JAPAN'S FEET OF CLAY

FREDA UTLEY

WW-NORTON & COMPANY-INC
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PUBLISHED, MCMXXXVII
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FIRST EDITION
 

Japan is putting up a big bluff to the world. She started the game of world politics and military aggression with the scantiest of resources, but unless her bluff is soon called she may actually achieve the success which could still easily be prevented.

Here is a country which claims to be the Britain of the East whose iron production is half that of Belgium, whose maximum coal production is | and consumption \ of Britain's. A country which has, it is true, a large navy and mercantile marine, but whose supplies of oil have all to be imported and whose supplies of coal are very scanty. A country, again, which believes it can take Britain's former place as the workshop of the world—or at least of Asia and Africa—yet whose industrial organisation, with the exception of certain specific industries such as armaments, shipbuilding and textiles, is at a stage of development still in many respects medieval, or at best corresponding to that of 17th and 18th century England. Here is an Imperialist Power which produces capital goods—iron, steel and machinery—in such small quantities that far from being able to export them she cannot even supply her own needs, much less those of the colonies which her armies are conquering.

Japan's most important export is a raw material: the silk produced by peasant labour. This is a semi-luxury article sold almost exclusively to her main rival the U.S.A. Without the money she obtains from the U.S.A. for her silk she would be. unable to buy the raw cotton for her principal industry; moreover, the whole of her social and economic fabric would fall toppling to the ground, since the majority of her peasants cannot exist without the subsidiary income they obtain from silk culture, and since the profits of her merchants from silk are her primary source of capital accumulation. All this is not to say that Japan is not rapidly entering new fields of industry and bit by bit re-orientating her national economy so as no longer to be so dependent on the American silk market. If her present bluff is not called she will soon possess herself of all China's very considerable resources of iron and coal, and potentially great cotton production, and develop Manchuria into a granary and a source of meat and dairy supplies.

'If, said the Japanese to M. Maurette of the International Labour Office, 'we have peace, we shall be one of the leading industrial nations of the world in 10 years' time.'¹ But the Japanese really meant 'if no one interferes with our triumphant course in China '. M. Maurette, like scores of other Europeans won over by the courtesy and seeming liberalism of Japan's industrialists and diplomats, believed in the pacific intentions of the Japanese business community, and failed to see that they meant peace and a free hand in China. Of course every nation prefers to get its own way without fighting, and since die Japanese are taught from the cradle that they have a divine right to rule on the mainland of Asia, the industrialists and merchants who entertain distinguished foreign visitors are quite sincere in hoping for peace—hoping, that is to say, that neither England nor the U.S.A. will stand in Japan's path and prevent her accomplishing her 'divine mission' to rule the lesser breeds of Eastern Asia, and in so doing create a great raw material basis for Japanese industry and an enormous closed market for Japanese manufacturers and traders.

I have here mentioned M. Maurette, not because the views in the book he wrote in 1934 are singular, but because they are typical of those expressed in dozens of other books and in hundreds of magazine and newspaper articles.²

Whereas most of the books written about Japan by those who pay a short visit to the country are full of admiration and sympathy for the Japanese, and accept all the well-known myths of the happy workers devoted to their employers, the textile fac-

Heroism there is in Japan—not the heroism of swashbuckling Samurai, but the heroism of Radicals² and labour leaders who brave the horrors of torture in the police cells in their struggle to improve the miserable lot of the workers and the peasantry; the

heroism of unarmed peasants who with their wives and children fight the police sent to turn them out of the fields they have sown, or to confiscate the scanty stores of grain in their houses against sums due for rent and interest; the heroism of young factory girls whose homes are hundreds of miles away and who yet go on the streets to defy the tyranny of the employers in whose barracks they live; the heroism of working women who keep themselves and their families decent and clean on incredibly small incomes; the heroism of Japan's few liberals, like the veteran Ozaki, who all his life has been threatened by 'patriotic' assassins and by the authorities, and yet continues to oppose Japan's militarists and the oppressors of her people; the heroism of Japan's young students who in extreme poverty, and faced with the prospect of permanent unemployment if they offend the authorities, nevertheless continue to 'think dangerously', to cooperate with, and sometimes to lead, the labour and peasant movements, to go on strike when an enlightened professor is dismissed and to defy the police tyranny which pries into their lives and watches over all their activities.

Japan is vulnerable not only because of her economic weaknesses but also because of her social weaknesses; because, that is to say, of the extreme social tension arising from the strong survivals of feudalism, from the diseased nature of her social structure, from her outworn, antiquated, oppressive and cruel laws, customs and constitution.

Japan's boasted civilisation that claims to combine the best of Western civilisation with the 'spiritual' qualities of her own Oriental civilisation, is a gigantic bluff, no less than her boasted national strength and the invincibility of her war machine. In fact many of Japan's own most distinguished men have deplored the sterility of Japanese civilisation and the failure of the Japanese mind either to synthesise or theorise. The quotation below is taken from an article in Contemporary Japan,¹ which far from being anti-Japanese is a semi-official publication in English designed to reveal Japan at her best:

'Japan has not achieved much in the basic sciences or displayed spectacular originality in the applied sciences. . . . The failure of the Japanese recently to produce anything purely their own, material or

spiritual, in the field of advanced civilisation, is evidence therefore not of any lack of cultural ingenuity but rather of the prolongation and extensiveness of their absorption of foreign things in everyday life, in which no little of what is generally accepted as entirely indigenous is in reality of alien origin. Japanese seldom digest theories of a civilisation though skilled in its application to their needs. Nor have they demonstrated ability to create a theoretical culture of their own.

'In the intellectual and spiritual realms as a result what is foreign and what is indigenous exist side by side in Japanese minds separate and even in conflict instead of fusing into a unity. No other civilised nation displays this phenomenon, though such a mental collision may often be seen when a backward nation comes into contact with an advanced people. ... It is the failure of the Japanese to derive from imported civilisation, regardless of the degree of its advancement, any stimulus for the creation of their own spiritual culture that accounts in large measure for their retention of a purely indigenous spiritual attitude that has come down from remote times, without making the progress that usually attends the contact of one form of civilisation with another.'

The writer continues:

'When called upon to formulate their mental attitude as a nation they can only react in a negative manner against what is foreign, especially of an intellectual nature, and fall back upon that ancient modicum of spiritual culture born of their own country.'

It is the main purpose of this book to destroy a few of the illusions concerning Japan's power, efficiency and culture; to explode the false notions both of her invincibility and of her real purpose; to show both her weakness as an ally and the danger she will ultimately become if her bluff is not called and she comes closer to being in fact what she is now only in fancy and outward appearance.

At the outset one can recall how strong and powerful Tsarist Russia seemed before 1905 and even before 1914. She also was a colossus with feet of clay; she also was a semi-barabaric, semi-medieval state with a peasantry no better off than the serfs which their grandfathers had been, but with a coating of 'Western Culture' and Constitutional Government and with some giant factories. She also had her 'Little Father' the Tsar, supposedly revered and beloved by the masses and holding something of the same position as the Mikado. Before 1905, indeed, the peasants and even the urban workers looked to the Tsar to save them from the oppression of the employers and bureaucrats and landowners just as the majority of the Japanese people do today. She also had her façade of a Diet to cloak the police-monarchy behind; she also had a powerful revolutionary movement which no terroristic measures of the government could destroy; she also had a vast Asiatic Empire. Without pushing this analogy too far, since there are important differences as well as resemblances, and since such important changes have occurred in the international economic and political situation since the world war, one can usefully recall to the present admirers of Japan and her military might the broken reed which Tsarist Russia proved to be when the war test came.

The Japanese have not adopted from the West more than its technique and its clothing. As far as the Government is able it shuts out Western philosophy, Western political theories, Western science in anything but its technical aspects, Western conceptions of social and political equality and liberty. The Japanese ruling classes have done their best to obtain all the benefits of Western technique whilst retaining their medieval morals, customs and laws, and stifling the spirit of scientific enquiry which is the father of new inventions. They try to train the young in Western science whilst shutting them off from Western thought and above all from Western political theory, by threats and drastic punishments. They want the young men to understand the mechanics of the universe in order to build power stations and battleships, and yet to retain the religious and political beliefs of an Egyptian under the Pharaohs. Absurd myths are taught to the children in the schools under the name of history, and any teacher who casts a word of doubt on the myths concerning the divine origin of the Emperor and the lives of the early Emperors, is prosecuted as a Radical or 'dangerous thinker', or, at the very least, deprived of his livelihood. Even in the Universities the same puerile myths are 'studied', and it is Use-majesti to inform students of the dates when the myths were first recorded, since this indirectly reveals the fact that they are a human invention.¹

1For instance a certain Dr. Inouye, a professor of the Imperial University and member of the House of Peers, was disgraced and dismissed for having written the following passage:

The Japanese Government's outlook is somewhat like that of the medieval church at its worst in its fostering of superstition and obscurantism and in its crushing of all independence of thought.

The whole educational system of the country is designed to make the children learn to copy but not to think. It is even admitted that it is undesirable to develop a pupil's intelligence because that makes him think. The Japanese assumption is that if people once begin to think they are sure to think 'dangerous thoughts', i.e. begin to question all the outworn creeds and to criticise the political institutions and economic structure of Japan.

The study of sociology is forbidden in schools and universities and many of the Western books in the libraries are not allowed out to the students.

Japan has neither representative institutions, nor a free Press, nor a Western juridical system with the Executive separated from the Judiciary. There is no Habeas Corpus and the police arrest whom they please and keep people in the police cells as long as they please, without trial. In short Japan is a police state ruled by force, not by laws and the consent of the governed.

For all the persecution of 'dangerous thinkers', the mass arrests of Radicals, the persecution of liberals and social reformers of all kinds, for all the stamping out of every sign of free thought and of all movements which aim at any change in Japan's outworn political system, there is no country where the revolutionary movement is more ardent, where discontent and the spirit of revolt are so widespread and so fierce. The Japanese have no safety valve for their discontents, no palliative for their misery and despair. Not only the peasantry and the working class but also the students, the small shop-keepers, the artisans and owners of small workshops live lives almost devoid of pleasures and distractions, lives which are uniformly grey and hard and constantly overshadowed by want and discomfort. The workers, the

peasants, the artisans and shopkeepers and students are all overworked and full of hatred for the rich. Even those who get enough to eat have no pleasures to distract them from their envy of the few who live in comfort and luxury and enjoy the 'corrupting pleasures of Western civilisation'.

The attitude of British Conservatives and even of certain Liberal circles towards Japan is a curiously contradictory one. On the one hand it is still imagined that Japan can be made to play the part of junior partner of the British Empire in 'preserving the peace' of the Far East, on the other hand it is argued that Japan is now so strong that it is no use trying to stop her course of armed aggression on the Asiatic mainland.

According to the first line of argument anything is better than the present disorder in China, and Japan is Imperialism's bulwark against Communism in Asia much as Constantinople once was Christendom's bulwark against the Turk.

As it is expressed by the well-known naval expert, Hector C. Bywater:¹

'If the Pax Japanica is the only alternative to chaos few British people will hesitate to make their choice.'

The underlying assumption is that if Japan 'pacifies' China and 'opens it up' together with Mongolia, i.e. if she conquers these countries, the process will be accomplished by Japanese blood and British treasure, by the Japanese army backed by British loans, credits and munitions. The view is that since Japan's financial resources and heavy industry are too weak for her to pay the costs of conquest, or to invest in her newly won colonies herself, Britain would gain a field of investment without having to fight for it. Since it is certain that the British people today would never stand for an open war for the partition of China, it is thought that a new kind of Anglo-Japanese alliance —avowed or secret—can be established in which Japan would do the 'dirty work' and England would supply the money. Subsequently, it is thought, England would supply the capital goods

and contract services whilst Japan makes the manufactures of mass consumption.¹

This is at bottom the view of those interests which sponsored the Federation of British Industries' mission to Japan and Manchuria in 1934.

Then there is the idea that if Japan is fully occupied in Manchuria, Mongolia and North China, she will cease to be a menace, to Australia or any other of England's South Pacific possessions. In particular they hope that if Japan goes on spending at her present rate on land armaments she will have no resources left for naval building. There is also the hope that Japan may become involved in war with the U.S.S.R. which would, whatever the outcome, exhaust her and cripple her for a generation.

All the above assumptions are, however, on closer examination found to be quite fallacious. True as it is that Japan needs the assistance of British finance and heavy industry, she has not the least intention of letting Britain in as a partner once she gets control of China. Unsecured loans and purchases by Japan from Britain, yes, but direct investment in Manchuria or China, no. This appears clearly from Japan's behaviour in Manchuria; it accounts for the restrained tone of the Federation of British Industries' report in 1934 and for the failure of the British Treasury expert, Sir F. Leith Ross, to come to any terms with the Japanese in 1935-36.² British loans are of course very much desired by the Japanese Government but there is no intention of

letting British companies set up in business in Manchuria, and there would not be in China either. Although foreign capital is required by Japan to develop Manchuria, and even if for a few years Britain would therefore get orders from Japan for iron and steel and some machinery destined for China, and could give very profitable loans and credits to Japan, it is precisely to free herself from such dependence that Japan wants China, and it would not be long before Britain, together with all the other powers, had the Chinese door closed and bolted in her face. Moreover, the value of all the huge British investments in China would be gradually reduced or destroyed by the innumerable means at the disposal of the Japanese, which have already been tried out successfully on the much smaller amount of foreign business in Manchuria.

As regards cotton goods the control of China, far from keeping Japan out of Lancashire's remaining markets, would eventually give her a raw material basis which would render her competition even more severe than it is at present. It is the hope of getting control of the cotton fields in North China and of extending and developing them, which is one of the compelling motives behind the present Japanese advance. The possession by the Japanese of large supplies of cheap cotton close at hand would indeed be the last straw for Lancashire.

The other main line of argument, curiously contradictory to the first, but put forward by the same groups, is that Japan is already invincible in the Far East, that her course of aggression cannot be held up anyhow, so the wisest policy is to make the best of it by quickly coming to an understanding with her to ensure her goodwill and her willingness, if not to let Britain share in the spoils, then at least to leave British interests in China intact. It is constantly argued that Japan is invulnerable in the Pacific, that the size of her navy and her proximity to China make it quite impossible for either England or the U.S.A., operating from bases thousands of miles away, to stop her. That is to say, it is precisely those who think the weakness of Japanese heavy industry and lack of capital will induce her to be England's junior partner in the Far East, as she was before 1914, who argue that she is invulnerable in the Pacific on account of her naval strength. Yet it is well known that wars nowadays are determined by the degree of material resources and technological capacity, i.e. by the strength of the industrial organisation of the combatants. Wars are won now by weight of iron and steel, by the capacity to produce munitions and aeroplanes and poison gas. Although armies still march on their stomachs food is not all, and Japan has neither the bread and butter of industry, coal, iron and oil, nor abundant food supplies, nor other raw materials. Nor has she substantial foreign investments to finance her purchases of these abroad. Her industrial organisation is weak, since heavy industry as a whole, and engineering in particular, are undeveloped, and since a very large proportion of her production of all goods comes from the workshops of artisans and from domestic industry where little machinery is used, and the waste of man power is very great.

Japan is even more vulnerable in the matter of agriculture since her primitive technique means shortage either of food or of man power in war time.

At the same time the condition both of her peasantry and of her workers and lower middle classes, as will be shown in subsequent chapters, makes Japan a country seething with unrest and rebellion, and the breaking point may come at any moment. The terrible poverty of the Japanese people and the revolutionary ferment amongst all classes, except a small circle of wealthy men, would certainly break out in social revolution if Japan suffered even one severe defeat, or found herself involved in a long and costly war, or even if she were faced with economic sanctions. Up to now the floodgates have been held back by Japan's military successes, by her success in flouting England and the U.S.A., and by the mirage of an end to poverty and hunger through foreign conquest. Any major reverse would force open the gates and Japan would be swept off her insecure foundations and submerged in the flood of revolt.

Yet Japan continues successfully to put up her bluff to the world and certain influential British statesmen remain convinced that she would be a strong ally, and that, in spite of her strength, she would be satisfied to remain England's junior partner as before 1914. Injustice to the Japanese it must be said that this latter dangerous illusion is of Britain's own making. The belief that Japan is still the useful and obedient younger brother who will help Britain to defend her Imperial interests in the Far East and be perfectly satisfied if given only social recognition as a 'Great Power' and a measure of political support, is held by certain circles in England in spite of the many proofs to the contrary which Japan has given in word and action. As an American writer has succinctly remarked with regard to the admiration of British admirals and of certain British statesmen for what they still quaintly call the 'little yellow brother' or the 'Sister Island Empire':

'Few such sentimentalists seem to be aware of the fact that in the Far Orient today Japan is full grown and regards England as her "little White Brother" becoming more of a nuisance every day.'¹

The fact is that Japan now considers herself strong enough, or England and the U.S.A. weak enough, for her to strike out on her own, that she resents British patronage and is determined to acquire her own independent Empire in the East. She has administered one angry rebuke after another to those who believe that she still accepts England as her mentor, as her agent in the councils of the West. Take for instance the response of the Japanese Foreign Office to the statements made by various peers in the House of Lords' debate on April 3, 1935, at which many offers to 'mediate' between Japan and China were made.

'Lord Peel's suggestion that Great Britain should offer to mediate evoked from the spokesman of the Foreign Office the observation that Great Britain seemed to think that she ruled all the waves including those of the China Sea. Between Japan and China there was nothing to mediate about. … If Britain wished to promote a Chinese-Japanese Entente she would only do nothing.'²

From the time of the seizure of Manchuria to the famous Amau 'Hands off China' statement in April 1934, and with special vehemence during Sir Frederick Leith Ross's economic mission to China in 1935-36, the Japanese have continued their

open proclamations of their paramount rights in China, their determination to control China and to let no one else in. Indeed, when in the autumn of 1935 Britain 'dared' to send Sir Frederick Leith Ross to China to investigate conditions, and to try to do something to retrieve the losses incurred by British investors by assisting the Chinese Government to institute a currency reform, the Japanese were furious at this poaching on their preserves, as they considered it. The Japanese Press was full of angry abuse and insistence that no other Power should do anything in China without first consulting Japan.

Ever since Britain's failure to prevent Japan seizing Manchuria the Japanese have grown more and more confident and arrogant and convinced that the day of the 'British lion' is done.

In particular, since the calm acquiescence of the British Foreign Office in Japan's 'Hands off China' statements, the Japanese Press has more and more openly proclaimed its contempt for British Imperialism. Whenever a friendly gesture to Japan is made by the British Government or by some British statesman, this is interpreted as weakness, as recognition of Japan's strength and of Britain's inability to restrain her career of conquest on the mainland of Asia. I give below a few typical extracts from the Japanese Press, the tone of which will perhaps come as a surprise to those English people who still believe in the myth of Anglo-Japanese co-operation for the benefit of the British Empire, and who have preserved their sentimental illusions concerning the common interests and common ideals of the 'two island empires'.

In June 1935 the Japan Society gave a banquet to the Japanese Ambassador Matsudaira on his departure from London, at which Sir Samuel Hoare stated:

'I wish the Japanese Ambassador to tell the people of his country when he returns there in a few weeks' time that British people are very conscious of the fact that the two nations have many things that matter most in the world in common. They are both great island powers and both have the inestimable blessing of living under a hereditary monarchy. ... We regard a proper understanding and collaboration between our two countries as essential not only to the stability of Asia but to the prosperity of the whole world.'¹

1Morning Post, 20.6.1935.

When Matsudaira arrived in Japan and reported to the Foreign Minister Hirota the Japanese Press was full of exultant comments on Britain's recognition of Japan's invincibility. The following extracts are typical:

'The British Government is well aware of the fact that nothing can be done politically or economically in the Far East without Japan's understanding. . . . British civilisation is falling into the background and taking advantage of this opportunity the European powers are beginning to lift their heads. At any rate Britain has lost its weighty power in the world since the Manchurian incident. The Powers have begun to start free actions since Britain has fallen into the background. Britain will gradually be forced to readjust its overseas branch offices as it has lost its fighting spirit.' {Nagoya Shinaichi, I-8-I935-)

'The control of events in the Far East is determined by Japan. Britain has now come to realisation of the fact that she must depend on Japan in the Far East. .. . We Japanese should be magnanimous enough to meet Britain in her new attitude with open arms.' (Miyako, 9-8-I935-)

In spite of the magnanimity towards the dying British lion advocated by this newspaper, it goes on to say that Japan must insist on the removal of the restrictions on Japanese trade in British Empire markets and on Britain agreeing to Japan's naval claims.

Japan's present attitude towards Britain recalls in some respects that of Germany before the war. Germany also considered that England was degenerate and weak and unable to defend her vast Empire. But Germany did not, like Japan, at the same time angle for British loans, and Germany was a giant in fact not a bluffer like Japan.

Summarising the press accounts of what Matsudaira said to Hirota, the Japan Advertiser¹ stated that the public had been told that the Far Eastern policy of the Baldwin Cabinet was tending towards recognition of Japan as a stabilising force in that part of the world and in favour of co-operation with Japan for the preservation of British interests in China. The same paper reported that Hirota had a scheme for trading the co-operation which Britain desires against Britain's support of Japan's naval claims and a more liberal trade policy on the part of the British Empire.

The Japanese are fairly confident now that the policy of the British Conservative Government is to co-operate with them in China in order to safeguard existing British interests there. Indeed, since the mission of the Federation of British Industries to Japan and Manchukuo in 1934 the Japanese have more and more confidently assumed that Britain is prepared to retreat from North China altogether provided her interests south of the Yangtse are guaranteed by an understanding—or alliance— with Japan. This confidence was strengthened all through 1935 by the British Foreign Secretary's pronouncements in and outside of Parliament, and was further reinforced by the report alleged to have been made by Matsudaira on his return to Tokyo in the autumn of 1935. The talk in Japan then was of demarcation of spheres of interest in China, and the proposal seemed to be that Japan should be left a free hand in North China whilst allowing Britain to finance Chiang Kai Shek's railway construction in Sechuan and elsewhere south and west. But according to the Japanese Press, Britain wanted the support and security given by an understanding with Japan before she would give any loans or assistance to Chiang Kai Shek for the economic development of Central or South-Western China. The Leith Ross mission came as a shock to the Japanese and caused both consternation and anger at the idea of Britain looking after her Chinese interests herself. The fact of his coming, the remarks he made, and the arrangement for bringing China into the sterling bloc, were regarded as a reversal of the British Foreign Office policy on which they had long counted as assuring them a free hand in East Asia.

Japan's luck has indeed held for a long time. Her quiet assumption of control in North China in 1935 without any action by Britain to prevent her, although British Imperialism has far more at stake in North China than in Manchuria, has been rendered easy first by Britain's preoccupation with the menace of a re-armed Germany and then by the threat from Italy to British interests in Africa. Although there is as yet no such understanding between Italy and Japan as almost certainly exists between Germany and Japan, and although Japan early in 1935 even annoyed Mussolini by her friendly gestures to Abyssinia, Italy has proved no less useful as an unwitting ally than Germany as a passive ally. The somewhat abrupt change in certain British circles in the summer of 1935, from hostility to Japan to advocacy of an understanding with her for the preservation of British interests in China,¹ was undoubtedly due to the need for Britain to concentrate her strength on the preservation of her African interests even if this entails the loss of a further large part of China to British trade and investment. Egypt and Britain's other African possessions can be more easily defended than Britain's partly frozen and far distant assets in China; moreover, trade with Africa is growing, whilst trade with the Far East is decreasing.² In her half-hearted attempts to hinder Mussolini from seizing Abyssinia, Britain was defending the route to India from any future menace. What is not fully realised in England is that the route to India needs defending equally or even more urgently in the Far East. If Japan once acquires hegemony over China whether directly or in camouflaged forms, India will be menaced by a mightier and more dangerous enemy than Italy. Japan has made no secret of her ultimate intentions. She has proclaimed through the mouths of generals, professional patriots, politicians and statesmen her determination to free not only China but India and all Asia from the 'domination of the white race', to establish her 'Imperial way' and smash the effete peoples of the West.

Japan's policy was announced to the world as early as 1927 in the secret Tanaka Memorandum which, whether spurious or not, only sets out in complete and detailed form what various War Office pamphlets,³ General Araki, the famous Black Dragon Society, the other patriot societies, and the young officers have for years been proclaiming from the housetops. General Araki, when War Minister in 1932 and 1933, continually referred to British oppression of the people of India and to Japan's divine mission of Pan-Asianism. In 1935 Major-General Tada, Commander of the Japanese garrison in North China, issued a pamphlet to the Japanese Press representatives at Tientsin en-

titled 'The Basic Conception of China', in which he wrote as follows¹:

'The international situation . . . may be regarded as the beginning of a racial war for the emancipation of the coloured people who form the greater part of the human inhabitants of the world from the enslaving oppression by the whites. . . . It is also the beginning of a spiritual war for rectifying the material civilisation of the West by the moral civilisation of the East. Those two great missions from Heaven are the natural obligations which our Japanese Empire must bear.'

It would appear that whenever Britain momentarily wakes from her stupor, or rather gets over her dread of interfering with Japan for long enough to assert herself, she quickly relapses into acquiescence, either on account of an apparent change to more moderate counsels in Tokyo, or because of the renewed influence in London of the advocates of an Anglo-Japanese understanding.

What is the explanation of the attitude of those Conservative and City circles which see the best course for British diplomacy in an understanding with Japan? Is it really thought that Japanese soldiers can be used to defend British interests in China and even to 'open up' China and 'pacify' her, in the interests of British finance and heavy industry, now that Britain finds it hard to pay for the ships and men necessary for the defence of the far-flung British Empire of our school books?

Is it really possible that our industrialists and bankers think that if Japan is given a free hand 'on the mainland of Asia', she will for ever cease from troubling and leave South China, Australia² and the Dutch East Indies alone, although it is only in these countries and in India that Japan can 'fulfil her destiny' by obtaining the raw materials which are essential to her?

