FACTORY GIRLS AND WOMEN
As already stated, many girls prefer factory work to that of domestic
service, either in private families or in hotels. From ancient times
there have been small industrial enterprises, employing each a few hands
in various lines of work, such as the reeling and spinning of silk and
cotton thread and the weaving of cloth; but since the war with China
there have arisen enormous factories, after the fashion of Western
lands, which have introduced great changes in the industrial situation
and in the condition of the working classes.
The government report for 1912 shows that there were 863,447 individuals
employed in 15,119 factories having ten or more hands each. Of these,
348,230 were men and 515,217 were girls and women. In addition it
reports 427,636 weaving houses, having 733,039 looms and employing
697,698 operators. No statement is made as to the proportion of the
sexes. Remembering that the government statistics take no account of
industrial enterprises employing less than ten hands, it is probably
safe to estimate the number of women employed in exclusively
non-domestic occupations at not less than a million.
We are not concerned however with the industries themselves, but rather
with the conditions under which the operatives work and the effect of
the work on their lives and characters. To begin with the more pleasant
side of the question, there are factories which come well up toward the
ideal. The terms of employment, the wages paid, the provisions for ill
health, for accident, for long service and old age; the rooms for
sleeping, eating, and recreation; the bathing establishments; the
education given to those who need it; the public lectures and religious
and ethical instruction given at fixed times in the public halls of the
factories, Buddhist and Christian teachers being impartially invited;
the provisions for marriage of employees and arrangements that each
couple have a separate suite of rooms, and that the infants are cared
for while the mother is in the mill; these and other provisions show
that the best in Japan is up to a high level of excellence. Such is the
policy of the Kanegafuchi Company, which owns a score of mills in
different parts of Japan, and whose success moreover is so great that it
is now buying up less successful competitors.
For several years this company has set aside annually 20,000 yen
($10,000) for its relief and pension fund for operatives. In June, 1913,
in addition to its regular appropriation, it voted an extra $50,000 for
a "welfare promotion fund."
The president of the Fuji Cotton Spinning Company was given in 1913 a
retiring grant of $50,000, inasmuch as the great success of this company
had been due to his skill and energy. He however presented the entire
amount to the "employers' relief fund, and it was decided to make this
gift the nucleus of a permanent endowment fund."
[Illustration: AT WORK IN A SILK FACTORY]
There is a silk factory in Ayabe, the Gunze Seishi Kwaisha, whose record
is the most wonderful of all. It is managed by a Christian, who runs it
entirely with a view to the benefit of the workers and the district. No
girls of that district go elsewhere for work. Once enrolled as members
of the working force they are regularly instructed, both in general
education and in their particular duties; they earn good wages, keep
good health, receive Christian instruction, have their regular rest
days, remain the full number of years, help support the family and earn
enough besides to set themselves up in married life, and are now
beginning to send their daughters to the same factory. This Christian
factory is Christianizing the district. The rising moral and religious
life is transforming even the agricultural and other interests of the
region. So high is the grade of silk thread produced, and so uniform
and reliable is the quality, that it alone of all the factories in Japan
is able to export its product direct to the purchasing firm in the
United States, which buys the entire output at an annual cost of about
$500,000, and without intermediate inspection at Yokohama. Here we have
a splendid illustration of the way in which Christian character is
solving the problem arising from the low moral and economic ideals of
the masses of Japan's working classes. As a rule the modern industrial
worker does not put moral character into his work; and a wide complaint
of Occidental importers of Japanese products is that goods are not made
according to contract or sample. This is one of the greatest obstacles
to the continuous prosperity of any Japanese industry; for as soon as a
large demand has arisen in foreign lands for any given article, its
quality, as a rule, has rapidly deteriorated. It is this unreliability
of Japanese workmen that makes so difficult direct exportation to
foreign lands without the supervision of Occidental middlemen. The
Christian Gunze Seishi Kwaisha is one of the splendid exceptions which
shows what Japanese workmen and manufacturers can do, when controlled by
high ideals and motives.
