estigations 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