JAPAN FOLLOWED WEST BY DRUG-PEDDLING IN CHINA

A newly discovered document on wartime Japan's Shanghai-based opium
dealer shows the Tokyo government was deeply engaged in the trade to
make money off Chinese addicts.

But Japan was not the only state involved in drug-trafficking. It was
just a latecomer.

The colonial governments of Britain, Portugal, Holland and France had
all heavily depended on opium-related revenues from areas of Asia
under their control in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

According to Harumi Goto, an associate professor at Chiba University,
opium revenues accounted for 10 percent to 50 percent of the fiscal
budgets of many colonial governments in Asia, including the British
rulers of India, Hong Kong and Singapore, the Portuguese ruling
Macau, the Dutch East Indies and French Indochina.

The British empire grew poppies and produced opium in India,
exporting more than 80 percent to China, a trade that resulted in the
Opium War in 1840 and semicolonial rule of the Qing Dynasty.

But those Western powers, most notably Britain, started to curtail
their opium trade in their colonies in the early 1900s amid mounting
criticism that narcotics were destroying the lives of millions of Chinese.

Britain stopped shipping opium from India to China in 1913.

The Western powers and Japan then signed three separate international
conventions, in 1912, 1925 and 1931, that obliged them to bring the
opium business under state control and gradually suppress it.

But Japan, which did not rein in the rampant opium and other
narcotics dealings pursued by Japanese merchants in northeastern
China, became a major target of international criticism at the League
of Nations after the mid-1920s, replacing Britain.

"Japan was an imperial state that arrived late," said Shinichi Sano,
a writer familiar with Japan's opium business in Manchukuo and Shanghai.

Records show that opium revenues accounted for less than 6 percent of
the fiscal budgets of Japan's puppet governments of Manchukuo and
Nanjing around 1940, but historians suspect more funds may have been
secretly channeled to the military.

In 1942, opium revenues accounted for 28 percent of the initial
budget of Japan's puppet regime set up in Inner Mongolia in 1937,
according to internal documents of the Mongolian government
discovered by historian Keiichi Eguchi in 1982.

The postwar International Military Tribunal for the Far East judged
that Japan violated the three antiopium treaties by promoting the
drug in China to increase revenues for its military and puppet governments.

"In all areas occupied by the Japanese, the use of opium and
narcotics increased steadily from the time of such occupation until
surrender," the judgment read.