{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 theKokumin Shimbuna 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}
VDOES JAPANESE COMPETITION MENACE THE WHITE MAN'S TRADE?
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.
In the race she has to run, moreover, the Mikado-land has no such advantages as many of our people have been led to believe. In America it has long been my conviction that cheap labor is never cheap; that so-called "cheap labor" is a curse to any community--not because it is cheap but because it is inefficient. The so-called cheap negro labor in the South, for example, I have come to regard as perhaps the dearest on the continent. Here in Japan, however, I was quite prepared to find that this theory would not hold good. By reason of conditions in a primitive stage of industrial organization, I thought that I might find cheap labor with all the advantages, in so far as there are any, and few of the disadvantages, encountered elsewhere. But it is not so. An American factory owner in Osaka, summing up his Job's trials with raw Japanese labor, used exactly my own phrase in a newspaper article a few days ago, "Cheap labor is never cheap." And all my investigations have convinced me that the remark is as applicable in Japan as it is in America or England.
The per capita wages of Japanese laborers here are, of course, amazingly low. The latest 1910 statistics, as furnished by the Department of Finance, indicate a daily wage (American money) of 40 cents for carpenters, 31-1/2 cents for shoemakers, 34 cents for blacksmiths, 25-1/2 cents for compositors, 19-1/2 cents for male farm laborers, and 22 cents for male weavers, and 12 cents for female. In the cotton factories I visited, those of the better sort, the wages run from 5 cents a day for the youngest children to 25 cents a day for good women workers. In a mousselaine mill I was told that the average wages were 22-1/2 cents, ranging from 10 cents to a maximum of 50 cents for the most skilled employees. And this, be it remembered, was {37} for eleven hours' work and in a factory requiring a higher grade of efficiency than the average.
But in spite of the fact that such figures as these were well known to him, it was my host in the first Japanese house to which I was invited --one of the Emperor's privy councillors, and a man of much travel and culture who had studied commercial conditions at home and abroad rather profoundly--who expressed the conclusion that Japanese factory labor when reduced to terms of efficiency is not greatly cheaper than European, an opinion which has since grown rather trite in view of the number of times that I have heard it. "In the old handicrafts and family industries to which our people have been accustomed," my host declared, "we can beat the world, but the moment we turn to modern industrial machinery on a large scale the newness of our endeavor tells against us in a hundred hindering ways. Numbers of times I have sought to work out some industrial policy which had succeeded, and could not but have succeeded, in England, Germany, or America, only to meet general failure here because of the unconsidered elements of a different environment, a totally different stage of industrial evolution. Warriors from the beginning and with a record for continuous government unsurpassed by any European country, our political and military achievements are but the fruitage of our long history, but in industry we must simply wait through patient generations to reach the stage represented by the Englishman, Irishman, or German, who takes to machinery as if by instinct."
All my investigations since have confirmed the philosophy of this distinguished Japanese whose name, if I should mention it, would be familiar to many in America and England. In the Tokyo branch of the Kanegafuchi Spinning Company (a company which controls 300,000 spindles) the director, speaking from the experience of one of the greatest and best conducted industries in Japan, declared: "Your skilled factory laborers in America or England will work four sides of a ring frame; our unskilled laborer may work only one." A young Englishman in another factory declared: "It takes five men here to do work that I and my mate would take care of at home." An American vice-consul told me that it takes three or four times as much Japanese as foreign labor to look after an equal number of looms. A Japanese expert just back from Europe declared recently that "Lancashire labor is more expensive than ours, but really cheaper." Similarly the Tokyo correspondent of the LondonTimessumming up an eight-column review of Japanese industry, observed: "If we go to the bottom of the question and consider what is being paid as wages and what is being obtained as the product of labor in Japan, we may find that Japanese labor is not cheaper than in other countries."