Unfortunately however not all factories and their managers have the same
spirit, aim, or skill. Many factories are the exact opposite in every
respect to those owned by the Kanegafuchi and Gunze Seishi companies. My
personal attention was first called to the heartrending condition of
servitude imposed on vast numbers of girls by reading, a score of years
ago, of a fire in the dormitory of an Osaka factory. The dormitory was
in a closed compound, whose doors and gates were carefully locked to
keep the girls from running away. The result was the death, if I
remember correctly, of every inmate, of whom there were several score.
My personal knowledge in regard to the conditions of life and work of
factory operatives was secured in Matsuyama, Shikoku, a small inland
city of some forty thousand inhabitants, having but a single cotton
thread spinning factory. It had no dormitories of its own, but sent
its operatives to certain specified boarding-houses in the town.
Through a Mr. Omoto, who was at that time working in the factory, and
whose life story is given in the final chapter, I became intimately
acquainted with the conditions prevailing in Matsuyama. In 1901, when
Mr. Omoto began to work in the factory, he was amazed to see how many
were the children taking their turns in work along with the older
girls by day and by night. Large numbers ranged from seven to twelve
years old, the majority, however, being from fifteen to twenty. They
worked in two shifts of twelve hours each, but as they were required
to clean up daily they did not get out till six-thirty or seven,
morning and night. The only holidays for these poor little workers
came two or three times a month, when the shifts changed; but even
then there was special cleaning, and the girls who had worked all
night were kept till nine and even ten in the morning. He was also
deeply impressed with their wretched condition and immoral life. The
majority of them could neither read nor write; their popular songs
were indecent, and they were crowded together in disease-spreading and
vermin-breeding, immoral boarding-houses, where they were deliberately
tempted. Some of the landlords were also brothel keepers.
Mr. Omoto, having opportunity as official "visitor" to become accurately
acquainted with their life, told me in detail the conditions which have
been briefly summarized above. The boarding-houses were only for girls
from out of town. They had to be "recognized" by the factory, and the
girls had to live in the houses to which they were assigned. Of course
the purpose of these houses was to make money. The financial, hygienic,
intellectual, and moral interests of the girls were wholly ignored. They
were crowded into ill-ventilated, sunless rooms, the two shifts
occupying the same rooms alternately. Personal extravagance was
purposely stimulated, for girls in debt to the keepers were compelled to
stay to work off their debts. Drinking and immoral carousings were their
only recreation. As might be expected, sickness was common and epidemics
frequent. Many girls returned to their homes after a few months in the
"city" ruined not only in health but in character,--premature mothers of
illegitimate children.
The conditions of the factory girls in Matsuyama were not unique. Miss
J. M. Holland, a Church of England missionary in Osaka, recently told me
some of her observations and experiences. She has devoted the larger
part of her time for fifteen years to work among factory girls, and on
the whole can report improvement. When she began her visits to the
factories, the conditions were often appalling. It was not uncommon for
girls working on the night shift to be kept, on one pretext or another,
till noon the next day, making eighteen hours of work. The conditions
of work and life were such that the girls frequently ran away, to
prevent which the dormitories were virtually prisons within the factory
compounds. The girls were not allowed to go out on the streets, were
given no opportunity for recreation, and of course no education. They
were underfed, overworked, and punished in various ways by their
overseers, cuffed and sometimes whipped, for disobedience or blunders.
The daily papers of those days had frequent items reporting oppression
and ill treatment; to be deprived of wages as punishment was a common
experience; police occasionally discovered girls working in cellars and
vaults as punishment for misdeeds; girls sometimes escaped in their
night clothes, and on a few occasions the girls rebelled and did
personal violence to the overseers.
But, as already stated, the general conditions are now much better, for
it was gradually found that such ill-treated labor was not profitable.
