Big Bright Bogey

The Italo-Ethiopian War spectre looked like the rosiest kind of good news to the businessmen of Japan last week. As the War bogey rose bigger & blacker in Europe, traders on the floor of the Tokyo Stock Exchange hugged themselves with joy, deliriously bought & bought. One day transactions reached an all-time high: 1,166,000 shares. Next day Tokyo trading went through this roof to 1,183,000 shares. At week's end practically every stock on the list had risen from 10% to 100%.

This spree was not without some skulduggery. First insiders spread the false rumor that Italy had quit the League of Nations. Shares zoomed wildly up. When the regular press association cables contradicted this false hope, shares slumped, the shoe-string speculators were sold out and the insiders picked up their 'shares again, having turned a quick profit. Later in the week the rumor mongers tried one along the line that Italy had accepted a League compromise. The short-sellers covered themselves comfortably as the market skidded down, were in a position to get back on the long side when the press associations brought the good news that it still looked like war.

Rapturous Japanese businessmen snatched at copies of Nichi Nichi last week to read an analysis showing that war between Italy and Ethiopia would help practically every Japanese industry except wheat and possibly chemicals. Biggest slices of cake would go to shipping, heavy industry, steel, rayon.

Japanese businessmen's naive delight over an Occidental War was perfectly natural. The World War was, to Japan alone among major belligerents, just one huge slice of cake. On the fighting side, Japan had scant trouble taking Germany's Chinese port of Kiao-chiao and Pacific islands, supplied some destroyers for troop convoys in the Mediterranean. Japan's total War dead: 300 men, mostly from illness. In money, Japan lent her Allies only 618,000.000 yen ($308,000.000). Britain repaid her share of this in 1919 to Japan out of monies borrowed from the U. S. The rest has since been largely repaid.

Japan's further activities in its Allies' behalf were chiefly two: 1) supplying textiles; 2) taking away their Eastern markets. From having an adverse trade balance in 1914 Japan suddenly found herself piling up the fantastic Wartime export surplus of 2-) billion yen ($1,246.000,000). Shipping receipts rose from 43,000,000 yen in 1914 to nearly 500,000.000 in 1918.

In Japan all this mushroomed into such a boom as even the U. S. cannot remember. With thousands of overnight millionaires, a self-congratulatory middle-class with money and power was suddenly thrown among the feudal remnants of pre-War Japan. Its members invested in stucco villas and saxophones, art works and sex novels, phonographs, geisha girls and the best Scotch whiskey and earned the contemptuous nickname of nankin (chess pawns promoted by crossing the board). The fantasy lasted until 1923 when a 52 billion yen earthquake jolted Japan and proved a forerunner of Depression. Even today most moneyed Japanese are regarded by the Army and patriotic zealots (see below) as tainted with profiteering, and Japanese morals have never recovered from the plunge they took during the World War. In 1933, the latest year for which statistics are complete, Japan scored an all-time high as exactly 24,-922.504 Japanese visited licensed prostitutes, the total male population of The Empire being only some 45,000,000 and unlicensed prostitution rampant.

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