{38}
My own conviction is that in actual output the Japanese labor is somewhat cheaper than American or European labor, but not greatly so, and that even this margin of excess in comparative cheapness represents mainly a blood-tax on the lives and energies of the Japanese people, the result of having no legislation to restrain the ruinous overwork of women and little children--a grievous debt which the nation must pay at the expense of its own stamina and which the manufacturers must also pay in part through the failure to develop experienced and able-bodied laborers. The latest "Japan Year Book" expresses the view that "in per capita output two or three skilled Japanese workers correspond to one foreign," but under present conditions the difficulty here is to find the skilled workers at all. When Mr. Oka, of the Department of Commerce and Agriculture, told me that the average Japanese factory hand remains in the business less than two years, I was astonished, but inquiry from original sources confirmed the view. With the best system of welfare work in the empire, the Kanegafuchi Company keeps its laborers two and a half {39} to three years, but in a mill in Osaka of the better sort, employing 2500 hands, I was told that only 20 per cent, had been at work as long as three years. Under such conditions, the majority of the operatives at any time must be in a stage of deplorable inexperience, and it is no wonder that the "Year Book" just quoted goes on to confess that "one serious defect of the production is lack of uniformity in quality--attributed to unskilled labor and overwork of machinery."
The explanation of this situation, of course, is largely to be found in the fact that Japanese industries are women's industries--there being seven times as large a proportion of women to men, the Department of Commerce informs me, as in European and American manufacturing. These women workers are mostly from the country. Their purpose is only to work two or three years before getting married, and thousands of them, called home to marry the husbands their parents have selected, or else giving way physically under strain, quit work before their contracts expire. "We have almost no factory laborers who look on the work as a life business," was an expression often repeated to me.
Not only in the mills, but in numerous other lines of work, have I seen illustrations of the primitive stage of Japan's industrial efficiency. As a concrete illustration I wish I might pass to each reader the box of Kobe-made matches on the table before me (for match-making of this sort is an important industry here, as well as the sort conducted through matrimonial middlemen without waiting for the aid or consent of either of the parties involved). I have never in my life seen such a box of matches in America. Not in a hundred boxes at home would you find so many splinters without heads, so many defective matches. And in turning out the boxes themselves, I am told that it takes five or six hands to equal the product of one skilled foreign laborer. "It takes two or three Japanese servants to do the work of one white servant" is the general verdict of housekeepers, while it has also been brought to my {40} attention that in shops two or three clerks are required to do the work of one at home. A Japanese newspaper man (his paper is printed in English) tells me that linotype compositors set only half as many ems per hour as in America. In short, the general verdict as I have found it is indicated by what I have written, and the most enthusiastic advocate of Japanese cheap labor, the captain of the steamer on which I came from America, rather spoiled his enthusiasm for getting his ship coaled at Nagasaki for 7-1/2 cents a ton, by acknowledging that if it rained he should have to keep his ship waiting a day to get sufficient hands.
Moreover, while the Japanese factory workers are forced into longer hours than labor anywhere else--eleven hours at night this week, eleven hours in the day next week--I am convinced that the people as a whole are more than ordinarily averse to steady, hard, uninterrupted toil. "We have a streak of the Malay in us," as a Japanese professor said to me, "and we like to idle now and then. The truth is our people are not workers; they are artists, and artists must not be hurried." Certainly in the hurried production of the factory the Japanese artistic taste seems to break down almost beyond redemption, and the people seem unable to carry their habits of neatness and carefulness into the new environment of European machinery. "Take the Tokyo street cars," said an ex-cabinet officer to me; "the wheels are seldom or never cleaned or oiled, and are half eaten by rust." The railroads are but poorly kept up; the telephones exhaust your patience; while in the case of telegraphing, your exasperation is likely to lose itself in amazed amusement. A few days ago, for example, I sent a telegram from Osaka to Kobe, took my rickshaw across town, waited for a slow train to start, and then reached Kobe and the street destination of my message before it did.
