For the first time in Japan women began to be employed. They are to be found in large numbers in the factories near Osaka (which is called the Chicago of Japan) and Kobe, as well as in the districts near Tokyo. Most of these women are peasants from the provincial sections who serve on three-year contracts. Children are still employed, although the Government does not allow them to go to work under twelve years of age.
Wages in all branches of industry are still very low, and the cost of living is rising. But living conditions, even at their worst, are much better than with us among corresponding classes. Weavers, dyers, and spinners receive from ten to twenty cents a day, while a streetcar conductor gets five or six dollars a month.
The factory owners keep their employees in compounds, where they provide some sort of shelter free and charge a nominal amount for meals. In the older type of factory there is often crowding and a low standard of living, but in the more modern and socialistic ones great attention is paid to the worker's needs, physical, mental and moral.
There is a fine factory in Hyogo from which many of our mills might well take pattern. Besides having beautiful recreation and dormitory gardens, there are rows of pretty, two-storied houses with tiny gardens in front of each. The owners also furnish a theatre for the use of their employees, a coöperative shop, a spacious hospital, and schools and kindergartens for the children.
Japan has more than seventy cotton mills in operation, and can manufacture cloth as cheaply as any of its rivals. The home demand is large, since the lower classes wear only cotton the year round. Cotton towels, printed in blue and white, have become so popular in America during the last year or two that the export trade in them has increased enormously.
Four years ago a boy of eighteen, Torakichi Inouye, succeeded to the hereditary management of a large towel firm in Tokyo. He realized that foreigners seemed much attracted by the pretty designs, and were buying them in surprising quantities at the shops where they were for sale. So he began trying them on the American markets, with the success that we have seen. To-day his factory is making two hundred thousand towels a day, and in ten months shipped over 175,000,000 pieces. He originated the idea of printing designs that could be combined into table-covers, bedspreads, etc. The patterns for the towels are cut in paper, like a stencil, and are folded in between many alternate layers of the cloth. The indigo-blue dye is then forced through by means of an air-pump.
Instead of importing all their machinery, as formerly, the Japanese are now beginning to manufacture it for themselves. They get the foreigners to come and teach them how to build steamships and locomotives, and as soon as they have learned whatever they wish to know they put their own countrymen in charge of the work. Although at one time there were many foreign engineers in different parts of the Empire, every year finds fewer of them filling important positions. This is true in every branch of industry.
Inventive genius is being cultivated, too, for clever people are not content simply to imitate. A system of wireless quite different from that generally in use is said to have been perfected for the navy. Wireless telephones are used over short distances, and are being rapidly improved and extended. Quite an advance has been made this last year in aviation also. Experts in both army and navy are making good records.
In spite of many difficulties several thousand miles of railway have been built during the last forty years. Engineers often find it necessary not only to tunnel through mountains, but under rivers the beds of which are shifting. To make matters even more interesting, there are typhoons, earthquakes, and torrents of rain which end in floods. Notwithstanding the cost of building and maintaining the roads under such conditions, railway travel is cheaper than with us or in Europe. First class costs less than third in an English train.
For the wherewithal to feed her people, Japan depends largely upon her native farmers. In spite of their poverty these are of a higher class socially than in most Western countries. The samurai and daimyo made much of agriculture, ranking it above trade. The Government to-day continues to do all that it can to aid and encourage farming. Experiment stations have been established, and various coöperative societies formed for the use of the farmers, who also have a special bank of their own. Prices are rising, and, on the whole, the prospects are good, although the nature of the land is against any great advance. The surface of the country is so mountainous that only about one-seventh can be cultivated, and that is not especially fertile. Sixty per cent. of the population is agricultural.