Where Half The World Is Waking Up
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Title: Where Half The World Is Waking Up
Author: Clarence Hamilton Poe
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Most recently updated: January 5, 2021
Language: English
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[Transcriber's note:
Page numbers are enclosed in curly braces, e.g. {99}. They are
located where page breaks occurred in the original book. Paragraphs
are not broken.
When a paragraph flows around illustrations the "next" page
immediately preceding or following the illustrations jumps to
account for the pages occupied by the illustrations. The location of
the paragraph following the illustration group is indicated as
{52 continued}. The material following {10}, up to the next {}, is on
page 10, even if the next page number is not 11.
Italic are enclosed in underscores: _this is italicized_.
End Transcriber's note]
WHERE HALF THE WORLD IS WAKING UP
[Illustration: COUNT SHIGE-NOBU OKUMA OF JAPAN]
(From a photograph and autograph given the author)
Count Okuma, one of the Genro or Elder Statesmen of Japan and
ex-Premier of the Empire, is an opponent of his country's high
protective tariff and an earnest advocate of international
arbitration.
WHERE HALF THE WORLD IS WAKING UP
THE OLD AND THE NEW IN JAPAN, CHINA, THE
PHILIPPINES, AND INDIA, REPORTED
WITH ESPECIAL REFERENCE TO
AMERICAN CONDITIONS
BY
CLARENCE POE
Author of "A Southerner in Europe," "Cotton: Its Cultivation and
Manufacture," Editor "The Progressive Farmer," Sec'y North Carolina
Historical Association, etc., etc.
Garden City New York
DOUBLEDAY, PAGE & COMPANY
1911
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED, INCLUDING THAT OF TRANSLATION INTO FOREIGN
LANGUAGES, INCLUDING THE SCANDINAVIAN
COPYRIGHT, 1911, BY CLARENCE POE
THE COUNTRY LIFE PRESS
GARDEN CITY, N. Y.
TO
THE RIGHT HONORABLE JAMES BRYCE
IN WHOM ACHIEVEMENT, CHARACTER AND PERSONAL CHARM MEET IN RARE
SYMMETRY; WHO HAS WON THE WISDOM OF AGE WITHOUT LOSING THE DEW OP
YOUTH; AND WHOSE GENEROUS FRIENDSHIP HAD MADE ME HIS DEBTOR BEFORE IT
AIDED ME ANEW IN PLANNING AND EXECUTING MY ORIENTAL TOUR
{vii}
PREFACE
"The human race, to which so many of my readers belong," as Mr.
Gilbert Chesterton begins one of his books by saying, has half its
members in Asia. That Americans should know something about so
considerable a portion of our human race is manifestly worth while.
And really to know them at all we must know them as they are to-day.
Vast changes are in progress, and even as I write this, the revolution
in China, foreshadowed in the chapters written by me from that
country, is remaking the political life of earth's oldest empire. From
Japan to India there is industrial, educational, political ferment.
The old order changes, yielding place to the new.
"Where Half the World is Waking Up" is not inappropriate therefore as
the title of the book now offered to the public. The reader will
kindly observe here that I have written of where half the world is
waking up and not merely of the waking-up itself. My purpose has been
to set forth the old and the new in due proportion; to present the
play of new forces against and upon the ancient, the amazingly
ancient, forces that have dominated whole races for centuries. In most
places, in fact, the ancient force is still clearly the dominant one.
Observe, too, therefore, that I have written not of where half the
world has waked up, but only of where it is waking up. The significant
thing is that the waking is really taking place at all, and of this
there can be no doubt.
It was, in short, with the hope of securing for myself and presenting
to others a photograph of the Orient as it is to-day that I made my
long trip through Japan, Korea, Manchuria, {viii} China, the
Philippines, and India during the past year. It was not a pleasure
trip nor yet a hurried "seaport trip." I travelled either entirely
across or well into the interior of each country visited, and all my
time was given to study and research to fit me for the preparation of
these articles.
That despite of the care exercised the book contains some errors, is
doubtless true. The sources of information in the Orient are not
always easy to find, nor always in accord after one finds them.
Consider, for example, the population of Manchuria: it seems a simple
enough matter, yet it required the help of consuls of two or three
nations to enable me to sift out the truth from the conflicting
representations of several writers and so-called authorities.
For my part I can only claim a laborious and painstaking effort to get
the facts. Letters of introduction to eminent Englishmen kindly
furnished me by Ambassador Bryce opened the doors of British
officialdom for me, and the friendship of Mr. Roosevelt and letters
from Mr. Bryan and our Department of State proved helpful in other
ways. I thus had the good fortune not only to get the ready fraternal
assistance of my brother newspaper men (of all races) everywhere, and
the help of English, German, and American consuls, but I was aided by
some of the most eminent authorities in each country visited--in
China, by H. E. Tang Shao-yi, Wu Ting Fang, Sir Robert Bredon, Dr. C.
D. Tenney, Dr. Timothy Richard; in Japan, by ex-Premier Okuma,
Viscount Kaneko, Baron Shibusawa, Dr. Juichi Soyeda; in Hong Kong, by
Governor-General Sir Frederick Lugard; in Manila by Governor-General
Forbes, Vice-Governor Gilbert; in India, the members of the Viceroy's
Cabinet, Hon. Krishnaswami Iyer, Dr. J. P. Jones, etc, etc. To all of
these and to scores of others, my grateful acknowledgments are
tendered. They helped me get information, but of course are in no case
to be held responsible for any opinions that I have expressed.
To Mr. G. D. Adams, of Akron, Ohio, and Dr. Arthur {ix} Mez, of
Mannheim, Germany, two generous fellow-travellers, my thanks are due
for the use of many of their photographs, and I am also indebted to
_The World's Work_ and _The Review of Reviews_ for permission to
republish articles that have already appeared in these magazines. The
larger number of chapters included in this volume, however, were
originally prepared with a view to their use in my own paper, The
Progressive Farmer. They are, therefore, often more elementary in
character, let me say in the outset, than if they had been written
exclusively for bookbuyers, but it is my hope that their journalistic
flavor, even if it has this disadvantage, will also be found to have
certain compensating qualities.
Perhaps just one other thing ought to be said: that practically every
article about any country was written while I was still in the country
described. In this way I hoped not only to write with greater
freshness and vividness, but I was enabled to have my articles revised
and criticised by friends well informed concerning the subjects
discussed. The reader will please bear in mind, therefore, that a
letter about Tokyo is also a letter from Tokyo, a letter about Korea
is a letter from Korea, etc., and shift his viewpoint accordingly. I
have also thought it best to be frank with the reader and let the
chapters on China remain exactly as they were written--presenting a
pen picture of the Dragon Empire as it appeared on the eve of the
outbreak, while the revolution was indeed definitely in prospect but
not yet a reality.
-----
"Give us as many anecdotes as you can," was old Samuel Johnson's
advice to Boswell, when that worthy proposed to write of Corsica; and
this wise suggestion I have sought to keep in mind in all my travel.
Moreover, another saying of the great lexicographer's comes quaintly
into my memory as I conclude this Foreword: "There are two things
which I am confident I could do very well," he once remarked to Sir
Joshua Reynolds; "one is an introduction to any literary work stating
{x} what it is to contain, and how it should be executed in the most
perfect manner: the other is a conclusion, showing from various causes
why the execution has not been equal to what the author promised to
himself and to the publick!"
C. P.
Raleigh, N. C.
December 1, 1911.
{xi}
CONTENTS
CHAPTER PAGE
I. Japan: The Land of Upside Down 3
A Land of Contradictions
Music as an Example
Marriage and the Home Life
Patriarchal Ideas Still Dominant.
II. Snapshots of Japanese Life and Philosophy 9
What a Japanese City Is Like
Strange Clothing of the Japanese
Who Ever Saw So Many Babies?
Alphonse and Gaston Outdone
The Grace of the Little Women
How the Old Japan and the Old South Were Alike
A "Moral Distinction" Between Producers and Non-Producers.
III. Japanese Farming and Farmer Folk 17
Japanese Farm Children Getting More Schooling
than American Farm Children
No Illiteracy in the New Japan
Where Five Acres Is a Large Farm
How Iowa Might Feed the Whole United States
Farming Without Horses or Oxen
What the Japanese Farmers Raise
The Crime of Soil-waste
All Work Done by Hand
Cooperative Credit Societies a Success
Farm Houses Grouped in Villages
"A Seller of the Ancestral Land"
The Japanese Love of the Beautiful a Suggestion for America.
IV. "Welfare Work" in Japanese Factories 29
Manufacturing Bound to Increase
Tariff Legislation Unfair to Agriculture
A Visit to a Progressive Japanese Factory
How the Factory Operatives Are Looked After
Stricter Factory Legislation Coming.
V. Does Japanese Competition Menace the White Man's Trade 34
A Study of Japanese Industrial Conditions
Japanese Labor Cheap but Inefficient
Actual Cost of Output Little Cheaper than in America
Laborers in a State {xii} of Deplorable Inexperience
Illustrations of Japanese Inefficiency
Some Current Misconceptions Corrected
Labor Wage Has Increased 40 Per Cent, in Eight Years
The Burden of Taxation
High Tariff Will Decrease Japan's Export Trade
Subsidy Policy Destroying Individual Initiative
Japanese Competition Not a Serious Menace to the White Man.
VI. Buddhism, Shintoism, and Christianity in Japan 48
The Artistic Touch of the Japanese
Religion Without Morals
Buddhism in Fact vs. Buddhism Idealized by Arnold
Official Notices Prohibiting Christianity
Christianity "Puts Too High an Estimate on Woman"
The Worth of the Individual Not Recognized
The Elemental Significance of Japan's Awakening
A New Type of Civilization.
VII. Korea: "The Land of the Morning Calm" 60
I Have Become a Contemporary of David
The Fascination of a Primitive City
Some Odd Korean Customs-A True Romance and an Odd One
Many Faces Marked by Smallpox
A Typical Monarchy of Ancient Asia-The Honorable Mr. Yang-ban
Six Men to Carry Fifty Dollars' Worth of Money
Japanese Annexation
Splendid Work of Foreign Missionaries.
VIII. Manchuria: Fair and Fertile 70
Some First-hand Stories of the Russo-Japanese War
A Bit of History with a Lesson
The Site of the World's Next Great War
Manchuria: Fair and Fertile
Fat Harvests of Food, Feed, and Fuel
A Land Where Everybody "Knows Beans"
Golden Opportunities for Stock-raising
Better Plows and Level Culture
Graves as Thick as Corn Shocks
IX. Where Japan Is Absorbing an Empire 78
Manchuria the One Great Oriental Empire Not Yet Developed
Its Strategic Importance
Why the "Open Door" Concerns Us All
Japan's Shrewd Policies {xiii}
Contempt of Chinese Authority
Japan at Home vs. Japan in Manchuria
How the Open Door Policy Was Violated
Will Manchuria Go the Way of Korea?
A Bit of Chinese Wit and Wisdom
Truth Is in the Interest of Peace.
X. Light from China on Problems at Home 93
A Chinese Martyr-Hero
The Most Tremendous Moral Achievement of Recent Times
A Lesson for America
Putting Officials on Salaries
Money Changers and Title Changers
Making Education Practical
The Parcels Post and Tariff Reform.
XI. The New China: Awake and at Work 102
The Coming National Parliament
The Successful War Against Opium
China's Right-about-face in Education
Building Up an Army
Attacking the Graft System
Railroads, Posts, and Telegraphs
America's Relations with China.
XII. A Trip into Rural China 116
The Camels from Mongolia
Strange Traffic and Travel in Nankou Pass
The Great Wall of China
Surprisingly Progressive Farming Methods.
XIII. From Peking to the Yangtze-Kiang 123
Street Life in Peking
History That Is History
Martyrdoms That Have Enriched the World
Average Wages 15 to 18 Cents a Day
Homes Without Firesides
All China a Vast Cemetery
Keeping on Good Terms with Dragons
The Blessings of Our Alphabet
Confucius as a Moral Teacher
My Friendship with a Descendant of Confucius.
XIV. Sidelights on Chinese Character and Industry 132
Healthy Public Sentiment
Slavery and Foot-binding Still Practised
"Big Feet No B'long Pretty"
The Popularity of a No. 2 Wife
The Virtue That Is Next to Godliness Largely Disregarded
Some Discredited Americans Discovered Abroad
A 600-Mile Trip on the Yangtze {xiv} River
An Interview with Wu Ting Fang
Farming on the Yangtze
Shanghai Factory Laborers Paid 12 Cents a Day.
XV. Farewell to China 142
A City of 2,000,000 People Without a Vehicle
A Dead Chinaman More Important and Respected Than a Live One
Queer Features of Chinese Funerals
Cruelty of Chinese Punishments
A Sample of Chinese Humor: The Story of the Magic Jar
Amusing Trials of a Land Buyer
"Pidgin English"
Everything Is Saved
The Influence That Is Remaking China.
XVI. What I Saw in the Philippines 153
In Manila
A Trip Through Five Provinces
What the Philippine Country Looks Like
Every Filipino Has Cigarette and a Clean Suit
A Mania for Cock-fighting
Snapshots of Philippine Life
Labor the One Thing Lacking.
XVII. What the United States Is Doing in the Philippines 163
Thirty Thousand White People and 7,000,000 Filipinos
Rich Resources and Varied Products
Millions in Lumber
How the Islands Are Governed
Restricting the Suffrage
Education: Achievements of the American Government
Postal Savings Banks and the Torrens System
Public Health Work
Building Roads
And Then Keeping Them Up
"A George Junior Republic."
XVIII. Asia's Greatest Lesson foe America . . 173
Where 10 Cents a Day Is a Laborer's Wage
The Savage Struggle for Existence in the East
Tasks Heart-sickening in Their Heaviness
Where Women Are Burden-bearers
$12 a Year for a Farm Hand
An Overcrowded Population Not the Chief Cause of Asia's Poverty
A Defective Organization of Industry Responsible
Foolish Opposition to Labor-saving Tools
Our Debt to Machinery
Knowledge Itself a Productive Agency
Ineffectiveness of Oriental Labor
Tools and Knowledge the Secret of Wealth
Importance of Our Racial Heritage
The Final Lesson.
{xv}
XIX. The Straits Settlements and Burma 186
The Amazing Industry of the Chinese
Easy Money in Cocoanuts
How Germany Is Capturing Oriental Trade
Rangoon the City of Gorgeous Colors
Burma's Buddhist Temples
Rangoon's Beasts of Burden
Where the Elephants Do the Work
Some First-hand Jungle Stories
My Lord the Elephant
Good-by to Burma.
XX. Hinduism--and the Himalayas 198
Theoretical vs. Practical Hinduism
The Kalighat Temple, Calcutta
Human Sacrifices
Two Indian Places of Worship: A Contrast
A Visit to Benares
Burning the Bodies of the Dead
"Religion" as It Is in Benares
The Himalayas: A New and Happier Subject.
XXI. "The Poor Benighted Hindus" 210
India's Enormous Population
"The Wealth of the Indies" a Romance
A Typical Indian Village
No Chairs, Mattresses, Knives, or Forks Used
Where It Is 105 at Midnight
"Gunga Din" in Evidence
The Lady of Banbury Cross Outdone.
XXII. Hindu Farming and Farm Life 218
Primitive Tools Used by Farmers
What Crops Are Grown
Where Drought Means Death
Reducing the Ravages of Famine
Usury and a Remedy
Where America Is Behind
Landowner and Farm Laborer
Salaam, O Little Folk!
XXIII. The Caste System in India 226
No Man May Rise Higher, but May Fall Lower
How Fatalism Sustains Caste
Contamination by Touch
A Bone Collector's Pride of Rank
The "Thief Caste"
Caste and the Banyan Tree
A Maharaja's Defence of Caste
Some Forces That Are Battering Down the System
Foreign Travel Weakening Caste.
XXIV. The Plight of the Hindu Woman 236
"Woman Is Not to Be Trusted"
Twelve-year-old Brides and Bridegrooms
A Wedding Procession in Agra {xvi}
5000 Rupees for a Wedding Feast
The Plight of the Child-wives
Cruel Treatment of Widows
The Picture Not Wholly Dark
One Worthy Tribute to the Grace of Woman.
XXV. More Leaves from an India Notebook 246
Some Historic Indian Cities
India No More Homogeneous than Europe
English Rule: An Interview with Mr. Krishnaswami Iyer
Indian Wealth in a Few Hands
16 Cents a Day an Incredibly High Wage
No Horses on Indian Farms
Bombay a Great Cotton Market
The Story of a Man-eater
A Snake Story to End With.
XXVI. What the Orient May Teach Us 261
Conservation the Keynote
What Neglect of Her Forests Has Cost China
Forestry Lessons from Japan and Korea
Conserving Individual Wealth
The Essential Immorality of Waste
Avoiding the Wastes of War
Preserving Our Physical Stamina and Racial Strength
A Lesson from China
Patriotism as a Moral Force
The Coming "Conflict of Color"
Oriental vs. Occidental Ideals.
{xvii}
ILLUSTRATIONS
Count Shige-Nobu Okuma of Japan Frontispiece
PAGE
The Giant Avenue of Cryptomerias at Nikko 13
Typical Japanese Costumes and Temple Architecture 14
Japanese Farming Scenes 19
Japanese School Children 20
The Great Buddha (Diabutsu) at Kamakura 53
The Degenerate Koreans at Rest and at Work 54
Like Scenes from Our Western Prairies 81
Manchurian Women (showing peculiar head-dress) 82
Chinese Waste-paper Collector 82
Pu Yi the Son of Heaven and
Emperor of the Middle Kingdom 105
How China Is Dealing with Opium Intemperance 106
A Man-made Desert 117
Pumping Water for Irrigation 117
Transportation and Travel in China 118
Fashionable Chinese Dinner Party 137
How Lumber Is Sawed in the Orient 137
A Quotation from Confucius 138
The Great Wall of China 147
Chinese Woman's Ruined Feet 147
Chinese School Children 148
The American Consulate at Antung 148
A Filipino's Home 157
The Carabao, the Work-stock of the Filipinos 158
An Old Spanish Cathedral 158
Society Belles of Mindanao, Philippine Islands 181
A Street Scene in Manila 181
{xviii}
Two Kinds of Workers in Burma 182
Types at Darjeeling, Northern India,
and at Delhi, Central India 205
Two Rangoon Types 206
A Hindu Faquir 213
Some Fashionable Hindus 213
Hindu Children 214
The Taj Mahal from the Entrance Gate 241
Gunga Din on Dress Parade 242
Bathing in the Sacred Ganges at Benares 249
The Battle-scarred and
World-famous Residency at Lucknow 250
Burning the Bodies of Dead Hindus 255
An Indian Camel Cart 255
Travel in India 256
{xix}
WHERE HALF THE WORLD IS WAKING UP
{3}
I
JAPAN: THE LAND OF UPSIDE DOWN
"I cannot help thinking," said one of my friends to me when I left
home, "that when you get over on the other side of the world, in Japan
and China, you will have to walk upside down like the flies on the
ceiling!"
While I find that this is not true in a physical sense, it is true, as
Mr. Percival Lowell has pointed out, that, with regard to the manners
and customs of the people, everything is reversed, and the surest way
to go right is to take pains to go dead wrong! "To speak backward,
write backward, read backward, is but the A B C of Oriental
contrariety."
Alice need not have gone to Wonderland; she should have come to Japan.
I cannot get used, for example, to seeing men start at what with us
would be the back of a book or paper and read toward the front; and it
is said that no European or American ever gets used to the
construction of a Japanese sentence, considered merely from the
standpoint of thought-arrangement. I had noticed that the Japanese
usually ended their sentences with an emphatic upward spurt before I
learned that with them the subject of a sentence usually comes last
(if at all), as for example, "By a rough road yesterday came John,"
instead of, "John came by a rough road yesterday."