In considering the failure of Japanese labor to bring forth a satisfactory output, however, one thing more should be said, and that is that we should not put the blame wholly on the {41} wage-earner. Not a small proportion of the responsibility lies at the door of inexpert managers. The family system of production has not only been the rule for generations with that minority of the people not engaged in farming, but it is still the dominant type of Japanese industry, and it will take time even to provide opportunities for training a sufficient corps of superintendents in the larger lines of production.
In further illustration of my argument that cheap labor is not proving so abnormally profitable, I may question whether Japanese factories have paid as good dividends, in proportion to prevailing rates of interest on money, as factories in England and America. Baron Shibusawa, the dean of Japanese financiers and one of the pioneers in cotton manufacturing, is my authority for the statement that 12 per cent, would be a rather high estimate of the average rate of dividend, while figures furnished by the Department of Finance show that for ten years the average rate of interest on loans has been 11.25 per cent.
The fact that Western ideas as to Japan's recent industrial advance have been greatly exaggerated may also be demonstrated just here. While the latest government figures show that in twelve years the number of female factory operatives increased from 261,218 to 400,925 and male factory operatives from 173,614 to 248,251, it is plain that a manufacturing population of 649,000 in a country of 50,000,000 souls is small, and the actual progress has not been so great as the relative figures would indicate. Moreover, many so-called "factories" employ less than ten persons and would not be called factories at all in England or America. The absence of iron deposits is a great handicap, the one steel foundry being operated by the government at a heavy loss, and in cotton manufacturing, where "cheap labor" is supposed to be most advantageous, no very remarkable advance has been made in the last decade. From 1899 to 1909 English manufacturers so increased their trade that in the latter year they imported $222 worth of raw {42} cotton for every $100 worth imported ten years before, while Japan in 1909 imported only $177 worth for each $100 worth a decade previous--though of course she made this cotton into higher grade products.
It must also be remembered that the wages of labor in Japan 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 classes 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 competition. 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 Japanese industry must also be the fact that there are in Japan 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 Japanese are a very home-loving folk, and even if they were not, almost all Shinto parents, realizing the paramount importance of having descendants to worship their spirits, favor and arrange early marriages for their sons. And what with this competition 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 competition from this quarter, to say nothing of the further fact that the Japanese 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 KobeChroniclequotes Mr. Kudota, of the Sanitary Bureau, as saying that "most of the women workers are compelled to leave the factories on account of their constitutions 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 Japanese 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.
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 Japanese 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
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 Japanese industry, as a whole, is likely to lose much more by lessened ability to compete in foreign markets than it will gain by shackled competition in the home markets. Farseeing old Count Okuma, 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 competition of the foremost industrial nations of the world. As our cost of production increases, our competition 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 shipbuilding, in which we have made such progress." Not a few of the country's foremost vernacular dailies are as outspoken as Count Okuma on this point, and the KobeChronicledeclares that, with diminished exports to Japan, "British manufacturers will find compensation in the lessened ability of the Japanese to compete in China; and Japan will find that she has raised prices against herself and damaged her own efficiency."
That such will be the net result of Japan'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 Japan will be recompensed for in China and India. Even after Japan'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 Japanese 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 Japanese imports of raw cotton from 1890 to 1909 as furnished me by Mr. Robert Young, of Kobe, Japan 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 Japan'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 Japanese 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 Japan is in this way simply handicapping herself for effective industrial growth. Just at this writing we have an illustration 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 TokyoKeizaideclares that "the habit of looking to the government for assistance 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 Japanese merchants, that is not a matter of concern in this discussion, except in so far as it may prove a form of Japanese 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.
Such is a brief review of the salient features of present-day Japanese industry, and in no point do I find any material menace to the general well-being of American and European trade. It is my opinion that the Japanese will steadily develop industrial efficiency, but that in the future no more than in the present will Japan menace European and American industry (unless she is permitted to take unfair advantages in Manchuria, Korea, etc.), for just in proportion as efficiency increases, just in the same proportion, broadly speaking, wages and standards of living will advance. The three--efficiency, wages, cost of living--seem destined to go hand in hand, and this has certainly been the experience thus far. And whatever loss we may suffer by reason of Japan gradually supplanting us in certain cruder forms of production should be abundantly compensated for in the better market for our own higher-grade goods that we shall find among a people of increasing wealth and steadily advancing standards of living.
