The telephone service is not so good. While it is all right as far as it goes, the system is not extended as rapidly as the demand requires. In Tokyo, for instance, those who want to install telephones have to wait until someone discontinues his 'phone or is willing to sell it, and a bonus is often demanded. If the local telephones were owned by the city and only the interurban lines managed by the imperial government, the service would respond more quickly to the needs of the community.
The Japanese government also owns and operates a part of the railroad system, and in doing so employs nothing but native help. I traveled on both the government and private lines and could not see that they differed materially so far as efficiency was concerned.
MR. OKURA, A SUCCESSFUL JAPANESE BUSINESS MAN.
The first-class fare is about four cents per mile (in our money) the second-class about two cents and the third-class (nearly all the travel is third-class) about one cent. A reduction of twenty per cent is made on return tickets, a reduction of from twenty to thirty per cent on commutation tickets, and a reduction of from forty-five to eighty per cent on season tickets for students. This reduction to students might be imitated to advantage in our country. The government road is all, or nearly all, double track and has the latest safeguards for the protection of passengers at depots. The Japanese are much given to meeting friends when they arrive and escorting them to the train when they leave, and this custom has led to the sale of platform tickets for one cent (in our money).
Japan has two educational problems: First, the increase in the percentage of those going from the primary to the middle schools; and, second, the cultivation of an ideal which will connect a respect for manual labor with intellectual advancement. To-day a large majority of her people work with their hands and at labor which forbids the wearing of good clothes. It is probable that the education of the masses will show itself to some extent in improved methods and in the more extensive use of animals and machinery, but there must remain a large amount of work which requires daily contact with the soil. The rice crop grows in the mud and cannot be harvested by machinery; the fields, too, are so small that they cannot well be cultivated with the aid of animals. The farmers' boys and girls are now going to school and gradually adopting the European dress. Will they be content to return to the paddy fields when they have finished their education? Some of the young men pull 'rikishas in the daytime in order to earn money to attend school at night. Will their learning make them unwilling to do hard work? Or will they substitute the cab for the 'rikisha?
Japan faces the educational problem that confronts the civilized world, viz., how to put behind a trained mind an ideal which will make the educated citizen anxious to do service rather than to be waited upon. Tolstoy's solution of the problem is "bread labor," that is, physical toil sufficient to produce what one eats. This he believes will teach respect for labor and by dignifying it unite all parts of society in sympathetic co-operation. Has any better solution been proposed?
With a broader educational foundation Japan will find it necessary to extend the suffrage. At present the right to vote is determined by a strict property qualification, but there is already an urgent demand for the reduction of the tax qualification, and it will not be long before a large addition will be made to the voting population.
The most serious national problem with which Japan has to deal is that imposed upon her by the attempt to extend the sphere of her political influence to Formosa on the southwest and Korea on the northwest. The people of Formosa do not welcome Japanese sovereignty and an army of some six or seven thousand is kept on that island to support Japanese authority.