Part 3 (2/2)
It must also be remembered that the wages of labor in j.a.pan are steadily increasing and will continue to increase. More significant than the fact of the low cost per day, to which I have already given attention, is the fact that these wages represent an average increase per trade of 40 per cent, above the wages eight years previous. The new 1910 ”Financial and Economic Annual” shows the rate of wages of forty-six cla.s.ses of labor for a period of eight years. For not one line of labor is a decrease of wages shown, and for only two an increase of less than 30 per cent.; sixteen show increases between 30 and 40 per cent., seventeen between 40 and 50 per cent., eight from 50 to 60 per cent., three from 60 to 70 per cent., while significantly enough the greatest increase, 81 per cent., is for female servants, a fact largely due to factory compet.i.tion. In Osaka the British vice-consul gave me the figures for the latest three-year period for which figures have been published, indicating in these thirty-six months a 30 per cent. gain in the wages of men in the factories and a 25 per cent, gain in the wages of women.
Of no small significance in any study of j.a.panese industry must also be the fact that there are in j.a.pan proper a full half million fewer women than men (1910 figures: men, 25,639,581; women, 25,112,338)--a condition the reverse of that obtaining in almost every other country.
Now the young j.a.panese are a very home-loving folk, and even if they were not, almost all s.h.i.+nto parents, realizing the paramount importance of having descendants to wors.h.i.+p their spirits, favor and arrange early marriages for their sons. And what with this compet.i.tion for {43} wives, the undiminished demand for female servants, and a half million fewer women than men to draw from, the outlook for any great expansion of manufacturing based on woman labor is not very bright. Moreover, with Mrs. Housekeeper increasing her frantic bids for servants 81 per cent, in eight years, and still mourning that they are not to be had, it is plain that the manufacturer has serious compet.i.tion from this quarter, to say nothing of the further fact that the j.a.panese girls are for the first time becoming well educated and are therefore likely to be in steadily increasing demand as office-workers. Upon this general subject the head of one of Osaka's leading factories said to me: ”I am now employing 2500 women, but if I wished to enlarge my mill at once and employ 5000, it would be impossible for me to get the labor, though I might increase to this figure by adding a few hundred each year for several years.”
Unquestionably, too, shorter hours, less night work, weekly holidays, and better sanitary conditions must be adopted by most manufacturers if they are to continue to get labor. The Kobe _Chronicle_ quotes Mr.
Kudota, of the Sanitary Bureau, as saying that ”most of the women workers are compelled to leave the factories on account of their const.i.tutions being wrecked” after two or three years of night work, consumption numbering its victims among them by the thousands. Either the mills must give better food and lodging than they now provide or else they must pay higher wages directly which will enable the laborers to make better provision for themselves.
Yet another reason why wages must continue to advance is the steady increase in cost of living, due partly to the higher standard developed through education and contact with Western civilization, but perhaps even more largely to the fearful burden of taxation under which the people are staggering. A usual estimate of the tax rate is 30 per cent. of one's income, while Mr. Wakatsuki, late j.a.panese Financial Commissioner to London, is quoted as authority for the statement {44} that the people now pay in direct and indirect taxes, 35 per cent, of their incomes. And I doubt whether even this estimate includes the increased amounts that citizens are forced to pay for salt and tobacco as a result of the government monopoly in these products, or the greatly increased prices of sugar resulting from the government's paternalistic efforts to guarantee prosperity to sugar manufacturers in Formosa.
IV
Higher still, and higher far than anything the nation has ever yet known, must go the cost of living under the new tariff law. From a British textile representative I learned the other day that a grade of English woollens largely used by the j.a.panese for underwear will cost over one third more under the new tariff, while the increased duty on certain other lines of goods is indicated by the table herewith:
PERCENTAGE OF DUTY TO COST OF ARTICLE
Old Tariff New Tariff
Printed goods 3 22
White lawns 10 47
s.h.i.+rtings 10 39
Cotton Italians 3 35
Poplins 8 19
Brocades 10 22
Neither a nation nor an individual can lift itself by its bootstraps.