Is it seriously thought that if Japan should fight the U.S.S.R.

backed by British credits—she will certainly never attempt the job without British financial backing—Britain would reap anything but disaster whatever the outcome? Disaster, moreover, not only in Asia, where a Japanese victory would set her on the way to becoming a real menace to the British Empire and a Japanese defeat would probably mean Communism in both Japan and China, but also in Europe, where Germany would be certain to seize the opportunity to start war.

Every student of history knows that Rome entered on her decline when she began to relegate the defence of her frontiers to the barbarians half within and half without the Roman pale. In spite of the pitfalls of historical comparison can one avoid seeing signs of the decline of British Imperialism in the present attitude to Japan in the Pacific?

This view ultimately comes down to the argument that 'what cannot be eschewed must be embraced'. However, world politics is not a comedy, and unfortunately in this case the kiss which Japan will return for the embrace will certainly be the classical kiss of betrayal. The rulers of Japan are out for colonies and Empire, not for friendship and self-sacrifice. If Japan is allowed to entrench herself in Manchuria and China and subsequently to develop her strength unmolested, her next step must inevitably be to turn on Singapore and the Dutch East Indies and finally on India and Australia—in a word to tear the British Empire to pieces. Japan will not even extend to her foolish and cowardly friends the privilege Cyclops accorded to Ulysses, since the British Empire will not be devoured last but next.

Those British Imperialists who claim that Japan must be allowed to expand in order to keep the U.S.S.R. in check, whether or not they themselves believe in the myth of Japan's invincibility, welcome it and propagate it as a convenient excuse for allowing Japan to proceed unchecked in her course of armed aggression in Eastern Asia, believing that her expansion is necessary to save the British Empire from Communism. This school wishes to see Japan strong and is ready even to give her credits to keep her going if she is weak, ignoring the great danger which Japanese Imperialism constitutes to vital British Imperial interests.

The answer to this latter argument is obvious from the whole course of world events in the past decade. It is indisputable that Russia's preoccupation with her internal economic affairs and her limitless resources and territory render her policy one which seeks peace above all things. Of this desire the Soviet Government has given innumerable proofs both in the East and in Europe. Moreover Stalin has clearly stated that Communism is not for export.

What is shared in common by all the advocates of an Anglo-Japanese understanding, or of a free hand for Japan in the Far East, is the belief, real or assumed, that neither Britain nor the U.S.A. can stop Japan expanding somewhere on account of her invincible strategic position in the Pacific.

What is ignored or not realised by all those who insist on Japan's invincible position are her economic and social weaknesses.

Japan's armed aggression could easily be checked without war.

Economic measures against her would be quite sufficient. I am aware that it is usually said in answer to this argument that economic measures must inevitably lead to war. This is, however, not the case with regard to Japan. She cannot proceed without the tacit consent of England and the U.S.A. It is not a question of blockading Japan; it is merely a question of refusing to buy her goods or supplying her ourselves with oil, iron, cotton and machinery, and of refusing her the credits she is now still able to obtain. Refusal to buy from her for a few weeks would indeed be sufficient. Japan cannot attack England or the U.S.A. for the same strategic reasons that they cannot attack her, so that there is no reason at all why economic sanctions need lead to war.¹ True, there are parts of the British Empire which could be attacked but even Japan cannot imagine that Britain would not defend them, and even Japan would not dare to challenge the joint strength of Britain and the U.S.A. Moreover, the seizure of Malaya or Hong Kong or Borneo would not solve Japan's raw material problem and she would still be in no position to carry on a war for long.

A brief period of collaboration between England and the U.S.A. is all that is necessary. Japan would collapse in a few weeks, if she could no longer sell her silk in the U.S.A., and her cotton goods in India and the British colonies, and could get no credits to buy iron, oil and armaments. She cannot obtain all the essentials she requires from anyone but the U.S.A. and the British Empire, and no one but the U.S.A., Britain or France can give her credits on a large scale. She cannot sell large quantities of goods to anyone else. She is indeed so vulnerable that even the serious declaration of such joint action to oppose her would almost certainly stop her aggression.

Already Japan is spending nearly half her budget on armaments and almost all the rest as interest on loans. Each year she issues more loans to meet the ever widening gap between revenue and expenditure and she has already used up all the reserves accumulated in three decades of virtual peace (1905-35).

It is a question of whether the internal financial and social collapse will not come before she is able to draw a profit from her conquests, and it would do so if she were opposed, instead of tacitly assisted, by Western finance.

The tragedy of the past five years has been that when, as in 1932, the U.S.A. was anxious to co-operate with Britain to restrain Japanese aggression Britain was unwilling; and that when, as in 1935-36, Britain tentatively sought to co-operate with the U.S.A. to strengthen the Chinese Nationalist Government the U.S.A. had turned back to isolation.

England and the U.S.A. will not forever be in the favourable position they are in today. Leave Japan to proceed in China, be afraid to call her bluff, let her have time, and she will be able with the possession of Chinese iron and coal and cotton, and with the profits from squeezing the masses of the Chinese people, soon to acquire the military invulnerability which she is falsely supposed to have already. In that event she may one day realise the dream of her ruling classes and become the mistress of Asia and of the South Pacific and cast her shadow over the whole world.

A survey of Japan's resources in the matter of the bread and butter of industry: coal, iron and oil, reveals perhaps more clearly than any other aspect of her national economy that Japanese Imperialism is primarily a military rather than an economic Imperialism. In other words her position as a Great Power is due to the sword, not to any economic strength, and her expansion on the mainland of Asia is a predatory expansion; not one due to the urge of an expanding and powerful home industry searching for markets and areas for development. In this Japan offers a striking contrast to Germany, seeking an outlet for its enormous iron, steel and machinery production. Just as there are many features of Japan's economic structure which resemble those of 18th, 17th and even 16th century England, so also is her Imperialist expansion and ambition of the type of England in those early centuries. In the 17th century England went east to strip India of her riches by the sword, and in the 18th century continued her Imperialist expansion owing to the urge of her merchants for new areas in which to accumulate capital by unequal trade and thinly veiled robbery of the conquered peoples; today Japan has been driven to armed aggression not by the need of markets for the products of her puny heavy industry, but firstly by the desire of her semi-feudal landowning class for loot—indemnities—and for more peasants to exploit, and secondly, by the urge of merchant capital seeking larger areas for profit than the extremely small home market can provide. In the second stage, which followed the rapid expansion of Japanese light industry during and after the world war, the urge to expansion has been greatly reinforced by the need for iron, coal, non-ferrous metals, oil, cotton and wool, in all of which Japan is either completely deficient or very inadequately supplied. Japan's aggression on the continent of Asia is also due to her desire to monopolise its raw materials, the desire to prevent others from using them as much as the desire to get them for her own use.

No other Great Power except Italy is so poor as Japan in the primary sources of wealth: agriculture (including livestock breeding and timber resources) and mining. She has little iron, little coal, little oil, no nickel or any other alloy for making steel. Hence she cannot without supplies from abroad make either the machinery required for manufacturing goods, or armaments, or ships, or railways or automobiles. Without imports she cannot even clothe her peasantry and workers—much less export textiles. True she is the world's largest silk producer, but since this is the fibre which takes most labour to produce and is most expensive and fragile, she cannot clothe her whole population in it, nor build up a large export trade in Far Eastern markets for silk tissues. She must export silk to buy cotton. She is now the world's second largest producer of rayon, but she imports most of the wood pulp from which it is produced.

A consideration of Japan's food supplies is reserved for Chapter X.

First, then, as to iron and coal, without an adequate supply of which no country can be industrialised in peace, much less fight a modern war. In view of the high tonnage cost of coal and iron a deficiency of those materials is the most serious deficiency a nation can suffer from, and the degree of industrialisation of a country can be measured truly only by its fuel and iron consumption.

To compare Japan first to the less important producers, she herself has an iron ore production only £ that of the Malay States. Even together with Korea her production is only a little larger than Italy's. If we compare her to Britain—which itself imports a large quantity of iron ore—Japan's, Korea's and Manchuria's production combined is only a small fraction of it, viz. 14%.

In fact, Japan's production is so small as to be insignificant in comparison with that of other countries. Moreover, her scanty iron ore deposits are scattered over various parts of the country in small quantities and the cost of transport to the centres of production adds very substantially to the cost of her pig iron production. She has no large deposits close to her coal mines.

The following table compares Japan's latest available production figure with that for other countries before the world crisis (1929):

It is true that Japan is said to have been conserving her iron ore deposits for the time of war when she may be cut off from outside supplies or have difficulty in getting them. This is probably no longer the case, since production in Japan and Korea in 1933 was 40% higher than in 1931 and has surpassed the previous maximum of the post-war boom period, that of 1919. Japan's deposits are so pitifully small that the total of her reserves—80 million tons at the very highest estimate—is only equal to a little more than the amount actually mined in the U.S.A. in one year before the world depression. At the American per capita rate of consumption Japan's total deposits would only be sufficient to last two years. Nor do Japan's colonies compensate for this weakness. Korea has deposits estimated at only 10-40 million tons. Manchuria is, it is true, in a different category, having 740 million tons.² This has always been one of the main attractions of Manchuria for the Japanese. But, and it is an important but, although Manchuria is estimated to contain 75% of China's total iron deposits, the

Manchurian ores are

mainly of very poor quality, having for the most part an iron content of only 35%. Only about 6 of the 740 million have an iron content of 60-70%.

China's highest grade ores are in the Yangtze valley, where the iron content is from 60-70%. To make clear how low is the quality of Manchurian ores it need only be stated that in the Lake Superior region of the U.S.A. there are millions of tons of similar ores not counted as ore at all, since the preliminary process of extraction is too expensive to be worth while.¹ Accordingly iron extraction in Manchuria is not a commercial proposition even with the extremely cheap Chinese labour with which the mines are worked. It is only the exigencies of military requirements which lead to the deposits being worked at all. The cost of extraction is so high that it is only Government subsidies, given through the South Manchurian Railway, which cause these ores to be used to any considerable extent in place of imported ore and scrap iron.

It is, however, to be noted that some of the best iron deposits in China are to be found in the mountains separating the Chihli plain from Mongolia, i.e. in Chahar. Here there are estimated to be 90 million tons with an average iron content of 50% and these are now in Japan's possession.

The Korean ores have an iron content of about 50%. For Japanese iron extraction taken as a whole, the average net recovery is very low, viz. 30% as compared with 50% for the U.S.A. and 64% for Malaya.

In 1934, at its peak figure of 986,000 long tons, Japan's and Korea's combined output only supplied about 31% of Japan's consumption. If the 1933 Manchurian output is included, the proportion is about two-thirds.

Even if it is conceded that a nation can build up an iron and steel industry on imported foreign ores, Japan's total consumption of iron ore is found to be extremely small. In 1934 it was only 3-1 million tons as against the 1929 figure of 17-3 for Britain and 21.3 million each for Belgium and Luxemburg.

Japan has of recent years imported large quantities of scrap iron, but even so her production of pig iron only comes to 3-8% of the world's total, or to 5% if the Japanese Empire is taken to

lSee Bain, Ores and Industry in the Far East. 40

include Manchuria. This compares with 22-2% for the U.S.A. and 15-5% for the U.S.S.R. Moreover, these are 1932 figures, showing Japan's production greatly increased and the U.S.A.'s greatly diminished. If we compare the 1929 figures for other countries with Japan's topmost figure—1934—we get the comparison given below. This is the more useful comparison as it shows what each country is capable of in normal times, i.e. their usual productive capacity, as compared with Japan's topmost figure to meet the present large demands of her war industries.

Thus the Japanese Empire, inclusive even of Manchuria, actually produces a little less pig iron than Luxemburg and little more than half as much as Belgium. Her per capita production is only 30 lbs. as against 700 in the U.S.A. Even with the new blast furnaces now being constructed to meet the expanding demands of the war industries the total will only be 3 million tons. In fact in pig iron production Japan must remain a pigmy in comparison with the other Imperialist powers, unless and until she controls all China's resources.

Japan's industrial fabric is built on sand, the very foundations of her power are lacking. Although her production of pig iron is so small compared to that of all the Great Powers, it supplies more than half of her requirements, so that in steel also her output compares very unfavourably with that of every Great Power, and did not until 1935 come up to the Belgian level.

For although Japan is now 89% self-sufficient in steel production and has doubled her output since 1929, her total in 1934

was only 4-2% of world production and compares as follows with that of other producers:

This figure of 4-46 million for Japan is a peak figure reached to meet what corresponds to a war-time demand. In 1931 production was only 1 -86 million tons and it is only war orders plus the advantages of depreciation which have enabled the steel producers to double their production.

Iron production has not been able to keep pace, so that imports of pig iron, and especially of scrap iron, have increased fourfold since 1931 and in 1934 amounted to 2 million tons. Part of this import is no doubt a war reserve, since steel production has only doubled, not quadrupled. Nevertheless it shows clearly Japan's vital dependence on imports of iron or scrap which have recently been nearly equal in quantity to the iron production of Japan, Korea and Manchuria combined.

The backwardness of Japanese iron and»steel production is due even more to the high price of coal than to the need to import ore and scrap.

True, Japan's coal production compares much better than her iron production with those of other important countries, and she is 91% self-sufficient, but she is extremely poor in coking coal for iron and steel production, her total per capita consumption is very low, and the price of her coal very high.

Coal production in Japan Proper is now at the rate of 36 million metric tons per annum. Together with Korea, Formosa and Karafuto she produces 40 million metric tons. This compares with 262 million in Britain, 163 million in Germany, 53 million in France, 46 in Poland and 552 in the U.S.A. before the world depression. Manchuria produces 9 million tons annually, of which something less than half is exported.

The 1935 figure of coal consumption for Japan Proper is 38 million metric tons, and for the Japanese Empire (excluding Manchuria) 44 million. This compares as follows with that of other countries:

Although Japan's figure is so low, it has also to be remembered that practically the whole of it is utilised for industrial purposes, since heating of houses by coal fires or stoves or central heating is practically unknown. Whereas England, with a population of 44 million, consumes about 40 million tons of coal yearly for domestic purposes, Japan, with her 69 million population, consumes only 5I million tons for non-industrial purposes.

The low total consumption indicates the smallness of Japan's pig iron and steel production just as the poor quality and high price of Japanese coal is one of the chief obstacles to the economic production of pig iron in Japan.

The best comparison which can be mad^ to show Japan's poverty in coal resources is shown in table v on page 44.

Manchuria's importance to Japan lies rather in its deposits of coal than in its low grade ores, but even so it has no abundance of coking coal and the total reserves are small compared with those of the rest of China, viz. 1 -8% of China's total.

It is coal no less than cotton which is impelling Japan to get control of North China as well as of Manchuria. She has already almost complete control of Chihli where there are two good fields of coking coal, and where the British-owned Kailan Mines produce more coal than any other enterprise in China Proper. If she swallows all North China she will acquire the large deposits of coking coal in Shantung and Honan. In fact most of China's coking coal is in Manchuria and North China and by far the largest coal field in China is that of Shansi, where the reserves are estimated at the very large figure of 127,127 million tons.

In his book, Ores and Industry in the Far East, H. Foster Bain has pointed out that China is the only Far Eastern country with considerable deposits of coal suitable as the basis for a metallurgical industry, but that she has no corresponding supplies of usable iron ore. Iron is only obtainable in sufficient quantity, and within reasonable distance, in Malaya, the Dutch East Indies and the Philippines, and even in the two latter it leaves much to be desired with regard to quality. Only India, of all Far Eastern countries, has really large deposits of good ore. Hence—since commercially iron must go to coal not coal to iron —the only practical development of a metallurgical industry on an economic basis in the Pacific is in China from Chinese coal and imported ore.

For China's coal to be of real use to the Japanese, they must also acquire the iron ore of Malaya, the Philippines, etc., and eventually they will also want those of India and Australia. Hence, it may be remarked in passing, those who imagine that

'There are of course no exact figures of coal reserves for each country and the certain reserves are in each case much smaller than the various estimates. The above table is based on figures given in Bain's Ores and Industry in the Far East, the Economic Handbook of the Pacific and Power Resources of the World (World Power Conference, London, 1929). Japan is now safely pre-occupied in Manchuria and North China for many years to come are likely to be rudely disillusioned.

At present Japan imports iron mainly from the Chinese provinces of Hupeh and Anhwei along the Yangtze and from Malaya, where she has acquired important mining concessions.

Although an iron and steel industry can be built up on imported ores provided plenty of good coking coal is available, when a country has neither the one nor the other the cost of production becomes prohibitive and production can only be undertaken with Government assistance.

The high cost of transport of such a heavy product adds greatly to the cost of production. For instance, whereas in England before the depression British ore cost $3-50 per ton of pig iron produced, when imported ore was used the cost was $9-30. Japanese iron and steel costs of production are excessively high owing to the high cost of coal and of iron ore and the costs of transport. A very useful table of comparisons with other countries was given a few years ago by the U.S. Assistant Commercial attache in Tokyo.¹

It will be noted that, whereas in Japan both coke and ore are at the same level of 8-50, in every other country where the coke is as expensive the ore is much cheaper—half the price or less—

and where the ore is as expensive as in Japan then the coke is much cheaper. Only in Japan are both expensive. Accordingly the total for Japan is higher than anywhere else. The table in fact illustrates the fact that, whereas it is feasible to bring ore to coal, and even sometimes coal to ore, it is never commercially profitable to transport both, or to produce pig iron with high priced home coal uneconomically produced. The price of iron will inevitably be uneconomic as in Japan.

As to why the price of Japan's coal is so high, it is worth quoting the following from the report of the United States Assistant Commercial Counsellor:

'The high cost of coal which presents such an obstacle to the iron and steel industry is due to a variety of causes. The mines in Japan proper are in general of thin seams and faulted structure and are troubled with seepage and gas. The production of coal per miner annually is lower than in other great coal producing countries, although, of course, the amount of machinery is much less than in Western countries. The production per miner before the war was 124 tons annually. In 1929 this declined to 106 tons, but has since risen to about 150 tons per man.'

This 150 tons per man per year has since that date risen to 203 with improved equipment and more intensive labour, but even now is only 75% of the British annual figure per man, although an average of less than 5 shifts per week is being worked in Britain. If the output per shift is taken, the Japanese figure would correspond to only 69% of the British figure in spite of the much longer working day in Japan.¹

Compared with the U.S.A., of course, Japan comes out very much worse than if compared with England. In 1929 the yearly output per person employed in bituminous coal mining in the

Poland	24.9	Upper Silesia (German)
Ruhr	23.5	(in 1927)	26.27
		Czechoslovakia	18.47

U.S.A. was 9497 tons against Japan's 106 at that date and 203 in 1933.

The high price of coal in Japan is not only a primary cause of the backwardness of the iron and steel industry and of the poor development of engineering, but also of the slow progress of industrialisation as a whole since it makes the use of power very expensive.

Pig iron has to pay an import duty of 1.66 yen a ton to make it possible for the Japanese pig iron producers to operate although they are exempt from taxation. Hence the prices of steel and machinery are rendered excessively high, retarding the completion of the industrialisation of the country. Since it is impossible for the small commodity producer to afford machinery, handicraft production is kept alive.

Even when all the adverse factors are taken into consideration, the cost of coal in Japan remains according to all foreign investigators inexplicably and unreasonably high. That this is due to the monopoly position of the producers and sellers—who are either the same firm or linked up with one another—is obvious from the fact that Japanese coal is sold cheaper in China than in Japan.

Average quotations on best quality lump coal were 20-63 yen per metric ton in 1929 and 15-72 yen in 1933. In January 1936 they were 17-65. These figures amount to £2-00 in 1929, 18s. ^d. in 1933, and £1 os. 5d. in January 1936 in sterling, and compare with the British export price of 16s. per ton at both dates. Still higher prices prevail in the principal consuming centres which are distant from the mines. The above are monopoly prices allowing huge profits. The Bureau of Mines of the Ministry of Commerce and Industry has estimated the production cost of coal in Kyushu, the most important coal field in Japan, at 5-56 yen per ton and in Hokkaido at 4-50.¹ This means 1 is. 8d. and 9s. at par and 6s. 5d. and 5s. 3d. today. Yet the Showa Coal Company on the basis of this estimate has claimed that coal mining in Japan can only be profitable with a price in Tokyo of from 9-70 to 10-20 yen,² i.e. 19s. 6d. to £1 os. 5d. at par.

These figures compare with the British 1929 price of not quite 14/- per ton gross sold at the mine and 13/6 average value per ton raised. The U.S. figure for 1929 was only 7/5.¹

Although costs have been very much lowered since 1929 in both English and U.S. mines, even the above high figures compare very favourably with the Japanese. Even if we allow 25% as the difference between the price at the mine and in Tokyo² the Japanese (1936) figure comes out at 15/-. Thus in spite of the depreciation of the yen Japanese coal costs more than British which is now below 14s. at the mine.

Coal and iron are the basic and indispensable minerals for any industrialised nation, but there have also to be considered the non-ferrous metals which are essential for the carrying out of modern war, viz. aluminium, antimony, chrome, copper, lead, manganese ore, mica, nickel, tin, tungsten and zinc.

Japan has abundant supplies of only one of them, viz. copper, and even in this she is not completely self-sufficient, but imports about 20% of her requirements. Her production of lead, zinc, tin, manganese and tungsten ranges from 10% to 50% of her needs. With regard to the remaining three on the above list— nickel, antimony and bauxite (for aluminium manufacture)— she is entirely dependent on imports. Although the Far East holds the bulk of the world's supply of tin, tungsten and antimony, it is the Malay States, Siam and the Dutch East Indies, not Japan, which are rich in tin, and it is China which supplies 63% of the world's production of tungsten and 80% of its antimony.

Accordingly Japan is also dependent on imports for steel alloys and for bauxite, which is as essential to an air force as iron and steel are to an army or a navy.

Japan has practically no supplies of oil. Her oil refining industry, working on imports, now supplies her witii 36% of her whole consumption of petroleum products for fuel. Yet she produces only 20% of her requirements of lubricating oil—the most important derivative of petroleum for industrial purposes.

Japan makes up to a considerable extent for her shortage of

'To those who indulge in this variety of cheap sentiment I have my answer, that I cannot see Japan as a country which has any possible chance of becoming an excess exporter for a very long day to come; that you cannot restore conditions here merely by poring over the Customs returns.'

Further on he observes that Japan's invisible trading receipts are dwindling, and that to get the 300,000,000 yen which she requires annually to rehabilitate the national credit on a permanent basis, he can see 'one source and only one which she might tap and that is her deep sea carrying trade'. He goes on to show that Japan has 'never been wealthy enough for her people to indulge in foreign investments'.

As early as 1926 Inouye had said that the whole of a sum of 3,600,000,000 yen made during the war had been used up in payment of Japan's excess of imports year by year. Since the end of the post-war boom Japan has had an excess of imports paid for in gold or foreign balances previously accumulated.

In 1930, that is to say just before Japan started to depreciate the yen and embark on her period of 'phenomenal trade expansion', she had an adverse visible balance of 155,000,000, and had an additional sum of 14,903,000 yen to pay in settlement 01 her invisible items. This was made up by shipments of gold.

Today Japan still has an unfavourable balance in her invis-

ible as well as her visible foreign trade. Her recent investments are for the most part not yielding a profit, and at the same time the burden of her foreign interest payments—mainly on State loans—has become heavier owing to her depreciated exchange. According to the latest reckoning of the Yokohama Specie Bank, Japan in 1934 had an excess of imports of 43 millions in her invisible foreign trade.¹

To create and maintain a highly developed industry, a country must either possess, or be able to buy, immense quantities of metals. To buy them if it does not possess them, and has no revenue from foreign investments, it must either export goods or seize them by force. Japan has neither metals nor coal nor any of the primary raw materials for manufacture. She can only export goods if she can get the raw materials to make them from— the only requisite she has in her own territory for making them is labour power and some water power. But human beings can be used not only to labour but also to fight, and Japan shows that she considers this on the whole the cheaper and easier way

of getting what she needs. Hence her present piecemeal conquest of China.

Japan imagines she can make up for her industrial weakness by conquest. She believes if she can become the dominant power in Eastern Asia by the might of her army and navy, she will be able to build up a secure heavy industry on the ore and coal resources of China and of the islands of the Pacific—and ultimately of India and Australia.

At present she is only a pigmy brandishing a huge sword which she has not got the muscle to hold long, but the giant she is attacking—China—has no sword at all.

The Powers whose interests she ultimately attacks—Britain and the U.S.A.—are incomparably stronger than Japan at present, but naturally they will lose this advantage in a few years' time if Japan is not checked in her career of conquest and robbery, and manages to acquire control of all China's actual and potential mineral and agrarian resources. In that event Japan, far from being satisfied, and far from being likely to turn her attention northwards against the U.S.S.R., as many English and Australian statesmen imagine, will threaten all the countries of the Pacific.

For China's resources cannot suffice her and her 'destiny' must lead her south to the Philippines, the Dutch East Indies and Australia, and west to India

.

It has already been indicated in the last chapter how weak Japanese industry is; how fragile the foundations of her industrialisation. This is not all. Even with imported iron and steel she has been unable as yet to build up anything but a weak engineering industry, and even with imported machinery the extent of mechanisation, in all but a few outstanding industries, is excessively low. Not only are the Japanese rice fields cultivated without the aid of machinery, but in many of her so-called 'factories' the work is still done by hand, and a large proportion of the goods she produces comes from the tiny workshops, not counted as 'factories', where master craftsmen and apprentices work with the same tools as their ancestors in feudal times. Another large percentage comes from the homes of the peasantry whose women and children are sweated in domestic industry in the hours they are free from labour in the fields.

In Japan a few large scale enterprises rise like islands in an ocean of small scale primitive industry. Naturally to the casual visitor it is the islands which strike the eye. Hence the many glowing accounts of the high level of technique in Japan, the marvellous organisation, up-to-date machinery and so forth, to which are ascribed her successful attack on the world market. Such glowing accounts range from the reports of the International Labour Office to those of certain M.P.s and industrialists who write to the Press stating confidently that it is not low wages but superior organisation and technique which enable Japanese manufacturers to drive the goods of their rivals off the world market.