And this, of course, is but one illustration of thousands that might
be given to justify my title, "The Land of Upside Down," the land of
contradictions to all our Occidental ideas. That {4} Japan is a land
"where the flowers have no odor and the birds no song" has passed into
a proverb that is almost literally true; and similarly, the far-famed
cherry blossoms bear no fruit. The typesetters I saw in the _Kokumin
Shimbum_ office were singing like birds, but the field-hands I saw at
Komaba were as silent as church-worshippers. The women carry children
on their backs and not in their arms. The girls dance with their
hands, not with their feet, and alone, not with partners. An ox is
worth more than a horse. The people bathe frequently, but in dirty
water. The people are exceptionally artistic, yet the stone "lions" at
Nikko Temple look as much like bulldogs as lions. A man's birthday is
not celebrated, but the anniversary of his death is. The people are
immeasurably polite, and yet often unendurably cocky and conceited.
Kissing or waltzing, even for man and wife, would be improper in
public, but the exposure of the human body excites no surprise. The
national government is supposed to be modern, and yet only 2 per cent,
of the people--the wealthiest--can vote. Famed for kindness though the
people are, war correspondents declared the brutality of Japanese
soldiers to the Chinese at Port Arthur such as "would damn the fairest
nation on earth." Though the nation is equally noted for simplicity of
living, it is a Japanese banker, coming to New York, who breaks even
America's record for extravagance, by giving a banquet costing $40 a
plate. The people are supposed to be singularly contented, and yet
Socialism has had a rapid growth. The Emperor is regarded as sacred
and almost infallible, and yet the Crown Prince is not a legitimate
son. Although the government is one of the most autocratic on earth,
it has nevertheless adopted many highly "paternalistic"
schemes-government ownership of railways and telegraphs, for example.
The people work all the time, but they refuse to work as strenuously
as Americans. The temples attract thousands of people, but usually
only in a spirit of frolic: in the first Shinto temple I visited the
priests offered me sake (the national liquor) {5} to drink. Labor per
day is amazingly cheap, but, in actual results, little cheaper than
American labor.
It is amid such a maze of contradictions and surprises that one moves
in Japan. When I go into a Japanese home, for example, it is a hundred
times more important to take off my shoes than it is to take off my
hat--even though, as happened this week when I called on a celebrated
Japanese singer, there be holes in my left sock. (But I was comforted
later when I learned that on President Taft's visit to a famous Tokyo
teahouse his footwear was found to be in like plight.)
Speaking of music, we run squarely against another oddity, in that
native Japanese (as well as Chinese) music usually consists merely of
monotonous twanging on one or two strings--so that I can now
understand the old story of Li Hung Chang's musical experiences in
America. His friends took him to hear grand opera singers, to listen
to famous violinists, but these moved him not; the most gifted
pianists failed equally to interest him. But one night the great
Chinaman went early to a theatre, and all at once his face beamed with
delight, and he turned to his friends in enthusiastic gratitude: "We
have found it at last!" he exclaimed. "That is genuine music!" . . .
And it was only the orchestra "tuning up" their instruments!
I might as well say just here that this story, while good, always
struck me as a humorous exaggeration till I came to Japan, but the
music which I heard the other night in one of the most fashionable and
expensive Japanese restaurants in Tokyo was of exactly the same
character--like nothing else in all the world so much as an orchestra
tuning up! And yet by way of modification (as usual) it must be said
that appreciation of Western music is growing, and one seldom hears in
classical selections a sweeter combination of voice and piano than
Mrs. Tamaki Shibata's, while my Japanese student-friend has also
surprised me by singing "Suwanee River" and other old-time American
favorites like a genuine Southerner.
Take the social relations of the Japanese people as another {6}
example of contrariety. Here the honorable sex is not the feminine but
the masculine. There is even a proverb, I believe, "Honor men, despise
women." Perhaps the translation "despise" is too strong, but certainly
it would be regarded as nothing but contemptible weakness for young
men to show any such regard for young women, or husbands for their
wives, as is common in America. The wives exist solely for their
husbands, nor must the wife object if the husband maintains other
favorites, or even brings these favorites into the home with her. And
although a man is with his wife a much greater part of his time than
is the case in America, he may have little or no voice in selecting
her; in fact, he may see her only once before marrying.
After having seen probably half a million or more Japanese, Sundays
and week-days, I have not noticed a single young Japanese couple
walking together, and in the one case where I saw a husband and a wife
walking thus side by side I discovered on investigation that the man
was blind!
"For a young couple to select each other as in America," said a young
Japanese gentleman to me, "would be considered immoral, and as for a
young man calling on a young woman, that never happens except
clandestinely." And when I asked if it was true that when husband and
wife go together the woman must follow the man instead of walking
beside him as his equal, he answered: "But it is very, very seldom
that the two go out together."
My Japanese friend also told me that the young man often has
considerable influence in selecting his life-partner (in case it is
for life: there is one divorce to every three to five marriages), but
the young woman has no more voice in the matter than the commodity in
any other bargain-and-sale. When a young man or young woman gets of
marriageable age, which is rather early, the parents decide on some
satisfactory prospective partner, and a "middleman" interviews the
parents of the prospective partner aforesaid, and if they are willing,
and {7} financial and other considerations are satisfactory, it
doesn't matter what the girl thinks, nor does it matter much whether
young Barkis himself is "willin'." The Sir Anthony Absolutes in Japan
indeed brook no opposition. All of which, while not wholly commendable
(my young Japanese friend himself dislikes the plan, at least in his
own prospective case), has at least the advantage of leaving but
remarkably few bachelors and old maids in Japan. Here every man's
house may not be his castle, but it is certainly his nursery. Usually,
too, in the towns at least, his home is his shop; the front part full
of wares, with no hard and fast dividing line between merchandise
rooms and the living rooms, children being equally conspicuous and
numerous in both compartments.
Japan is still governed largely on patriarchal lines. The Emperors
themselves depend largely on the patriarchal spirit for their power,
claiming direct descent in unbroken line from the Sun-Goddess, while
the people are supposed to be themselves descendants of Emperors or of
minor gods. In family life the patriarchal idea is still more
prominent, the father being the virtual ruler until he abdicates in
favor of the eldest son.
Ancestor-worship is general, of course, and a typical case is that of
my young Nikko friend, who tells me that in his home are memorial
tablets to six of his most recently deceased ancestors, and that hot
rice is placed before these tablets each morning. Now the teaching is
that the spirits of the dead need the odor of the rice for
nourishment, and also require worship of other kinds. Consequently the
worst misfortune that can befall a man is to die without heirs to
honor his memory (the mere dying itself is not so bad); and if an
oldest son die unmarried such action amounts almost to treason to the
family.
Moreover, if a man be without sons (daughters don't count), he may
adopt a son; and the cases of adoption are surprisingly frequent.
Count Okuma, ex-prime minister of the empire, whom I visited last
Sunday, adopted his son-in-law as his {8} legal son. A distinguished
banker I visited is also an adopted son; and in a comparatively brief
list of eminent Japanese, a sort of abbreviated national "Who's Who,"
I find perhaps twenty cases in which these eminent officials and
leaders have been adopted and bear other family names than those with
which they were born.
The willingness to give up one's name in adoption, viewed in the light
of the excessive devotion to one's own ancestors and family name, is
only another illustration of Japanese contrariety. It is a land of
surprises.
Miyanoshita, Japan.
{9}
II
SNAPSHOTS OF JAPANESE LIFE AND PHILOSOPHY
"What is a Japanese city like?" Well, let us "suppose," as the children
say. You know the American city nearest you, or the one you live in.
Suppose then you should wake up in this city to-morrow morning and
find in the first place that forty-nine people out of every fifty have
put on such unheard-of clothing as to make you rub your eyes in wonder
as to whether you are asleep or awake; next, that everybody has become
six inches shorter, and that all these hundred-thousand five-foot men
and four-foot women have unanimously developed most violent
sunburn--have become bronzed almost beyond recognition.
Moreover, the high buildings you once knew have all disappeared, and a
wilderness chiefly of tiny one and two story houses has taken their
places, wherein the first story, even in two-story buildings, is so
low that all your new brown friends warn you by a gesture to duck your
head as you go through the doors, while the second story is usually
little more than a garret.
Next, a wild jargon of unmeaning voices strikes your ear and you
discover that ninety-nine people out of a hundred have forgotten how
to speak English. More than this, the English signs are no more, and
on the billboards and before the business offices are marks that look
as if a thousand ostriches fresh from a thousand ink barrels had been
set to scratching new signs to take the places of the old. You pick up
a book {10} or the morning paper, and the same thing has happened--pig
tracks, chicken tracks, and double bowknots fantastically tied instead
of English type--and everybody begins at the back of the book and
reads toward him instead of reading the way you have grown used to!
And the buggies, carriages, and automobiles: what on earth has become
of them? There's hardly a horse in sight, but dozens or scores of men
with bare legs and odd clothes, each flying around pulling a light
two-wheeled jinrikisha, a man or a woman seated in each man-drawn
"buggy"; and there are dozens of other bare-legged men laboriously
pulling heavy loads of vegetables, freight, and even lumber and giant
telegraph poles! You jump into one of the rickshaws and forget your
strange little Puck-like steed in the marvel of your surroundings till
a voice from the shafts makes you feel like Balaam when the ass spoke
to him!
By this time you begin to get a hazy idea as to how the people are
dressed, and as nearly as you can make out, it is something like this:
Evidently all the inhabitants of an ancient Roman city, a modern
American town, a half-dozen Hindoo villages, and several thousand
seashore bathers have all thrown their clothes--(or the lack of
them!)--into one tremendous pile, and everybody has rushed in
pell-mell and put on the first thing, or the first two or three
things, that came to hand. There is every conceivable type of
clothing, but perhaps the larger number have wound up with something
like a light bathing suit and a sort of gingham dressing-gown belted
over it; and if one has less than this, why, then, as the Japanese
say, "_Shikata na gai_" (All right; it can't be helped). In the shops
and stores one passes a few men clad only in their own integrity and a
loin-cloth, and both children and grown people dress with a hundred
times more disregard of convention than the negroes in America.
Of shoes, there is an equally great variety as of clothing, {11} but
the majority of men, women, and children (in muddy weather at least)
have compromised on the "getas," a sort of wooden sole strapped on the
foot, with wooden pieces put fore and aft the instep, these pieces
throwing the foot and sole about three inches above ground. It looks
almost as difficult to walk in them as to walk on stilts, but away the
people go, young and old, and the muddy places marked by the strange
footwear look as if the corrugated wheels of a hundred mowing-machines
had passed along! In most cases the clatter of the "get as" is the
loudest noise on the streets, for the Japanese are remarkably quiet:
in Tokyo to-day I saw a thousand of them waiting to see the Empress,
and an American crowd would literally have made more noise in a minute
than they made in an hour.
On entering their houses, as we have already noticed, the people take
off their getas, sandals, shoes or whatever outer footwear is
used--for the very good reason that the people sit on the floor (on
mats or on the floor itself), eat on the floor (very daintily,
however), and sleep on the floor, so that to walk over the floor here
with muddy feet would be the same as if an American should walk
roughshod over his chairs, table and bed. Even in the Japanese
department store I visited this morning cloth covers were put on my
shoes, and this afternoon at the Ni-no Go Reiya Shinto temple I had to
go in my stocking feet.
Then the babies--who ever saw as many babies to the square inch? About
10 per cent of the male population seems to be hauling other men, but
50 per cent, of the female population seems hardly enough to carry the
wise and happy-looking little Jap babies--not in go-carts (a go-cart
or a hired nurse is almost never seen), but on the back. And these
little women who when standing are only about as tall as you are when
sitting--they seem hardly more than children themselves, so that you
recall Kipling's saying of Japan: "A four-foot child walks with a
three-foot child, who is holding the hand {12} of a two-foot child,
who carries on her back a one-foot child."
Boys in their teens are also seen with babies strapped on their backs
in the same loose-fitting, sack-like baby-holders, and after work-time
the father takes a turn at the same business. You are reminded of the
negro who said to another: "'Fo Gawd, Bill, you's got the mos' chillun
any nigger I ever seed. Why, I passed yo' house yistiddy mornin' at
nine erclock and throwed a brick on top and hollered 'Fiah!' an' at
five erclock in the evenin' nigger chillun was still runnin' out!" It
seems sometimes as if such an incident, with Jap children substituted
for negroes (I doubt if there is a negro here), might actually happen
in Japan.
And those two men bowing to each other as they meet--are they
rehearsing as Alphonse and Gaston for the comedy show to-night, or are
they serious? No, they are serious, for yonder is another pair meeting
in the same way, and yonder another couple separating with even more
violent "convulsions of politeness"--and nobody laughing but yourself.
No wonder the Japanese are strong: they only need to meet a few
friends a day to get exercise enough to keep them in trim! Look again:
those women meeting at the depot, for example (for there are
familiar-looking street cars and less familiar-looking passenger cars
amid all these strange surroundings). There is the woman with her hair
combed straight back, which, I am told, means that she is a widow; one
with an odd Japanese topknot, which means that she is married, and a
younger one whose hair is arranged in the style of unmarried girls;
and though they are evidently bosom friends, they do not embrace and
kiss at meeting--to kiss in public would be shocking to the
Japanese--and you can only guess the depth of their affection by the
greater warmth and emphasis of their bows to one another.
{13}
[Illustration: THE GIANT AVENUE OF CRYPTOMERIAS AT NIKKO.]
This magnificent avenue, twenty-five miles in length, consists of
trees planted by daimyos, or small lords, as a memorial to the great
Japanese warrior and statesman, Iyeyasu. A spirit of simplicity and
love of nature has produced a nobler monument than extravagance
could possibly have done.
{14}
[Illustration: TYPICAL JAPANESE COSTUMES AND TEMPLE ARCHITECTURE.]
In the temple picture notice also how the limbs of the trees have
been trained. Many fantastic effects are often produced in this way.
{12 continued}
They are trained in politeness from their youth up, are these
Japanese; and it is perhaps the greatest charm of both young and old.
I must have seen a full hundred thousand Japanese {15} by this time,
and I do not recall one in the attitude of scolding or abuse, while
authorities tell me that the Japanese language simply has no words to
enable one to swear or curse. I was also interested to have the
American Ambassador here tell me that in all his three years' stay in
Japan, and with all the freedom with which a million children run
about the streets and stores, he has never seen a man impatient with a
child. At the Imperial University yesterday morning I noticed two
college boys part with the same deep courtesy used by the older men,
and the little five-year-old girl near Chuzenji the other day thanked
me for my gift with the most graceful of Eastern salaams.
I shall not say that the excessive ceremoniousness of the men does not
at times seem ludicrous, but when you come to your hotel dining-room,
and the inexpressibly dainty little Japanese girls, moving almost
noiselessly on their sandaled feet (no getas indoors) welcome each
guest with smiling bows, happy, refined and graceful, a very different
impression of Japanese courtesy comes over you. In America,
unfortunately, the like courteous attention under such circumstances
might be misinterpreted, but here you are only reminded of how a
thousand years of courtesy and gentle manners have given the women of
Japan--pretty though they are not, judged by our Western standards--an
unsurpassed grace of manner and happiness of disposition together with
Shakespeare's well-praised "voice, soft and low, an excellent thing in
woman."
And here and everywhere, as in the old fable of the man with the
overcoat, must not such sun-like gentleness be more powerful in
compelling deference than all the stormy strength of the "new woman"?
Which reminds me that however much the social, political, and economic
revolution of the last forty years may have changed the national
character (and upon this point I shall not speak till later), it is
certain that Old Japan and the Old South were distinguished for not a
few characteristics {16} in common. For example, we are reminded of
the South's ante-bellum civilization when we learn that in old Japan
"the business of money-making was held in contempt by the superior
classes," and of all forms of business, agriculture was held in
highest esteem. Next to the nobility stood the Samurai, or soldier
class, the social rank of all other persons then being as follows: (1)
farmers, (2) artisans, (3) merchants. And farming was thus not only
regarded as the most honorable of all occupations, but farmers in the
early ages were privileged to wear swords, the emblem of rank next to
the nobility. Below the farmers ranked the mechanic element, while as
Lafcadio Hearn tells us:
"The commercial class (A kindo), including bankers, merchants,
shopkeepers, and traders of all kinds, was the lowest officially
recognized. The business of money-making was held in contempt by the
superior classes; and all methods of profiting by the purchase and
resale of the produce of labor were regarded as dishonorable. . . .
There is a generally, in militant society, small respect for the
common forms of labor. But in old Japan the occupation of the farmer
and artisan were not despised; trade alone appears to have been
considered degrading, and the distinction may have been partly a
moral one."
I wonder if there is not really a great deal more than we have
realized in what Hearn here suggests as to the soundness and essential
"morality" of the Japanese plan of ranking farming and manufacturing
above trade as occupations? Morally and economically considered, it is
the men who actually produce wealth rather than those men who trade or
barter in the products of other men's labor who deserve most honor.
They serve the world best: The barterers are, in limited numbers,
necessary and useful servants of those who do produce, but the
strength of a state manifestly lies in the classes who are really
creators of values.
Tokyo, Japan.
{17}
III
JAPANESE FARMING AND FARMER FOLK
I went yesterday to the Agricultural College of the Imperial
University of Japan, situated at Komaba, near Tokyo, where I had an
appointment with Director Matsui. My purpose was to get further
information concerning the general condition of Japanese farmers and
Japanese farming, but the biggest fact my researches brought out was
not in regard to rice or barley or potatoes or taro, or any other
field product of the Mikado's empire.
Rather it was a fact with regard to what is in every land the most
important of all crops--the crop of boys and girls. And the big fact I
discovered was simply this:
These brown Mongolian farm children, whose land we opened to
civilization but fifty years ago, and whom we thought of but yesterday
as backward "heathen"--they are getting, as a general proposition,
just twice as much schooling as is furnished pupils in many of our
American rural districts: their parents are providing, in their zeal
for their children's welfare, just twice as good educational
facilities as we are giving many of our white farm boys and
girls--boys and girls who have in their veins the blood of a race
which has carried the flag of human progress for a thousand years, and
whom we are expecting to continue leaders in civilization and
enlightenment.
In other words, so Doctor Matsui told me (and I went to-day to the
Japanese National Department of Education to verify the fact), the
Japanese farm boys and girls are getting ten months' schooling a year,
while the farm boy or girl {18} in my own state is getting only five
or six months--and when I was in a country school fifteen years ago,
not nearly so much as that! Do you wonder that I avoided telling the
Japanese educational officer just how our provision for farm boys and
girls compared with Japan's? Also that I neglected to tell him how we
compare in the matter of utilizing school advantages, when he showed
me that of all the children between six and fourteen in all the empire
of Japan the school attendance is 98 per cent.--98 out of every 100
children of "school age" attending school, and in several provinces 99
out of every 100! Thirty-five years ago the average school attendance
in Japan was only 28, and in 1893 only 59, but by the time of the war
with Russia it had passed 90, and since then has been climbing
straight and steadily toward the amazing maximum itself, the official
figures showing a gain of 1 per cent, a year--94 per cent., then 95,
then 96, then 97, and now 98, and the leaders are now ambitious for 99
or 100, as they told me to-day.
When this officer of an "inferior race" showed me, furthermore, that
Japan is so intent upon educating every boy and girl in her borders
that she compels attendance on the public schools for eight years, I
didn't tell him that in civilized America, in the great enlightened
nation so long held up to him as a model, demagogues and others in
many states on one pretext or another have defeated every effort for
effective compulsory education laws, so that if a boy's parents are
indifferent to his future, the state does not compel them to give him
a fighting chance in life--for the state's own sake and for the boy's.
{19}
[Illustration: JAPANESE FARMING SCENES.]
The upper picture shows a rice field in the foreground, tea
alongside the buildings, and the graceful feathery bamboo in the
background; also, an unusual sight on a Japanese farm, a group of
cattle. The lower picture shows the work of transplanting rice.
{20}
[Illustration: JAPANESE SCHOOL CHILDREN.]
Boys predominate in the upper picture, girls in the lower. A system
of compulsory education is enforced in Japan, and 98 per cent, of
the children of school age attend. Even the country schools run ten
months in the year--longer than in a majority of our states.
{18 continued}
With these facts before me, as I have said, I did not make any
vainglorious boasts of the great educational progress of our own
states these last twenty years: However much progress we have made,
these brown Japanese "heathen" have beaten us. While there is no
official census on the question of illiteracy here, every Japanese man
in his twenties must serve {21} two years in the army (unless he is in
a normal school studying to be a teacher), and a record is made as to
the literacy or illiteracy of each recruit. That is to say, there is a
place where the fact of any recruit's inability to read would be
recorded, but the Department of Education informed me to-day that the
illiterate column is now absolutely blank.