"Most of the superintendents in Osaka are now splendid men, who on the
whole take good care of the girls and wish to treat them honorably." The
crying evils of the past have been largely done away. Rest, recreation,
education, wages, and health are receiving careful consideration at all
the leading factories. Still, no true parent would send a daughter to
work in such a place, unless under the stress of dire poverty. There are
still many small children under ten years of age, whose parents make
false statements in regard to their ages. The work is from six in the
morning to six in the evening. This means rising at four-thirty every
morning for work on the day shift. Some factories have abolished the
night shift. Fifteen minutes are allowed for rest in the middle of the
forenoon, thirty minutes for lunch, and fifteen minutes again in the
afternoon, giving thus eleven hours of steady work per day and the same
per night. On pay days the girls, after standing eleven hours, have to
stand in file from one to three hours more, according to their luck, and
Miss Holland says that such long hours of standing result in serious
organic difficulties. One half of the girls fail to work out their three
years' contract, returning to their homes before time for marriage,
seriously injured, if not completely ruined, physically. So long as this
system continues, she adds, skilled labor is impossible. While some
factories take great care that girls are carefully guarded from evil,
others exercise no control whatever over their goings and doings. One
factory she named as allowing its girls to be out on the streets till
two o'clock in the morning. It insists on only two and a half hours of
sleep! The difficulties connected with private boarding-houses for
factory girls have proved so great that most of them have been closed.
One of the tragic aspects of factory life in Japan is the large number
of what would seem to us avoidable accidents, due to the fact that the
girls know nothing whatever about machinery. Large factories accordingly
keep surgeons on hand to care for the wounded. Miss Holland says that in
one Osaka factory where there are a thousand operatives, the
kind-hearted surgeon told her they had an average of fifty accidents
daily which needed his attention. The little children especially suffer,
often losing fingers. Not long since five fingers were clipped off in a
single day! Miss Holland added that, improved though the conditions are,
factory life for children is a "murder of the innocents." As a rule the
food provided in factory dormitories is still inadequate. When asked
whether corporal punishment is still inflicted, she expressed a doubt,
having heard of none for a long time.
In her conversation Miss Holland expressly limited her report to the
factories she knows in Osaka. The question arises whether the conditions
there may not be peculiar. May not factory conditions in Yokohama and
Tokyo, where government inspection and control would theoretically be
most complete, be better than elsewhere? The facts do not seem to
justify such a surmise. The Kanegafuchi Company and some others have
good factories everywhere, but there would seem also to be bad ones
everywhere.
A Japanese book on _Industrial Education_ has recently been published by
a Mr. R. Uno, who, for fifteen years, has been a devoted student of
Japan's industrial problems. A summary of the statistics there given
appeared in May, 1914, in the _Tokyo Advertiser_, from which I cull the
following facts and figures.
In the cotton thread and spinning factories of Japan, there are 81 girls
to 19 men. Out of 1,000 girls, 386 are over 20 years of age, 317 are
from 17 to 20, 191 are from 15 to 16, 73 are from 12 to 14, while 7
girls out of a thousand are under 12 years of age. The vast majority of
factory girls live in the factory dormitories, which are of enormous
size. In the region of Osaka there are more than 30,000 girls working in
30 factories; in these same factories there are less than 7,000 men.
Three of these factories employ over 3,000 girls each, while three more
employ 2,000 and upward. These girls are herded together in enormous
dormitories, disastrous both to health and morals. Statistics covering a
number of years show that out of every 1,000 girls, 270 work less than
six months at the same place; 200 less than one year, 179 less than two
years; 121 less than three years; 141 less than five years, and only 89
pass the five-year period. The usual reason for this extraordinary
fluctuation of workers is that the girls break down in health.
Government statistics declare that out of every 100 girls to enter upon
factory work 23 die within one year of their return to their homes, and
of these 50 per cent. die of tuberculosis. But it is also asserted that
60 per cent. of the girls who leave home for factory work never return.
Of the criminal girls arrested in Osaka for a certain period, 49 per
cent. had been factory hands. As to the education of factory girls it is
stated that, out of 1,000, the number that had completed the required
number of years of schooling (six) was 450, while 385 were entirely
without education. Out of 1,000 girls, 453 were orphans. Of 1,000 girls,
611 came from farmers' homes, 166 from those of fishermen, and 55 from
merchant homes, the remaining 168 being scattering. Factory girls earn
and can save more than almost any other class. The average earnings per
month are stated to be $4.67. The girl pays $1.20 per month for food,
which is less than the actual cost, the factory providing the balance,
namely, $1.30. The average girl sends home fifty cents per month. Three
out of ten girls spend the balance entirely on clothes, five out of ten
on cakes and theaters, while two out of ten save it. Such are some of
the statements made by Mr. Uno in his enlightening book.