Nevertheless, any examination of Japanese official statistics, coupled with some observation of what can be seen in any day's walk through the back streets of her cities, show how false is the conception of Japan as a highly industrialised, mechanized modern country. Look into the little sheds and houses where buttons or glass or footwear or even parts of bicycles, lamps, etc., are being made. See the small children working any number of hours per day since they are not engaged in factories employing 'ioor more persons' and so do not come under the Factory Act. See the primitive tools, or at best the small motor worked by electricity which gives a larger output than in the old days. But even with this amount of mechanisation most of the work is still done by human muscles.

Although the Japanese population works so hard and so long, although children of 12 and even less can often be seen in the shops of the artisans, and work after 14 is general, and although hours even in large factories are so much longer than in the West, Japan's actual production each year, in proportion to her population, is very much less than that of almost any Western country, and infinitely less than that of the U.S.A. or Britain. For the energy resources of Japan, the number of coal and oil 'horses' which are working for her, are so few, and the extent of mechanisation is so much less than with us, that, if we compare the amount of work done with the numbers of the population in the U.S.A., England and Japan, we find Japan very much weaker than either—weaker even than such countries as Poland. The American engineer, T. T. Reed¹, has brought together figures of the world's output of work on the basis of a calculation that two pounds of coal properly utilised will do the work of one man per day, and that, as actually used in steam making, 3 J barrels of oil consumed are equal to one ton of coal. His calculations also take into consideration

the developed water power of each country. It is true that his figures, as given below, relate to 10 years ago and that Japan has further developed her hydroelectric power since then, but the gap between her and Britain, not to speak of the U.S.A., is so enormous that even if she had doubled her electrical energy production, it would have little effect on the comparison.

The last column, calculated on the basis of T. T. Reed's figures in the first two, is intended to show how many coal, oil and electric 'robots' per human inhabitant are working in each

country. Whereas in Japan there are only twice as many days of work done per year as there are inhabitants, in England there are 24, and in the U.S.A. 36. Even Italy has more non-human productive power than Japan—only India and China have less.

Viewed again as to total output, Japan, with twice as large a population as Poland, has only a slightly higher work output, and with a population 8 times larger than Belgium has a smaller work output than the latter.

Could any comparisons show better than this the weakness of Japan? Weakness, that is to say, if it is true that countries are militarily powerful in proportion, not to the size of their population and armies alone, but according to their work output. For only countries strong in this sense have enough surplus energy or power to be able to release large numbers of their people for fighting, i.e. for non-productive purposes.

The last war clearly showed that what ultimately counts most is power resources and food resources; in other words possession of the bread required by human beings and the bread required by machines: coal and oil, plus the possession of the machines themselves, to utilise these resources.

When a large proportion of the adult males are withdrawn

from production to fight, then, provided there is not too great a disparity in population and land area, that nation which has the most non-human energy and machines will win. Germany held out so long just because of her superb organisation, her high development of technique and power and scientific land cultivation, in spite of the overwhelming advantages of the Allies with regard to man power and raw materials. But in the end she was beaten by the inexhaustible non-human productive forces of the U.S.A. and Britain—by coal, oil and machines and by the New World's food resources. Tsarist Russia, on the other hand, collapsed first in spite of her colossal population and land area because she depended so largely on human muscles. She could not afford to withdraw the millions she withdrew from the cultivation of the soil, and from the production of consumers' goods; there were not enough machines to take the place of the men drafted into the army and production fell so sharply as to involve the breakdown of her national economy, chaos and revolution.

Japan is actually in very similar case today in spite of all her bluffing. With nearly half the work of the country done by human hands and little more than half by coal, oil and hydro-electricity, she could not sustain the strain of a modern war.

Even the strain of her present armament expenditure has nearly broken her national economy, nearly strangled her peasantry. The greater part of her population is already on the border line of starvation and could not draw its belt any tighter in any national emergency.

In order to get any true picture of Japan's industrial structure one must first estimate what place industry as a whole occupies in her national economy, secondly how much of her industry is modern large scale industry, and lastly what share heavy industry takes of her total production.

Agriculture still occupies nearly half the Japanese population. The next largest occupation is non-factory industry—i.e. workshops employing less than 5 persons—and the third largest is commerce. Factory industry, even if we include places employing only 5-10 workers, comes only fourth. There are in fact only twice as many factory workers as there are landlords, viz. 2 million against nearly 1 million out of a total of 29 million adults classified in the last census as having an occupation. The following table shows the relatively small number of factory workers and the very large number of artisans or casual workers.

Thus, only 7% of the occupied population works in factory industry. We also know that the total number engaged—whether as principals or workers—in manufacturing industry was 5-4 million at the last census. Accordingly, factory workers constituted only 36% of the total of those in manufacturing industry. The latest figures available, which are those for 1935, show Japan with 2,234,000 factory workers, 227,000 miners and 557,000 workers in transport and communications.

There are accordingly just about the same number of day labourers as factory workers. Day labourers means largely not coolies but 'journeymen', in the original and pre-capitalist sense of the word:¹ qualified handicraft workers employed by a master artisan but paid by the day. They work together with the young apprentices who do not figure in the above estimates at all. Today it also includes workers in enterprises employing less than 5 persons, and accordingly not classed as factories, and workers temporarily taken on in factory industry. If the master artisans are also considered the total of non-factory industrial workers comes to over 3 million against 2 million in factories.

According to calculations made by the Japanese economist, K. Takahashi,² 46 ½ of the total number of industrial workers are employed in establishments with 5 workers or less.

Moreover, many even of the enterprises classified as factories use little or no power-driven machinery and in the general organisation of production are at the stage of capitalist evolution known as 'Manufacture'.

Nor are the tiny establishments of master craftsmen and apprentices limited to the small cities and villages. In Osaka, Japan's foremost industrial city, out of 19,000 industrial establishments existing in 1924, 13,000, i.e. 68%, employed less than 5 workers.

The clearest proof of the amazing preponderance of the small

manufacturer or artisan is given by the fact that out of a total of 5,378,000 engaged in manufacturing industry exclusive of dependents, 1,340,000 were 'principals' and 3,360,000 workers with 308,000 staff. This means that the ratio of principals to workers is 2 15. It will be readily understood that in such tiny enterprises little or no machinery is employed, although it is true that the widespread availability of electrical power enables some of the artisans to employ small motors, if and when they can accumulate sufficient capital.

What is of particular interest, as revealed by the census of 1930 compared with that of 1920, is the fact that the number of persons in industry remained at practically the same figure at the two dates, viz. 5-3 million. Insofar as there was any change it was a reduction of 9,688. Japan was not even able during those ten years to reabsorb as many workers into industry as there had been during the post-war boom. For the yearly increase of population of some 900,000, industry has offered no opening. Yet between 1920 and 1930 the occupied population increased from 27,378,155 to 29,220,550. Where did the increase of 1,842,395 go? It did not remain in agriculture, for according to the census, the number of persons occupied in agriculture remained at 14 million. The only categories where the numbers occupied increased very largely were commerce, the civil service and the liberal professions. The number engaged in commerce increased by nearly i£ million in the decade, and those in the public service and liberal professions by nearly 400,000.

These figures have been given mainly to show the astonishingly large proportion of the population engaged in commerce and the tremendous increase in the decade 1920 to 1930. Actually, of course, those engaged in commerce merge with those engaged in manufacture since the master craftsman usually sells his own products in a shop which consists of his workroom. Nevertheless such artisans are included under the heading industry, not under commerce.

Even if this fact is left out of consideration the inherent wastefulness and the primitive nature of Japan's industrial organisation is clearly revealed by the fact that there are nearly as many persons employed in trade as in industry, viz. 4.4 million in the former as against 5.3 million in the latter. This means that 15% of the occupied population are engaged in commerce as against 18% in industry. Many of the former are the agents or jobbers who form the large class of middlemen between the merchant houses, or the larger manufacturers, and the multitude of tiny commodity producers. They travel round giving out raw material and collecting the finished product from the artisans, from the small 'factories' and from the homes of the peasants and other households. Japan's greatly increased silk output since 1920, the enormous increase in her production of textiles—not only cotton but also wool and rayon—and the increase in her production and export of a number of other less important articles of consumption such as knitwear, rubber goods, etc., have all led to an increase in the number of middlemen, agents and jobbers. The fluctuations in rice and silk prices keep alive a host of petty speculators and merchants.

	1920	1930
Total population	55.963	64.067
Total occupied population	27.378	29.221
Unoccupied persons	28.585	34.846'
Agriculture	14.128	14.156
Fishing	0.558	0.568
Mines	0.424	0.236
Industry	5.300	5.290
Commerce	3.188	4.463
Communications	1.037	1.108
Public Service and Liberal Professions	1.442	2.031
Domestics	0.806
Others	0.561

Industry has not been able since 1920 to absorb the surplus population of the village. Insofar as this surplus population has found an occupation it has been in petty trading,² speculation and usury.

The large number of small shops is indeed one of the most striking visible signs of the wastage of human energy and time in Japan. According to the 1929 statistics, there was in Tokyo one retail shop to every 9-5 houses and to every 43 inhabitants. Nor is this the case only in the capital city. For instance, recently one read in the Press of 200 retailers demonstrating against the co-operatives in one small town—Urawa, the capital of Saitama Prefecture. Those foreign observers who write so glibly of Japan's strength consisting in her wonderful organisation, rationalisation of industry and so forth, would do well to note the tremendous waste of national resources and energy which is involved in the maintenance of hundreds of thousands of tiny shops where half a dozen customers a day is frequently the most to be expected, and in the existence of a multitude of small middlemen handling Japan's agricultural produce.

Whereas in regard to the percentage of the population engaged in industry Japan falls behind almost every country of Western Europe, in respect of numbers engaged in commerce she heads the list:

selling and buying mainly among themselves. Who then is paying for their aggregate existence? It is in the last resort chiefly the farmers. They buy cheap from farmers and sell high among themselves. In late years even chances of selling among themselves have been progressively limited by the growth of department stores. What if their chances of buying cheap from the farmers are to be limited by rural co-operative marketing? Anything that goes in the name of controlled economy, State or private, tends to drive them out of business, and yet they constitute a large proportion of the urban population and a growing part.'

Japan has no large tourist industry like Switzerland, nor is she the world's greatest entrepôt market and centre of an enormous empire like London, and yet a larger proportion of her inhabitants are engaged in commerce than in either of those countries.

Another fact which bears witness to the excessively large number of middlemen (jobbers, commercial travellers, etc.) in Japan is the number of passengers carried, as compared to freight, per kilometre of railway lines in operation. The number is estimated to be the highest among those of the Powers.¹

It might indeed be argued that Japan is still in her mercantile age as regards the greater part of her national economy, for her condition corresponds in many respects to that of England in the 17th and 18th centuries, when the agents of the merchant houses rode about the countryside of Yorkshire and the West Country giving out raw material and collecting the finished cloth. The use of electricity has indeed assisted this early form of industrial organisation to survive in Japan side by side with the great concentrations of capital represented by the big cotton and rayon factories, the iron and steel foundries, the armament concerns and a few other industries, which have developed along modern lines. Nevertheless this is not the primary cause, but rather a mitigating factor in considering the low productive capacity of Japanese industry. In any case the use of electric power in production in the small workshops is not general. Even in the establishments classified as factories, i.e. having 5 or more workers, £ have no prime movers.

Nor is it to be thought that amongst Japan's actual factories employing her total of 2-2 million factory workers the large modern factory predominates. On the contrary more than half of the total of 50,000 factories employ 5-9 workers, and the number of establishments employing more than 100 workers constitutes only 5% of the total. Even if we consider the question from the point of view of the proportion of the total of factory workers employed in large establishments—if we designate by that term places employing 500 or more workers—then the percentage is only 35. As against this, the smallest factories employ-

ing 5-9 workers employ 10% of the total and constitute 56% of the total number of factories.

It is, however, typical of Japan's industrial structure as a whole that the really large modern factory with 1,000 or more workers plays a larger role than either the medium sized factory with between 50 and 100 workers or the fairly large factory with between 500 and 1,000 workers.

It should be borne in mind that the small establishments employing less than 10 workers but more than 5, although appearing in the official statistics of factories, are not subject to the Factory Acts. This means that there is no labour protection, no limitation of hours, no check on the employment of young children in these very numerous small enterprises, any more than in those employing less than 5 workers.

It is not even the case that the small factories are disappearing as industrialisation progresses. The number of places employing 5-9 workers has increased proportionately since 1914,¹ and the percentage of the total factory workers whom they employ was the same then as now. It is of interest to note that in 1927 there were found to be 2,362 'factories' in existence which date back to 1868.²

The number of those industries to which modern large scale methods of production and technique have been extensively applied is very small and consists mainly of those working largely for export like the cotton and rayon industries, the flour, sugar, beer and canning industries, the metallurgical enterprises mainly engaged in armament manufacture and shipbuilding and the heavy chemical industry. These did not exist in the pre-modern era and are necessarily large undertakings involving huge capital expenditure and. a large labour force.

As against the few large scale industries, in those industries which supply the consumption needs of the masses of the Japanese population there is hardly any large scale factory production at all. The typical figure is the master craftsman with his apprentices and one or two journeymen. It is simple to mark off the production of goods for export from those for home con-

sumption because the latter are peculiar Japanese goods designed for the needs of a standard and mode of life which have hardly changed since feudal times. Just as the apprentices live in and receive payment only in kind as in the feudal period, so do the customers sleep on the same rush mats, wear the same clothing and the same wooden footgear, eat the same food, shiver in winter in the same flimsy wooden houses inadequately heated by a stone bowl with a few lumps of glowing charcoal, and in general live very much the same life as in the days of the Samurai.

It is this peculiar retention of a medieval mode of living, and above all of a medieval standard of living, among the majority of the Japanese population, which is part of the secret of the cheapness of Japan's export goods. To that aspect I return in a subsequent chapter. Here I am concerned to show how the small producer has survived. As to why he has done so and why the mode of life has not changed is another question to be dealt with later.

Even in the case of goods made on Western patterns for export the small workshop, the small and medium sized factory and domestic industry predominate in most lines.

The Tokyo Chamber of Commerce gave the following estimate for 1931 of the share of the smallest establishments (employing less than 5 workers) in the total output of various important manufactures: cotton piece goods 18.8%; woollen textiles 28.8%; silk textiles 55.1%; knitgoods 27.4%; hats 29.1%; pencils 91.5%; pottery 60.8%; bicycles 65.5% (not only parts but also assembling).

Nor is it to be surmised that the number of small factories and tiny workshops, or the proportion of goods produced in the homes of the peasantry and workers, is diminishing now in consequence of Japan's rapid trade expansion. True that the number of big factories has increased, but the number of tiny enterprises has increased more rapidly.¹

1This is true even since Japan's rapid trade expansion period which began in 1932. According to the Tokyo metropolitan police board there was a net gain of 311 small factories in the first 6 months of 1932 whilst the Osaka statistics indicate an increase of approximately 1,000 in 1932. Only 4,600 additional people were, however, employed by the new Osaka factories, so that the average number employed per 'factory' was less than 5.

Almost the whole production of silk comes from very small local establishments. In 1929 when sericulture was still flourishing there was a total of 66,400 reeling factories of which 98-5% had less than 10 basins. The number with over 1,000 basins, which means a fairly large factory, was only 8. By 1931 there were only two such large factories. In 80% of the total of 60,351 filatures existing in 1933, hand reeling methods were still employed, and 31 % of the total basins in the country were hand reeling basins. The total number of operatives employed is nearly half a million, so that the reeling of silk is Japan's largest single industry. Yet there are only two large companies owning several establishments. One of these (the Katakura) is in reality a family enterprise, whilst the shares of the other (the Gunze) are owned by Mitsui and Mitsubishi—Japan's two largest trusts. Even the inclusion of the few big factories does not prevent the average number of operatives per factory working out to only 7½. It can accordingly be understood that the greater part of Japan's raw silk production comes from little semi-household reeling factories employing about 5 workers. Silk reeling is in fact little more than an extension of agriculture and the filatures are slight expansions of former household industry. Both the 'owners' of the filatures and the operatives form part of the agrarian population, and the same man who lends to the peasants on the security of their future crops, and of their future cocoon production, is frequently the owner of the local filature and also a landowner.¹ It is accordingly impossible to reckon how much capital in Japan is invested in sericulture, and most estimates of capital investments ignore the tiny filatures.

Nor is this the case only as regards silk. There are a whole series of industries which are still mainly handicraft, or semi-handicraft, family industries where estimates of capital invested are impossible to make.

Accordingly, whereas as regards numbers employed the very small factory and handicraft production far outweigh modern large scale industry, with regard to capital invested the big en-

terprises account for a disproportionate share and we find an extreme centralisation of capital.

Over 65% of Japanese capital is invested in 1.5% of the total number of companies, while only 2.1% is invested in 60% of all the industrial and commercial companies of Japan. Again, some 83% of invested capital is under the control of companies with a capital of a million yen or more, and less than 4% is held by those working on a capital of less than 100,000 yen.

Statistics of capital investment further reveal the importance of merchant capital. In 1929 out of a total capital of 13,790,758 thousand yen invested, 42.7% was invested in commerce and banking as against 44.7% in manufacturing industries and mining. Transport accounted for a little more than 10% and the insignificant remainder was in agriculture and fishing.

The extreme concentration of capital in industry is naturally most striking in heavy industry. In engineering, for instance, out of a total paid up capital of 87,000,000 yen in large enterprises, four trusts—Mitsui, Mitsubishi, Okura and Furukawa —control the whole. In Chapter VII some account is given of the variety of interests of these great horizontal and vertical trusts.

What, then, of the large scale modern industry of Japan?

As everyone knows it is in cotton textiles that Japan is now supreme, having been able to take first place in the world market by ousting Britain from her 150 years of supremacy. Second to cotton textiles comes rayon, of which Japan is now the second largest producer in the world. In the latter industry, which has only developed during the past 6 or 7 years, almost the entire production comes from large factories. In the case of cotton textiles the position is somewhat different. In cotton spinning there is a very high degree of capital concentration as well as centralisation. The whole production comes from the modern factories of a few big firms united together in an effective cartel: the Japan Cotton Spinners' Association.¹ With regard to weaving, however, the very small factory of 10 looms or less still predominates. There are also many medium-sized factories individually owned. Only about half of the goods even for export are made

by the big companies which combine weaving with spinning. Their cartel controls only 45% of the wide power looms in the country (i.e. the looms used for making export cloths) and only 28% if all power looms are included.¹

According to the 1928 figures of the Department of Commerce and Industry, 93% of the cotton weaving factories actually had less than 10 looms.

If one takes silk and cotton weaving together an even more astonishing position is revealed, for half the operatives are employed in establishments with less than 5 workers—i.e. in non-factory industry.

These figures all refer to power looms. There are in addition still a considerable number of handlooms not only in silk but also in cotton.

This, then, is the position even in Japan's foremost industry— cotton textiles; in the one Japanese industry of decisive importance in the world market.

Although Japan takes such pride in her world supremacy in cotton goods, and although her competition has frightened not only Britain but every Western manufacturing country, her textile industry is really like some abnormal growth, like a gigantic tumour or overgrown limb which renders her whole national economy lopsided and unbalanced, if not actually crippled. It has developed to gigantic proportions whilst other industries have remained atrophied. Or perhaps a better simile would be that of the child who grows abnormally fast and achieves height without strength. For in Japan the rapid growth of textile manufacture, and the recent rapid, though still much less noticeable, growth of a number of industries producing consumption goods such as rubber shoes and tyres, electric lamps, cutlery, hardware, soap, bicycles, pencils and fountain pens, clocks and so forth, has not been balanced by any proportionate growth of heavy industry. Moreover, such heavy industry as exists is almost wholly designed for the production of armaments and survives only with the support of subsidies, exemption from taxation and high tariff protection. The manufacture of machinery and machine tools, in particular that of primary machines for

the making of machinery, is very poorly developed. The bones and sinews of Japan's industrial structure are accordingly lacking: iron, steel and engineering. Her industrial structure is rickety.

How lopsided the industrial structure is can be best realised by a few comparative figures. Bearing in mind all the time that only 18% of the Japanese occupied population is supported by industry, and that the total number of factory workers is only 7% of the occupied population, let us see what proportion of this 7% are engaged in heavy industry:

The preponderance of light industry is startlingly shown in the above table, textiles alone employing nearly half of the factory workers as against less than one-fifth in metallurgy and engineering. If we take the textile and food industries together they account for 55% as against only 28% for the trio: metallurgy, engineering and chemicals. Yet the latter in any truly industrial nation would far outweigh the former. In England, for instance, there are 2-7 million in the heavy industry trio as against 1-3 million in textiles.

Japan's heavy industry consists mainly of plants for armaments production and shipbuilding. Take these away and there is litde left, except die electrical industry and locomotive and rolling stock building. If one takes for instance the manufacture of metal working machines and machine tools, Japan cannot supply 50% of her requirements even with her production

This fact does not, however, matter since the productive re-

lationships on the land were not changed, since capitalist methods of production did not, and have not till this day, penetrated into Japanese agriculture. The number of big estates is comparatively small and even where the ownership of the land is concentrated it is almost always left subdivided into small lots among tenants. This is true even in such exceptional cases where as many as 4,000 acres belong to one family.¹

The big estates exist mainly in the Hokkaido—the northernmost island—which was colonised after the Restoration and where there is some fairly large scale modern farming carried on with hired labour and animal power. But even in the cold Hokkaido, where the type of agriculture called for is along North American lines with machinery, large fields and some cattle and dairy farming, the failure to invest capital in agriculture, and the transference of the old parasitic type of landholding from the main island to this virgin soil, prevent full utilisation of the land and leave large stretches lying waste.

In order to understand why it is that payment of rent in kind, and the cultivation of the land in tiny plots by a multitude of households, have survived in Japan, one must also take into consideration the nature of farming on irrigated land. The yield from such land is, as compared to that from other land, fairly constant. There are good and bad years, but the land always

yields something and the fluctuations are not very big. Accordingly, the landowner who receives rent in kind has an assured income since the amount he receives per acre is fixed. It is sometimes imagined, when the statement is made that in Japan the tenants pay on an average 50% to 60% of the harvest as rent, that this means a kind of metayer system in which the produce of the fields is divided between landlord and tenant in an unvarying proportion, the landlord providing seed, etc. This is not the case in Japan, where the landlord receives a fixed number of bushels per acre irrespective of the yield, and where the tenant suffers all the losses in a year of bad harvest. Moreover, since the terms of the lease can be varied at the will of the landowner, he benefits without risk from every extra ounce of sweat and from every extra measure of fertiliser which the tenant puts into the soil. It was in fact until a few years ago about the only form of perfectly secure investment which the small man could make in a country where local banks frequently fail and where investment in firmly established large enterprises is not usually open to him, since these are for the most part family businesses (see Chapter VII).

There has been a continuing tendency for the urban middle class to buy land, or to keep possession of the land it already has, in a country where the small industrialist is always liable to annihilation by the extreme fluctuations of price brought about by the big monopoly business interests, and by the frequent periods of violent inflation and sudden deflation, as well as by the continual difficulty in securing working capital or fixed capital—in a word, by the strangling of the small man by the big monopolists. The small landowner, although he complains that the return on his capital is only about 3%, whereas the ratio on industrial share capital is 10-15% or even more, is rating the capital value of his land excessively high on account of the pressure of population, which enables him to extract such high rents. At the same time he is naturally reluctant to sell out at a big loss and invest in the much riskier venture of industry. The 3% from land used to be as near to a perfectly safe investment as Consols in England before the war, and although ever since 1920 the landowners' income has been falling because of the continuous fall in rice prices, it was not until the world crisis that he suffered actual loss. This loss has resulted partly from the absolute impossibility of forcing tenants to pay up in full at times of famine as in 1932 and 1934, and partly from the much lower selling price of the rice revenues when they are collected. Nevertheless, as I show later, this 3% return on capital is an underestimate.

What it amounts to is that in Japan the small rentier class is not, as in other imperialist countries, composed of the investors in Government bonds, in debentures and preference shares, but of landowners. Land up to the post-war agrarian crisis, at least, if not up to the world economic crisis, had been recognised as the only gilt-edged investment for the small investor. The small man who wanted security did not invest in agriculture as a business enterprise, but purchased land in order to draw half the produce from the tenant whilst risking nothing. For the ever increasing pressure on the land meant that its price was continually rising and the output per acre continually being increased by the use of fertilisers bought by the tenant entirely at his own cost; and the landowning class, with which the interests of the bureaucracy and military are so closely connected, could always bring pressure on the Government to keep up the price of rice for the landlord.

Of course, it is not only a question of directly buying a piece of land and taking half the produce from the cultivator. It is not only a question of the exploitation of the tenant. There are also the large number of small local banks which lend on the security of land and crops, and lending by individuals at usurious rates of interest to the peasant proprietors.

This brings one to the other important factor which keeps the small landowner in existence, and which, in addition to the factor of greater security of investment, accounts for the very high land values in spite of the much larger apparent return on capital invested in industrial enterprises. His position gives the landlord opportunities to make profits by moneylending at rates of interest running as high as 30% and 40%, and by trading with the scales heavily weighted against the small producers, and last but not least, by himself becoming a small industrialist. As it is expressed in the Japanese Press: 'Landed farmers is a better designation for them than landlords; some are provincial business men or industrialists who cultivate their land on the side. Thus they are really honest and diligent people, quite different from the great landlords in foreign countries who exploit other people.'

In other words, the landowner is usually not merely a landowner, he is a petty industrialist, or a money lender, or a trader and speculator at the same time, so that the profit he is making out of the peasants is in reality far greater than the apparent 3% on his capital which he gets from his rents. He may run a small silk reeling establishment or weaving shed or a sake brewing factory, or he may possess rice milling machinery.¹ He may be the only buyer, or one of two or three buyers, of produce in the village, and since the peasants are nearly all in debt to him, he gets hold of that part of the crop not delivered to him as rent at a very low price. He can then hold it till the end of the year when the Government artificially raises its price. For it is one of those Hide ironies so common in Japan that the name of 'relief' to the 'farmers' is given by the Government to its rice buying policy which raises prices a sufficiently long time after the harvest for the cultivators to have already delivered it up to landlord or usurer or trader in payment of interest on debts. To this question of rural indebtedness I return later.