There are no illiterates among Japan's rising generation.
More than this, we have to reflect that it is in their poverty that
the Japanese are thus doing more than we are doing in our plenty. We
waste more in a year than they make. Even with a hundred acres of land
the American farmer is likely to consider himself poor, but when I
asked my Japanese guide the other day if two _cho_ (five acres) would
be an average sized farm here he said: "No, not an average; such a man
would be regarded as a middle-class farmer--a rather large farmer."
And the figures which I have just obtained in a call on the national
Department of Agriculture and Commerce more than justify the reply.
Forty-six farmers out of every 100 in Japan own less than one and one
quarter acres of land; 26 more out of every 100 own less than two and
one half acres, and only one man in a hundred owns as much as
twenty-five acres. (In the matter of cultivation also I find that 70
per cent, cultivate less than two and one half acres, and nearly half
are tenants.)
This year the situation is even worse than usual, for disastrous
floods have reduced the rice crop, which represents one half Japan's
crop values, 20 per cent, below last year's figures, and many people
will suffer.
Ordinarily, however, these little handkerchief-sized farms yield
amazingly. It has been shown by Prof. F. H. King that the fields of
Japan are cultivated so intensively, fertilized so painstakingly, and
kept so continuously producing some crop, that they feed 2277 people
to the square mile--21,321 square miles of cultivated fields in the
main islands supporting a population of 48,542,376. If the tilled
fields of Iowa, for {22} example, supported an equal number of people per
square mile, the population so supported would be over 100,000,000.
That state alone could feed the entire population of the United States
and then have an excess product left for export to other countries! If
North Carolina did as well with her cultivated land she would support
30,000,000 people, and if Mississippi's 11,875 square miles of land
under cultivation supported each 2277 persons, then 27,041,375 people,
or thirteen times the present population of the state, could live off
their produce!
And yet these Japanese lands have been in cultivation for unnumbered
centuries. Some of them may have been cleared when King Herod trembled
from his dream of a new-born rival in Judea, and certainly "the glory
that was Greece and the grandeur that was Rome" had not faded from the
earth when some of these fields began their age-long ministry to human
need. And they have been kept fertile simply by each farmer putting
back on the ground every ounce of fertility taken from it, for
commercial fertilizers were absolutely unknown until our own
generation.
Of course, with a population so dense and with each man cultivating an
area no larger than a garden-patch in America, the people are poor,
and the wonder is that they are able to produce food enough to keep
the country from actual want. Practically no animal meat is eaten; if
we except fish, the average American eats nearly twice as much meat in
a week as the average Japanese does in a year: to be exact, 150 pounds
of meat per capita is required per year for the average American
against 1.7 pounds for the average Japanese! Many of the farmers here
are too poor even to eat a good quality of rice. Consequently Japan
presents the odd phenomenon of being at once an exporter and a large
importer of rice. Poor farmers sell their good rice and buy a poorer
quality brought in from the mainland of Asia and mix it with barley
for grinding.
Only about one farmer in three has a horse or an ox; in most cases all
the work must be done by hand and with crude tools. {23} It is
pitiful--or rather I should say, it would be pitiful if they did not
appear so contented--to see men breaking the ground not by plowing but
by digging with kuwas: long-handled tools with blades perhaps six
inches wide and two feet long. At the Agricultural College farm in
Komaba I saw about thirty Japanese weeding rice with the kama--a tool
much like an old-fashioned sickle except that the blade is straight:
the right hand quickly cut the roots of the weed or grass plant and
the left hand as quickly pulled it up. With the same sickle-like kamas
about thirty other Japanese were cutting and shocking corn: they are
at least too advanced to pull fodder, I was interested to notice!
With land so scarce, it is of course necessary to keep something on
the ground every growing day from year's end to year's end. Truckers
and gardeners raise three crops a year. Rice, as a rule, is not sown
as with us, but the plants are transplanted as we transplant cabbage
or tomato plants (but so close together, of course, that the ripening
fields look as if they had been sown), in order that the farmer may
save the time the rice plants are getting to the transplanting stage.
That is to say, some other crop is maturing on the land while the rice
plants are growing large enough to transplant. Riding through the
country almost anywhere you will notice the tender young plants of
some new crop showing between the rows of some earlier-planted crop
now maturing or newly harvested.
The crops in Japan are not very varied. Rice represents half the
agricultural values. Next to rice is the silkworm industry, and then
barley, wheat, vegetables, soy beans, sweet potatoes, and fruits.
There is especial interest in fruit growing just now. Sweet potatoes
grow more luxuriantly than in any other country I have ever seen, and
are much used for food. I have seen one or two little patches of
cotton, but evidently only for home spinning, although I hear it said
that in Korea, which has just been formally annexed as Japanese
territory, cotton can be profitably grown. A much {24} cultivated
plant, with leaves like those of the lotus or water-lily, is the taro,
which I also saw growing in Hawaii; its roots are used for food as
potatoes are.
Every particle of fertility of every kind, as I have said, is
religiously saved, and in recent years a considerable demand for
commercial fertilizers has sprung up, $8 to $10 worth per acre being a
normal application.
So much for the farming country as it has impressed me around Tokyo. A
few days ago I saw a somewhat different agricultural area--280 miles
of great rice-farming land between Miyanoshita and Kyoto. This country
is different from that around Yokahoma and north of Tokyo in that it
is so much more rolling and mountainous (majestic Mount Fuji, supreme
among peaks, was in sight several hours) and greater efforts are
therefore necessary to take care of the soil.
But when such effort is necessary in Japan, it is sure to be made. The
population is so dense that every one realizes the essential
criminality of soil-waste, of the destruction of the one resource
which must support human life as long as the race shall last.
Much of the land is in terraces, or, perhaps I should say, tiers. That
is to say, here will be a half-acre or an acre from eighteen inches to
six feet higher (all as level as a threshing-floor) than a similar
level piece adjoining. While the levelling is helpful in any case for
the preservation of fertility and the prevention of washing, the tier
system is necessary in many cases on account of the irrigation methods
used in rice growing. While the lower plot is flooded for rice, upland
crops may be growing on the adjacent elevated acre or half-acre.
The hillside or mountain slopes are also cultivated to the last
available foot, and in dry seasons you may even see the men and women
carrying buckets uphill to water any suffering crop. In nearly all
cases the rows are on a level. Where there was once a slanting
hillside the Japanese here dig it down or grade it, and the
mountainsides are often enormous steps or {25} stairs; one level
terrace after another, each held in place by turf or rock wall.
Rice growing, as it is conducted in Japan, certainly calls for much
bitter toil. The land must be broken by hand; into the muddy, miry,
water-covered rice fields the farmer-folk must wade, to plant the rice
laboriously, plant by plant; then the cultivation and harvesting is
also done by hand, and even the threshing, I understand. When we
recall that the net result of all this bitter toil is only a bare
existence made increasingly hard by the steady rise in land-taxes, and
that the Japanese people know practically none of the diversions which
give joy and color to American and English country life, it is no
wonder that thousands of farmers are leaving their two and three acre
plots, too small to produce a decent living for a family, to try their
fortunes in the factories and the towns. Specifically, it may be
mentioned that the boys from the farms who go into the army for the
compulsory two years' service are reported as seldom returning to the
country.
True, the government is trying to help matters to some extent (though
this is indeed but little) by lending money to banks at low rates of
interest with the understanding that the farmers may then borrow from
these banks at rates but little higher; and there are also in most
communities, I learn, "cooperative credit societies" (corresponding
somewhat to the mutual building and loan societies in American towns),
by means of which the farmers escape the clutches of the Shylock
money-lenders who have heretofore charged as high as 20 to 30 per
cent. for advances. The Japanese farmers invest their surplus funds in
these "cooperative credit societies," just as they would in savings
banks, except that in their case their savings are used solely for
helping their immediate neighbors and neighborhoods. A judicious
committee passes upon each small loan, and while the interest rates
might seem high to us, we have to remember that money everywhere here
commands higher interest than in America.
{26}
I am the more interested in these "cooperative credit societies,"
because they seem to me to embrace features which our American farmers
would do well to adopt.
It is said that the farmers live on better food than they had twenty
years ago, but I should think that there has been little improvement
in the little thatch-roofed houses in which they live. These houses
are grouped into small villages, as are the farm houses in Europe, the
farmer going out from the settlement to his fields each working day,
much after the fashion of the workers on the largest American
plantations. Buildings corresponding to our American two-story houses
are almost never seen in towns here and absolutely never in farming
sections, the farm home, like the town home, usually consisting of a
story and a half, with sliding walls of paper-covered sash between the
rooms, a sort of box for the fire on which the meals are cooked, and
no chimney--little better, though much cleaner, than the negro cabins
in the South. In winter the people nearly freeze, or would but for the
fact that the men put on heavy woolens, and the women pile on cotton
padding until they look almost like walking feather beds.
True as are the things that I have said in this article, I fear that
my average reader would get a very gloomy and false conception of
Japanese farm life if I should stop here. The truth is that, so far as
my observation goes, I have seen nothing to indicate that the rural
population of Japan is not now as happy as the rural population in
America. If their possessions are few, so are their wants. In fact.
Dr. Juichi Soyeda, one of the country's leading men, in talking to me,
expressed a doubt as to whether the new civilization of Japan will
really produce greater average happiness than the old rural seclusion
and isolation (a doubt, however, which I do not share). "Our farm
people," he said, "are hard-working, frugal, honest, cheerful, and
while their possessions are small, there is little actual want among
them. A greater {27} number than in most other countries are
home-owners, and, altogether, they form the backbone of an empire."
Doctor Soyeda went on to give a noteworthy illustration of the
affection of the people for their home farms. "The Japanese," he said,
"have a term of contempt for the man who sells an old homestead."
There is no English word equivalent to it, but it means "a seller of
the ancestral land," and to say it of a man is almost equivalent to
reflecting upon his character or honor! I wish that we might develop
in America such a spirit of affection for our farm homes.
I wish, too, that we might develop the Japanese love of the beautiful
in nature. No matter how small and cramped the yard about the tiny
home here, you are almost sure to find the beauty of shrub and tree
and neatly trimmed hedge, and in Tokyo the whole population looks
forward with connoisseur-like enthusiasm to the season for wistaria
blooms in earliest spring, to the cherry blossom season in April, to
lotus-time in mid-summer, and to the chrysanthemum shows in the fall.
The fame of Tokyo's cherry blossoms has already gone around the world,
and thus they not only add to the pleasure of its citizens, but give
the city a distinction of no small financial advantage as well.
Why may not our civic improvement associations, women's clubs, etc.,
get an idea here for our American towns? A long avenue of beautiful
trees along a road or street, even if trees without blossoms, would
give distinction to any small village or to any farm. Every one who
has been to Europe will recall the long lines of Lombardy poplars that
make the fair vision of many French roads linger long in the memory,
and I can never forget the magnificent avenue of
cryptomerias--gigantic in size, straight as ship masts, fair as the
cedars of Lebanon--that line the road leading to the great Shogun
Iyeyasu's tomb in Nikko.
Lastly, these people are fired by the thought that a better day is
coming. Their children are going to school, as the {28} older folk
could not, and as a Japanese editor said to me this week:
"Every boy in the empire believes he may some day become Premier!"
What is the lesson of it all? Is it not just this: That we in America
should feel highly favored in that we have such magnificent resources,
and yet as sharply rebuked in that we are doing so little with them.
And most of all, is there not need for us to emulate the broad
patriotism and the heroic spirit of self-sacrifice in which the Land
of the Rising Sun, in spite of dire poverty, is providing ten-months
schools for every boy and girl in all its borders? And, indeed, how
otherwise can we make sure, before it is too late, that our American
farm boys and girls will not be outdistanced in twentieth-century
achievement by the children of a people our fathers regarded only as
hopeless "heathen?"
Tokyo, Japan.
{29}
IV
"WELFARE WORK" IN JAPANESE FACTORIES
The obvious truth is that the agricultural population of Japan is too
congested. It is a physical impossibility for a people to live in
genuine comfort on such small pocket-handkerchief pieces of land, even
though their standards do not call for shoes or tables, beds or
chairs, Western houses or Western clothing. The almost exclusive use
of hand labor, too, is uneconomic, seen from a large standpoint, and
it would seem that in future farmers must combine, as they are already
beginning to do, in order to purchase horses and horse-power tools to
be used in common by a number of farmers. In the Tokyo Seed, Plant &
Implement Company store the other day I saw a number of widely
advertised American tools, and the manager told me the demand for them
is increasing.
Thus with a smaller number of men required to produce the nation's
food, a larger number may engage in manufacturing, and gradually the
same principle of division of labor which has brought Western people
to high standards of living, comfort, and earning power will produce
much the same result in Japan. Already wages, astonishingly low as
they are to-day to an ordinary American, have increased 40 per cent,
in the last eight or ten years, this increase being partly due to the
general cheapening of money the world over, and partly also to the
increased efficiency of the average laborer.
Unfortunately, however, Japan is not content to rely upon natural law
for the development of its manufactures. Adam {30} Smith said in his
"Wealth of Nations" (published the year of our American Declaration of
Independence), that the policy of all European nations since the
downfall of the Roman Empire had been to help manufacturing, the
industry of the towns, rather than agriculture, the industry of the
country--a policy in which America later imitated Europe. Japan now
follows suit. For a long time the government has paid enormous
subsidies to shipbuilding and manufacturing corporations, and now a
high tariff has been enacted, which will still further increase the
cost of living for the agricultural classes, comprising, as they do,
two thirds of the country's population.
"'With your cheap labor and all the colossal Oriental market right at
your door," I said to Editor Shihotsu of the _Kokumin Shimbun_ a day
or two ago, "what excuse is there for further dependence on the
government? What can be the effect of your new tariff except to
increase the burdens of the farmer for the benefit of the
manufacturer?" And while defending the policy, he admitted that I had
stated the practical effect of the policy. "They are domestic
consumption duties," was his phrase; and Count Okuma, one of the
empire's ablest men, once Minister of Agriculture, has also pointed
out how injuriously the new law will affect the masses of the people.
"Some would argue," he said in a speech at Osaka, "that the duties are
paid by the country from which the goods are imported. That this is
not the case is at once seen by the fact that an increase in duty
means a rise in the price of an article in the country imposing the
duty, and this to the actual consumer often amounts to more than the
rise in the duty. In these cases consumers pay the duty themselves;
and the customs revenues, so far from being a national asset, are
merely another form of taxation paid by the people." And the masses in
Japan, already staggering under the enormous burden of an average tax
amounting to 32 per cent, of their earnings (on account of their wars
with China and Russia and their enormous army and navy expenditure),
are ill-prepared to stand further {31} taxation for the benefit of
special interests. On the whole, there seems to have been much truth
in what a recent authority said on this subject:
"The Japanese manufacturers are concerned only to make monopoly
profits out of the consumer. If they can do that, they will not
worry about foreign markets, from which, in fact, their policy is
bound more and more to exclude them."
In any case, manufacturing in Japan is bound to increase, but it ought
not to increase through unjust oppression of agriculture or at the
expense of the physical stamina of the race. This fact is now winning
recognition not only from the nation at large, but from
public-spirited manufacturers as well.
Some very notable evidence upon this point came to me Wednesday when
influential friends secured special permission, not often granted to
strangers, for me to visit the great Kanegafuchi Cotton Spinning
Company's plant near Tokyo--the great surprise being not that I
succeeded in getting permission to visit this famous factory, though
that was partly surprising, but in what I saw on the visit.
Much has been said and written as to the utterly deplorable condition
of Japanese factory workers, and I was quite prepared for sights that
would outrage my feelings of humanity. Imagine my surprise, therefore,
when I found the manager making a hobby of "welfare work" for his
operatives and with a system of such work modelled after the Krupp
system in Germany, the best in the world! And as the Kanegafuchi
Company has seventeen factories in all, representing several cities
and aggregating over 300,000 spindles, being one of the most famous
industries of Japan, it will be seen that its example is by no means
without significance.
The Kanegafuchi's Tokyo factories alone employ 3500 operatives, and
they are cleaner, I should say, than most of our stores and offices.
The same thing is true of their great hospital and boarding-house, and
the dining-room is also {32} surprisingly clean and well kept. Of the
welfare work proper a whole article could be written. Each operative
pays 3 per cent, of his or her wages (most operatives are women) into
a common insurance and pension fund, and the company, out of its
earnings, pays into the fund an equal amount. From this a pension is
given the family of any employee who dies, while if an operative gets
sick or is injured, a committee, assisted by Director Fuji, allows a
suitable pension until recovery. In the case, however, of
long-standing disease or disability, help is given, after ten years,
from still another fund. This employees' pension fund now amounts to
$143,000, while other funds given partly or wholly by the company
include $30,000 for operatives' sanitary fund, $112,000 in a fund "for
promoting operatives' welfare," and $15,000 for erecting an
operatives' sanatorium. The company also has a savings department,
paying 10 per cent, on long-time deposits made by employees. There is
an excellent theatre and dance hall at the Tokyo plant, and I suppose
at the other branches also, and five physicians are regularly employed
to look after the health of operatives.
While the hours of labor in Japan generally are inexcusably long and,
as a rule, only two rest days a month are allowed, the Kanegafuchi
Company observes the Biblical seventh-day rest with profitable
results. The work hours are long yet, it is true, ten hours having
been the rule up to October 1, and now nine and one half hours. The
ten hours this summer embraced the time from 6 to 6, with a half
hour's rest from 9 to 9:30, one hour from 11:30 to 12:30, and another
half hour from 3 to 3:30; a system of halfway rests not common in
America, I believe.
Conditions at Kanegafuchi, of course, are not ideal, nor would I hold
them up as a general model for American mills. Rather should America
ask: "If Japan in a primitive stage of industrial evolution is doing
so much, how much more ought we to do?" More noteworthy still is the
fact that the sentiment of the country is loudly and insistently
demanding a law {33} to stop the evils of child labor and night work for
women, which, on the whole, are undoubtedly bad--very bad. The
Kanegafuchi welfare work is exceptional, but it is in line with the
new spirit of the people.
That Japan with its factory system not yet extensive, its people used
to a struggle for existence tenfold harder than ours, and with a
population comprising only the wealthy or capitalist class--that under
such conditions, these Buddhist Japanese should still make effective
demand for adequate factory labor legislation is enough to put to
shame many a Christian state in which our voters still permit
conditions that reproach our boasted chivalry and humanity. Perhaps
all the changes needed cannot be made at once without injury to
manufacturing interests, but in that case the law should at least
require a gradual and steady approach to model conditions--a distinct
step forward each six months until at the end of three years, or five
years at longest, every state should have a law as good as that of
Massachusetts.
Tokyo, Japan.
{34}
V
DOES JAPANESE COMPETITION MENACE THE WHITE MAN'S TRADE?
I
With all the markets of the Orient right at Japan's doors and labor to
be had for a mere song--four fifths of her cotton-factory workers,
girls and women averaging 13-1/2 cents a day, and the male labor
averaging only 22 cents--it is simply useless for Europe and America
to attempt to compete with her in any line she chooses to monopolize.
Now that she has recovered from her wars, she will doubtless forge to
the front as dramatically as an industrial power as she has already
done as a military and maritime power, while other nations, helpless
in competition, must simply surrender to the Mikado-land the lion's
share of Asiatic trade--the richest prize of twentieth-century
commerce.
In some such strain as this prophets of evil among English and
American manufacturers have talked for several years. For the last few
months, professing to see in Japan's adoption of a high protective
tariff partial confirmation of their predictions, they have assumed
added authority. Their arguments, too, are so plausible and the facts
as to Japan's low wage scale so patent that the world has become
acutely interested in the matter. I account myself especially
fortunate, therefore, in having been able to spend several weeks under
peculiarly favorable circumstances in a first-hand study of Japanese
industrial {35} conditions. I have been in great factories and
business offices; I have talked with both Japanese and foreign
manufacturers who employ laborers by the thousand; I have had the
views of the most distinguished financial leaders of the empire as
well as of the great captains of industry; I have talked with several
men who have served in the Emperor's cabinet, including one who has
stood next to the Mikado himself in power; and at the same time I have
taken pains to get the views of English and American consular
officials, commercial attaches and travelers, and of newspaper men
both foreign and native.
