Bad Business

Japan's great silk business is in a very bad way. More than one-third of Japan's farming families (6,000,000 people) make part of their living by raising mulberry trees, feeding the leaves to silkworms, selling the cocoons that the worms spin out of their lower jaws. Several hundred thousand little Japanese girls earn their living and their marriage dowries in the filatures where the silken cocoons are un reeled. Until last summer the U.S. bought 90% of Japan's raw silk exports, amounting in 1940 to $150,311,000. Then the freezing of Japanese credits in the U.S. virtually stopped the trade.

Last week Japan offered subsidies of $20 an acre for the conversion of mulberry groves into cereal patches. The Government wants a 20% shift into wheat, beans and other vegetables which, like mulberry trees, can be grown on Japan's hilly, upland plots. (Rice, the Japanese staple, must be grown under water, takes up most of the Empire's flat, lowland acreage.) Cereals, which hungry Japanese could eat, were obviously better than silk which Japan could not sell.

Japan also plans to reduce the number of reeling basins in the silk filatures, to limit the year's output of reeled silk to 450,000 bales as against last year's 550,000. Tens of thousands of reeling girls will have to find other ways to keep bodies & souls together and marriages in view.

This is not the first time that silk has seriously troubled Japan. Between 1930 and 1934 U.S. depression and the world onset of rayon (which had most of silk's qualities except elasticity) forced raw-silk prices down from $7 to $1.30 a pound. Japan found partial solutions to the problem. She went off gold, restricted silk production and greatly increased her small domestic silk consumption. She built up her own rayon industry until it approached her silk business, became the world's No. 1 rayon producer.

In the fall of 1939 Japanese silk suffered another blow when Du Pont introduced Nylon, whose elasticity threatened silk's enduring hold on the U.S. hosiery trade. Last summer, in spite of technology and economics. Japan's silk trade with the U.S. was still lively. Then it bumped smack into U.S. foreign policy. The silk crisis, like every other great factor in Japanese life, fell hard into the khaki laps of Japan's Army statesmen.

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