It is, however, particularly in regard to small scale industry that the landowner is in a position of such advantage. Silk reeling, small scale cotton and woollen weaving and a number of lesser small scale industries are run for the most part on the labour of peasant girls and, to a lesser extent, boys. They go to work most frequently in order to pay off the fathers' debts and naturally the landowner to whom the peasants are indebted is in a position to force the young people to work in his little 'factory' on his own terms. Similarly, when the big mills want a recruiting agent it is the village landowner who can supply the labour required by forcing the peasants indebted to him to contract their daughters to go to work off the debt in the

big mills. Hence, incidentally, as the agrarian position has worsened of recent years, the big factories have been relieved of any necessity to seek for labour; the local landowner-usurer can be relied on to supply as much as is required. It is, I consider, these additional sources of profit which go far to account for the high land values and apparently small return on capital invested in land, which have puzzled many foreign investigators. Of course, the money lent out at usurious rates to the peasants by the landowners and petty traders is itself most frequently obtained— through a series of intermediate stages—from the large banks whose agents the petty landowners and traders really are. Hence not only the petty landowning class but the big capitalists have their stake in the semi-feudal exploitation of the peasantry; they get their advantage from it not only in the supplies of cheap indentured labour for the factories but also from their share of the profits of usury.

It is to be noted in passing that since the rentier class in Japan consists of parasitic landowners receiving their rents in kind, they frequently favour an inflation policy. As sellers of rice and frequently also as traders in other commodities and as small industrialists, they benefit from a rise in prices. This is in direct contrast to the position in other imperialist countries, where the middle class rentier being a holder of bonds or gilt-edged securities or debentures, (a 'coupon clipper') naturally wants deflation as does the landowning class which receives its rents in cash. This fact has important political consequences which will be referred to in a later chapter.

There is little doubt that it is not the peculiarities of rice cultivation, as has sometimes been argued, which keep the small landlord and the small scale cultivator in existence and prevent the formation of big farms and the introduction of modern farming with machinery. It is rather the pressure on the land and the absence of an alternative means of livelihood for the cultivators. The rate of Japanese industrialisation has not kept pace with the increase in her population and such industrialisation as has taken place, being for the most part only in light industry, offers employment to peasant girls but not to grown men. Hence, although the Japanese peasant must and can send his daughters to work in the factories to pay off his debts, or provide the where-withal to buy fertilisers, he himself has to remain on the land, however near to the starvation line he may approach. On the other hand, so long as the pressure on the land gives to the landlord the possibility of exacting more than 20 bushels of rice per acre from the hard driven cultivators, he has no incentive to introduce large scale farming with machinery and hired labour. Nor indeed has the small landlord usually got sufficient capital to do so, since the major part of what he wrings from the peasants is passed on to the banks as interest on his debts, or paid to the State in taxation. So long as the Government protects him by its rice policy and general social policy the small landowner will not be driven out of existence, any more than the peasant cultivator will be completely dispossessed and turned into a labourer.

Hence the fact that in agriculture the use of machinery is almost unknown, and even animal power is little used. Although electric light now illuminates the peasant's home when he can afford to use it, there is very rarely any use made of electric power for irrigation or other field operations. The only way in which the benefits of modern science and technique have been brought to Japanese agriculture, besides somewhat improved irrigation, is in the use of chemical fertilisers; but this, whilst greatly increasing the yield per acre, has not lessened the numbers of those working on the land.

As an illustration of how the cheapness of labour, rather than the peculiarities of rice cultivation, prevents the use of machinery I quote the following extract from an account of a new rice farm begun in Manchuria in 1930:

'The new cultivation is to be carried on by a typical modern method of mechanising all works; starting with ploughing and including sowing, harvesting, threshing and purification. The new farming experiment may perform a revolution in rice farming in Manchuria. The S.M.R. Co.'s Agricultural Experimental Station has laid down a sort of motto, crystallised out of the year's experiments, which says: "As wages are bound to rise year after year, labour is advantageous till the wages rise up to 75 sen a day, should the wages rise still higher the use of machinery will be preferable." '¹

There can indeed be no doubt that small scale cultivation without machinery, and with primitive methods of irrigation, is

1Weekly Japan Chronicle, March 6, 1930.

extremely wasteful and costly, and that, in the words of a delegate to the Third Conference of the Institute of Pacific Relations: 'The introduction of even the simplest mechanical improvements into the farming of Far Eastern countries is hindered by the fear of displacing labour and by the cheapness of the labour itself.'

That machinery could be applied to rice cultivation is obvious even to the tourist, who from the train or on his walks sees the peasants breaking up the ground with hoes or spades instead of ploughs, irrigating their paddy fields by a tread wheel pump, or breaking off the ears of barley by hand, or winnowing rice. The failure to apply machinery, which means also the failure completely to expropriate the small cultivator and establish large plantations, must be regarded as a consequence of historical as well as purely economic circumstances in Japan, insofar as it is explained by the political power wielded since the Restoration by the landowning class, and by the desire of the ruling class to preserve the peasantry as a great reservoir of man power in war. At the same time the diversion of so much of the national income for war purposes, ever since Japan's foundation as a modern State, has, by hindering general industrialisation, kept the peasants on the land; whilst the possibility of continually rendering the land more productive by 'sweating' the peasant more has removed the incentive to expropriate him completely and introduce capitalist farming methods. Above all the payment of rent in kind, by ensuring the landlord an ever increasing income as the yield has been increased by the use of chemical fertiliser, has kept the land divided up into an enormous number of tiny farms. Fundamentally, therefore, it is the feudal survivals, or Asiatic backwardness, of Japanese agriculture which have prevented the application of mechanical farming methods.

Let us now come to a consideration of the high real cost of production of Japanese rice, or, in other words, to the question of the small surplus produced by the labour of her 5£ million farming families. In the first place one has to consider how wasteful of human energy is the small scale production which demands that the maximum amount of human labour be applied literally to each grain of rice. In the second place, the very large number of landlords means that a large part of the rice produced and delivered as rent is consumed by the landlords and not brought to the market at all. It is this fact which to a considerable extent explains the greater cheapness of rice grown in other countries with a similarly low level of technique and a much lower production per acre. Hence arises the paradox that Japan, who is continually telling the world that she is over-populated and cannot feed her people, periodically shuts out or imposes a duty on foreign rice, and has of recent years even 'dumped' rice abroad at one-third of the Japanese market price. Again, although Japan under pressure of the military has taken measures to increase the yield of Korean rice, its greater cheapness constitutes a perpetual problem to the Government and has led of recent years to proposals to restrict its import into Japan. In Korea only 3.8% of the total 'farming families' are landowners as against 14.5% in Japan, and the number of large estates is accordingly much greater than in Japan. In Korea 57.9% of the rice which comes on the market is rice made over as rent, as against only 37.9% in Japan.¹ Although it is a fact that the Korean peasant's standard of life is even lower than that of the Japanese, the main reason for the cheaper price of Korean rice is not this, but the existence of big estates and the considerable investment of Japanese capital.

The fundamental difference in costs of production lies in the fact that the native landowning class of small property owners has not got the political power to retain its position since the country is ruled by the Japanese. Nor can the native landowner get credits to save him in bad years since all the capital accumulation in the country is drained away to Japan. The small landowner or peasant proprietor cannot survive because, as a Japanese publication naively puts it: 'The Korean Government has been much less paternal in the matter of loans than the Japanese, and the Korean financial system has been much less developed. The Korean farmer has not been allowed to burden himself with debts and accordingly no debt charges of any import-

There is now a definite tendency in Japan for the yield of the land to decrease rather than to increase. In fact since the world crisis, or at least since 1933, there has been a degradation of agriculture: the lesser amount of fertiliser which the peasant has been able to use on account of his increasing poverty, combined with the neglect of irrigation and drainage works, has been responsible for a fall in the productivity of the land.

The past five years average per tan, in spite of the bumper crop of 1933 (which Japan shared with the rest of the world, but which was the biggest she had ever seen), is 3.16% below the pre-crisis average. The 1934 harvest shows a yield per tan 14.2% below; that of 1935 is 5.8% below.

Such a comparison alone shows the low productivity of Japanese agriculture, its overmanning and under-capitalisation. It also shows the extremely restricted nature of the home market, which retards the industrialisation of the country and in particular prevents the application of large scale modern capitalist methods of production to the industries supplying the needs of the Japanese population.

In spite of the exceedingly low productivity of agriculture, the Government continues to tax it far more heavily than industry. It is indeed a curious fact that those foreign investigators who have tried to discover whether Japanese exports of manufactured goods are subsidised, and have reluctantly come to the conclusion that there is no evidence for this accusation, have failed to see that the much heavier incidence of taxation on agriculture than on industry is equivalent to a subsidy for the latter. When Japan started off on her modern era in 1868 the sole source of revenue to finance her newly created industries, in fact the sole source of capital accumulation, was the land, and accordingly the latter was taxed to the maximum. As late as 1930, the Japanese Minister of Agriculture could say that 'agriculture still remains the foundation upon which all industries must be erected'. The following table shows the result of a survey made in 1934 by the Imperial Agricultural Society:

It will be noted in passing that the incidence of taxation among peasant proprietors presses most hardly on the smallest holders. The main interest of the table lies in the evidence it provides concerning the low taxes paid by merchants and industrialists. At the same time the latter receive an additional advantage from the fact that the heavily taxed peasantry are forced to send their daughters to work in the factories at wages very much lower than would have to be paid to permanent workers in industry, or to sweat themselves and their wives and children in domestic industry for minute returns.

Returning once more to the figures of value of the total agricultural output, let us consider for a moment what they mean in terms of gross income for the whole agricultural population.

Such figures meant even before the world crisis an average gross production of only 640 yen per family of 6 persons and about 235 yen per adult, since there were some 14,000,000 persons working on the land (not counting the children under 15), and another million landlords. In 1930 this figure was reduced to 163 yen and in 1931 to only 136. It then rose again slightly according to yen values in 1932 when the yen fell to nearly 60% below gold parity. In 1933 there was the best harvest ever produced in Japan and yet the figure per adult came to only 200 yen. In 1934 there was the typhoon which swept the Osaka-Kobe district, and drought and frost in other districts, and Japan had the poorest harvest seen for 22 years (i.e. since 1913) or, if one considers the yield per acre, the poorest harvest since 1905. The yield was 19% below the average for the last 5 years. In addition to this silk prices fell to the 1932 level (or even lower if we consider gold values) in spite of some decrease in production. Accordingly, 1934 proved to be as terrible or even more terrible than 1932, and Japanese agriculture plunged further into the swamp of bankruptcy and destitution in which it has been floundering for 15 years. This degradation of agriculture is a cumulative process, since once less fertilisers are applied through poverty the yield becomes less, and the peasant even poorer and so able to buy less and less fertiliser.

The ever increasing pressure on the land and the slackening in the pace of industrialisation, coupled with the decline in world agricultural prices have, since about 1920, rendered Japanese rice cultivation bankrupt, i.e. requiring a greater expenditure than could be regained from the sale of the product and therefore only possible if subsidised in some way.

That subsidy was made available up to the world economic crisis not by the Government but by silk cultivation, and the rapid expansion of silk exports to the U.S.A. Next to rice, silk cocoons are by far the most important product of Japanese agriculture. It was silk which from 1920 to 1930 kept Japanese agriculture going. The annual average production of cocoons rose from 22 million kamme in 1895-99 to go million in 1927, whilst exports more than trebled in quantity between 1909-1913 and 1927.

Not only was it cocoon breeding which enabled more than two million families to exist somehow in spite of the losses on their rice cultivation, but it was silk which, by providing the money for fertiliser for the rice fields, enabled Japan to go on producing rice, and even to increase slightly its total rice production so as to become 80% self-sufficient, although the costs of production were higher than the market price. This statement is not an exaggeration, but actual fact, even if only official data of the cost of rice production are considered. In other words, up to 1930 silk provided the subsidy necessary for the continuation of rice culture in Japan.

As early as 1920 an investigation made by the Department of Agriculture and Commerce showed that the tenant cultivating a farm of 3.7 acres had an annual deficit of 44 yen, and the peasant proprietor cultivating 5.14 acres a deficit of 181 yen. Of the 120 families in 40 villages then investigated only the landowner with 35 acres—which means in Japan a large landowner¹ —ended the year with a surplus of about 20 yen.

For the years immediately preceding the world crisis, there are cost of production figures of the Imperial Agricultural Society which clearly indicate the uneconomic nature of Japanese rice production. The figures show in the first place that the price obtained, as compared with the costs of production, was insufficient at the very lowest standard of living to maintain the peasant households, and in the second place that rice culture as a whole was being carried on at a loss if considered even from the point of view of a comparatively large farmer employing hired labour and some animal power.

In particular the figures show the extremely heavy cost of fertiliser and the heavy incidence of taxation.

Rice in 1929 was sold on an average for the year at 26-60 yen a koku, so that the owner of a comparatively large scale farm could just make out with a small surplus, or, if not with a surplus, at least with enough rice to feed his family if he calculated no return on his capital and was not in debt. But very few farmers were cultivating on a large enough scale to hire labour and very few were unburdened with debt.

As to the peasant proprietor cultivating less than one hectare, he could no more exist on the return from his rice cultivation than could the tenant paying half or more of the harvest to a landowner.

What is of particular interest in the above calculations is the estimate of the incidence of taxation and the fertiliser cost. Even in 1929, with its comparatively high rice prices, the farmer was paying taxes amounting to 16% of the market price, or 17% of the cost of production including labour but excluding interest on land at 3%.

As regards fertilisers, which came to nearly a quarter of the market price for the peasant proprietor or landowners, for the tenant farmer the cost was crushingly high since he had to buy enough to fertilise both the rice he sold and the rice he delivered up as rent. In his case fertiliser amounted to over 33% of his costs of production including labour, or to close on 50% of the selling price. In fact the amount of fertiliser that now has to be put into the soil and its high cost make it almost true to say that it constitutes the raw material of the rice industry, whilst the land is the machinery which transmutes it into rice. The only person who comes out fairly well in the following table is naturally the parasitic landed proprietor who, having no expenses, received 14 yen clear per koku of rice, after having paid his taxes. Here is clearly shown the way in which payment of rent in kind deprives the actual producers of any control over the market price which is determined by the sellers whose costs are half that of the producers.

Unsatisfactory as these figures are, since they relate to peasants using some animal power in cultivation and hence farming on a much larger scale than the vast majority, one can use them as a basis for determining the costs of production other than labour of the mass of poor and 'middle' cultivators. In their case all labour is done by the members of the family.²

If one eliminates the items labour and livestock from the above calculation the cost of production becomes 11-51 perkoku for the peasant proprietor and 14-62 for the tenant. With rice selling at 26-60 as in 1929 the proprietor would realise 15-09 yen net

and the tenant 11 -98 yen net per koku. Accordingly, those peasants cultivating i£ acres (5 tan) and producing on an average 950 koku a year would realise 143 yen a year, whilst tenants paying 1 -03 koku per tan as rent (see Table xxviii) would realise about 52 yen as the full return for their year's labour and that of their families—usually 3 grown persons. The somewhat better off cultivators of 2 45 acres—the 'middle' peasantry—would realise 246 yen a year if proprietors and 104 yen a year if tenants. Having considered their cases, we have considered the case of 70% of the total farming households.

The following extract from a Japanese newspaper conveys perhaps more graphically than the above bare calculations the narrow margin of subsistence of a peasant renting 2-45 acres.¹

'The statement of our farmer's daily expenditures, however, requires amplification: that is 46 sen is expended by a farmer who is considered fairly well off in his community to feed and clothe not only himself but his whole family for one hard working day.

'Of the 60 bales of rice a chobu of paddy field yields a year, 35 bales generally go to the landowner and another 10 disappear in the cost of fertiliser and implements. Supposing a bale brings our agriculturist 11 yen, what he gets for himself for his twelve months drudgery would be something like 16 yen, in other words 46 sen a day.'

This calculation puts the cost of fertilisers much lower than the previous estimates of costs of production given above, but even so this 168 yen meant in 1929 about 9d a day or £14 a year² for a family of 6 persons. Yet this small income was much too high for the peasantry as a whole, even in the comparatively prosperous year of 1929, since it relates to a tenant with 2| acres and takes no account of interest payments. The average income of the peasantry was then calculated at £7 a year.

All the above calculations are based on the average production per acre for the 5 years ending 1930 and on the assumption that the producer is free from debt. In actual fact, however, a bad year's harvest immediately brings both small proprietor and tenant into debt, and since they can rarely borrow at rates as low as 11% and usually pay as much as 20% or 30% they are forced yearly to pay a further heavy sum per koku as interest. As early as 1920 rural indebtedness was officially estimated at 2,120,000,000.

lJapan Times, 12.6.1929.

In 1929 the official figure was put at about 4 milliard yen. The effect of this debt from the national point of view can be most clearly appreciated by considering its incidence per acre of rice land. This works out at 664 yen per chobu (2-45 acres) which even at the average interest rate on such loans of 11 % means 73 yen per annum. The average yield per chobu being 18½ koku, this means an interest burden of about 4 yen per koku which has to be added to the costs of production.

However, all the above calculations and estimates, though necessary for an appreciation of the fundamental and longstanding causes for the present acute agrarian crisis in Japan, are long out of date. They are but a prelude to what has occurred since the world crisis. Impossible as it was for the mass of the peasantry to exist without a subsidiary income from 1920 to 1929, the ever rising tide of silk exports to the U.S.A. enabled the majority to eke out an existence. But since 1930 silk has no longer been able to pay a subsidy to rice, debts have mounted to catastrophic levels, prices of fertilisers have risen and rice prices fallen, actual famines have swept several districts both in 1932 and 1934 and ruin and starvation have been the fate of the majority. Rice, which sold at over 26 yen a koku in 1929, sold at 16 yen at the end of 1930 and in 1931. In 1932 and 1933 it rose to 20 yen, and in 1934 and 1935 following an extremely poor harvest it averaged 25 and 28.82 yen. But the yen had by then depreciated to about 60% of its gold value and since the price of chemical fertilisers depends in Japan on world prices it is precisely the farmers who feel most the fall in the yen exchange rate. By the end of 1935 the general index of wholesale prices stood at 155 against 100 on December 10, 1931, but fertilisers as a whole stood at 172 and ammonium sulphate at 197.8.

The fall in rice prices in the worst years of the crisis was, however, as nothing compared with the catastrophic fall in cocoon and silk prices as the great silk market of the U.S.A. began to contract.

In 1931-32 the value of Japanese silk exports fell to less than half the 1924-25 figure, although they were more than double in quantity. Perhaps these figures alone are sufficient to convey an idea not only of the pitch of despair, hunger and wretchedness to which the Japanese peasantry have been reduced, but also of the blow dealt to the very foundations of Japanese national economy. For an export of silk double that of a decade ago, a sum less than half was received. This is true not only of 1931-32, but also of 1934-35. Compared with the period when silk production in Japan first began to expand rapidly in the post-war boom, the decline in prices is almost astronomical. In the postwar boom the export value of raw silk reached the figure of 4,300 yen per bale; in 1931 it averaged 611 yen. Whereas less than a decade ago it accounted for 41% of Japan's total export, in 1934 it accounted for only 13%.

It is clear that since the world crisis silk has not only no longer been able to subsidise rice cultivation but is itself in need of a subsidy. One can indeed enquire: who will now subsidise the subsidisers?

Silk accordingly is today also being produced at a loss. The effect on the peasantry will be seen in the next chapter. The effect on Japanese national economy was at first such as almost to paralyse the whole process of production, for it is literally true that in Japan agriculture is the foundation on which industry has been built. In 1931 a situation had arisen which demanded that State subsidies should be paid to agriculture unless the whole process of production were to come to a standstill, with the ruin of the local banks with their tremendous frozen loans on real estate and silk and with the bankruptcy of the landowners and peasants. The wholesale bankruptcy of local banks would have involved the larger banks which finance and control them and would have brought on a money and credit crisis on such a scale as to paralyse the whole process of production.

Since the crisis the Government has turned this way and that to the appeals of almost every propertied class in the country to save it from ruin. Whilst the Government by cheap credits assisted the banks to liquidate their frozen real estate loans, gave relief to the reelers by State purchases of silk for storage and to the landowners by credits and rice purchases, it had to continue its subsidies to various industries. It was even asked in 1932 to remit the taxes on the brothel keepers in view of the hard times. The Government is in fact appealed to by every organised interest to save it at the expense of the rest of the population, regardless of the fact that a serpent cannot live by eating its own tail, much less a State continue to exist by taxing agriculturists to subsidise industrialists and industrialists to save landowners and banks.

The Government's answer to this dilemma was inflation and the military adventures in Manchuria. But whilst the decline in the exchange value of the yen very greatly assisted Japan's export industries, and whilst the war on China greatly assisted her heavy industry, neither the one nor the other could save agriculture. Even silk did not gain much by the decline of the yen, since the American buyers control the market. True that in 1933 there was a temporary increase in demand and rise in price arising from the effects of the first measures of the Roosevelt administration in the U.S.A., but by 1934 the position was as hopeless for both the Japanese peasantry and the silk reelers as in 1932, and it was only in 1935, when production had been substantially curtailed, that prices rose. As regards rice, although Government buying¹ for storage has since 1933 kept the price from falling below 23-30, which is the minimum price set by the revised Rice Control Law, the price of ammonium sulphate and

of manufactured goods which are bought by the peasantry, e.g. coarse cotton cloth of various kinds, had doubled by 1935.

According to the Ministry of Agriculture and Forestry, 'average' production costs are now 22.17 yen per koku of rice, so that the minimum price of 23.30 yen gives a profit of only 1.23 yen a koku. 1933 saw the largest rice harvest Japan has ever produced, viz. 70 million koku. This raised the average production per chobu (2.45 acres) to 21.8 koku in place of the old average of 18.5 koku. Yet even with this bumper crop the medium-sized farm of 1 chobu produced an income of only 27 yen a year for its family of six.

Moreover, the price did not rise to 23.30 yen until April 1934, which was long after most of the peasants had sold their crops. It is actually calculated that about half the cultivators appear in the rice market as consumers, having had to dispose of all their own produce in November immediately after the harvest in order to pay interest on debts. They appear as consumers if and when they receive a return from some subsidiary occupation— in particular from May to November, when the returns from cocoon breeding come in—or a remittance from their children in industry, and they are then penalised by the higher rice prices brought about by Government purchase some time after the harvest. This is what is pleasantly called 'rural relief in Japan although it is purely relief to landowners and rice merchants.

Japanese agriculture has now clearly reached an impasse in which the expenses of cultivation absorb all the price realised and not only leave no return for labour but also no surplus for payment of rent and interest. Farm indebtedness, officially put at 4½ milliard yen in 1929, was calculated at 6 milliard yen in 1932 and by now at the natural rate of increase must be at least 8 milliard.

The Ministry of Agriculture and Forestry has compiled data on the farm debt situation in 29 prefectures¹ and some of the in formation is already available. In one district there are 9,663 farm households of which 7,750 or 79% are in debt. The average debt is 813 yen with the debt of the peasant proprietor aver-

aging 1,158, that of the tenant farmer 403 and that of the small holder who also rents land 987.

Of the total of debt coming under the above survey 52-2% was not secured by mortgage. Interest rates are as follow for the various classes of loans, according to an investigation made by the Japan Hypothetic Bank:

Accordingly, 72.2% of the indebtedness was at interest of from 8.12%. Of the above debts 31.3% was owed to co-operatives (with their comparatively low rates); 22.8% to special banks such as the Hypothetic Bank of Japan and the prefectural banks; 12.3% to the so-called mutual financing associations; 12.3% to private persons, 10% to ordinary banks, 8% to shops and 3-3% to prefectural governments. The highest rates—the really usurious rates—were charged by professional moneylenders, shops and mutual aid societies. These latter are in fact actually run by the landowners, the few rich peasants and the traders, and they act as associations of usurers in spite of their benevolent sounding title.

The above estimate deals only with the nominal rates for loans by private persons, mutual aid societies, shops, etc. It is, however, well known that the actual rates for this type of loan are between 20% and 30%. In 1935 it was estimated that 57% of all loans to agriculturists had been advanced by private lenders at a real rate of between 20% and 30%.¹ If we take only 11% as the average rate of interest paid on the sum total of farm indebtedness (8 milliard) this means 880 million yen a year. As against this the gross agricultural production of die country (in-

cluding live stock breeding, etc.) has averaged 2,704 over the last five years. The net agricultural production was 73% of the gross value in the pre-crisis period, according to the calculations of the eminent Japanese economist, Dr. Nasu.¹ Today with the rise in the price of fertilisers it must be less than 73%. If 70%² of the gross value is taken this means only 1,893 million yen, as the net value of Japan's agricultural products of all kinds including cocoons, meat, eggs, and dairy products. Hence interest payments, on the most conservative estimate of interest rates, now amount to 47% of the net value of agricultural production of all kinds. It is probable that if exact figures were available for the average interest paid and for the cost of fertilisers and other expenses of cultivation it would be found that interest charges now eat up more than half the net produce of agriculture.

This 50% or thereabouts is the amount claimed by creditors from agriculture. There remain the landowners' claims. The average price per chobu of rice land was 3,860 yen in 1932 and about the same figure in 1933. Valued at this price Japan's 3 million hectares of paddy fields alone would come to 11,580 million yen, which at 3% means 350 million a year. The valuation of the total of dry arable land, which in 1932 sold at 2,340 yen per chobu, comes to 6,318 million yen. At 3% this means 190 million a year. The State in its turn levies 58 million yen a year in taxation and the local authorities about three or four times as much.³ Hence we have the following total annual claims on the produce of Japan's agriculture:

Creditors	880 million yen
Landowners (paddy fields)	350 million yen
Landowners (dry land)	190 million yen
Taxation (national)	58 million yen
Taxation (village and prefectural)	174 million yen
Total	1,652 million yen

Hence these claims in 1934 amounted at the lowest possible estimate to 89% of the net agricultural produce, and probably to more if the increased cost of fertilisers since Dr. Nasu's estimate was made is taken into account. Moreover, many estimates place the total of rural indebtedness even higher than 8 milliard yen and the average interest rate is obviously higher than 11%. Lastly, I have calculated local taxes very low in order to allow something for the value of the product of village domestic industry.

