Import or Die

Britain's experts on economic warfare, gauging the size of the gun which Franklin Roosevelt pointed at Japan last week (see col. 1), came out with a startling estimate: total economic blockade by Washington and London would cripple Japanese industry within six months. The Japanese Islands (where 98,000,000 people live in 260,770 square miles) are almost barren of the raw materials of modern industry, must import or die.

The Tokyo stockmarket collapsed in a near-panic this week. But Finance Minister Masatsune Ogura betrayed no alarm. He said that Japan's answer to the democratic gun would be to "push ahead" with its plans for imperial self-sufficiency in Asia--or, as he called it, a "Greater East Asia co-prosperity sphere." Theoretically, the conquest of the South China Sea would give Japan almost all the raw materials she needs. But actually, it would not.

Oil is Japan's most obvious lack. She produces only 10% of her peacetime needs. She depends for the rest on the U.S., the Netherlands East Indies, British Borneo, Latin America. Under the State Department policy designed to keep Japan from moving into the East Indies, the U.S. sent Japan 16,086,000 bbl. of petroleum and petroleum products in 1939, 11,529,000 bbl. last year, about 1,150,000 bbl. a month this year. Until this week, Japan also got 1,800,000 tons (around 14,000,000 bbl.) a year from the East Indies under a contract with the Dutch. That contract is now suspended.

For its steel industry, Japan is 88% dependent on imports of iron ore, pig iron, scrap. In 1936 (last year Japan printed statistics on metals) she imported 6,000,000 tons from the U.S., Britain, the Philippines, Malaya, China.

Copper is available in Japan in amounts barely sufficient for peacetime needs. Last year Japan imported 130,356 tons of refined copper and scrap from the U.S., other large supplies from Latin America (now partly cut off by U.S. pre-emptive buying programs below the border). Other basic materials of which Japan is short include coal (barely enough for peacetime requirements), zinc (50% of peacetime

61 needs), tin (20% of peacetime needs), aluminum, lead, mercury and phosphorus (almost none), rubber (none). Of such important alloy metals as antimony, chrome, nickel, manganese and tungsten, Japan produces scarcely any at all.

Of the raw cotton on which its great textile industry depends, Japan must get all her supplies from India, the U.S., Brazil, Peru, China. Wool must be 99% imported from Australia, the Union of South Africa, England.

Of total Japanese imports the U.S. normally supplies over 30%, the British Empire about 20%. Already Japan's industry has been slowed down by stoppage of U.S. shipments of scrap, machinery and scarce defense metals. Moreover, the biggest customers for raw silk (see p. 61) and other exports through which Japan gets foreign exchange are also the U.S. ($105,311,000 last year) and Great Britain. In the early part of World War II, Japan found a profitable customer in Germany, which sent its No. 1 traveling salesman, Helmuth Wohlthat, to Tokyo this spring to try to streamline Japanese industry and arrange shipments over the Trans-Siberian Railway. But the Russian war has cut off that trade, and Japan is more than ever dependent on the U.S. and Britain.

It was to end this dependence that Japan conceived her schemes for a "New Order" in the Far East--with Japan in control of all the rich natural resources of China, Indo-China, the East Indies, Malaya and perhaps even the Philippines. The East Indies produce enough oil to supply Japan in abundance; Malaya produces a third of the world's tin; there is plenty of rubber in Indo-China. In the Philippines are chrome and iron ore. China has iron, coal, tungsten, mercury, cotton, antimony, some lead and manganese. The

East Indies have bauxite; New Caledonia has nickel. About the only metal Japan would not stand to gain in substantial quantity is copper.

But raw materials are useless in the ground. They have to be mined, transported, processed; and there lies Japan's most serious lack. She has neither the technological know-how nor the industrial machinery to exploit the Far East's resources in time to become a serious contender for international power. To use East Indian bauxite, Japan would have first to build aluminum plants and a power industry to run them.

Japan's steel industry, geared to use

U.S. scrap instead of ore, floundered badly after scrap supplies were cut off ten months ago. To exploit China's iron ore, Japan would have to multiply her mining-facilities, expand her merchant marine to carry the ore, build a tremendous battery of coke ovens and blast furnaces to turn it into pig iron. Although Japan has controlled Manchuria for nine years, she has been unable to swing any substantial increase in Manchuria's iron production. China's cotton is a short-staple variety which Japan's present textile machinery is not equipped to handle.

In China, war is not the best approach to raw materials anyway. Thanks to guerrilla resistance, Japan now gets fewer raw materials from "conquered" China than before the war. Similarly, if Japan moves into the Dutch East Indies she will probably get less oil than she has been getting. The wells are mined by the Dutch for destruction at a moment's notice. The mines could put some fields out of production for six months to a year, might ruin others permanently.

Mr. Ogura's threat last week did not have nearly the muzzle-load of Mr. Roosevelt's.

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