area no larger than a garden-patch in America, the people are poor,
and the wonder is that they are able to produce food enough to keep
the country from actual want. Practically no animal meat is eaten; if
we except fish, the average American eats nearly twice as much meat in
a week as the average Japanese does in a year: to be exact, 150 pounds
of meat per capita is required per year for the average American
against 1.7 pounds for the average Japanese! Many of the farmers here
are too poor even to eat a good quality of rice. Consequently Japan
presents the odd phenomenon of being at once an exporter and a large
importer of rice. Poor farmers sell their good rice and buy a poorer
quality brought in from the mainland of Asia and mix it with barley
for grinding.
Only about one farmer in three has a horse or an ox; in most cases all
the work must be done by hand and with crude tools. {23} It is
pitiful--or rather I should say, it would be pitiful if they did not
appear so contented--to see men breaking the ground not by plowing but
by digging with kuwas: long-handled tools with blades perhaps six
inches wide and two feet long. At the Agricultural College farm in
Komaba I saw about thirty Japanese weeding rice with the kama--a tool
much like an old-fashioned sickle except that the blade is straight:
the right hand quickly cut the roots of the weed or grass plant and
the left hand as quickly pulled it up. With the same sickle-like kamas
about thirty other Japanese were cutting and shocking corn: they are
at least too advanced to pull fodder, I was interested to notice!
With land so scarce, it is of course necessary to keep something on
the ground every growing day from year's end to year's end. Truckers
and gardeners raise three crops a year. Rice, as a rule, is not sown
as with us, but the plants are transplanted as we transplant cabbage
or tomato plants (but so close together, of course, that the ripening
fields look as if they had been sown), in order that the farmer may
save the time the rice plants are getting to the transplanting stage.
That is to say, some other crop is maturing on the land while the rice
plants are growing large enough to transplant. Riding through the
country almost anywhere you will notice the tender young plants of
some new crop showing between the rows of some earlier-planted crop
now maturing or newly harvested.
The crops in Japan are not very varied. Rice represents half the
agricultural values. Next to rice is the silkworm industry, and then
barley, wheat, vegetables, soy beans, sweet potatoes, and fruits.
There is especial interest in fruit growing just now. Sweet potatoes
grow more luxuriantly than in any other country I have ever seen, and
are much used for food. I have seen one or two little patches of
cotton, but evidently only for home spinning, although I hear it said
that in Korea, which has just been formally annexed as Japanese
territory, cotton can be profitably grown. A much {24} cultivated
plant, with leaves like those of the lotus or water-lily, is the taro,
which I also saw growing in Hawaii; its roots are used for food as
potatoes are.
Every particle of fertility of every kind, as I have said, is
religiously saved, and in recent years a considerable demand for
commercial fertilizers has sprung up, $8 to $10 worth per acre being a
normal application.
So much for the farming country as it has impressed me around Tokyo. A
few days ago I saw a somewhat different agricultural area--280 miles
of great rice-farming land between Miyanoshita and Kyoto. This country
is different from that around Yokahoma and north of Tokyo in that it
is so much more rolling and mountainous (majestic Mount Fuji, supreme
among peaks, was in sight several hours) and greater efforts are
therefore necessary to take care of the soil.
But when such effort is necessary in Japan, it is sure to be made. The
population is so dense that every one realizes the essential
criminality of soil-waste, of the destruction of the one resource
which must support human life as long as the race shall last.
Much of the land is in terraces, or, perhaps I should say, tiers. That
is to say, here will be a half-acre or an acre from eighteen inches to
six feet higher (all as level as a threshing-floor) than a similar
level piece adjoining. While the levelling is helpful in any case for
the preservation of fertility and the prevention of washing, the tier
system is necessary in many cases on account of the irrigation methods
used in rice growing. While the lower plot is flooded for rice, upland
crops may be growing on the adjacent elevated acre or half-acre.
The hillside or mountain slopes are also cultivated to the last
available foot, and in dry seasons you may even see the men and women
carrying buckets uphill to water any suffering crop. In nearly all
cases the rows are on a level. Where there was once a slanting
hillside the Japanese here dig it down or grade it, and the
mountainsides are often enormous steps or {25} stairs; one level
terrace after another, each held in place by turf or rock wall.
