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CLARENCE -POEIi
Book_
•Gopyiight]^^_
COPYRIGHT DEPOSIT.
WHERE HALF THE WORLD IS WAKING UP
COUNT SHIGE-NOBU OKUMA OF JAPAN
[From a photograph and autograph given the author) Count Okuma, one of the Genro or Elder Statesmen of Japan and ex-Premier of the Empire, is an opponent of his country's high pro- tective tariff and an earnest advocate of international arbitration
WHERE HALF THE WORLD IS WAKING UP
THE OLD AND THE NEW IN JAPAN, CHINA, THE
PHILIPPINES, AND INDIA, REPORTED
WITH ESPECIAL REFERENCE TO
AMERICAN CONDITIONS
BY
CLARENCE POE
Avthor of " A Southerner in Europe" " Cotton: Its Cultivation
and Manufacture" Editor " The Progressive Farmer"
Sec'y North Carolina Historical Association, etc., etc.
Garden City New Yosk
DOUBLEDAY, PAGE & COMPANY
1911
6^<'to
fS
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED, INCH3DING THAT OF TRANSLATION INTO FOREIGN LANGUAGES, XNCLUDING THE SCANTJINAVIAN
COFYKIGBT, IQII, BY CLARENCE POE
THE COUNTRY LIFE PRESS GARDEN CITY, N. Y.
©CI.A303506
TO THE RIGHT HONORABLE ^ JAMES BRYCE
IN WHOM ACHIEVEMENT, CHARACTER AND PERSONAL CHARM
MEET IN RARE SYMMETRY; WHO HAS WON THE WISDOM
OF AGE WITHOUT LOSING THE DEW OF YOUTH;
AND WHOSE GENEROUS FRIENDSHIP HAD MADE
ME HIS DEBTOR BEFORE IT AIDED ME
ANEW IN PLANNING AND EXECUTING
MY ORIENTAL TOUR
PREFACE
THE human race, to which so many of my readers belong," as Mr. Gilbert Chesterton begins one of his books by saying, has half its members in Asia. That Americans should know something about so considerable a portion of our human race is manifestly worth while. And really to know them at all we must know them as they are to-day.
Vast changes are in progress, and even as I write this, the revolution in China, foreshadowed in the chapters written by me from that country, is remaking the political life of earth's oldest empire. From Japan to India there is indus- trial, educational, political ferment. The old order changes, yielding place to the new.
"Where Half the World is Waking Up" is not inappro- priate therefore as the title of the book now offered to the public. The reader will kindly observe here that I have writ- ten of where half the world is waking up and not merely of the waking-up itself. My purpose has been to set forth the old and the new in due proportion; to present the play of new forces against and upon the ancient, the amazingly ancient, forces that have dominated whole races for centuries. In most places, in fact, the ancient force is still clearly the dominant one. Observe, too, therefore, that I have written not of where half the world has waked up, but only of where it is waking up. The significant thing is that the waking is really taking place at all, and of this there can be no doubt.
It was, in short, with the hope of securing for myself and presenting to others a photograph of the Orient as it is to-day that I made my long trip through Japan, Korea, Manchuria,
viii PREFACE
China, the Philippines, and India during the past year. It was not a pleasure trip nor yet a hurried "seaport trip." I travelled either entirely across or well into the interior of each country visited, and all my time was given to study and re- search to fit me for the preparation of these articles.
That despite of the care exercised the book contains some errors, is doubtless true. The sources of information in the Orient are not always easy to find, nor always in accord after one finds them. Consider, for example, the population of Manchuria: it seems a simple enough matter, yet it required the help of consuls of two or three nations to enable me to sift out the truth from the conflicting representations of several writers and so-caUed authorities.
For my part I can only claim a laborious and painstaking effort to get the facts. Letters of introduction to eminent Englishmen kindly furnished me by Ambassador Bryce opened the doors of British officialdom for me, and the friendship of Mr. Roosevelt and letters from Mr. Bryan and our Depart- ment of State proved helpful in other ways. I thus had the good fortune not only to get the ready fraternal assistance of my brother newspaper men (of all races) everywhere, and the help of English, German, and American consuls, but I was aided by some of the most eminent authorities in each country visited — in China, by H. E. Tang Shao-yi, Wu Ting Fang, Sir Robert Bredon, Dr. C. D. Tenney, Dr. Timothy Richard; in Japan, by ex-Premier Okuma, Viscount Kaneko, Baron Shibusawa, Dr. Juichi Soyeda; in Hong Kong, by Governor- General Sir Frederick Lugard; in Manila by Governor-General Forbes, Vice-Go vernor Gilbert; in India, the members of the Viceroy's Cabinet, Hon. Krishnaswami Iyer, Dr. J. P. Jones, etc., etc. To all of these and to scores of others, my grateful acknowledgments are tendered. They helped me get informa- tion, but of course are in no case to be held responsible for any opinions that I have expressed.
To Mr. G. D. Adams, of Akron, Ohio, and Dr. Arthur
PREFACE ix
Mez, of Mannheim, Germany, two generous fellow-travellers, my thanks are due for the use of many of their photographs, and I am also indebted to The World's Work and The Review of Reviews for permission to republish articles that have already appeared in these magazines. The larger number of chapters included in this volume, however, were originally prepared with a view to their use in my own paper. The Progressive Farmer. They are, therefore, often more elementary in char- acter, let me say in the outset, than if they had been written exclusively for bookbuyers, but it is my hope that their jour- nalistic flavor, even if it has this disadvantage, will also be found to have certain compensating qualities.
Perhaps just one other thing ought to be said: that practi- cally every article about any country was written while I was still in the country described. In this way I hoped not only to write with greater freshness and vividness, but I was enabled to have my articles revised and criticised by friends well informed concerning the subjects discussed. The reader will please bear in mind, therefore, that a letter about Tokyo is also a letter from Tokyo, a letter about Korea is a letter from Korea, etc., and shift his viewpoint accordingly. I have also thought it best to be frank with the reader and let the chap- ters on China remain exactly as they were written — present- ing a pen picture of the Dragon Empire as it appeared on the eve of the outbreak, while the revolution was indeed definitely in prospect but not yet a reaUty.
"Give us as many anecdotes as you can," was old Samuel Johnson's advice to Boswell, when that worthy proposed to write of Corsica; and this wise suggestion I have sought to keep in mind in all my travel. Moreover, another saying of the great lexicographer's comes quaintly into my memory as I conclude this Foreword: "There are two things which I am confident I could do very well," he once remarked to Sir Joshua Reynolds; "one is an introduction to any literary work stating
X PREFACE
what it is to contain, and how it should be executed in the most perfect manner: the other is a conclusion, showing from various causes why the execution has not been equal to what the author promised to himself and to the publick!"
C. P. Raleigh, N. C.
December 1, 1911.
CONTENTS
CHAPTER PAGE
I. Japan: The Land op Upside Down . . . S
A Land of Contradictions — Music as an Example — Marriage and the Home Life — Patriarchal Ideas Still Dominant.
II. Snapshots of Japanese Life and Philosophy 9
What a Japanese City Is Like — Strange Clothing of the Japanese — Who Ever Saw So Many Babies? — Alphonse and Gaston Outdone — The Grace of the Little Women — How the Old Japan and the Old South Were Alike — A "Moral Distinction" Between Producers and Non- Producers.
III. Japanese Farming and Farmer Folk . . 17
Japanese Farm Children Getting More Schooling than American Farm Children — No Illiteracy in the New Japan
— Where Five Acres Is a Large Farm — How Iowa Might Feed the Whole United States — Farming Without Horses or Oxen — What the Japanese Farmers Raise — The Crime of Soil-waste — All Work Done by Hand — Cooperative Credit Societies a Success — Farm Houses Grouped in Vil- lages — "A Seller of the Ancestral Land" — The Japanese Love of the Beautiful a Suggestion for America.
rV. "Welfare Work" in Japanese Factories . 29
Manufacturing Bound to Increase — Tariff Legislation Unfair to Agriculture — A Visit to a Progressive Japanese Factory — How the Factory Operatives Are Looked After
— Stricter Factory Legislation Coming.
V. Does Japanese Competition Menace the
White Man's Trade 34
A Study of Japanese Industrial Conditions — Japanese Labor Cheap but Inefficient — Actual Cost of Output Little Cheaper than in America — Laborers in a State of
i CONTENTS
^APTEB FAGS
Deplorable Inexperience — Illustrations of Japanese IneiE- ciency — Some Current Misconceptions Corrected — Labor Wage Has Increased 40 Per Cent, in Eight Years — The Burden of Taxation — High Tariff Will Decrease Japan's Export Trade — Subsidy Policy Destroying Individual Initiative — Japanese Competition Not a Serious Menace to the White Man,
VI. Buddhism, Shintoism, and Christianity m
Japan 48
The Artistic Touch of the Japanese — Religion With- out Morals — Buddhism in Fact vs. Buddhism Idealized by Arnold — Official Notices Prohibiting Christianity — Christianity "Puts Too High an Estimate on Woman" — The Worth of the Individual Not Recognized — The Elemental Significance of Japan's Awakening — A New Type of Civilization.
VII. Korea: "The Land op the Morning Calm" 60
I Have Become a Contemporary of David — The Fascina- tion of a Primitive City — Some Odd Korean Customs — A True Romance and an Odd One — Many Faces Marked by Smallpox — A Typical Monarchy of Ancient Asia — The Honorable Mr. Yang-ban — Six Men to Carry Fifty Dollars' Worth of Money — Japanese Annexation — Splen- did Work of Foreign Missionaries.
VIII. Manchuria: Fair and Fertile .... 70
Some First-hand Stories of the Russo-Japanese War — A Bit of History with a Lesson — The Site of the World's Next Great War — Manchuria: Fair and Fertile — Fat Harvests of Food, Feed, and Fuel — A Land Where Every- body "Knows Beans" — Golden Opportunities for Stock- raising — Better Plows and Level Culture — Graves as Thick as Corn Shocks
IX. Where Japan Is Absorbing an Empire . . 78
Manchuria the One Great Oriental Empire Not Yet Developed — Its Strategic Importance — Why the "Open Door" Concerns Us All — Japan's Shrewd Policies — Con-
CONTENTS xiii
JAPTBB PAGE
tempt of Chinese Authority — Japan at Home vs. Japan in Manchuria — How the Open Door Policy Was Violated — Will Manchuria Go the Way of Korea? — A Bit of Chinese Wit and Wisdom — Truth Is in the Interest of Peace.
X. Light FROM China ON Problems AT Home . . 93
A Chinese Martyr-Hero — The Most Tremendous Moral Achievement of Recent Times — A Lesson for America — Putting Officials on Salaries — Money Changers and Title Changers — Making Education Practical — The Parcels Post and Tarifif Reform.
XI. The New China: Awake and at Work. . 10^
The Coming National Parliament — The Successful War Against Opium — China's Right-about-face in Education
— Building Up an Army — Attacking the Graft System
— Railroads, Posts, and Telegraphs — • America's Rela- tions with China.
XII. A Trip into Rural China 116
The Camels from Mongolia — Strange Traffic and Travel in Nankou Pass — The Great Wall of China — Surpris- ingly Progressive Farming Methods.
XIII. From Peking to the Yangtze-Kiang . . . 123
Street Life in Peking — History That Is History — Martyrdoms That Have Enriched the World — Average Wages 15 to 18 Cents a Day — Homes Without Firesides — All China a Vast Cemetery — Keeping on Good Terms with Dragons — The Blessings of Our Alphabet — Confucius as a Moral Teacher — My Friendship with a Descendant of Confucius.
XIV. Sidelights on Chinese Character and In-
dustry ........... 132
Healthy Public Sentiment — Slavery and Foot-binding Still Practised — "Big Feet No B'long Pretty"— -The Popularity of a No. 2 Wife — The Virtue That Is Next to Godliness Largely Disregarded — Some Discredited Ameri- cans Discovered Abroad — A 600-Mile Trip on the Yangtze
XIV
CONTENTS
CHAPTER PAGE
River — An Interview with Wu Ting Fang — Fanning on the Yangtze — Shanghai Factory Laborers Paid 12 Cents a Day.
XV. Farewell to China 142
A City of 2,000,000 People Without a Vehicle — A Dead Chinaman More Important and Respected Than a Live One — Queer Features of Chinese Funerals — Cruelty of Chinese Punishments — A Sample of Chinese Humor: The Story of the Magic Jar — Amusing Trials of a Land Buyer — "Pidgin English" — Everything Is Saved — The Influence That Is Remaking China.
XVI. What I Saw in the Philippines .... 153
In Manila — A Trip Through Five Provinces — What the PhiUppine Coimtry Looks Like — Every Filipino Has Cigarette and a Clean Suit — A Mania for Cock-fighting — Snapshots of Philippine Life — Labor the One Thing Lacking.
XVII. What the United States Is Doing in the
Philippines 163
Thirty Thousand White People and 7,000,000 Filipinos — Rich Resources and Varied Products — Millions in Lumber — How the Islands Are Governed — Restricting the Suffrage — Education: Achievements of the American [ Government — Postal Savings Banks and the Torrens Sys- tem — Public Health Work — Building Roads — And Then Keeping Them Up — "A George Junior Repubhc."
XVIII. Asia's Greatest Lesson for America . . 173
Where 10 Cents a Day Is a Laborer's Wage — The Sav- age Struggle for Existence in the East — Tasks Heart-sick- ening in Their Heaviness — Where Women Are Burden- bearers — $12 a Year for a Farm Hand — An Overcrowded Population Not the Chief Cause of Asia's Poverty — A Defective Organization of Industry Responsible — Foolish Opposition to Labor-saving Tools — Our Debt to Machin- ery — Knowledge Itself a Productive Agency — Ineffective- ness of Oriental Labor — Tools and Knowledge the Secret of Wealth — Importance of Our Racial Heritage — The Final Lesson.
CONTENTS XV
CHAFTEB PAGE
XIX. The Straits Settlements and Burma . . 186
The Amazing Industry of the Chinese — Easy Money in Cocoanuts — How Germany Is Capturing Oriental Trade — Rangoon the City of Gorgeous Colors — Burma's Buddhist Temples — Rangoon's Beasts of Barden — Where the Elephants Do the Work — Some First-hand Jungle Stories — My Lord the Elephant — Good-by to Burma.
XX. Hinduism — and the Himalayas .... 198
Theoretical vs. Practical Hinduism — The Kalighat Temple, Calcutta — Human Sacrifices — Two Indian Places of Worship : A Contrast — A Visit to Benares — Burning the Bodies of the Dead — "Religion" as It Is in Benares — The Himalayas: A New and Happier Subject.
XXI. "The Poor Benighted Hindus" . . . .210
India's Enormous Population — "The Wealth of the Indies " a Romance — A Typical Indian Village — No Chairs, Mattresses, Knives, or Forks Used — Where It Is 105 at Midnight — "Gunga Din" in Evidence — The Lady of Banbury Cross Outdone.
XXII. Hindu Farming and Farm Life .... 218
Primitive Tools Used by Farmers — WTiat Crops Are Grown — Where Drought Means Death — Reducing the Ravages of Famine — Usury and a Remedy — Where America Is Behind — Landowner and Farm Laborer — Salaam, O Little Folk!
XXIII. The Caste System in India 226
No Man May Rise Higher, but May Fall Lower — How Fatalism Sustains Caste — Contamination by Touch — A Bone Collector's Pride of Rank — The "Thief Caste" — Caste and the Banyan Tree — A Maharaja's Defence of Caste — Some Forces That Are Battering Down the Sys- tem — Foreign Travel Weakening Caste.
XXIV. The Plight of the Hindu Woman . . . 236
"Woman Is Not to Be Trusted" — Twelve-year-old Brides and Bridegrooms — A Wedding Procession in Agra
cvi CONTENTS
:haptee faqb
— 6000 Rupees for a Wedding Feast — The Plight of the Child-wives — Cruel Treatment of Widows — The Pic- ture Not Wholly Dark — One Worthy Tribute to the Grace of Woman.
XXV. More Leaves from an India Notebook . . 246
Some Historic Indian Cities — India No More Homogene- ous than Europe — English Rule : An Interview with Mr. Krishnaswami Iyer — Indian Wealth in a Few Hands — 16 Cents a Day an Incredibly High Wage — No Horses on Indian Farms — Bombay a Great Cotton Market — The Story of a Man-eater — A Snake Story to End With.
XXVI. What the Orient May Teach Us . . . 261
Conservation the Keynote — What Neglect of Her Forests Has Cost China — Forestry Lessons from Japan and Korea
— Conserving Individual Wealth — The Essential Im- morality of Waste — Avoiding the Wastes of War — Pre- serving Our Physical Stamina and Racial Strength — A Lesson from China — Patriotism as a Moral Force — The Coming "Conflict of Color" — Oriental vs. Occidental Ideals.
