Working Women of Japan

by Sidney Lewis Gulick

As a rule the girls are apprenticed for from two to three years immediately on leaving the primary school, at an age therefore of twelve or thirteen. They barely earn their living, although they work from daybreak to ten or eleven at night, and in some establishments even till midnight—from fifteen to eighteen hours a day! There are no night shifts and rare holidays on occasional festivals. The hygienic and moral conditions are about as bad as can be. It is estimated that one half of the girls are ruined before the close of their apprenticeship. Our Home is now deliberately attacking the new problem, which in many respects is more difficult than was the old one. We have put up two small buildings on our own grounds, enabling us to have thirty looms to give opportunity for work to thirty girls.

The uniform quality of the cloth produced by our girls, the central portions of each piece equaling the ends in quality, shows unflagging moral attention, without effort to rush the work and stint the material; this has already won such approval from merchants that the "Sympathy Home" brand can be sold for a little more than other brands, and Mr. Omoto is assured that there is no limit to the amount which could be marketed.

An owner of several weaving establishments has become so impressed with the quality of the work and the character developed in our girls that he asked Mr. Omoto if he would not take charge of a hundred of his weaving girls. This new departure is especially promising, for we have complete supervision of the girls throughout the entire twenty-four hours. The girls, moreover, are already remaining in our Home as a rule much longer than they used to when getting work in the spinning factory.

As successive chapters of this book have shown, no more urgent problem faces New Japan than that of the moral development of her workers. This is particularly true of the hundreds of thousands of girls in the larger and smaller factories and industrial establishments. The wretched physical, economic, social, and moral conditions under which the majority of these girls lived and worked at the time when our Home was started are not easily described.

Many of the factory authorities[12] are neither ignorant nor unmindful of the situation, and are striving to remedy it. The government also has enacted laws not a few. But laws and official actions alone provide no adequate solution of the serious problems raised by the extraordinary industrial and social transformations sweeping over Japan. A new spirit must be evoked, both on the part of capital and labor, and new moral ideals and relations established. This cannot be done by laws alone. Only love and contagious personal example are sufficient for the needs.

[12] ] It is not to be inferred from the statements in this book that the political leaders and the organizers of industrial Japan have been dependent on our Home for ideas and ideals in regard to the problems raised by modern industry. Many of those leaders are men of cosmopolitan education and are well versed in the best and most recent of literature of the West on these matters. It is true, however, that our Home has been an important concrete experiment affording in Japan valuable suggestions and stimulus.

Our Home was designed to meet just such a situation and has to a remarkable degree, we think, succeeded. It has provided not only sufficient fresh air, nourishing food, adequate bedding, clean rooms, and wholesome recreation, but also moral and religious instruction, and some education. The girls in our Home have enjoyed conspicuously better health and have done better work and earned and sent to their parents more money than those of the other boarding-houses of Matsuyama. But better than these have been the educational, moral, and religious results. Their womanhood has been raised. They have been better fitted for life's duties and for motherhood than they would have been without the training which has been given them.

Moreover, the results of the Home have been such as to break down opposition. The good-will and cooperation of the factory officials were won. Factories in other parts of the country also have recognized our Home as presenting a splendid ideal which, in a measure, many of them are already following. The local and the central governments, as already shown, have repeatedly sent officials to inspect us, and in their reports have not only praised us, but have described our Home in detail, saying that we have solved the difficult problem of how to care for factory hands.

Through the Home we are reaching the lowest strata of the working classes of Japan, and are providing them with ideals, motives, and education, and in a way, too, which does not tend to pauperize them, for each girl pays as board a sum sufficient to cover actual living expenses. It is also exerting an influence on the townsfolk. The attitude of the people toward Christianity has undergone a marked change. Villages in the interior likewise have altered their attitude on seeing how their daughters, graduates of our Home, have improved both in intelligence and character, in marked contrast to those who have been in other boarding-houses. All in all, Mr. Omoto has attained remarkable success. He is absorbed, heart and soul, in his work of bettering the moral and religious conditions of the working girls of Japan, and is a man continuously growing in spiritual life, Christian character, and knowledge of men. I have never known a man more thoroughly converted or more enthusiastic in his chosen field of work. The Omoto of to-day is a different person from the reformed debauchee of thirteen years ago, who began this service for factory girls as the outcome of his sincere question, "Lord, what wilt thou have me to do?" His family have become possessed with the idea of social service, and his five children are being brought up in this atmosphere and in the fear of the Lord.

Thus has the Matsuyama Working Girls' Home survived many threatening vicissitudes, attained conspicuous successes, and is now embarked on a new line of endeavor. May it exceed in the future its successes of the past and make still more substantial contributions to the uplift of the working women of Japan!