Tottering Yen

Something Japanese militarists would rather not think about was held up to their noses last week: the provisional budget for 1933-34. Squint as they might, the Cabinet of white-haired Premier Viscount Saito could not get away from two facts: Japan is faced with the biggest budget and the biggest deficit in her history. Expressed in yen at par the new budget is to balance at $1.100,000,000--a figure staggering in small Japan--with an expected deficit of $450,000,000.*

Of her towering budgeted expenditures Japan's Army & Navy will absorb nearly half. From Manchuria, excuse for these expenditures, there has come glory but no revenue. Facing the fact of national incapacity to pay, Finance Minister Takahashi prepared to make up his staggering deficit by issuing bonds. He hoped that Japanese tycoons who profit from exploitation of Manchukuo will buy them.

In Japan, it is tantamount to treason to criticize the fighting services. Jiji Shimpo ventured to say :

"The people have adopted an attitude of resignation to military expenditures. We advise the army not to be satisfied with compelled recognition of its estimates but to invite discussion and offer explanations."

Civilian Tokyo did indeed seethe with furtive protest against the Cabinet. Prominent members of the Diet and the

House of Peers said privately that the government must fall. But how? There was no sign that the Army & Navy, which in Japan are responsible to the Emperor alone, and can hamstring the politicians, had wavered. The Army was last week engaged in annual "Grand Maneuvers." Suddenly at night a typhoon burst upon Tokyo, plunged the Capital into darkness as power lines were torn down, silenced telephones and telegraphs, engulfed 30,000 flimsy houses. Japan must expand, say her sabre-rattlers, because of her "population pressure." This is exerted by a population roughly half as great as that of the entire U. S. cooped up on islands of less total area than California and with only half that State's cultivated area. Dainty little Baroness Shidzue Ishimoto thinks she has the answer and is proud to be called "the Margaret Sanger of Japan." In 1922 the Baroness brought Birth-Controller Sanger to Japan, braved storms of opposition and has established a remarkable number of birth control clinics throughout the Empire (Tokyo has some 60 small commercial clinics).'

Last week the petite Baroness was in Manhattan to study best U. S. birth control methods. Gowned in a kimono of blue silk wound with an elaborate. flowered obi (sash) the Baroness said: "Birth control alone will not solve Japan's problems. They will not be met until the economic system is changed. . . . Birth control will lighten the burden of ignorance and distress."

Sadly the Baroness Ishimoto admitted that birth control may have come to Japan "100 years too late."

* At par there are roughly two yen to the dollar. Today, with Japan off the gold standard, there are roughly five to the dollar. But this decline in the tottering yen, makes it no easier for Japanese taxpayers to pay. For them the burden is as heavy as though the yen were still at par.

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