ILLUSTRATIONS
Count Shige-Nobu Okuma of Japan - - - - Frontispiees
PAGE ,^.
The Giant Avenue of Cryptomerias at Nikko - - - 13 ^^
Typical Japanese Costumes and Temple Architecture - 14
Japanese Farming Scenes --- 19
Japanese School Children ---------- 20
The Great Buddha (Diabutsu) at Kamakura - - - - 53
The Degenerate Koreans at Rest and at Work - - - 54
Like Scenes from Our Western Prairies ----- 81
Manchurian Women (showing peculiar head-dress) - - 82'
Chinese Waste-paper Collector - 82
Pu Yi the Son of Heaven and Emperor of the Middle ^
Kingdom -- 105 '
How China Is Dealing with Opium Intemperance - - 106
A Man-made Desert 117
Pumping Water for Irrigation ---------117
Transportation and Travel in China- ------ 118
Fashionable Chinese Dinner Party ------- 137
How Lumber Is Sawed in the Orient - 137
A Quotation from Confucius --------- 138
The Great Wall of China 147
Chinese Woman's Ruined Feet ._- 147 '^
Chinese School Children .-..-- 148
The American Consulate at Antung 148
A FiHpino's Home 157 '
The Carabao, the Work-stock of the Filipinos - - - 158 ''^
An Old Spanish Cathedral 158 "^
Society Belles of Mindanao, Philippine Islands - - - 181
A Street Scene in Manila ---------- 181
zvii
xviii ILLUSTRATIONS
PAGE
Two Kinds of Workers in Burma ------- 182
Types at Darjeeling, Northern India, and at Delhi, Cen- tral India - 205
Two Rangoon Types ------------ 206 "'
A Hindu Faquir --. 213 ,
Some Fashionable Hindus ---------- 213 ^
Hindu Children -------------- 214
The Taj Mahal from the Entrance Gate 241'^^
Gunga Din on Dress Parade --------- 242 '
Bathing in the Sacred Ganges at Benares ----- 249
The Battle-scarred and World-famous Residency at
Lucknow -------------- 250
Burning the Bodies of Dead Hindus ------ 255 -
An Indian Camel Cart ----------- 255*^
Travel in India - - - 256 '''
WHERE HALF THE WORLD IS WAKING UP
JAPAN: THE LAND OF UPSIDE DOWN
I CANNOT help thinking," said one of my friends to me when I left home, "that when you get over on the other side of the world, in Japan and China, you will have to walk upside down like the flies on the ceiling!"
While I find that this is not true in a physical sense, it is true, as Mr. Percival Lowell has pointed out, that, with regard to the manners and customs of the people, everything is re- versed, and the surest way to go right is to take pains to go dead wrong! "To speak backward, write backward, read backward, is but the A B C of Oriental contrariety."
Alice need not have gone to Wonderland; she should have come to Japan.
I cannot get used, for example, to seeing men start at what with us would be the back of a book or paper and read toward the front; and it is said that no European or Amer- ican ever gets used to the construction of a Japanese sen- tence, considered merely from the standpoint of thought- arrangement. I had noticed that the Japanese usually ended their sentences with an emphatic upward spurt before I learned that with them the subject of a sentence usually comes last (if at all), as for example, "By a rough road yesterday came John," instead of, "John came by a rough road yesterday."
And this, of course, is but one illustration of thousands that might be given to justify my title, "The Land of Upside Down," the land of contradictions to all our Occidental ideas. That
4 WHERE HALF THE WORLD IS WAKING UP
Japan is a land "where the flowers have no odor and the birds no song" has passed into a proverb that is almost literally true; and similarly, the far-famed cherry blossoms bear no fruit. The typesetters I saw in the Kokumin Shimbum office were singing like birds, but the field-hands I saw at Komaba were as silent as church-worshippers. The women carry children on their backs and not in their arms. The girls dance with their hands, not with their feet, and alone, not with partners. An ox is worth more than a horse. The people bathe frequently, but in dirty water. The people are exceptionally artistic, yet the stone "lions" at Nikko Temple look as much like bulldogs as lions. A man's birthday is not celebrated, but the anniversary of his death is. The people are immeasur- ably polite, and yet often unendurably cocky and conceited. Kissing or waltzing, even for man and wife, would be improper in public, but the exposure of the human body excites no surprise. The national government is supposed to be modern, and yet only 2 per cent, of the people — the wealthiest — can vote. Famed for kindness though the people are, war cor- respondents declared the brutality of Japanese soldiers to the Chinese at Port Arthur such as "would damn the fairest nation on earth." Though the nation is equally noted for sim- plicity of living, it is a Japanese banker, coming to New York, who breaks even America's record for extravagance, by giving a banquet costing $40 a plate. The people are supposed to be singularly contented, and yet Socialism has had a rapid growth. The Emperor is regarded as sacred and almost infallible, and yet the Crown Prince is not a legitimate son. Although the government is one of the most autocratic on earth, it has nevertheless adopted many highly "paternalistic" schemes — government ownership of railways and telegraphs, for example. 'The people work all the time, but they refuse to work as strenuously as Americans. The temples attract thousands of people, but usually only in a spirit of frolic : in the first Shinto temple I visited the priests offered me sake (the national liquor)
JAPAN: THE LAND OF UPSIDE DOWN 5
to drink. Labor per day is amazingly cheap, but, in actual results, little cheaper than American labor.
It is amid such a maze of contradictions and surprises that one moves in Japan. When I go into a Japanese home, for example, it is a hundred times more important to take off my shoes than it is to take off my hat — even though, as happened this week when I called on a celebrated Japanese singer, there be holes in my left sock. (But I was comforted later when I learned that on President Taft's visit to a famous Tokyo teahouse his footwear was found to be in like plight.)
Speaking of music, we run squarely against another oddity, in that native Japanese (as well as Chinese) music usually consists merely of monotonous twanging on one or two strings — so that I can now understand the old story of Li Hung Chang's musical experiences in America. His friends took him to hear grand opera singers, to listen to famous violinists, but these moved him not; the most gifted pianists failed equally to in- terest him. But one night the great Chinaman went early to a theatre, and all at once his face beamed with delight, and he turned to his friends in enthusiastic gratitude: "We have found it at last!" he exclaimed. "That is genuine music!" . . . And it was only the orchestra "tuning up" their instruments!
I might as well say just here that this story, while good, always struck me as a humorous exaggeration till I came to Japan, but the music which I heard the other night in one of the most fashionable and expensive Japanese restaurants in Tokyo was of exactly the same character — like nothing else in all the world so much as an orchestra tuning up! And yet by way of modification (as usual) it must be said that appreciation of Western music is growing, and one seldom hears in classical selections a sweeter combination of voice and piano than Mrs. Tamaki Shibata's, while my Japanese student-friend has also surprised me by singing "Suwanee River" and other old-time American favorites like a genuine Southerner.
Take the social relations of the Japanese people as another
6 WHERE HALF THE WORLD IS WAKING UP
example of contrariety. Here the honorable sex is not the feminine but the masculine. There is even a proverb, I be- lieve, "Honor men, despise women." Perhaps the translation "despise" is too strong, but certainly it would be regarded as nothing but contemptible weakness for young men to show any such regard for young women, or husbands for their wives, as is common in America. The wives exist solely for their husbands, nor must the wife object if the husband maintains other favorites, or even brings these favorites into the home with her. And although a man is with his wife a much greater part of his time than is the case in America, he may have little or no voice in selecting her; in fact, he may see her only once before marrying.
After having seen probably half a million or more Japanese, Sundays and week-days, I have not noticed a single young Japanese couple walking together, and in the one case where I saw a husband and a wife walking thus side by side I dis- covered on investigation that the man was blind !
"For a young couple to select each other as in America," said a young Japanese gentleman to me, "would be considered immoral, and as for a young man calling on a young woman, that never happens except clandestinely." And when I asked if it was true that when husband and wife go together the woman must follow the man instead of walking beside him as his equal, he answered: "But it is very, very seldom that the two go out together."
My Japanese friend also told me that the young man often has considerable influence in selecting his life-partner (in case it is for life: there is one divorce to every three to five marriages), but the young woman has no more voice in the matter than the commodity in any other bargain-and-sale. When a young man or young woman gets of marriageable age, which is rather early, the parents decide on some satisfactory prospec- tive partner, and a "middleman" interviews the parents of the prospective partner aforesaid, and if they are willing, and
JAPAN: THE LAND OF UPSIDE DOWN 7
financial and other considerations are satisfactory, it doesn't matter what the girl thinks, nor does it matter much whether young Barkis himself is "willin'." The Sir Anthony Abso- lutes in Japan indeed brook no opposition. All of which, while not wholly commendable (my young Japanese friend himself dislikes the plan, at least in his own prospective case), has at least the advantage of leaving but remarkably few bachelors and old maids in Japan. Here every man's house may not be his castle, but it is certainly his nursery. Usually, too, in the towns at least, his home is his shop; the front part full of wares, with no hard and fast dividing line between merchandise rooms and the living rooms, children being equally conspicuous and numerous in both compartments.
Japan is still governed largely on patriarchal lines. The Emperors themselves depend largely on the patriarchal spirit for their power, claiming direct descent in unbroken line from the Sun-Goddess, while the people are supposed to be them- selves descendants of Emperors or of minor gods. In family life the patriarchal idea is still more prominent, the father being the virtual ruler until he abdicates in favor of the eldest son.
Ancestor-worship is general, of course, and a typical case is that of my young Nikko friend, who tells me that in his home are memorial tablets to six of his most recently deceased ancestors, and that hot rice is placed before these tablets each morning. Now the teaching is that the spirits of the dead need the odor of the rice for nourishment, and also require worship of other kinds. Consequently the worst misfortune that can befall a man is to die without heirs to honor his memory (the mere dying itself is not so bad); and if an oldest son die unmarried such action amounts almost to treason to the family.
Moreover, if a man be without sons (daughters don't count), he may adopt a son; and the cases of adoption are surprisingly frequent. Count Okuma, ex-prime minister of the empire, whom I visited last Sunday, adopted his son-in-law as his
8 WHERE HALF THE WORLD IS WAKING IIP
legal son. A distinguished banker I visited is also an adopted son; and in a comparatively brief list of eminent Japanese, a sort of abbreviated national "Who's Who," I find perhaps twenty cases in which these eminent officials and leaders have been adopted and bear other family names than those with which they were bom.
The willingness to give up one's name in adoption, viewed in the light of the excessive devotion to one's own ancestors and family name, is only another illustration of Japanese contrariety. It is a land of surprises.
Miyanoshita, Japan.
n
SNAPSHOTS OF JAPANESE LIFE AND PHILOSOPHY
'HAT is a Japanese city like?" Well, let us "sup- pose," as the children say. You know the Amer- ican city nearest you, or the one you live in.
Suppose then you should wake up in this city to-morrow morning and find in the first place that forty-nine people out of every fifty have put on such unheard-of clothing as to make you rub your eyes in wonder as to whether you are asleep or awake; next, that everybody has become six inches shorter, and that all these hundred-thousand five-foot men and four-foot women have unanimously developed most violent sunburn — have become bronzed almost beyond recognition.
Moreover, the high buildings you once knew have all dis- appeared, and a wilderness chiefly of tiny one and two story houses has taken their places, wherein the first story, even in two-story buildings, is so low that all your new brown friends warn you by a gesture to duck your head as you go through the doors, while the second story is usually little more than a garret.
Next, a wild jargon of unmeaning voices strikes your ear and you discover that ninety-nine people out of a hundred have forgotten how to speak English. More than this, the English signs are no more, and on the billboards and before the business offices are marks that look as if a thousand ostriches fresh from a thousand ink barrels had been set to scratching new signs to take the places of the old. You pick up a book
d
10 WHERE HALF THE WORLD IS WAKING UP
or the morning paper, and the same thing has happened — pig tracks, chicken tracks, and double bowknots fantastically tied instead of English type — and everybody begins at the back of the book and reads toward him instead of reading the way you have grown used to!
And the buggies, carriages, and automobiles: what on earth has become of them? There's hardly a horse in sight, but dozens or scores of men with bare legs and odd clothes, each flying around pulling a light two-wheeled jinrikisha, a man or a woman seated in each man-drawn "buggy"; and there are dozens of other bare-legged men laboriously pulling heavy loads of vegetables, freight, and even lumber and giant tele- graph poles! You jump into one of the rickshaws and for- get your strange little Puck-like steed in the marvel of your surroundings till a voice from the shafts makes you feel like Ba- laam when the ass spoke to him!
By this time you begin to get a hazy idea as to how the people are dressed, and as nearly as you can make out, it is something like this :
Evidently all the inhabitants of an ancient Roman city, a modern American town, a half-dozen Hindoo villages, and several thousand seashore bathers have all thrown their clothes — (or the lack of them !) — into one tremendous pile, and everybody has rushed in pell-mell and put on the first thing, or the first two or three things, that came to hand. There is every conceivable type of clothing, but perhaps the larger number have wound up with something like a light bathing suit and a sort of gingham dressing-gown belted over it; and if one has less than this, why, then, as the Japanese say, "Shikata na gai" (All right; it can't be helped). In the shops and stores one passes a few men clad only in their own integrity and a loin-cloth, and both children and grown people dress with a hundred times more disregard of convention than the negroes in America.
Of shoes, there is an equally great variety as of clothing,
SNAPSHOTS OF JAPANESE LIFE AND PHILOSOPHY 11
but the majority of men, women, and children (in muddy weather at least) have compromised on the "getas," a sort of wooden sole strapped on the foot, with wooden pieces put fore and aft the instep, these pieces throwing the foot and sole about three inches above ground. It looks almost as difficult to walk in them as to walk on stilts, but away the people go, young and old, and the muddy places marked by the strange footwear look as if the corrugated wheels of a hundred mow- ing-machines had passed along! In most cases the clatter of the "get as" is the loudest noise on the streets, for the Japa- nese are remarkably quiet: in Tokyo to-day I saw a thousand of them waiting to see the Empiess, and an American crowd would literally have made more noise in a minute than they made in an hour.
On entering their houses, as we have already noticed, the people take oflf their getas, sandals, shoes or whatever outer footwear is used — for the very good reason that the people sit on the floor (on mats or on the floor itself), eat on the floor (very daintily, however), and sleep on the floor, so that to walk over the floor here with muddy feet would be the same as if an American should walk roughshod over his chairs, table and bed. Even in the Japanese department store I visited this morning cloth covers were put on my shoes, and this afternoon at the Ni-no Go Reiya Shinto temple I had to go in my stocking feet.
Then the babies — who ever saw as many babies to the square inch? About 10 per cent; of the male population seems to be hauling other men, but 50 per cent, of the female popula- tion seems hardly enough to carry the wise and happy-looking little Jap babies — not in go-carts (a go-cart or a hired nurse is almost never seen), but on the back. And these little women who when standing are only about as tall as you are when sitting — they seem hardly more than children themselves, so that you recall Kipling's saying of Japan: "A four-foot child walks with a three-foot child, who is holding the hand
12 WHERE HALF THE WORLD IS WAKING UP
of a two-foot child, who carries on her back a one-foot child."
Boys in their teens are also seen with babies strapped on their backs in the same loose-fitting, sack-like baby-holders, and after work- time the father takes a turn at the same business. You are reminded of the negro who said to another: " 'Fo Gawd, Bill, you's got the mos' chillun any nigger I ever seed. Why, I passed yo' house yistiddy mornin' at nine erclock and throwed a brick on top and hollered Tiah!' an' at five erclock in the evenin' nigger chillun was still runnin' out!" It seems some- times as if such an incident, with Jap children substituted for negroes (I doubt if there is a negro here), might actually happen in Japan.
And those two men bowing to each other as they meet — are they rehearsing as Alphonse and Gaston for the comedy show to-night, or are they serious? No, they are serious, for yonder is another pair meeting in the same way, and yonder another couple separating with even more violent "convulsions of politeness ' ' — and nobody laughing but yourself. No wonder the Japanese are strong: they only need to meet a few friends a day to get exercise enough to keep them in trim ! Look again : those women meeting at the depot, for example (for there are familiar-looking street cars and less familiar-looking passenger cars amid all these strange surroundings). There is the woman with her hair combed straight back, which, I am told, means that she is a widow; one with an odd Japanese topknot, which means that she is married, and a younger one whose hair is arranged in the style of unmarried girls; and though they are evidently bosom friends, they do not embrace and kiss at meeting — to kiss in public would be shocking to the Japanese — and you can only guess the depth of their affection by the greater warmth and emphasis of their bows to one another.
