As opportunity offered and means were available, following the advice of friends, four small adjacent lots were purchased, one of which we were almost forced to secure for self-protection, because of the evil character of the buildings upon it. We now own altogether about two acres of land on the north side of the beautiful Castle Hill, around which Matsuyama is built. Here have been erected at different times six buildings (three of them two-storied), for residential, dormitory, chapel, night school, weaving, hospital, bath, and other purposes. We have space for a playground, of which the girls joyously avail themselves, after returning from twelve hours of confinement in the dust and clatter of machinery. The garden, too, provides fresh vegetables of an assured character at a minimum of expense, adding much to the variety and the wholesomeness of the diet. The present value of the property is more than its original cost, for land and buildings are constantly rising in price, as is the case in other parts of the country.
The city educational authorities in 1906 asked Mr. Omoto to open his night school to the poor of the district. For this he had to have a regular school license from the National Bureau of Education at Tokyo. This was to be a Christian school—the only license of exactly that kind in the empire, he was told.
Industrial newspapers have been noticing the Home and its work for some time.[11] During the past five years the favorable attitude of local and national government officials has been particularly pronounced. Government inspectors have repeatedly been sent from the Prefectural Office and occasionally even from Tokyo to visit the Home. One such expressed himself as amazed at the excellent mental work done by the girls, in view of the fact that all their study takes place after twelve hours of toil. Nothing but good food, sufficient sleep, and a wholesome and happy home life could account for their splendid health and superior school work. One man remarked that the girls in the Home do better work than pupils in the same grade in public schools.
Even so early as the autumn of 1906 the Home Department of the central government sent down special instructions to the prefectural office in Matsuyama to investigate our work, with the result that of nine benevolent institutions throughout Japan selected for commendation, ours was the one most carefully described and unqualifiedly praised. A recent government pamphlet concerning industrial problems makes special reference, covering two pages, to the work of the Home. Thus has a small institution begun to serve as a model for the country.
The good health of the girls in our Home has been in strong contrast with the health of those in other boarding-houses, even in the best dormitories of the best factories in other cities.
Statistics recently compiled by the government show that the average death-rate among factory operatives throughout the country is extraordinarily high. The highest, fifty per cent. on account of an epidemic, was reported from a certain factory owned and managed boarding-house in Niigata prefecture. Not one girl has ever died in our Home. Of the 301 girls who had lived in our Home by 1911, only eight, all told, died.
In 1912 the Home passed through a crisis that threatened to destroy it. Late in 1911 the one factory in Matsuyama, where all the girls worked, was sold out to parties living in Osaka. A new manager was sent down who introduced many drastic changes. The change most affecting us was the stopping of the night work and the lengthening of day work to fourteen hours: namely, from 6 a.m. till 8 p.m.
The girls in the Home soon became dissatisfied, and not many months passed before all had left the factory. Mr. Omoto was urged by the manager to find and bring in new girls. He refused however on the ground that he could not ask anybody to work such brutally long hours.
Had it not been for a little weaving department with which we had already been experimenting, the Home would have been compelled to close. More looms were secured and those girls who wished to remain with us were given opportunity for work. Mr. Omoto's attention was at that time directed to the condition of the weaving girls in the scores and even hundreds of little establishments in the city and its suburbs. He soon found that an educational, economic, moral, and religious condition existed among them not unlike that which he had found among the factory girls of Matsuyama a dozen years before. The weaving establishments are, as a rule, small private affairs, usually having less than ten girls each, and are therefore wholly outside of the supervision of the government. The treatment of workers and the hours of labor are entirely settled by the individual owners.