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