They are trained in politeness from their youth up, are these Japanese; and it is perhaps the greatest charm of both young and old, I must have seen a full hundred thousand Japanese
THE GIANT AVENUE OF < UYPTOMEHIA.S AT NIKKO This magnificent avenue, twenty-five miles in length, consists of trees planted by daimyos, or small lords, as a memorial to the great Japanese warrior and statesman, lyeyasu. A spirit of simplicity and love of nature has produced a nobler monument than extravagance could possibly have done
TYPICAL JAPANESE COSTUMES AND TEMPLE ARCHITECTURE
In the temple picture notice also how the limbs of the trees have been trained Many fantastic effects are often produced in this way
SNAPSHOTS OF JAPANESE LIFE AND PHILOSOPHY 15
by this time, and I do not recall one in the attitude of scolding or abuse, while authorities tell me that the Japanese language simply has no words to enable one to swear or curse. I was also interested to have the American Ambassador here tell me that in all his three years' stay in Japan, and with all the freedom with which a million children run about the streets and stores, he has never seen a man impatient with a child. At the Imperial University yesterday morning I noticed two college boys part with the same deep courtesy used by the older men, and the little five-year-old girl near Chuzenji the other day thanked me for my gift with the most graceful of Eastern salaams.
I shall not say that the excessive ceremoniousness of the men does not at times seem ludicrous, but when you come to your hotel dining-room, and the inexpressibly dainty little Japanese girls, moving almost noiselessly on their sandaled feet (no getas indoors) welcome each guest with smiling bows, happy, refined and graceful, a very different impression of Japanese courtesy comes over you. In America, unfortunately, the like cour- teous attention under such circumstances might be misinter- preted, but here you are only reminded of how a thousand years of courtesy and gentle manners have given the women of Japan — pretty though they are not, judged by our Western standards — an unsurpassed grace of manner and happiness of disposition together with Shakespeare's well-praised "voice, soft and low, an excellent thing in woman."
And here and everywhere, as in the old fable of the man with the overcoat, must not such sun-like gentleness be more power- ful in compelling deference than all the stormy strength of the "new woman".?
Which reminds me that however much the social, political, and economic revolution of the last forty years may have changed the national character (and upon this point I shall not speak till later), it is certain that Old Japan and the Old South were distinguished for not a few characteristics in
16 WHERE HALF THE WORLD IS WAKING UP
common. For example, we are reminded of the South's ante- bellum civilization when we learn that in old Japan "the business of money-making was held in contempt by the su- perior classes," and of all forms of business, agriculture was held in highest esteem. Next to the nobility stood the Samurai, or soldier class, the social rank of all other persons then being as follows: (1) farmers, (2) artisans, (3) merchants. And farming was thus not only regarded as the most honorable of all occupations, but farmers in the early ages were privi- leged to wear swords, the emblem of rank next to the nobility. Below the farmers ranked the mechanic element, while as Lafcadio Hearn tells us:
"The commercial class (A kindo), including bankers, merchants, shopkeepers, and traders of all kinds, was the lowest officially recognized. The business of money-making was held in contempt by the superior classes; and all methods of profiting by the purchase and resale of the produce of labor were regarded as dishonorable. . , . There is a generally, in militant society, small respect for the common forms of labor. But in old Japan the occupation of the farmer and artisan were not despised; trade alone appears to have been considered degrading, and the distinction may have been partly a moral one."
I wonder if there is not really a great deal more than we have realized in what Hearn here suggests as to the soundness and essential "morality" of the Japanese plan of ranking farming and manufacturing above trade as occupations? Morally and economically considered, it is the men who actually produce wealth rather than those men who trade or barter in the products of other men's labor who deserve most honor. They serve the world best : The barterers are, in limited numbers, necessary and useful servants of those who do produce, but the strength of a state manifestly lies in the classes who are really creators of values.
ToIq'^o, Japan.
Ill
JAPANESE FARMING AND FARMER FOLK
I WENT yesterday to the Agricultural College of the Im- perial University of Japan, situated at Komaba, near Tokyo, where I had an appointment with Director Matsui. My purpose was to get further information concerning the general condition of Japanese farmers and Japanese farming, but the biggest fact my researches brought out was not in regard to rice or barley or potatoes or taro, or any other field product of the Mikado's empire.
Rather it was a fact with regard to what is in every land the most important of all crops — the crop of boys and girls. And the big fact I discovered was simply this:
These brown Mongolian farm children, whose land we opened to civilization but fifty years ago, and whom we thought of but yesterday as backward "heathen" — they are getting, as a general proposition, just twice as much schooling as is furnished pupils in many of our American rural districts : their parents are providing, in their zeal for their children's welfare, just twice as good educational facilities as we are giving many of our white farm boys and girls — boys and girls who have in their veins the blood of a race which has carried the flag of human progress for a thousand years, and whom we are ex- pecting to continue leaders in civilization and enlightenment.
In other words, so Doctor Matsui told me (and I went to- day to the Japanese National Department of Education to verify the fact), the Japanese farm boys and girls are getting ten months' schooling a year, while the farm boy or girl in
17
18 WHERE HALF THE WORLD IS WAKING UP
my own state is getting only five or six months — and when I was in a country school fifteen years ago, not nearly so much as that! Do you wonder that I avoided telling the Japanese educational officer just how our provision for farm boys and girls compared with Japan's? Also that I neglected to tell him how we compare in the matter of utilizing school advan- tages, when he showed me that of all the children between six and fourteen in all the empire of Japan the school attendance is 98 per cent. — 98 out of every 100 children of "school age" attending school, and in several provinces 99 out of every 100! Thirty -five years ago the average school attendance in Japan was only 28, and in 1893 only 59, but by the time of the war with Russia it had passed 90, and since then has been climbing straight and steadily toward the amazing maximum itself, the official figures showing a gain of 1 per cent, a year — 94 per cent., then 95, then 96, then 97, and now 98, and the leaders are now ambitious for 99 or 100, as they told me to-day.
When this officer of an "inferior race" showed me, further- more, that Japan is so intent upon educating every boy and girl in her borders that she compels attendance on the public schools for eight years, I didn't tell him that in civilized America, in the great enlightened nation so long held up to him as a model, demagogues and others in many states on one pretext or another have defeated every effort for effective compulsory education laws, so that if a boy's parents are in- different to his future, the state does not compel them to give him a fighting chance in life — for the state's own sake and for the boy's.
With these facts before me, as I have said, I did not make any vainglorious boasts of the great educational progress of our own states these last twenty years : However much prog- ress we have made, these brown Japanese "heathen" have beaten us. While there is no official census on the question of illiteracy here, every Japanese man in his twenties must serve
JAPANESE FARMING SCENES
h..ilJfn7^^'"/'^^''^ '^°T', ^^^^f ^^^^ '"^ ^^^ foreground, tea alongside the buildings, and the graceful feathery bamboo in the background; also an unusual sight on a Japanese farm, a group of cattle. The lower picture shows tne work ot transplanting rice
JAPANESE SCHOOL CHILDREN Boys predominate in the upper picture, girls in the lower. A system of compulsory education is enforced in Japan, and 98 per cent, of the children of school age" attend. Even the country schools run ten months in the year — longer than in a majority of our states
JAPANESE FARMING AND FARMER FOLK 21
two years in the army (unless he is in a normal school studying to be a teacher), and a record is made as to the literacy or illiteracy of each recruit. That is to say, there is a place where the fact of any recruit's inability to read would be recorded, but the Department of Education informed me to-day that the illiterate column is now absolutely blank.
There are no illiterates among Japan's rising generation.
More than this, we have to reflect that it is in their poverty that the Japanese are thus doing more than we are doing in our plenty. We waste more in a year than they make. Even with a hundred acres of land the American farmer is likely to consider himself poor, but when I asked my Japanese guide the other day if two cho (five acres) would be an average sized farm here he said: "No, not an average; such a man would be regarded as a middle-class farmer — a rather large farmer.'' And the figures which I have just obtained in a call on the national Department of Agriculture and Commerce more than justify the reply.
Forty-six farmers out of every 100 in Japan own less than one and one quarter acres of land; 26 more out of every 100 own less than two and one half acres, and only one man in a hundred owns as much as twenty-five acres. (In the matter of cultivation also I find that 70 per cent, cultivate less than two and one half acres, and nearly half are tenants.)
This year the situation is even worse than usual, for dis- astrous floods have reduced the rice crop, which represents one half Japan's crop values, 20 per cent, below last year's figures, and many people will suffer.
Ordinarily, however, these little handkerchief -sized farms yield amazingly. It has been shown by Prof. F. H. King that the fields of Japan are cultivated so intensively, fertilized so painstakingly, and kept so continuously producing some crop, that they feed 2277 people to the square mile — 21,321 square miles of cultivated fields in the main islands supporting a population of 48,542,376. If the tilled fields of Iowa, for
22 WHERE HALF THE WORLD IS WAKING UP
example, supported an equal number of people per square mile, the population so supported would be over 100,000,000. That state alone could feed the entire population of the United States and then have an excess product left for export to other countries! If North Carolina did as well with her cultivated land she would support 30,000,000 people, and if Mississippi's 11,875 square miles of land under cultivation supported each 2277 persons, then 27,041,375 people, or thirteen times the present population of the state, could live off their produce!
And yet these Japanese lands have been in cultivation for unnumbered centuries. Some of them may have been cleared when King Herod trembled from his dream bi a new-born rival in Judea, and certainly "the glory that was Greece and the grandeur that was Rome" had not faded from the earth when some of these fields began their age-long ministry to human need. And they have been kept fertile simply by each farmer putting back on the ground every ounce of fertility taken from it, for commercial fertilizers were absolutely unknown until our own generation.
Of course, with a population so dense and with each man cultivating an area no larger than a garden-patch in America, the people are poor, and the wonder is that they are able to produce food enough to keep the country from actual want. Practically no animal meat is eaten; if we except fish, the average American eats nearly twice as much meat in a week as the average Japanese does in a year: to be exact, 150 pounds of meat per capita is required per year for the average American against 1.7 pounds for the average Japanese! Many of the farmers here are too poor even to eat a good quality of rice. Consequently Japan presents the odd phenomenon of being at once an exporter and a large importer of rice. Poor farmers sell their good rice and buy a poorer quality brought in from the mainland of Asia and mix it with barley for grinding.
Only about one farmer in three has a horse or an ox; in most cases all the work must be done by hand and with crude tools.
JAPANESE FARMING AND FARMER FOLK 23
It is pitiful — or rather I should say, it would be pitiful if they did not appear so contented — to see men breaking the ground not by plowing but by digging with kuwas : long-handled tools with blades perhaps six inches wide and two feet long. At the Agricultural College farm in Komaba I saw about thirty Japanese weeding rice with the kama — a tool much like an old-fashioned sickle except that the blade is straight: the right hand quickly cut the roots of the weed or grass plant and the left hand as quickly pulled it up. With the same sickle-like kamas about thirty other Japanese were cutting and shocking corn: they are at least too advanced to pull fodder, I was interested to notice!
With land so scarce, it is of course necessary to keep some- thing on the ground every growing day from year's end to year's end. Truckers and gardeners raise three crops a year. Rice, as a rule, is not sown as with us, but the plants are trans- planted as we transplant cabbage or tomato plants (but so close together, of course, that the ripening fields look as if they had been sown), in order that the farmer may save the time the rice plants are getting to the transplanting stage. That is to say, some other crop is maturing on the land while the rice plants are growing large enough to transplant. Riding through the country almost anywhere you will notice the tender young plants of some new crop showing between the rows of some earlier-planted crop now maturing or newly harvested.
The crops in Japan are not very varied. Rice represents half the agricultural values. Next to rice is the silkworm industry, and then barley, wheat, vegetables, soy beans, sweet potatoes, and fruits. There is especial interest in fruit grow- ing just now. Sweet potatoes grow more luxuriantly than in any other country I have ever seen, and are much used for food, I have seen one or two little patches of cotton, but evidently only for home spinning, although I hear it said that in Korea, which has just been formally annexed as Jap- anese territory, cotton can be profitably grown. A much
24 WHERE HALF THE WORLD IS WAKING UP
cultivated plant, with leaves like those of the lotus or water- lily, is the taro, which I also saw growing in Hawaii; its roots are used for food as potatoes are.
Every particle of fertility of every kind, as I have said, is religiously saved, and in recent years a considerable demand for commercial fertilizers has sprung up, $8 to $10 worth per acre being a normal application.
So much for the farming country as it has impressed me around Tokyo. A few days ago I saw a somewhat different agricultural area — 280 miles of great rice-farming land be- tween Miyanoshita and Kyoto. This country is different from that around Yokahoma and north of Tokyo in that it is so much more rolling and mountainous (majestic Mount Fuji, supreme among peaks, was in sight several hours) and greater efforts are therefore necessary to take care of the soil.
But when such effort is necessary in Japan, it is sure to be made. The population is so dense that every one realizes the essential criminality of soil- waste, of the destruction of the one resource which must support human life as long as the race shall last.
Much of the land is in terraces, or, perhaps I should say, tiers. That is to say, here will be a half-acre or an acre from eighteen inches to six feet higher (all as level as a threshing- floor) than a similar level piece adjoining. While the levelling is helpful in any case for the preservation of fertility and the prevention of washing, the tier system is necessary in many cases on account of the irrigation methods used in rice growing. While the lower plot is flooded for rice, upland crops may be growing on the adjacent elevated acre or haff-acre.
The hillside or mountain slopes are also cultivated to the last available foot, and in dry seasons you may even see the men and women carrying buckets uphill to water any suffering crop. In nearly all cases the rows are on a level. Where there was once a slanting hillside the Japanese here dig it down or grade it, and the mountainsides are often enormous steps or
JAPANESE FARMING AND FARMER FOLK 25
stairs; one level terrace after another, each held in place by turf or rock wall.
Rice growing, as it is conducted in Japan, certainly calls for much bitter toil. The land must be broken by hand; into the muddy, miry, water-covered rice fields the farmer-folk must wade, to plant the rice laboriously, plant by plant; then the cultivation and harvesting is also done by hand, and even the threshing, I understand. When we recall that the net re- sult of all this bitter toil is only a bare existence made increas- ingly hard by the steady rise in land-taxes, and that the Japanese people know practically none of the diversions which give joy and color to American and English country life, it is no wonder that thousands of farmers are leaving their two and three acre plots, too small to produce a decent living for a family, to try their fortunes in the factories and the towns. Specifically, it may be mentioned that the boys from the farms who go into the army for the compulsory two years' service are reported as seldom returning to the country.
True, the government is trying to help matters to some extent (though this is indeed but little) by lending money to banks at low rates of interest with the understanding that the farmers may then borrow from these banks at rates but little higher; and there are also in most communities, I learn, "co- operative credit societies" (corresponding somewhat to the mutual building and loan societies in American towns), by means of which the farmers escape the clutches of the Shy- lock money-lenders who have heretofore charged as high as 20 to 30 per cent, for advances. The Japanese farmers invest their surplus funds in these "cooperative credit societies," just as they would in savings banks, except that in their case their savings are used solely for helping their immediate neigh- bors and neighborhoods. A judicious committee passes upon each small loan, and while the interest rates might seem high to us, we have to remember that money everywhere here commands higher intei:est than in America.
26 WHERE HALF THE WORLD IS WAKING UP
I am the more interested in these "cooperative credit so- cieties," because they seem to me to embrace features which our American farmers would do well to adopt.
It is said that the farmers live on better food than they had twenty years ago, but I should think that there has been little improvement in the little thatch-roofed houses in which they live. These houses are grouped into small villages, as are the farm houses in Europe, the farmer going out from the set- tlement to his fields each working day, much after the fashion of the workers on the largest American plantations. Build- ings corresponding to our American two-story houses are almost never seen in towns here and absolutely never in farming sections, the farm home, like the town home, usually con- sisting of a story and a half, with sliding walls of paper-covered sash between the rooms, a sort of box for the fire on which the meals are cooked, and no chimney — little better, though much cleaner, than the negro cabins in the South. In winter the people nearly freeze, or would but for the fact that the men put on heavy woolens, and the women pile on cotton padding until they look almost like walking feather beds.
True as are the things that I have said in this article, I fear that my average reader would get a very gloomy and false conception of Japanese farm life if I should stop here. The truth is that, so far as my observation goes, I have seen noth- ing to indicate that the rural population of Japan is not now as happy as the rural population in America. If their posses- sions are few, so are their wants. In fact. Dr. Juichi Soy- eda, one of the country's leading men, in talking to me, ex- pressed a doubt as to whether the new civilization of Japan will really produce greater average happiness than the old rural seclusion and isolation (a doubt, however, which I do not share). "Our farm people," he said, "are hard-working, frugal, honest, cheerful, and while their possessions are small, there is little actual want among them. A greater
JAPANESE FARMING AND FARMER FOLK 27
number than in most other countries are home-owners, and, altogether, they form the backbone of an empire."
Doctor Soyeda went on to give a noteworthy illustration of the affection of the people for their home farms. "The Jap- anese," he said, "have a term of contempt for the man who sells an old homestead." There is no English word equivalent to it, but it means "a seller of the ancestral land," and to say it of a man is almost equivalent to reflecting upon his character or honor! I wish that we might develop in America such a spirit of affection for our farm homes.