Rice growing, as it is conducted in Japan, certainly calls for much
bitter toil. The land must be broken by hand; into the muddy, miry,
water-covered rice fields the farmer-folk must wade, to plant the rice
laboriously, plant by plant; then the cultivation and harvesting is
also done by hand, and even the threshing, I understand. When we
recall that the net result of all this bitter toil is only a bare
existence made increasingly hard by the steady rise in land-taxes, and
that the Japanese people know practically none of the diversions which
give joy and color to American and English country life, it is no
wonder that thousands of farmers are leaving their two and three acre
plots, too small to produce a decent living for a family, to try their
fortunes in the factories and the towns. Specifically, it may be
mentioned that the boys from the farms who go into the army for the
compulsory two years' service are reported as seldom returning to the
country.
True, the government is trying to help matters to some extent (though
this is indeed but little) by lending money to banks at low rates of
interest with the understanding that the farmers may then borrow from
these banks at rates but little higher; and there are also in most
communities, I learn, "cooperative credit societies" (corresponding
somewhat to the mutual building and loan societies in American towns),
by means of which the farmers escape the clutches of the Shylock
money-lenders who have heretofore charged as high as 20 to 30 per
cent. for advances. The Japanese farmers invest their surplus funds in
these "cooperative credit societies," just as they would in savings
banks, except that in their case their savings are used solely for
helping their immediate neighbors and neighborhoods. A judicious
committee passes upon each small loan, and while the interest rates
might seem high to us, we have to remember that money everywhere here
commands higher interest than in America.
{26}
I am the more interested in these "cooperative credit societies,"
because they seem to me to embrace features which our American farmers
would do well to adopt.
It is said that the farmers live on better food than they had twenty
years ago, but I should think that there has been little improvement
in the little thatch-roofed houses in which they live. These houses
are grouped into small villages, as are the farm houses in Europe, the
farmer going out from the settlement to his fields each working day,
much after the fashion of the workers on the largest American
plantations. Buildings corresponding to our American two-story houses
are almost never seen in towns here and absolutely never in farming
sections, the farm home, like the town home, usually consisting of a
story and a half, with sliding walls of paper-covered sash between the
rooms, a sort of box for the fire on which the meals are cooked, and
no chimney--little better, though much cleaner, than the negro cabins
in the South. In winter the people nearly freeze, or would but for the
fact that the men put on heavy woolens, and the women pile on cotton
padding until they look almost like walking feather beds.
True as are the things that I have said in this article, I fear that
my average reader would get a very gloomy and false conception of
Japanese farm life if I should stop here. The truth is that, so far as
my observation goes, I have seen nothing to indicate that the rural
population of Japan is not now as happy as the rural population in
America. If their possessions are few, so are their wants. In fact.
Dr. Juichi Soyeda, one of the country's leading men, in talking to me,
expressed a doubt as to whether the new civilization of Japan will
really produce greater average happiness than the old rural seclusion
and isolation (a doubt, however, which I do not share). "Our farm
people," he said, "are hard-working, frugal, honest, cheerful, and
while their possessions are small, there is little actual want among
them. A greater {27} number than in most other countries are
home-owners, and, altogether, they form the backbone of an empire."
Doctor Soyeda went on to give a noteworthy illustration of the
affection of the people for their home farms. "The Japanese," he said,
"have a term of contempt for the man who sells an old homestead."
There is no English word equivalent to it, but it means "a seller of
the ancestral land," and to say it of a man is almost equivalent to
reflecting upon his character or honor! I wish that we might develop
in America such a spirit of affection for our farm homes.
I wish, too, that we might develop the Japanese love of the beautiful
in nature. No matter how small and cramped the yard about the tiny
home here, you are almost sure to find the beauty of shrub and tree
and neatly trimmed hedge, and in Tokyo the whole population looks
forward with connoisseur-like enthusiasm to the season for wistaria
blooms in earliest spring, to the cherry blossom season in April, to
lotus-time in mid-summer, and to the chrysanthemum shows in the fall.
The fame of Tokyo's cherry blossoms has already gone around the world,
and thus they not only add to the pleasure of its citizens, but give
the city a distinction of no small financial advantage as well.
