Evening Republican, Volume 22, Number 69, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 24 March 1919 — Japan’s Urban Population Rapidly Increasing as in Other Civilized Countries [ARTICLE]

Japan’s Urban Population Rapidly Increasing as in Other Civilized Countries

>, When we speak of Japan mainly as an agricultural country this gives an inadequate conception of the great strength of the urban population which is increasing in Japan as in other civilized countries, writes H.M. Hyndman in Asia Magazine. Apart from Tokyo, with its 2,000,000 inhabitants, and Osaka, with 1,400,000, there are five other cities which have together a population of 2,000,000, and there are in all 66 towns with a population 6f over 30,000 each. Moreover, the greater part of the larger cities and towns are collected close together in comparison with the total area of the| Japanese islands. Railways now connect the main industrial and agricultural centers, supplementing the admirable water communications by sea and canal. This concentration of industrialism and improvement in transport combine to give Japan a focus of material influence which can scarcely fail to increase her pressure upon China in time to come. A glance at the map shows how this long procession of islands from Sagh&lieirtu-FOf-mosa, lying of wharves along the coast of eastern Asia, with its outposts and inlets at Corea, on the Liaotung peninsula, at Kiao-Chaou and now at Fukien, gives Japan an enormous commercial as well as a strategical advantage in the competitive war of the near future, as compared with her rivals in Europe or in America. Never in history was so Remarkably favorable a geographical situation in the hands of one nation, controlled by men capable of taking full advantage of It and looking to the future of Asia as in some sort the heritage of the Japanese race.