Home Life in Tokyo

by Jukichi Inouye

The truth is that young women have discovered that there is a great demand for their services elsewhere, as at cotton mills, tobacco and other factories, and for house-industries; and there is in consequence a dearth of servants, let alone good ones. Still, many prefer domestic service, because they have not to work with mechanical regularity as at factories, and they are on that account content with lower wages. For hard as she is worked and though she is without a young man to console her on Sunday for the week’s drudgery, her life is not altogether an unhappy one. There is at least variety in it. The tradesmen’s boys come to the kitchen for orders and most people of the artisan and trading classes go in and out by the kitchen. They have therefore plenty of chance company, The tradesmen’s boys take it easy and linger in kitchens which find favour with them. When visitors come and are entertained in the parlour, their jinrikisha-men are given a meal in the kitchen. Still another chance of gossip is afforded where a common well is used by two or more families. Here they congregate and discuss the affairs of their respective households, tearing to pieces the character of one mistress and extolling another to the skies. The “well-side council,” as it is called, is the great market for scandals of all sorts, though it would not be fair to attribute its notoriety entirely to the servants’ love of gossip, for the worst scandal-mongers in such cases are the wives of poorer tradesmen and artisans who bring their washings to the common well.

But the servants are on the whole good-natured, thoughtless, and careless of the morrow. They are satisfied if they are well fed; they are merry and grow fat. It is comparatively rare to find a black sheep among them. Such a woman usually commits petty thefts; she dares not steal anything of value, for if she takes it to the pawnbroker, she is sure to be discovered as he is completely under the surveillance of the police who can look over the pawn-accounts and seize any article that they may suspect to have been purloined. The woman may take the stolen article to an accomplice; but sooner or later, it finds its way to the pawnbroker’s, or if it is an article of clothing, to the second-hand clothes-dealer’s, who is similarly under police control, and so the crime is discovered. She steals most commonly stray coins, or handfuls of rice or other food which can be pilfered without much risk of detection. A woman whose mother or husband is in needy circumstances and comes often to call her out on mysterious business is most likely to be guilty of such dishonest practices.

Servants are recruited from various quarters. They may be daughters of poor artisans or tradesmen in Tokyo, of peasants in the country, or of fishermen on the coasts. They naturally come, many of them, to ease the straitened means of their families and to save up enough to buy clothes to take with them when they marry. Others come from the country to see the town and learn its manners, which they do effectually, though perhaps not exactly according to their original intention. Such girls are of the better class of peasants; for the majority of peasants are kept pretty busy with the cultivation of their rice-paddies, and in spring-time whole families are engaged knee-deep in mud in planting rice, while they are equally busy at harvest-time, so that a girl at home does enough work to pay for her maintenance. It is therefore more often the girl’s ambition to see Tokyo and save up something than family necessity that prompts the country lass to seek service. Girls living in Tokyo are in a different position. Here girls in a large family can do little to earn their keep by helping their mother, unless they are engaged in some house-industry which calls for the whole energy of the family. If they have a small shop or an eating-house, one or at most two may be useful at home; while among artisans and labourers an extra girl means only one mouth more to feed, and accordingly she is sent out to service. But even in Tokyo it is not always poverty that supplies the vast army of domestic servants. It may be irksomeness on the girl’s part of parental authority which is not unfrequently exercised with severity, or fear on the parents’ part that the child would be spoilt under their roof and rendered unfit to bear the trials and hardships which must press on the poor man’s wife with a troop of children at her heels. In the latter case she is sent out among strangers to be buffeted and knocked into shape. Sometimes, again, the girl prefers absolute strangers’ society to the sway and, too often, ill-treatment of a stepfather or stepmother; or, being an orphan, she is unwilling to be a burden to a near relative who would as a matter of duty offer to take her in. Again, a young woman who has lost her husband by death or divorce would seek service from a desire in the former case to remain faithful to his memory, which would otherwise be difficult if she has no means of support, and in the latter from disgust of conjugal life or to look for another opportunity of trying her luck in matrimony. Or, she may still be married but has, through inability to make both ends meet, to break up her household and wait in domestic service while her husband knocks about, until fortune smiles upon them when they will keep house again. Finally, even fairly well-to-do tradesmen send their daughters sometimes to a family, noble, wealthy, or noted for its strict management, to learn in service deportment and etiquette. Thus, the domestic servant enters service from diverse motives.

