Emil Lederer, Review of Japan’s Feet of Clay, by Freda Utley (1937)

Emil Lederer’s signed journal book review examines the relationship between factual accuracy, economic explanation, and cultural understanding. He credits Freda Utley’s account of contemporary Japan with exceptional documentary breadth and accepts its evidence of poverty and exploitation. His objection is that accurate facts do not necessarily produce an adequate interpretation of a society in crisis:

This book, based on tremendous material and giving more information than any other volume on present conditions in Japan, contains no factual statement that is not correct and still offers a distorted picture, painted in the colors of inimical criticism, lacking entirely that sympathetic understanding of cultural values without which it is impossible to give an "objective" representation of such a complex problem as a people in crisis.

The tension between correctness and distortion governs the review. Lederer presents Utley’s central thesis as an account of feudal survivals, industrial monopoly, and aggressive militarism sustaining peasant subjection and wage slavery. Scarce raw materials, taxation, and insufficient capital leave working people barely able to subsist, while industrial millionaires, landlords, and the army extract their resources. He does not dispute the income figures, which derive from official Japanese sources. Instead, he concentrates his criticism on two areas: agricultural economics and Japan’s spiritual inheritance. A concluding discussion tests Utley’s geopolitical pessimism against the possibility of peaceful economic development.

The agricultural argument distinguishes low income per worker from inefficient production per acre. Utley attributes meagre returns to inadequate fertilizer and capital, suggesting that investment in reclamation and transport could expand fertile acreage. Lederer counters that reclamation between 1890 and 1930 probably already brought considerable submarginal land into use. Population density and the limits of cultivable land cannot simply be explained away as consequences of exploitation.

His treatment of international comparisons makes this objection concrete. Higher rice yields in Italy and Spain are not decisive evidence of Japanese inefficiency: those countries cultivate much smaller rice-growing areas, potentially restricted to unusually fertile, well-irrigated land. Japan’s much larger cultivated area includes a different range of conditions, while Utley’s own figures show Japanese yields substantially exceeding those of Siam and the Dutch Indies. Lederer thus questions the comparability of the evidence rather than its numerical accuracy.

Nor does he assume that greater agricultural efficiency would resolve rural distress. Larger farms and the abandonment of marginal land might improve economic performance while creating a surplus agricultural population. Abolishing rents and reducing land taxes could raise farmers’ incomes without expanding the food supply:

In other words, though changing the distribution of national income, it would hardly be likely to increase the national dividend.

This distinction separates the justice of redistribution from the productive effects attributed to it. Lederer allows that agriculture may fall short of an optimum, but resists treating institutional reform as a sufficient answer to demographic and resource constraints. His criticism concerns the consequences of reform, not the reality of deprivation.

The review then moves from economic comparison to the standards by which an unfamiliar society is judged:

The comparison with western institutions and standards is indispensable for understanding Japan, if one is a westerner, but this comparison should not lead to a wholesale judgment of Japan on the basis of our concepts.

Lederer acknowledges that a democratic Japan would make the international situation less threatening. Nevertheless, he argues that the persistence of feudal institutions, military authority, and powerful wealthy families cannot be understood solely as impositions upon an unwilling population. Nationalist mobilization, the imperial ambitions shared by political moderates, and the participation of farmers and urban middle classes indicate a broader attachment to the imperial order. Even socially radical movements, he suggests, may oppose the regime without rejecting imperialism, although military defeat could provoke revolt.

His core conceptual move is to treat myth and tradition as active sources of political allegiance, rather than as superficial coverings for economic domination:

Thus, it seems to me, the author underestimates the strength and the psychological influence of myth and tradition on the average Japanese mind, and does not see that a destruction of this old world—outdated and flimsy as it may look to western eyes—would not westernize Japan but would reduce it, culturally, to a shambles.

This is a claim about the costs of cultural rupture, not a demonstration that existing institutions are economically sound. Lederer also proposes, tentatively, that aggression may express a desperate defense of an obsolete position rather than confidence in durable strength.

The conclusion challenges Utley’s suggestion that control of northern China’s resources might consolidate Japanese power. Lederer argues that conquest would leave Japan vulnerable in a major war against first-rate powers, while an industrialized China would develop a national movement resistant to foreign domination. Against that prospect, he sets a conditional alternative:

On the other hand there is, in the abstract, no reason why Japan, even with the handicaps of scanty natural resources and a large population, should not build up, under a peaceful regime which would abandon plans for conquest, an industrial system that could with increasing efficiency gradually improve the economic situation and integrate Japan economically with China and Siberia, which are her "natural" complements for a prosperous Far East.

The review’s relevance lies in its separation of factual evidence from causal interpretation, redistribution from increased production, and regional economic integration from imperial conquest. Its constructive conclusion remains explicitly abstract: peaceful development is a possibility, not a prediction.