I wish, too, that we might develop the Japanese love of the beautiful in nature. No matter how small and cramped the yard about the tiny home here, you are almost sure to find the beauty of shrub and tree and neatly trimmed hedge, and in Tokyo the whole population looks forward with connoisseur- like enthusiasm to the season for wistaria blooms in earliest spring, to the cherry blossom season in April, to lotus-time in mid-summer, and to the chrysanthemum shows in the fall. The fame of Tokyo's cherry blossoms has already gone around the world, and thus they not only add to the pleasure of its citi- zens, but give the city a distinction of no small financial advan- tage as well.
Why may not our civic improvement associations, women's clubs, etc., get an idea here for our American towns? A long avenue of beautiful trees along a road or street, even if trees without blossoms, would give distinction to any small village or to any farm. Every one who has been to Europe will recall the long lines of Lombardy poplars that make the fair vision of many French roads linger long in the memory, and I can never forget the magnificent avenue of cryptomerias — gigantic in size, straight as ship masts, fair as the cedars of Lebanon — that line the road leading to the great Shogun lyeyasu's tomb in Nikko.
Lastly, these people are fired by the thought that a better day is coming, Their children are going to school, as the
28 WHERE HALF THE WORLD IS WAKING UP
older folk could not, and as a Japanese editor said to me this week:
"Every boy in the empire believes he may some day be- come Premier!"
What is the lesson of it all? Is it not just this: That we in America should feel highly favored in that we have such magnificent resources, and yet as sharply rebuked in that we are doing so little with them.
And most of all, is there not need for us to emulate the broad patriotism and the heroic spirit of self-sacrifice in which the Land of the Rising Sun, in spite of dire poverty, is provid- ing ten-months schools for every boy and girl in all its borders? And, indeed, how otherwise can we make sure, before it is too late, that our American farm boys and girls will not be out- distanced in twentieth-century achievement by the children of a people our fathers regarded only as hopeless "heathen?"
Tokyo, Japan.
IV
"WELFARE WORK" IN JAPANESE FACTORIES
THE obvious truth is that the agricultural population of Japan is too congested. It is a physical impos- sibility for a people to live in genuine comfort on such small pocket-handkerchief pieces of land, even though their standards do not call for shoes or tables, beds or chairs. Western houses or Western clothing. The almost exclusive use of hand labor, too, is uneconomic, seen from a large standpoint, and it would seem that in future farmers must combine, as they are already beginning to do, in order to purchase horses and horse-power tools to be used in common by a number of farmers. In the Tokyo Seed, Plant & Imple- ment Company store the other day I saw a number of widely advertised American tools, and the manager told me the demand for them is increasing.
Thus with a smaller number of men required to produce the nation's food, a larger number may engage in manufactur- ing, and gradually the same principle of division of labor which has brought Western people to high standards of living, com- fort, and earning power will produce much the same result in Japan. Already wages, astonishingly low as they are to-day to an ordinary American, have increased 40 per cent, in the last eight or ten years, this increase being partly due to the general cheapening of money the world over, and partly also to the increased efficiency of the average laborer.
Unfortunately, however, Japan is not content to rely upon natural law for the development of its manufactures. Adam
30 WHERE HALF THE WORLD IS WAKING UP
Smith said in his "Wealth of Nations" (published the year of our American Declaration of Independence), that the policy of all European nations since the downfall of the Roman Empire had been to help manufacturing, the industry of the towns, rather than agriculture, the industry of the country — a policy in which America later imitated Europe. Japan now follows suit. For a long time the government has paid enor- mous subsidies to shipbuilding and manufacturing corporations, and now a high tariff has been enacted, which wiU still further increase the cost of living for the agricultural classes, compris- ing, as they do, two thirds of the country's population.
"With your cheap labor and all the colossal Oriental market right at your door," I said to Editor Shihotsu of the Kohumin Shimbun a day or two ago, "what excuse is there for further dependence on the government? What can be the effect of your new tariff except to increase the burdens of the farmer for the benefit of the manufacturer.'*" And while defending the policy, he admitted that I had stated the practical effect of the policy. "They are domestic consumption duties," was his phrase; and Count Okuma, one of the empire's ablest men, once Minister of Agriculture, has also pointed out how injuri- ously the new law will affect the masses of the people.
"Some would argue," he said in a speech at Osaka, "that the duties are paid by the country from which the goods are imported. That this is not the case is at once seen by the fact that an increase in duty means a rise in the price of an article in the country imposing the duty, and this to the actual consumer often amounts to more than the rise in the duty. In these cases consumers pay the duty themselves; and the customs revenues, so far from being a national asset, are merely another form of taxation paid by the people." And the masses in Japan, already staggering under the enormous burden of an average tax amounting to 32 per cent, of their earnings (on account of their wars with China and Russia and their enormous army and navy expenditure), are ill-prepared to stand further
"WELFARE WORK" IN JAPANESE FACTORIES 31
taxation for the benefit of special interests. On the whole, there seems to have been much truth in what a recent authority said on this subject:
" The Japanese manufacturers are concerned only to make monopoly profits out of the consumer. If they can do that, they will not worry about foreign markets, from which, in fact, their policy is bound more and more to exclude them."
In any case, manufacturing in Japan is bound to increase, but it ought not to increase through unjust oppression of agriculture or at the expense of the physical stamina of the race. This fact is now winning recognition not only from the nation at large, but from public-spirited manufacturers as well.
Some very notable evidence upon this point came to me Wednesday when influential friends secured special per- mission, not often granted to strangers, for me to visit the great Kanegafuchi Cotton Spinning Company's plant near Tokyo — the great surprise being not that I succeeded in getting permission to visit this famous factory, though that was partly surprising, but in what I saw on the visit.
Much has been said and written as to the utterly deplorable condition of Japanese factory workers, and I was quite prepared for sights that would outrage my feelings of humanity. Imag- ine my surprise, therefore, when I found the manager making a hobby of "welfare work" for his operatives and with a sys- tem of such work modelled after the Krupp system in Germany, the best in the world! And as the Kanegafuchi Company has seventeen factories in all, representing several cities and aggregating over 300,000 spindles, being one of the most famous industries of Japan, it will be seen that its example is by no means without significance.
The Kanegafuchi's Tokyo factories alone employ 3500 operatives, and they are cleaner, I should say, than most of our stores and offices. The same thing is true of their great hospital and boarding-house, and the dining-room is also sur-
32 WHERE HALF THE WORLD IS WAKING UP
prisingly clean and well kept. Of the welfare work proper a whole article could be written. Each operative pays 3 per cent, of his or her wages (most operatives are women) into a common insurance and pension fund, and the company, out of its earnings, pays into the fund an equal amount. From this a pension is given the family of any employee who dies, while if an operative gets sick or is injured, a committee, as- sisted by Director Fuji, allows a suitable pension until recovery. In the case, however, of long-standing disease or disability, help is given, after ten years, from still another fund. This employees' pension fund now amounts to $143,000, while other funds given partly or wholly by the company include $30,000 for operatives' sanitary fund, $112,000 in a fund "for promoting operatives' welfare," and $15,000 for erecting an operatives' sanatorium. The company also has a savings department, paying 10 per cent, on long-time deposits made by employees. There is an excellent theatre and dance hall at the Tokyo plant, and I suppose at the other branches also, and five physicians are regularly employed to look after the health of operatives.
While the hours of labor in Japan generally are inexcusably long and, as a rule, only two rest days a month are allowed, the Kanegafuchi Company observes the Biblical seventh-day rest with profitable results. The work hours are long yet, it is true, ten hours having been the rule up to October 1, and now nine and one half hours. The ten hours this summer embraced the time from 6 to 6, with a half hour's rest from 9 to 9:30, one hour from 11:30 to 12:30, and another half hour from 3 to 3:30: a system of halfway rests not common in America, I believe.
Conditions at Kanegafuchi, of course, are not ideal, nor would I hold them up as a general model for American mills. Rather should America ask: "If Japan in a primitive stage of industrial evolution is doing so much, how much more ought we to do?" More noteworthy still is the fact that the senti- ment of the country is loudly and insistently demanding a law
"WELFARE WORK" IN JAPANESE FACTORIES 3S
to stop the evils of child labor and night work for women, which, on the whole, are undoubtedly bad — very bad. The Kanegafuchi welfare work is exceptional, but it is in line with the new spirit of the people.
That Japan with its factory system not yet extensive, its people used to a struggle for existence tenfold harder than ours, and with a population comprising only the wealthy or capitalist class — that under such conditions, these Buddhist Japanese should still make effective demand for adequate factory labor legislation is enough to put to shame many a Christian state in which our voters still permit conditions that reproach our boasted chivalry and humanity. Perhaps all the changes needed cannot be made at once without injury to manufactur- ing interests, but in that case the law should at least require a gradual and steady approach to model conditions — a distinct step forward each six months until at the end of three years, or five years at longest, every state should have a law as good as that of Massachusetts.
Tokyo, Japan.
DOES JAPANESE COMPETITION MENACE THE WHITE MAN'S TRADE?
WITH all the markets of the Orient right at Japan's doors and labor to be had for a mere song — four fifths of her cotton-factory workers, girls and women averaging 13| cents a day, and the male labor averaging only 22 cents — it is simply useless for Europe and America to attempt to compete with her in any line she chooses to monopolize. Now that she has recovered from her wars, she will doubtless forge to the front as dramatically as an industrial power as she has already done as a military and maritime power, while other nations, helpless in competition, must simply surrender to the Mikado-land the lion's share of Asiatic trade — the richest prize of twentieth-century commerce."
In some such strain as this prophets of evil among English and American manufacturers have talked for several years. For the last few months, professing to see in Japan's adoption of a high protective tariff partial confirmation of their predic- tions, they have assumed added authority. Their arguments, too, are so plausible and the facts as to Japan's low wage scale so patent that the world has become acutely interested in the matter. I account myself especially fortunate, therefore, in having been able to spend several weeks under peculiarly favor- able circumstances in a first-hand study of Japanese industrial
34
JAPANESE COMPETITION 35
conditions. I have been in great factories and business offices; I have talked with both Japanese and foreign manufac- turers who employ laborers by the thousand; I have had the views of the most distinguished financial leaders of the empire as well as of the great captains of industry; I have talked with several men who have served in the Emperor's cabinet, including one who has stood next to the Mikado himself in power; and at the same time I have taken pains to get the views of English and American consular officials, commercial attaches and travelers, and of newspaper men both foreign and native.
And yet after having seen the big factories and the little factory-workers in Tokyo and Osaka, after having listened to the most ambitious of Japan's industrial leaders, I shall leave the country convinced of the folly of the talk that white labor cannot compete with Japanese labor. I believe indeed that the outlook is encouraging for manufacturing in the Mi- kado's empire, but I do not believe that this development is to be regarded as a menace to English or American industry. Any view to the contrary, it seems to me, must be based upon a radical misconception of conditions as they are.
In the very outset, the assumed parallel between Japan's rise as a military power and her predicted rise as an industrial power should be branded as the groundless non sequiiur that it is. "All our present has its roots in the past," as my first Japanese acquaintance said to me, and we ignore fundamental facts when we forget that for centuries unnumbered Japan existed for the soldier, as the rosebush for the blossom. The man of martial courage was the goal of all her striving, the end of all her travail. Society was a military aristocracy, the Sam- urai the privileged class. And at the same time commerce was despised as dishonorable and industry merely tolerated as a necessary evil. In the Japan of Yalu, Liao-yang, and Mukden we have no modern Minerva springing full-armed from the head of Jove, but rather an unrecognized Ulysses
36 WHERE HALF THE WORLD IS WAKENG UP
of ancient skill surprising onlookers merely ignorant of the long record of his prowess. Viewed from the same historical standpoint, however, industrial Japan is a mere learner, unskilled, with the long and weary price of victory yet to pay. ^
In the race she has to run, moreover, the Mikado-land has no such advantages as many of our people have been led to believe. In America it has long been my conviction that cheap labor is never cheap; that so-called "cheap labor" is a curse to any community — not because it is cheap but because it is inefficient. The so-called cheap negro labor in the South, for example, I have come to. regard as perhaps the dearest on the continent. Here in Japan, however, I was quite prepared to find that this theory would not hold good. By reason of conditions in a primitive stage of industrial organization, I thought that I might find cheap labor with all the advantages, in so far as there are any, and few of the disadvantages, encoun- tered elsewhere. But it is not so. An American factory owner in Osaka, summing up his Job's trials with raw Japanese labor, used exactly my own phrase in a newspaper article a few days ago, "Cheap labor is never cheap." And all my investiga- tions have convinced me that the remark is as applicable in Japan as it is in America or England.
The per capita wages of Japanese laborers here are, of course, amazingly low. The latest 1910 statistics, as furnished by the Department of Finance, indicate a daily wage (American money) of 40 cents for carpenters, Slj cents for shoemakers, 34 cents for blacksmiths, 25| cents for compositors, 19| cents for male farm laborers, and 22 cents for male weavers, and 12 cents for female. In the cotton factories I visited, those of the better sort, the wages run from 5 cents a day for the young- est children to 25 cents a day for good women workers. In a mousselaine mill I was told that the average wages were 22| cents, ranging from 10 cents to a maximum of 50 cents for the most skilled employees. And this, be it remembered, was
JAPANESE COMPETITION 37
for eleven hours' work and in a factory requiring a higher grade of efficiency than the average.
But in spite of the fact that such figures as these were well known to him, it was my host in the first Japanese house to which I was invited — one of the Emperor's privy councillors, and a man of much travel and culture who had studied commer- cial conditions at home and abroad rather profoundly — who expressed the conclusion that Japanese factory labor when reduced to terms of efficiency is not greatly cheaper than European, an opinion which has since grown rather trite in view of the number of times that I have heard it. "In the old handicrafts and family industries to which our people have been accustomed," my host declared, "we can beat the world, but the moment we turn to modern industrial machinery on a large scale the newness of our endeavor tells against us in a hundred hindering ways. Numbers of times I have sought to work out some industrial policy which had succeeded, and could not but have succeeded, in England, Germany, or America, only to meet general failure here because of the unconsidered elements of a different environment, a totally different stage of industrial evolution. Warriors from the beginning and with a record for continuous government unsurpassed by any Euro- pean country, our political and military achievements are but the fruitage of our long history, but in industry we must simply wait through patient generations to reach the stage repre- sented by the Englishman, Irishman, or German, who takes to machinery as if by instinct."
All my investigations since have confirmed the philosophy of this distinguished Japanese whose name, if I should mention it, would be familiar to many in America and England. In the Tokyo branch of the Kanegafuchi Spinning Company (a com- pany which controls 300,000 spindles) the director, speaking from the experience of one of the greatest and best conducted industries in Japan, declared: "Your skilled factory laborers in America or England will work four sides of a ring frame;
38 WHERE HALF THE WORLD IS WAKING UP
our unskilled laborer may work only one." A young English- man in another factory declared: "It takes five men here to do work that I and my mate would take care of at home." An American vice-consul told me that it takes three or four times as much Japanese as foreign labor to look after an equal number of looms. A Japanese expert just back from Europe declared recently that "Lancashire labor is more expensive than ours, but really cheaper." Similarly the Tokyo corre- spondent of the London Times, summing up an eight-column review of Japanese industry, observed: "If we go to the bottom of the question and consider what is being paid as wages and what is being obtained as the product of labor in Japan, we may find that Japanese labor is not cheaper than in other countries."
II
My own convinction is that in actual output the Japanese labor is somewhat cheaper than American or European labor, but not greatly so, and that even this margin of excess in com- parative cheapness represents mainly a blood-tax on the lives and energies of the Japanese people, the result of having no legislation to restrain the ruinous overwork of women and little children — a grievous debt which the nation must pay at the expense of its own stamina and which the manufacturers must also pay in part through the failure to develop experi- enced and able-bodied laborers. The latest "Japan Year Book" expresses the view that "in per capita output two or three skilled Japanese workers correspond to one foreign," but under present conditions the difficulty here is to find the skilled workers at all. When Mr. Oka, of the Department of Commerce and Agriculture, told me that the average Japanese factory hand remains in the business less than two years, I was astonished, but inquiry from original sources confirmed the view. With the best system of welfare work in the empire, the Kanegafuchi Company keeps its laborers two and a half
JAPANESE COMPETITION 39
to three years, but in a mill in Osaka of the better sort, employ- ing 2500 hands, I was told that only 20 per cent, had been at work as long as three years. Under such conditions, the majority of the operatives at any time must be in a stage of de- plorable inexperience, and it is no wonder that the "Year Book" just quoted goes on to confess that "one serious defect of the production is lack of uniformity in quality — attributed to unskilled labor and overwork of machinery."
