Japan in the Pacific

Pacific Press Publishing Association · Mountain View, California · Nov 3, 1909

FromSigns of the Times, Vol. 36, No. 43.

Japan in the Pacific

We have summarized on another page some of the chief points of three articles by General Homer Lea in Harper’s Weekly. In the fourth article he declares that Japan has had in mind for years the seizure of the Hawaiian Islands. To quote:

“Without hurry, calmly, with the inexorable certitude of a glacier, Japan has moved toward this predetermined point. At the conclusion of the Russian War her plans for taking the possession of these islands assumed a positive phase.”

First was her protest against the establishment of an American Republic on the overthrow of the Hawaiian monarchy. Immediately after that began her population of the Hawaiian Islands, so that the Japanese population increased in Hawaii from 116 in 1884 to 22,329 in 1896; and from 1896 to 1900 the Japanese population increased from the latter figure to 61,115, the total population of the Hawaiian Islands in the latter year, being 154,001. From 1900 to 1908, 65,708 more went to the islands, while 42,313 of military unfitness were recalled. In other words, General Lea avers, they have been supplanted, so that “in these islands at the present time the number of Japanese who have completed their active term of service in the imperial armies, a part of whom are veterans of the Russian War, exceeds the entire standing army of the United States. Within twenty-four hours after declaration of war, the solitary American battalion that stands guard over these islands—12 officers and 209 men—will disappear,” while the seizure of the Philippines, he contends, would be less of a military undertaking than that of the conquest of Cuba by the United States. All this, he believes, could have been prevented if America had given consideration to the question soon enough; but one can not read his article without feeling that he questions the ability of America to retain a dominant position in the Pacific at any time in the future. It goes without saying that what he says will be ridiculed and laughed at by Americans, but this is just what he calls “the ardor of ignorance.” Certain it is that all the nations of earth are preparing for the great battle of Armageddon.