And yet after having seen the big factories and the little
factory-workers in Tokyo and Osaka, after having listened to the most
ambitious of Japan's industrial leaders, I shall leave the country
convinced of the folly of the talk that white labor cannot compete
with Japanese labor. I believe indeed that the outlook is encouraging
for manufacturing in the Mikado's empire, but I do not believe that
this development is to be regarded as a menace to English or American
industry. Any view to the contrary, it seems to me, must be based upon
a radical misconception of conditions as they are.
In the very outset, the assumed parallel between Japan's rise as a
military power and her predicted rise as an industrial power should be
branded as the groundless non sequitur that it is. "All our present
has its roots in the past," as my first Japanese acquaintance said to
me, and we ignore fundamental facts when we forget that for centuries
unnumbered Japan existed for the soldier, as the rosebush for the
blossom. The man of martial courage was the goal of all her striving,
the end of all her travail. Society was a military aristocracy, the
Samurai the privileged class. And at the same time commerce was
despised as dishonorable and industry merely tolerated as a necessary
evil. In the Japan of Yalu, Liao-yang, and Mukden we have no modern
Minerva springing full-armed from the head of Jove, but rather an
unrecognized Ulysses {36} of ancient skill surprising onlookers merely
ignorant of the long record of his prowess. Viewed from the same
historical standpoint, however, industrial Japan is a mere learner,
unskilled, with the long and weary price of victory yet to pay.
In the race she has to run, moreover, the Mikado-land has no such
advantages as many of our people have been led to believe. In America
it has long been my conviction that cheap labor is never cheap; that
so-called "cheap labor" is a curse to any community--not because it is
cheap but because it is inefficient. The so-called cheap negro labor
in the South, for example, I have come to regard as perhaps the
dearest on the continent. Here in Japan, however, I was quite prepared
to find that this theory would not hold good. By reason of conditions
in a primitive stage of industrial organization, I thought that I
might find cheap labor with all the advantages, in so far as there are
any, and few of the disadvantages, encountered elsewhere. But it is
not so. An American factory owner in Osaka, summing up his Job's
trials with raw Japanese labor, used exactly my own phrase in a
newspaper article a few days ago, "Cheap labor is never cheap." And
all my investigations have convinced me that the remark is as
applicable in Japan as it is in America or England.
The per capita wages of Japanese laborers here are, of course,
amazingly low. The latest 1910 statistics, as furnished by the
Department of Finance, indicate a daily wage (American money) of 40
cents for carpenters, 31-1/2 cents for shoemakers, 34 cents for
blacksmiths, 25-1/2 cents for compositors, 19-1/2 cents for male farm
laborers, and 22 cents for male weavers, and 12 cents for female. In
the cotton factories I visited, those of the better sort, the wages
run from 5 cents a day for the youngest children to 25 cents a day for
good women workers. In a mousselaine mill I was told that the average
wages were 22-1/2 cents, ranging from 10 cents to a maximum of 50
cents for the most skilled employees. And this, be it remembered, was
{37} for eleven hours' work and in a factory requiring a higher grade
of efficiency than the average.
But in spite of the fact that such figures as these were well known to
him, it was my host in the first Japanese house to which I was
invited--one of the Emperor's privy councillors, and a man of much
travel and culture who had studied commercial conditions at home and
abroad rather profoundly--who expressed the conclusion that Japanese
factory labor when reduced to terms of efficiency is not greatly
cheaper than European, an opinion which has since grown rather trite
in view of the number of times that I have heard it. "In the old
handicrafts and family industries to which our people have been
accustomed," my host declared, "we can beat the world, but the moment
we turn to modern industrial machinery on a large scale the newness of
our endeavor tells against us in a hundred hindering ways. Numbers of
times I have sought to work out some industrial policy which had
succeeded, and could not but have succeeded, in England, Germany, or
America, only to meet general failure here because of the unconsidered
elements of a different environment, a totally different stage of
industrial evolution. Warriors from the beginning and with a record
for continuous government unsurpassed by any European country, our
political and military achievements are but the fruitage of our long
history, but in industry we must simply wait through patient
generations to reach the stage represented by the Englishman,
Irishman, or German, who takes to machinery as if by instinct."
All my investigations since have confirmed the philosophy of this
distinguished Japanese whose name, if I should mention it, would be
familiar to many in America and England. In the Tokyo branch of the
Kanegafuchi Spinning Company (a company which controls 300,000
spindles) the director, speaking from the experience of one of the
greatest and best conducted industries in Japan, declared: "Your
skilled factory laborers in America or England will work four sides of
a ring frame; our unskilled laborer may work only one." A young
Englishman in another factory declared: "It takes five men here to do
work that I and my mate would take care of at home." An American
vice-consul told me that it takes three or four times as much Japanese
as foreign labor to look after an equal number of looms. A Japanese
expert just back from Europe declared recently that "Lancashire labor
is more expensive than ours, but really cheaper." Similarly the Tokyo
correspondent of the London _Times_ summing up an eight-column review
of Japanese industry, observed: "If we go to the bottom of the
question and consider what is being paid as wages and what is being
obtained as the product of labor in Japan, we may find that Japanese
labor is not cheaper than in other countries."
{38}
II
My own conviction is that in actual output the Japanese labor is
somewhat cheaper than American or European labor, but not greatly so,
and that even this margin of excess in comparative cheapness
represents mainly a blood-tax on the lives and energies of the
Japanese people, the result of having no legislation to restrain the
ruinous overwork of women and little children--a grievous debt which
the nation must pay at the expense of its own stamina and which the
manufacturers must also pay in part through the failure to develop
experienced and able-bodied laborers. The latest "Japan Year Book"
expresses the view that "in per capita output two or three skilled
Japanese workers correspond to one foreign," but under present
conditions the difficulty here is to find the skilled workers at all.
When Mr. Oka, of the Department of Commerce and Agriculture, told me
that the average Japanese factory hand remains in the business less
than two years, I was astonished, but inquiry from original sources
confirmed the view. With the best system of welfare work in the
empire, the Kanegafuchi Company keeps its laborers two and a half {39}
to three years, but in a mill in Osaka of the better sort, employing
2500 hands, I was told that only 20 per cent, had been at work as long
as three years. Under such conditions, the majority of the operatives
at any time must be in a stage of deplorable inexperience, and it is
no wonder that the "Year Book" just quoted goes on to confess that
"one serious defect of the production is lack of uniformity in
quality--attributed to unskilled labor and overwork of machinery."
The explanation of this situation, of course, is largely to be found
in the fact that Japanese industries are women's industries--there
being seven times as large a proportion of women to men, the
Department of Commerce informs me, as in European and American
manufacturing. These women workers are mostly from the country. Their
purpose is only to work two or three years before getting married, and
thousands of them, called home to marry the husbands their parents
have selected, or else giving way physically under strain, quit work
before their contracts expire. "We have almost no factory laborers who
look on the work as a life business," was an expression often repeated
to me.
Not only in the mills, but in numerous other lines of work, have I
seen illustrations of the primitive stage of Japan's industrial
efficiency. As a concrete illustration I wish I might pass to each
reader the box of Kobe-made matches on the table before me (for
match-making of this sort is an important industry here, as well as
the sort conducted through matrimonial middlemen without waiting for
the aid or consent of either of the parties involved). I have never in
my life seen such a box of matches in America. Not in a hundred boxes
at home would you find so many splinters without heads, so many
defective matches. And in turning out the boxes themselves, I am told
that it takes five or six hands to equal the product of one skilled
foreign laborer. "It takes two or three Japanese servants to do the
work of one white servant" is the general verdict of housekeepers,
while it has also been brought to my {40} attention that in shops two
or three clerks are required to do the work of one at home. A Japanese
newspaper man (his paper is printed in English) tells me that linotype
compositors set only half as many ems per hour as in America. In
short, the general verdict as I have found it is indicated by what I
have written, and the most enthusiastic advocate of Japanese cheap
labor, the captain of the steamer on which I came from America, rather
spoiled his enthusiasm for getting his ship coaled at Nagasaki for
7-1/2 cents a ton, by acknowledging that if it rained he should have
to keep his ship waiting a day to get sufficient hands.
Moreover, while the Japanese factory workers are forced into longer
hours than labor anywhere else--eleven hours at night this week,
eleven hours in the day next week--I am convinced that the people as a
whole are more than ordinarily averse to steady, hard, uninterrupted
toil. "We have a streak of the Malay in us," as a Japanese professor
said to me, "and we like to idle now and then. The truth is our people
are not workers; they are artists, and artists must not be hurried."
Certainly in the hurried production of the factory the Japanese
artistic taste seems to break down almost beyond redemption, and the
people seem unable to carry their habits of neatness and carefulness
into the new environment of European machinery. "Take the Tokyo street
cars," said an ex-cabinet officer to me; "the wheels are seldom or
never cleaned or oiled, and are half eaten by rust." The railroads are
but poorly kept up; the telephones exhaust your patience; while in the
case of telegraphing, your exasperation is likely to lose itself in
amazed amusement. A few days ago, for example, I sent a telegram from
Osaka to Kobe, took my rickshaw across town, waited for a slow train
to start, and then reached Kobe and the street destination of my
message before it did.
In considering the failure of Japanese labor to bring forth a
satisfactory output, however, one thing more should be said, and that
is that we should not put the blame wholly on the {41} wage-earner.
Not a small proportion of the responsibility lies at the door of
inexpert managers. The family system of production has not only been
the rule for generations with that minority of the people not engaged
in farming, but it is still the dominant type of Japanese industry,
and it will take time even to provide opportunities for training a
sufficient corps of superintendents in the larger lines of production.
In further illustration of my argument that cheap labor is not proving
so abnormally profitable, I may question whether Japanese factories
have paid as good dividends, in proportion to prevailing rates of
interest on money, as factories in England and America. Baron
Shibusawa, the dean of Japanese financiers and one of the pioneers in
cotton manufacturing, is my authority for the statement that 12 per
cent, would be a rather high estimate of the average rate of dividend,
while figures furnished by the Department of Finance show that for ten
years the average rate of interest on loans has been 11.25 per cent.
The fact that Western ideas as to Japan's recent industrial advance
have been greatly exaggerated may also be demonstrated just here.
While the latest government figures show that in twelve years the
number of female factory operatives increased from 261,218 to 400,925
and male factory operatives from 173,614 to 248,251, it is plain that
a manufacturing population of 649,000 in a country of 50,000,000 souls
is small, and the actual progress has not been so great as the
relative figures would indicate. Moreover, many so-called "factories"
employ less than ten persons and would not be called factories at all
in England or America. The absence of iron deposits is a great
handicap, the one steel foundry being operated by the government at a
heavy loss, and in cotton manufacturing, where "cheap labor" is
supposed to be most advantageous, no very remarkable advance has been
made in the last decade. From 1899 to 1909 English manufacturers so
increased their trade that in the latter year they imported $222 worth
of raw {42} cotton for every $100 worth imported ten years before, while
Japan in 1909 imported only $177 worth for each $100 worth a decade
previous--though of course she made this cotton into higher grade
products.
III
It must also be remembered that the wages of labor in Japan are
steadily increasing and will continue to increase. More significant
than the fact of the low cost per day, to which I have already given
attention, is the fact that these wages represent an average increase
per trade of 40 per cent, above the wages eight years previous. The
new 1910 "Financial and Economic Annual" shows the rate of wages of
forty-six classes of labor for a period of eight years. For not one
line of labor is a decrease of wages shown, and for only two an
increase of less than 30 per cent.; sixteen show increases between 30
and 40 per cent., seventeen between 40 and 50 per cent., eight from 50
to 60 per cent., three from 60 to 70 per cent., while significantly
enough the greatest increase, 81 per cent., is for female servants, a
fact largely due to factory competition. In Osaka the British
vice-consul gave me the figures for the latest three-year period for
which figures have been published, indicating in these thirty-six
months a 30 per cent. gain in the wages of men in the factories and a
25 per cent, gain in the wages of women.
Of no small significance in any study of Japanese industry must also
be the fact that there are in Japan proper a full half million fewer
women than men (1910 figures: men, 25,639,581; women, 25,112,338)--a
condition the reverse of that obtaining in almost every other country.
Now the young Japanese are a very home-loving folk, and even if they
were not, almost all Shinto parents, realizing the paramount
importance of having descendants to worship their spirits, favor and
arrange early marriages for their sons. And what with this competition
for {43} wives, the undiminished demand for female servants, and a
half million fewer women than men to draw from, the outlook for any
great expansion of manufacturing based on woman labor is not very
bright. Moreover, with Mrs. Housekeeper increasing her frantic bids
for servants 81 per cent, in eight years, and still mourning that they
are not to be had, it is plain that the manufacturer has serious
competition from this quarter, to say nothing of the further fact that
the Japanese girls are for the first time becoming well educated and
are therefore likely to be in steadily increasing demand as
office-workers. Upon this general subject the head of one of Osaka's
leading factories said to me: "I am now employing 2500 women, but if I
wished to enlarge my mill at once and employ 5000, it would be
impossible for me to get the labor, though I might increase to this
figure by adding a few hundred each year for several years."
Unquestionably, too, shorter hours, less night work, weekly holidays,
and better sanitary conditions must be adopted by most manufacturers
if they are to continue to get labor. The Kobe _Chronicle_ quotes Mr.
Kudota, of the Sanitary Bureau, as saying that "most of the women
workers are compelled to leave the factories on account of their
constitutions being wrecked" after two or three years of night work,
consumption numbering its victims among them by the thousands. Either
the mills must give better food and lodging than they now provide or
else they must pay higher wages directly which will enable the
laborers to make better provision for themselves.
Yet another reason why wages must continue to advance is the steady
increase in cost of living, due partly to the higher standard
developed through education and contact with Western civilization, but
perhaps even more largely to the fearful burden of taxation under
which the people are staggering. A usual estimate of the tax rate is
30 per cent. of one's income, while Mr. Wakatsuki, late Japanese
Financial Commissioner to London, is quoted as authority for the
statement {44} that the people now pay in direct and indirect taxes,
35 per cent, of their incomes. And I doubt whether even this estimate
includes the increased amounts that citizens are forced to pay for
salt and tobacco as a result of the government monopoly in these
products, or the greatly increased prices of sugar resulting from the
government's paternalistic efforts to guarantee prosperity to sugar
manufacturers in Formosa.
IV
Higher still, and higher far than anything the nation has ever yet
known, must go the cost of living under the new tariff law. From a
British textile representative I learned the other day that a grade of
English woollens largely used by the Japanese for underwear will cost
over one third more under the new tariff, while the increased duty on
certain other lines of goods is indicated by the table herewith:
PERCENTAGE OF DUTY TO COST OF ARTICLE
Old Tariff New Tariff
Printed goods 3 22
White lawns 10 47
Shirtings 10 39
Cotton Italians 3 35
Poplins 8 19
Brocades 10 22
Neither a nation nor an individual can lift itself by its bootstraps.
The majority of the thoughtful people in the empire seem to me to
realize even now that through the new tariff Japanese industry, as a
whole, is likely to lose much more by lessened ability to compete in
foreign markets than it will gain by shackled competition in the home
markets. Farseeing old Count Okuma, once Premier, and one of the
empire's Elder Statesmen, seemed to realize this more fully than any
other man I have seen. "Within two or three years from the time the
new law goes into force," he declared, "I am {45} confident that its
injurious effects will be so apparent that the people will force its
repeal. With our heavy taxes the margin of wages left for comfort is
already small, and with the cost of living further increased by the
new tariff, wages must inevitably advance. This will increase the cost
of our manufactured products, now exported mostly to China, India, and
other countries requiring cheap or low-grade goods, and where we must
face the competition of the foremost industrial nations of the world.
As our cost of production increases, our competition with Europe will
become steadily more difficult and a decrease in our exports will
surely follow. It is folly for one small island to try to produce
everything it needs. The tariff on iron, for example, can only hamper
every new industry by increasing the cost of machinery, and must
especially hinder navigation and shipbuilding, in which we have made
such progress." Not a few of the country's foremost vernacular dailies
are as outspoken as Count Okuma on this point, and the Kobe
_Chronicle_ declares that, with diminished exports to Japan, "British
manufacturers will find compensation in the lessened ability of the
Japanese to compete in China; and Japan will find that she has raised
prices against herself and damaged her own efficiency."
That such will be the net result of Japan's new policy seems to me to
admit of no question. Unfortunately, certain special lines of British
and American manufacture may suffer, but, on the whole, what the white
man's trade loses in Japan will be recompensed for in China and India.
Even after Japan's adoption of the moderately protective tariff of
1899 her export of yarns to China--in the much discussed "market right
at her doors"--dropped from a product of 340,000 bales to a recent
average of 250,000 bales. From 1899 to 1908, according to the latest
published government figures, the number of employees in Japanese
cotton factories increased only 240--one third of 1 per cent.--or from
73,985 to 74,225, to be exact, while I have already alluded to the
figures showing the {46} comparative English and Japanese imports of
raw cotton from 1890 to 1909 as furnished me by Mr. Robert Young, of
Kobe, Japan in this period going from $30,000,000 to $54,000,000, or
77 per cent., while England's advance was from $135,000,000 to
$300,000,000, or 122 per cent. The increase in England's case, of
course, was largely, and in Japan's case almost wholly, due to the
increased price of the cotton itself, but the figures are none the
less useful for the purposes of comparison.
In the frequent attempts of the Japanese Government to stimulate
special industries by subsidies and special privileges there is, it
seems to me, equally as little danger to the trade of Europe and
America in general (though here, too, special industries may suffer
now and then), because Japan is in this way simply handicapping
herself for effective industrial growth. Just at this writing we have
an illustration in the case of the Formosan sugar subsidy which seems
to have developed into a veritable Frankenstein; or, to use a homelier
figure, the government seems to be in the position of the man who had
the bear by the tail, with equal danger in holding on or letting go.
Already, as a result of the system of subsidies, bounties and special
privileges, individual initiative has been discouraged, a dangerous
and corrupting alliance of government with business developed, public
morals debased (as was strikingly brought out in the Dai Nippon sugar
scandal), and the people, as Mr. Sasano, of the Foreign Department,
complains, now "rely on the help of the government on all occasions."
On the same point the Tokyo _Keizai_ declares that "the habit of
looking to the government for assistance in all and everything,
oblivious of independent enterprise . . . has now grown to the chronic
stage, and unless it is cured the health and vitality of the nation
will ultimately be sapped and undermined."
As for increasing complaints of "low commercial morality" brought
against Japanese merchants, that is not a matter of concern in this
discussion, except in so far as it may prove a form of Japanese
commercial suicide. But to one who holds {47} the view, as I do, that
the community of nations is enriched by every worthy industrial and
moral advance on the part of any nation, it is gratifying to find the
general alarm over the present undoubtedly serious conditions, and it
is to be hoped that the efforts of the authorities will result in an
early change to better methods.
V
Such is a brief review of the salient features of present-day Japanese
industry, and in no point do I find any material menace to the general
well-being of American and European trade. It is my opinion that the
Japanese will steadily develop industrial efficiency, but that in the
future no more than in the present will Japan menace European and
American industry (unless she is permitted to take unfair advantages
in Manchuria, Korea, etc.), for just in proportion as efficiency
increases, just in the same proportion, broadly speaking, wages and
standards of living will advance. The three--efficiency, wages, cost
of living--seem destined to go hand in hand, and this has certainly
been the experience thus far. And whatever loss we may suffer by
reason of Japan gradually supplanting us in certain cruder forms of
production should be abundantly compensated for in the better market
for our own higher-grade goods that we shall find among a people of
increasing wealth and steadily advancing standards of living.
In any fair contest for the world's trade there seems little reason to
fear any disastrous competition from Japan. Perhaps she has been
allowed to make the contest unfair in Manchuria or elsewhere, but
that, as Mr. Kipling would say, is another story.
Kobe, Japan.
{48}
VI
BUDDHISM, SHINTOISM, AND CHRISTIANITY IN JAPAN
One of the most fascinating places in all Japan is Kyoto, the old
capital of the empire, and one of its most picturesque and historic
cities. Without great factories such as Osaka boasts of, without the
political importance of Tokyo, and without shipping advantages such as
have made Kobe and Yokahoma famous, Kyoto is noted rather for
conserving the life of old Japan. Here are the family industries, the
handicrafts, and a hundred little arts in which the Land of the Rising
Sun excels.
