FOREWORD THIS is a story of what Manchuria has and what she is making of it,-a story of her crops, her mines and of her forest wealth. It is also a story of what all these mean to Nippon. It is not an Economic History of Manchuria: it tries to have as little as possible to do with a mere record of dead facts. The book's aspirations are rather immodest, in fact—even heroic. It addresses itself to the task of stopping America to see Manchuria as she is a big enough job even for the prophet who once commanded the sun to stand still. With the general run of our American Readers, Manchuria is a name pasted on that jumping-off edge of the world somewhere in the outer darkness of their school geography-a mere label, some 10,000 miles below their mental horizon. Knowing that, and without apology, without ceremony, this book essays to make Manchuria as intimate to our American friends as a Philadelphia-made locomotive or Milwaukee steam shovels, which, indeed, happen to be writing the present-day history of Manchurian industry out there. Funshun and Anshan are quite as American as 576700 Pittsburgh or a coal field of Illinois in their methods and mechanical equipments. This is quite as true as that a few steps from these coal mines and steel plants one will find the Chou Dynasty (born 1122 B.C.) a reality, alive and kicking. For in Manchuria the Twentieth Century walks arm in arm with the days of Noah. Along the side of the Through Express of the South Manchuria Railway-made up of the same American Pullman sleepers as the "Broadway Limited"-creaks a wheelbarrow which has not lost a single one of the classic lines, old when Confucius was a baby. All of which means that Industrial Manchuria is, this very day, clearing in a single jump more than two thousand years. It is a huge industrial laboratory in which the old and the new, the oriental and the occidental experiences and experiments, are being tested out in a feverish rush. It is not a melting pot of races but a crucible of economic theories. There is another thing of interest about Manchuria: The question of WAR or PEACE for Japan will be settled-not in Japan nor on the Pacific, as some of the navy people on both shores of that ocean dearly love to believe. But in Manchuria. The question of FOOD for Japan is being settled there to a considerable extent. And the question of FOOD is one of the aliases of the question of WAR or PEACE. This must be of some interest to the people of America, where every time money is needed for a warship the propagandists feel it a moral duty to drag forth the overworked ghost of a Japanese menace. In the past Japan has known Manchuria as a bat |