Why may not our civic improvement associations, women's clubs, etc.,
get an idea here for our American towns? A long avenue of beautiful
trees along a road or street, even if trees without blossoms, would
give distinction to any small village or to any farm. Every one who
has been to Europe will recall the long lines of Lombardy poplars that
make the fair vision of many French roads linger long in the memory,
and I can never forget the magnificent avenue of
cryptomerias--gigantic in size, straight as ship masts, fair as the
cedars of Lebanon--that line the road leading to the great Shogun
Iyeyasu's tomb in Nikko.
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 Japanese 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, Japan.
{29}
IV
"WELFARE WORK" IN JAPANESE FACTORIES
The obvious truth is that the agricultural population of Japan 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 Japan. Already wages, astonishingly 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, Japan 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. Japan now
follows suit. For a long time the government has paid enormous
subsidies to shipbuilding and manufacturing corporations, and now a
high tariff has been enacted, which will still further increase the
cost of living for the agricultural classes, 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 Shihotsu of the _Kokumin Shimbun_ 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 Okuma, one of the
empire's ablest men, once Minister of Agriculture, has also pointed
out how injuriously the new law will affect the masses 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 asset, are
merely another form of taxation paid by the people." And the masses in
Japan, 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 Japanese 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 Japan 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 Japanese 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 Japan, 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, assisted 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 Japan 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 Japan 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 Japan 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 class--that under
such conditions, these Buddhist Japanese 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
Massachusetts.
Tokyo, Japan.
{34}
V
DOES JAPANESE COMPETITION MENACE THE WHITE MAN'S TRADE?
I
With all the markets of the Orient right at Japan's doors and labor to
be had for a mere song--four fifths of her cotton-factory workers,
girls and women averaging 13-1/2 cents a day, and the male labor
averaging only 22 cents--it is simply useless for Europe and America
to attempt to compete with her in any line she chooses to monopolize.
Now that she has recovered from her wars, she will doubtless forge to
the front as dramatically as an industrial power as she has already
done as a military and maritime power, while other nations, helpless
in competition, must simply surrender to the Mikado-land the lion's
share of Asiatic trade--the richest prize of twentieth-century
commerce.
In some such strain as this prophets of evil among English and
American manufacturers have talked for several years. For the last few
months, professing to see in Japan's adoption of a high protective
tariff partial confirmation of their predictions, they have assumed
added authority. Their arguments, too, are so plausible and the facts
as to Japan's low wage scale so patent that the world has become
acutely interested in the matter. I account myself especially
fortunate, therefore, in having been able to spend several weeks under
peculiarly favorable circumstances in a first-hand study of Japanese
industrial {35} conditions. I have been in great factories and
business offices; I have talked with both Japanese and foreign
manufacturers who employ laborers by the thousand; I have had the
views of the most distinguished financial leaders of the empire as
well as of the great captains of industry; I have talked with several
men who have served in the Emperor's cabinet, including one who has
stood next to the Mikado himself in power; and at the same time I have
taken pains to get the views of English and American consular
officials, commercial attaches and travelers, and of newspaper men
both foreign and native.
And yet after having seen the big factories and the little
factory-workers in Tokyo and Osaka, after having listened to the most
ambitious of Japan's industrial leaders, I shall leave the country
convinced of the folly of the talk that white labor cannot compete
with Japanese labor. I believe indeed that the outlook is encouraging
for manufacturing in the Mikado's empire, but I do not believe that
this development is to be regarded as a menace to English or American
industry. Any view to the contrary, it seems to me, must be based upon
a radical misconception of conditions as they are.
In the very outset, the assumed parallel between Japan's rise as a
military power and her predicted rise as an industrial power should be
branded as the groundless non sequitur that it is. "All our present
has its roots in the past," as my first Japanese acquaintance said to
me, and we ignore fundamental facts when we forget that for centuries
unnumbered Japan existed for the soldier, as the rosebush for the
blossom. The man of martial courage was the goal of all her striving,
the end of all her travail. Society was a military aristocracy, the
Samurai the privileged class. And at the same time commerce was
despised as dishonorable and industry merely tolerated as a necessary
evil. In the Japan of Yalu, Liao-yang, and Mukden we have no modern
Minerva springing full-armed from the head of Jove, but rather an
unrecognized Ulysses {36} of ancient skill surprising onlookers merely
ignorant of the long record of his prowess. Viewed from the same
historical standpoint, however, industrial Japan is a mere learner,
unskilled, with the long and weary price of victory yet to pay.