Little themselves in stature, the people of Japan are best in dealing
with little things requiring daintiness, finish, and artistic taste.
Some one has said that their art is "great in little things and little
in great things," and unlike many epigrams, it is as true as it is
terse.
A traveler gets the impression that most of their shops, or "stores,"
as we say in America, are for selling bric-a-brac, toys, lacquer ware,
bronzes, or ornamental things of one kind or another; but perhaps this
is largely because they give an artistic or ornamental appearance to a
thousand utensils and household articles which in America would be raw
and plain in their obvious practicality. The room in which I write is
a fine illustration of this: finished in natural, unpainted woods,
entirely without "fussiness" or show, and yet with certain touches and
bits of wood carving that make it a work of art. Upon this point I
must again quote Lafcadio Hearn, whose {49} books, although often more
poetic and laudatory than accurate, are nevertheless too valuable to
be neglected by any student of Japan:
"It has been said that in a Greek city of the fourth century before
Christ every household utensil, even the most trifling object, was
in respect of design an object of art; and the same fact is true,
though in another and stranger way, of all things in a Japanese
home; even such articles of common use as a bronze candlestick, a
brass lamp, an iron kettle, a paper lantern, a bamboo curtain, a
wooden tray, will reveal to educated eyes a sense of beauty and
fitness entirely unknown to Western cheap production."
Like most old Japanese cities, Kyoto is proud of its temples, Buddhist
and Shinto. And perhaps I should explain just here the difference
between these two faiths that were long merged into one, but have been
dissociated since the restoration of the Emperor to his old-time
powers forty years ago. Shinto is the ancient Japanese system of
ancestor-worship, with its doctrine of the divine descent of the
Mikado from the Sun-goddess and its requirement that every faithful
adherent make daily offerings to the spirits of the family's
ancestors. With the future life or with moral precepts for this life
it does not concern itself. "Obey the Emperor and follow your own
instincts," is the gist of the Shinto religion, in so far as it may be
called a religion at all: the tendency is to consider it only a form
of patriotism and not a religion.
Buddhism, on the other hand, is an elaborate system of theology
comprising a great variety of creeds, and insisting upon much
ecclesiastical form and ceremony, however little it may have to do
with practical morals. "The fact is, we Japanese have never gotten our
morals from our religion," said one quasi-Buddhist newspaper man to me
in Tokyo. "What moral ideas we have came neither from Shintoism nor
Buddhism, but largely from Confucius and the Chinese classics."
Buddhism as it left India may have been a rather exalted religious
theory, but if so, then in Japan it has certainly {50} degenerated
into a shameless mockery of its former self. To read Sir Edwin
Arnold's glorification of theoretical Buddhism in his "Light of Asia,"
and then see practical Buddhism in Japan with all its superstitions
and idolatries, is very much like hearing bewitched Titania's praise
of her lover's beauty and then turning to see the long ears and hairy
features of the ass that he has become.
Nor is it without significance that Sir Edwin Arnold himself coming to
Buddhist Japan dropped into open and flagrant immoralities such as a
Christian community would never have tolerated, while the foremost
American-bred apologists for Buddhism here have been but little
better. One of the greatest and wealthiest temples in Kyoto is more
notorious right now for the vices of its sacred (?) officials than for
any virtues in its creed, and one of the high priests, like the
Emperor himself, has a dozen or more women in his household. Some
Buddhists are making an earnest effort to bring about at least an
outward reformation of their organization, but the difficulties are
such as to make the success of the undertaking very improbable. With
the usual Japanese quality of imitativeness they have started "Young
Men's Buddhist Associations," "Sunday schools," etc., and are also
beginning to follow the example set by the Christians of participating
in philanthropic and charitable work. In the Buddhist service I
attended last Sunday the gorgeously robed priest sat on a raised altar
in the centre of the room, with other priests ranged about him, and
the general service, as usual, was much as if they had copied the
Catholic ritual.
After the Buddhist ceremonies, I went to the Christian service at the
Congregational School, or Doshisha, where the sound of the
American-born minister's voice was punctuated by the street sounds of
whirring rickshaw wheels and the noisy getas of passing Buddhists,
while outside the window I could see the bamboo trees and the now
familiar red disk and white border of the Mikado's flag. Prayer was
offered for {51} "the President of the United States, the King of
Great Britain, the Emperor of Germany, and the Emperor of Japan."
At night I was even more interested, even though I could not
understand a word, in a native Japanese service I attended for half an
hour. Although there was a downpour of rain the chapel was comfortably
filled and the faces of the worshippers, I thought, were of more than
ordinary intelligence and promise, while their sincerity is
illustrated by the fact that numbers of the women Christians are
actually depriving themselves of suitable food in order to give money
for erecting a larger church building.
The next evening I took tea with a missionary who has in his home one
of the public notices (dated March, 1868,) and common throughout the
empire forty odd years ago, prohibiting Christianity, the ancient
penalty being nothing less than death itself. The explanation of this
notice is found in a bit of history. Three hundred and sixty years ago
the Catholics came here, started missions, and made many converts
among the lords or daimyios, who ordered their followers also to
become Catholics, with the result that by the time of the first
English settlement at Jamestown, in 1607, there were from 600,000 to
1,000,000 Christians, nominal and actual, away over here in Japan.
Seven years later, however, government persecution began, Christianity
was put under the ban, and so remained until eight years after our
Civil War ended. Many Christians suffered martyrdom for their faith in
this long period; and a few who escaped detection even secretly handed
their faith down from father to son through all the long generations
until tolerance came again.
Dr. A. D. Hail, of Osaka, tells me that even as late as 1885 an old
man from the "backwoods," as we should say, came to a village where
Dr. Hail's brother was a missionary, discovered for the first time
that a man might be a Christian without being punished, and then
confessed that each day he had worshipped secretly at a little
Catholic shrine hidden in {52} his wall, as his father and his father's
father had done before him.
As another illustration of the changed attitude toward Christianity, I
may mention that a Japanese Buddhist once came to Doctor Hail's
services armed with a dagger to kill the preacher, but had his
attention caught by the sermon while waiting his chance and is now a
missionary himself!
Perhaps in no other respect is Christianity working a greater change
than in the general estimate of woman, although this is an objection
the natives openly urge against Christianity. Just as in any conflict
of interest the family in Japan has been everything and the individual
nothing, so in every disagreement between husband and wife his
opinions count for everything, hers for nothing. The orthodox and
traditional Japanese view as to a woman's place has been very
accurately and none too strongly set forth by the celebrated Japanese
moralist, Kaibarra, writing on "The Whole Duty of Woman":
"The great lifelong duty of a woman is obedience. . . . Should her
husband be roused at any time to anger, she must obey him with fear
and trembling, and never set herself up against him in anger and
forwardness. A woman should look on her husband as if he were Heaven
itself and never weary of thinking how she may yield to her husband,
and thus escape celestial castigation."
Similarly, in the "Greater Learning for Women" it is declared:
"The five worst maladies that afflict the female mind are
indocility, discontent, slander, jealousy and silliness. These five
maladies infest seven or eight out of every ten women, and it is
from these that arises the inferiority of women to men."
{53}
[Illustration: THE GREAT BUDDHA (DIABUTSU) AT KAMAKURA.]
This gigantic figure of Buddha (a man's head would barely reach the
statue's feet) singularly expresses the spirit of serene
contemplation for which the Buddhist religion stands; is indeed,
hauntingly suggestive of that dreamy Nirvana which it teaches is the
goal of existence. There is perhaps no finer piece of statuary in
the East than this.
{54}
[Illustration: THE DEGENERATE KOREANS AT REST AND AT WORK.]
The favorite occupation is smoking, but in the lower picture three
men together are managing to operate one spade. One man rams it into
the ground, and the other two (by means of ropes attached) jerk out
the shovelful of earth!
{52 continued}
The wife of the missionary I visited in Osaka told me one or two
amusing incidents--amusing in one aspect and pathetic in another--that
are of interest in this connection. A Japanese member of her church
declared: No, no, Mrs. {55} "Hail, you can't ever make me believe that
my wife is as good as I am!" On another occasion she was teaching a
Sunday-school class concerning the woman of Samaria, and asked: "Why
did Jesus ask the woman to call her husband?" And the Japanese answer
was: "Because he was going to talk on intellectual things and she
needed some man to help her understand!"
Dr. Sidney Gulick, with whom I had tea in Kyoto, tells of tying his
wife's shoes on the street, on one occasion, only to find the Japanese
amazed that a man should so humble himself. His wife's taking his arm
in walking was also regarded as the height of impropriety!
No religion of the Far East has ever recognized the dignity of woman,
probably because no religion has ever recognized the worth of the
individual. Just as I have said, that in the old days, and almost as
largely to-day, in the relations of the home, it was the family that
counted and not the individual, so in his relations to the larger
world beyond the individual formerly counted for nothing when weighed
against the wishes of the superior classes. In the earliest days, when
the lord died, a number of his subjects were buried with him to wait
upon his spirit in the Beyond. Later, with the same object in view,
wives and servants committed suicide on the death of the master. Even
now it is regarded as honorable for a girl to sell herself into shame
to save the family from want.
The same antipodal difference between East and West--here "the family
is the social unit" and with us the individual himself--explains the
system of adoption: a younger son not being essential to the
maintenance of the family cult may be adopted into another family,
while the eldest son may not. On the same principle the father rules,
not because of what he represents as an Individual, but because he
represents the Family. Whenever he chooses, he abdicates, and must
then join his other children in obeying the eldest son.
In the relations of citizenship the same disregard of {56} individual
rights was the ancient rule, not merely in the fact that for centuries
the smallest details of everyday life were regulated by law, but more
seriously in that the Samurai, or privileged class, might "cut down in
cold blood a beggar, a merchant, or a farmer on the slightest
provocation, or simply for the purpose of testing his sword," while in
case of the ruin of their cause it was the honorable and natural thing
for soldiers to commit "hari-kiri"--that is to say, commit suicide by
disemboweling themselves. A Japanese writer recently declared that
"the value of the individual life is an illustration of the Christian
spirit" that is profoundly influencing Japan, and he mentioned as an
example that formerly suicide, in such circumstances as I have
mentioned, "was regarded as an honorable act; now it is regarded as a
sin."
Without professing the religion of fatalism which so influences the
peoples of the Nearer East, the Japanese soldiers behave like
fatalists because the fundamental basis of the social order for
centuries has been the necessity of the Individual to sacrifice
pleasure, comfort, or life itself when required either by the Family
or by the Social Order. And this partially explains why it is said in
sober earnest that the highest ambition of most Japanese schoolboys
to-day is to die for their Emperor.
---
This is my last letter from Japan, and my next letter will be from
Korea--if the cholera doesn't get me. It has been raging in Osaka and
in Kobe, both of which cities I have thought it necessary to visit in
order to get first-hand information about industrial conditions.
Ordinarily, the cholera victim lives only a few hours. The first day's
record here in Kobe, I believe, showed six cases and five deaths.
Gradually, however, cholera is being stamped out, just as we have
eradicated yellow fever in Cuba and the South, and just as we shall
eventually come to recognize the prevalence of typhoid in any town as
a disgrace--an evidence of primitive and uncivilized {57} sanitary
conditions. A friend of mine who came to Osaka in 1879 tells me that
there were 10,000 cholera victims in that one city that year--the
yellow flag on almost every street, and all through the night the
sound of men hurrying past with new victims for the hospitals or with
new corpses for the burning. In the thirteen years 1878-91 more than
313,000 Japanese died of the scourge.
I regret to say good-by to Japan. It is a tremendously interesting
country. For just as America represents the ultimate type of
Occidental civilization, so does Japan represent the ultimate type of
Oriental civilization.
More than this, it is here that the full tides of Oriental and
Occidental life are now meeting for the first time in human history.
For centuries uncounted the yellow man advanced across the plains and
peaks of Asia, finding at last in these outlying islands his
farthermost outpost, and so tarried here in the Farthest East, "the
Land of the Rising Sun." He hardly thought of the existence of a West,
but if his Buddha-like composure had been ruffled by such a thought,
he might have droned monotonously:
"Oh, East is East, and West is West,
and never the twain shall meet."
But while the yellow man had thus moved steadily eastward, the white
man, starting from the land of the Euphrates, had pitched his camp,
with each succeeding generation, nearer and nearer the setting sun.
Greece--Rome--Spain--France--England--then four hundred years ago,
more restless than the Mongolian, the white man dared the seas that
hemmed him in and found a new continent to people. Westward still the
course of empire then continued until in our time the white man
planted his civilization on the Pacific Coast.
There was no more West.
Then it was, as if in obedience to a cosmic, racial instinct deeper
than reason, the white man sent his messengers across the new-found
ocean and awakened the Sleepy World {58} of the Yellow Man by the
booming of Perry's guns off Yokahoma.
The Kingdom of Heaven, we are told, cometh not with observation, and
the deeper meaning of the greatest events in human history may often
escape the attention of contemporaries. My father and yours, perhaps,
heard little and thought less of Perry's exploit, and yet it marked
not merely a new historical epoch, but a new act in the long drama of
human evolution itself. Curious, too, it is to observe how the strange
world-destiny that shapes our ends gave to it a stage-setting in
keeping with its dramatic significance. Not to England, nor to any
other great naval and commercial Power of the time, but to the young
United States--the nation that had found the ultimate West--came the
unlikely but strangely fitting task of opening the Farthest East to
Western trade and thought.
When at last the world has grown old and nations and empires not yet
formed shall themselves have gone the mortal way common alike to human
creatures and human creations, I think the far historian will record
few events either more dramatic or more pregnant with undreamed-of
meaning than Perry's entrance into Japanese waters just five years
after the discovery of gold in California had ended the world-old
drama of our westward march.
So to-day, as I have said, the full tides of Orient and Occident have
rushed together in Japan, and it is not merely a land of curious
customs and strange phenomena, but a land in which the contrasts exist
side by side, and most interesting of all, a land of strangely
mingling social and industrial currents. East and West have met, and
we wait to see what forces in each shall prevail when the shock of
their fierce encounter shall have passed. For it is not merely Japan,
but all Asia, whose future may be affected by the outcome of the new,
tense struggle here between the ideals of West and East.
As on the streets of Tokyo and Yokahoma the Japanese {59} in European
dress jostles his brother in native garb, as streams of men in coats
and trousers and shoes mingle with men wearing kimonas, hikamas, and
getas, so in the minds of the people the teachings of modern science
and Confucian classic meet; the faith of the Christian grapples with
the faith of the Buddhist; the masterful aspirations of Western
civilization surge against the old placidity of the East.
What shall be the outcome? Upon nothing else, it seems to me, depends
so much as upon the religious foundation upon which Japan seeks to
build the structure of her newer and richer life. Many of her people,
if I may change the figure, are seeking to put the new wine of
Christian civilization into the old bottles of Shinto and Buddhist
ritualism. That this must fail is, I think, self-evident. Many others,
like the iconoclasts of the French Revolution, would sweep away all
religion, but they will find that they are fighting against an
ineradicable instinct of human nature, the innate craving of the
divine in man.
In my own brief stay in Japan I have seen enough to convince me of the
truth of both the foregoing observations. I confess that I came to the
country with a distinct doubt as to the wisdom of stressing mission
work here--came thinking the field less promising then elsewhere. But
I go away with no such feeling. What I have seen and heard has
dispelled my doubts. Speaking simply as a journalist and a student of
social and industrial conditions, I believe that to-day Japan needs
nothing more than Christian missionaries--men who are willing to
forget dogma and tradition and creedal differences in emphasizing the
fundamental teachings of Christ Himself, and who have education,
sympathy, and vision to fit them for the stupendous task of helping
mold a new and composite type of human civilization, a type which may
ultimately make conquest of the whole Oriental half of our human race.
Kobe, Japan.
{60}
VII
KOREA: "THE LAND OF THE MORNING CALM"
I have become a contemporary of David and the patriarchs of Israel. In
the civilization into which I have come science and invention are in
swaddling clothes, the Pyramids are yet young, the great nations of
Western Europe still in the womb of Time.
This at least is how I have felt now that, having left Japan, I am
travelling through Korea, "the Land of the Morning Calm"--or "Chosen,"
as the Japanese will call it hereafter--whose authentic recorded
history runs back into the twelfth century before the Christian era,
and whose general features must have changed but little in all this
time. A typical Korean view of the present year might well be
photographed to illustrate a Sunday-school lesson from the Old
Testament.
The men in the fields I have seen plow with bullocks harnessed in the
primitive fashion of the earliest civilization. Their plow stocks are
of wood rough-hewn from their native forest trees, the plowman here
never standing between the "plow-handles," as we say, because there is
only one handle and that little better than a stick of firewood. With
sickles equally primitive I have seen men cutting the ripe rice in the
fields; with flails, beating out their grain. Their houses, hardly
high enough to stand up in, are little more than four square rock
walls with roofs of straw, over which pumpkin vines clamber or on
which immense quantities of red pepper are drying in the autumn sun.
Nor would the dress of the people--everybody {61} in white (or what
was once white) garments--have seemed strange in ancient Judea.
There is also the same mixture of plains and peaks as Bible pictures
of the Holy Land have made familiar, and at night, as October's
hunters' moon glorifies all the landscape, a faint light gleaming here
and there from an opening in the rock huts, and with Arcturus and the
Pleiades of Job in the sky, it has seemed almost sacrilege to mar the
ancient environment by such an anachronism as a modern railway
locomotive. Rather, in looking out over the picturesque mountains and
valleys and sniffing the cool, dry air, you feel "the call of the
wild" in your blood. Across long centuries the life of your far-gone
nomadic ancestors calls to you. Almost irresistibly you are moved to
take a human friend and a friendly horse or pony and pitch your camp
out under the great stars--larger and brighter indeed do they seem to
burn here in the Orient--and feel the dew on your face as you awaken
in the "morning calm" of the ancient Hermit Kingdom, whose feeble life
was snuffed out, like the flame of a burnt-down candle, but a few
short months ago.
As I came into Seoul three nights ago I found it hardly less
fascinating than the country through which I had travelled during the
day. Through ancient streets, unlit by any electric glare, strangely
robed, almost spirit-like white figures were gliding here and there in
the moonlight, singly or in groups, and but a few minutes' ride in our
rickshaws brought us to the old South Gate. Great monument of a dead
era is it, relic of the days when Seoul trusted to its ten miles of
massive stone walls (already a century old when Columbus set sail from
Palos) to keep out the war-like Mongol and Tartar.
In Japan I found a different world from that which I had known, but a
world in which East and West were strangely mingled: much of the
familiar with the unfamiliar. Here in Korea, on the contrary, I have
found the real East, the Asia of romance, of tradition and of fable,
almost untouched by {62} Western influences--dirty, squalid,
unprogressive, and yet with a fascination all its own. Great bare
mountains look down on the capital city, the old city-wall climbing
their steep sides, and the historic Han flows through an adjacent
valley. The thatched or tiled roofs of the houses are but little
higher than one's head, and I shall never forget what a towering
skyscraper effect is produced by a photographer's little two-story
studio building on the main street of the city. Practically every
other building is but little higher and not greatly larger as a rule,
than the pens in which our American farmers fatten hogs in the fall.
Most American merchants would expect to make more in a day than the
average white-robed, easy-going Seoul merchant has in stock, but he
smokes his long-stemmed pipe in peaceful contemplation of the world
and doesn't worry. There are no sidewalks in Seoul, of course,
although it has been for five centuries (until now) the capital of a
kingdom, and a quarter of a million people call the city their home;
no carriages or buggies, no sewerage, and but few horses. There are
miserable little overloaded ponies that the average farmer would feel
that he could pitch single-handed into his barn-loft, but the
burden-carriers are mostly bulls that are really magnificent in
appearance, both oxen and ponies carrying loads on their backs that an
American would expect to crush them.
The customs are odd indeed. Men wear enormous straw hats as a badge of
mourning, but the usual style of head-dress is to shave the extreme
summit of the head, while the rest of the hair grows long and is
braided up in a sort of topknot with a little bird-cage hat above it.
