[Transcriber's note:

Page numbers are enclosed in curly braces, e.g. {99}. They are located where page breaks occurred in the original book. Paragraphs are not broken.

When a paragraph flows around illustrations the "next" page immediately preceding or following the illustrations jumps to account for the pages occupied by the illustrations. The location of the paragraph following the illustration group is indicated as {52 continued}. The material following {10}, up to the next {}, is on page 10, even if the next page number is not 11.

Italic are enclosed in underscores: this is italicized.

End Transcriber's note]



WHERE HALF THE WORLD IS WAKING UP



(From a photograph and autograph given the author)

Count Okuma, one of the Genro or Elder Statesmen of Japan and ex-Premier of the Empire, is an opponent of his country's high protective tariff and an earnest advocate of international arbitration.



WHERE HALF THE WORLD IS WAKING UP



THE OLD AND THE NEW IN JAPAN, CHINA, THE PHILIPPINES, AND INDIA, REPORTED WITH ESPECIAL REFERENCE TO AMERICAN CONDITIONS

BY CLARENCE POE

Author of "A Southerner in Europe," "Cotton: Its Cultivation and Manufacture," Editor "The Progressive Farmer," Sec'y North Carolina Historical Association, etc., etc.



Garden City New York DOUBLEDAY, PAGE & COMPANY 1911



ALL RIGHTS RESERVED, INCLUDING THAT OF TRANSLATION INTO FOREIGN LANGUAGES, INCLUDING THE SCANDINAVIAN



COPYRIGHT, 1911, BY CLARENCE POE



THE COUNTRY LIFE PRESS GARDEN CITY, N. Y.



TO

THE RIGHT HONORABLE JAMES BRYCE

IN WHOM ACHIEVEMENT, CHARACTER AND PERSONAL CHARM MEET IN RARE SYMMETRY; WHO HAS WON THE WISDOM OF AGE WITHOUT LOSING THE DEW OP YOUTH; AND WHOSE GENEROUS FRIENDSHIP HAD MADE ME HIS DEBTOR BEFORE IT AIDED ME ANEW IN PLANNING AND EXECUTING MY ORIENTAL TOUR



{vii}

PREFACE

"The human race, to which so many of my readers belong," as Mr. Gilbert Chesterton begins one of his books by saying, has half its members in Asia. That Americans should know something about so considerable a portion of our human race is manifestly worth while. And really to know them at all we must know them as they are to-day.

Vast changes are in progress, and even as I write this, the revolution in China, foreshadowed in the chapters written by me from that country, is remaking the political life of earth's oldest empire. From Japan to India there is industrial, educational, political ferment. The old order changes, yielding place to the new.

"Where Half the World is Waking Up" is not inappropriate therefore as the title of the book now offered to the public. The reader will kindly observe here that I have written of where half the world is waking up and not merely of the waking-up itself. My purpose has been to set forth the old and the new in due proportion; to present the play of new forces against and upon the ancient, the amazingly ancient, forces that have dominated whole races for centuries. In most places, in fact, the ancient force is still clearly the dominant one. Observe, too, therefore, that I have written not of where half the world has waked up, but only of where it is waking up. The significant thing is that the waking is really taking place at all, and of this there can be no doubt.

It was, in short, with the hope of securing for myself and presenting to others a photograph of the Orient as it is to-day that I made my long trip through Japan, Korea, Manchuria, {viii} China, the Philippines, and India during the past year. It was not a pleasure trip nor yet a hurried "seaport trip." I travelled either entirely across or well into the interior of each country visited, and all my time was given to study and research to fit me for the preparation of these articles.

That despite of the care exercised the book contains some errors, is doubtless true. The sources of information in the Orient are not always easy to find, nor always in accord after one finds them. Consider, for example, the population of Manchuria: it seems a simple enough matter, yet it required the help of consuls of two or three nations to enable me to sift out the truth from the conflicting representations of several writers and so-called authorities.

For my part I can only claim a laborious and painstaking effort to get the facts. Letters of introduction to eminent Englishmen kindly furnished me by Ambassador Bryce opened the doors of British officialdom for me, and the friendship of Mr. Roosevelt and letters from Mr. Bryan and our Department of State proved helpful in other ways. I thus had the good fortune not only to get the ready fraternal assistance of my brother newspaper men (of all races) everywhere, and the help of English, German, and American consuls, but I was aided by some of the most eminent authorities in each country visited—in China, by H. E. Tang Shao-yi, Wu Ting Fang, Sir Robert Bredon, Dr. C. D. Tenney, Dr. Timothy Richard; in Japan, by ex-Premier Okuma, Viscount Kaneko, Baron Shibusawa, Dr. Juichi Soyeda; in Hong Kong, by Governor-General Sir Frederick Lugard; in Manila by Governor-General Forbes, Vice-Governor Gilbert; in India, the members of the Viceroy's Cabinet, Hon. Krishnaswami Iyer, Dr. J. P. Jones, etc, etc. To all of these and to scores of others, my grateful acknowledgments are tendered. They helped me get information, but of course are in no case to be held responsible for any opinions that I have expressed.

