Part 2 (2/2)

Lastly, these people are fired by the thought that a better day is coming. Their children are going to school, as the {28} older folk could not, and as a j.a.panese editor said to me this week:

”Every boy in the empire believes he may some day become Premier!”

What is the lesson of it all? Is it not just this: That we in America should feel highly favored in that we have such magnificent resources, and yet as sharply rebuked in that we are doing so little with them.

And most of all, is there not need for us to emulate the broad patriotism and the heroic spirit of self-sacrifice in which the Land of the Rising Sun, in spite of dire poverty, is providing ten-months schools for every boy and girl in all its borders? And, indeed, how otherwise can we make sure, before it is too late, that our American farm boys and girls will not be outdistanced in twentieth-century achievement by the children of a people our fathers regarded only as hopeless ”heathen?”

Tokyo, j.a.pan.

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IV

”WELFARE WORK” IN j.a.pANESE FACTORIES

The obvious truth is that the agricultural population of j.a.pan is too congested. It is a physical impossibility for a people to live in genuine comfort on such small pocket-handkerchief pieces of land, even though their standards do not call for shoes or tables, beds or chairs, Western houses or Western clothing. The almost exclusive use of hand labor, too, is uneconomic, seen from a large standpoint, and it would seem that in future farmers must combine, as they are already beginning to do, in order to purchase horses and horse-power tools to be used in common by a number of farmers. In the Tokyo Seed, Plant & Implement Company store the other day I saw a number of widely advertised American tools, and the manager told me the demand for them is increasing.

Thus with a smaller number of men required to produce the nation's food, a larger number may engage in manufacturing, and gradually the same principle of division of labor which has brought Western people to high standards of living, comfort, and earning power will produce much the same result in j.a.pan. Already wages, astonis.h.i.+ngly low as they are to-day to an ordinary American, have increased 40 per cent, in the last eight or ten years, this increase being partly due to the general cheapening of money the world over, and partly also to the increased efficiency of the average laborer.

Unfortunately, however, j.a.pan is not content to rely upon natural law for the development of its manufactures. Adam {30} Smith said in his ”Wealth of Nations” (published the year of our American Declaration of Independence), that the policy of all European nations since the downfall of the Roman Empire had been to help manufacturing, the industry of the towns, rather than agriculture, the industry of the country--a policy in which America later imitated Europe. j.a.pan now follows suit. For a long time the government has paid enormous subsidies to s.h.i.+pbuilding and manufacturing corporations, and now a high tariff has been enacted, which will still further increase the cost of living for the agricultural cla.s.ses, comprising, as they do, two thirds of the country's population.

”'With your cheap labor and all the colossal Oriental market right at your door,” I said to Editor s.h.i.+hotsu of the _Kok.u.min s.h.i.+mbun_ a day or two ago, ”what excuse is there for further dependence on the government? What can be the effect of your new tariff except to increase the burdens of the farmer for the benefit of the manufacturer?” And while defending the policy, he admitted that I had stated the practical effect of the policy. ”They are domestic consumption duties,” was his phrase; and Count Ok.u.ma, one of the empire's ablest men, once Minister of Agriculture, has also pointed out how injuriously the new law will affect the ma.s.ses of the people.

”Some would argue,” he said in a speech at Osaka, ”that the duties are paid by the country from which the goods are imported. That this is not the case is at once seen by the fact that an increase in duty means a rise in the price of an article in the country imposing the duty, and this to the actual consumer often amounts to more than the rise in the duty. In these cases consumers pay the duty themselves; and the customs revenues, so far from being a national a.s.set, are merely another form of taxation paid by the people.” And the ma.s.ses in j.a.pan, already staggering under the enormous burden of an average tax amounting to 32 per cent, of their earnings (on account of their wars with China and Russia and their enormous army and navy expenditure), are ill-prepared to stand further {31} taxation for the benefit of special interests. On the whole, there seems to have been much truth in what a recent authority said on this subject:

”The j.a.panese manufacturers are concerned only to make monopoly profits out of the consumer. If they can do that, they will not worry about foreign markets, from which, in fact, their policy is bound more and more to exclude them.”