This hat is then tied under the chin as an American woman would tie
hers.
Girls are but little seen on the streets, custom requiring them to
stay indoors before marriage, and the married women, when on the
street are likely to wear a sort of green wrap thrown over their heads
and shoulders that leaves only their eyes and contiguous facial
territory exposed. The tourist is at first {63} inclined to think that
there are many young girls on the streets, but this is because the
boys dress as we have grown used to seeing girls dress in America.
Take the young boy who waits on my table: fair of feature in his neat
white dress, and with a long glossy hair-plait hanging down his back,
you would think him some fair Korean maiden. When he gets married a
little later, probably at seventeen or eighteen, he will shave his
head (not necessarily as a sign of mourning!) and wear his hair
thereafter in the manner described in the preceding paragraph. An
English missionary-doctor's pretty daughter here yesterday (and how
pretty an English or American girl does look in this far land!) told
me that a Korean girl of twenty or twenty-one is regarded as a rather
desperate old maid, and the go-betweens, who arrange the marriages
here as they do in Japan, are likely to charge a rather steep sum for
getting a husband for one so far advanced in spinsterhood! The chances
are that the groom doesn't see his bride until the ceremony, and she
doesn't even see him then, for according to the curious custom here
the bride's eyes are sealed up until late afternoon of her wedding
day. More than this, custom requires that the bride must keep
absolutely unbroken silence all the day long, and for a varying length
of time thereafter. Mrs. Bishop in her book on Korea asserts that "it
may be a week or several months before the husband knows the sound of
his wife's voice,"--and the nature of the dear creatures in America
will of course insure the ready acceptance of her statement!
The go-betweens are often not very scrupulous, and for good fees
sometimes manage to palm off damsels of unsatisfactory features on
unsuspecting swains, or match undesirable young fellows with girls
vastly superior to them. A rather amusing instance was reported to me
by the young lady from whom I have just quoted. One of the officials
or noblemen in Seoul had a daughter whom the go-between was preparing
to marry off into a family of rank in another city. A few days before
the wedding-day-set-to-be, some one came to {64} the father of the
bride and said: "Did you know that your prospective son-in-law has a
hare-lip?" Now a hare-lip in Korea is not merely such an undesirable
addition to one's countenance as to make a Mrs. Wiggs happy because of
being without it, but under the old dispensation no one with a
harelip, or other like facial blemish, could be presented at court and
thereby introduced into the Four Hundred of this capital city.
Therefore the father waxed thoughtful from his topknot to the end of
his long-stem pipe. "I tell you what I'll do," he finally said to his
wife. "We'll go ahead with the ceremony, but instead of my daughter
I'll substitute my orphan niece." And he did, and the young fellow
didn't know any better for a week.
Fortunately, however, my story doesn't end here. I am extremely glad
to add the usual "lived-happily-ever-after" peroration, for that was
really what happened in this case. The father of my young lady
informant, who is a doctor, sewed up the young fellow's lip, he was
presented at court, and the real daughter who so narrowly escaped
marrying may be an old maid, for all I know.
In such a high, dry climate as this one would expect to find little
tuberculosis, but I am told that there is really a great deal of it,
due to the carelessness of the families where there are victims, and
to the generally unsanitary conditions. A daughter of one of the
Southern missionaries here, having contracted the malady, has just
gone to Arizona in search of cure. Everywhere on the streets I
encounter faces marked by smallpox, and formerly to have had the
disease was the rule rather than the exception. In fact, instead of
alluding to a man's inexperience by saying "He hasn't cut his eye
teeth," as we do, a Korean would say: "He hasn't had smallpox." Since
vaccination became the rule, however, there are very few cases.
Infant mortality here, as in America, is one of the greatest factors
in the high death-rate, but conditions are improving. {65} And so long
as authorities declare that in America half the infant death-rate is
due to ignorance or neglect, we haven't much right to point a scornful
finger at Korea, anyhow.
I have already alluded to the fact that the old monarchial government
of Korea ended its inglorious career but a few short months ago. While
the records of the nation run back more than three thousand
years--probably to a period when Job was so superbly reproaching his
comforters in the Land of Uz--the late dynasty runs back only 500
years. We Americans, I may say in passing, are accustomed to think of
men of five hundred years ago, or even of John Smith and Pocahontas,
as very ancient, but a pedigree of only five hundred years wouldn't
entitle a family to enter good society over here. But though only five
hundred years in power, this recent dynasty succeeded in doing about
as much devilment and as little good as many dynasties much older in
years. One of the missionaries explained to me yesterday that it was
only when the King got very mad that he would order heads cut off
without reason--but then the Koreans are very lazy and his inactivity
at other periods may have been due to sloth.
The truth is, that most of these Oriental monarchies have been corrupt
beyond the belief of the average American. When I was a boy I used to
hear the old men in country churches thank God for the blessings of
orderly government and for the privilege of worshipping as they chose,
"with no one to molest us or make us afraid." As a rule, we take such
things as matters of course, but when one comes over here into Asia
and into countries where the people have been cursed by corrupt
governments, where innocent lives have been taken upon the mere whim
of the government, where property has been confiscated with no better
reason, and where men have had to die for their faiths:--when he, in
short, comes into lands where the rights of neither life, property nor
conscience have been respected, he is likely to prize his American
privileges somewhat more highly.
{66}
The old Korean dynasty was not only corrupt, but unspeakably stupid.
Like the people, the King relied on sorcerers or fortune-tellers to
find a lucky day or a lucky time of the moon to do whatever he wished,
and in case of sickness consulted the mutang, or conjurer, instead of
a doctor. Thus when the prince had smallpox some years ago, the mutang
declared that the Smallpox Spirit or devil (who must always be
referred to with great respect as "His Excellency") would not leave
unless allowed to ride horseback clear to the Korean boundary, three
hundred miles away; and a gayly caparisoned horse was accordingly led
the entire distance for His Excellency, the Smallpox Spirit, to ride
away on!
The government was also unfeignedly corrupt. Offices were given, just
as lives were taken merely at the whim of the Throne. Taxes were
farmed out, the grafting collectors taking from the people probably
five or six times as much as finally reached the public treasury. More
than this, the nobility robbed the people at will, and there was no
authority from whom they could get redress. Woe unto the man who
became energetic and industrious under the old dispensation! First,
the tax-gatherers would relieve him of the bulk of his swollen
fortune, and what was left the noble or "Yang-ban," as a noble was
called, would take the trouble to borrow but never take the trouble to
repay. For the Yang-ban was a "gentleman," he was. It was beneath his
dignity to work--even to guide the reins of the horse he rode--but it
was not beneath his dignity to sponge on his friends (I think the verb
"to sponge" is too expressive to remain slang) or to borrow without
repaying. Moreover, in case of extremity, it is said that Mother
Yang-ban and Sister Ann might take in washing, as is recorded in the
classic lays of our own land, but Father never defiled himself by
doing anything so dishonorable as an honest day's work.
But alas and alack! for the degeneracy of our times. The Yang-bans in
Korea have been deprived of their ancient {67} privileges, and I fear
that even their fellows in America are by no means treated with the
ancient deference and respect due to persons of such exalted merit and
blue-blood.
What with the arbitrary and oppressive system of tax-robbery and the
extortions of the Yang-bans it is not surprising that the Koreans here
became disinclined to labor, while those who went to Manchuria, where
there has been "proper security for the gains of industry" are said to
be quite a different folk--energetic because there has been
encouragement to be energetic. The old Korean system of taxation being
arbitrary, the only way to escape a raid by the tax-gatherer was to
appear not to have anything worth raiding, and with the coinage
confined usually to the copper "cash" (each "cash" worth a small
fraction of a cent), it was difficult for a man to have much money
without everybody knowing it. If a man had much he needed a warehouse
to store it in. Mrs. Bishop in her book, already referred to, speaks
of a time when it took 3200 "cash" to equal a dollar in our money,
making each coin worth 1-32 of a cent, and it took six men or one pony
to carry $50 worth of coin! Another instance is mentioned in the
Japanese official Year Book on Korea. The Japanese army bought $5000
worth of timber in the interior, where the people were not used to any
other currency, with the result that "the army had to charter a small
steamer and fill her completely with this copper cash to finance the
transaction!" I bought a few long, necklace-like strings of this old
Korean money at ten cents a string, and even then probably paid too
much.
When I bought my ticket for Korea it was nominally an independent
monarchy under a Japanese "protectorate," but the day before I sailed
from San Francisco, Japanese aggression took another step and the
country was formally annexed as a part of the Japanese Empire. There
is little doubt, I suppose, that the Japanese will give the Koreans
better government than the old monarchy gave them, but one {68} cannot
excuse all the methods by which Japan fastened her rule on the island.
Yesterday morning I went out to the Old North Palace, a deserted and
melancholy memorial of vanished power, stood on the throne where
Korean kings once held audience, and saw the royal dwelling in which
the Japanese and their aids killed the Queen in 1895, and also saw the
place where they burned her body. The Japanese minister at that time
was recalled and placed on trial for the offence, and, though he
escaped conviction, the evidence of his guilt was undoubted. It has
been estimated that in about eighteen months in 1907-'08, "12,916
Koreans, called 'insurgents' by the Japanese and patriots by their
fellow countrymen, were killed by the Mikado's soldiers and gendarmes,
only 160 of whom lost their lives." This looks more like butchery than
war. Moreover, the Japanese themselves have to admit that there were
inexcusable delays in paying for land seized from Koreans, and in view
of all the circumstances it is questionable whether the Korean hatred
or dislike of Japan will become very much less cordial than it is
to-day.
Perhaps in no country in the world has missionary work been more
successful than in Korea (there are probably 125,000 Protestants now,
while there were only 777 thirteen years ago), and I have been
interested to learn that there is absolutely no truth in the Japanese
newspaper reports that immense numbers of native Christians are
leaving the church since annexation. On the contrary, reports from all
over the country are good, and Seoul itself is just now in the midst
of a most thoroughgoing and successful Christian revival, with 1800
conversions reported during the first ten days. At a Methodist mission
school I visited this morning I found that a hundred of the native
pupils had been canvassing the town a part of three successive
afternoons with the result that they had brought in the names of 697
Koreans expressing a desire to become Christians.
Here in Korea there is no waste of energy or money through {69}
denominational divisions. Each denomination has its own sphere of
activity, preventing duplication of effort, and my general observation
has convinced me that the criticisms of foreign mission work sometimes
heard in America are based on a radical misconception of conditions.
Even the non-Christians, in the great majority of cases, speak in high
praise of the splendid work of the missionaries. A typical expression
is that found in the latest issue of the Shanghai _National Review_,
now before me, which may be expected to speak impartially. Referring
to an address by Doctor Morrison, the Peking correspondent of the
London _Times_, it says:
"Doctor Morrison eulogized the work of the missionaries and we
cannot conceive that anybody who really knows of their work at first
hand, not as it is to be found in extreme cases, but as ordinarily
carried on, should do otherwise than eulogize it."
Seoul, Korea.
{70}
VIII
MANCHURIA--FAIR AND FERTILE
"Uneasily sleeps Mukden to-night"--I remember yet how one of the
dispatches began which brought so vividly to my mind the meaning of
the great death-grapple here between the Japanese and Russian hosts in
1905.
[Footnote: "Uneasily sleeps Mukden to-night. In the main street
lamps burn dimly. Along dark roads in heavy dust are marching
columns. The cool night is full of the low rustle of movement. Near
the station, in over-filled hospitals, are heard low groans. The
wounded arrive in a never-ceasing stream of carts, and another
stream of ambulances moves northward, for the place must be cleared
for to-day's victims. The eternal pines whisper above the Tombs of
Chinese Emperors. In the fields watch fires are burning stores and
evacuated villages----" And the correspondent goes on to tell of the
wearied forces gathering for further fighting with the coming of
dawn--men footsore and weak for want of food and water and rest. For
forty-eight hours the Japanese had not eaten.]
The story in a nutshell is this:
"After the capitulation of Port Arthur, Oyama pressed toward Mukden,
where Kuropatkin had established his headquarters, and there from
February 24 to March 12 occurred probably the most desperate battle
in modern history, if not in all history. About eight hundred
thousand men were engaged. Again Oyama won, and Kuropatkin retreated
in fairly good order about a hundred miles north of Mukden."
So runs the historian's brief record of the titanic struggle five
years ago in the ancient Manchurian city to which I have come. What
Gettysburg was in our Civil War, that Mukden was in the first great
contest between the white race and the Mongolian. Here covetous Death
for once was satisfied, his gruesome garnering seen at each wintry
nightfall in the {71} windrows of bloody and mangled bodies strewn along
miles of snowy trenches.
I have heard all sorts of war traditions in Mukden: that at one time
the Japanese thought themselves beaten in the battle and had ordered a
retreat, when, a Russian force giving way, they turned quickly to
press the advantage and snatched victory from what they had thought
was ruin. There are many stories, too, of the inefficiency of the
Russian officers, stories made all the more probable in the light of
the Russian Commander Kuropatkin's memoirs to the same general effect.
"Why, the English would put one of their admirals against the wall and
shoot him like a common seaman for such gross neglect of duty as went
entirely unpunished among Russian generals," was one man's comment as
he talked with me. "The Rooshians were good fighters--fought 'and to
'and with the butt of their muskets--and if they 'ad 'ad good
commanders the Japs would never have won," said an Englishman who had
seen service in India. A railway man also told me of the debauchery
and profligacy of the Russian officers, disreputable women travelling
regularly with them to and fro, drunkenness being also common. About
the same charges were reported to me by a Japanese officer. In fact,
it is said that the Japanese contrived to get a very considerable
quantity of champagne to the Russian headquarters one day, and the
next day made a slaughter-pen of the Russian camp while the Cossack
commanders were still hopelessly befuddled from too much drinking!
The truth is that the Japanese, from camp-followers to
commander-in-chief, were prepared for war and the Russians were not.
From the day that Russia, aided by France and Germany, forced Japan to
cede back to China some of the fruits of her victory over the Chinese,
from that hour Japan nursed and fed fat her rankling grudge and bided
her time as deliberately as a tiger waiting to spring. While I was in
Japan an Englishman told me that immediately after Russia forced Japan
{72} to give up her spoils of victory he was amazed to see the
tremendous interest in the military drills in all the Japanese
schools. When he asked what it meant, there was one frank answer: "We
are getting ready to lick Russia."
It should also be observed that when the war came on the Japanese were
not only in a state of preparedness so far as battleships and army
drill and munitions of war were concerned, but they were also prepared
in the vital matter of proper medical attendance.
"When your American soldiers went with Shafter into Cuba the army was
utterly without proper medical corps and equipment, and the death-rate
was disgracefully high. But the first Japanese who fell in crossing
the Yalu were taken at once to the best of Japanese surgeons and cared
for in the most approved of modern military hospitals." So said a
frank Scotchman to me yesterday, and in the light of the official
statistics I could say nothing in palliation of the unpleasant
allusion to America. When the war with Russia ended, Baron Takaki,
Surgeon-General of the Japanese Army, boasted that whereas in the
Spanish-America War "fourteen men died from preventable diseases to
one man killed on the field of battle," the Japanese had lost only one
man from disease to every four from bullets. Now the Japanese, as
usual, had not worked out any of the principles of medical science,
sanitation, and hygiene which enabled them to make this remarkable
record, but they showed their characteristic facility in taking the
white man's inventions and getting as much or more--more in this
case--out of them than the white man himself.
The Japanese record, showing in such amazing fashion what a wisely
directed health organization may accomplish, is worth remembering not
only in connection with plans for military efficiency, but also in
connection with plans for general public health activities at home.
Every State should spend five times as much for this public health
work as at present.
In 1910 the forgetful Manchurian earth bears but few traces {73} of
the fierce contest that only five or six years ago scarred its bosom,
and the serried shocks of newly harvested corn, _kaoliang_ (sorghum)
and millet--in some infrequent instances fertilized by the dead men's
bones--are seen on fields where contending armies struggled. Let it be
so for a little while; let the Manchurian peasant sow and garner in
peace while he may; for still the war cloud hangs heavy above China's
Three Eastern Provinces, and in the next struggle the peasant's blood
may redden his own fields. For that the fighting has not ended is to
me perfectly clear. By reason of the Japanese railroad monopoly
through the very heart of Southern Manchuria, and her leased territory
on the coast, Japan has obtained power bordering on control, and
everything goes to show that she has fully made up her mind to
complete and retain that control.
Moreover, when one has seen the great Manchurian empire, it is easy to
understand how it has now roused the covetousness of Japan just as the
temptation a few years ago proved too strong for Russia. Immense
farming areas are only thinly settled; some of the richest of the
world's mineral resources have only been touched.
A day or two ago I went out to see Mr. Edward C. Parker, in charge of
the agricultural experiment farm here (he is a Minnesota man, I
believe), and found him enthusiastic over his corn crop just
harvested. "I have been so surprised by the growth of corn this year,"
he declared, "that I could hardly believe my own eyes. I have never
seen finer seed ears anywhere." Among American states, only Iowa, he
declares, is probably more fertile than Manchuria; with stock-raising
to prevent land-deterioration, all the vast southern section could
beat Illinois growing crops, and the same thing could be said of the
northern country but for its colder climate. About Harbin, where the
South Manchuria Railway joins the Trans-Siberian Line, one may see
cuts thirty feet deep and the soil rich to the bottom. Most of
Manchuria is level--strikingly like our Western Corn Belt and Wheat
Belt--and the {74} soil is of wind-drift origin "like a great
snow-blanket," very easily tilled. The plowing is done with a
steel-tipped wooden beam such as I have already written of seeing in
Korea, and only the favoring physical texture of the soil explains the
fat harvests of food, feed, and fuel achieved under such methods.
It has been a positive joy to me in traveling through the country here
in late October to see the great shocks of kaoliang, millet and corn
(even with labor at 20 cents a day out here, the people don't pull
fodder!), quaint-looking farmhouses almost surrounded by well-stuffed
barns, and corn cribs packed until the overflowing yellow ears spill
out the ampler cracks. The kaoliang is a sort of sorghum, the grain
being used for food, while the stalks, which contain but little sugar,
are used for fuel. Consequently the barnyards packed to the limit and
running over with
"The garnered largess of the fruitful year"
not only mean feed for all the variegated animals that are used in
Manchurian agriculture, but fuel for the long Manchurian winters as
well. I even find the peasants digging up the roots and stubble to be
dried and burned in the houses.
One sees but a small proportion of good horses here, and practically
no four-wheeled farm wagons. Unlike Japan, however, Manchuria does
have its farm vehicles: great heavy two-wheeled carts drawn by from
two to eight horses, donkeys, and asses. Sometimes there is a big
horse or two, then one or two donkeys half the size of the horses, and
a couple of little asses or burros half the size of the donkeys--and
maybe a bull thrown in for good measure. It looks as if the Whole
Blamed Family of work-stock had been hitched to pull the cart. The
Whole Blamed Family is often needed, too, for the roads in China are
ample proof that we needn't expect ours in America or anywhere else to
get any better by letting them alone three thousand years. The Chinese
have tried it, and it doesn't work. The October roads are so bad in
many places that if {75} the carts had four wheels instead of two not
even the combined aggregation in the team could pull them out of the
mud. A little later, however, the roads freeze over solidly and stay
so for five or six months--and then the Manchurian farmers go on long,
slow pilgrimages carrying their products to the larger
markets--sometimes two or three hundred miles from home.