In any case, whether the claims of creditors, landlords and the State come to 89% or 100% of the total yearly produce does not much matter. In either case Japanese agriculture appears as bankrupt. There is nothing, or practically nothing, left for the 5½ million peasant families, and if they are to go on working they must have food if nothing else. Moreover, the above calculations are based on market prices, not on the prices which the peasants receive.

Nothing can save Japanese agriculture except the sweeping away of the landowners and usurers and monopoly capitalist interests who now claim all the produce of the land, or the miracle of a return to the post-war boom prices for silk in the U.S.A.—an absolute impossibility not only on account of the general decline in world prices, but also because of the competition of rayon which grows more and more severe each year.

Land values in Japan must be drastically cut and the tremendous burden of debt liquidated if a social and economic collapse is to be avoided. This can, however, never be done under a social system in which landowners, financiers and big capitalists jointly wield power. The landowners—whose interests are largely represented by the 'military'—hope to escape their doom by foreign conquest which would enable them to subsidise agriculture out of the profits of colonial exploitation. But the big capitalist interests are also deeply involved in real estate and in seri-

culture. Through the banks they hold mortgage claims which cannot be realised; as merchants they are vitally interested in Japanese silk exports, and as industrialists they gain enormous profits from their monopoly control of the fertiliser market. The banks since the crisis have done their utmost not to foreclose since there are no buyers of land which at the old valuation will not pay even interest and taxes. They together with the landowners have demanded State action to raise the price of rice (i.e. to keep up land values), to 'can' unsold silk stocks, to indemnify the banks for their frozen real estate loans.

In 1932 bankers estimated that the foreclosure value of farm lands would fall 25% below the principal of the loans advanced. It is no wonder that the cry went up for land nationalisation, which meant that the State should buy out the landowners at the inflated current land values and save them from bankruptcy and the bankers from incalculable losses. In 1932 the well known publicist Dr. Washio gave the following graphic description of Japan's agrarian crisis, and what he wrote then is equally true today.

'Rural distress is very acute and in the opinion of most sincere observers is past hope of salvation within the existing economic system. Some who look sincerely for rural salvation suggest land nationalisation to be effected by the issue of Government bonds at a special low rate of interest, so low that peasants can bear it and feel comparative relief from the present burden of rent. Land nationalisation at the price landowners ask would be manifestly ruinous to the State, but owing to the prevailing rural distress and rebellious attitude of tenants the position of landowners has become hopeless.

'If land can be nationalised at a comparatively cheap value and landowners can be forced to accept Government bonds at a special low rate of interest our agricultural industry can be considerably relieved of its financial burden. But at present it is obvious that land nationalisation cannot be realised by any method short of a revolutionary change. Not only the landowners but the creditors of 7,000,000,000 rural loans, including many banks which advanced money at a high valuation of lands, will have to lose. But the relief sought at present is as much a relief of these interests as a relief of the starving peasants. It is sought at the expense of the State and is like a hungry octopus feeding on its own legs.' Trans-Pacific, 1 Sep. J932.

An examination of Japanese land values will show clearly how inflated they have remained since the war and post-war boom of 1917 to 1919 sent them soaring, in spite of" the subsequent steady fall in rice and silk prices and even in spite of the slight fall in rents.

In 1929 the value of a chobu of rice field had only sunk 26% below the peak figure of 1919 when it stood 161% above 1916. By 1932 it had fallen 45% below 1919 but was still 50% above 1915, although the price of rice dipped in 1931 and 1932 to almost its pre-war level of 14 yen a koku as against nearly 27 yen in 1929.¹

Rents had in the meantime fallen some 12-13% in 1929 and were at almost the same level in 1932. The case of dry land is strikingly different as regards rent which is paid in cash, not in kind. Whereas its value has fallen yearly in almost exactly the same degree as rice land, rents which had risen, not fallen, up to 1924, have fallen very sharply since the crisis, reflecting first the high silk prices ruling for some years after the war and then the much greater fall in silk prices than in rice prices since 1929. It is clear that while rice lands yielded the landlords a smaller and smaller income each year even before the world economic crisis, dry land was, prior to 1929, yielding exactly the same return on capital valuation as in 1921, viz. 5-4%. In 1932, however, even with land values calculated at that year's value, which was 44% below that for 1921, the rent paid amounted to only 47%. The same holds good of 1933 and 1934. (See Table XXVIII for rents.)

Take the case of a landowner who bought his land in 1921 for 5,910 yen. At that date the tenant paid 11.17 koku Per chobu of land and rice was selling at 28 yen. The landowner's gross income per chobu (i.e. before paying taxes) was accordingly 31276 yen. In 1931 he was receiving 10-20 koku and the price of rice was 16-52 so his income per chobu was 168-50 yen. In 1932 it was 202 yen per chobu. His income in 1931 was only 54% of the 1921 figure. A landlord who had borrowed on the 1919 value of his land or

bought it partly with borrowed money, as a very large proportion of landowners had done, was, by 1931, bankrupt. For if his mortgage amounted to only 50% of the value of his land in 1919, at 5% from the Hypothetic Bank he would in 1931 have been paying 176-50 yen out of the gross total income of 169 yen. Taxation at the rate of 73 40 yen per chobu of rice land brings his liabilities to 250 yen against an income of just under 169. Accordingly the landowner's return from his land would be insufficient to meet interest and taxation—there would be a deficit of about 81 yen per chobu in 1931, and of 48 in 1932. This means that even large-scale landowners—the only ones who have ever been able to borrow at so low a rate of interest as 5%—were bankrupt. Smaller landowners have to pay at least 8% and are bankrupt with the price of rice even at the comparatively high 1935 and 1936 price of 28 and 29 yen per koku.

The position of the owner of dry land since 1930 has been even worse. In 1924 a chobu of dry land was valued at 3,410 yen and the cultivator paid 199-60 yen a year (cash). In 1929 the valuation was 3,190 and the rent 172.30 yen. In 1932 and 1933 the valuation was 2,340 yen and the income 112-10 and 109 yen respectively. If the owner had mortgage payments to meet at 5% on 50% of the 1924 value this would amount to 80 yen, leaving 30 yen which would be insufficient to pay taxes.

If he had borrowed on 50% of the land values of 1919, 104.50 yen would be due from him as interest as against a rent of about 112 yen, and taxation still unpaid.

These figures illustrate the statement so frequently made in the Japanese Press that lenders try to avoid foreclosure since buyers cannot be found for land which will not even pay interest and taxes. The fact is that although land values have come down 45% since 1919 and 26% since 1929, they are still tremendously inflated and both landowners and creditors refuse to write them down or sell out at the real present value of the land. They naturally refuse to do so as long as the State can be made to assist them by artificially raising rice and silk prices, and to compensate the creditors by agrarian relief measures such as those undertaken in 1932 and subsequently. Both landowners and their creditors go on expecting that the State will assist them and perhaps eventually buy them out at the current inflated prices and so release their funds, now tied up in land, for investment elsewhere in commerce and industry at a much higher yield. Unless the Government will buy them out even the high returns on capital invested in industry will not compensate for the loss of some 50% of the paper value of their lands, especially in view of the greater security from rice land investment than from industrial investment even today. Moreover, if there is not much hope of nationalisation of the land at current values —which would bankrupt the State—there is always the prospect and hope of a large-scale war which would certainly send rice prices soaring and enable the landowners to levy a tremendous toll on the nation. Landowners and bankers have not forgotten the golden harvest they reaped during the war and post-war boom.

Although there is an industrial boom now, in so far as export industries and armaments are concerned, it has not pushed up rice prices. When rice prices began to rise in 1934, and in 1935 went beyond the 1929 level, it was owing to the exceedingly poor harvests of 1934 and 1935 which had depleted the past accumulated stocks. The relief, through higher prices, to the landowners whose crops have not failed, is outweighed by the ruin of those in the famine-stricken districts. Indeed the solvency of the whole banking system of the country which was in jeopardy in 1931 and 1932 is still threatened today.

The agrarian crisis has not been solved but only shelved by inflation, Government rice buying and silk buying and other such forms of relief. Not only this but the measures which have given it 'relief are such as to ensure an even greater crisis in the future, since the enormously increased Government expenditure has to be paid for eventually. Japan's export expansion has in no way helped the farmers or even the landowners—in fact, to a large extent it has been at the peasants' expense. The internal market has shrunk to even smaller proportions than in the past, for where are even the wealthier peasants to get cash to buy anything when the landowners themselves are bankrupt or nearly so. Silk, the one important article for export grown in Japan, has not regained its 1929 price since the inflation which began in 1932.

The serious, in fact the fatal consequences of Japan's agrarian crisis to her whole national economy, are only to be appreciated by considering once again how true it is that agriculture is the 'foundation upon which Japanese industry is built'. However much greater the seeming profits of industry, however much lower the ostensible value of Japan's total agricultural production, the latter still constitutes the basis of her economic structure. For, low as it may be, it is all obtained from her own soil, whereas Japan's manufacturing industry has to deduct large sums from the gross value of its product to pay the cost of imported raw materials. For instance, although silk exports since the world crisis have become smaller than cotton goods exports, they nevertheless represent a greater net value for Japanese national economy than the latter, since in order to produce the cotton manufactures 714 million yen's worth of cotton has to be imported.

Dr. Shirasu Nasu has calculated that 44% of the total productive labour and 47% of the total capital of Japan are employed in agriculture. This calculation as to capital is however a fictitious one since most of it is not capital invested in agriculture but landowners' paper claims, i.e. the high land values which both account for and are caused by the enormous land rents. His calculation of total agricultural production is more valuable. Allowing for the deduction of the cost of fertiliser, green manure, seeds, livestock, fodder and depreciation of buildings and implements he arrives at a total figure for a decade ago of 3,246 million yen as the net wealth produced by agriculture—the real material income which can be distributed into wages, interest, rent and taxes. This figure, which equals 73% of the gross production, he then compares with the total value of the production of manufacturing industry. The figure was then 7,300 million yen but to produce this the industries had to spend nearly 5,000 million yen for raw materials, 300 million for depreciation and 120 million for fuel. The balance was only 1,900 million yen or 27% of the gross value.¹

1The Mitsubishi Economic Research Bureau (op. cit. p. 15a) deducts 60% from the gross value of the output of manufacturing industry for raw materials and 6 to 7% for depreciation. This calculation brings the net production value of manufacturing industry below that for agriculture.

According to Dr. Nasu we get the following table :

	Gross wealth produced {million yen)	Net wealth produced {million yen)	Labour employed {million days)	Net wealth production per working day
Agriculture	4,439	3,246	2,700	1.20
Manufacturing	7,300	1,895	1,670	1.13

	Capital invested (million yen)	Net wealth productivity of capital (per cent.)
Agriculture	34,700	9.4
Manufacturing	10,000	18.9

The figures here for millions of days worked are calculated on the assumption that the peasants work less than 200 days a year on the land, and it is this method of calculation which makes the net wealth production per working day so high.

Such calculations as these leave out of account the fact that if labour is done by hand instead of by machinery, it is true that fuel has not got to be paid for but the workers must be fed, which reduces the real wealth produced and available. They similarly disregard the 165 days a year during which the agricultural population is not working on the land but has to live. They are, however, of interest in showing the low productivity of Japanese industry as well as of her agriculture. The effect of the large numbers employed in handicraft industry in bringing down the total value of industrial production is here clearly revealed.

The various interests which have made their profit on the peasant's scanty produce are at odds among themselves now that the total product is insufficient to meet all their claims, in spite of the terribly low standard of life to which the peasantry is reduced. The landowners, and the richer peasants who also let land, cry out against the monopoly capital interests which mulct the cultivators through high fertiliser prices, against the State which taxes them so heavily in order to subsidise heavy industry, and against the speculators in rice and silk who cause such a gap between the price at which the producer sells and that at which the consumer buys.

In 1935 the price of fertilisers gave a manufacturing profit of 30-40 yen a ton, i.e. of more than a third of the selling price, and the four big companies which control its production, in addition to increasing their capitalisation made a profit of 16-41% in the first half of 1935 and of 18-9% in the second half. It is clear that of all the interests sucking dry the peasant, monopoly capital, represented by the fertiliser manufacturers, gets the lion's share.

The elimination of the host of middlemen would assist the small proprietors and the tenants as well as the richer farmers and landowners (who would be able to raise rents) but many landowners and well-off peasants are themselves traders. Something could be done to assist the peasantry by further encouragement and aid to co-operative buying and selling organisations— Sangyo Kumiai—although it is true that it is the richer peasants and small landowners who control them. Indeed something has been done along these lines, at least insofar as purchasing fertilisers, etc., is concerned. But such progress as has been made was vociferously opposed by the multitude of small merchants who gain their living in trading at the expense of the peasants and landowners. Any measures such as these, which can slightly improve the economic position of the cultivator without touching the important vested interests of either landowner or monopoly capital, can only be at the expense of the large class of petty traders, who, since their very existence is threatened, are naturally violently opposed to such measures. The State dare not drive the millions supported by petty trade and speculation to ruin, for there is no other occupation open to them; they cannot go back into agriculture or forward into industry. Hence whilst with one hand it gives some encouragement to the Sangyo Kumiai by tax remissions and other privileges, the clamour of the All-Japan Commercial Rights Protection Association (the organisation of the retailers and of the wholesalers who have the retailers in their pockets) causes it not only to drop its schemes for rice price control as it did in 1935, but to plan the establishment of a central deposit for loans to small merchants and industrialists. This is, however, only one of the manifold contradictions in State policy as the Government is pulled this way and that by the various organised interests.

Japanese Imperialism is indeed confronted now with the insoluble dilemma that you cannot at one and the same time subsidise industry out of agriculture and agriculture out of industry, nor assist landowners and peasant proprietors by encouraging co-operatives and eliminating middlemen whilst at the same time assisting middlemen to survive by giving them credits. It is confronted with the problem that its agriculture cannot support a million parasitic landowners now that the contraction of the American silk market and the competition of rayon have put an end to the subsidisation of rice culture by cocoon breeding. But the landowners are the social root and support of the 'military' and the military are too powerful and too closely associated with finance capital in their upper ranks to be expropriated. Since 1932 Japan has temporarily shelved its fundamental agrarian problem by war and export and inflation. But the effect of these are like drugs which can only stimulate and not cure, and which leave the patient weaker than before once their effects have worn off.

An 1932 actual famines swept over many districts¹ of Japan and everywhere there was acute suffering. There were reports in the press of villages in the Northern prefectures where there were no unmarried girls left since they had all been sold to the licensed quarters in the big towns. One prefecture alone (Aomori) reported 5,000 children to be starving. Demonstrations of peasants were harshly suppressed by the police and even the bearers of petitions to the Diet were arrested. Reports of terrible suffering, unheard-of privation, and growing revolt flooded the newspapers.

Even the restrained official reports made by the Provincial Governors at a Special Conference held in the middle of July 1932, spoke of the sufferings of the agricultural population being beyond description. Many of the local banks had closed down, and the small traders and industrialists were said to be almost as badly off as the farmers. Many towns and villages were unable to collect enough local taxes to pay the school teachers. The average indebtedness per household was stated to be between 500 and 1,000 yen. The fact which most disturbed the Prefectural Governors was what they referred to as 'the disturbed minds of the people' as a result of their terrible distress. Although they sounded the note of alarm and dismay, they did not in the least reveal the appalling misery of the peasants. For descriptions of this, however, one had only to turn to the newspapers. One read in the Press of sons ordered to join the army without the money to buy a postage stamp to inform their parents. Here is one such example from a newspaper report:

'Eisoku Shibata had a son, but he was ordered to Manchuria while serving in the Aomori Regt. on December 14. The son wrote to his

father telling him of the order but he posted the letter without a postage stamp on the envelope. The father could not take delivery of the letter from the son because he could not pay the postage charge of 6 sen and could not know that his son had been sent until the village office told him of it.'

The following are typical newspaper reports:

'With starvation staring them in the face the impoverished communities of Nagano, Iwate and Niigata are selling their young girls into prostitution, eating "warabe" (bracken) where such a "delicacy" is still obtainable, cooking bean-cake ordinarily used as fertiliser with various kinds of grass as their regular food.... In Nagano prefecture those who can afford to eat barley are very well off. Every tree in the hills is bare, its fruit, however bad it may taste, having been picked by hungry children. ... In one village the investigator found that last year the total income of a certain peasant was 130 yen whilst his losses were 366 yen. In order to make up for such losses peasants and poor farmers are selling off their children. The most unfortunate are girls who are being taken away on payment of 3 to 1 o yen on the promise that they will soon be brought home, and sold to unlicensed brothels. The same conditions prevail in Niigata prefecture. Young women of marriageable age are

scarce as most of them have been sold off and there is a growing tendency to sell even primary school children. The prices for children are about 100 yen for third grade pupils and about 400 for those who have finished school' {Japan Times, 7.6.1932).

This is a description not of 'backward' China after a flood or drought or civil war, but of Imperialist Japan claiming naval equality with the richest powers in the world and the right to control China and introduce her to all the benefits of Japanese civilisation and order.

True the harvest of 1931 was a poor one but it was not natural calamities which had reduced the Japanese village to starvation —good or bad harvests are equally disastrous for the peasant:

'Last year the farmers in the North-Eastern districts of Japan suffered from a bumper crop with an accompanying fall in the price of rice. Even then they had no rice to feed themselves when they had paid for fertilisers, taxes and rates. They are today eating roots. They have sent out their daughters to bigger towns, and their young sons to Manchuria for the protection of the vested interests there. Part of the money which they got in exchange for the liberty of their daughters has gone toward payment of rent and taxes. . . . Without money or food they are today eating roots, dried rhubarb, wild radishes, husks of rice, stalks of water lilies, etc.

'In Aomori prefecture alone it is reported there are 5,000 school children who have nothing to eat for lunch and who go without meals to school.'

It was indeed the starving of the children and the closing down of schools owing to the non-payment of teachers which appeared more likely to rouse the authorities than anything else, since the cannon fodder of the future could not be allowed to die off, or become physically useless in childhood, or, worse still, grow up imbued with 'dangerous thoughts' for want of proper instruction in loyalty, filial piety and patriotism.

The Nichi Nichi¹ wrote:

'The physical condition of children attending school will determine the future of our country. The question of improving the health of children has a vital bearing upon the question of defence....

'The militarists ought to be paying attention to the question of improving the health of children....

'Many people think fit to contribute toward the improvement of military equipment. But few give money toward improving the health of children.'

The article goes on to show that although the number of births per year is about 2,100,000, 460,000 children between the ages of 1 and 14 die each year, and this must be in large part due to undernourishment. The Nichi Mchi urged the Government to use its enormous rice stocks (which it could not dispose of) to feed the hungry school children and even allowed itself a burst of indignation bordering on 'dangerous thinking'. It wrote:

'Something must be wrong with a community where many are on the verge of starvation whilst large quantities of rice are going to waste because there are no buyers.'

Nevertheless, although a tiny sum was allowed the Ministry of Education for the feeding of starving children, the Government, rather than injure the rice merchants and landlords who hold the country's rice stocks by selling its own rice stocks to the starving, dumped some of them abroad at a selling price about £ of the then current price in Japan. This was done in spite of the flood of petitions and the riots which broke out when the Government refused to relieve the starving by disposal of its great reserves of rice.

Disease followed close on the heels of starvation, and this was particularly terrible in Japan since there is no public health service and many villages have no doctor. In fact the poverty of the Japanese countryside, as compared with the towns which drain away the profits of agriculture, is clearly shown by the fact that although there is a surplus of qualified medical practioners in the towns they do not set up practices in the villages for the simple reason that hardly any of the peasants can pay even the smallest sum for their services. The Osaka Mainichi recently reported that there are 1,500 villages without physicians.¹ This newspaper in spite ofits patriotism is forced to admit that this fact 'casts a gloomy shadow on the culture of our nation'. Yet 4,000 physicians graduate from the medical schools every year and there are roughly 7 doctors per 10,000 inhabitants in Japan as a whole.²

The peasants were not only at a stroke deprived of the profits from silk culture and confronted with a 40% decline in rice prices but were also deprived altogether in many cases of their children's earnings in industry or received half or less than before. The big cotton mills, taking advantage of the abundant labour supply made available by the starvation of the peasantry, cut wages again and again in 1931 and 1932 and so reduced their costs that they could begin on the tremendous expansion of their exports which was soon to rouse a world-wide protest. Many of the silk filatures closed down altogether and sent the girls home without paying the wages due to them, whilst others kept the girls on without paying them any wages for months. On May 5 1932, the Japan Times under the heading : 'Silk Reelers' Wages Reported in Arrears by Millions of Yen,' gave the following details:

'The financial difficulties of the silk reeling industry have continued to get worse and this year the authorities concerned estimate that about 80% of the silk reeling factories throughout the country are now in arrears in the payment of wages, affecting 400,000 operatives to the amount of yen 5,000,000 and 10,000,000.'

1932 was the year of lowest ebb, or so it seemed at the time. In 1933 there was a lull or breathing space, thanks to a temporary revival in the demand for silk in the U.S.A. and the decline in the exchange value of the yen; but also to such a bumper rice harvest as had never before been seen and following on which prices did not fall as usual on account of large Government purchases under a new system of rice control.

However, in 1934 there was drought and flood and frost and the disaster of the Osaka typhoon, so that the crop was again poor. Silk prices were again excessively low and the same tales of distress and starvation as in 1932 appeared in the Press, as for instance the following:

'In the N.E. districts of Japan drought and flood, combined with serious agricultural depression, have brought about a condition of suffering and poverty among millions of people which in the aggregate is far worse than that caused by the Osaka Typhoon. ... In Miyagi prefecture 1/10 of the population, that is 150,000 persons, are in a state of "acute distress". And this implies at least twice as many whose distress although not quite "acute" is very serious.

'Some idea of what is meant by "acute distress" can be gained by comparing it with what is not so regarded. According to these same authorities the poor people are able to eke out an existence, one cannot say live, on 8 or 10 sen a day (about 1 ½ d). That is to say if a family consisting of father and mother and four children is to exist, it can do so on such a small sum as 15 yen a month (1 7/6 now, £ 1.108 at par). Any such families therefore which can scrape together the sum of 15 yen a month will not be regarded as suffering from acute distress. And there are, in this one prefecture alone, 150,000 persons who cannot scrape together this almost infinitesimaily small sum. For although the Japanese people pride themselves on being able to maintain a reasonable standard of living at a very low cost, few there are who will venture to deny that this cost, even for the poorer sections of the community, ought to be double, if not treble, the 15 yen a month which has been mentioned as necessary for the subsistence of a family of 6.'¹

In Tohoku alone the number of persons requiring immediate assistance was put at 2,200,000 according to official reports.

There were the same reports as in 1932 from many prefectures of the people feeding on fern roots, acorn flour, and wild chestnuts. The Tokyo Nichi Nichi wrote:²

'Conditions in the Tohoku district are horrible. The number of

peasants who are dying of starvation reaches 70,000. Mothers are exhausted and children perishing. School children faint daily at school from emaciation.'

In the Hokkaido around December the number of underfed children was reported as 30,000, at Iwate exhausted school children and infants numbered 36,000, at Aomori 10,000. Even the Minister of Education admitted that there were J million school children starving.

The leader of the moderate Trade Union, Zenno Sohombu, reported as follows:

'School children are given lunch at the cost of 4 sen but the most horrible thing is to watch small children of pre-school age who, as soon as the school doors open, rush in and cry out for food. Some of them are too weak to beg and only gaze with their sad eyes. The skin on their faces hangs down flabbily and the joints of their hands and feet are swollen with the flesh dried up. They look like weak little old men.'

From other accounts it is clear that such distress as the above is largely caused not by unpreventable natural calamities but by the inability of the peasants to buy sufficient fertilisers¹ and by the fact that the produce of their fields has been confiscated as rent or in payment of debt or taxation arrears.

It is now recognised even by the Department of Agriculture and Forestry that the floods which of recent years have destroyed the crops in many districts could have been prevented by proper attention.

In particular there is a crying need for expenditure on irrigation and flood prevention works which are beyond the means of the peasantry. The drought of 1934 was unprecedentedly severe, but lack of sufficient water to irrigate the rice fields during the hot summer months is a common occurrence in many parts of the country and becomes disastrous in years of small rainfall.

Peasants from different villages frequently fight each other for water, coming out in hundreds armed with hoes, shovels, bam-

boo pikes and stones. On one such occasion in 1934 as many as 3,000 peasants fought each other and it took 200 police to stop the battle.¹

The illegal paper of the Japanese Communists published the following appeal, which is of interest as showing the crying need for capital investments in Japanese agriculture, the parasitic nature of Japanese landlordism which merely draws rent and does nothing to improve cultivation, and the falseness of the usual assumption that Japanese agriculture is a model to the rest of the world and that nothing can be done at home to solve Japan's 'Population Problem'. It also shows how fruitful is the soil for Communist propaganda when such crying injustices as the peasants suffer from are left unheeded by the Government.

'There is no sense, brothers, in fighting each other about water; we must make it clear who is the real enemy. Our water problem is not due to any special drought this year. We have always suffered from a water shortage. The water problem would be quite easy to solve if we had the money to build a dam, to drain the underground waters, and to build large basins and reservoirs. We know exactly what needs to be done but we have no money to do it, because we are exploited by the Emperor, the landlords and the capitalists. Let all these people hand over the money which provides them with sweet food and rich clothing and let it be used to build dams and canals! Brothers! Cease from foolish fratricidal strife over a drop of water; turn your blows against landlords, officials and capitalists (for instance the local electric companies) and demand that they all bear their share of the expenses for the improvement of the irrigation system.'²

The programme of the Tenant Farmers' Union of the Left— the Zenkoku Kaigi—follows similar lines to the above appeal of the Japanese Communist Party.

