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 Amer