In any fair contest for the world's trade there seems little reason to fear any disastrous competition from Japan. Perhaps she has been allowed to make the contest unfair in Manchuria or elsewhere, but that, as Mr. Kipling would say, is another story.
Kobe, Japan.
{48}
VIBUDDHISM, SHINTOISM, AND CHRISTIANITY IN JAPAN
One of the most fascinating places in all Japan is Kyoto, the old capital of the empire, and one of its most picturesque and historic cities. Without great factories such as Osaka boasts of, without the political importance of Tokyo, and without shipping advantages such as have made Kobe and Yokahoma famous, Kyoto is noted rather for conserving the life of old Japan. Here are the family industries, the handicrafts, and a hundred little arts in which the Land of the Rising Sun excels.
Little themselves in stature, the people of Japan are best in dealing with little things requiring daintiness, finish, and artistic taste. Some one has said that their art is "great in little things and little in great things," and unlike many epigrams, it is as true as it is terse.
A traveler gets the impression that most of their shops, or "stores," as we say in America, are for selling bric-a-brac, toys, lacquer ware, bronzes, or ornamental things of one kind or another; but perhaps this is largely because they give an artistic or ornamental appearance to a thousand utensils and household articles which in America would be raw and plain in their obvious practicality. The room in which I write is a fine illustration of this: finished in natural, unpainted woods, entirely without "fussiness" or show, and yet with certain touches and bits of wood carving that make it a work of art. Upon this point I must again quote Lafcadio Hearn, whose {49} books, although often more poetic and laudatory than accurate, are nevertheless too valuable to be neglected by any student of Japan:
"It has been said that in a Greek city of the fourth century before Christ every household utensil, even the most trifling object, was in respect of design an object of art; and the same fact is true, though in another and stranger way, of all things in a Japanese home; even such articles of common use as a bronze candlestick, a brass lamp, an iron kettle, a paper lantern, a bamboo curtain, a wooden tray, will reveal to educated eyes a sense of beauty and fitness entirely unknown to Western cheap production."
Like most old Japanese cities, Kyoto is proud of its temples, Buddhist and Shinto. And perhaps I should explain just here the difference between these two faiths that were long merged into one, but have been dissociated since the restoration of the Emperor to his old-time powers forty years ago. Shinto is the ancient Japanese system of ancestor-worship, with its doctrine of the divine descent of the Mikado from the Sun-goddess and its requirement that every faithful adherent make daily offerings to the spirits of the family's ancestors. With the future life or with moral precepts for this life it does not concern itself. "Obey the Emperor and follow your own instincts," is the gist of the Shinto religion, in so far as it may be called a religion at all: the tendency is to consider it only a form of patriotism and not a religion.
Buddhism, on the other hand, is an elaborate system of theology comprising a great variety of creeds, and insisting upon much ecclesiastical form and ceremony, however little it may have to do with practical morals. "The fact is, we Japanese have never gotten our morals from our religion," said one quasi-Buddhist newspaper man to me in Tokyo. "What moral ideas we have came neither from Shintoism nor Buddhism, but largely from Confucius and the Chinese classics."
Buddhism as it left India may have been a rather exalted religious theory, but if so, then in Japan it has certainly {50} degenerated into a shameless mockery of its former self. To read Sir Edwin Arnold's glorification of theoretical Buddhism in his "Light of Asia," and then see practical Buddhism in Japan with all its superstitions and idolatries, is very much like hearing bewitched Titania's praise of her lover's beauty and then turning to see the long ears and hairy features of the ass that he has become.
