OCR Text |
Show Japan's Babies Every year makes it increasingly plain that the basic problem in Japan Ja-pan is not militarism, or industrialism, industrial-ism, or Westernization, but babies. More than two million babies were born to the sixty-six million Japanese Japan-ese last year, giving the nation a net increase of more than a million. It is the necessity of finding food and work for its growing population which drives Japanese leaders along their present path of conquest. Back in 1871, when the first of the modern census reports were made, the population of the islands was thirty-three million. It has been around thirty million at least since 1721. But with the coming of Western West-ern ideas and Occidental ways, opportunities op-portunities to live in Japan grew wider, and the population swelled to meet it. Now a new saturation point has been reached, and social customs are beginning to change to conform. The population which doubled within sixty years will in another decade or two reach a new level of stability at around eighty or ninety million, experts ex-perts say. But in the meantime the struggle for survival grows keener every year, and the pressure to develop de-velop trade abroad in Manchuria, in China, in the Philippines, in South America, beoomes more and more insistent. It is the babies who are expansionists in Japan, really. Detroit Free Press. 3 |