To Mr. G. D. Adams, of Akron, Ohio, and Dr. Arthur {ix} Mez, of Mannheim, Germany, two generous fellow-travellers, my thanks are due for the use of many of their photographs, and I am also indebted to The World's Work and The Review of Reviews for permission to republish articles that have already appeared in these magazines. The larger number of chapters included in this volume, however, were originally prepared with a view to their use in my own paper, The Progressive Farmer. They are, therefore, often more elementary in character, let me say in the outset, than if they had been written exclusively for bookbuyers, but it is my hope that their journalistic flavor, even if it has this disadvantage, will also be found to have certain compensating qualities.

Perhaps just one other thing ought to be said: that practically every article about any country was written while I was still in the country described. In this way I hoped not only to write with greater freshness and vividness, but I was enabled to have my articles revised and criticised by friends well informed concerning the subjects discussed. The reader will please bear in mind, therefore, that a letter about Tokyo is also a letter from Tokyo, a letter about Korea is a letter from Korea, etc., and shift his viewpoint accordingly. I have also thought it best to be frank with the reader and let the chapters on China remain exactly as they were written—presenting a pen picture of the Dragon Empire as it appeared on the eve of the outbreak, while the revolution was indeed definitely in prospect but not yet a reality.

——-

"Give us as many anecdotes as you can," was old Samuel Johnson's advice to Boswell, when that worthy proposed to write of Corsica; and this wise suggestion I have sought to keep in mind in all my travel. Moreover, another saying of the great lexicographer's comes quaintly into my memory as I conclude this Foreword: "There are two things which I am confident I could do very well," he once remarked to Sir Joshua Reynolds; "one is an introduction to any literary work stating {x} what it is to contain, and how it should be executed in the most perfect manner: the other is a conclusion, showing from various causes why the execution has not been equal to what the author promised to himself and to the publick!"

C. P. Raleigh, N. C. December 1, 1911.



{xi}

CONTENTS

CHAPTER PAGE

I. Japan: The Land of Upside Down 3

A Land of Contradictions Music as an Example Marriage and the Home Life Patriarchal Ideas Still Dominant.

II. Snapshots of Japanese Life and Philosophy 9

What a Japanese City Is Like Strange Clothing of the Japanese Who Ever Saw So Many Babies? Alphonse and Gaston Outdone The Grace of the Little Women How the Old Japan and the Old South Were Alike A "Moral Distinction" Between Producers and Non-Producers.

III. Japanese Farming and Farmer Folk 17

Japanese Farm Children Getting More Schooling than American Farm Children No Illiteracy in the New Japan Where Five Acres Is a Large Farm How Iowa Might Feed the Whole United States Farming Without Horses or Oxen What the Japanese Farmers Raise The Crime of Soil-waste All Work Done by Hand Cooperative Credit Societies a Success Farm Houses Grouped in Villages "A Seller of the Ancestral Land" The Japanese Love of the Beautiful a Suggestion for America.

IV. "Welfare Work" in Japanese Factories 29

Manufacturing Bound to Increase Tariff Legislation Unfair to Agriculture A Visit to a Progressive Japanese Factory How the Factory Operatives Are Looked After Stricter Factory Legislation Coming.

V. Does Japanese Competition Menace the White Man's Trade 34

A Study of Japanese Industrial Conditions Japanese Labor Cheap but Inefficient Actual Cost of Output Little Cheaper than in America Laborers in a State {xii} of Deplorable Inexperience Illustrations of Japanese Inefficiency Some Current Misconceptions Corrected Labor Wage Has Increased 40 Per Cent, in Eight Years The Burden of Taxation High Tariff Will Decrease Japan's Export Trade Subsidy Policy Destroying Individual Initiative Japanese Competition Not a Serious Menace to the White Man.

VI. Buddhism, Shintoism, and Christianity in Japan 48

The Artistic Touch of the Japanese Religion Without Morals Buddhism in Fact vs. Buddhism Idealized by Arnold Official Notices Prohibiting Christianity Christianity "Puts Too High an Estimate on Woman" The Worth of the Individual Not Recognized The Elemental Significance of Japan's Awakening A New Type of Civilization.

VII. Korea: "The Land of the Morning Calm" 60

I Have Become a Contemporary of David The Fascination of a Primitive City Some Odd Korean Customs-A True Romance and an Odd One Many Faces Marked by Smallpox A Typical Monarchy of Ancient Asia-The Honorable Mr. Yang-ban Six Men to Carry Fifty Dollars' Worth of Money Japanese Annexation Splendid Work of Foreign Missionaries.

VIII. Manchuria: Fair and Fertile 70

Some First-hand Stories of the Russo-Japanese War A Bit of History with a Lesson The Site of the World's Next Great War Manchuria: Fair and Fertile Fat Harvests of Food, Feed, and Fuel A Land Where Everybody "Knows Beans" Golden Opportunities for Stock-raising Better Plows and Level Culture Graves as Thick as Corn Shocks

IX. Where Japan Is Absorbing an Empire 78

Manchuria the One Great Oriental Empire Not Yet Developed Its Strategic Importance Why the "Open Door" Concerns Us All Japan's Shrewd Policies {xiii} Contempt of Chinese Authority Japan at Home vs. Japan in Manchuria How the Open Door Policy Was Violated Will Manchuria Go the Way of Korea? A Bit of Chinese Wit and Wisdom Truth Is in the Interest of Peace.

