MUST THE JAPANESE MAKE THEIR OWN "YOFUKU"?[264]
"God damn all foreigners!"_--Interrupter at one of Mr. Gladstone's
early meetings at Oxford_
When I was in Hokkaido sheep were being experimented with at different
places on the mainland, investigators and sheep buyers had gone off to
Australia, New Zealand and South America, and a Tokyo Sheep Bureau of
two dozen officials had been established. Great hopes were built on a
few hundred sheep in Hokkaido.[265] But I noticed that Government farm
sheep were under cover on a warm September day. Also I heard of
trouble with two well-known sheep ailments. There was talk
nevertheless of the day when there would be a million sheep in
Hokkaido, perhaps three millions. On the mainland I also met high
officials and enthusiastic prefectural governors who dreamed dreams of
sheep farming in Old Japan, where land is costly, farms small,
agriculture intensive, grazing ground to seek, and farmland
necessarily damp. This sheep keeping is conceived as one animal or
perhaps two on a holding as rather unhappy by-products. The notion is
that the wool and manure of a sheep would meet the expense of its keep
and that the mutton would be profit. Hopes of an extension of sheep
breeding resting on such a basis seem to be extravagant. One high
authority told me that it would take twenty or thirty years to develop
sheep keeping.
The sheep at present in Japan are not living in natural conditions.
They feed on cultivated crops. Sheep could hardly live a week on
natural Japanese pasture. The wild herbage is full of the sharp bamboo
grass. In the summer much of the eatable herbage dries up. Not only
must sheep endure the summer heat and insects; they must survive the
trying rainy season. But they must do more than merely endure and
survive. In order to produce good wool it is necessary that they shall
be in good condition. The hair of one's head immediately shows the
effect of imperfect nutrition or unhealthy conditions, and it is the
same with the wool on the back of the sheep.
It is said that the quality of the wool on the sheep kept in Japan
depreciates. However this may be, it is plain that sheep breeding must
be conducted on a large scale in order to produce wool in commercial
quantities and of even quality. Some notion of the land normally
required for sheep may be estimated from the fact that Australian
pasture carries no more than four sheep per acre.[266]
An improvement of Japanese herbage sufficient to fit it for sheep
would be a heavy task even in small areas. It is not only the herbage
but the rocks below it which are all wrong for sheep, if we are to
judge by the geological formations on which sheep flourish in the
West. If the sheep were put on cultivated land[267] or placed on straw
as I saw them in Hokkaido there would be serious risks of foot rot. No
doubt there would also be insect pests to control. If Japan set up
sheep keeping she would no doubt have to devise her own special breed
of sheep, for the well-known Western breeds are artificial products.
Probably the experiments which are being made in China with sheep at
an earlier stage of development are proceeding on the right lines. I
have already spoken of the fact that a Japanese taste for mutton has
yet to be cultivated.
This is a formidable list of difficulties confronting the new
Governmental Sheep Bureau. No doubt much may be done by a large
expenditure of money and much patience. The Japanese have wrought
marvels before by spending money and having a large stock of patience.
Account must also be taken of the spirit reflected in the speech made
to me by a Japanese friend when I read the foregoing paragraph to
him:
"But we are keen to try. If there were no necessity to prepare for
war, when we must have wool for soldiers, sailors and officials, we
might rely on Australia and elsewhere and hope to improve the inferior
and dirty Chinese wool. But thinking of the disease prevailing in
Northern Manchuria and of service needs, we want to try sheep keeping
with some subsidy in Hokkaido and on the mainland in Northern Aomori
where there is much dry wild land and the farmers are often
miserable--there are villages where the people do not wash. We might
provide some of the wool needed by Japan. We have practically met our
needs in sugar, though of course our needs are small compared with
England and America."
Let us turn from the sheep problem to the factory problem. What are
the difficulties of the woollen industry? In the first place, as we
have seen, there is no home supply of wool worth mentioning. Further,
there is the intricacy of woollen manufacture. Cotton machinery has
been brought to such a pitch of perfection for every operation and
there are in existence so many technical manuals for every department
of cotton manufacture that a certain standardisation of output is not
difficult. The problem of woollen manufacture is much more
complicated. The output cannot be similarly standardised, and there
are many directions in which originality, self-reliance and experience
come into play decisively.
In the woollen districts of Great Britain the operatives are people
who have been in the trade all their lives, whose parents and
grandparents have been in the trade before them. There is not only an
hereditary aptitude but an hereditary interest. There is not only an
individual interest but an interest of the whole community. The
welfare of a town or city is wrapped up in the woollen industry. This
is not so in Japan. The mill workers in the Tokyo prefecture, for
example, come from remote parts of Japan, and the girls--and
three-quarters of the employees of the woollen industry are girls--are
merely on a three-years contract. The girls arrive absolutely
inexperienced. Even in England it is considered that it takes two or
three years to make a worker skilful. Within the three-years period
for which the Japanese mill girls or their parents contract, as many
as 30 per cent. leave the mills and, appalling fact, from 20 to 25 per
cent. die.[268] Not more than 10 per cent. renew their three-years
contract. Therefore there is, at present at any rate, little real
skilled labour in the factories. Another difficulty is the absence of
skilful wool sorters. Even before the War a good wool sorter commanded
in England from £3 to £4 a week. One of the things which hampers the
Japanese woollen industry is the prevalence of illness at the
factories. They must have, in consequence, about 25 per cent. more
labour than is needed.