In the September, 1910, number of the _Shin Koron_, a monthly magazine
published in Tokyo, is an article by Professor Kuwada (of the Tokyo
Imperial University) entitled "The Pitiful Environment of Factory
Girls." He gives a detailed statement of the conditions of factory
workers, in which he estimates the number of female laborers in
factories containing ten or more hands at 700,000, of whom ten per cent.
are under fourteen years of age. In tobacco factories ten per cent., in
match factories twenty per cent, and in glass factories thirty per cent.
of the girls are under ten years of age. He vigorously condemns the
situation as threatening the future of the working class, whose
prospective mothers are thus being destroyed. The efforts of the
government during recent years to enact factory laws have been
successfully thwarted thus far, says Professor Kuwada, by shortsighted,
selfish capitalists. The girls are brought in from their country homes
by false promises. They are told of the beautiful sights to be seen,
theaters to be visited, the regular Sunday rest, and even of the
splendid care and education they will receive from the factory. There is
also stealing of expert workers from one factory by the artful
stratagems of another. There are factories which resort to devices for
defrauding helpless operatives. In one town where there are many
factories, it is customary to work overtime by setting back the hands of
the clock. To conceal this from the operatives, no factory blows its
whistles! Some factories do not give time for the girls to rest even
while they eat, but require them to work with the right hand while they
eat with the left. Night work in which both male and female operatives
are engaged together is most demoralizing. Punishment of various kinds
is administered. In addition to fines, in some places the girls are
imprisoned in dark rooms, rations are reduced, their arms are bound and
the lash applied freely, and in extreme cases they are stripped to the
waist and marched through the factory among young men and girls, bearing
a red flag tied to the back! Superintendents are invariably men.
So appalling was the statement made by Professor Kuwada that I could
scarcely believe him in all the details, particularly in regard to the
use of the lash and the stripping to the waist. I accordingly wrote
both to him and to Professor Abe of Waseda University, who has made
special study of the social problems and conditions of industry.
Professor Kuwada, I learned, has been a careful student of social and
industrial conditions for nearly twenty years, and is one of the leaders
in the Society for the Study of Social Politics, composed of one hundred
and fifty university professors and high government officials. This
society was organized to aid the government in its efforts to secure
social and industrial reforms. In reply to my inquiries Professor Kuwada
says that most of the facts given concerning silk factories he has
himself observed. Those concerning cotton spinning factories he has
derived from reliable sources, chiefly from the officers of the
Department of Agriculture and Commerce, who are especially engaged in
making investigations in regard to industrial conditions. Much of the
testimony rests on the statements of the girls themselves. Some of the
facts come from local police and some from the published reports of the
Department of Agriculture and Commerce. "The article in the _Shin
Koron_ may therefore be regarded as semi-official," says Professor Abe.
Since the appearance of the article referred to above, no reply has been
made to it by factory owners or managers. As to the stripping of a girl
to the waist and marching her through the factory filled with
operatives, male and female, Professor Kuwada was told this by the girl
herself. Under such circumstances, it is difficult to doubt the
testimony. Nor is it probable that the cases cited are absolutely
unique, although I think it highly probable that such extreme
indignities and punishments are rare,--they are so out of keeping with
the whole trend of Japanese civilization and culture. Mrs. Binford, a
missionary in Mito, assures me, however, that altering the hands of the
clock is a practise known to her. Testimony is widespread that girls are
secured for factories by all kinds of false statements.