The power stations not only demonstrate that capital can be provided to supply power to industry, but not for the building of necessary dams and canals for irrigation of the rice fields, but they sometimes diminish the water supply for many villages.

'Some 200 farmers of Kanamura, Ishigawa prefecture, Thursday morning marched on the hydro-electric plant of the Taishojigawa Power Co. near the village and threatened to close it by force if its

operations were not curtailed. They blamed the plant for a fall in the level of the Taishoji River depriving them of irrigation water.... On Wednesday night die level of the river had dropped to an extent that made it impossible to get any water for irrigation the next day. The farmers mobilised for action under the leadership of the village headman.'¹

Again at the villages of Shirota, in Saitama prefecture in May 1934 a crowd of peasants attacked the Irrigation Department of the Ministry of Home Affairs.² In another village in Chiba prefecture, 400 peasants armed with hoes and shovels clashed with the police whilst demonstrating against the failure of the authorities to do anything concerning necessary irrigation works.³ In the village of Kichioka in Saitama 200 men broke into the local office of the Irrigation Department,⁴ and in the city of Kumamoto 600 peasants forced their way into the Governor's office early in August and were only dispersed by the police after blood had been shed.⁵ On September 6th, they repeated the performance, wounding four policemen. The leaders were of course arrested. The most serious incident occurred in the prefecture of Iwate where the Tsuchibata mines had poisoned the waters of the river and where 2,000 peasants, together with their women and children, surrounded the head office of the Mining Company demanding that it cease operations. A similar poisoning of the water supply by the Ashio mines led to a mass protest from the peasantry of 3 districts and became a life or death question for 100,000 peasants. Since 8,000 cho of rice fields were affected the Department of Industry and Commerce eventually intervened to force the Mining Company to stop the flow of contaminated water into the river.

These are but a few of a large number of such incidents. Sometimes it is lack of water and sometimes, on the contrary, the flooding of their fields, which brings the peasants out in violent protest against the authorities whom they consider responsible for the failure to undertake the most urgent public works or even to keep existing dams in repair, or for the cutting off of water supplies by the operations of industrial enterprises.

It is sufficiently clear that it is not natural calamities and 'over-population' which are the main cause of the terrible suffering and starvation of the past few years in the Japanese countryside but that their origin is social and political.

In districts where there was no crop failure in 1934 the population suffered much the same misery through the fall in cocoon prices. The temporary revival in silk prices in 1933 was quickly followed by a renewed fall in 1934, and since the value of the yen was even lower than in 1932 there were never yet in Japan such low cocoon prices as in 1934.

The price of a kwan of cocoons in 1934 was only 2-50 yen as against 7-58 in 1929. In gold the fall is of course sharper still and, since the prices of the various fertilisers have risen between 70% and 100% since inflation began, it is really in gold prices that the peasants' production should be considered.

The cost of production of a kwan of cocoons, according to the figures of the Federation of Cocoon Producers Associations for 1934, was 3-56 yen, so the price was only two-thirds of the cost of production. Taking the whole production of the country the decrease in the value of the year's total cocoon production exceeded 400 million yen, which means a fall of over 60% on the 1933 figure. The number of sericultural households had by 1935 fallen to 1 -8 millions from over 2 millions before the crisis.

In the central sericultural districts 70 to 80% of the peasants were found at the end of 1934 to have no rice at all left to eat. One investigation of 2,400 families near Toyohasi in the prefecture of Shizuoka showed that 800 were actually starving.

Even in the most fertile districts, for instance in Hokuriku, which is the very granary of Japan, 30% of the population were reported starving.

So desperately poor are the agricultural communities that when an epidemic of diphtheria broke out in Aomori there was no money to buy a bottle of serum at 2 yen (2/6) for innocula-tion and the children died off like flies for lack of medical attention.

A police investigation in Aomori prefecture in June 1934¹ showed 16,394 families without medicine and unable to consult a physician when ill and another 23,184 unable to obtain medical

attention without running into debt. 654 persons had died without any medical attention.

Naturally the sale of girls to the 'gay quarters' has enormously increased again. The Tokyo Asahi reported, on 31.10.34, that upon the deduction of travelling expenses the parents get about 150 yen. This means £8.15s. at the current rate of exchange for a girl slave—for such girls never work themselves free.

According to the Chuo Koron,¹ a well-known Japanese economic and political journal, the investigation of an official of the Department of Agriculture and Forestry showed 614 girls leaving a single village in Nagano prefecture—the main sericultural district—of whom 279 went to work as servants and 335 as prostitutes. In one village in the prefecture of Akita, composed of 350 households, 50 girls became prostitutes in 1934. In Iwate prefecture girls were sold for as little as 50 yen.

Export trade is booming in the towns so the brothels are doing a roaring trade, and need plenty of fresh girls from the starving villages. Like the factories, the licensed quarters are reaping enormous profits by reason of their cheap labour supply.

In 1935, although rice and silk prices rose very considerably, there was again famine in some districts, for the rise in prices was itself a symptom of extremely poor harvests, and of a 20% decrease in the production of cocoons.

Although rice prices began to rise sharply in the spring and reached nearly 34 yen by September, this could not benefit the majority of the cultivators, who had long before sold or given up their rice and by the time prices rose were in the market as consumers. If they had no subsidiary income they starved. The peasant proprietors in most places, having much less to sell, were no more solvent than before. For the majority of the tenants the position was more hopeless than ever since the share taken by the landowner amounted to 6o%~7o% of the crop instead of 50% or 55% as in years of good harvest. But the landowners were making profits for the first time since 1929 and accordingly, although the peasantry in 1935 were everywhere suffering the same misery as before, although children continued to come to school half-starved, although school teachers went unpaid and schools were closed down for want of funds, little or nothing was

heard of petitions to the Diet or speeches in the Diet demanding agrarian relief. For in Japan 'agrarian relief means relief to landlords and bankers—so long as their position is improved the peasants may starve in silence. As Dr. Washio wrote in the Japan Advertiser in October 1935:

'Blown to the winds are the complaints which the landlords were habitually making before through the political parties. It is odd that the demand for rural relief was heard louder when crops were better than average and has been comparatively low in the past year when 40% of the farming families had to live in worse want and debt than before. Lurid stories of their misery failed to be reported in spite of the poor crops of last year and the equally discouraging weather this year. There are plenty of such stories if we look for them, but they have no news value so far.'

Nevertheless in some districts, where flood or drought had been particularly severe, the condition of the peasantry was so terrible that the authorities were forced to investigate. This was notably the case in Tohoku—the Northern part of the main island of Japan which comprises 6 prefectures. The Ministry of Home Affairs in a report summarised in the Japanese Press in October 1935, said there were 381 villages and 549 schools in these prefectures unable to pay the teachers' salaries, which meant that there were 5,766 teachers unpaid.

A pamphlet issued by the Imperial Agricultural Association in the summer of 1935 deals with financial distress, agrarian disputes and increasing social unrest, and speaks of 'conditions which must defy the imagination of civilised and humane people tfiroughout the world'. It also mentions the many serious epidemics and malignant diseases due to starvation and undernourishment and left to spread because the peasants are too poor to obtain medical attention or even to buy medicines.

As late as November 1935, there were Press reports that the approach of the snowy season found a third of the population of Aomori starving. This meant 350,000 people. The Prefectura] Government was reported to be gathering roots as food for the destitute—but rice stocks still remain in the central Government's storehouses. The distress has indeed been so terrible in the North-East for the last five years that even the Japanese Government, which can spare nothing from armaments to help the peasantry, felt obliged to promise 8-8 million yen for relief there and to pay for essential public works to prevent the almost yearly 'natural calamities' in that part of the country. However, the dissolution of the Diet in January 1936, at the very beginning of the session, meant that even this small item in the Budget could not be allocated.

One could continue the tale of distress, destitution and starvation indefinitely but enough has been said to convey an idea of the terrible sufferings of the peasantry.

Ever since 1929 arrears of taxation have been piling up all over the country. Some prefectures reported non-payment of taxes mounting as high as 3½ million yen at the end of 1934. The prefecture of Yamanashi shows the following progressive increase in arrears: 1931—168,000 yen; 1932—292,000 yen; 1933—568,000 making a total of 1,028,000 yen for the three years. If half a million was the figure for 1933 when there was a bumper crop, 1 million is likely to have been the figure for 1934. In that year the authorities started a campaign for compulsory collection of taxes through confiscation of property. This usually means confiscation of crops since the peasants have practically no possessions.

The small landowners for their part, crushed between the impossibility of extracting full rents from their tenants in times of famine, or near-starvation, and the impossibility of paying interest on their debts to the banks, and unable to sell their land at the current inflated values, press harder and harder on the tenants in the attempt to save themselves from ruin. They refuse to allow rent reductions and sometimes evict old tenants in order to re-let at higher rentals. Whereas there was a tendency for rice rents to decrease from 1922 to 1932 they are now again on the increase. In 1934 69% of the tenant disputes concerned eviction of the tenants as against only 29% in 1929.

For the tenant farmer has no legal right to the soil. The landowner can evict him at any time if there is a chance of obtaining a higher rent from a new tenant, or if the old tenant cannot pay up in full. For 15 years the tenants have been striving through their Unions to establish their legal right to the soil which their forefathers have tilled for centuries, but they have not succeeded. They cannot even claim compensation for the improvements they have made: the irrigation, the enrichment of the soil through fertilisers, or even the bringing of new soil to the fields carried slowly and laboriously on their own backs. They have less security of tenure than in feudal times but no greater opportunities of advancement. The tenant is in reality an agricultural labourer, but a labourer under the disadvantage of having no fixed wage. So much is this the case that the Tenant Unions used, at one time, to make some efforts to demand a minimum daily wage for tenants.

The landlord has stood in the position of employer, and the common interest of all tenants in forcing him to reduce rents, or make other concessions, led to the rapid spread of Tenants’ Unions in the decade following the world war and to a steadily mounting yearly number of tenant disputes, from 1921.

The struggle of the tenants against the landowners, as can be seen from the figures, has doubled in intensity during these last years of Japan’s trade expansion and war of aggression in China, signifying not only the increasing misery of the peasantry, but also the growing spirit of revolt amongst them, in spite of all the propaganda about Japanese peasant patriotism and loyalty. Each year since 1929 the figure has mounted and in 1934—when so much less was heard abroad than in 1932 of peasant misery and discontent—the number of tenants involved in disputes was almost 80% larger than the year before and the area of land in dispute 100% larger. The following accounts are typical of what is happening all over Japan from one year’s end to another.

‘The tenants of a big landlord, the millionaire Terao of Osaka, demonstrated in order to get their rents reduced 31 5%. The landlord answered by getting the court to prohibit entry into the fields. This judgment had to be put into effect by the court officers, who came and hung up a notice forbidding entry. A crowd of more than 70 tenants armed with field implements surrounded the court officers, wrested the notice from them and beat them. Police arrived immediately. Four persons were badly wounded, 72 persons were arrested’ (Shakai Undo Tsushin, 7.11.1935).

‘The children of the tenants of 4 villages near the town of Okayama, declared a school strike as a protest against the action of the landlords. On September 19th 60 tenants came with their wives and children into Okayama and demonstrated. A number were arrested. The police are taking urgent measures’ (Ibid. 6.11.1935).

It is significant that nearly all the disputes concern the rice fields with their feudal system of rents in kind. The cash rents of dry land have, in the first place, fallen sharply since the crisis, whereas rice rents have remained about the same and in 1934 rose slightly. In the second place dry land rentals have always been more reasonable than rice rents in kind, working out as they do to about 30% of the yield as against 50% to 60% for paddy fields.

Moreover, in the case of rice land the landowner takes away the actual food which the peasant needs to save him and his children from starvation, whereas in the case of most dry land the crop is grown for sale, not for consumption.

Expulsion from the rice fields dooms the peasant to starvation and he resists it at all costs. There is no avenue of escape for him, no opening in industry to enable him to live once he has lost his land. Whereas the English peasants turned off their lands in the Great Enclosure movement of the late 18th and early 19th centuries, went into the new factories and mines or emigrated to America, no such escape from starvation is open to the Japanese peasant today. He must hang on to his little plot at all costs, however heavily burdened by rent and interest payments, if he can somehow keep body and soul together through the assistance afforded by some subsidiary occupation, or by a daughter’s earnings in the factories. Expulsion means death.

The growing unity of purpose and spirit of revolt among the peasantry was causing grave anxiety to the Government long before the world crisis drove the mass of the peasantry to desperation and doubled the number of tenant disputes. The Unions of Tenant Farmers spread rapidly after 1921 when the first national union was formed.

In 1926 the Department of Agriculture and Forestry gave the total number of Tenant Farmers’ Unions as 4,065 and the total membership as 368,426. What it really amounted to was that in every village the tenants had realised their community of interest against the landowners and supported any tenant who had a dispute by joint action. But in the final outcome the tenants could do little radically to improve their position since the law was always against them. Proposals brought before the Diet at intervals during the past 15 or 20 years designed to give the tenants some rights in the soil and compensation for improvements were always disregarded, and the necessity for political representation was forced upon the peasantry. Thus the first Labour Parties in Japan sprang from the Tenant Farmers’ Unions rather than from the Trade Unions, although leadership usually came from the workers or from the ‘intelligentsia’ of the towns.

In 1925 the first Farmer-Labour Party was organised but was immediately suppressed by the Government.¹

Left Wing Unions and their political parties were more and more ruthlessly suppressed by the police after the Peace Preservation Law of 1925 had been made even more drastic in 1928.

Only unions and political parties professing extremely Right Wing policies and views are now allowed to exist and even these are jealously spied upon by the police for signs of ‘dangerous thoughts’ developing among their members. Any hint of ‘radicalism’ in word or deed is met with arrest and torture, so that all effective trade union activity of workers or tenant farmers is illegal and has to be carried on secretly.

At the same time, compulsory arbitration for strikes and for tenant farmers’ disputes has been instituted. This in practice means that the landowners can always call in the police to force the tenants to give way. Nevertheless you cannot sweep the tide back with a broom, and not all the repression and terroristic measures of the Government can defeat the bitterness and determination of the peasant movement, nor keep the activities of the union led by the most moderate of leaders within harmless channels in conditions as hopeless and as hard for the masses of the countryside as those which have been described. Men whose wives and children are starving before their eyes will at any cost fight to preserve their last supplies of rice or barley, or to prevent their only means of subsistence—the land—being taken away from them.

During the past few years there has been a widespread movement to form peasant committees in village after village and prefecture after prefecture. News of this movement and in general of agrarian ‘disorder’ is very hard to come by at present, for since it is thought to be instigated by Communists and to offer dangerous precedents, the authorities do their utmost to prevent news of this kind appearing in the newspapers.

The Left Wing magazines which used to publish particularly interesting information about the peasant movements have been raided and suppressed. Occasionally news leaks out, in connection with the arrests of Communists, of what is happening in the villages. For instance, in April 1934,50 persons accused as Communists were arrested in the prefecture of Niigata in connection with the formation of peasant committees in many villages.

Although to some extent peasant discontent has been diverted into military fascist channels since the ‘Manchurian incident’, the landless peasants and the poorest peasant proprietors cannot easily be won over, or be kept from Communist or ‘Radical’ influence, when year after year their conditions become more intolerable and year after year it becomes clearer that they will derive no benefit at all from the conquest of Manchuria.

The revolutionary peasant movement cannot be stemmed by words or by patriotic or demagogic propaganda, since the roots of the agrarian crisis lie too deep and demand too radical a solution. The rising tide of disputes, the irrigation incidents described in this chapter, the raiding of rice storehouses and the formation of peasant committees, in spite of the suppression of the Left Wing national organisations of the tenants by the Govvernment, are all proof of this.

The landowners and richer peasants can hope for some amelioration through foreign aggression which can produce profits to subsidise them, and give employment to their sons as officers or as officials. But obviously it cannot help the mass of the peasantry.

The big capitalist interests for their part had far too long assumed that the peasantry will stand anything and that only the industrial proletariat is to be feared.

A certain well-known journalist called Tsuni Baba, in opposing the ‘relief measures’ of the Government in 1932, wrote as follows:

‘. . . disturbances among urban labourers may be much more difficult to curb than unrest among farmers. . . . There can be no relief when everyone wants it and no one can give it. . . . The agricultural population of 40 million is to get relief. What is to be done for the 20 million in the cities? To relieve them the price of necessities must be lowered and this is diametrically opposed to rural relief. . . . From time immemorial peasant riots have broken out locally and been suppressed locally. Discontent among urban labourers and unemployment because of hardships will bring disturbances to the centre of tie nation.’¹

Since 1932 there has indeed been a growing conviction in banking and industrial circles that if such a year could be passed without revolution then the peasants can be expected to stand anything. In the midst of the famines and universal distress in the countryside during the winter of 1934-35 the Finance Minister, Takahashi, said in his New Year’s Message to the nation: ‘I shall be glad to see the farming community rise to prosperity through its own efforts.’

The small landowners and the larger farmers try to save their skins by diverting the anger of the tenants and small holders away from landowners, usurers, local merchants and industrialists, against monopoly capital. Here arises Japan’s peculiar

brand of fascism whose social basis is among the very large numbers of petty landowners and small industrialists and whose mouthpiece is the young officers. Contrast, for a moment, the programmes put before the peasants for their support by the Fascists and the Radical organisations, whether Left Unions or Peasant Committees. The latter concentrate on the struggle for the land, against evictions, for reduced rents, for a law forbidding confiscation of the rice crop in payment of rent or tax arrears, for improved irrigation works constructed at Government expense, and distribution of Government rice stocks to the starving.

The Fascist demands are quite different. For instance the Kokumin Domei submitted a petition to the Government, in 1932, asking for: a moratorium on debts, a subsidy for the development of uncultivated land, a subsidy for emigration to Manchuria and a subsidy for the purchase of fertilisers, delay in repayment of loans made by the Government at low rates of interest, reduction in the salaries of Government officials.

Quite obviously such demands as these latter ones are the demands of small landowners and larger peasant proprietors.

The Fascist agrarian organisations confine themselves to petitions, and terrorist acts against individual capitalists or politicians. The Left organisations struggle locally for their demands, whether against landowners to prevent eviction, or against the Government for release of rice stocks to feed the starving. It is of importance to note that one of the main demands of the peasantry in 1932 and 1934 was for distribution of Government rice stocks to the starving. Riots were frequent, and in some cases the rice storehouses were broken open, or the local authorities forced to distribute the grain. Peasants and the unemployed of the towns gathered together as in the rice riots of 1918; they surrounded the county halls demanding free rice distribution. Terrible scenes were witnessed when thousands of men, and women with their starving babies in their arms, broke into the town halls and refused to leave until some rice had been given out.

Easy as it may seem to a Tsuni Baba or a Takahashi to suppress spontaneous mass risings of the peasantry so long as the working class of the towns is kept content, or cowed by the imprisonment of all ‘dangerous thinkers’, and the middle strata are kept on the side of ‘law, order and property’ by their hopes of salvation through foreign conquest, the ruling classes nevertheless realise that they are sitting on a volcano, which would erupt if Japan suffered a serious military defeat, or if once a firm alliance and organisation were built up between the workers of the towns and the tenant farmers and small peasant proprietors. Hence the vicious oppression of the Trade Unions and Tenant Unions, which were in a fair way to achieving unity under Radical leadership a decade ago. Hence the extreme fear of Communism, the mass arrests of all suspects, the suppression of strikes by the police.

The insoluble agrarian problem and the simmering discontent in the Japanese countryside is the black care which sits behind the financial, military and political leaders of Japan as they ride desperately forward on their course of military aggression. They must go on for they dare not look back at what threatens them when war, inflation, and an irredeemable national debt shall have brought on their inevitable Nemesis, and, in the midst of bankruptcy and defeat, they will be confronted by a starving and desperate peasantry, an awakened working class and a disillusioned and ruined middle class.

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There is a long standing controversy on this subject in which one side maintains that Japan engages in dumping, sweats her workers, and generally competes with the West with an unfair advantage as regards hours and wages; and in which the other side hotly denies the charge and insists that all Japan’s success in world trade is due to her wonderful organisation, technique, rationalisation of work and so forth, and somewhat inconsistently, that, if wages are low, this does not mean that her workers are not adequately fed and clothed and housed according to the standard to which they are accustomed. The argument is usually based on misconceptions on both sides. Those who attack Japan narrow their argument down into a discussion of the rates of Japanese wages and her labour productivity, whilst those who defend her are satisfied if they can prove that wages in the cotton industry are higher than in silk filatures or in certain other industries, or than on the land; or that, since the Japanese people have always fed on rice or barley, slept on the floor and worn wooden clogs, there is no reason why they should ever enjoy a more civilised life. Some Japanese propagandists, however, go even further than this, and with photographs of pleasant Japanese rooms and gardens, bathhouses and smiling girls, try to convince the West that the Japanese factory is more like a high class boarding school¹ than a place of severe toil. Such propagandists make themselves ridiculous to anyone who has been in Japan, but they have some effect on the gullible Western

It is indeed quite amazing how the same old labour myths are repeated again and again, although they have frequently been disproved and can easily be refuted out of the mouths of eminent Japanese, anxious to prove a different thesis: the myth that girls come to the factories to earn their dowries, the myth that social services cost the millowners enormous sums of money in addition to their wage bill, the myth that the girls are all contented, happy, well fed and healthy, although working as intensively or more intensively than those of Lancashire, and fed at a fraction of the cost of maintaining life in the West.

Although any serious examination of the conditions shows a far grimmer and more cruel picture, yet, in quite a different sense from that of the above controversy, it can be argued that Japanese labour is dear, not cheap. For although it is certainly very cheap if we compare wages and output per worker with those of Europe, Japanese

labour is just as certainly dear, if we take account of the productivity of Japan as a whole—that is to say, if we regard not merely the wages paid to the industrial workers and what they can purchase for them, but also what it costs the nation in human energy and time to feed them. This is clear from the facts set forth in the preceding chapters. The low productivity of agriculture and of household and artisan Indus try means that, low as is the standard of life of the Japanese people, the surplus which they produce beyond their own consumption minimum is very small. Hence Japan’s shortage of capital, hence the survival of handicrafts, hence the low wages paid in industry. The standard of life of the peasantry drags down the wage level of the industrial workers; the low productivity of handicraft industry and the low wages paid in the small workshops and domestic industry keep down the wages of the factory workers. Hence large scale modern industry, where it exists, enjoys a tremendous advantage over that of other countries. The Japanese cotton and rayon industries in particular, whilst utilising the most modern technique, draw their labour force from amongst the daughters of the poverty stricken peasantry with their medieval or colonial standard of life. As a Japanese writer has expressed it: ‘The farming population constitutes the reservoir of industrial labour and its size serves to keep the wages of industrial workers from rising.’¹

Hence the Japanese cotton spinners and textile manufacturers are able to benefit both from the maximum productivity of labour, arising from the use of modern power-driven machinery, and from the maximum degree of exploitation of its labour force, made possible by the extreme poverty of the peasantry, by the patriarchal, Asiatic, barbaric conception of women as chattels to be bought and sold, and by the standards of hours and wages set by handicraft industry. The wages paid in the big cotton mills and rayon factories are little higher than those paid in handicraft industry—indeed they are frequently lower since these big factories employ for the most part girls, not men; but the productivity of labour in the big factories is incomparably greater than that of the artisans, or of the workers in domestic industry. This is the primary fact which solves the riddle of Japanese trade expansion. This is the primary fact which makes Japan’s irresistible advance against Lancashire clear and understandable and in no sense a mystery. The same advantages are enjoyed by the manufacturers of certain other consumption goods which have of recent years appeared on the world market, such as rubber shoes, electric lamps, pencils, soap, bicycles, pottery, etc., etc.

The advantage accrues to the makers of all goods where skilled and experienced labour is not necessary and where mass production methods can be applied. The advantage ceases to operate in the case of heavy industry where a permanent, skilled and experienced labour force is a primary necessity. To this aspect of Japan’s labour problem I shall return later in this chapter.

Japanese textile capitalists accordingly enjoy a tremendous

advantage over their competitors of the West on account of the semi-feudal conditions in the Japanese village which keep down the standard of life of the whole Japanese population. Further-more they benefit in particular from the status of women in Japan, which enables them to obtain not only very cheap, but very docile and defenceless, labour for their factories. Whereas the textile industry in England in the late 18th and early 19th centuries accumulated enormous profits, and expanded rapidly, by exploiting pauper children, the young children of the peasantry ousted from their lands by the Enclosure Movement, and the children of the ruined handicraft workers, in Japan the conversion of the peasantry into landless labourers was not necessary. The much vaunted ‘family system’ with its subjection of women as naturally inferior beings, and the powers it gives to the head of the family, has enabled the textile capitalists to obtain a plentiful supply of the cheapest and most helpless factory labour without the necessity for the expropriation of the peasantry, but merely by so burdening them with rent, interest, taxes and monopoly prices for industrial goods, that large numbers of them cannot exist without contracting their daughters to factories or silk filatures or selling them to the brothels. The Japanese manufacturers are accordingly assured of a large supply of docile labour by the widespread and long-standing custom of the sale of daughters by their fathers. So long as this supply is forthcoming—and of recent years it has become more and more abundant as conditions in the villages have gone from bad to worse— industrial capital is content to leave well alone the feudal survivals, the archaisms, the wasteful small scale production of the countryside. It does not want a large class of landless labourers, since it is assured of a much safer and more easily manageable labour force from amongst the daughters of the peasantry. Nor, since the large scale industries work for export, are they concerned with the narrowness of the home market which is a natural consequence of the backwardness and poverty of Japanese agriculture.