The explanation of this situation, of course, is largely to be found in the fact that Japanese industries are women's indus- tries — there being seven times as large a proportion of women to men, the Department of Commerce informs me, as in Eu- ropean and American manufacturing. These women workers are mostly from the country. Their purpose is only to work two or three years before getting married, and thousands of them, called home to marry the husbands their parents have selected, or else giving way physically under strain, quit work before their contracts expire. "We have almost no factory laborers who look on the work as a life business," was an expression often repeated to me.
Not only in the mills, but in numerous other lines of work, have I seen illustrations of the primitive stage of Japan's indus- trial efficiency. As a concrete illustration I wish I might pass to each reader the box of Kobe-made matches on the table before me (for match-making of this sort is an important industry here, as well as the sort conducted through matri- monial middlemen without waiting for the aid or consent of either of the parties involved). I have never in my life seen such a box of matches in America. Not in a hundred boxes at home would you find so many splinters without heads, so many defective matches. And in turning out the boxes themselves, I am told that it takes five or six hands to equal the product of one skilled foreign laborer. "It takes two or three Japanese servants to do the work of one white servant" is the general verdict of housekeepers, while it has also been brought to my
40 WHERE HALF THE WORLD IS WAEING UP
attention that in shops two or three clerks are required to do the work of one at home. A Japanese newspaper man (his paper is printed in English) tells me that linotype compositors set only half as many ems per hour as in America. In short, the general verdict as I have found it is indicated by what I have written, and the most enthusiastic advocate of Japanese cheap labor, the captain of the steamer on which I came from America, rather spoiled his enthusiasm for getting his ship coaled at Nagasaki for 7| cents a ton, by acknowledg- ing that if it rained he should have to keep his ship waiting a day to get sufficient hands.
Moreover, while the Japanese factory workers are forced into longer hours than labor anywhere else — eleven hours at night this week, eleven hours in the day next week — I am con- vinced that the people as a whole are more than ordinarily averse to steady, hard, uninterrupted toil. "We have a streak of the Malay in us," as a Japanese professor said to me, "and we like to idle now and then. The truth is our people are not workers; they are artists, and artists must not be hurried." Certainly in the hurried production of the factory the Japanese artistic taste seems to break down almost beyond redemption, and the people seem unable to carry their habits of neatness and carefulness into the new environment of European machinery. "Take the Tokyo street cars," said an ex-cabinet officer to me; " the wheels are seldom or never cleaned or oiled, and are haK eaten by rust." The railroads are but poorly kept up; the tele- phones exhaust your patience; while in the case of telegraphing, your exasperation is likely to lose itself in amazed amusement. A few days ago, for example, I sent a telegram from Osaka to Kobe, took my rickshaw across town, waited for a slow train to start, and then reached Kobe and the street destination of my message before it did.
In considering the failure of Japanese labor to bring forth a satisfactory output, however, one thing more should be said, and that is that we should not put the blame wholly on the
JAPANESE COMPETITION 41
wage-earner. Not a small proportion of the responsibility- lies at the door of inexpert managers. The family system of production has not only been the rule for generations with that minority of the people not engaged in farming, but it is still the dominant type of Japanese industry, and it will take time even to provide opportunities for training a sufficient corps of superintendents in the larger lines of production.
In further illustration of my argument that cheap labor is not proving so abnormally profitable, I may question whether Japanese factories have paid as good dividends, in proportion to prevailing rates of interest on money, as factories in England and America. Baron Shibusawa, the dean of Japanese finan- ciers and one of the pioneers in cotton manufacturing, is my authority for the statement that 12 per cent, would be a rather high estimate of the average rate of dividend, while figures furnished by the Department of Finance show that for ten years the average rate of interest on loans has been 11.25 per cent.
The fact that Western ideas as to Japan's recent industrial advance have been greatly exaggerated may also be demon- strated just here. While the latest government figures show that in twelve years the number of female factory operatives increased from 261,218 to 400,925 and male factory operatives from 173,614 to 248,251, it is plain that a manufacturing popu- lation of 649,000 in a country of 50,000,000 souls is small, and the actual progress has not been so great as the relative figures would indicate. Moreover, many so-called "factories" employ less than ten persons and would not be called factories at all in England or America. The absence of iron deposits is a great handicap, the one steel foundry being operated by the government at a heavy loss, and in cotton manufacturing, where "cheap labor" is supposed to be most advantageous, no very remarkable advance has been made in the last decade. From 1899 to 1909 English manufacturers so increased their trade that in the latter year they imported $222 worth of raw
42 WHERE HALF THE WORLD IS WAKING UP
cotton for every $100 worth imported ten years before, while Japan in 1909 imported only $177 worth for each $100 worth a decade previous — though of course she made this cotton into higher grade products.
Ill
It must also be remembered that the wages of labor in Japan are steadily increasing and will continue to increase. More significant than the fact of the low cost per day, to which I have already given attention, is the fact that these wages represent an average increase per trade of 40 per cent, above the wages eight years previous. The new 1910 "Financial and Economic Annual" shows the rate of wages of forty-six classes of labor for a period of eight years. For not one line of labor is a de- crease of wages shown, and for only two an increase of less than 30 per cent.; sixteen show increases between 30 and 40 per cent., seventeen between 40 and 50 per cent,, eight from 50 to 60 per cent., three from 60 to 70 per cent., whUe significantly enough the greatest increase, 81 per cent., is for female servants, a fact largely due to factory competition. In Osaka the British vice-consul gave me the figures for the latest three-year period for which figures have been published, indicating in these thirty-six months a 30 per cent, gain in the wages of men in the factories and a 25 per cent, gain in the wages of women.
Of no small significance in any study of Japanese industry must also be the fact that there are in Japan proper a full half million fewer women than men (1910 figures: men, 25,639,581; women, 25,112,338) — a condition the reverse of that obtaining in almost every other country. Now the young Japanese are a very home-loving folk, and even if they were not, almost all Shinto parents, realizing the paramount importance of hav- ing descendants to worship their spirits, favor and arrange early marriages for their sons. And what with this competition for
JAPANESE COMPETITION 43
wives, the undiminished demand for female servants, and a half million fewer women than men to draw from, the outlook for any great expansion of manufacturing based on woman labor is not very bright. Moreover, with Mrs. Housekeeper increasing her frantic bids for servants 81 per cent, in eight years, and still mourning that they are not to be had, it is plain that the manufacturer has serious competition from this quarter, to say nothing of the further fact that the Japanese girls are for the first time becoming well educated and are therefore likely to be in steadily increasing demand as office- workers. Upon this general subject the head of one of Osaka's leading factories said to me: "I am now employing 2500women, but if I wished to enlarge my mill at once and employ 5000, it would be impossible for me to get the labor, though I might increase to this figure by adding a few hundred each year for several years."
Unquestionably, too, shorter hours, less night work, weekly holidays, and better sanitary conditions must be adopted by most manufacturers if they are to continue to get labor. The Kobe Chronicle quotes Mr. Kudota, of the Sanitary Bureau, as saying that "most of the women workers are compelled to leave the factories on account of their constitutions being wrecked " after two or three years of night work, consumption numbering its victims among them by the thousands. Either the mills must give better food and lodging than they now provide or else they must pay higher wages directly which will enable the laborers to make better provision for themselves.
Yet another reason why wages must continue to advance is the steady increase in cost of living, due partly to the higher standard developed through education and contact with Western civilization, but perhaps even more largely to the fearful burden of taxation under which the people are stagger- ing. A usual estimate of the tax rate is 30 per cent, of one's income, while Mr. Wakatsuki, late Japanese Financial Com- missioner to London, is quoted as authority for the statement
44 WHERE HALF THE WORLD IS WAE3NG UP
that the people now pay in direct and indirect taxes, 35 per cent, of their incomes. And I doubt whether even this esti- mate includes the increased amounts that citizens are forced to pay for salt and tobacco as a result of the government mon- opoly in these products, or the greatly increased prices of sugar resulting from the government's paternalistic eflForts to guar- antee prosperity to sugar manufacturers in Formosa.
IV
Higher still, and higher fpi' than anything the nation has ever yet known, must go the cost of living under the new tariff law. From a British textile representative I learned the other day that a grade of English woollens largely used by the Japanese for underwear will cost over one third more under the new tariff, while the increased duty on certain other lines of goods is indicated by the table herewith:
PERCENTAGE OF DUTY TO COST OF ARTICLE
Old Tariff New Tariff
Printed goods 3 22
White lawns 10 47
Shirtings 10 39
Cotton Italians 8 35
Poplins 8 19
Brocades 10 22
Neither a nation nor an individual can lift itself by its boot- straps. The majority of the thoughtful people in the empire seem to me to realize even now that through the new tariff Japanese industry, as a whole, is likely to lose much more by lessened ability to compete in foreign markets than it will gain by shackled competition in the home markets. Far- seeing old Count Okuma, once Premier, and one of the empire's Elder Statesmen, seemed to realize this more fully than any other man I have seen. "Within two or three years from the time the new law goes into force," he declared, "I am confi-
JAPANESE COMPETITION 46
dent that its injurious effects will be so apparent that the people will force its repeal. With our heavy taxes the margin of wages left for comfort is already small, and with the cost of living further increased by the new tariff, wages must inevi- tably advance. This will increase the cost of our manufac- tured products, now exported mostly to China, India, and other countries requiring cheap or low-grade goods, and where we must face the competition of the foremost industrial nations of the world. As our cost of production increases, our compe- tition with Europe will become steadily more difficult and a decrease in our exports will surely follow. It is folly for one small island to try to produce everything it needs. The tariff on iron, for example, can only hamper every new industry by increasing the cost of machinery, and must especially hinder navigation and shipbuilding, in which we have made such progress." Not a few of the country's foremost vernacular dailies are as outspoken as Count Okuma on this point, and the Kobe Chronicle declares that, with diminished exports to Japan, "British manufacturers will find compensation in the lessened ability of the Japanese to compete in China; and Japan will find that she has raised prices against herself and damaged her own efficiency."
That such will be the net result of Japan's new policy seems to me to admit of no question. Unfortunately, certain special lines of British and American manufacture may suffer, but, on the whole, what the white man's trade loses in Japan will be recompensed for in China and India. Even after Japan's adoption of the moderately protective tariff of 1899 her export of yarns to China — in the much discussed "market right at her doors " — dropped from a product of 340,000 bales to a recent average of 250,000 bales. From 1899 to 1908, according to the latest published government figures, the number of employees in Japanese cotton factories increased only 240 — one third of 1 per cent. — or from 73,985 to 74,225, to be exact, while I have already alluded to the figures showing the compara-
46 WHERE HALF THE WORLD IS WAKING UP
tive English and Japanese imports of raw cotton from 1890 to 1909 as furnished me by Mr. Robert Young, of Kobe, Japan in this period going from $30,000,000 to $54,000,000, or 77 per cent,, while England's advance was from $135,000,000 to $300,000,000, or 122 per cent. The increase in England's case, of course, was largely, and in Japan's case almost wholly, due to the increased price of the cotton itself, but the figures are none the less useful for the purposes of comparison.
In the frequent attempts of the Japanese Government to stimulate special industries by subsidies and special privileges there is, it seems to me, equally as httle danger to the trade of Europe and America in general (though here, too, special industries may suffer now and then), because Japan is in this way simply handicapping herself for effective industrial growth. Just at this writing we have an illustration in the case of the Formosan sugar subsidy which seems to have developed into a veritable Frankenstein; or, to use a homelier figure, the gov- ernment seems to be in the position of the man who had the bear by the tail, with equal danger in holding on or letting go. Already, as a result of the system of subsidies, bounties and special privileges, individual initiative has been discouraged, a dangerous and corrupting alliance of government with busi- ness developed, public morals debased (as was strikingly brought out in the Dai Nippon sugar scandal), and the people, as Mr. Sasano, of the Foreign Department, complains, now "rely on the help of the government on all occasions." On the same point the Tokyo Keizai declares that "the habit of looking to the government for assistance in all and everything, oblivious of independent enterprise . . . has now grown to the chronic stage, and unless it is cured the health and vitality of the nation will ultimately be sapped and undermined."
As for increasing complaints of "low commercial morality" brought against Japanese merchants, that is not a matter of concern in this discussion, except in so far as it may prove a form of Japanese commercial suicide. But to one who holds
JAPANESE COMPETITION 47
the view, as I do, that the community of nations is enriched by every worthy industrial and moral advance on the part of any nation, it is gratifying to find the general alarm over the present undoubtedly serious conditions, and it is to be hoped that the efforts of the authorities will result in an early change to better methods.
Such is a brief review of the salient features of present-day Japanese industry, and in no point do I find any material menace to the general well-being of American and European trade. It is my opinion that the Japanese will steadily develop industrial efficiency, but that in the future no more than in the present will Japan menace European and American indus- try (unless she is permitted to take unfair advantages in Manchuria, Korea, etc.), for just in proportion as efficiency increases, just in the same proportion, broadly speaking, wages and standards of living will advance. The three — efficiency, wages, cost of living — seem destined to go hand in hand, and this has certainly been the experience thus far. And whatever loss we may suffer by reason of Japan gradually supplanting us in certain cruder forms of production should be abundantly compensated for in the better market for our own higher-grade goods that we shall find among a people of increasing wealth and steadily advancing standards of living.
In any fair contest for the world's trade there seems little reason to fear any disastrous competition from Japan. Perhaps she has been allowed to make the contest unfair in Manchuria or elsewhere, but that, as Mr. Kipling would say, is another story.
Kobe, Japan.
VI
BUDDHISM, SHINTOISM, AND CHRISTIANITY IN JAPAN
ONE of the most fascinating places in all Japan is Kyoto, the old capital of the empire, and one of its most picturesque and historic cities. Without great factories such as Osaka boasts of, without the political importance of Tokyo, and without shipping advantages such as have made Kobe and Yokahoma famous, Kyoto is noted rather for conserving the life of old Japan. Here are the family industries, the handicrafts, and a hundred little arts in which the Land of the Rising Sun excels.
Little themselves in stature, the people of Japan are best in dealing with little things requiring daintiness, finish, and artistic taste. Some one has said that their art is "great in little things and little in great things," and unlike many epigrams, it is as true as it is terse.
A traveler gets the impression that most of their shops, or "stores," as we say in America, are for selling bric-a-brac, toys, lacquer ware, bronzes, or ornamental things of one kind or another; but perhaps this is largely because they give an artistic or ornamental appearance to a thousand utensils and house- hold articles which in America would be raw and plain in their obvious practicality. The room in which I write is a fine illustration of this: finished in natural, unpainted woods, entirely without "fussiness" or show, and yet with certain touches and bits of wood carving that make it a work of art. Upon this point I must again quote Lafcadio Hearn, whose
48
BUDDHISM, SHINTOISM AND CHRISTIANITY 49
books, although often more poetic and laudatory than accu- rate, are nevertheless too valuable to be neglected by any student of Japan:
"It ha3 been said that in a Greek city of the fourth century before Christ every household utensil, even the most trifling object, was in respect of design an object of art; and the same fact is true, though in another and stranger way, of all things in a Japanese home; even such articles of common use as a bronze candlestick, a brass lamp, an iron kettle, a paper lantern, a bamboo curtain, a wooden tray, will reveal to educated eyes a sense of beauty and fit- ness entirely xmknown to Western cheap production."
Like most old Japanese cities, Kyoto is proud of its temples, Buddhist and Shinto. And perhaps I should explain just here the difference between these two faiths that were long merged into one, but have been dissociated since the restora- tion of the Emperor to his old-time powers forty years ago. Shinto is the ancient Japanese system of ancestor-worship, with its doctrine of the divine descent of the Mikado from the Sun-goddess and its requirement that every faithful adherent make daily offerings to the spirits of the family's ancestors. With the future life or with moral precepts for this life it does not concern itself. "Obey the Emperor and follow your own instincts," is the gist of the Shinto religion, in so far as it may be caUed a religion at all: the tendency is to consider it only a form of patriotism and not a religion.
Buddhism, on the other hand, is an elaborate system of theology comprising a great variety of creeds, and insisting upon much ecclesiastical form and ceremony, however little it may have to do with practical morals. "The fact is, we Jap- anese have never gotten our morals from our religion," said one quasi-Buddhist newspaper man to me in Tokyo. "What moral ideas we have came neither from Shintoism nor Bud- dhism, but largely from Confucius and the Chinese classics."
Buddhism as it left India may have been a rather exalted religious theory, but if so, then in Japan it has certainly de-
50 WHERE HALF THE WORLD IS WAKLNG UP
generated into a shameless mockery of its former self. To read Sir Edwin Arnold's glorification of theoretical Buddhism in his "Light of Asia," and then see practical Buddhism in Japan with all its superstitions and idolatries, is very much like hearing bewitched Titania's praise of her lover's beauty and then turning to see the long ears and hairy features of the ass that he has become.