In view of the frightful conditions of industrial labor thus indicated
by Mr. Uno and Professor Kuwada, it is amazing that the Diet has
refused on several successive occasions to enact suitable laws. The
government began to realize in 1898 the need for legislation on these
matters. A bill which was drafted and presented in 1902 was rejected, as
were also three subsequent bills. The chief feature of the bill
presented during the winter of 1910-11 was the provision that no factory
may employ girls under twelve, and that girls of any age and youth under
sixteen may not be kept at work for more than twelve hours per day, nor
be made to do night work without "special reason." While some provisions
of this bill were enacted and others amended, those considered most
important by social reformers and by the government were virtually
rejected. The bill was indeed passed, but with the added provision that
the important clauses, relative to ages and night work, be inoperative
for a period of fifteen years (!) in order to give time to the factories
involved to adjust themselves to the new conditions. Since that time no
further factory legislation has been enacted. Is it not astounding that
in a land on the whole so progressive as Japan the difficulty of
securing reform should be found in the Diet? The administration at this
point is ahead of the representatives of the people, as it is indeed in
many other respects. The fact is, as Professor Kuwada points out, that
the "representatives" in both the lower and upper houses represent the
financial interests of capitalists, rather than the human interests of
the masses.
But the reader, in his indignation over the situation of factory workers
in Japan, should remember that Japan is no exceptional sinner among the
nations. Christian England and America have had conditions equally bad,
and possibly worse. Dr. Washington Gladden, in his article on "The
Reason for the Unions," in the New York _Outlook_ for March, 1911, makes
the following statements in regard to the condition of labor in England
in the early part of the nineteenth century. Men and women stood daily
at their tasks, from twelve to fourteen and fifteen hours; a working
day of sixteen hours was not an unheard-of thing. Government reports of
this period show that children of five and six years of age were
frequently employed in factories. "Nor was this unmeasured abuse of
child labor confined to the cotton, silk, and wool industries.... The
report of 1842 is crammed with statements as to the fearful overwork of
girls and boys in iron and coal mines, which doubtless had been going on
from the end of the eighteenth century;... Children could get about
where horses and mules could not. Little girls were forced to carry
heavy buckets of coal up high ladders, and little girls and boys instead
of animals dragged the coal bunkers. Women were constantly employed
underground at the filthiest tasks. Through all this period the wages
gravitated downward and family income was steadily lowered, while the
cost of food increased. The homes of the workers were ruined. In a
certain congested district there lived 26,830 persons in 5,366
families, three fourths of which possessed but one room each. The rooms
were without furniture, without everything; two married couples often
shared the same room. In some cases there was not even a heap of straw
on which to sleep. In one cellar the pastor found two families and a
donkey; two of the children had died and the third was dying." And these
conditions existed, not in days of industrial depression, but in flush
times; business was booming and wealth accumulating in the hands of
factory owners and employers.
Many of the conditions of industrial workers even in the United States
to-day are heartrending in the extreme. Who could read of the strike of
the shirt-waist makers of New York in the winter of 1909-10 without deep
indignation over the conditions under which those brave girls worked,
and against which they rebelled? The National Committee on Child Labor
reported in the spring of 1911 that there were over 60,000 children in
the factories of the United States, mostly in the South. Before
condemning Japan unduly, Occidentals should remember that their own
record is none too bright.
If comparison is to be made however between Japan and the West, it may
be made along other lines. The West fell into its industrial
difficulties with no example from which to learn. But this is not true
of Japan. She can easily learn the lesson of a century of Western
experience; but she seems slow to do it. Then again in Japan it is the
government that is feebly leading, and the official popular
representatives who are both blind and resisting, whereas in the West
the great movements for industrial reform are movements of the people
themselves, backed up and oftentimes led by enlightened humanitarian and
Christian popular opinion. In the West, the churches are fairly in line
with forward social movements, whereas in Japan, Shintoism,
Confucianism, and even Buddhism are apparently wholly indifferent to the
economic and even ethical condition of the nation's toilers.
Furthermore, we are seeing to-day in Japan the strange phenomenon of
one section of the government seeking to ameliorate social and economic
conditions, and at the same time another, seemingly mortally afraid of
allowing the people either to discuss these matters or to attempt reform
movements themselves. Labor unions are strictly forbidden, and any
person advocating socialism is under strict police surveillance. Strikes
are illegal and their promoters are liable to criminal punishment.
Anomalous as it may be, the government seems to be seeking to destroy
that enlightened popular opinion on which it must rely for the efficient
enforcement of its own plans for social betterment of the working
classes.
I have dwelt at considerable length on the conditions of factory
workers, for later on I shall describe a sociological experiment among
this class.