In the feudal period, daughters could only be sold to the houses of prostitution, or as geishas, and the superfluous daughters were therefore to a large extent got rid of by infanticide. With the development of silk filatures and cotton mills daughters became a profitable investment for their parents. The houses of prostitution buy the girl outright for a sum down, whilst in the case of silk filatures and small weaving sheds the girl’s labour is usually contracted for by the year, the contract being renewed from year to year if her work is still required. In the case of the big factories two or three years are contracted for, but only a small sum is paid in advance. Of recent years the big millowners have not needed to employ recruiting agents of their own. Agrarian distress has been so acute, and the indebtedness of the peasantry so colossal, that the landlord or usurer-trader of the village can be counted upon to see to it that the peasants should contract their daughters into industry in order to obtain the money to pay rent and interest. Girls and their parents naturally prefer industrial employment to the brothels, since the former is temporary whereas the latter means slavery for life because the debt can never be paid off. However in certain districts far from industrial centres, such as Aomori and other Northern prefectures, it is not always easy to arrange for a contract with the factories. The latter can get plenty of labour nearer at hand without paying the fare for a long railway journey and so in these districts an undue proportion of girls go to the houses of prostitution.

Moreover where the peasants’ debts are very large they may be forced to sell a girl to the brothels, which pay a comparatively large sum down, since the factories no longer pay big sums in advance.

Neither as regards the brothels or the factories does the girl herself play any part in the transaction except as a commodity. The father or other male head of the family signs a contract with the factory’s agent that his daughter shall work for a stated period and either the whole or a part of her year’s wages is paid to him in advance. When the advance is small the stipulation is that a part of her monthly wage shall be sent to the girl’s parents. In the case of the brothels a much larger sum is paid to the father and the girl cannot leave her ‘employment’ until it is worked off. Since in addition to this sum bills are made out against her for expensive clothing, and since each day’s illness is charged up against her, she can only in exceptional cases ever work off the debt.

The following is a draft of the certificate of sale, nenki-shomon, in the case of a girl sold to the licensed quarters.¹ The ‘contract’ with a factory takes practically the same form.

agree to take into your employ for five years the above named at a price of 300 yen.

30 yen you retain as mizukin (allowance for dress)

270 yen, the balance, I have received.

I guarantee that the girl will not cause you trouble whilst in your employ.

She is of the………………………………………….sect, her temple being the

………………………………in………………………………………………..

Parent’s name……………………………………………………………...

If the girl runs away from either brothel or factory her father’s goods, or his guarantor’s goods, are liable to distraint, so that she dare not return home, even if she escapes, for she knows that her father or his creditors will send her back again. In any case escape is very difficult since if the girl manages to evade the guards of factory or licensed quarters she may be caught by the police and returned to her ‘owners’. Moreover since she has no money, her wages being ‘saved’ for her by the factory management, if there is anything left over after the cost of her food and the sums sent to her father have been deducted, she cannot pay her fare home. Those girls who do manage to escape can only seek work in another factory where conditions may be even worse, or become café-waitresses or unlicensed prostitutes.²

1Translated in ‘The Passing Yoshiwara’. Article by Bunji Omura in Asia, February 1936. The same author writes that an investigation by Commander Gumpei Yamamuro, the founder of the Japanese Salvation Army, shows that at the rate at which the girls are able to repay their debts during the first 2 or 3 years it would take each girl almost 189 years to become free. Naturally factory employment is better than this.

The peasants who thus sell their daughters into something closely resembling serfdom, or debt slavery, are in most cases driven by dire necessity. The details given in Chapters IV and V of agrarian economy, and of the distress and hunger in the Japanese villages, show clearly that it is want which forces the peasants to supply the factories with cheap indentured labour. Even if it were thought more natural that the men of the family should leave their farms and seek industrial employment, there is no demand for their labour as there is for that of young girls. All that is open to them is coolie labour or casual labour in industry and transport. In any case the whole tradition of Japan insists that it is the women who must be sacrificed. From time immemorial the ‘beautiful customs of old Japan’, the much vaunted family system and all it entails, in a word the patriarchal ideology which has survived in spite of the decay of patriarchal economic forms, puts women into a lower category than men, treats them as inferiors who should be glad to sacrifice life and liberty for their masters, whether fathers or husbands. How many of Japan’s ancient legends and revered stories of the past, acted now in the theatre and on the screen, show the young daughter of an afflicted house being sold to the Yoshiwara to save the honour of brother or father or to save her family from want. Girls are even sometimes sold to provide the money to educate their brothers. The whole force of tradition and custom dating from the feudal period and assiduously fostered, praised and preserved by those who profit most from it today—landowners, and factory owners and the whole bureaucratic apparatus of Government—keeps large scale industry run on indentured female labour, and prevents the breakdown of the patriarchal feudal village system and the creation of a working class divorced from agriculture and able to combine to improve conditions of labour.

It is not even always poverty or famine, or a crushing load of debt, which leads the peasant to contract his daughter to a factory. So ingrained and natural, and admittedly praiseworthy, is the power of the head of the household over the female members, that peasants sometimes sell their children in order to accumulate some capital to advance themselves in the world, or even just in order to have a good time. Thus the peasant may sell his daughter to a brothel, or contract her to a silk filature or factory, taking all her wages for a year or two in advance, in order to acquire more land, or in order to buy a loom or two to set up as a small village manufacturer, or to start a tiny silk reeling establishment—in a word to acquire capital and become a small capitalist.

In the Ichinomiya woollen weaving district near Nagoya, when I asked a yarn merchant how the peasant got the money in the first place to buy his one or two looms worked by a hired motor, I was informed: either by mortgaging his land, or from the proceeds of sending his daughter away for a few years’ work in a small weaving shed. In this way, some of the less poverty-stricken peasants can become well-to-do and, in time, start to employ the wives and children of the landless or of the poor tenant farmers as well as their own families. When a man has thus, by means of the most ruthless exploitation of his children’s labour and that of his wife, acquired his own ‘means of production’ in the shape of a few looms and a small motor, he is nevertheless little more than an agent for the merchant manufacturer who supplies him with yarn and takes the woven cloth from him. The latter finds it more profitable to give out yarn to be woven in these household establishments at a fixed charge, than to employ labour himself in his own factory. Here one sees how the large merchants and industrialists profit from the poverty of the peasantry and from the subjection of Japanese women. The peasant can be relied upon to work his wife and children and any hired labour he employs 14, 15 or 16 hours a day, in the frantic effort to become a small capitalist, or to keep his land unmortgaged, or to keep his creditors at bay; whereas the merchant who profits most from this exploitation could not keep labour employed directly working such long hours for so paltry a return. To some extent the law would restrain him, and certainly workers in a factory would sooner or later combine to obtain better conditions. Herein lies the secret of the survival and even extension of domestic industry. Viscount Ohkochi, General Araki, and the rest of those who advocate the extension of domestic industry, who call for a movement of ‘industries to the village’, think they can reap a double advantage over the West with its large factories and landless working class. They think they can in this way both avoid the strikes and inevitable rise in the workers’ standard of living which must occur once there is a true working class in the towns, and at the same time preserve the peasantry to work in the fields for the landlords. Naturally landowners and industrialists consider it an ideal system that industrial commodities should be produced by the wives and children of the peasantry, and by the peasants themselves in the slack seasons of the year, rather than by a working class full of ‘dangerous thoughts’ and in a position to combine. Electricity has, in fact, rendered this system to a considerable extent practicable in Japan. Hence the rapid expansion of domestic industry which has been producing more and more goods for export during the last few years. So far, however, it still remains to be proved that goods other than unstandardised consumption goods of low quality can be manufactured in this fashion.

To return to the question of the women workers contracted to work in factories and silk filatures. I have said that occasionally the peasant sells his daughter merely to have a good time. One reads sometimes in the newspapers of flagrant cases of this sort where a man sells his daughter to one brothel and then goes and enjoys himself in another on the proceeds. I cite one such instance below for the light it throws on Japanese mores and on what Japan’s famous ‘family system’ means for peasant girls. It will be noted that no punishment either legal or social awaits such a father. It is all quite due and proper except when he tries to defraud the brothel keepers by selling the same daughter twice, as sometimes happens when she escapes

‘A farmer from Miyagi prefecture who sold his 14-year-old daughter in Tokyo for 250 yen and then went on a spree with the proceeds was given a "lecture" at the Susaki Police Station, Monday, the Asahi reported. He aroused the suspicions of the police by his manner of spending the money but after his explanation of how he came by it, he was dismissed with a lecture.

‘He was sorry, he told the police, but when he got back to his native village his remorse appeared to be considerably diminished. "After all," he was quoted, "why so much excitement about it? It was my own daughter and my own money and it’s nobody’s else’s business."

‘The farmer, Kyushichi Sato, 49, brought his daughter to Tokyo and sold her to a geisha house for a five-year term of service. The same night he appeared at a brothel in the Susaki licensed quarter of Fukagawa ward, spent the night and settled for 33 yen the next morning. Sunday night he went to another establishment in the same district and his bill there was 77 yen. . . . He further said: "I was raising pigs as a sideline but ran 600 yen into debt. As I had no means of repaying it, I decided to sell my daughter. At first I only intended to place her as a servant in some house in Tokyo, but on the train to Tokyo I changed my mind. In my village it is not considered evil to sell one’s daughter."’¹

This incident has not been quoted in order to prove that fathers in Japan usually sell their daughters in order to ‘go on the bust’. Such a statement would be as fantastically untrue as the time honoured myth beloved of tourists that the peasant girls go to work in the factories in order to acquire a dowry. But there are probably as many or more cases of the one as of the other. Few and far between are the cases of girls able to save their wages for a dowry. As regards the number of cases in which girls are sold, not on account of compelling poverty but through the unscrupulousness of their fathers—or shall one rather say through the fine old Japanese spirit of their fathers—there are some interesting figures for four of the Northern prefectures. The Imperial Agricultural Society recently made an investigation of conditions in the prefectures of Aomori, Miyagi, Akita, Fukushima, Iwate and Yamagata. This investigation endeavoured to ascertain how many girls had left home during the first 10 months of 1934, to what kind of employment they had gone and why, what advance payments were made to their parents for the various kinds of employment, and so forth. For the first four of the above prefectures they published the following results.²

1Trans-Pacific, 22.8.1935.

2Japan Times, 1.10.1935.

Thus, for these four prefectures comprising a total of 4J million inhabitants, 50,340 girls were sold during the first 10 months of 1934. The investigators remark that there has long been a tradition to sell daughters in these prefectures which are amongst the poorest regions of Japan and suffered famine in 1934 and again in 1935.

The large majority of sales—82%—were due to extreme poverty or actual famine, and come under the heading ‘economic causes’. But as many as 6,136 girls were sold for traditional reasons or on account of lack of moral sense. These two headings are somewhat contradictory and their precise significance left unexplained. Presumably however, the traditional sales are those made by parents not actually starving or forced to sell their daughters to pay their debts, but whose farms cannot support all their children, or who are seeking to accumulate a little capital to get on in the world. Again they may relate to sales of girls as geisha, not regarded as at all a dishonourable profession. The lack of moral sense group can only mean those who sell their daughters to enjoy themselves on the proceeds, but it is hardly in line with Japanese morality to condemn them, since the daughters are displaying all the fine virtues of filial piety.

Indeed this report of the Imperial Agricultural Society seems to be a case in which the old morality and the corrupting influence of the West are at odds, else why should they include a category of sales due to lack of moral sense? This is an entirely Western conception threatening the pure and special morality of Japan.

These figures are perhaps sufficient to explode the myth concerning girls leaving home to acquire their dowries.

Other figures in the same report show that even in the case of factory employment the whole or greater part of the girls’ wages are advanced to the fathers before they begin work. These girls are therefore little better than debt slaves and cannot leave their employment, however inhuman the conditions, until their time is up. The comparatively high sums paid for geisha and prostitutes reveal that in their case there is no prospect of return home at any time; they are actually sold, not contracted for a few years’ work.

The above details have been given to show, not only the agrarian poverty which enables the silk filatures, cotton mills, rayon factories, etc., to obtain cheap female labour, but also the low status of women and their complete subjection to the men of their families, who can freely dispose of their liberty. It is this fact which must continually be borne in mind if one is to appreciate the conditions of factory labour in Japan. So long as industry can obtain a plentiful supply of semi-slave female labour it will be hard for men to get employment and the level of male wages will be kept excessively low. With only a few exceptions, openings for men in industry in normal times in Japan are only to be found in the small scale establishments and handicrafts or as casual labourers.¹ Since 1932 the boom in iron, steel and engineering, together witth the increased intensity of labour in the cotton mills which has decreased the numbers employed, have greatly increased the number of male workers in comparison to female, but even now the number of male workers in factory industry only slightly exceeds that of female. Moreover, the figures include the large numbers of small establishments employing 5-10 workers where conditions of labour, even when some machinery is in use, approximate more to handicraft than modern industry.

Nevertheless, the increase in the number of male factory workers as against female since 1931 clearly indicates the increasing importance of heavy industry since Japanese aggression in China caused a boom in iron, steel and armaments production, and since the decline in the exchange value of the yen gave a big impetus to the manufacture of machinery. It has already been remarked that the advantage Japanese light industry enjoys from its use of cheap female labour is not one that can be shared by heavy industry, where the greater part of the labour employed must be male. If real progress in engineering in Japan is to be made, a skilled, trained, permanent male labour force must come into being, and the present small number of factory workers must be greatly increased. The Japanese employers are however extremely nervous about such a development. They have not forgotten the great strikes of the post-war boom in 1919, in particular the strike at the Kawasaki dock yards, which involved over 15,000 workers and was successful in forcing a limitation of hours of work to 8 per day—an extraordinary achievement in Japan. Indeed this strike, and the many others of the historic year 1919, showed that labour in Japan, once organised sufficiendy strongly to defy police terrorism, would demand the same standards of wages and conditions as labour in the West. Accordingly, the employers are loath to see a large permanent factory population arising in the towns. For them the increase in the number of male factory workers is an ominous symptom. They had sufficient experience from 1917 to 1920 to know that this means strikes, trade unions, higher wages and shorter hours.

Thus Japanese Imperialism is on the horns of a dilemma: it must develop heavy industry, if it is to maintain itself as a Great Power, but it knows that the development of heavy industry means the formation of a large working class completely divorced from agriculture and full of’dangerous thoughts’. Every Japanese employer believes that if a strong labour movement develops, as it is bound to develop once there is a large class of free male factory workers, it means not only strikes and higher wages but the end of the Japanese Constitution, the end of ‘the system of private property’.

At the same time the present boom in heavy industry is felt to be unstable and temporary, a purely war phenomenon not fated to endure. This, and the fear of strikes, no doubt explains the following curious paragraph in the March 1935 issue of the Mitsubishi Monthly Business Circular—organ of one of the two largest trusts and expressing the views of Japanese large scale industrialists as a whole:

‘As a rule, manufacturing works which had bitter experience in the past, were loath to increase the number of workers but they tried to meet the emergency by the extension of working hours.’

There is plenty of other evidence showing reluctance of employers to increase their permanent labour force in spite of the boom conditions. Moreover, they also seek, by taking advantage of the acute distress in the villages and of unemployment in the towns, to pay even lower wages than those standardised previously. For instance the Home Office in 1935 reported a large increase in the number of temporary workers—the Rinjiko. These are employed in factories at lower than regulation wages. The Home Office investigation showed that 30% of the total workmen on the pay rolls of factories employing 100 or more workers were Rinjiko. At the same time the Osaka Prefectural Office reported that out of a total of 360,000 workmen employed at the factories in that prefecture controlled under the Factory Law (i.e., having 10 or more workers) 85,000 or more than 40% were Rinjiko.

Such labourers, besides being paid lower wages, are only day labourers with no rights to dismissal bonuses, which is an additional advantage to the employers.

At the same time an acute shortage of skilled workers is reported in the Press, in particular in iron and steel foundries and leather manufacturing. Really skilled workers are able to obtain much higher wages than those given as averages¹ whereas the large army of casual labourers earn much less. The following figures of actual average wages in certain trades in Tokyo show the steep decline since 1929 in the textile and other light industries working largely for export, and the considerable increase in the heavy industries where the demand for skilled labour is larger than the supply.

All wages fell sharply in 1930, but whereas those of textile workers and of other workers in light industry continued to fall each year, in spite of the fall in the value of the yen and the rise in the cost of living, the wages of fitters and turners (lathe men) increased 35% between 1932 and 1934, rising 26% above the 1929 level. The wages of blacksmiths had by 1934 reached a considerably higher level in yen values than in 1929 and those of founders and pattern makers a slightly higher level. These wages represent those of the workers in the iron, steel and engineering trades where the demands of the army and navy have sent production to record heights and produced a shortage of qualified labour. The rates are still low in terms of English money, but they are very high in comparison not only with those of the women textile workers, but also with those for men in all other industries. The wages of engineers in Japan are now nearly three times as large as those of a potter or a carpenter or a worker in the chemical industry. They are nearly seven times as high as those of a cotton weaver. Such wage comparisons as these indicate that in iron and steel and engineering the Japanese are unlikely to be able to beat their competitors by means of quite the same advantages of cheap labour as in textiles and other consumers’ goods. Together with their higher overheads, and high raw material costs, they render Japanese engineering uneconomic, and only profitable in exceptional times such as the last few years.

In considering these wage rates in terms of English money one must not be led away by the Japanese employers’ argument that, low as they are, they are adequate to maintain the Japanese workers in comfort. The cost of living is not cheap in Japan. The retail price of rice is higher than in London, cotton goods are little if at all cheaper, and rents are very high due to the high interest rates and the large profits made by the landlords. The latter normally recover the cost of building within 7 or 8 years. The Bureau of Statistics of the Imperial Cabinet estimates the average monthly housing costs per head in the better paid workers’ families as 4-12 yen (8/2 at par or 4/9 at the present rate of exchange).¹ Rents usually come to at least one-fifth of the workers’

budget. Moreover, the majority of working class families occupy extremely small quarters. The present writer visited the poorest districts of Kobe where workers lived in tiny 3 or 4 mat rooms (a mat is 3 ft. by 6 ft.); in some cases there was insufficient floor space for the whole family to lie down and sleep at the same time. Cooking on charcoal braziers was done in the narrow alley outside the rows of cabins.

In general the argument that the Japanese enjoy their old style mode of living in unheated thin wooden houses, widiout furniture, and that wages and salaries are quite adequate for this traditional mode of life, does not bear close examination. In the first place the wealthier Japanese readily live in stone houses or apartments with modern heating arrangements, and eat European foods, and in the second place the wages of most workers are not sufficient to maintain life decently even in the old manner.

It is true that the incredible industry, devotion to their children, and natural cleanliness of the poorer Japanese enable them to maintain the decencies of a civilised existence on minute incomes which, for Europeans, would mean raggedness and dirt and abandonment of all decencies. Nevertheless there is a limit to the endurance and capabilities even of Japanese women, and most wages are now so low as to make the struggle hopeless and undernourishment the rule rather than the exception for the working class. The above table is of further interest as showing how the textile manufacturers have gone on reducing wages all through the past years of falling exchange, mounting wholesale¹ and retail prices and unprecedented expansion of exports. This they have been able to do purely and simply on account of the agrarian distress which has grown more and more acute. Although the prices of commodities have risen even on the Japanese market, the price of girls bought from their starving parents has as continuously fallen. The poverty and hunger in the villages has been a source of greater and greater profits to

1The general index of wholesale prices in 1935 was 49-6% above Dec. 10.1931 (when Japan went off gold). Retail prices in the second half of 1935 had risen 15-6%. As already noted in Chap. IV. the prices of goods of mass consumption such as coarse cotton cloth have risen far more steeply than the general index.

the textile manufacturers and is the primary cause of their success in capturing the world market. As the well known Japanese economist Kamekichi Takahashi has said: ‘The national standard of wages in Japan is based on the income of the peasant.’ He further calculated that the wages of two women in cotton spinning are the equivalent of the income of an agricultural family of 3 grown-up persons.

In actual fact, Japan’s ‘phenomenal trade expansion’ of recent years is a symptom of her social distress. The more miserable the condition of the peasantry the lower the wages in the cotton and rayon industries, the cheaper the price of textiles and the larger the export.

It is quite idle, in face of the official figures of wage rates in the cotton industry, to try to prove that it is not low wages which are the main cause of the cheapness of Japanese manufactures. Not all the pretty photographs and fairy tales of the propagandists can get over these figures. Nevertheless there are still to be found plenty of propagandists who go on asserting that it is not cheap labour but greater efficiency which has enabled the Japanese to oust Lancashire from her century old supremacy in the world cotton market. As early as 1929 a detailed investigation which I made of the Japanese cotton industry showed that labour costs in spinning were about half those of Lancashire and in weaving nearer one-third than a half. ¹ Since then the sharp reduction in Japanese money wages, as shown in the above table, coupled with the fall in the yen exchange rate, and a steadily yearly increasing intensity of labour, have enormously increased Japan’s advantage.

From 1930 to 1934 the Japanese cotton factory owners were able to supply rice to their workers at a price 18% to 30% lower

than in 1929, and pay diem a wage 35% lower in yen values, whilst forcing them to work more intensively than before. A somewhat more detailed examination of labour conditions in die cotton industry will show even more clearly why it is that Japanese cotton spinning companies have been able since 1932 to sell their goods abroad at prices 50% lower than those of their competitors, and yet pay dividends averaging nearly 30% per annum as well as putting large sums to reserve and rapidly increasing their productive capacity.

According to the figures of the Cotton Spinners’ Association for all Japan average wages for women workers in the cotton mills fell from 1-21 yen in 1929100-71 yen in 1934. But this fall of 35% is the fall calculated in yen. Since the yen from the latter half of 1932 has been about 66% below parity, and 60% below the 1929 exchange rate, the fall in gold values has been very much greater. In sterling wages have fallen about 60%. At the same time labour has been rendered so much more intense that the number of female workers per 10,000 spindles had by December 1932 been reduced to 164-1 from 218-9 in June 1929¹ (i.e. just before the reduction of hours to 8½ per shift on the abolition of late night work—11 p.m. to 5 a.m.—for women from July 1, 1929). This meant a reduction of 25% in the number of female workers per 10,000 spindles. At the same time the number of male workers had been cut down by half. Since the male workers receive wages a good deal higher than the female this meant a big decrease in labour costs. Consequently it is not surprising that, even according to the admission of the Cotton Spinners’ Association, the total labour cost per day per 10,000 spindles had been reduced from 363 yen to 174 yen, i.e. by more than 50% in yen values, between June 1929 and December I932.² Nor is it to be imagined that production per spindle has been lowered by this enormous reduction in the numbers employed. Allowing for the slightly higher average count spun (25’s instead of 24’s) output

was just about the same at the two dates in spite of the shorter hours worked. Hence labour costs in spinning by the end of 1932 were 50% less than in 1929, as calculated in yen, but, if calculated in gold values, they were 80% lower. As regards weaving, wages have similarly fallen, the number of female operatives per 100 looms was 22% less in 1935 than in 1929, and the production of cloth per operative had risen 30% (from 44,966 yards to 58,414 yards). As already noted, the drastic reduction in the numbers employed in thecotton industry accounts in large part for the fact that there are now slightly more male than female factory workers in Japan.

It is to be noted that the average wage for women cotton operatives according to tfiese figures was only 0-79 yen in 1932, and 0-71 in 1934. These are lower than the rates shown in the earlier table. The earlier table, however, referred to Tokyo where wages are highest and apparently gives the joint average for male and female operatives in spinning. By 1934 the general level of wages in the cotton industry had sunk to below 70 sen a day. Taking even 70 sen as the average it means less than iod. a day for 8½ hours’ intensive labour. In 1929 average earnings were about one yen a day which then meant is. iod. English cotton spinning wages have fallen some 13%. As regards the much advertised social services in Japan, these used to cost (including the employers’ food contribution) between 20 and 25 sen a day per worker. The sum must now be less still.

Such perfectly clear and simple calculations as these make Japan’s triumph over Lancashire in the world cotton market neither mysterious nor astonishing. The Japanese cotton factory owners are able to instal the latest machinery invented in the West and employ labour at a colonial level of wages. It would be surprising if they did not triumph. It is of course true that they enjoy the additional advantage of large scale organisation, car-tellised selling and the elimination of middlemen’s charges; true that they are not burdened with tremendous interest payments to the banks like the Lancashire spinners. But give Lancashire all the advantages enjoyed by Japan through rationalisation of sales and purchases of raw materials, and freedom from debt, and still she could not compete with Japan. The difference in labour costs is too enormous. For it is no longer true that Japanese labour in spinning and weaving is less efficient than English. In spinning, a slightly larger number of workers may still be employed but the machinery is worked faster and production per hour is considerably higher.¹ Moreover the Japanese enjoy the advantages of double shift working since night work is only forbidden between the hours of 11 p.m. and 5 a.m. As regards weaving, even in 1929 when I investigated conditions, more looms were usually tended by one girl weaver than by one weaver in Lancashire.

How is it that the Japanese have been able to reduce wages whilst increasing the intensity of labour in a period of rising prices and inflation? The answer has already, in part, been given in my insistence that the misery of the peasantry is the root cause of the cheapness of Japanese labour. Since the end of 1931 prices of industrial commodities have been rising but the prices of agricultural commodities, in particular those of rice and silk —as we have already seen in Chapter IV—fell catastrophically in 1931, 1932 and 1933 and only in 1935, following on a very bad harvest in 1934, did they begin to rise. Even in 1935, although rice prices were somewhat higher than in 1929, silk prices were still nearly 50% lower. Hence the cotton mill-owners have been able not only to buy their girl labour more cheaply than ever before, but to treat the girls even more severely than in the past and raise the intensity of labour to the maximum degree, since, however bad the conditions in the factory, conditions in the village are worse. There is no temptation to run away.

A brief outline of conditions in the cotton mills must be given in order to explain how the employers are able to keep down wages at all times.

