ALL

of

us are apt to see a ghost sometimes. The most prosy and practical, the well-meaning, sincere, and the most conscientious of us, see it. Only often it happens that the ghost turns out to be a scarecrow put up there in the midst of his rice-field by Farmer Yosaku. The farmer is honest, sincere, hard-working; a perfectly good citizen, he who put up the scarecrow. He put it up not to make his good neighbors see ghosts; he put it up to scare sparrows. It was not the fault of his good neighbors, either, that they saw a ghost, and swore up and down that they did see it standing right in the middle of Yosaku's field. They were perfectly sincere in the matter. The trouble lay in the necromancy of night and the sloe-eyed witchery of the midnight hour. To turn a ghost into a scarecrow a little sunshine was all that was needed.

My countrymen in California see

a

滤

澤

ghost in some-not all-things which are being dealt out to them. The native sons, too, see more than one ghost. Let us take up one phase of the necromancy of misunderstanding of the subject in California.

Some of our American friends seem to confuse the two entirely distinct issues when they discuss the so-called Japanese question in California. That at least is the way it appears to me. One of them is the Japanese immigration into the United States; the other is the just treatment of the Japanese who are already in America. -their claim to the right of being treated on an equal footing with any other foreigners who enjoy the same treaty protection from the Government of the United States. As a living issue, the one has nothing to do with the other; for one of them is dead. I mean the immigration question is no longer a living issue between the governments of the United States and Japan.

It has been finished and settled. The agreement popularly known as "a gentleman's agreement" introduced the question. into the company of accomplished facts. How well and how scrupulously the Japanese Government has kept its words given to America is a matter of history. It is no secret to any one who wishes to look into it. The immigration of the Japanese labor is effectively stopped by the Japanese Government. Frankly, the people of Japan did not like it any more than a child likes a dose of castor-oil, and they were not so sure about the correctness of that good, old parental formula, "It is the best. thing in the circumstances," which the Japanese Government offered to them. Still, once their Government gave its word of honor to keep the agreement, the people took the medicine like a good child. They have not whimpered or sulked about it since.

To-day the Japanese in California are not protesting against this matter at all. They are protesting against the discrimination against the Japanese who are already in California. They are protesting against the land-ownership and other discriminatory laws and legislative acts that are directed against the Japanese, and against no other foreigners, living in the State. Our treaty with America provides for the same protection and treatment as any other foreign people. The Japanese cannot understand why America, whose first name is Fair Play, should deny them the equally fair treatment that others enjoy. Do the treaties between America and Japan call for this discriminatory act on the part of California or justify it? It does n't seem so-to a lay mind like ours. At that, our people are not insisting that they should have the right of owning land in California. Ownership of land in itself is not the thing which troubles the Japanese. If the United States, or the State of California, were to say to all the subjects of the treaty powers that the foreigners cannot own land in California, then the Japanese would submit to that as a simple matter of course. There would be never a word of protest or complaint.

It is the discrimination against the Japanese that is objectionable to us.

Canada does not want our labor immigration, neither does Australia,-in both countries the immigration of Japanese labor is not freely admitted, but Canada treats our people exactly as she does any other foreigners admitted under the terms and provisions of her treaty stipulations. The Japanese who are in Canada can be naturalized there; they can own land there. Our people are not discriminated against in other matters in any sense.

Here I wish to make it clear that we are not at all blind to the fact that there are many difficulties, constitutional, economic, and other, that surround the solution of this problem in the United States. We are not saying to America or to California: "Here, here are our rights under the treaty. Please fulfil them in the way we think you should fulfil them." Far from it, in fact. We wish to, and I hope we do, approach the United States in the spirit of conciliation and in all friendliness. We wish America to understand that we are ever ready to meet her halfway; that we are mindful of the local difficulties she has to face in effecting a satisfactory solution of it all. Approached in this manner and spirit, I am confident that in time the darkest ghost will turn out to be a scarecrow.

Frank and friendly understanding between America and Japan is particularly imperative at the present time. We have come together in California, your people and mine. But that is a mere incident compared with what the to-morrow has in store for the two peoples. And the place upon which we shall meet on a much wider scale and in vastly more lines of activity than in California will be on the Asian side of the Pacific. China will be the stage for a world drama that is to be. From the point of view of industrial and economic development in a modern sense China is still hardly touched. She will be developed, and very soon. The possibilities there are as great as her resources. China is not able to develop her resources by herself. For one thing, she has not the

adequate capital; she has not a sufficient number of men trained to do the vast and varied work connected with her transformation.

And in China, especially through all the years of her development, there is one thing more important than all the rest: that America and Japan should work there hand in hand in friendly coöperation. This is important for America and Japan, but in a much more vital sense is it important for China herself. And for this reason: America has plenty of capital -cheap money. She will have much more by the time the war is finished. We are told that this European War will do much in shifting the world's financial center from London to New York. If it does not do that exactly, it will certainly make the United States the mistress of huge wealth, and change her from a debtor nation into a great creditor nation.

Japan, on the other hand, lacks capital. At present our banks are suffering from an accumulation of idle funds. But this is temporary; it is an abnormal condition of things that will not last for any length of time. Even to-day, with all her unemployed money, Japan has not the hundredth or one thousandth part of the funds required for the undertaking of developing the resources of continental Asia.

But Japan has men -men able, trained, and capable of holding the positions of managers, engineers, and foremen.

Now, when American capital enters China, it will find something much harder than "lining up against a Chinese poem." It will find that it is well nigh impossible to secure even a small number of native Chinese of sufficient training and ability to handle the machinery and direct the unskilled native labor. American capital might import a large number of American engineers and foremen; but that would be piling inconvenience on top of economic extravagance. Moreover, Americans of skill and experience in mining enterprises and in other industrial undertakings who may be imported into China find themselves as "green" and helpless as a proverbial new-born babe in reading the psy

chology of Chinese labor. They are not versed in the customs of the native race, its traditions, and especially its prejudices. They know very little of the Chinese mode of life. They can tell, perhaps, with great and surprising accuracy, just what a mule is thinking about; but the thoughts of Chinese labor run in a much more complicated orbit than that of a mule. Japanese managers and foremen are much more apt to understand Chinese labor than are Americans. At least they understand Chinese thoughts and habits, and of course the Japanese can be hired much more readily and at much less expense than Americans.

In other words, American capital would find it much more economical to employ Japanese of training and ability to direct and conduct its Chinese undertakings than to bring out men from the United States to any great extent. I have personally seen both of these phases worked out in China and Korea. When I entered the Korean and Chinese fields, I saw at once how futile it was to try to get natives to direct operations. There are a few men both in China and Korea who are able to do this work, but they are rarely available.

Here, then, is a golden opportunity for American capital and Japanese energy to come together. And they can come together in perhaps the weightiest work as far as the shaping of the future destiny of the far East is concerned-in the development of China's resources. If Japan and America insist on working independently and separately, it will be a great waste of expenditure. It will mean something even more serious, the loss of time. The work of bringing about the real new China will be delayed many a long year; for it is absurd on the face of it for Japan. to undertake the work single-handed and on a large scale. It has not the money to do so. And American capital would not enter the field because it would find it too expensive, and therefore unprofitable. It would spell stagnation. That in turn spells another long sleep for China.

It's no mere moonshine-mothered