X. Light from China on Problems at Home 93

A Chinese Martyr-Hero The Most Tremendous Moral Achievement of Recent Times A Lesson for America Putting Officials on Salaries Money Changers and Title Changers Making Education Practical The Parcels Post and Tariff Reform.

XI. The New China: Awake and at Work 102

The Coming National Parliament The Successful War Against Opium China's Right-about-face in Education Building Up an Army Attacking the Graft System Railroads, Posts, and Telegraphs America's Relations with China.

XII. A Trip into Rural China 116

The Camels from Mongolia Strange Traffic and Travel in Nankou Pass The Great Wall of China Surprisingly Progressive Farming Methods.

XIII. From Peking to the Yangtze-Kiang 123

Street Life in Peking History That Is History Martyrdoms That Have Enriched the World Average Wages 15 to 18 Cents a Day Homes Without Firesides All China a Vast Cemetery Keeping on Good Terms with Dragons The Blessings of Our Alphabet Confucius as a Moral Teacher My Friendship with a Descendant of Confucius.

XIV. Sidelights on Chinese Character and Industry 132

Healthy Public Sentiment Slavery and Foot-binding Still Practised "Big Feet No B'long Pretty" The Popularity of a No. 2 Wife The Virtue That Is Next to Godliness Largely Disregarded Some Discredited Americans Discovered Abroad A 600-Mile Trip on the Yangtze {xiv} River An Interview with Wu Ting Fang Farming on the Yangtze Shanghai Factory Laborers Paid 12 Cents a Day.

XV. Farewell to China 142

A City of 2,000,000 People Without a Vehicle A Dead Chinaman More Important and Respected Than a Live One Queer Features of Chinese Funerals Cruelty of Chinese Punishments A Sample of Chinese Humor: The Story of the Magic Jar Amusing Trials of a Land Buyer "Pidgin English" Everything Is Saved The Influence That Is Remaking China.

XVI. What I Saw in the Philippines 153

In Manila A Trip Through Five Provinces What the Philippine Country Looks Like Every Filipino Has Cigarette and a Clean Suit A Mania for Cock-fighting Snapshots of Philippine Life Labor the One Thing Lacking.

XVII. What the United States Is Doing in the Philippines 163

Thirty Thousand White People and 7,000,000 Filipinos Rich Resources and Varied Products Millions in Lumber How the Islands Are Governed Restricting the Suffrage Education: Achievements of the American Government Postal Savings Banks and the Torrens System Public Health Work Building Roads And Then Keeping Them Up "A George Junior Republic."

XVIII. Asia's Greatest Lesson foe America . . 173

Where 10 Cents a Day Is a Laborer's Wage The Savage Struggle for Existence in the East Tasks Heart-sickening in Their Heaviness Where Women Are Burden-bearers $12 a Year for a Farm Hand An Overcrowded Population Not the Chief Cause of Asia's Poverty A Defective Organization of Industry Responsible Foolish Opposition to Labor-saving Tools Our Debt to Machinery Knowledge Itself a Productive Agency Ineffectiveness of Oriental Labor Tools and Knowledge the Secret of Wealth Importance of Our Racial Heritage The Final Lesson.

{xv}

XIX. The Straits Settlements and Burma 186

The Amazing Industry of the Chinese Easy Money in Cocoanuts How Germany Is Capturing Oriental Trade Rangoon the City of Gorgeous Colors Burma's Buddhist Temples Rangoon's Beasts of Burden Where the Elephants Do the Work Some First-hand Jungle Stories My Lord the Elephant Good-by to Burma.

XX. Hinduism—and the Himalayas 198

Theoretical vs. Practical Hinduism The Kalighat Temple, Calcutta Human Sacrifices Two Indian Places of Worship: A Contrast A Visit to Benares Burning the Bodies of the Dead "Religion" as It Is in Benares The Himalayas: A New and Happier Subject.

XXI. "The Poor Benighted Hindus" 210

India's Enormous Population "The Wealth of the Indies" a Romance A Typical Indian Village No Chairs, Mattresses, Knives, or Forks Used Where It Is 105 at Midnight "Gunga Din" in Evidence The Lady of Banbury Cross Outdone.

XXII. Hindu Farming and Farm Life 218

Primitive Tools Used by Farmers What Crops Are Grown Where Drought Means Death Reducing the Ravages of Famine Usury and a Remedy Where America Is Behind Landowner and Farm Laborer Salaam, O Little Folk!

XXIII. The Caste System in India 226

No Man May Rise Higher, but May Fall Lower How Fatalism Sustains Caste Contamination by Touch A Bone Collector's Pride of Rank The "Thief Caste" Caste and the Banyan Tree A Maharaja's Defence of Caste Some Forces That Are Battering Down the System Foreign Travel Weakening Caste.

XXIV. The Plight of the Hindu Woman 236

"Woman Is Not to Be Trusted" Twelve-year-old Brides and Bridegrooms A Wedding Procession in Agra {xvi} 5000 Rupees for a Wedding Feast The Plight of the Child-wives Cruel Treatment of Widows The Picture Not Wholly Dark One Worthy Tribute to the Grace of Woman.

XXV. More Leaves from an India Notebook 246

Some Historic Indian Cities India No More Homogeneous than Europe English Rule: An Interview with Mr. Krishnaswami Iyer Indian Wealth in a Few Hands 16 Cents a Day an Incredibly High Wage No Horses on Indian Farms Bombay a Great Cotton Market The Story of a Man-eater A Snake Story to End With.

