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. Back to PTO Contents