Nor is it without significance that Sir Edwin Arnold himself coming to Buddhist Japan dropped into open and flagrant immoralities such as a Christian community would never have tolerated, while the foremost American-bred apologists for Buddhism here have been but little better. One of the greatest and wealthiest temples in Kyoto is more notorious right now for the vices of its sacred (?) officials than for any virtues in its creed, and one of the high priests, like the Emperor himself, has a dozen or more women in his household. Some Buddhists are making an earnest effort to bring about at least an outward reformation of their organization, but the difficulties are such as to make the success of the undertaking very improbable. With the usual Japanese quality of imitativeness they have started "Young Men's Buddhist Associations," "Sunday schools," etc., and are also beginning to follow the example set by the Christians of participating in philanthropic and charitable work. In the Buddhist service I attended last Sunday the gorgeously robed priest sat on a raised altar in the centre of the room, with other priests ranged about him, and the general service, as usual, was much as if they had copied the Catholic ritual.
After the Buddhist ceremonies, I went to the Christian service at the Congregational School, or Doshisha, where the sound of the American-born minister's voice was punctuated by the street sounds of whirring rickshaw wheels and the noisy getas of passing Buddhists, while outside the window I could see the bamboo trees and the now familiar red disk and white border of the Mikado's flag. Prayer was offered for {51} "the President of the United States, the King of Great Britain, the Emperor of Germany, and the Emperor of Japan."
At night I was even more interested, even though I could not understand a word, in a native Japanese service I attended for half an hour. Although there was a downpour of rain the chapel was comfortably filled and the faces of the worshippers, I thought, were of more than ordinary intelligence and promise, while their sincerity is illustrated by the fact that numbers of the women Christians are actually depriving themselves of suitable food in order to give money for erecting a larger church building.
The next evening I took tea with a missionary who has in his home one of the public notices (dated March, 1868,) and common throughout the empire forty odd years ago, prohibiting Christianity, the ancient penalty being nothing less than death itself. The explanation of this notice is found in a bit of history. Three hundred and sixty years ago the Catholics came here, started missions, and made many converts among the lords or daimyios, who ordered their followers also to become Catholics, with the result that by the time of the first English settlement at Jamestown, in 1607, there were from 600,000 to 1,000,000 Christians, nominal and actual, away over here in Japan. Seven years later, however, government persecution began, Christianity was put under the ban, and so remained until eight years after our Civil War ended. Many Christians suffered martyrdom for their faith in this long period; and a few who escaped detection even secretly handed their faith down from father to son through all the long generations until tolerance came again.
Dr. A. D. Hail, of Osaka, tells me that even as late as 1885 an old man from the "backwoods," as we should say, came to a village where Dr. Hail's brother was a missionary, discovered for the first time that a man might be a Christian without being punished, and then confessed that each day he had worshipped secretly at a little Catholic shrine hidden in {52} his wall, as his father and his father's father had done before him.
As another illustration of the changed attitude toward Christianity, I may mention that a Japanese Buddhist once came to Doctor Hail's services armed with a dagger to kill the preacher, but had his attention caught by the sermon while waiting his chance and is now a missionary himself!
Perhaps in no other respect is Christianity working a greater change than in the general estimate of woman, although this is an objection the natives openly urge against Christianity. Just as in any conflict of interest the family in Japan has been everything and the individual nothing, so in every disagreement between husband and wife his opinions count for everything, hers for nothing. The orthodox and traditional Japanese view as to a woman's place has been very accurately and none too strongly set forth by the celebrated Japanese moralist, Kaibarra, writing on "The Whole Duty of Woman":
"The great lifelong duty of a woman is obedience. . . . Should her husband be roused at any time to anger, she must obey him with fear and trembling, and never set herself up against him in anger and forwardness. A woman should look on her husband as if he were Heaven itself and never weary of thinking how she may yield to her husband, and thus escape celestial castigation."
Similarly, in the "Greater Learning for Women" it is declared:
"The five worst maladies that afflict the female mind are indocility, discontent, slander, jealousy and silliness. These five maladies infest seven or eight out of every ten women, and it is from these that arises the inferiority of women to men."