XXVI. What the Orient May Teach Us 261

Conservation the Keynote What Neglect of Her Forests Has Cost China Forestry Lessons from Japan and Korea Conserving Individual Wealth The Essential Immorality of Waste Avoiding the Wastes of War Preserving Our Physical Stamina and Racial Strength A Lesson from China Patriotism as a Moral Force The Coming "Conflict of Color" Oriental vs. Occidental Ideals.

{xvii}

ILLUSTRATIONS

Count Shige-Nobu Okuma of Japan Frontispiece

PAGE

The Giant Avenue of Cryptomerias at Nikko 13

Typical Japanese Costumes and Temple Architecture 14

Japanese Farming Scenes 19

Japanese School Children 20

The Great Buddha (Diabutsu) at Kamakura 53

The Degenerate Koreans at Rest and at Work 54

Like Scenes from Our Western Prairies 81

Manchurian Women (showing peculiar head-dress) 82

Chinese Waste-paper Collector 82

Pu Yi the Son of Heaven and Emperor of the Middle Kingdom 105

How China Is Dealing with Opium Intemperance 106

A Man-made Desert 117

Pumping Water for Irrigation 117

Transportation and Travel in China 118

Fashionable Chinese Dinner Party 137

How Lumber Is Sawed in the Orient 137

A Quotation from Confucius 138

The Great Wall of China 147

Chinese Woman's Ruined Feet 147

Chinese School Children 148

The American Consulate at Antung 148

A Filipino's Home 157

The Carabao, the Work-stock of the Filipinos 158

An Old Spanish Cathedral 158

Society Belles of Mindanao, Philippine Islands 181

A Street Scene in Manila 181 {xviii} Two Kinds of Workers in Burma 182

Types at Darjeeling, Northern India, and at Delhi, Central India 205

Two Rangoon Types 206

A Hindu Faquir 213

Some Fashionable Hindus 213

Hindu Children 214

The Taj Mahal from the Entrance Gate 241

Gunga Din on Dress Parade 242

Bathing in the Sacred Ganges at Benares 249

The Battle-scarred and World-famous Residency at Lucknow 250

Burning the Bodies of Dead Hindus 255

An Indian Camel Cart 255

Travel in India 256

{xix}

WHERE HALF THE WORLD IS WAKING UP



{3}

I

JAPAN: THE LAND OF UPSIDE DOWN

"I cannot help thinking," said one of my friends to me when I left home, "that when you get over on the other side of the world, in Japan and China, you will have to walk upside down like the flies on the ceiling!"

While I find that this is not true in a physical sense, it is true, as Mr. Percival Lowell has pointed out, that, with regard to the manners and customs of the people, everything is reversed, and the surest way to go right is to take pains to go dead wrong! "To speak backward, write backward, read backward, is but the A B C of Oriental contrariety."

Alice need not have gone to Wonderland; she should have come to Japan.

I cannot get used, for example, to seeing men start at what with us would be the back of a book or paper and read toward the front; and it is said that no European or American ever gets used to the construction of a Japanese sentence, considered merely from the standpoint of thought-arrangement. I had noticed that the Japanese usually ended their sentences with an emphatic upward spurt before I learned that with them the subject of a sentence usually comes last (if at all), as for example, "By a rough road yesterday came John," instead of, "John came by a rough road yesterday."

And this, of course, is but one illustration of thousands that might be given to justify my title, "The Land of Upside Down," the land of contradictions to all our Occidental ideas. That {4} Japan is a land "where the flowers have no odor and the birds no song" has passed into a proverb that is almost literally true; and similarly, the far-famed cherry blossoms bear no fruit. The typesetters I saw in the Kokumin Shimbum office were singing like birds, but the field-hands I saw at Komaba were as silent as church-worshippers. The women carry children on their backs and not in their arms. The girls dance with their hands, not with their feet, and alone, not with partners. An ox is worth more than a horse. The people bathe frequently, but in dirty water. The people are exceptionally artistic, yet the stone "lions" at Nikko Temple look as much like bulldogs as lions. A man's birthday is not celebrated, but the anniversary of his death is. The people are immeasurably polite, and yet often unendurably cocky and conceited. Kissing or waltzing, even for man and wife, would be improper in public, but the exposure of the human body excites no surprise. The national government is supposed to be modern, and yet only 2 per cent, of the people—the wealthiest—can vote. Famed for kindness though the people are, war correspondents declared the brutality of Japanese soldiers to the Chinese at Port Arthur such as "would damn the fairest nation on earth." Though the nation is equally noted for simplicity of living, it is a Japanese banker, coming to New York, who breaks even America's record for extravagance, by giving a banquet costing $40 a plate. The people are supposed to be singularly contented, and yet Socialism has had a rapid growth. The Emperor is regarded as sacred and almost infallible, and yet the Crown Prince is not a legitimate son. Although the government is one of the most autocratic on earth, it has nevertheless adopted many highly "paternalistic" schemes-government ownership of railways and telegraphs, for example. The people work all the time, but they refuse to work as strenuously as Americans. The temples attract thousands of people, but usually only in a spirit of frolic: in the first Shinto temple I visited the priests offered me sake (the national liquor) {5} to drink. Labor per day is amazingly cheap, but, in actual results, little cheaper than American labor.