Nor is it without significance that Sir Edwin Arnold him- self coming to Buddhist Japan dropped Into open and flagrant immoralities such as a Christian community would never have tolerated, while the foremost American-bred apologists for Buddhism here have been but little better. One of the greatest and wealthiest temples in Kyoto is more notorious right now for the vices of its sacred (.'') officials than for any vir- tues in its creed, and one of the high priests, like the Emperor himself, has a dozen or more women in his household. Some Buddhists are making an earnest effort to bring about at least an outward reformation of their organization, but the dif- ficulties are such as to make the success of the undertaking very improbable. With the usual Japanese quality of imi- tativeness they have started "Young Men's Buddhist Asso- ciations," "Sunday schools,'* etc., and are also beginning to follow the example set by the Christians of participating in philanthropic and charitable work. In the Buddhist service I attended last Sunday the gorgeously robed priest sat on a raised altar in the centre of the room, with other priests ranged about him, and the general service, as usual, was much as if they had copied the Catholic ritual.
After the Buddhist ceremonies, I went to the Christian ser- vice at the Congregational School, or Doshisha, where the sound of the American-born minister's voice was punctuated by the street sounds of whirring rickshaw wheels and the noisy getas of passing Buddhists, while outside the window I could see the bamboo trees and the now familar red disk and white border of the Mikado's flag. Prayer was offered for "the
BUDDHISM, SHINTOISM AND CHRISTIANITY 51
President of the United States, the King of Great Britain, the Emperor of Germany, and the Emperor of Japan."
At night I was even more interested, even though I could not understand a word, in a native Japanese service I attended for half an hour. Although there was a downpour of rain the chapel was comfortably filled and the faces of the wor- shippers, I thought, were of more than ordinary intelligence and promise, while their sincerity is illustrated by the fact that numbers of the women Christians are actually depriving them- selves of suitable food in order to give money for erecting a larger church building.
The next evening I took tea with a missionary who has in his home one of the public notices (dated March, 1868,) and common throughout the empire forty odd years ago, pro- hibiting Christianity, the ancient penalty being nothing less than death itself. The explanation of this notice is found in a bit of history. Three hundred and sixty years ago the Cath- olics came here, started missions, and made many converts among the lords or daimyios, who ordered their followers also to become Catholics, with the result that by the time of the first English settlement at Jamestown, in 1607, there were from 600,000 to 1,000,000 Christians, nominal and actual, away over here in Japan. Seven years later, however, govern- ment persecution began, Christianity was put under the ban, and so remained until eight years after our Civil War ended. Many Christians suffered martyrdom for their faith in this long period; and a few who escaped detection even secretly handed their faith down from father to son through all the long generations until tolerance came again.
Dr. A. D. Hail, of Osaka, tells me that even as late as 1885 an old man from the "backwoods," as we should say, came to a village where Dr. Hail's brother was a missionary, dis- covered for the first time that a man might be a Christian with- out being punished, and then confessed that each day he had worshipped secretly at a little Catholic shrine hidden in
52 WHERE HALF THE WORLD IS WAKING UP
his wall, as his father and his father's father had done before him.
As another illustration of the changed attitude toward Christianity, I may mention that a Japanese Buddhist once came to Doctor Hail's services armed with a dagger to kill the preacher, but had his attention caught by the sermon while waiting his chance and is now a missionary himself!
Perhaps in no other respect is Christianity working a greater change than in the general estimate of woman, although this is an objection the natives openly urge against Christianity. Just as in any conflict of interest the family in Japan has been everything and the individual nothing, so in every disagree- ment between husband and wife his opinions count for every- thing, hers for nothing. The orthodox and traditional Jap- anese view as to a woman's place has been very accurately and none too strongly set forth by the celebrated Japanese moralist, Kaibarra, writing on "The Whole Duty of Woman":
"The great lifelong duty of a woman is obedience. . . . Should her husband be roused at any time to anger, she must obey him with fear and trembling, and never set herself up against him in anger and forwardness. A woman should look on her husband as if he were Heaven itself and never weary of thinking how she may yield to her husband, and thus escape celestial castigation."
Similarly, in the "Greater Learning for Women" it is declared:
"The five worst maladies that afflict the female mind are indocility, dis- content, slander, jealousy and silliness. These five maladies infest seven or eight out of every ten women, and it is from these that arises the inferiority of women to men."
The wife of the missionary I visited in Osaka told me one or two amusing incidents — amusing in one aspect and pa- thetic in another — that are of interest in this connection. A Japanese member of her church declared: "No, no, Mrs.
THE GREAT BUDDHA (DIABUTSU) AT KAMAKURA J This gigantic figure of Buddha (a man's head would barely reach the statue's feet) singularly expresses the spirit of serene contemplation for which the Buddhist religion stands; is indeed, hauntingly suggestive of that dreamy Nirvana which it teaches is the goal of existence. There is perhaps no finer piece of statuary in the East than this
THE DEGENERATE KOREANS AT REST AND AT WORK The favorite occupation is smoking, but in the lower picture three men together are managing to operate one spade. One man rams it into the ground, and the other two (by means of ropes attached) jerk out the shovelful of earth!
BUDDHISM, SHINTOISM AND CHRISTIANITY 55
Hail, you can't ever make me believe that my wife is as good as I am!" On another occasion she was teaching a Sunday- school class concerning the woman of Samaria, and asked: "Why did Jesus ask the woman to call her husband?" And the Japanese answer was: "Because he was going to talk on intellectual things and she needed some man to help her understand ! "
Dr. Sidney Gulick, with whom I had tea in Kyoto, tells of tying his wife's shoes on the street, on one occasion, only to find the Japanese amazed that a man should so humble himself. His wife's taking his arm in walking was also re- garded as the height of impropriety!
No religion of the Far East has ever recognized the dignity of woman, probably because no religion has ever recognized the worth of the individual. Just as I have said, that in the old days, and almost as largely to-day, in the relations of the home, it was the family that counted and not the individual, so in his relations to the larger world beyond the individual formerly counted for nothing when weighed against the wishes of the superior classes. In the earliest days, when the lord died, a number of his subjects were buried with him to wait upon his spirit in the Beyond. Later, with the same object in view, wives and servants committed suicide on the death of the master. Even now it is regarded as honorable for a girl to sell herself into shame to save the family from want.
The same antipodal difference between East and West — here "the family is tlie social unit" and with us the individual himself — explains the system of adoption : a younger son not being essential to the maintenance of the family cult may be adopted into another family, while the eldest son may not. On the same principle the father rules, not because of what he represents as an Individual, but because he represents the Family. Whenever he chooses, he abdicates, and must then join his other children in obeying the eldest son.
In the relations of citizenship the same disregard of individ-
56 WHERE HALF THE WORLD IS WAKING UP
ual rights was the ancient rule, not merely in the fact that for centuries the smallest details of everyday life were regulated by law, but more seriously in that the Samurai, or privileged class, might "cut down in cold blood a beggar, a merchant, or a farmer on the slightest provocation, or simply for the purpose of testing his sword," while in case of the ruin of their cause it was the honorable and natural thing for soldiers to commit "hari-kiri" — that is to say, commit suicide by disemboweling themselves. A Japanese writer recently declared that "the value of the individual life is an illustration of the Christian spirit" that is profoundly influencing Japan, and he mentioned as an example that formerly suicide, in such circumstances as I have mentioned, "was regarded as an honorable act; now it is regarded as a sin."
Without professing the religion of fatalism which so influ- ences the peoples of the Nearer East, the Japanese soldiers behave like fatalists because the fundamental basis of the social order for centuries has been the necessity of the Individ- ual to sacrifice pleasure, comfort, or life itself when required either by the Family or by the Social Order. And this partially explains why it is said in sober earnest that the highest ambition of most Japanese schoolboys to-day is to die for their Emperor. ^^^^^
This is my last letter from Japan, and my next letter will be from Korea — if the cholera doesn't get me. It has been raging in Osaka and in Kobe, both of which cities I have thought it necessary to visit in order to get first-hand information about industrial conditions. Ordinarily, the cholera victim lives only a few hours. The first day's record here in Kobe, I believe, showed six cases and five deaths. Gradually, however, cholera is being stamped out, just as we have eradicated yel- low fever in Cuba and the South, and just as we shall event- ually come to recognize the prevalence of typhoid in any town as a disgrace — an evidence of primitive and uncivilized
BUDDHISM, SHINTOISM AND CHRISTIANITY 57
sanitary conditions. A friend of mine who came to Osaka in 1879 tells me that there were 10,000 cholera victims in that one city that year — the yellow flag on almost every street, and all through the night the sound of men hurrying past with new victims for the hospitals or with new corpses for the burning. In the thirteen years 1878-91 more than 313,000 Japanese died of the scourge.
I regret to say good-by to Japan. It is a tremendously interesting country. For just as America represents the ultimate type of Occidental civilization, so does Japan rep- resent the ultimate type of Oriental civilization.
More than this, it is here that the full tides of Oriental and Occidental life are now meeting for the first time in human history. For centuries uncounted the yellow man advanced across the plains and peaks of Asia, finding at last in these outlying islands his farthermost outpost, and so tarried here in the Farthest East, "the Land of the Rising Sun." He hardly thought of the existence of a West, but if his Buddha- like composure had been ruffled by such a thought, he might have droned monotonously:
" Oh, East is East, and West is West, and never the twain shall meet."
But while the yellow man had thus moved steadily east- ward, the white man, starting from the land of the Euphrates, had pitched his camp, with each succeeding generation, nearer and nearer the setting sun. Greece — Rome — Spain — France — England — then four hundred years ago, more rest- less than the Mongolian, the white man dared the seas that hemmed him in and found a new continent to people. West- ward still the course of empire then continued until in our time the white man planted his civilization on the Pacific Coast.
There was no more West.
Then it was, as if in obedience to a cosmic, racial instinct deeper than reason, the white man sent his messengers across the new-found ocean and awakened the Sleepy World
58 WHERE HALF THE WORLD IS WAKING UP
of the Yellow Man by the booming of Perry's guns off Yokahoma.
The Kingdom of Heaven, we are told, cometh not with observation, and the deeper meaning of the greatest events in human history may often escape the attention of contem- poraries. My father and yours, perhaps, heard little and thought less of Perry's exploit, and yet it marked not merely a new historical epoch, but a new act in the long drama of human evolution itself. Curious, too, it is to observe how the strange world-destiny that shapes our ends gave to it a stage-setting in keeping with its dramatic significance. Not to England, nor to any other great naval and commercial Power of the time, but to the young United States — the nation that had found the ultimate West — came the un- likely but strangely fitting task of opening the Farthest East to Western trade and thought.
When at last the world has grown old and nations and empires not yet formed shall themselves have gone the mortal way common alike to human creatures and human creations, I think the far historian will record few events either more dramatic or more pregnant with undreamed-of meaning than Perry's entrance into Japanese waters just five years after the discovery of gold in California had ended the world-old drama of our westward march.
So to-day, as I have said, the fuU tides of Orient and Occident have rushed together in Japan, and it is not merely a land of curious customs and strange phenomena, but a land in which the contrasts exist side by side, and most interesting of all, a land of strangely mingling social and industrial currents. East and West have met, and we wait to see what forces in each shall prevail when the shock of their fierce encounter shall have passed. For it is not merely Japan, but all Asia, whose future may be affected by the outcome of the new, tense struggle here between the ideals of West and East.
As on the streets of Tokyo and Yokahoma the Japanese
BUDDHISM, SHINTOISM AND CHRISTIANITY 59
in European dress jostles his brother in native garb, as streams of men in coats and trousers and shoes mingle with men wear- ing kimonas, hikamas, and getas, so in the minds of the people the teachings of modern science and Confucian classic meet; the faith of the Christian grapples with the faith of the Bud- dhist; the masterful aspirations of Western civilization surge against the old placidity of the East.
What shall be the outcome? Upon nothing else, it seems to me, depends so much as upon the religious foundation upon which Japan seeks to build the structure of her newer and richer life. Many of her people, if I may change the figure, are seeking to put the new wine of Christian civili- zation into the old bottles of Shinto and Buddhist ritualism. That this must fail is, I think, self-evident. Many others, like the iconoclasts of the French Revolution, would sweep away all religion, but they will find that they are fighting against an ineradicable instinct of human nature, the innate craving of the divine in man.
In my own brief stay in Japan I have seen enough to con- vince me of the truth of both the foregoing observations. I confess that I came to the country with a distinct doubt as to the wisdom of stressing mission work here — came think- ing the field less promising then elsewhere. But I go away with no such feeling. What I have seen and heard has dis- pelled my doubts. Speaking simply as a journalist and a student of social and industrial conditions, I believe that to-day Japan needs nothing more than Christian missionaries — men who are willing to forget dogma and tradition and creedal differences in emphasizing the fundamental teachings of Christ Himself, and who have education, sympathy, and vision to fit them for the stupendous task of helping mold a new and composite type of human civilization, a type which may ultimately make conquest of the whole Oriental half of our human race.
Kobe, Japan.
VII
KOREA: "THE LAND OF THE MORNING CALM"
HAVE become a contemporary of David and the patri- archs of Israel. In the civiHzation into which I have come science and invention are in swaddhng clothes, the Pyramids are yet young, the great nations of Western Europe still in the womb of Time.
This at least is how I have felt now that, having left Japan, I am travelling through Korea, "the Land of the Morning Calm" — or " Chosen," as the Japanese will call it hereafter — whose authentic recorded history runs back into the twelfth century before the Christian era, and whose general features must have changed but little in all this time. A typical Korean view of the present year might well be pho- tographed to illustrate a Sunday-school lesson from the Old Testament.
The men in the fields I have seen plow with bullocks har- nessed in the primitive fashion of the earliest civilization. Their plow stocks are of wood rough-hewn from their native forest trees, the plowman here never standing between the "plow- handles," as we say, because there is only one handle and that little better than a stick of firewood. With sickles equally pr'aiitive I have seen men cutting the ripe rice in the fields; with flails, beating out their grain. Their houses, hardly high enough to stand up in, are little more than four square rock walls with roofs of straw, over which pumpkin vines clamber or on which immense quantities of red pepper are drying in the autumn sun. Nor would the dress of the people — every-
60
KOREA: "THE LAND OF THE MORNING CALM" 61
body in white (or what was once white) garments — have seemed strange in ancient Judea.
There is also the same mixture of plains and peaks as Bible pictures of the Holy Land have made familiar, and at night, as October's hunters' moon glorifies all the landscape, a faint light gleaming here and there from an opening in the rock huts, and with Arcturus and the Pleiades of Job in the sky, it has seemed almost sacrilege to mar the ancient environment by such an anachronism as a modern railway locomotive. Rather, in looking out over the picturesque mountains and valleys and sniffing the cool, dry air, you feel "the call of the wild" in your blood. Across long centuries the life of your far-gone nomadic ancestors calls to you. Almost irresistibly you are moved to take a human friend and a friendly horse or pony and pitch your camp out under the great stars — larger and brighter indeed do they seem to burn here in the Orient — and feel the dew on your face as you awaken in the "morning calm" of the ancient Hermit Kingdom, whose feeble life was snuffed out, like the flame of a burnt-down candle, but a few short months ago.
As I came into Seoul three nights ago I found it hardly less fascinating than the country through which I had travelled during the day. Through ancient streets, unlit by any elec- tric glare, strangely robed, almost spirit-like white figures were gliding here and there in the moonlight, singly or in groups, and but a few minutes' ride in our rickshaws brought us to the old South Gate. Great monument of a dead era is it, relic of the days when Seoul trusted to its ten miles of massive stone walls (already a century old when Columbus set sail from Palos) to keep out the war-like Mongol and Tartar.
In Japan I found a different world from that which I had known, but a world in which East and West were strangely mingled: much of the famihar with the unfamiUar. Here in Korea, on the contrary, I have found the real East, the Asia of romance, of tradition and of fable, almost untouched by
62 WHERE HALF THE WORLD IS WAKING UP
Western influences — dirty, squalid, unprogressive, and yet with a fascination all its own. Great bare mountains look down on the capital city, the old city-wall climbing their steep sides, and the historic Han flows through an adjacent valley. The thatched or tiled roofs of the houses are but little higher than one's head, and I shall never forget what a tower- ing skyscraper effect is produced by a photographer's little two-story studio building on the main street of the city. Prac- tically every other building is but little higher and not greatly larger as a rule, than the pens in which our American farmers fatten hogs in the fall. Most American merchants would expect to make more in a day than the average white-robed, easy-going Seoul merchant has in stock, but he smokes his long-stemmed pipe in peaceful contemplation of the world and doesn't worry. There are no sidewalks in Seoul, of course, although it has been for five centuries (until now) the capital of a kingdom, and a quarter of a million people call the city their home; no carriages or buggies, no sewerage, and but few horses. There are miserable little overloaded ponies that the average farmer would feel that he could pitch single-handed into his barn-loft, but the burden-carriers are mostly bulls that are really magnificent in appearance, both oxen and ponies carrying loads on their backs that an American would expect to crush them.