The pride and glory of Manchuria, the talk of its citizens, the
foundation of its prosperity, the backbone of its commerce, the symbol
of its wealth, is the bean--the common soja, or soy bean as we know
it. What corn is to our Corn Belt and what cotton is to our Southern
States, that the bean is to Manchuria: supreme among products. There
is no class of people not affected by the prosperity or the adversity
of his Majesty the Bean. Bankers, merchants, farmers, even the ladies
one meets in the drawing-rooms in the foreign concessions, not only
"know beans," but can talk beans too. If the present rate of progress
is maintained, it will not be long until no one will enumerate the
world's great crops--wheat, corn, oats, rice, rye, barley, cotton,
etc.--without including beans. The first beans were shipped to Europe
only about four years ago, and the London _Times_ correspondent
estimates that next year Europe will take $35,000,000 worth. In a very
great measure the beans have the same properties as cottonseed, an oil
being extracted that is used for much the same purposes as cottonseed
oil, while the residue called "bean cake" is about the equivalent of
cottonseed meal. It is somewhat superior, Mr. Parker says, to
cottonseed meal or linseed meal as a stock feed, but is now chiefly
used for fertilizing purposes. My first acquaintance with the bean
cake was in Japan, where I found it enriching the earth for
vegetable-growing, Japan importing an average of half a million tons a
year to put under its crops. Manchuria also uses not a little for the
same purpose. The more intelligent Manchurian farmers, however, are
learning that it is a waste to rot one of the best cattle feeds in the
{76} world and get its fertilizing value only--just as our American
farmers, it is gratifying to see, are at last waking up to the
disgraceful folly of using cottonseed meal as a crop-producer without
first getting its other value as a meat-producer.
I find out, furthermore, that what old Maury's Geography led me to
believe was a vast Desert of Gobi here in North China or Mongolia
alongside Manchuria is not a genuine desert at all, but chiefly a
great grass plain with golden possibilities as a cattle country. Mr.
Parker declares that if cattle were grown on these immense ranges and
brought to Manchuria in the fall to be fattened off on bean cake,
millet, etc., Harbin, Chang-chun, Mukden, and other Manchurian cities
might soon build packing plants that would rival Chicago's in bigness.
This system of stock-raising would also solve the problem of
maintaining soil fertility, just as it would bring relief to those
sections of America where the policy of selling everything off the
land and putting nothing back threatens disaster.
The old ridge system of growing crops, the rows thrown up as high as
the little plows will permit and the crops planted on top, is the
general practice here, and Mr. Parker is making an effort through the
experiment farm to convince the people of the advantages of level
cultivation. He also wishes to introduce better plows. "The truth is,"
he says, "that we never had any real plows until James Oliver and John
Deere invented theirs. All the plowing before that was merely
scratch-work, and here in Manchuria the plows are hardly better than
those the Egyptians used. But for the extremely light, ash-like,
wind-drift soil the people with such crude tools could hardly make
enough to subsist on."
In Korea I noticed some moderately fair cotton fields, and in
Manchuria I have also found a few patches, though the climate here is
obviously too cold for its profitable production. I find that the
Japanese have great faith in the future of the industry in Korea.
This notice of Manchurian farming would not be complete {77} without
some mention of the queer aspect of many of the cultivated fields--
thick-dotted with earth mounds, around which the rows are curved and
twisted, these mounds resembling medium-sized potato hills. They
contain not vegetables, however, but bones. Each cone-shaped mound is
a Chinaman's grave. I first noticed this method of burying in Korea,
but the mounds are quite low there--all that I saw, at least, except
the Queen's Tomb at Seoul. Here in Manchuria they are about three or
four feet high in most cases, and sometimes six. One of the famous
sights of Mukden is the Peilang, or Northern Tomb, where old Taitsun,
the first great Manchu Emperor of China, lies buried, and the grave
proper (reached after a long approach of temple buildings, magnificent
gates, images, and monuments) is a huge earth mound, probably an acre
in extent. The base is thrown up twenty-five or thirty feet high and
surrounded by a rock wall, while the cone-shaped summit runs up about
twenty feet higher. The Chinese have a deep-rooted superstition as to
the existence of a sort of devil or "fung-shui" in the ground, and to
disturb this fung-shui may prove the direful spring of more "woes
unnumbered" than the Iliad records. Such a fung-shui is supposed to
exist under the surface of the earth about the Mukden royal tombs,
and, accordingly, the railroad between Mukden and Peking had to run
twenty-five miles out of its proper course in order not to disturb it.
Mukden, Manchuria.
{78}
IX
WHERE JAPAN IS ABSORBING AN EMPIRE
"The Open Door in Manchuria--of what concern is it to me any more than
the revolution in Portugal or the Young Turks movement in
Constantinople?" With some such expression the average American is
likely to dismiss the question--a question whose determination may
prove the pivot on which will swing the greatest world-movements of
our time as well as the prosperity of many European and American
industries, and that of the labor dependent upon them.
I
Concerning Manchuria and all the issues involved in the present
struggle for its possession, all kinds of misconceptions are rife.
That it is a small country; that it is an infertile country; that it
must be already well developed in point of population and consumption
of goods: this is only the ABC of Manchurian misinformation.
In answer, it need only be said that Manchuria is larger than all our
New England, Middle, and South Atlantic States from Maine to Georgia
inclusive, and that into its borders all of Great Britain (England,
Scotland and Wales), together with all of the German Empire, could be
crowded, and still leave a gap so big that Holland, Belgium, and
Switzerland would lack thousands of square miles of filling it: while
as to population Manchuria has only 18,000,000 people as compared with
{79} 118,000,000 in the European countries just mentioned. And after
having travelled in all of them as well as in Manchuria I should say
that the Asiatic area is the more fertile.
The possibilities of such an empire situated in the fairest portion of
Asia's temperate zone are simply illimitable. No one who has been
through the fruitful lands of the American Corn Belt and Wheat Belt
and goes later through Manchuria can fail to note the similarity
between them in physical appearance and natural resources, and it may
well be that what the settlement of the West has meant in America
these last fifty years the development of Manchuria will mean in Asia
these next fifty.
In itself the sheer creation of such a country--larger far than Great
Britain and Germany, as rich as Illinois and Manitoba--would appeal
at once to American commerce and industry, but you have only begun to
grasp the significance of Manchuria when you compare it to the
creation of such an empire in some favored portion of the sea.
Manchuria means all this, but it means more: Its possession would give
such vastly increased influence to any Power possessing it as to make
that Power a menace to the commercial rights of all other nations in
Asia--rights of almost vital importance both to Europe and America.
England and Germany, of course, are already dependent upon foreign
trade for their prosperity, and President McKinley was never so
seerlike as when, in his last speech at Buffalo, he reminded the
American people that their own future greatness depends upon the
development of trade beyond the seas. And it was to Asia, the greatest
of continents, and especially to China, the greatest of countries on
this greatest of continents, that he looked, as we must also look
to-day. In Secretary Hay's memorial address on McKinley, which I had
the good fortune to hear, the dead President's determined efforts to
maintain the ancient integrity of the Dragon Empire were fittingly
mentioned as one of his most distinguished services to his people and
his time. {80} To keep the immense area of China from spoliation by
other nations and to preserve to all peoples equal commercial rights
within boundaries are absolutely essential to the proper future
development of both European and American commerce and industry.
II
This is why the Open Door in Manchuria is a matter of very real
concern to every Occidental citizen; this is why the other nations
after the ending of the Russo-Japanese War were careful to see that
these belligerents guaranteed a continuance of the Open Door policy;
this is why it is of importance to us to know whether this pledge is
being kept.
In centering my attention upon Japan in this article let me say in the
outset, I am not to be understood as being one whit more tolerant of
Russian than of Japanese aggression in Manchuria--I am not. In the
Russo-Japanese War my sympathies were all with Japan, my present
friendships with numbers of her sons I prize very highly, but I cannot
blind myself to the fact that she is apparently "drunk with sight of
power" in the Orient.
As conditions are to-day, the reason for giving primary attention to
Japan's position in Manchuria rather than Russia's must be
self-evident. In the first place, the territory embraced in her sphere
of influence is more important and contains two thirds the population.
Then again: Northern Manchuria being cold and inhospitable, Japan's
sphere not only covers the fairer and more favored section
agriculturally, but from the standpoint of military strategy (as a
mighty war taught all the world) Japan is vastly better placed. With
Port Arthur in her possession, and the new broad-gauge line from
Antung and Mukden enabling her to rush troops across the Sea of Japan
and through Korea to Manchuria without once getting into foreign
waters or on foreign soil, she could ask nothing better. And finally
and most significant of all, Russia has {83} suffered perhaps the greatest
humiliation in her history by reason of Manchurian aggression; she has
learned Japan's point of vantage; and whatever advance she makes in
the near future will be only by Japanese sufferance and connivance.
{81}
[Illustration: LIKE SCENES FROM OUR WESTERN PRAIRIES.]
Manchuria is a vast empire--one of the most fertile portions of the
earth's surface. The great money crop is the soy bean, and the lower
picture shows miles of beans and bean-cake awaiting shipment at
Changchun.
{82}
[Illustration: MANCHURIAN WOMEN (SHOWING PECULIAR HEAD-DRESS),]
[Illustration: CHINESE WASTE-PAPER COLLECTOR.]
Everything in China is scrupulously saved--except human labor. That
is wasted on a colossal scale through the failure to use improved
machinery or scientific knowledge.
{83 continued}
Whatever may be the meaning of the alleged secret treaty between Japan
and Russia, the great truth which all nations need to remember is
this: Whatever scotches Japanese aggression in Manchuria scotches
Russian aggression at the same time--automatically and simultaneously.
To the Open Door in Manchuria Japan carries the key.
III
Japan's primary commercial advantage over all other nations in South
Manchuria, her railway monopoly, together with the use she is making
of this monopoly and her plans to maintain it, we must now consider
more in detail.
When the war with Russia ended, Japan succeeded Russia in the control
of what is now the South Manchurian Railway, running from Dairen
(formerly Dalny) to Chang-chun, 438 miles, through the very heart of
the country, and she also obtained from China the right "to maintain
and work the military line constructed between Antung and Mukden
_and_"--as if of secondary importance--"to improve the said line so as
to make it fit for the conveyance of commercial and industrial goods
of all nations." The stipulation with regard to the South Manchurian
Railway was that China should have the right to buy it back in 1938,
and with regard to the Antung-Mukden line, in 1932, by paying the
total cost--"all capital and all moneys owed on account of the line
and interest." And just here Japan is playing a wily game.
Consider, for example, the Antung-Mukden line just referred to, now
regarded as a part of the South Manchurian system. Although running
through a very mountainous and sparsely settled area, it is of immense
importance to Japan {84} from a strategic standpoint, connecting Mukden as
it does with the Japanese railway in Korea leading directly to Fusan,
and thus enabling Japan to transport troops across her own territory
to Manchuria without taking any of the risks involved in getting out
of her own waters and boundaries. The paramount military importance of
the line is further indicated by the fact that no one had thought of a
commercial line here at all. Simply as a matter of war-time necessity
Japan stretched a 2-1/2-foot narrow-gauge line across these mountain
barrens to transport her troops in 1905. It is interesting to see,
therefore, how she has now interpreted her right to "work, maintain
and improve"--especially "improve"--this line. In October I spent two
days travelling over its entire length (188 miles), most of the time
on the narrow-gauge part, and I was amazed to see on what a
magnificent scale the new broad-gauge substitute line is now building.
In striking contrast to the traditional Japanese tendency to
impermanence in building, this line is constructed regardless of
expense as if to last for a thousand years. Tunnel after tunnel
through solid rock, the most superb masonry and bridges wherever
streams intervene, the best of ballast to make an enduring
roadbed--all these indicate the style of the new, not "improved" but
utterly reconstructed, line which is building for Japan's benefit at
China's expense--at China's expense directly if she buys it back in
1932, at China's expense indirectly if she doesn't.
It will be remembered, of course, that according to her agreement with
China, Japan was to begin the work of "improving" the Antung-Mukden
line within two years. Whether she was strangely unable to make any
sort of beginning in the period, or whether she purposely delayed it
in order to show her contempt for Chinese sovereignty in Manchuria, it
is difficult to say; what is known is only that the Mikado's
government let its treaty rights lapse, and then when China objected
to a renewal, defied China, and proceeded with the work of
"improvement" by what was euphemistically termed "independent action."
{85}
Incidentally, it may be recalled just here that in the Portsmouth
Peace Treaty Japan and Russia jointly promised the rest of the world
"to exploit their respective railways in Manchuria exclusively for
commercial and industrial purposes and in no wise for strategic
purpose."
That Japan (in the event no other method of getting control of
Manchuria appears) hopes to make the railroads too expensive for the
hard-pressed Peking government to buy back is self-evident. She is
looking far ahead, as those interested in the continuance of the Open
Door policy must also look far ahead. The real Open Door question is
not a matter of the last four or five years or of the next four or
five years, but whether after a comparatively short time the Door is
to be permanently closed as in Korea. If it be said that Japan is only
human in laying many plans to gain so rich an empire, let it also be
said that other nations are only human if they wish to protect their
own interests.
IV
For one thing, as has been suggested, Japan has a perfectly obvious
plan to make the railways too expensive for China to purchase when the
lease expires, and just here some comparisons may be in order. In
Japan proper the government-owned railway stations are severe and
inexpensive structures in which not one yen is wasted for display and
but little for convenience. When I was in Tokyo, for example,
Ex-Premier Okuma, in a public interview, called attention to the
disreputable condition and appearance of the leading station
(Shimbashi) in the Japanese capital, declaring that foreign tourists
must inevitably have their general impressions of the country
unfavorably influenced by it, so primitive and uninviting is its
appearance. But when it comes to the South Manchurian Railway, also
under the control of the Japanese Government (five sixths of the
investment held by the government and one {86} sixth by individual
Japanese), one finds an entirely different policy in force. Handsome
stations, built to accommodate traffic for fifty years to come, have
been erected. In Dairen, "virtually the property of the railway
company," the system has built a magnificent modern city--street
railways, waterworks, electric light plants, macadamized roads, and
beautiful public parks. More than this, the railway company, not
content with the best of equipment for every phase of legitimate
railway work, including handsome stations and railway offices, such as
Japan proper never sees, has also erected hotels which, for the
Orient, may well be styled sumptuous, in five leading cities of
Manchuria. Comparatively few travellers go to Mukden, and yet the
hotel which the South Manchurian Railway has erected there, for
example, is perhaps not excelled in point of furnishing and equipment
anywhere in the Far East.
In buying back the railroads, therefore, China will be expected not
only to pay for the railways themselves but for all the irrelevant
enterprises--hotels, parks, cities--in which the railway companies
have embarked; for lines "improved" beyond recognition, and for lines
built not even with a view to ultimate profit, but for their strategic
importance to a rival and possibly antagonist nation! As an Englishman
said to me: "It's much the same as if I, a poor man, should rent you a
$1000 house, agreeing to stand the expense of some improvements when
taking it back, and you should spend $10,000 in improving my $1000
house--and largely to suit your own peculiar business and purposes."
More than this, Japan, as I have said, is determined to keep her
absolute monopoly on South Manchurian railway facilities. In Article
IV of the Portsmouth Peace Treaty Japan and Russia reciprocally
engaged not to "obstruct any general measures, common to all
countries, which China may take for the development of the commerce
and industry of Manchuria," but in December of the same year Japan
caused China to yield a secret agreement prohibiting any new line "in
the {87} neighborhood of and parallel to" the South Manchurian Railway
or any branch line that "might be prejudicial" to it. Japan, under
threat of arms, forced China to abandon the plan for the
Hsinmintun-Fakumen line after arrangements had been made with an
English syndicate, and later Japan and Russia on the same pretext
prevented the proposed Chinchow-Aigun line across Mongolia and
Manchuria, although a hundred miles or more away from the South
Manchurian line.
V
That Japan, then, holds the whip hand in Manchuria, and expects to
continue to hold it, is very clear. With China as yet too weak to
protect herself, Japan is virtually master of the situation. Let us
ask then--since this is in an American book--whether the Open Door
policy is being enforced even now; to ask it of any one in Manchuria
is to be laughed at. I tried it once in a Standard Oil office and the
man in front of me roared, and an unnoticed clerk at my back,
overhearing so absurd a question, was also unable to contain his
merriment. It is not a question of the fact of the shutting-up policy,
Chinese and foreigners in Manchuria will tell you; it is only a
question as to the extent of that condition.
The truth is that the ink was hardly dry on the early treaties before
the discriminations began. The military railroads, which Japan was in
honor bound to all the world to use only for war purposes, were used
for transporting Japanese goods before the military restrictions with
regard to the admission of other foreign goods were removed. The
Chinese merchant and his patrons were famishing for cotton "piece
goods" and other manufactured products, and the Japanese goods coming
over were quickly taken up and a market for these particular "chops"
or "trademarks" (the Chinaman relies largely on the chop) was
established. By the time European and American goods came back their
market in many cases {88} had already been taken away. In some cases,
too, their trademark rights had been virtually ruined by the closeness
of Japanese imitation. Even on my recent tour, among consuls of three
nations, at Manchurian points, I did not find one who did not mention
some recent case of trademark infringement.
Then came the period of freight discriminations and rebates, when the
Japanese (principally the Mitsui Bussan Kaisha, the one great octopus
of Japanese business and commerce) secured freight rates that
practically stifled foreign business competitors. The railway company
now asserts that rebates (formerly allowed, it alleges, because of
heavy shipments) are no longer given; but in many cases the evil
effects of the former rebating policy remain in that Japanese traders
were thus allowed to rush in during a formative period and establish
permanent trade connections.
Meanwhile, too, the relations between the Japanese Government and the
Mitsui Bussan Kaisha are so close that competitors are virtually in
the plight of having to ship goods over a line owned by a
rival--without any higher tribunal to guarantee equality of treatment.
As was recently declared:
"Two directors of the South Manchurian Railway are also directors of
Mitsui Bussan Kaisha. The traffic manager of the railway is an
ex-employee of Mitsui. The customs force at Dalny is not only
entirely Japanese--no other foreigner in charge of a Chinese customs
office employs exclusively assistants of his own nationality--but a
number of the customs inspectors are ex-employees of Mitsui. The
Mitsui company also maintains branches all through Manchuria in and
out of treaty ports. In this way they escape the payment of Chinese
likin, or toll taxes. The Chinese have agreed that these taxes--2
per cent, on the value of the goods each time they pass to a new
inland town--shall not be paid so long as they remain in the hands
of the foreigner. American piece goods often pay likin tax, two,
three, or four times, while the Japanese--sometimes legitimately by
reason of their branch houses, sometimes illegally by bluffing
Chinese officials or smuggling through their military areas--manage
to escape likin almost altogether."
It may not be true that the Japanese customs officials at Dairen (the
treaty provides that China shall appoint a Japanese {89} collector at
this port), ignorantly or knowingly, allow Japanese goods to be
smuggled through to Manchuria--although consuls of three nations a few
months ago thought the matter serious enough to suggest an
investigation--but the evasion of likin taxes in the interior is an
admitted fact.
More flagrant still is another violation of international treaty
rights. Under Chinese regulations foreign merchants are not allowed to
do business in the Manchurian interior away from the twenty-four open
marts, but it has been shown that several thousand Japanese are now
stationed within the prohibited area, and Japan's reply to the Chinese
Viceroy's protest is that he should have objected sooner and that it
is now too late. Meanwhile, many Chinese merchants both in the
interior and along the South Manchurian Railway, themselves paying the
regular likin and consumption taxes, are finding themselves unable to
compete with the Japanese, who refuse to pay these taxes. Thus Japan
is gradually rooting out the natives who stand in her way, and, day by
day, tightening her grip on the country.
She is advancing step by step as she did in Korea.
On the whole, the Mikado's subjects seem already to count themselves
virtual masters of the country. Inside their railway areas and
concessions they have their own government; in the majority of cases
while in Manchuria I found it more convenient to use the Japanese
telegraph or the Japanese postal system than the Chinese; and where I
stopped at the little towns along the line it was a Japanese officer
who came to inquire my name and nationality. When I was in Mukden the
German consul there had just had two Chinese meddlers arrested for
spying on his movements, only to find that they were acting under the
direction of Japanese officials who claimed immunity for them! The
fact that they have their soldiers back of them, and that they can be
tried only in their own courts, also gives the Japanese unlimited
assurance in bullying the natives. At Mukden the Japanese bellboy
struck my Chinese rickshaw {90} man to get his attention. At Taolu
some weeks ago some Japanese merchants who were there doing business
illegally (for it is not an open mart) were interfered with, with the
result that the Japanese authorities when I was in Mukden were
preparing a formal demand for satisfaction, including indemnity for
any injury to an unlawful business!
Manifestly, the new masters of Manchuria propose to teach the natives
their place. "If a Chinaman is killed by a Japanese bullet," as a
Chinaman of rank said to me in Manchuria, "the fault is not that of
the man who fired the bullet: the Chinaman is to blame for getting in
the way of it!"