It is amid such a maze of contradictions and surprises that one moves in Japan. When I go into a Japanese home, for example, it is a hundred times more important to take off my shoes than it is to take off my hat—even though, as happened this week when I called on a celebrated Japanese singer, there be holes in my left sock. (But I was comforted later when I learned that on President Taft's visit to a famous Tokyo teahouse his footwear was found to be in like plight.)

Speaking of music, we run squarely against another oddity, in that native Japanese (as well as Chinese) music usually consists merely of monotonous twanging on one or two strings—so that I can now understand the old story of Li Hung Chang's musical experiences in America. His friends took him to hear grand opera singers, to listen to famous violinists, but these moved him not; the most gifted pianists failed equally to interest him. But one night the great Chinaman went early to a theatre, and all at once his face beamed with delight, and he turned to his friends in enthusiastic gratitude: "We have found it at last!" he exclaimed. "That is genuine music!" . . . And it was only the orchestra "tuning up" their instruments!

I might as well say just here that this story, while good, always struck me as a humorous exaggeration till I came to Japan, but the music which I heard the other night in one of the most fashionable and expensive Japanese restaurants in Tokyo was of exactly the same character—like nothing else in all the world so much as an orchestra tuning up! And yet by way of modification (as usual) it must be said that appreciation of Western music is growing, and one seldom hears in classical selections a sweeter combination of voice and piano than Mrs. Tamaki Shibata's, while my Japanese student-friend has also surprised me by singing "Suwanee River" and other old-time American favorites like a genuine Southerner.

Take the social relations of the Japanese people as another {6} example of contrariety. Here the honorable sex is not the feminine but the masculine. There is even a proverb, I believe, "Honor men, despise women." Perhaps the translation "despise" is too strong, but certainly it would be regarded as nothing but contemptible weakness for young men to show any such regard for young women, or husbands for their wives, as is common in America. The wives exist solely for their husbands, nor must the wife object if the husband maintains other favorites, or even brings these favorites into the home with her. And although a man is with his wife a much greater part of his time than is the case in America, he may have little or no voice in selecting her; in fact, he may see her only once before marrying.

After having seen probably half a million or more Japanese, Sundays and week-days, I have not noticed a single young Japanese couple walking together, and in the one case where I saw a husband and a wife walking thus side by side I discovered on investigation that the man was blind!

"For a young couple to select each other as in America," said a young Japanese gentleman to me, "would be considered immoral, and as for a young man calling on a young woman, that never happens except clandestinely." And when I asked if it was true that when husband and wife go together the woman must follow the man instead of walking beside him as his equal, he answered: "But it is very, very seldom that the two go out together."

My Japanese friend also told me that the young man often has considerable influence in selecting his life-partner (in case it is for life: there is one divorce to every three to five marriages), but the young woman has no more voice in the matter than the commodity in any other bargain-and-sale. When a young man or young woman gets of marriageable age, which is rather early, the parents decide on some satisfactory prospective partner, and a "middleman" interviews the parents of the prospective partner aforesaid, and if they are willing, and {7} financial and other considerations are satisfactory, it doesn't matter what the girl thinks, nor does it matter much whether young Barkis himself is "willin'." The Sir Anthony Absolutes in Japan indeed brook no opposition. All of which, while not wholly commendable (my young Japanese friend himself dislikes the plan, at least in his own prospective case), has at least the advantage of leaving but remarkably few bachelors and old maids in Japan. Here every man's house may not be his castle, but it is certainly his nursery. Usually, too, in the towns at least, his home is his shop; the front part full of wares, with no hard and fast dividing line between merchandise rooms and the living rooms, children being equally conspicuous and numerous in both compartments.

Japan is still governed largely on patriarchal lines. The Emperors themselves depend largely on the patriarchal spirit for their power, claiming direct descent in unbroken line from the Sun-Goddess, while the people are supposed to be themselves descendants of Emperors or of minor gods. In family life the patriarchal idea is still more prominent, the father being the virtual ruler until he abdicates in favor of the eldest son.

Ancestor-worship is general, of course, and a typical case is that of my young Nikko friend, who tells me that in his home are memorial tablets to six of his most recently deceased ancestors, and that hot rice is placed before these tablets each morning. Now the teaching is that the spirits of the dead need the odor of the rice for nourishment, and also require worship of other kinds. Consequently the worst misfortune that can befall a man is to die without heirs to honor his memory (the mere dying itself is not so bad); and if an oldest son die unmarried such action amounts almost to treason to the family.

Moreover, if a man be without sons (daughters don't count), he may adopt a son; and the cases of adoption are surprisingly frequent. Count Okuma, ex-prime minister of the empire, whom I visited last Sunday, adopted his son-in-law as his {8} legal son. A distinguished banker I visited is also an adopted son; and in a comparatively brief list of eminent Japanese, a sort of abbreviated national "Who's Who," I find perhaps twenty cases in which these eminent officials and leaders have been adopted and bear other family names than those with which they were born.

The willingness to give up one's name in adoption, viewed in the light of the excessive devotion to one's own ancestors and family name, is only another illustration of Japanese contrariety. It is a land of surprises.

Miyanoshita, Japan.