The majority of the thoughtful people in the empire seem to me to realize even now that through the new tariff j.a.panese industry, as a whole, is likely to lose much more by lessened ability to compete in foreign markets than it will gain by shackled compet.i.tion in the home markets. Fa.r.s.eeing old Count Ok.u.ma, once Premier, and one of the empire's Elder Statesmen, seemed to realize this more fully than any other man I have seen. ”Within two or three years from the time the new law goes into force,” he declared, ”I am {45} confident that its injurious effects will be so apparent that the people will force its repeal. With our heavy taxes the margin of wages left for comfort is already small, and with the cost of living further increased by the new tariff, wages must inevitably advance. This will increase the cost of our manufactured products, now exported mostly to China, India, and other countries requiring cheap or low-grade goods, and where we must face the compet.i.tion of the foremost industrial nations of the world.
As our cost of production increases, our compet.i.tion with Europe will become steadily more difficult and a decrease in our exports will surely follow. It is folly for one small island to try to produce everything it needs. The tariff on iron, for example, can only hamper every new industry by increasing the cost of machinery, and must especially hinder navigation and s.h.i.+pbuilding, in which we have made such progress.” Not a few of the country's foremost vernacular dailies are as outspoken as Count Ok.u.ma on this point, and the Kobe _Chronicle_ declares that, with diminished exports to j.a.pan, ”British manufacturers will find compensation in the lessened ability of the j.a.panese to compete in China; and j.a.pan will find that she has raised prices against herself and damaged her own efficiency.”
That such will be the net result of j.a.pan's new policy seems to me to admit of no question. Unfortunately, certain special lines of British and American manufacture may suffer, but, on the whole, what the white man's trade loses in j.a.pan will be recompensed for in China and India.
Even after j.a.pan's adoption of the moderately protective tariff of 1899 her export of yarns to China--in the much discussed ”market right at her doors”--dropped from a product of 340,000 bales to a recent average of 250,000 bales. From 1899 to 1908, according to the latest published government figures, the number of employees in j.a.panese cotton factories increased only 240--one third of 1 per cent.--or from 73,985 to 74,225, to be exact, while I have already alluded to the figures showing the {46} comparative English and j.a.panese imports of raw cotton from 1890 to 1909 as furnished me by Mr. Robert Young, of Kobe, j.a.pan in this period going from $30,000,000 to $54,000,000, or 77 per cent., while England's advance was from $135,000,000 to $300,000,000, or 122 per cent. The increase in England's case, of course, was largely, and in j.a.pan's case almost wholly, due to the increased price of the cotton itself, but the figures are none the less useful for the purposes of comparison.
In the frequent attempts of the j.a.panese Government to stimulate special industries by subsidies and special privileges there is, it seems to me, equally as little danger to the trade of Europe and America in general (though here, too, special industries may suffer now and then), because j.a.pan is in this way simply handicapping herself for effective industrial growth. Just at this writing we have an ill.u.s.tration in the case of the Formosan sugar subsidy which seems to have developed into a veritable Frankenstein; or, to use a homelier figure, the government seems to be in the position of the man who had the bear by the tail, with equal danger in holding on or letting go.
Already, as a result of the system of subsidies, bounties and special privileges, individual initiative has been discouraged, a dangerous and corrupting alliance of government with business developed, public morals debased (as was strikingly brought out in the Dai Nippon sugar scandal), and the people, as Mr. Sasano, of the Foreign Department, complains, now ”rely on the help of the government on all occasions.”
On the same point the Tokyo _Keizai_ declares that ”the habit of looking to the government for a.s.sistance in all and everything, oblivious of independent enterprise . . . has now grown to the chronic stage, and unless it is cured the health and vitality of the nation will ultimately be sapped and undermined.”
As for increasing complaints of ”low commercial morality” brought against j.a.panese merchants, that is not a matter of concern in this discussion, except in so far as it may prove a form of j.a.panese commercial suicide. But to one who holds {47} the view, as I do, that the community of nations is enriched by every worthy industrial and moral advance on the part of any nation, it is gratifying to find the general alarm over the present undoubtedly serious conditions, and it is to be hoped that the efforts of the authorities will result in an early change to better methods.
V
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