Where Half The World Is Waking Up Part 2

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 j.a.panese 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 j.a.panese 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 j.a.panese! Many of the farmers here are too poor even to eat a good quality of rice. Consequently j.a.pan 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 j.a.panese weeding rice with the kama--a tool much like an old-fas.h.i.+oned sickle except that the blade is straight: the right hand quickly cut the roots of the weed or gra.s.s plant and the left hand as quickly pulled it up. With the same sickle-like kamas about thirty other j.a.panese 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 j.a.pan 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 j.a.panese 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 Miyanos.h.i.+ta 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 j.a.pan, 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 thres.h.i.+ng-floor) than a similar level piece adjoining. While the levelling is helpful in any case for the preservation of fertility and the prevention of was.h.i.+ng, 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 j.a.panese 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 j.a.pan, 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 thres.h.i.+ng, 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 j.a.panese 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 j.a.panese 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 pa.s.ses 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.

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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 fas.h.i.+on 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 j.a.panese 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 j.a.pan 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 j.a.pan 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 ill.u.s.tration of the affection of the people for their home farms. "The j.a.panese," 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 j.a.panese 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 a.s.sociations, 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 s.h.i.+p 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 j.a.panese 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, j.a.pan.

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IV

"WELFARE WORK" IN j.a.pANESE FACTORIES

The obvious truth is that the agricultural population of j.a.pan 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 j.a.pan. Already wages, astonis.h.i.+ngly 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, j.a.pan 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. j.a.pan now follows suit. For a long time the government has paid enormous subsidies to s.h.i.+pbuilding and manufacturing corporations, and now a high tariff has been enacted, which will still further increase the cost of living for the agricultural cla.s.ses, 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 s.h.i.+hotsu of the _Kok.u.min s.h.i.+mbun_ 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 Ok.u.ma, one of the empire's ablest men, once Minister of Agriculture, has also pointed out how injuriously the new law will affect the ma.s.ses 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 a.s.set, are merely another form of taxation paid by the people." And the ma.s.ses in j.a.pan, 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 j.a.panese 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 j.a.pan 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 j.a.panese 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 j.a.pan, 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, a.s.sisted 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 j.a.pan 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 j.a.pan 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 j.a.pan 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 cla.s.s--that under such conditions, these Buddhist j.a.panese 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 Ma.s.sachusetts.

Tokyo, j.a.pan.

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V