{9}

II

SNAPSHOTS OF JAPANESE LIFE AND PHILOSOPHY

"What is a Japanese city like?" Well, let us "suppose," as the children say. You know the American city nearest you, or the one you live in. Suppose then you should wake up in this city to-morrow morning and find in the first place that forty-nine people out of every fifty have put on such unheard-of clothing as to make you rub your eyes in wonder as to whether you are asleep or awake; next, that everybody has become six inches shorter, and that all these hundred-thousand five-foot men and four-foot women have unanimously developed most violent sunburn—have become bronzed almost beyond recognition.

Moreover, the high buildings you once knew have all disappeared, and a wilderness chiefly of tiny one and two story houses has taken their places, wherein the first story, even in two-story buildings, is so low that all your new brown friends warn you by a gesture to duck your head as you go through the doors, while the second story is usually little more than a garret.

Next, a wild jargon of unmeaning voices strikes your ear and you discover that ninety-nine people out of a hundred have forgotten how to speak English. More than this, the English signs are no more, and on the billboards and before the business offices are marks that look as if a thousand ostriches fresh from a thousand ink barrels had been set to scratching new signs to take the places of the old. You pick up a book {10} or the morning paper, and the same thing has happened—pig tracks, chicken tracks, and double bowknots fantastically tied instead of English type—and everybody begins at the back of the book and reads toward him instead of reading the way you have grown used to!

And the buggies, carriages, and automobiles: what on earth has become of them? There's hardly a horse in sight, but dozens or scores of men with bare legs and odd clothes, each flying around pulling a light two-wheeled jinrikisha, a man or a woman seated in each man-drawn "buggy"; and there are dozens of other bare-legged men laboriously pulling heavy loads of vegetables, freight, and even lumber and giant telegraph poles! You jump into one of the rickshaws and forget your strange little Puck-like steed in the marvel of your surroundings till a voice from the shafts makes you feel like Balaam when the ass spoke to him!

By this time you begin to get a hazy idea as to how the people are dressed, and as nearly as you can make out, it is something like this:

Evidently all the inhabitants of an ancient Roman city, a modern American town, a half-dozen Hindoo villages, and several thousand seashore bathers have all thrown their clothes—(or the lack of them!)—into one tremendous pile, and everybody has rushed in pell-mell and put on the first thing, or the first two or three things, that came to hand. There is every conceivable type of clothing, but perhaps the larger number have wound up with something like a light bathing suit and a sort of gingham dressing-gown belted over it; and if one has less than this, why, then, as the Japanese say, "Shikata na gai" (All right; it can't be helped). In the shops and stores one passes a few men clad only in their own integrity and a loin-cloth, and both children and grown people dress with a hundred times more disregard of convention than the negroes in America.

Of shoes, there is an equally great variety as of clothing, {11} but the majority of men, women, and children (in muddy weather at least) have compromised on the "getas," a sort of wooden sole strapped on the foot, with wooden pieces put fore and aft the instep, these pieces throwing the foot and sole about three inches above ground. It looks almost as difficult to walk in them as to walk on stilts, but away the people go, young and old, and the muddy places marked by the strange footwear look as if the corrugated wheels of a hundred mowing-machines had passed along! In most cases the clatter of the "get as" is the loudest noise on the streets, for the Japanese are remarkably quiet: in Tokyo to-day I saw a thousand of them waiting to see the Empress, and an American crowd would literally have made more noise in a minute than they made in an hour.

On entering their houses, as we have already noticed, the people take off their getas, sandals, shoes or whatever outer footwear is used—for the very good reason that the people sit on the floor (on mats or on the floor itself), eat on the floor (very daintily, however), and sleep on the floor, so that to walk over the floor here with muddy feet would be the same as if an American should walk roughshod over his chairs, table and bed. Even in the Japanese department store I visited this morning cloth covers were put on my shoes, and this afternoon at the Ni-no Go Reiya Shinto temple I had to go in my stocking feet.

Then the babies—who ever saw as many babies to the square inch? About 10 per cent of the male population seems to be hauling other men, but 50 per cent, of the female population seems hardly enough to carry the wise and happy-looking little Jap babies—not in go-carts (a go-cart or a hired nurse is almost never seen), but on the back. And these little women who when standing are only about as tall as you are when sitting—they seem hardly more than children themselves, so that you recall Kipling's saying of Japan: "A four-foot child walks with a three-foot child, who is holding the hand {12} of a two-foot child, who carries on her back a one-foot child."

Boys in their teens are also seen with babies strapped on their backs in the same loose-fitting, sack-like baby-holders, and after work-time the father takes a turn at the same business. You are reminded of the negro who said to another: "'Fo Gawd, Bill, you's got the mos' chillun any nigger I ever seed. Why, I passed yo' house yistiddy mornin' at nine erclock and throwed a brick on top and hollered 'Fiah!' an' at five erclock in the evenin' nigger chillun was still runnin' out!" It seems sometimes as if such an incident, with Jap children substituted for negroes (I doubt if there is a negro here), might actually happen in Japan.