A servant is sometimes engaged on the recommendation of an acquaintance, which is a good plan if she proves satisfactory. But if she does not, her employer is placed in an awkward position; he hesitates to dismiss her as he would have to account for her discharge to that acquaintance, to whom he is naturally unwilling to speak ill of her, especially if he is related to the girl or intimate with her family. Indeed, friendships have been brought to an abrupt termination by the misconduct of a girl so engaged. Most people, therefore, prefer to engage the servant through a register-office, for there are many such offices in Tokyo as they do not require any capital to start. Word is sent to the register-office, and the woman, for it is generally a woman who runs it, brings a girl who is likely to suit the service required. The girl stays one night; and if neither she nor the mistress takes to the other, the woman brings another in her place, and yet another, until a suitable person is found, Then the woman draws up the contract of service, usually for six months, fixing the girl’s wages. For this she receives a small fee from both parties. If, at the end of six months, the girl elects to stay on, the woman receives her fees again for the renewal of the contract; but apparently, for some of these register-offices a sixmonth is too long a time to wait, for they often make tempting offers to the servant and try to persuade her to throw up her situation. And if she follows the advice by making to her mistress some plausible excuse for the breach of contract, she is introduced into another family, but finds her position in no way improved and herself poorer by the commission she has again paid the woman. The register-office is naturally responsible for the servant’s conduct; but if she is found dishonest and discharged, the office, on being taken to task for bringing such a woman, wriggles out of its responsibility by an eloquent flow of virtuous indignation and profuse apologies to the family, and if called upon to indemnify any loss or damage, asks for time to make necessary inquiries and prolongs the delay until the matter is forgotten or at least given up as hopeless.

COOKING RICE.

Though the number of servants naturally varies with the size, wealth, and social standing of their employer’s household, there are usually three in a well-to-do middle-class family. Of these the most important is the cook. In wealthy families there are cuisiniers for the preparation of the dishes, in which case the cook proper confines herself to boiling rice and keeping the kitchen tidy; indeed, the boiling of rice is in any case the cook’s principal function, as is implied by her Japanese designation, which means “rice-boiler”; but in middle-class families she undertakes general cookery as well. If, moreover, she is the only servant in the house, she sweeps the rooms, scrubs the verandahs, lays and puts away the beds, sets the meal-trays, washes the clothes, and does many other things which are of daily necessity in a Japanese household. Her mistress, however, naturally helps the maid-of-all-work. But if there is an upper servant, the cook boils rice and prepares meals, scrubs the wooden flooring of the kitchen, washes the meal-trays, bowls, and crockery, and helps in washing clothes. The tea-pots and tea-cups, being in constant requisition, have to be often washed in the course of the day. The cook gets up early as the rice has to be boiled for breakfast, and if late hours are kept in the family, she is sent to bed before the others; but as soon as the day’s work is over, she is generally found nodding over the brazier or snoring aloud stretched out on the mats. As the cook’s duties are of the simplest kind, girls fresh from the country become “rice-boilers” and are noted for their dull wits and rough manners.

The housemaid’s chief duty is to keep the rooms tidy. She is called in Japanese the “middle-worker,” as she stands midway between the cook and the lady’s maid. She dusts the paper sliding-doors, shelves, and other woodwork, sweeps the mats, and scrubs the woodwork, especially the grooves of the sliding-doors, the shelves, the wooden edges of the alcoves, the pillars, and the verandahs. She lays the beds every night, takes them up in the morning, and puts them into the closets. She has plenty of work in keeping the rooms tidy, above all the sitting-room where almost everything, except the brazier and tea-shelf, has to be cleared immediately it is done with. Besides, the shelves have such a knack of getting untidy as all sorts of things are for the moment put on them. If there are children in the family, she looks after them, which is no light task as they roam all over the house and after their nature scatter things about wherever they go. She also does a great deal of needlework; she mends the clothes and does most of the work where skill or delicacy is not required. Washing, too, is no child’s play in a large family.

THE HOUSEMAID AT WORK.