A brief review of Japan's Asiatic policy was deemed advisable in connection with the discussion of the Japanese-California problem in order to see how Japan proposes to solve the question of human congestion at home and to meet her other urgent needs. The succeeding chapters will show what an unparalleled predicament Japan is facing. Circumscribed within a narrowly limited area, only 16 per cent. of which is fit for cultivation, and crowded with two thirds as many people as the entire population of the United States, with an annual increase at the rate of seven hundred thousand, Japan must perforce find a way whereby her people may live contentedly and develop robustly. Emigration and industrial expansion are manifestly the exits from the dilemma of slow strangulation. Emigration, however, is found a difficult exit, for the Japanese find themselves barred from the most favorably placed lands of the earth. Australia, Canada, and the United States, with their vast lands yet sparsely peopled, and their immense resources left unexploited, while welcoming every race and creed of Europe, shut their doors against the Japanese. Japan has acquiesced without much ado in the restrictive immigration measures adopted by America and by British colonies from the higher consideration of international comity. She saw that there lies at the bottom of these measures the delicate question of race difference, which requires a long period for its proper adjustment. To ignore this fact and force the race issue, however just in principle, would be to court disaster. It might result in the loss of friendship of her best associates in international affairs and of the vital interests involved in that friendship. At the same time, the "Gentlemen's Agreement" which Japan has entered into is evidence of her sincere solicitude to avoid embarrassment of her friends by the influx of an alien race. It is then but just that they reciprocate the courtesy by a sympathetic understanding of Japan's difficulties. Barred in the east and south, it is natural for Japan to strive to find room and employment for the surplus of her population in her neighboring lands--the sparsely peopled Manchuria, Mongolia, and East Siberia. Climate, cheap and efficient native labor, and the unfavorable economic conditions, however, preclude the immigration in large numbers of Japanese laborers into these regions. Only by building up large plants and inaugurating big agricultural enterprises, in coöperation with the natives, could Japan hope to transplant in these lands some portion of her skilled laborers and traders. During the stay of a decade and a half in South Manchuria, limited as it was until the conclusion of the China-Japan Treaties of 1915 to the Kwantung territory and the railway zones, Japan can count therein as colonists only a little over 150,000 of her sons and daughters.[3]