And those two men bowing to each other as they meet—are they rehearsing as Alphonse and Gaston for the comedy show to-night, or are they serious? No, they are serious, for yonder is another pair meeting in the same way, and yonder another couple separating with even more violent "convulsions of politeness"—and nobody laughing but yourself. No wonder the Japanese are strong: they only need to meet a few friends a day to get exercise enough to keep them in trim! Look again: those women meeting at the depot, for example (for there are familiar-looking street cars and less familiar-looking passenger cars amid all these strange surroundings). There is the woman with her hair combed straight back, which, I am told, means that she is a widow; one with an odd Japanese topknot, which means that she is married, and a younger one whose hair is arranged in the style of unmarried girls; and though they are evidently bosom friends, they do not embrace and kiss at meeting—to kiss in public would be shocking to the Japanese—and you can only guess the depth of their affection by the greater warmth and emphasis of their bows to one another.

{13}

This magnificent avenue, twenty-five miles in length, consists of trees planted by daimyos, or small lords, as a memorial to the great Japanese warrior and statesman, Iyeyasu. A spirit of simplicity and love of nature has produced a nobler monument than extravagance could possibly have done.

{14}

In the temple picture notice also how the limbs of the trees have been trained. Many fantastic effects are often produced in this way.

{12 continued}

They are trained in politeness from their youth up, are these Japanese; and it is perhaps the greatest charm of both young and old. I must have seen a full hundred thousand Japanese {15} by this time, and I do not recall one in the attitude of scolding or abuse, while authorities tell me that the Japanese language simply has no words to enable one to swear or curse. I was also interested to have the American Ambassador here tell me that in all his three years' stay in Japan, and with all the freedom with which a million children run about the streets and stores, he has never seen a man impatient with a child. At the Imperial University yesterday morning I noticed two college boys part with the same deep courtesy used by the older men, and the little five-year-old girl near Chuzenji the other day thanked me for my gift with the most graceful of Eastern salaams.

I shall not say that the excessive ceremoniousness of the men does not at times seem ludicrous, but when you come to your hotel dining-room, and the inexpressibly dainty little Japanese girls, moving almost noiselessly on their sandaled feet (no getas indoors) welcome each guest with smiling bows, happy, refined and graceful, a very different impression of Japanese courtesy comes over you. In America, unfortunately, the like courteous attention under such circumstances might be misinterpreted, but here you are only reminded of how a thousand years of courtesy and gentle manners have given the women of Japan—pretty though they are not, judged by our Western standards—an unsurpassed grace of manner and happiness of disposition together with Shakespeare's well-praised "voice, soft and low, an excellent thing in woman."

And here and everywhere, as in the old fable of the man with the overcoat, must not such sun-like gentleness be more powerful in compelling deference than all the stormy strength of the "new woman"?

Which reminds me that however much the social, political, and economic revolution of the last forty years may have changed the national character (and upon this point I shall not speak till later), it is certain that Old Japan and the Old South were distinguished for not a few characteristics {16} in common. For example, we are reminded of the South's ante-bellum civilization when we learn that in old Japan "the business of money-making was held in contempt by the superior classes," and of all forms of business, agriculture was held in highest esteem. Next to the nobility stood the Samurai, or soldier class, the social rank of all other persons then being as follows: (1) farmers, (2) artisans, (3) merchants. And farming was thus not only regarded as the most honorable of all occupations, but farmers in the early ages were privileged to wear swords, the emblem of rank next to the nobility. Below the farmers ranked the mechanic element, while as Lafcadio Hearn tells us:

"The commercial class (A kindo), including bankers, merchants, shopkeepers, and traders of all kinds, was the lowest officially recognized. The business of money-making was held in contempt by the superior classes; and all methods of profiting by the purchase and resale of the produce of labor were regarded as dishonorable. . . . There is a generally, in militant society, small respect for the common forms of labor. But in old Japan the occupation of the farmer and artisan were not despised; trade alone appears to have been considered degrading, and the distinction may have been partly a moral one."

I wonder if there is not really a great deal more than we have realized in what Hearn here suggests as to the soundness and essential "morality" of the Japanese plan of ranking farming and manufacturing above trade as occupations? Morally and economically considered, it is the men who actually produce wealth rather than those men who trade or barter in the products of other men's labor who deserve most honor. They serve the world best: The barterers are, in limited numbers, necessary and useful servants of those who do produce, but the strength of a state manifestly lies in the classes who are really creators of values.

Tokyo, Japan.

{17}

III

JAPANESE FARMING AND FARMER FOLK

I went yesterday to the Agricultural College of the Imperial University of Japan, situated at Komaba, near Tokyo, where I had an appointment with Director Matsui. My purpose was to get further information concerning the general condition of Japanese farmers and Japanese farming, but the biggest fact my researches brought out was not in regard to rice or barley or potatoes or taro, or any other field product of the Mikado's empire.

Rather it was a fact with regard to what is in every land the most important of all crops—the crop of boys and girls. And the big fact I discovered was simply this:

These brown Mongolian farm children, whose land we opened to civilization but fifty years ago, and whom we thought of but yesterday as backward "heathen"—they are getting, as a general proposition, just twice as much schooling as is furnished pupils in many of our American rural districts: their parents are providing, in their zeal for their children's welfare, just twice as good educational facilities as we are giving many of our white farm boys and girls—boys and girls who have in their veins the blood of a race which has carried the flag of human progress for a thousand years, and whom we are expecting to continue leaders in civilization and enlightenment.