The customs are odd indeed. Men wear enormous straw hats as a badge of mourning, but the usual style of head-dress is to shave the extreme summit of the head, while the rest of the hair grows long and is braided up in a sort of topknot with a little bird-cage hat above it. This hat is then tied under the chin as an American woman would tie hers.
Girls are but little seen on the streets, custom requiring them to stay indoors before marriage, and the married women, when on the street are likely to wear a sort of green wrap thrown over their heads and shoulders that leaves only their eyes and contiguous facial territory exposed. The tourist is at first
KOREA: "THE LAND OF THE MORNING CALM" 63
inclined to think that there are many young girls on the streets, but this is because the boys dress as we have grown used to seeing girls dress in America. Take the young boy who waits on my table: fair of feature in his neat white dress, and with a long glossy hair-plait hanging down his back, you would think him some fair Korean maiden. When he gets married a little later, probably at seventeen or eighteen, he will shave his head (not necessarily as a sign of mourning !) and wear his hair thereafter in the manner described in the preceding para- graph. An English missionary-doctor's pretty daughter here yesterday (and how pretty an English or American girl does look in this far land !) told me that a Korean girl of twenty or twenty-one is regarded as a rather desperate old maid, and the go-betweens, who arrange the mamages here as they do in Japan, are likely to charge a rather steep sum for getting a husband for one so far advanced in spinsterhood ! The chances are that the groom doesn't see his bride until the ceremony, and she doesn't even see him then, for according to the curious custom here the bride's eyes are sealed up until late after- noon of her wedding day. More than this, custom requires that the bride must keep absolutely unbroken silence all the day long, and for a varying length of time thereafter. Mrs. Bishop in her book on Korea asserts that "it may be a week or several months before the husband knows the sound of his wife's voice," — and the nature of the dear creatures in Amer- ica will of course insure the ready acceptance of her statement ! The go-betweens are often not very scrupulous, and for good fees sometimes manage to palm off damsels of unsatis- factory features on unsuspecting swains, or match undesir- able young fellows with girls vastly superior to them. A rather amusing instance was reported to me by the young lady from whom I have just quoted. One of the officials or noble- men in Seoul had a daughter whom the go-between was pre- paring to marry off into a family of rank in another city. A few days before the wedding-day-set-to-be, some one came to
64 WHERE HALF THE WORLD IS WAKING UP
the father of the bride and said: "Did you know that your prospective son-in-law has a hare-lip?" Now a hare-lip in Korea is not merely such an undesirable addition to one's countenance as to make a Mrs. Wiggs happy because of being without it, but under the old dispensation no one with a hare- lip, or other like facial blemish, could be presented at court and thereby introduced into the Four Hundred of this capital city. Therefore the father waxed though tf id from his top- knot to the end of his long-stem pipe. "I tell you what I'll do," he finally said to his wife. "We'll go ahead with the ceremony, but instead of my daughter I'll substitute my orphan niece." And he did, and the young fellow didn't know any better for a week.
Fortunately, however, my story doesn't end here. I am extremely glad to add the usual "lived-happily-ever-after" peroration, for that was really what happened in this case. The father of my young lady informant, who is a doctor, sewed up the young fellow's hp, he was presented at court, and the real daughter who so narrowly escaped marrying may be an old maid, for all I know.
In such a high, dry climate as this one would expect to find little tuberculosis, but I am told that there is really a great deal of it, due to the carelessness of the families where there are victims, and to the generally unsanitary conditions. A daughter of one of the Southern missionaries here, having contracted the malady, has just gone to Arizona in search of cure. Everywhere on the streets I encounter faces marked by smallpox, and formerly to have had the disease was the rule rather than the exception. In fact, instead of alluding to a man's inexperience by saying "He hasn't cut his eye teeth," as we do, a Korean would say: "He hasn't had smallpox." Since vaccination became the rule, however, there are very few cases.
Infant mortality here, as in America, is one of the greatest factors in the high death-rate, but conditions are improving.
KOREA: "THE LAND OF THE MORNING CALM" 65
And so long as authorities declare that in America half the infant death-rate is due to ignorance or neglect, we haven't much right to point a scornful finger at Korea, anyhow.
I have already alluded to the fact that the old monarchial government of Korea ended its inglorious career but a few short months ago. While the records of the nation run back more than three thousand years — probably to a period when Job was so superbly reproaching his comforters in the Land of Uz — the late dynasty runs back only 500 years. We Ameri- cans, I may say in passing, are accustomed to think of men of five hundred years ago, or even of John Smith and Pocahontas, as very ancient, but a pedigree of only five hundred years wouldn't entitle a family to enter good society over here. But though only five hundred years in power, this recent dynasty succeeded in doing about as much devilment and as little good as many dynasties much older in years. One of the mission- aries explained to me yesterday that it was only when the King got very mad that he would order heads cut off without reason — but then the Koreans are very lazy and his inactivity at other periods may have been due to sloth.
The truth is, that most of these Oriental monarchies have been corrupt beyond the belief of the average American. When I was a boy I used to hear the old men in country churches thank God for the blessings of orderly government and for the privilege of worshipping as they chose, "with no one to molest us or make us afraid." As a rule, we take such things as matters of course, but when one comes over here into Asia and into countries where the people have been cursed by cor- rupt governments, where innocent lives have been taken upon the mere whim of the government, where property has been confiscated with no better reason, and where men have had to die for their faiths : — when he, in short, comes into lands where the rights of neither life, property nor conscience have been respected, he is likely to prize his American privileges somewhat more highly.
66 WHERE HALF THE WORLD IS WAKING UP
The old Korean dynasty was not only corrupt, but unspeak- ably stupid. Like the people, the King relied on sorcerers or fortune-tellers to find a lucky day or a lucky time of the moon to do whatever he wished, and in case of sickness con- sulted the midang, or conjurer, instead of a doctor. Thus when the prince had smallpox some years ago, the mutang declared that the Smallpox Spirit or devil (who must always be referred to with great respect as "His Excellency") would not leave unless allowed to ride horseback clear to the Korean boundary, three hundred miles away; and a gayly caparisoned horse was accordingly led the entire distance for His Excel- lency, the Smallpox Spirit, to ride away on!
The government was also unfeignedly corrupt. Offices were given, just as lives were taken merely at the whim of the Throne. Taxes were farmed out, the grafting collectors taking from the people probably five or six times as much as finally reached the public treasury. More than this, the nobility robbed the people at will, and there was no authority from whom they could get redress. Woe unto the man who became energetic and industrious under the old dispensation! First, the tax-gatherers would relieve him of the bulk of his swollen fortune, and what was left the noble or "Yang-ban," as a noble was called, would take the trouble to borrow but never take the trouble to repay. For the Yang-ban was a "gentleman," he was. It was beneath his dignity to work — even to guide the reins of the horse he rode — but it was not beneath his dignity to sponge on his friends (I think the verb "to sponge" is too expressive to remain slang) or to borrow without repaying. Moreover, in case of extremity, it is said that Mother Yang-ban and Sister Ann might take in washing, as is recorded in the classic lays of our own land, but Father never defiled himself by doing anything so dishonorable as an honest day's work.
But alas and alack! for the degeneracy of our times. The Yang-bans in Korea have been deprived of their ancient priv-
KOREA: "THE LAND OF THE MORNING CALM" 67
ileges, and I fear that even their fellows in America are by no means treated with the ancient deference and respect due to persons of such exalted merit and blue-blood.
What with the arbitrary and oppressive system of tax-robbery and the extortions of the Yang-bans it is not surprising that the Koreans here became disinclined to labor, while those who went to Manchuria, where there has been "proper se- curity for the gains of industry," are said to be quite a different folk — energetic because there has been encouragement to be energetic. The old Korean system of taxation being arbitrary, the only way to escape a raid by the tax-gatherer was to appear not to have anything worth raiding, and with the coinage confined usually to the copper "cash" (each "cash" worth a small fraction of a cent), it was difficult for a man to have much money without everybody knowing it. If a man had much he needed a warehouse to store it in. Mrs. Bishop in her book, already referred to, speaks of a time when it took 3200 "cash" to equal a dollar in our money, making each coin worth 1-32 of a cent, and it took six men or one pony to carry $50 worth of coin! Another instance is mentioned in the Japanese official Year Book on Korea. The Japanese army bought $5000 worth of timber in the interior, where the people were not used to any other currency, with the result that "the army had to charter a small steamer and fill her completely with this copper cash to finance the trans- action!" I bought a few long, necklace-like strings of this old Korean money at ten cents a string, and even then prob- ably paid too much.
When I bought my ticket for Korea it was nominally an independent monarchy under a Japanese "protectorate," but the day before I sailed from San Francisco, Japanese aggression took another step and the country was formally annexed as a part of the Japanese Empire. There is little doubt, I suppose, that the Japanese will give the Koreans better government than the old monarchy gave them, but one
68 WHERE HALF THE WORLD IS WAKING UP
cannot excuse all the methods by which Japan fastened her rule on the island. Yesterday morning I went out to the Old North Palace, a deserted and melancholy memorial of van- ished power, stood on the throne where Korean kings once held audience, and saw the royal dwelling in which the Jap- anese and their aids killed the Queen in 1895, and also saw the place where they burned her body. The Japanese minister at that time was recalled and placed on trial for the offence, and, though he escaped conviction, the evidence of his guilt was undoubted. It has been estimated that in about eighteen months in 1907-'08, "12,916 Koreans, called 'insurgents' by the Japanese and patriots by their fellow countrymen, were killed by the Mikado's soldiers and gendarmes, only 160 of whom lost their lives." This looks more like butchery than war. Moreover, the Japanese themselves have to admit that there were inexcusable delays in paying for land seized from Koreans, and in \dew of all the circumstances it is questionable whether the Korean hatred or dislike of Japan will become very much less cordial than it is to-day.
Perhaps in no country in the world has missionary work been more successful than in Korea (there are probably 125,000 Protestants now, while there were only 777 thirteen years ago), and I have been interested to learn that there is abso- lutely no truth in the Japanese newspaper reports that im- mense numbers of native Christians are leaving the church since annexation. On the contrary, reports from all over the country are good, and Seoul itself is just now in the midst of a most thoroughgoing and successful Christian revival, with 1800 conversions reported during the first ten days. At a Methodist mission school I visited this morning I found that a hundred of the native pupils had been canvassing the town a part of three successive afternoons with the result that they had brought in the names of 697 Koreans expressing a desire to become Christians.
Here in Korea there is no waste of energy or money through
KOREA: "THE LAND OF THE MORNING CALM" 69
denominational divisions. Each denomination has its own sphere of activity, preventing dupKcation of effort, and my general observation has convinced me that the criticisms of foreign mission work sometimes heard in America are based on a radical misconception of conditions. Even the non- Christians, in the great ^majority of cases, speak in high praise of the isplendid work of the missionaries. A typical expression is that found in the latest issue of the Shanghai National Review, now before me, which may be expected to speak impartially. Referring to an address by Doctor Mor- rison, the Peking correspondent of the London Times, it says:
"Doctor Mon-ison eulogized the work of the missionaries and we cannot conceive that anybody who really knows of their work at first hand, not as it is to be foT'r>d in extreme cases, but as ordinarily carried on, should do other- wise thni eulogize it."
Seoul, Korea.
VIII
MANCHURIA- FAIR AND FERTILE
NEASILY sleeps Mukden to-night" — I remember yet how one of the dispatches began which brought so vividly to my mind the meaning of the great death-grapple here between the Japanese and Rus- sian hosts in 1905.* The story in a nutshell is this :
" After the capitulation of Port Arthur, Oyama pressed toward Mukden, where Kuropatkin had established his headquarters, and there from February 24 to March 12 occurred probably the most desperate battle in modem history, if not in all history. About eight hundred thousand men were engaged. Again Oyama won, and Km-opatkin retreated in fairly good order about a hundred miles north of Mukden."
So runs the historian's brief record of the titanic struggle five years ago in the ancient Manchurian city to which I have come. What Gettsyburg was in our Civil War, that Mukden was in the first great contest between the white race and the Mongolian. Here covetous Death for once was satisfied, his gruesome garnering seen at each wintry nightfall in the
* " Uneasily sleeps Mukden to-night. In the main street lamps burn dimly. Along dark roads in heavy dust are marching columns. The cool night is full of the low rustle of movement. Near the station, in over-filled hospitals, are heard low groans. The wounded arrive in a never-ceasing stream of carts, and another stream of ambulances moves northward, for the place must be cleared for to-day's victims. The eternal pines whisper above the Tombs of Chinese Emperors. In the fields watch fires are burning stores and evacuated
villages " And the correspondent goes on to tell of the wearied forces
gathering for further fighting with the coming of dawn — men footsore and weak for want of food and water and rest. For forty-eight hours the Japanese had not eaten.
70
MANCHURIA: FAIR AND FERTILE 71
windrows of bloody and mangled bodies strewn along miles of snowy trenches.
I have heard all sorts of war traditions in Mukden: that at one time the Japanese thought themselves beaten in the battle and had ordered a retreat, when, a Russian force giving way, they turned quickly to press the advantage and snatched victory from what they had thought was ruin. There are many stories, too, of the inefficiency of the Russian officers, stories made all the more probable in the light of the Russian Commander Kuropatkin's memoirs to the same general effect. "Why, the English would put one of their admirals against the wall and shoot him like a common seaman for such gross neglect of duty as went entirely unpunished among Russian generals," was one man's comment as he talked with me. "The Roo- shians were good fighters — fought 'and to 'and with the butt of their muskets — and if they 'ad 'ad good commanders the Japs would never have won," said an Englishman who had seen service in India. A railway man also told me of the debauchery and profligacy of the Russian officers, disreputable women travelling regularly with them to and fro, drunkenness being also common. About the same charges were reported to me by a Japanese officer. In fact, it is said that the Japanese contrived to get a very considerable quantity of champagne to the Russian headquarters one day, and the next day made a slaughter-pen of the Russian camp while the Cossack com- manders were still hopelessly befuddled from too much drinking !
The truth is that the Japanese, from camp-followers to commander-in-chief, were prepared for war and the Russians were not. From the day that Russia, aided by France and Germany, forced Japan to cede back to China some of the fruits of her victory over the Chinese, from that hour Japan nursed and fed fat her rankling grudge and bided her time as deliber- ately as a tiger waiting to spring. While I was in Japan an Englishman told me that immediately after Russia forced Japan
72 WHERE HALF THE WORLD IS WAKING UP
to give up her spoils of victory he was amazed to see the tre- mendous interest in the military drills in all the Japanese schools. When he asked what it meant, there was one frank answer: "We are getting ready to lick Russia."
It should also be observed that when the war came on the Japanese were not only in a state of preparedness so far as battleships and army drill and munitions of war were con- cerned, but they were also prepared in the vital matter of proper medical attendance.
"When your American soldiers went with Shafter into Cuba the army was utterly without proper medical corps and equip- ment, and the death-rate was disgracefully high. But the first Japanese who fell in crossing the Yalu were taken at once to the best of Japanese surgeons and cared for in the most ap- proved of modern military hospitals." So said a frank Scotch- man to me yesterday, and in the hght of the official statistics I could say nothing in palliation of the unpleasant allusion to America. When the war with Russia ended. Baron Takaki, Surgeon-General of the Japanese Army, boasted that whereas in the Spanish-America War "fourteen men died from prevent- able diseases to one man killed on the field of battle," the Japanese had lost only one man from disease to every four from bullets. Now the Japanese, as usual, had not worked out any of the principles of medical science, sanitation, and hygiene which enabled them to make this remarkable record, but they showed their characteristic facility in taking the white man's inventions and getting as much or more — more in this case — out of them than the white man himseK.
The Japanese record, showing in such amazing fashion what a wisely directed health organization may accomplish, is worth remembering not only in connection with plans for military efficiency, but also in connection with plans for general public health activities at home. Every State should spend five times as much for this public health work as at present.
In 1910 the forgetful Manchurian earth bears but few traces
MANCHURIA: FAIR AND FERTILE 73
of the fierce contest that only five or six years ago scarred its bosom, and the serried shocks of newly harvested corn, kaoliang (sorghum) and millet — in some infrequent instances fertil- ized by the dead men's bones — are seen on fields where con- tending armies struggled. Let it be so for a little while; let the Manchurian peasant sow and garner in peace while he may ; for still the war cloud hangs heavy above China's Three Eastern Provinces, and in the next struggle the peasant's blood may redden his own fields. For that the fighting has not ended is to me perfectly clear. By reason of the Japanese railroad monopoly through the very heart of Southern Manchuria, and her leased territory on the coast, Japan has obtained power bordering on control, and everything goes to show that she has fully made up her mind to complete and retain that control.
Moreover, when one has seen the great Manchurian empire, it is easy to understand how it has now roused the covetousness of Japan just as the temptation a few years ago proved too strong for Russia. Immense farming areas are only thinly settled; some of the richest of the world's mineral resources have only been touched.
