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By Root 5749 0

melancholy and, though comatose, was still awake. For someone like himself, Walter was explaining, whose job it was to run a merchant business, a war with Japan was not a vague possibility for the future, it had already been in progress for some time. In this war, which was being fought invisibly and in silence by means of quotas, price-cutting and a stealthy invasion of traditional markets, Blackett and Webb had found itself not only in the front line but fighting for its life. Since the end of the Great War there had been a steady encirclement of British commerce in the Far East. By 1934 Japanese assaults on British textile markets had caused Westminister to introduce import quotas on cotton and rayon goods destined for Malaya. No wonder Walter and other Singapore merchants had protested to the Colonial Office that their mercantile interests were being sacrificed for no better reason than the inability of Lancashire to survive intensive competition from Japan. Walter paused and the faint grinding of his teeth became audible in the silence. He had reminded himself of the fact that Solomon Langfield, a big importer of Lancashire cotton, had been in favour of the quotas. That unprincipled blackguard! The bristles on his spine stirred beneath his Lancashire cotton shirt.

Walter surveyed his family and guests sullenly, as if somehow they had been responsible for this lamentable state of affairs. They gazed back, as if hypnotized. Only Monty, who had doubtless heard all this before, twiddled his fork and smothered a yawn.

‘What I would like to know is this: can one really blame the Japanese?’ enquired Walter. His guests exchanged puzzled glances, as if to say: ‘Of course one can blame the Japanese. Why ever not?’

‘After all, they too are fighting for their lives. They depended so heavily for their survival on silk and cotton that, naturally, they would do whatever they had to in order to sell them. In 1933 the average Japanese price for textiles was ten cents a yard while Lancashire’s was eighteen or nineteen cents, almost twice the price! Mind you, the Japs got up to every trick in the book to evade the quotas. For example, since cotton piece-goods were not included in the quotas in no time pillow-cases big enough to put a house in began to arrive here in Singapore … pyjamas to fit elephants … shirts that twenty people could have got into … and all designed to be swiftly unstitched and used by our local manufacturers instead of the Lancashire cotton they were supposed to be using. Frankly, I admire their ingenuity. Can you blame them?’

‘Business is all very well, Mr Blackett,’ said the General rather brusquely. ‘But you surely do not mean to condone the way they grabbed Manchuria and invaded China. Your own firm’s business must have suffered as a result of the way the Japs have been closing the Open Door.’

Walter nodded and smiled. ‘That’s true. We have suffered. But look at it from the Japanese point of view. Can you blame them for extending their influence into Manchuria and China? After all, the demands they have been making since 1915 … for the lease of Port Arthur and Dairen, for the South Manchuria and Antung-Mukden Railways and for the employment of Japanese capital in Manchuria and Eastern Inner Mongolia, what do they remind you of?’ Walter, smiling now, gazed at his baffled guests. ‘I can tell you what they remind me of! They are an excellent imitation of the sort of economic imperialism through demands for special privileges which Britain herself has been making in Asia since … well, since this young man’s father started our business in the 1880s.’

‘But was that a reason for Japan to invade China?’ the General wanted to know.

Walter shook his head. ‘As a businessman I understand very well why the Japanese had to invade China in 1937. China, from the point of view of trade and investment, was chaotic. No reasonably hard-boiled businessman looking at Nationalist China would have seen much to give him confidence. The Kuomintang wanted to put an end to foreigners’ privileges. They wanted to see the foreign concession