CO129-592-2 Reports on current situation- medical work 3-3-1946 - 12-5-1947 — Page 108

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and over a number of small, mostly uninhabited islets near Hong Kong.

Although the surface area of the Colony and Leased Territories is rather more than twice that of the Isle of Wight, the area of Hong Kong island itself (which held nearly a million residents and refugees at the outset of the Second World War) is about a fifth of the size of the Isle of Wight.

A new era dawned in the Far East in the middle of the nineteenth century. Japan was rudely awakened by one after another of the fleets of certain of the then great powers. She was compelled to open up her territory to overseas trade.

Stimulated by contacts with western civilization, Japan threw off her mediaeval trappings. She abolished the regime of the bold, bad barons under the Shogunate, replacing it eventually by a partially representative two-chamber government consisting of a diet and house of peers, with a cabinet responsible to the imperor. Emperor Meiji encouraged his subjects to absorb western ideas and to imitate western methods.

Changes that had been effected by a process of gradual evolution in western nations, came about in a few decades In the case of Japan. what wonder, then, that the Japanese suffered from acute mental indigestion, having swallowed the good with the not-so-good without due time for mastication!

With the example of the western powers before them, both in regard to the carving up of Africa, and, later, the forcing upon China of territorial concessions, extra-territoriality and the like, Japan quickly followed suit.

First Formosa was annexed from China towards the end of the last century. Later, after the victory over Ru sia in 1905, she obtained a strip of territory along the outh_Manchurian Railway and the southern half of the island of Sakhalin. In 1910, she annexed Korea.

These conquests merely whetted her appetite.

Students of Far Eastern policy who read translations of the Tanaka Memorial in 1930 clearly saw in it "the writing on the wall". The following year, on a quite inadequate pretext, the Japanese invaded Manchuria.

Had the then Foreign Minister of Great Britain accorded this country's support to Mr. Stimson_representing the United States of America, it is possible that Far Eastern history might have been written without having to record the useless slaughter of millions of men, women and children and the destruction of countless homes.

Profiting once again by the regrettable disunity amongst the people of China and not yet satisfied with the degree of control she had acquired over Chinese trade, Japan staged the now historic incident of the Marco Polo Bridge in July, 1937, and invaded the Northern Provinces of China.

The lamentable failure of the League of Nations to prevent the rape of thiopia or to influence the course of events in Spain and, afterwards in Central Europe, no doubt lent added encouragement to the Young Military Party in Japan, who had, got the bit between their teeth, as the saying goes.

Perhaps it might be as well to remember that this country the United States and Holland were busily engaged at that period in helping Japan to build up a huge reserve of oil and scran, to be used ultimately in her spectacular advance throu-h the southern regions to the very borders of India and Australia.