Generally one would say that the industry at its present stage is not
only weak on the labour side,[269] but, where it is efficient, is
skilful rather in imitation than in original design. Everything
produced is an imitation of foreign designs. That is not an unnatural
state of things, however, at the commencement of a new industry.
With regard to the old complaint of Japanese goods failing to come up
to sample, the shortcoming is often due not to intentional dishonesty
but simply to inability to produce a uniform product. In one factory
an order had to be filled by bringing together work from 300 different
places. The first delivery of the cloth produced for the Russian army
was like the sample, but the later deliveries, though of excellent
material, were not, for the simple reason that the precise raw
materials for the required blending did not exist in Japan.
One of the marvels of the industry is the high prices obtained in
Japan. The best winter serge was selling in England before the War at
8s. a yard. The Japanese price for winter serge was from 5 to 6 yen.
Before the War it was possible to import cloth at 50 per cent. less
than the local rates. Nevertheless there seemed to be a market for
everything. Japanese cloth lacks finish but it is made out of good
materials and will wear. The factories are compelled to use a better
quality of material in order to get anywhere near the appearance of
imported goods. A foreign manufacturer, "owing to his skill in
manufacture," as it was once explained to me, may produce a cloth of a
certain quality containing only 10 per cent. new wool: the Japanese
manufacturer, in order to produce a comparable article must use 30 per
cent. new wool. Obviously this means that the Japanese factory must
charge higher prices.
In considering the position of the industry it is natural to ask how
it would be affected if the Japanese factories were able to draw more
largely upon Manchuria for wool. The answer is that the sheep in
Manchuria at present yield what is called "China" wool, which is
suitable only for blankets and coarse cloth.
To some who feel a sympathy for Japan in her present stage of
industrial development and are inclined to take long views it may seem
a pity that she should contemplate making such a radical change in her
national habits as is represented by the demand for woollen materials
and for meat. Japanese dress, easy, hygienic and artistic though it
is, and admirably suited for wearing in Japanese dwellings, is ill
adapted for modern business life, not to speak of factory conditions.
But it has not yet been demonstrated that Japan is under the necessity
of substituting, to so large an extent as she evidently contemplates
doing, woollen for cotton and silk clothing, and Western clothing for
her own characteristic raiment.[270] The cotton padded garment and bed
cover are both warm and clean. It is odd that this new demand on the
part of Japan for woollen material should coincide with movements in
Europe and America to utilise more cotton, for underclothing at any
rate. There is undoubtedly a hygienic case of a certain force against
wool. The same is true of meat. It may well be that the dietary of
many Japanese has not been sufficiently nutritious, but much of the
meat-eating which is now being indulged in seems to be due more to an
aping of foreign ways than to physical requirements. The more meat
Japan eats and the more she dresses herself in wool the more she
places herself under the control of the foreigner.[271] Whatever
degree of success may attend sheep breeding within the limits imposed
upon it by physical conditions in Japan, the raw material of the
woollen industry must be mostly a foreign product. As far as meat is
concerned, it is difficult to believe that while the agriculture of
Japan is based upon rice production there is room for the production
of meat on a large scale. If the meat and wool are to be produced in
Manchuria and Mongolia we shall see what we shall see. The
significance of the experiment of the Manchuria Railway Company since
1913 in crossing merino and Mongolian sheep and the work which is
being done on the sheep runs of Baron Okura in Mongolia cannot be
overlooked. Ten years hence it will be interesting to examine
industrially and socially the position of the woollen industry[272]
and the animal industry in Japan and on the mainland, and the net gain
that the country has made.
FOOTNOTES:
[264] _Yofuku_ means foreign clothes.
[265] In 1920 there were 8,219 sheep in Japan, including 945 in
Hokkaido.
[266] A sheep produces about 7 lbs. of wool in the year. But this is
the unscoured weight. In Japan, an expert assured me, it would not
reach more than 56 to 60 per cent. when scoured.
[267] "To-day sheep cannot, be kept on arable to leave any reward to
the farmer."--_Country Life_, August 20, 1921.
[268] See Appendix LXIX.
[269] See Appendix LXX.
[270] An immense amount of silk is used in Japanese men's clothing.
The kimono, except the cheaper summer kind and the bath kimono
_(yukata)_, which are cotton, is silk. So are the _hakama_ (divided
skirt) and the _haori_ (overcoat). Japanese women's clothes are
largely silk. The dress of working people is cotton, but even they
have some silk clothing.
[271] "By degrees they proceeded to all the stimulations of banqueting
which was indeed part of their bondage."--Tacitus on the Britons under
Roman influence.
[272] The industry has already made on the London market an impression
of competence in some directions. For production and exports, see
Appendix LXX.