thus: South America: 29 Africa: 41
Australia: 20
Egypt: 15
As a world problem the present Japanese trade menace is largely a matter of textile goods. Only in the U. S. where Japanese dumping has been receiving more and more attention since the last days of the Hoover Administration is the accent shifted to small manufactured goods-celluloid toys, rubber soled shoes crockery electric light bulbs. The U. S. is by far Japan's greatest market, but from the U. S. Japan imports one-fourth again as much as she sends.
The cotton war between Japan and Britain budded and bloomed in India five years ago. Remembering the picturesque but inefficient spinning wheel of St. Gandhi, people forget that even in 19^9 idia had a modern, highly efficient domestic cotton industry capable of supplv-mg all but 25% of her needs. That 25% was the prize, and in 1929 Britain got twice as much of it as did Japan. Then came Depression, the Gandhi anti-British boy, depreciation of the yen. Japanese cotton sales to India rose "and rose until by 1932 they not only passed Britain but were cutting seriously into the sales of the Indian mills. In 1933 the Indian Government increased the tariff on foreign cotton goods, which was mostly Japanese, to 5%, set the duty on British cotton at 25%. It did not stop the flood and Japan struck sharply back. Her spinners voted to buy no more raw cotton from India Last winter British, Indian and Japanese cotton manufacturers met in Simla, patched up a peace for India. A further cotton conference began in London on St. Valentine's Day. It failed to settle the question of Japanese exports to the world at large. Mr. Runciman's manifesto on quotas followed.