In other words, so Doctor Matsui told me (and I went to-day to the Japanese National Department of Education to verify the fact), the Japanese farm boys and girls are getting ten months' schooling a year, while the farm boy or girl {18} in my own state is getting only five or six months—and when I was in a country school fifteen years ago, not nearly so much as that! Do you wonder that I avoided telling the Japanese educational officer just how our provision for farm boys and girls compared with Japan's? Also that I neglected to tell him how we compare in the matter of utilizing school advantages, when he showed me that of all the children between six and fourteen in all the empire of Japan the school attendance is 98 per cent.—98 out of every 100 children of "school age" attending school, and in several provinces 99 out of every 100! Thirty-five years ago the average school attendance in Japan was only 28, and in 1893 only 59, but by the time of the war with Russia it had passed 90, and since then has been climbing straight and steadily toward the amazing maximum itself, the official figures showing a gain of 1 per cent, a year—94 per cent., then 95, then 96, then 97, and now 98, and the leaders are now ambitious for 99 or 100, as they told me to-day.

When this officer of an "inferior race" showed me, furthermore, that Japan is so intent upon educating every boy and girl in her borders that she compels attendance on the public schools for eight years, I didn't tell him that in civilized America, in the great enlightened nation so long held up to him as a model, demagogues and others in many states on one pretext or another have defeated every effort for effective compulsory education laws, so that if a boy's parents are indifferent to his future, the state does not compel them to give him a fighting chance in life—for the state's own sake and for the boy's.

{19}

The upper picture shows a rice field in the foreground, tea alongside the buildings, and the graceful feathery bamboo in the background; also, an unusual sight on a Japanese farm, a group of cattle. The lower picture shows the work of transplanting rice.

{20}

Boys predominate in the upper picture, girls in the lower. A system of compulsory education is enforced in Japan, and 98 per cent, of the children of school age attend. Even the country schools run ten months in the year—longer than in a majority of our states.

{18 continued}

With these facts before me, as I have said, I did not make any vainglorious boasts of the great educational progress of our own states these last twenty years: However much progress we have made, these brown Japanese "heathen" have beaten us. While there is no official census on the question of illiteracy here, every Japanese man in his twenties must serve {21} two years in the army (unless he is in a normal school studying to be a teacher), and a record is made as to the literacy or illiteracy of each recruit. That is to say, there is a place where the fact of any recruit's inability to read would be recorded, but the Department of Education informed me to-day that the illiterate column is now absolutely blank.

There are no illiterates among Japan's rising generation.

More than this, we have to reflect that it is in their poverty that the Japanese are thus doing more than we are doing in our plenty. We waste more in a year than they make. Even with a hundred acres of land the American farmer is likely to consider himself poor, but when I asked my Japanese guide the other day if two cho (five acres) would be an average sized farm here he said: "No, not an average; such a man would be regarded as a middle-class farmer—a rather large farmer." And the figures which I have just obtained in a call on the national Department of Agriculture and Commerce more than justify the reply.

Forty-six farmers out of every 100 in Japan own less than one and one quarter acres of land; 26 more out of every 100 own less than two and one half acres, and only one man in a hundred owns as much as twenty-five acres. (In the matter of cultivation also I find that 70 per cent, cultivate less than two and one half acres, and nearly half are tenants.)

This year the situation is even worse than usual, for disastrous floods have reduced the rice crop, which represents one half Japan's crop values, 20 per cent, below last year's figures, and many people will suffer.

Ordinarily, however, these little handkerchief-sized farms yield amazingly. It has been shown by Prof. F. H. King that the fields of Japan are cultivated so intensively, fertilized so painstakingly, and kept so continuously producing some crop, that they feed 2277 people to the square mile—21,321 square miles of cultivated fields in the main islands supporting a population of 48,542,376. If the tilled fields of Iowa, for {22} example, supported an equal number of people per square mile, the population so supported would be over 100,000,000. That state alone could feed the entire population of the United States and then have an excess product left for export to other countries! If North Carolina did as well with her cultivated land she would support 30,000,000 people, and if Mississippi's 11,875 square miles of land under cultivation supported each 2277 persons, then 27,041,375 people, or thirteen times the present population of the state, could live off their produce!

And yet these Japanese lands have been in cultivation for unnumbered centuries. Some of them may have been cleared when King Herod trembled from his dream of a new-born rival in Judea, and certainly "the glory that was Greece and the grandeur that was Rome" had not faded from the earth when some of these fields began their age-long ministry to human need. And they have been kept fertile simply by each farmer putting back on the ground every ounce of fertility taken from it, for commercial fertilizers were absolutely unknown until our own generation.

Of course, with a population so dense and with each man cultivating an 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.

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 London Times summing 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."

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II

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.

III

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 Kobe Chronicle quotes Mr. Kudota, of the Sanitary Bureau, as saying that "most of the women workers are compelled to leave the factories on account of their 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.

IV

Higher still, and higher far than anything the nation has ever yet known, must go the cost of living under the new tariff law. From a British textile representative I learned the other day that a grade of English woollens largely used by the 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

Old Tariff New Tariff

Printed goods 3 22

White lawns 10 47

Shirtings 10 39

Cotton Italians 3 35

Poplins 8 19

Brocades 10 22

Neither a nation nor an individual can lift itself by its bootstraps. The majority of the thoughtful people in the empire seem to me to realize even now that through the new tariff 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 Kobe Chronicle declares 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 Tokyo Keizai declares 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.

V

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.

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VI

BUDDHISM, 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.