The girls are kept almost without money. Anything left over from their earnings after deductions for food, monthly repayment of debt, health insurance, and a small sum of pocket money, is ‘saved’ for them by the management. In 1929 when the girls were earning an average of 30 yen a month instead of

the present average of about 18-50 yen, their monthly wages were divided something on these lines:

The rest, about 6 yen a month, was credited to the girl by the company and only handed over to her on completing her contract. The first 6 months or a year, however, the girl would be earning only half, or a little more, of the average 30 yen a month so that nothing was saved for her and less was sent home. Today, with average earnings about 18-50 a month, it is clear that if 3 yen instead of 4-50 is deducted for food (and by 1935 with the rise in rice prices it is probable that the girl again has to pay 4-50 for her food), 12 yen sent home to her family and 2 yen deducted for debt, there is only 1 yen left over for pocket money and no savings at all. Probably, however, the amount sent home has been reduced, for it is to the management’s interest to allow the girl a few yen to spend at the factory shop on cakes and sweets to supplement her inadequate diet, and on clothing and footwear and soap.

It is difficult to convey to the Western reader a vivid picture of the conditions under which these little girls work. Many of them are less than 14 years old. The majority are round about 15 or 16. Brought up from the country with no knowledge of even such laws as do exist for their protection, they are almost defenceless in their relations with their employers. Although their contracts are not strictly speaking binding by law, they do not realise this. Even if they did the letter of the law and the practice of the authorities are not at all the same thing. The police, in fact, assist the employers and ignore the law by always capturing and returning to their owners girls who run away. This is admitted everywhere in Japan. It is true that this police aid to the employers is less avowed than formerly and if a girl who runs away from a factory or brothel stands firm, and is not kidnapped by soshi (hired bullies) she can escape. But even if she leaves she dare not return home even if she could find the money for the railway fare. For she knows that her father will send her back again, either because, having already received a sum of money from brothel or factory, his bit of property will be distrained on, or because without the monthly remittance from her earnings her family would starve. Indeed, insofar as employment in the large factories is concerned, little has been heard of recent years of girls wanting to escape. Economic pressure is sufficient to keep them at work, conditions are admittedly better than in the small factories and the crude methods of compulsion used in the past are no longer necessary, although they survive in the brothels and in small enterprises and domestic industry. This development should mean that the factory workers, realising that their life for some years at least must be in the factory, would combine to force better conditions on the employers. Such combination is however made almost impossible first by the training of these girls and secondly by the living-in system. In the first place it takes some time for girls to throw off the ideas of inferiority and submissiveness to authority inculcated in them from babyhood. The idea that a woman must always be a chattel under someone’s control or tutelage greatly assists employers and foremen in maintaining discipline and making the girls submit to low wages, long hours and increasing intensity of labour. By the time that the conditions of their new life, and the modern conceptions of labour solidarity taught to them by the men workers in the factory, have prepared them to throw off the patriarchal conceptions of the village and to realise their common interests with the other workers, their contract is frequently up, or their health ruined, and it is time for a new lot of little serfs to take their places in the factory. Besides the disadvantages of their training and of all die conceptions covered by the pleasant sounding word ‘paternalism’, which so greatly assist the employers, there is the almost insurmountable obstacle of the dormitory system. Strikes do sometimes occur in Japanese mills but the employers then simply lock the girls into the dormitories, thus separating them from the men on strike outside and preventing any communication. Even if they can get out they are helpless, since their wages are held by the company, or taken in repayment of their father’s debts, and they have nowhere to go but the street. These girls, whose wages are often

the mainstay of their homes, cannot seek the protection of their homes when on strike. The surprising thing is that under such conditions strikes should occur at all, yet they sometimes do, being started by the men and joined in by the girls. It is the men who are feared by the factory management for it is the men who encourage the girls to revolt and who begin strikes. Accordingly every effort is made to dispense with men’s labour as far as possible. Only 20% of the labour in the cotton factories used to be male. The percentage has of recent years been reduced still further. An interesting sidelight on the attitude of the factory owners to their workers was provided on the occasion of the limitation of night work for women which came into force on July 1, 1929. Most mills adopted two 9 hour shifts, in consequence, instead of the previous two 10½ hour shifts. Actual working hours exclusive of meals became 8½ instead of 10. The women workers are almost all on piece rates and the men on a daily wage. Since the men were regarded as the dangerous element, likely to start agitations involving all the workers if their wages were reduced, the factory managements announced that men’s wages would remain unchanged in spite of the fewer hours worked. The girls, however, who were regarded as unlikely to protest unless led by the men, were paid the same piece rates as before and told at the same time to increase their hourly earnings by attending to more spindles or looms or other machines, and generally by greater efficiency. The assumption by the employers that their girl workers are something like slaves or horses whose whole sleeping and working hours are to be regulated and ordered by their masters, whose interest it is to see that they are fed and exercised sufficiently for the utmost possible amount of work to be got out of them, is clearly shown in the following report in the Osaka Mainichi:

‘Another important factor which has significant bearing upon the efficiency of the operatives is the utilisation of the leisure hours of the operatives which increases as the result of the shortening of the working hours. After nine hours’ work and eight hours’ sleep the operatives will have seven hours on their hands. Estimating that it takes about two hours for eating, taking bath, preparing to start work, etc., they have five hours to put in somehow.

‘Some of the spinning companies have hitherto opposed the abolition of the midnight operations through the fear that if such leisure

hours be given to the operatives as the result of the shortening of the working hours, the operatives would invariably fail to utilise the leisure hours properly: that is, they would either take on some sort of side job and overwork themselves, or abuse the leisure hours somehow or other and tire themselves, thus affecting their efficiency during their regular working hours.

‘With this in view the Toyo Cotton Spinning Company has invented a plan of reducing their free hours by two hours to five hours; the plan is that the girls in the dormitory must take part in two hours’ collective games, or cultural engagements, such as schooling, teaching tea ceremony or flower arrangement, moral training, etc.

‘The Nisshin Cotton Spinning Company has worked out a programme of giving lessons of middle-grade schools to those stopping at the dormitory, and to the male operatives supporting a family a certain area of field is offered at their disposal, and they are encouraged to do the farming.

The Dainihon Cotton Spinning Company has not announced any proposal in this connection, but it is understood that the company will also find some way of shortening the free hours of the operatives similarly to those adopted by the foregoing companies.’

In a previous work¹ I have given a detailed description of the conditions of life in the cotton mills. Suffice it to say here that full accommodation and food provided by the management at half the cost price does not mean what it would mean in Europe. Accommodation consists merely of 1½ mats’ space on the floor (a mat being 6 ft. by 3 ft.) in dormitories which are heated in the cold winter months merely by a bowl full of ashes with some glowing lumps of charcoal in the centre. Food consists of rice and barley with a little vegetable and pickle, with a small piece offish three times a week and very occasionally a little meat.

As regards the so-called cultural work carried on, it is designed either to make the girls better workers or to keep them submissive. Those who can hardly read or write are taught enough to enable them to understand the instructions given at work. Then there are the classes in ‘flower arrangement’ and ‘tea ceremony’. These are arts taught to girls of middle and upper class families and the instruction in them received by the factory girls is designed both to give them the hope of marrying well and to preserve their submissive feminine outlook. If girls have their hopes fixed on rising into a higher social position through marriage

they are less likely to realise their immediate common interests as wage-earners, and more likely to accept the present social system. Similarly with the classes in ‘Ethics’ held in all the large factories. ‘Ethics’ means the rules of good conduct, obedience, and loyalty to parents, employers and Emperor, hard work, meekness and submissiveness as the supreme feminine virtues. Such instruction in Japanese ethics, coupled in some factories with instruction, by missionaries, in the Christian virtues of humility and obedience, is designed to counteract the Marxism which is known to have enormous influence in Japan and is so greatly feared by the employers.

All told the social services do not amount to more than a small fraction of the profits of the cotton spinning companies, and in any case they are a kind of double insurance—insurance of the health of their workers and insurance against strikes and revolution. The cost is very much less than that of rates and unemployment insurance for the English factory owner.¹

It certainly is not true, as the Japanese propagandists and their foreign spokesmen contend, that conditions of life in the factories are very good, that food is adequate, that the reason for lower wages in Japan is merely the lower cost of living, while the standard of living is perfectly satisfactory.

The diet, though better than the girls received in their peasant homes, is quite inadequate for the strain of modern industrial conditions. It is in particular almost entirely deficient in fats. Hence the terrible prevalence of tuberculosis² and the large percentage of girls who return to their villages after 2 or 3 years ruined in health for life.

In fact, as against those whose business it is to represent to the West that Japanese workers are as well paid and enjoy as good, or better, conditions than those of Western Europe, we have the frank pronouncements of statesmen who boast of the exploitation of young girls for the glory of the fatherland, just as in 1796 Pitt, in the House of Commons, gloried in the advan-

tages to England of employing young children in the mills of Lancashire and Yorkshire and advocated work beginning at the age of 5.¹

For instance we have Debuchi, late Ambassador to the U.S.A. and head of a goodwill mission to Australia in 1935, making the following pronouncement in a Press interview after visiting the textile mills and pottery factories of Nagoya:

‘To see hundreds of young girls mostly 15 or 16 years old toiling silently at their work is pitiable, but at the same time inspiring. These girl operatives are satisfied with low wages and never grumble. The fact that Japanese goods which are now conquering the world’s markets are made by these maidens makes one thankful to them, warriors of the peace.’²

Similarly Takahashi, Japan’s late Finance Minister, in his 1933 New Year greetings, spoke of Japan making up for her lack of capital and for the poverty of her financial resources by cheap labour. ‘Japan can’, he said,’ face England and France’s Golden Bullets with labour as her weapon.’

A clear statement of the advantages derived by the Japanese factory employers from the colonial, or medieval, standard of life of the Japanese workers and peasantry, is contained in the following quotation from a speech made in 1933 by Yotaro, former President of the South Manchurian Railway Company:

‘If Japan were a nation which ate a lot of meat and wheat, which wore woollen clothing and were dependent upon a great many international commodities, we should be on the verge of a revolution. But fortunately, or unfortunately, our people eat rice and fish, wear cheap clothing and are almost entirely divorced from the international markets in the essentials of living. Imports run to about 1,200,000,000 yen per annum, i.e. to about 1/10 of national consumption. If prices are up 150% on the 1/10 they are up only about 15% on the whole. For 9/10 of what the Japanese public consumes prices cannot rise above the purchasing power of the public.’³

Hitherto I have been describing conditions in the big factories with their up-to-date technique typical of cotton spinning, and of a certain amount of cotton weaving, and of rayon manufacture.

It is these factories which enjoy to the full the advantages of labour fed and housed and paid as in the days before modern industrial civilisation, yet employed to tend power driven machinery.

Only about half the cotton goods exported are made in the big mills which combine spinning and weaving. Conditions of labour in the small weaving sheds are similar to those in the silk filatures. Here also the labour is mainly female. But here are no show dormitories, no lecture rooms, no classes, no hospitals, no welfare work of any kind. Here, when two shifts are working, the night shift sleeps by day in the same room as the day shift sleeps by night. Here machinery is less modern, hours of labour longer, food worse and wages frequently lower still. It is in these small establishments that the worst horrors of overwork, undernourishment and actual physical brutality are perpetrated behind the factory walls under the cover of ‘paternalism’. The Factory Act does not apply to the multitude of small enterprises employing less than 10 workers, so that here it is legal to work women and children any number of hours. This means that the Factory Acts do not apply to the majority of workers in industry. Japan’s Factory Acts, like so many of her laws, are indeed merely an apparent concession to Western opinion, part of her ‘make up’ as a Great Power. The restriction on the hours of women’s and children’s labour does not hamper the big factory owners, who find that with their up-to-date equipment it pays better to work comparatively short hours but greatly to intensify labour; as regards small enterprises there is no restriction. Moreover, factory inspection is extremely inadequate and infrequent so that even the medium sized enterprises are little affected. Fines for infringement of the Factory Acts are very low and the factory inspectorate in each prefecture forms part of the Police Department of the Prefectural Government. When it is remembered that Chiefs of Police, and the Governors of Prefectures over them, are politicians, holding office so long as the political party to which they belong is in power, can it be doubted that the ordinary poorly paid policeman, to whom most of the responsibility of factory inspection is left, is greatly influenced by the rich men of the neighbourhood who control the elections and so indirectly the appointment of Police Chiefs? Moreover can it be doubted that the poorly paid Japanese police are unlikely to refuse bribes, in view of the universal corruption of Japan’s public administration?

The large number of small enterprises would make it extremely difficult under any circumstances to provide an adequate inspectorate. As it is the number of factory inspectors is ludicrously inadequate. The I.L.O. Report states that in 1930 an aggregate of 30,614 visits were made to 26,875 factories, which means that only 37% of the factories which come under the Factory Act were inspected.¹

It is not, in fact, merely a question of the inadequacy of the factory inspection and the limited authority of the few inspectors.² The history of every country shows that social legislation remains only paper legislation unless enforced by strong organisations of those whom it is intended to benefit. The weakness of Japanese trade unions, which embrace only 7% of the workers in factory industry, which are not legal, and which are absolutely unknown in the majority of enterprises where women are mainly employed, means that the Factory Acts can be disregarded almost with impunity, even by the minority of industrial enterprises to which they apply.

Accordingly when there are rush orders to fulfil in weaving, or in the busy season in the silk filatures, the limitation of hours is disregarded and the girls are unable to refuse the extra labour or to complain.

But these small factories and filatures do not make big pro-

fits; the profits go to the spinners who charge them monopoly prices for yarn, to the merchants who buy the silk or cloth they produce, and in general to the big capitalist interests which cause severe fluctuations in price to the ruin of the small entrepreneur. The small weaving masters, like the silk reelers, the potters and the rest, are rarely in a position to accumulate capital sufficient to adopt the most modern and profitable system of exploitation. In their more primitive industry their profit derives from working their labour as long hours as is physically possible, and so getting as much produced on their inferior machinery as the big manufacturer with his superior equipment, who can only keep his workers up to the speed of the best machines with a shorter working day. Usually one shift only is worked in the small establishments, but it is usually a 12 hour one and frequently even longer in spite of the Factory Acts.

Although the looms are worked more slowly, this does not mean that labour is not extremely arduous and exhausting in the small places. Clearly women working 12 hours on inferior machinery in a badly-lit and ill-ventilated room cannot, whatever the compulsion, work as intensively as girls working 8½ hours in healthier surroundings on the best machines. Both kinds of labour exhaust the workers and make many of them consumptive; it is just a question of method and capital resources.

The large rôle played by the small sized factories in Japanese national economy accordingly also helps to keep low the general level of wages for the benefit mainly of large scale industry.

Although contract labour is the rule in the silk filatures, and is also usual in the weaving sheds, there is to be found side by side with it the employment of women weavers coming daily from their homes and sometimes working 9 or 10 years in one establishment. The proportion of such labour appears to be increasing. The small manufacturers who have slack and busy times prefer to employ, at a daily wage, workers who live at home and who can be dismissed when trade is bad. The women who thus become factory weavers in past times wove cloth at home on handlooms. The employers have begun to find such labour more productive and reliable than that of girls working on contract whose wages have been paid in advance to their parents, or who are working off a debt to a manufacturer who is at the same time a moneylender and landowner. It is a truism that slave labour is less productive than free labour and the same is true of debt slavery.

The interesting point is that it is in the small weaving sheds that a free permanent labour force is coming into existence. The dormitory system is found to be the safest and most economical by the big companies, but the small employer with slender capital resources often finds himself driven to abandon it.

In fact, the combination of ‘paternalistic’ or medieval and modern capitalist economic forms in Japanese industry—great and small—means preserving the worst features of both. The apprentice has no longer the security of work, definite position in society, and prospect of becoming a master, which he enjoyed in the medieval period, but he still lives in and is paid wholly or mainly in kind.¹ He works unlimited hours and has not won the freedom of action, the possibility of combining with his fellow workers, afforded to the working class in large scale enterprises in other countries.

Below the small factories come the tiny establishments employing less than 10 workers and completely outside the operation of the Factory Acts. Here, although the availability of electric power may have facilitated the installation of a small motor and the use of some machinery, conditions are otherwise medieval. Frequently all work is still done by hand. It is here that the worst exploitation of children, both boys and girls, takes place. Although the Minimum Age of Industrial Workers Act prohibits the employment of children before the age of 13,² children are frequently apprenticed to artisans at an earlier age.

Children may leave school at 12 if their parents’ circumstances require it, indeed they may be exempted from school altogether if their parents are extremely poor, in spite of the Japanese boast of universal education and literacy.¹ The exploitation of small boys and girls as apprentices of craftsmen in towns and villages, or in domestic industry, or as shop assistants, is very widespread and such children are without protection in fact or theory.² In the least skilled trades and in shops, when they grow older and demand money wages they are frequently dismissed and a new small child is taken on to whom nothing has to be paid. Some few can become master craftsmen in their turn but the majority can only look forward to a future life as day labourers at a wage almost as low for men as that earned by the girl factory operatives. The demagogic propaganda of the Fascists in Japan speaks of the hopeless future of the peasants’ children in the following terms:

‘The future in store for the children of rural families is nothing else than the slavish apprenticeship for boys, and for girls lives as factory women, maidservants and abandoned waitresses.’⁸

Similarly with regard to conditions in the large and variegated domestic industry, which the poverty of the peasantry and the low wages of men in industry cause to flourish in every town and village. It is little to be distinguished from artisan industry except insofar as it produces goods requiring little or no skill or craftsmanship. Insofar as export is concerned it plays a greater role than the traditional arts and crafts practised by artisans from time immemorial and supplying mainly the domestic market. The main items in the cost of production in these domestic industries are raw material and sometimes electric power

and the hire of a motor and machinery. The labour of the peasant or worker’s family in the evenings or in the slack months for farming receives an infinitesimal award, and this is why such goods can compete on the world market even when made mainly by hand.

Artisan and domestic industry, although they bear down the general level of wages in Japan, are themselves engaged in a desperate competition with the factories with advanced technique. However low the standard of life of these small producers, however much they sweat their families, apprentices and hired workers, they are at a tremendous disadvantage as against the factory. Moreover, they themselves are exploited by merchant capital which reaps the main profit from their labours. They, together with the owners of the tiny filatures and weaving sheds, are indeed little more than the agents of the big trusts in utilising the labour of every woman and child, and of every male peasant in the slack season, in producing industrial goods for a pittance.

An idea of the conditions prevailing in workshops and domestic industry, and of the hideous forms of child exploitation to be found, can perhaps be best conveyed by an account of the conditions of shop employees, among whom are many children. It is to be noted that frequently a shop is also a workshop, goods being both made and sold on the premises.

In 1932, a Bill was to come before the Diet proposing some protection for the employees of small stores, and accounts appeared in the Press of their conditions of labour. Such employees, it was stated, are regularly forced to work between 15 and 19 hours a day.¹ Most of them live with their employers and so have continued in the feudal relation of master and vassal. The young ones are treated as domestic servants and are forced to do housework after the establishments are closed. The depression has caused shops to remain open to all hours of the night and so has intensified exploitation.²

The Bill proposed to enforce 10 p.m. closing, and four days a month holiday. It was stated that there are more than 2,000,000

shop employees. The Bill in effect was a first feeble attempt to limit the exploitation of children in small scale industry and commerce. Nevertheless, mild as were its terms, it failed to become law. The Government decided not to submit the Bill in view of the strong objections of the organisation representing the Osaka employers.

It should not be forgotten, in considering such facts as these, that many of these small shops are little more than agencies for the big wholesalers from whom they get their goods on credit, that others themselves manufacture the goods they sell and are only able to exist, burdened as they are by monopoly prices for their raw materials or struggling in competition with larger enterprises, by working day and night.

Other shops are frequently small family enterprises with no hired labour, in which the wife looks after the shop in order to supplement her husband’s inadequate earnings in industry or some poorly paid clerical employment.

Forced labour exists in Japan for men as well as women. In the mines workers cannot leave of their own free will and recently amazing revelations of conditions in the Hokkaido lumber and constructional camps were made by a man who escaped from one of them, made his way to Kobe, and applied to the police for assistance.¹ He said that conditions were so terrible that men risked death to escape and were pursued by gangers until they threw themselves into a swift river and were drowned. Food in the camps is extremely poor, hours are 5 a.m. to 6 p.m., those who do not put in a full quota of work are beaten and at night the workers are locked up in log cabins with sealed windows and guards outside. Workers are recruited by agents from the poverty-stricken agricultural districts and paid so little that they can barely pay back the money advanced to them for their fares to the Hokkaido.

In the mines also labour is apparently not free, for one can find frequent references to miners ‘running away’ from the coal fields.² Probably conditions in the mines are the very worst to be

found in Japan, for here women and children work with their men, dragging the coal which the men have hewn. A description of life in the mines in Japan today reads like one of England a century ago. Conditions indeed appear to be even worse than in India or at least as bad. Baroness Ishimoto, whose book I have already referred to,¹ gives a vivid description of the conditions in Kyushu, where she lived at the mines with her husband who was then a mining engineer. In a chapter entitled ‘Are Miners Human Beings?’ she describes both conditions of work and of living: how the miners descend by a platform without walls or rails; how girls are often crushed, while carrying coal in baskets from pit to wagons, by a sudden overturn of the heavy coal trucks or through being caught under the big wagons, because of the excessive speed of the latter and the narrowness of the way. She states that prisoners in uniform with heavy chains on their hips are sent down to the mines to forced labour and that this competition, together with that of women and children, brings down the wage level. She describes how the wives and daughters of the miners, half naked, follow the men and carry out the coal as the men loosen it with picks; how sometimes pregnant women give birth to children in the pit, and how the women take their small babies down upon their backs.

As regards living conditions, she says that the miners ‘live in barns like pigs’, in shacks made of rough boards roofed with thin sheets of zinc. Each booth is 12 feet square and houses a family of 5 or 6 persons. There is no gas or water and only one lavatory for a whole row of barracks. She further remarks that ‘the people who lived in the barns were strictly watched and loyalty to their employers enforced. It was impossible for them to run away, nor could labour organisers get among the miners for labour unions were severely banned in the coal field.’

The conditions Baroness Ishimoto describes are those in the Mitsui Co.’s mines, that is to say, in the mines of Japan’s richest Trust. It is clear that the miners are practically the serfs of this great company.

Commenting with gentle irony on the ‘beautiful family system which made men and women work harmoniously and pleasantly at their tasks’, the writer describes ‘the crowded nests of

Ignorance, poverty and misery, the children born without love and reared without care or affection’. She says that when she hears the well known boast that Japan is a paradise for children, she recalls the little children haunting her garbage box, the frequent sight of mothers beating their children, and the babies dying of illness without any medical attention or any nursing since their mothers are at work.

I have already referred to the very high percentage of miners who have either never been to school or have not finished the primary courses—47%.

The yearly accident rate is very high. It varied from 60% to 45% of the numbers employed from 1920 to 1929.¹ Today the rate is almost certainly higher on account of the increased pressure of work and higher output. There was a great increase in the accident and death rate during and after the war when output was pushed up to its maximum. The loss of lives has been reckoned as 30 for each million tons of coal. The largest number of accidents and deaths is caused by the collapse of gallery roofs, and the second largest number in connection with the haulage system. It is true that some 4 million workers of various kinds are now² entitled by law to some compensation when injured, but the scale of payments is extremely low. A worker hopelessly maimed for life receives 540 days’ wages and one disabled for work for life 360 days’ wages. If disabled for resumption of former work the amount is 180 days’ pay.

It must not be forgotten that the large numbers of women and children employed in household and artisan industry and in the small ‘factories’ employing less than 10 persons, if injured, are entitled to no compensation whatsoever from their employer, or from the merchant manufacturer who pays them piece rate wages, or from the State.

There is an almost complete absence of social services in Japan. There are no public hospitals, there is no unemployment insurance, no poor relief (except occasional charity from indi-

viduals, distributed by the police) so that, except for the small proportion of workers in large factories which maintain hospitals, or those entitled to some compensation from their employer for occupational diseases, the poor, the widows, the orphans and the sick are left to what assistance they can get from their relatives, or to die. Even lepers are not provided for, but are left to their families to take care of; many of them become beggars and thus infect more persons with this terrible disease.¹ Similarly there are some 200,000 lunatics for whom nothing is done. Only when the Emperor is to pass by in state are the lepers and lunatics in a neighbourhood rounded up by the police and kept out of the way for the occasion.

According to a police report in 1935 there are some 250 cases a year of destitute mothers with young children who, after losing their husbands, kill their children and then commit suicide. Further, of 127,000 mothers with children requiring relief in Tokyo, only 52,000 received any and this at the rate of only 20 sen (3d.) a day.² There are of course no workhouses for the homeless. A case was recently reported in the Press of a mother with three children who, after being evicted from her small room, wandered all day and night in the streets in the rain, and then entered the crematorium and begged to be allowed to remain and die in the warmth.

The incidence of sickness is very high amongst the workers on account of poor food and lodging and excessive hours of labour. From time to time the Government collects and publishes information from various prefectures which is considered as representative. It also sometimes publishes sickness statistics of factories in all parts of Japan where not less than 500 workers are employed.³

These official figures, high as they are, are representative only of factories and mines and of course take no account of sickness in domestic and artisan industry or among the peasantry. They show a sickness rate of 33.8% amongst women and 18.3% amongst men. In textile factories the combined rate for women

and men was 314 per 1,000 workers; of these 60 per 1,000 were cases of stomach and intestinal diseases, which are diseases attributable to coarse or bad food or to malnutrition; 23.9 per 1,000 were cases of bronchitis and 9.85 were cases of pleurisy, which must be mainly due to the change from the hot air of the workrooms to the unheated dormitories. Pulmonary tuberculosis is very prevalent in Japan and it is probable that many of the pleurisy cases amongst factory workers lead to, or turn out to be, cases of tuberculosis. Tuberculosis may largely be ascribed to the absence of fats in the diet and lack of air in the unventilated and unheated dormitories in winter. Beriberi, a disease due to lack of vitamins, is one of the most common in all the different industries, except in the gas, electricity and smelting industries, where the wages paid are higher.

The prevalence of tuberculosis is shown more in the figures of death than of sickness, indicating that workers with this disease often go on working till they are near death, not reporting sick or not being considered as sick. The figures show that there were 88 deaths out of every 1,000 cases of tuberculosis, the highest death rate for any of the diseases, and that out of every 1,000 cases another 211.8 were