II. THE INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION

Industrialization—Factories—Wages—Strikes—Poverty—The Japanese point of view

Meanwhile, in the course of half a century, Japan had changed every aspect of its life. The peasant, though poor, was free; he could own a modest parcel of land by paying an annual tax or rental to the state; and no lord could hinder him if he chose to leave the fields and seek his fortune in the cities. For there were great cities now along the coast: Tokyo (i.e., the “Eastern Capital”), with its royal and aristocratic palaces, its spacious parks and crowded baths, and a population second only to that of London and New York; Osaka, once a fishing village and a castle, now a dark abyss of hovels, factories and skyscrapers, the center of the industries of Japan; and Yokohama and Kobe, from whose gigantic wharves, equipped with every modern mechanism, those industries despatched to a thousand ports the second largest merchant marine in the world.*

The leap from feudalism to capitalism was eased by an unprecedented use of every aid. Foreign experts were brought in, and Japanese assistants obeyed their instructions eagerly; within fifteen years the clever learners had made such progress that the foreign specialists were paid off and courteously sent home. Following the lead of Germany the Government took over posts, railroads, telegraphs and telephones; but at the same time it made generous loans to private industries, and protected them with high tariffs from the competition of factories abroad. The indemnity paid by the Chinese after the war of 1894 financed and stimulated the industrialization of Japan precisely as the French indemnity of 1871 had accelerated the industrialization of Germany. Japan, like the Germany of a generation before, was able to begin with modern equipment and feudal discipline, while their long-established competitors struggled with obsolescent machinery and rebellious workingmen. Power was cheap in Japan, and wages were low; laborers were loyally submissive to their chiefs; factory laws came late, and were leniently enforced.¹² In 1933 the new Osaka spindles needed one girl for twenty-five machines; the old Lancashire spindles required one man for six.¹³

The number of factories doubled from 1908 to 1918, and again from 1918 to 1924; by 1931 they had increased by fifty per cent more,¹⁴ while industry in the West plumbed the depths of depression. In 1933 Japan took first place as an exporter of textile products, sending out two of the five-and-a-half billion yards of cotton goods consumed in that year by the world.¹⁵ By abandoning the gold standard in 1931, and allowing the yen to fall to forty per cent of its former value in international exchange, Japan increased her foreign sales fifty per cent from 1932 to 1933.¹⁶ Domestic as well as foreign commerce flourished, and great merchant families, like the Mitsui and the Mitsubishi, amassed such fortunes that the military joined the wage-earning classes in meditating governmental absorption or control of industry and trade.†

While the growth of commerce generated a new and prosperous middle class, the manual workers bore the brunt of the low production costs through which Japan undersold her competitors in the markets of the world. The average wage of the men in 1931 was $1.17 a day; of the women, 48 cents a day; 51 per cent of the industrial workers were women, and twelve per cent were under sixteen years of age.¹⁹* Strikes were frequent and communism was growing when the war spirit of 1931 turned the nation to patriotic cooperation and conformity; “dangerous thoughts” were made illegal, and labor unions, never strong in Japan, were subjected to severe restrictions.²⁰ Great slums developed in Osaka, Kobe and Tokyo; in those of Tokyo a family of five occupied an average room space of from eight to ten feet square—a trifle more than the area covered by a double bed; in those of Kobe twenty thousand paupers, criminals, defectives and prostitutes lived in such filth that each year epidemics decimated them, and infant mortality rose to four times its average for the remainder of Japan.²¹ Communists like Katayama and Christian Socialists like Kagawa fought violently or peaceably against these conditions, until at last the Government undertook the greatest slum-clearing project in history.

A generation ago Lafcadio Hearn expressed a bitter judgment upon the modern regime in Japan:

Under the new order of things forms of social misery never before known in the history of the race are being developed. Some idea of this misery may be obtained from the fact that the number of poor people in Tokyo unable to pay their residence tax is upward of 50,000; yet the amount of the tax is only about twenty sen, or ten cents in American money. Prior to the accumulation of wealth in the hands of the minority there was never any such want in any part of Japan—except, of course, as a temporary consequence of war.²²

The “accumulation of wealth in the hands of the minority” is, no doubt, a universal and apparently unfailing concomitant of civilization. Japanese employers believe that the wages which they pay are not too low in relation to the comparative inefficiency of Japanese labor, and the low cost of living in Japan.²³ Low wages, thinks Japan, are necessary for low costs; low costs are necessary for the capture of foreign markets; foreign markets are necessary for an industry dependent upon imported fuels and minerals; industry is necessary for the support of a growing population in islands only twelve per cent of whose soil permits cultivation; and industry is necessary to that wealth and armament without which Japan could not defend herself against the rapacious West.