In any case, manufacturing in j.a.pan is bound to increase, but it ought not to increase through unjust oppression of agriculture or at the expense of the physical stamina of the race. This fact is now winning recognition not only from the nation at large, but from public-spirited manufacturers as well.

Some very notable evidence upon this point came to me Wednesday when influential friends secured special permission, not often granted to strangers, for me to visit the great Kanegafuchi Cotton Spinning Company's plant near Tokyo--the great surprise being not that I succeeded in getting permission to visit this famous factory, though that was partly surprising, but in what I saw on the visit.

Much has been said and written as to the utterly deplorable condition of j.a.panese factory workers, and I was quite prepared for sights that would outrage my feelings of humanity. Imagine my surprise, therefore, when I found the manager making a hobby of ”welfare work” for his operatives and with a system of such work modelled after the Krupp system in Germany, the best in the world! And as the Kanegafuchi Company has seventeen factories in all, representing several cities and aggregating over 300,000 spindles, being one of the most famous industries of j.a.pan, it will be seen that its example is by no means without significance.

The Kanegafuchi's Tokyo factories alone employ 3500 operatives, and they are cleaner, I should say, than most of our stores and offices.

The same thing is true of their great hospital and boarding-house, and the dining-room is also {32} surprisingly clean and well kept. Of the welfare work proper a whole article could be written. Each operative pays 3 per cent, of his or her wages (most operatives are women) into a common insurance and pension fund, and the company, out of its earnings, pays into the fund an equal amount. From this a pension is given the family of any employee who dies, while if an operative gets sick or is injured, a committee, a.s.sisted by Director Fuji, allows a suitable pension until recovery. In the case, however, of long-standing disease or disability, help is given, after ten years, from still another fund. This employees' pension fund now amounts to $143,000, while other funds given partly or wholly by the company include $30,000 for operatives' sanitary fund, $112,000 in a fund ”for promoting operatives' welfare,” and $15,000 for erecting an operatives' sanatorium. The company also has a savings department, paying 10 per cent, on long-time deposits made by employees. There is an excellent theatre and dance hall at the Tokyo plant, and I suppose at the other branches also, and five physicians are regularly employed to look after the health of operatives.

While the hours of labor in j.a.pan generally are inexcusably long and, as a rule, only two rest days a month are allowed, the Kanegafuchi Company observes the Biblical seventh-day rest with profitable results. The work hours are long yet, it is true, ten hours having been the rule up to October 1, and now nine and one half hours. The ten hours this summer embraced the time from 6 to 6, with a half hour's rest from 9 to 9:30, one hour from 11:30 to 12:30, and another half hour from 3 to 3:30; a system of halfway rests not common in America, I believe.

Conditions at Kanegafuchi, of course, are not ideal, nor would I hold them up as a general model for American mills. Rather should America ask: ”If j.a.pan in a primitive stage of industrial evolution is doing so much, how much more ought we to do?” More noteworthy still is the fact that the sentiment of the country is loudly and insistently demanding a law {33} to stop the evils of child labor and night work for women, which, on the whole, are undoubtedly bad--very bad. The Kanegafuchi welfare work is exceptional, but it is in line with the new spirit of the people.

That j.a.pan with its factory system not yet extensive, its people used to a struggle for existence tenfold harder than ours, and with a population comprising only the wealthy or capitalist cla.s.s--that under such conditions, these Buddhist j.a.panese should still make effective demand for adequate factory labor legislation is enough to put to shame many a Christian state in which our voters still permit conditions that reproach our boasted chivalry and humanity. Perhaps all the changes needed cannot be made at once without injury to manufacturing interests, but in that case the law should at least require a gradual and steady approach to model conditions--a distinct step forward each six months until at the end of three years, or five years at longest, every state should have a law as good as that of Ma.s.sachusetts.

Tokyo, j.a.pan.

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V

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