Abstract

Japan - Enemy or Friend?

If the military men are permitted indefinitely to plan arid plot and talk war with a particular nation in mind as the hypothetical "enemy," they may easily end by convincing the country that nation really is an "enemy," and the war which began as a hypothetical exercise in military strategy will become an inevitability. Americans have talked war with many countries, just as they are now working out possible stages of a war with Japan, executing naval maneuver in the Pacific, mapping every step in a war that need never come. Japan is already so Westernized that one forgets that a century ago she was a closed nation. It is easy for an Englishman or an American, with centuries of struggle for political democracy behind him, to belittle Japan's progress, forgetting that Japan has tried to catch up with the West in seventy-five years.