VI
Those who apologize for Japanese aggressiveness in Manchuria, those
who excuse or sympathize with her evident purpose to make Manchuria
walk the way of Korea, have but one argument for their position--the
pitiably abused and threadbare plea that the Japanese have won the
country by the blood they shed in the war with Russia. The best answer
to this is also a quotation from the distinguished and witty Chinaman
just mentioned. "The Japanese," said he, "claimed they were fighting
Russia because she was preparing to rob China of Manchuria; now they
themselves out-Russia Russia. It is much as if I should knock a man
down, saying, 'That man was about to take your watch,' and then take
the watch myself!"
The aptness of the simile is evident. My sympathy, and the sympathy of
every other American acquaintance of mine as far as I can now recall,
was with Japan in her struggle because of our hot indignation over
Russian aggressiveness. But if Japan had said, "I am fighting to put
Russia out only that I may myself develop every identical policy of
aggrandizement that she has inaugurated," it is very easy to see with
what different feelings we should have regarded the conflict.
{91}
Moreover, Japan's legitimate fruits of victory do not extend to the
control or possession of Manchuria. As one of the ablest Englishmen
met on my tour in the Far East pointed out, Japan's purposes in
inaugurating the war were four: (1) to get a preponderating influence
in Korea; (2) to get the control of the Tsushima Straits, which a
preponderating influence in Korea would give her; (3) to drive Russia
from her ever-menacing position at Port Arthur; and (4) to arrest (as
she alleged) the increasing influence and power of Russia in
Manchuria.
All these things she has gained. Furthermore, she now has actual
possession of Korea. The menace of a great Russian navy has been swept
away. Again, she has become (with the consent of England) the
commanding naval power in the eastern Pacific; and she has gained an
influence in South Manchuria at least equal to that which Russia had
previous to the war.
And yet one hears the plea that unless she gets Manchuria her blood
will have been spilt without result! Unless she can do more in the way
of robbing China than she went to war with Russia for doing, she will
not be justified!
Among representatives of five nations with whom I discussed the matter
in Manchuria I found no dissent from the opinion that Japan will never
get out of Manchuria, unless forced to do so by a speedily awakened
China or by the most emphatic and unmistakable attitude on the part of
the Powers. Chinese, English, Americans, Germans--all
nationalities--in Manchuria agree that thus far the way of Manchuria
has been the way of Korea and that only favoring circumstances--a
rebellion fomented in China or whatever excuse may serve--is needed
for the same end to be reached.
Then with Japanese customs duties to complete the shutting out of
foreign goods, now made only partially possible by the discrimination
of a railway monopoly, and with the entire Chinese Empire and foreign
trade rights within it menaced by the added preeminence of Japan, the
people of Europe and America {92} may wake up too late to find out at
last that the Open Door in Manchuria is a matter of somewhat more
general importance than the disturbances in Turkey or the change of
government in Portugal.
Be it said, in conclusion, however, that if the white nations take
heed in time all this may be prevented. China's waking up may serve
the same purpose, but it is doubtful whether she will develop
sufficient military strength for this. In any case there need be and
should be no war, and in describing conditions as I found them my
purpose is to help the cause of peace and not that of bloodshed. For
if the Powers realize the seriousness of the situation and give
evidence of such feeling to Japan that she will realize the bounds of
safety, there will be no trouble. But a continued policy of ignorance,
indifference, or inactivity means that Japan will probably go so far
that she cannot retreat without a struggle. Truth is in the interest
of peace.
Mukden, Manchuria.
{93}
X
LIGHT FROM CHINA ON PROBLEMS AT HOME
I am here in China's ancient capital at one of the most interesting
periods in all the four thousand years that the Son of Heaven has
ruled the Middle Kingdom. The old China is dying--fast dying; a new
China is coming into being so rapidly as to amaze even those who were
most expectant of rapid change. The dreams of twelve years ago, that
have since seemed nothing but dreams, are coming into actual
realization.
Great reforms were then proposed--twelve years ago--and the Emperor
sanctioned edict after edict for their introduction. But their hour
had not yet come.
I talked yesterday with one of the men whose voice was most potent at
that time: a man whose heart was then aflame with the idea of remaking
China. They dared much, did these men, and Tantsetung, a Chinaman of
high rank and a Christian, consecrated himself on his knees to the
great task, with all the devotion of a Hannibal swearing allegiance to
Carthage. But reaction came. The Emperor was deposed and the Empress
Dowager substituted, and Tantsetung and five other leaders were
beheaded.
Now, however, dying Tantsetung's brave words have already been
fulfilled: "You may put me to death, but a thousand others will rise
up to preach the same doctrine." A new reign has come; the Empress
Dowager, dying, has been succeeded by a mere boy, whose father, the
Prince Regent, holds the imperial sceptre. But the sceptre is no
longer all-powerful. {94} For the first time in all the cycles of
Cathay the voice of the people is stronger than the voice of the
Throne. Men do not hesitate any day to say things for which, ten years
ago, they would have paid the penalty with their heads.
There are many things that give one faith in the future of China, but
nothing else which begets such confidence as the success of the
crusade against the opium habit. Four years ago, when the news went
out that China had resolved to put an end to the opium habit within
ten years--had started on a ten years' war against opium--there were
many who scoffed at the whole project as too ridiculous and quixotic
even for praise; there were more who regarded it as praiseworthy but
as being as unpromising as a drunkard's swearing off at New Year's,
while those who expected success to come even in twice ten years
hardly dared express their confidence among well-informed people.
"If there is anything which all our contact with the Chinese has
taught more unquestionably than anything else, it is that the Chinaman
will always be a slave to the opium habit." So said a professedly
authoritative American book on China, published only five years ago,
and to hold any other opinion was usually regarded as contradictory to
common sense. "We white Americans can't get rid of whiskey
intemperance with all our moral courage and all our civilization and
all our Christianity. How then can you expect the poor, ignorant
Chinaman to shake off the clutches of opium?" So it was said, but
to-day the most tremendous moral achievement of recent
history--China's victory over opium-intemperance already assured and
in great measure completed, not in ten years, but in four--stands out
as a stinging rebuke to the slow progress our own people have made in
their warfare against drink-intemperance.
To shake off the opium habit when once it has gripped a man is no easy
task. Officials right here in Peking, for example, died as a result of
stopping too suddenly after the {95} edict came out announcing that no
opium victim could remain in the public service. But a member of the
Emperor's cabinet, or Grand Council, tells me that 95 per cent, of the
public officials who were formerly opium-smokers have given up the
habit, or have been dismissed from office. Five per cent, may smoke in
secret, but with the constant menace of dismissal hanging like a
Damocles sword over their heads, it may be assumed that even these few
are breaking themselves from the use of the drug.
Formerly it was the custom for the host to offer opium to his guests,
but the Chinese have now quite a changed public sentiment. Because
they recognize that opium is ruining the lives of many of their
people, and lessening the efficiency of many others, because they
regard it as a source of weakness to their country and danger to their
sons, it has become a matter of shame for a man to be known as an
opium-smoker, even "in moderation." To be free from such an enervating
dissipation is regarded as the duty not only to one's self and one's
family, but to the country as well: it is a patriotic duty. I saw a
cartoon in a native Chinese paper the other day in which there were
held up to especial scorn and humiliation the weakling officials who
had lost their offices by reason of failure to shake off opium. In
short, the opium-smoker, instead of being a sort of "good fellow with
human weaknessess"--and with possibilities, of course, of going
utterly to wreck--has become an object of contempt, a bad citizen.
The earnestness of the people has been strikingly illustrated in the
great financial sacrifices made by farmers and landowners in sections
where the opium poppy was formerly grown. The culture of the poppy in
some sections was far more profitable than that of any other crop; it
was, in fact, the "money crop" of the people. In fact, to stop growing
the opium poppy has meant in some cases a decrease of 75 per cent, in
the profit and value of the land. Farms mortgaged on the basis of old
land values, therefore, had to be sold; peasants who had {96} been
home-owners became homeless. And yet China has thought no price too
great to pay in the effort to free herself from this form of
intemperance. Well may her leading men proudly declare, as one did to
me to-day: "While America dares not undertake the task of stopping the
whiskey curse among less than a hundred million people, we are
stopping the opium curse among over four hundred millions." It should
also be observed that there is little drunkenness over here. At a
dinner party Friday evening my hostess thought it worth while to
mention as a matter of general interest to her guests (so rare is the
occurrence) that she had seen a drunken Chinaman that day. I have not
yet seen one.
China is waking up, and I am glad she is. She is going into industrial
competition with all the world, and I am glad that she is. I believe
that every strong and worthy nation is enriched by the proper
development of every other nation. But in this coming struggle the
people whom vice or dissipation has rendered weak sooner or later must
go down before the men who, gaining the mastery over every vicious
habit, keep their bodies strong and their minds clear. In thunder
tones indeed does China's victory over opium speak to America. If we
are to maintain our high place among the nations of the earth, if we
are to keep our leadership in wealth and industry, we can do it only
by freeing ourselves, as heroically as the yellow man of the Orient is
doing in this respect, from every enervating influence that now
weakens the physical stamina, blunts the moral sense, or befogs the
brain.
The new China is devoting itself to a number of other reforms to which
the people of America may well give attention. The curse of graft
among her public officials ("squeeze" it is called over here) is one
of the most deep-rooted cancers with which she has to contend.
Officers have been paid small salaries and have been allowed to make
up for the meagreness of their stipends by exacting all sorts of fees
and tips. Before the coming parliament is very old, however, it will
{97} doubtless undertake to do away with the fee and "squeeze" system,
stop grafting, and put all the more important offices on a strict
salary basis. Under the old fee system of paying county and city
officials in the United States, as my readers know, we have often let
enormous sums go into office-holders' pockets when they should have
gone into improving our roads and schools. The Chinese system not only
has this weakness, but by reason of the fact that the fees are not
regularly fixed by law, as is the case with us, the way is opened for
numberless other abuses.
Currency reform is in China a matter hardly second in importance to
the abolition of "squeeze." There is no national currency here; each
province (or state, as we would say) issues its own money when it
pleases, just as the different American states did two generations
ago. I remember hearing an old man tell of going from the Carolinas to
Alabama about 1840 and having to pay heavy exchange to get his
Carolina money changed into Alabama money. So it is in China to-day.
You must get your bills of one bank or province changed whenever you
go into another bank or province, paying an outrageous discount, and a
banking corporation will even discount a bill issued by another branch
of the same corporation. Thus a friend of mine with a five-dollar
Russia-Asiatic banknote from the Peking branch on taking it to the
Russia-Asiatic's branch at Hankow gets only $4.80 for it.
Nor is this all: All kinds of money are in circulation, the values
constantly fluctuating, and hundreds and thousands of men make a
living by "changing money," getting a percentage on each transfer.
Take the so-called 20-cent pieces in circulation; they lack a little
of weighing one fifth as much as the 100-cent dollar; consequently it
takes sometimes 110 and again 112 cents "small coin" to equal one
dollar! The whole system is absurd, of course, and yet when the
government proposes to establish a uniform national currency it is {98}
said that the influence of these money-changers is so great as to make
any reform exceedingly slow and difficult.
And yet let not my readers at home with this statement before them
proceed too hastily to laugh or sneer at China for unprogressiveness.
For my part, as I have thought of this matter of money transfer over
here, the whole question has seemed to me to be on all-fours with our
question of land title transfers at home, and the more I have thought
of it the firmer has the conviction become. In fact, China's failure
to adopt a modern currency system is perhaps even less a sinning
against light than our failure to adopt the Torrens system of
registering land titles. The man who makes a living by changing money
and investigating its value is no more a parasite than the man who
makes a living changing titles or investigating their value; the
hindrance of trade and easy transfer of property is no more excusable
in one case than the other; and the 90 per cent, that China might save
by a better system of money transfers is paralleled by the 90 per
cent, that we might save by a better system of title transfers.
Mr. Money-Changing Banker, fattening needlessly at the expense of the
people, prevents currency reform in China--yes, that is true. But
before we assume superior airs let us see if Mr. Title-Changing
Lawyer, also fattening needlessly at the expense of the people, does
not go to our next legislature and stifle any measure for reforming
land-title registration. And in saying this I am not to be understood
as making any wholesale condemnation of either Chinese bankers or our
American lawyers. The ablest advocates of the Torrens system I know
are lawyers, men who say that lawyers ought to be content with the
really useful ways of earning money and not insist on keeping up
utterly useless and indefensible means of getting fees out of the
people. Such lawyers, indeed, deserve honor; my criticism is aimed
only at those who realize the wisdom of a changed system but are led
by selfishness to oppose it.
{99}
After all, however, the most revolutionary and iconoclastic reform in
the new China is the changed policy of the schools. For thousands of
years the education has been exclusively literary. The aim has been to
produce scholars. A thorough knowledge of the works of the sages and
poets, and the ability to write learned essays or beautiful verses,
this has been the test of merit. When Colonel Denby wrote his book on
China five years ago he could say:
"The Chinese scholar knows nothing of ancient or modern history
(outside of China), geography, astronomy, zoology or physics. He
knows perfectly well the dynastic history of his own country and he
composes beautiful poems, and these are his only accomplishments."
But now all this is changed. The ancient system of selecting public
officials by examination as to classical scholarship was abolished the
year after Colonel Denby's book was published, and the new ideal of
the school is to train men and women for useful living, for practical
things, and to combine culture with utility. Japanese education now
has the same aim. There, in fact, even the study of the languages is
made to subserve a practical end. Where the American boy studies Latin
and soon forgets it, the Japanese boy studies English and continues to
read English and speak it on occasion the rest of his life, increasing
his efficiency and usefulness in no small measure as a result. In
Japan, too, I found the keenest interest in the teaching of
agriculture to boys and domestic science to girls; and in all these
things China is also moving--blunderingly, perhaps, but yet making
progress--toward the most modern educational ideas.
As a matter of fact, much as America has talked these last ten years
of making the schools train for more useful living, China and Japan
have actually moved relatively much farther away from old standards
than we have done, and if they should continue the same rate of
advance for the next thirty years we may find their schools doing more
for the efficiency {100} of the people than our American schools are
doing. And when I say this let not the cry go up that I am decrying
culture. Already I anticipate the criticism from men who cling to old
standards of education with even more tenacity than absurdly
conservative China has done. I am not decrying culture, but I am among
those who insist that culture may come from a study of useful things
as well as from a study of useless things; that a knowledge of the
chemistry of foods may develop a girl's mind as much as a knowledge of
chemistry that is without practical use; and that a boy may get about
as much cultural value from the knowledge of a language which does put
him into touch with modern life as from the knowledge of a language
which might put him into touch with ancient life but which he will
probably forget as soon as he gets his diploma. Slow-moving and
tradition-cursed China and Japan, as we thought them a generation ago,
have already committed themselves to making education train for actual
life. Has America given anything more than a half-hearted assent to
the idea?
The practical value of this article, I am reminded just here, has to
do almost entirely with legislation. You may wish to remind your
member of the legislature of the parallel between the wasteful and
antiquated money-transfer system in China and the equally wasteful and
antiquated title-transfer system at home; you may wish to inform your
member of the legislature and your school officials of the advance of
practical education in the Orient; and you may wish to remind both
your member of the legislature and your congressman of China's
successful crusade against the opium evil as an incentive for more
determined American effort against the drink evil. Let me conclude
this letter, therefore, with two more facts with which you may prod
your representatives in Washington. (Which reminds me to remark,
parenthetically, that every reform the Chinese are getting to-day
comes as a result of persistently bringing pressure on their
officials; and this {101} parenthetical observation may be as full of
suggestion as any idea I have elaborated at greater length.)
The two facts with which you may stir up your servants in Washington
are just these:
First, in regard to the parcels post. Here in China the other day I
mailed a package by parcels post to another country for about half
what it would have cost me to mail it from one county-seat to another
at home. How long are we going to be content to let so-called
"heathen" countries like China have advantages which so-called
enlightened, progressive America is too slow to adopt?
Secondly, the tariff. Here in the hotel where I write this article one
of the foremost journalists in the Far East tells me that the average
tariff-protected American industry sells goods to Asiatic buyers at 30
per cent. less than it will sell to the people at home. Thirty per
cent., he says, is the usual discount for Oriental trade. An electric
dynamo which is sold in America for $1000, for instance, is sold for
Chinese trade at $550 or $600. Quite a number of times on this trip
have men told me that they can get American goods cheaper over here,
after paying the freight ten thousand miles, than we Americans can buy
them at our own doors. For example, a man told me a few weeks ago of
buying fleece-lined underwear at half what it costs at home; a
missionary tells me that he saves 20 cents on each two-pound can of
Royal baking powder as compared with American prices; Libby's meats
are cheaper in London than in San Francisco; harvesting machinery made
in Chicago is carried across land and sea, halfway around the world,
and sold in far-away Siberia for less than the American farmer can buy
it at the factory gates.
And these are only a few instances. Hundreds of others might be given.
How long the American people are going to find it amusing to be held
up in such fashion remains to be seen.
Peking, China.
{102}
XI
THE NEW CHINA: AWAKE AND AT WORK
Within eighteen months China will have a parliament or a revolution
(she may have both). Such at least is the prediction I am willing to
risk, and it is one which I believe most foreigners in Peking would
indorse.
And the coming of a parliament, popular government, to guide the
destinies of the vast empire over which the Son of Heaven has reigned
supreme for more than four thousand years--this is only one chapter in
the whole marvelous story, not of China Awakening, but of China Awake.
For the breaking with tradition, the acceptance of modern ideas, which
but yesterday was a matter of question, is now a matter of history.
"China Breaking Up" was the keynote of everything written about the
Middle Kingdom ten years ago; "China Waking Up" has been the keynote
of everything treating of it these last five years.
Sir John Jordan, British Minister to China, does not exaggerate when
he declares that in a European sense China has made greater progress
these last ten years than in the preceding ten centuries. The
criticism one hears most often now is, not that the popular leaders
are too conservative, but that they are if, anything, too radical; are
moving, not too slowly, but too rapidly.
Instead of the old charge that China is unwilling to learn what the
West has to teach, I now hear foreigners complain that a little
contact with Europe and America gives a leader {103} undue influence.
"Let an official take a trip abroad and for six months after his
return he is the most respected authority in the empire." Instead of
English missionaries worrying over China's slavery to the opium habit,
we now have English officials embarrassed because China's too rapid
breaking loose from opium threatens heavy deficits in Indian revenues.
Instead of the old extreme "states' rights" attitude on the part of
the provinces, as illustrated by the refusal of the others to aid
Manchuria and Chihli in the war with Japan, the beginnings of an
intense nationalism are now very clearly in evidence. Even Confucius
no longer looks backward. A young friend of mine who is a descendant
of the Sage (of the seventy-fifth generation) speaks English fluently
and is getting a thoroughly modern education, while Duke Kung, who
inherits the title in the Confucian line, is patron of a government
school which gives especial attention to English and other modern
branches--by his direction. Significant, too, is the fact that the
ancient examination halls in Peking to which students have come from
all parts of the empire, the most learned classical scholars among
them rewarded with the highest offices, have now been torn down, and
where these buildings once stood Chinese masons and carpenters are
fashioning the building that is to house China's first national
parliament--unless the parliament comes before this building can be
made ready.
And so it goes. When a man wakes up, he does not wake up in a part of
his body only, he wakes up all over. So it seems with Cathay. The more
serious problem now is not to get her moving, but to keep her from
moving too rapidly. In his Civic Forum address in New York three years
ago, Wu Ting Fang quoted Wen Hsiang's saying, "When China wakes up,
she will move like an avalanche." A movement with the power of an
avalanche needs very careful guidance.
The one question about which every Chinese reformer's heart is now
aflame is that of an early parliament. By the imperial decree of 1908
a parliament and a constitution were {104} promised within nine years.
At that time there was little demand for a parliament, but with the
organization of the Provincial Assemblies in the fall of 1909 the
people were given an opportunity to confer together and were also
given a taste of power. For the first time, too, they seem to have
realized suddenly the serious plight of the empire and the fact that
since the deaths of the late Emperor and Empress Dowager, and the
dismissal of Yuan Shih-Kai by the Prince Regent acting for the infant
Emperor, the Peking government is without a strong leader.
Conse
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