A day or two ago I went out to see Mr. Edward C. Parker, in charge of the agricultural experiment farm here (he is a Minnesota man, I believe), and found him enthusiastic over his corn crop just harvested. "I have been so surprised by the growth of corn this year," he declared, "that I could hardly believe my own eyes. I have never seen finer seed ears any- where." Among American states, only Iowa, he declares, is probably more fertile than Manchuria; with stock-raising to prevent land-deterioration, all the vast southern section could beat Illinois growing crops, and the same thing could be said of the northern country but for its colder climate. About Harbin, where the South Manchuria Railway joins the Trans-Siberian Line, one may see cuts thirty feet deep and the soil rich to the bottom. Most of Manchuria is level — strik- ingly like our Western Corn Belt and Wheat Belt — and the
74 WHERE HALF THE WORLD IS WAKING UP
soil is of wind-drift origin "like a great snow-blanket," very easily tilled. The plowing is done with a steel-tipped wooden beam such as I have already written of seeing in Korea, and only the favoring physical texture of the soil explains the fat harvests of food, feed, and fuel achieved under such methods. It has been a positive joy to me in travelling through the country here in late October to see the great shocks of kaoliang, millet and corn (even with labor at 20 cents a day out here, the people don't pull fodder!), quaint-looking farmhouses almost surrounded by well-stuffed barns, and corn cribs packed until the overflowing yellow ears spill out the ampler cracks. The kaoliang is a sort of sorghum, the grain being used for food, while the stalks, which contain but little sugar, are used for fuel. Consequently the barnyards packed to the limit and running over with
" The garnered largess of the fruitful year"
not only mean feed for all the variegated animals that are used in Manchurian agriculture, but fuel for the long Manchu- rian winters as well. I even find the peasants digging up the roots and stubble to be dried and burned in the houses.
One sees but a small proportion of good horses here, and practically no four-wheeled farm wagons. Unlike Japan, how- ever, Manchuria does have its farm vehicles: great heavy two-wheeled carts drawn by from two to eight horses, donkeys, and asses. Sometimes there is a big horse or two, then one or two donkeys half the size of the horses, and a couple of little asses or burros half the size of the donkeys — and maybe a bull thrown in for good measure. It looks as if the Whole Blamed Family of work-stock had been hitched to pull the cart. The Whole Blamed Family is often needed, too, for the roads in China are ample proof that we needn't expect ours in America or anywhere else to get any better by letting them alone three thousand years. The Chinese have tried it, and it doesn't work. The October roads are so bad in many places that if
MANCHURIA: FAIR AND FERTILE 75
the carts had four wheels instead of two not even the combined aggregation in the team could pull them out of the mud. A little later, however, the roads freeze over solidly and stay so for five or six months — and then the Manchurian farmers go on long, slow pilgrimages carrying their products to the larger markets — sometimes two or three hundred miles from home.
The pride and glory of Manchuria, the talk of its citizens, the foundation of its prosperity, the backbone of its commerce, the symbol of its wealth, is the bean — the common soja, or soy bean as we know it. What corn is to our Corn Belt and what cotton is to our Southern States, that the bean is to Man- churia: supreme among products. There is no class of people not affected by the prosperity or the adversity of his Majesty the Bean. Bankers, merchants, farmers, even the ladies one meets in the drawing-rooms in the foreign concessions, not only "know beans,*' but can talk beans too. If the present rate of progress is maintained, it will not be long until no one will enumerate the world's great crops — wheat, corn, oats, rice, rye, barley, cotton, etc. — without including beans. The first beans were shipped to Europe only about four years ago, and the London Times correspondent estimates that next year Europe will take $35,000,000 worth. In a very great measure the beans have the same properties as cottonseed, an oil being extracted that is used for much the same purposes as cotton- seed oil, while the residue called "bean cake" is about the equivalent of cottonseed meal. It is somewhat superior, Mr. Parker says, to cottonseed meal or linseed meal as a stock feed, but is now chiefly used for fertilizing purposes. My first acquaintance with the bean cake was in Japan, where I found it enriching the earth for vegetable-growing, Japan importing an average of half a million tons a year to put under its crops. Manchuria also uses not a little for the same purpose. The more intelligent Manchurian farm^ers, however, are learning that it is a waste to rot one of the best cattle feeds in the
76 WHERE HALF THE WORLD IS WAKING UP
world and get its fertilizing value only — just as our American farmers, it is gratifying to see, are at last waking up to the disgraceful folly of using cottonseed meal as a crop-producw without first getting its other value as a meat-producer.
I find out, furthermore, that what old Maury's Geography led me to believe was a vast Desert of Gobi here in North China or Mongolia alongside Manchuria is not a genuine desert at all, but chiefly a great grass plain with golden possibilities as a cattle country. Mr. Parker declares that if cattle were grown on these immense ranges and brought to Manchuria in the fall to be fattened off on bean cake, millet, etc., Harbin, Chang-chun, Mukden, and other Manchurian cities might soon build packing plants that would rival Chicago's in bigness. This system of stock-raising would also solve the problem of maintaining soil fertility, just as it would bring relief to those sections of America where the policy of selling everything off the land and putting nothing back threatens disaster.
The old ridge system of growing crops, the rows thrown up as high as the little plows will permit and the crops planted on top, is the general practice here, and Mr. Parker is making an effort through the experiment farm to convince the people of the advantages of level cultivation. He also wishes to intro- duce better plows. "The truth is," he says, "that we never had any real plows until James Oliver and John Deere invented theirs. All the plowing before that was merely scratch-work, and here in Manchuria the plows are hardly better than those the Egyptians used. But for the extremely light, ash-like, wind-drift soil the people with such crude tools could hardly make enough to subsist on."
In Korea I noticed some moderately fair cotton fields, and in Manchuria I have also found a few patches, though the cli- mate here is obviously too cold for its profitable production. I find that the Japanese have great faith in the future of the industry in Korea.
This notice of Manchurian farming would not be complete
MANCHURIA- FAIR AND FERTILE 77
without some mention of the queer aspect of many of the cultivated fields — thick- dotted with earth mounds, around which the rows are curved and twisted, these mounds resembling medium-sized potato hills. They contain not vegetables, how- ever, but bones. Each cone-shaped mound is a Chinaman's grave. I first noticed this method of burying in Korea, but the mounds are quite low there — all that I saw, at least, except the Queen's Tomb at Seoul. Here in Manchuria they are about three or four feet high in most cases, and sometimes six. One of the famous sights of Mukden is the Peilang, or Northern Tomb, where old Taitsun, the first great Manchu Emperor of China, lies buried, and the grave proper (reached after a long approach of temple buildings, magnificent gates, images, and monuments) is a huge earth mound, probably an acre in extent. The base is thrown up twenty-five or thirty feet high and surrounded by a rock wall, while the cone-shaped summit runs up about twenty feet higher. The Chinese have a deep-rooted superstition as to the existence of a sort of devil or "fung-shui" in the ground, and to disturb this fung-shui may prove the direful spring of more "woes unnumbered" than the Iliad records. Such a fung-shui is supposed to exist under the surface of the earth about the Mukden royal tombs, and, accordingly, the railroad between Mukden and Peking had to nm twenty-five miles out of its proper course in order not to disturb it.
Mukden, Manchuria.
IX
WHERE JAPAN IS ABSORBING AN EMPIRE
^ HE Open Door in Manchuria — of what concern is it to me any more than the revolution in Portugal or the Young Turks movement in Constantinople?" With some such expression the average American is likely to dismiss the question — a question whose determi- nation may prove the pivot on which will swing the greatest world-movements of our time as well as the prosperity of many European and American industries, and that of the labor de- pendent upon them.
Concerning Manchuria and all the issues involved in the present struggle for its possession, all kinds of misconceptions are rife. That it is a small country; that It is an infertile country; that it must be already well developed in point of population and consumption of goods: this is only the ABC of Manchurian misinformation.
In answer, it need only be said that Manchuria is larger than all our New England, Middle, and South Atlantic States from Maine to Georgia Inclusive, and that Into Its borders all of Great Britain (England, Scotland and Wales), together with all of the German Empire, could be crowded, and still leave a gap so big that Holland, Belgium, and Switzerland would lack thousands of square miles of filling it: while as to population Manchuria has only 18,000,000 people as compared with
78
JAPAN IN MANCHURIA 79
118,000,000 in the European countries just mentioned. And after having travelled in all of them as well as in Manchuria I should say that the Asiatic area is the more fertile.
The possibilities of such an empire situated in the fairest portion of Asia's temperate zone are simply illimitable. No one who has been through the fruitful lands of the American Corn Belt and Wheat Belt and goes later through Manchuria can fail to note the similarity between them in physical appear- ance and natural resources, and it may well be that what the settlement of the West has meant in America these last fifty years the development of Manchuria will mean in Asia these next fifty.
In itself the sheer creation of such a country — larger far than Great Britain and Germany, as rich as Illinois and Mani- toba — would appeal at once to American commerce and in- dustry, but you have only begun to grasp the significance of Manchuria when you compare it to the creation of such an empire in some favored portion of the sea.
Manchuria means all this, but it means more : Its possession would give such vastly increased influence to any Power pos- sessing it as to make that Power a menace to the commercial rights of all other nations in Asia — rights of almost vital importance both to Europe and America. England and Ger- many, of course, are already dependent upon foreign trade for their prosperity, and President McKinley was never so seer- like as when, in his last speech at Buffalo, he reminded the American people that their own future greatness depends upon the development of trade beyond the seas. And it was to Asia, the greatest of continents, and especially to China, the greatest of countries on this greatest of continents, that he looked, as we must also look to-day. In Secretary Hay's memorial address on McKinley, which I had the good fortune to hear, the dead President's determined efforts to maintain the ancient integrity of the Dragon Empire were fittingly mentioned as one of his most distinguished services to his people and his time.
80 WHERE HALF THE WORLD IS WAKING UP
To keep the immense area of China from spoliation by other nations and to preserve to all peoples equal commercial rights within boundaries are absolutely essential to the proper future development of both European and American commerce and industry.
II
This is why the Open Door in Manchuria is a matter of very real concern to every Occidental citizen; this is why the other nations after the ending of the Russo-Japanese War were care- ful to see that these belligerents guaranteed a continuance of the Open Door policy; this is why it is of importance to us to know whether this pledge is being kept.
In centering my attention upon Japan in this article let me say in the outset, I am not to be understood as being one whit more tolerant of Russian than of Japanese aggression in Manchuria — I am not. In the Russo-Japanese War my sym- pathies were all with Japan, my present friendships with num- bers of her sons I prize very highly, but I cannot blind myself to the fact that she is apparently "drunk with sight of power" in the Orient.
As conditions are to-day, the reason for giving primary atten- tion to Japan's position in Manchuria rather than Russia's must be self-evident. In the first place, the territory embraced in her sphere of influence is more important and contains two thirds the population. Then again: Northern Manchuria being cold and inhospitable, Japan's sphere not only covers the fairer and more favored section agriculturally, but from the standpoint of military strategy (as a mighty war taught all the world) Japan is vastly better placed. With Port Arthur in her possession, and the new broad-gauge line from Antung and Mukden enabling her to rush troops across the Sea of Japan and through Korea to Manchuria without once getting into foreign waters or on foreign soil, she could ask nothing better. And finally and most significant of all, Russia has
LIKE SCENES FROM OUR WESTERN PRAIRIES Manchuria is a vast empire — one of the most fertile portions of the earth's surface. The great money crop is the soy bean, and the lower picture shows miles of beans and bean-cake awaiting shipment at Changchun
MANC'IIIRIAN WOMEN (SHOWING PECULIAR HEAD-DRESS)
(IIIXKSK WASTE-PAPKH COLLEICTI lU Everything in China is scrupulously saved — except human labor. That is wasted on a colossal scale through the failure to use improved machinery or scientific knowledge
JAPAN IN MANCHURIA 83
suffered perhaps the greatest humiliation in her history by rea- son of Manchurian aggression; she has learned Japan's point of vantage; and whatever advance she makes in the near future will be only by Japanese sufferance and connivance.
Whatever may be the meaning of the alleged secret treaty between Japan and Russia, the great truth which all nations need to remember is this: Whatever scotches Japanese aggres- sion in Manchuria scotches Russian aggression at the same time — automatically and simultaneously. To the Open Door in Manchuria Japan carries the key.
Ill
Japan's primary commercial advantage over all other nations in South Manchuria, her railway monopoly, together with the use she is making of this monopoly and her plans to maintain it, we must now consider more in detail.
When the war with Russia ended, Japan succeeded Russia in the control of what is now the South Manchurian Railway, running from Dairen (formerly Dalny) to Chang-chun, 438 miles, through the very heart of the country, and she also ob- tained from China the right "to maintain and work the military line constructed between Antung and Mukden and" — as if of secondary importance — "to improve the said line so as to make it fit for the conveyance of commercial and industrial goods of all nations." The stipulation with regard to the South Manchurian Railway was that China should have the right to buy it back in 1938, and with regard to the Antung-Mukden line, in 1932, by paying the total cost — "all capital and all moneys owed on account of the line and interest." And just here Japan is playing a wily game.
Consider, for example, the Antung-Mukden line just re- ferred to, now regarded as a part of the South Manchurian system. Although running through a very mountainous and sparsely settled area, it is of immense importance to Japan
84 WHERE HALF THE WORLD IS WAKING UP
from a strategic standpoint, connecting Mukden as it does with the Japanese railway in Korea leading directly to Fusan, and thus enabling Japan to transport troops across her own ter- ritory to Manchuria without taking any of the risks involved in getting out of her own waters and boundaries. The paramount military importance of the line is further indicated by the fact that no one had thought of a commercial line here at all. Simply as a matter of war-time necessity Japan stretched a 2|-foot narrow-gauge line across these mountain barrens to transport her troops in 1905. It is interesting to see, therefore, how she has now interpreted her right to "work, maintain and improve" — especially "improve" — this line. In October I spent two days travelhng over its entire length (188 miles), most of the time on the narrow-gauge part, and I was amazed to see on what a magnificent scale the new broad-gauge- substitute line is now building. In striking contrast to the traditional Japanese tendency to impermanence in building, this line is constructed regardless of expense as if to last for a thousand years. Tunnel after tunnel through solid rock, the most superb masonry and bridges wherever streams intervene, the best of ballast to make an enduring roadbed — all these indicate the style of the new, not "improved" but utterly reconstructed, line which is building for Japan's benefit at China's expense — at China's expense directly if she buys it back in 1932, at China's expense indirectly if she doesn't.
It will be remembered, of course, that according to her agreement with China, Japan was to begin the work of "im- proving" the Antung-Mukden line within two years. Whether she was strangely unable to make any sort of beginning in the period, or whether she purposely delayed it in order to show her contempt for Chinese sovereignty in Manchuria, it is dijSScult to say; what is known is only that the Mikado's government let its treaty rights lapse, and then when China objected to a renewal, defied China, and proceeded with the work of "improvement" by what was euphemistically termed "independent action."
JAPAN IN MANCHURIA 85
Incidentally, it may be recalled just here that in the Ports- mouth Peace Treaty Japan and Russia jointly promised the rest of the world "to exploit their respective railways in Man- churia exclusively for commercial and industrial purposes and in no wise for strategic purpose."
That Japan (in the event no other method of getting control of Manchuria appears) hopes to make the railroads too expen- sive for the hard-pressed Peking government to buy back is self-evident. She is looking far ahead, as those interested in the continuance of the Open Door policy must also look far ahead. The real Open Door question is not a matter of the last four or five years or of the next four or five years, but whether after a comparatively short time the Door is to be permanently closed as in Korea. If it be said that Japan is only human in laying many plans to gain so rich an empire, let it also be said that other nations are only human if they wish to protect their own interests.
IV
For one thing, as has been suggested, Japan has a perfectly obvious plan to make the railways too expensive for China to purchase when the lease expires, and just here some compari- sons may be in order. In Japan proper the government- owned railway stations are severe and inexpensive structures in which not one yen is wasted for display and but little for convenience. When I was in Tokyo, for example, Ex-Premier Okuma, in a public interview, called attention to the disrepu- table condition and appearance of the leading station (Shim- bashi) in the Japanese capital, declaring that foreign tourists must inevitably have their general impressions of the country unfavorably influenced by it, so primitive and uninviting is its appearance. But when it comes to the South Manchurian Railway, also under the control of the Japanese Government (five sixths of the investment held by the government and one
86 WHERE HALF THE WORLD IS WAKING UP
sixth by individual Japanese), one finds an entirely different policy in force. Handsome stations, built to accommodate traffic for fifty years to come, have been erected. In Dairen, "virtually the property of the railway company," the system has built a magnificent modern city — street railways, water- works, electric light plants, macadamized roads, and beautiful public parks. More than this, the railway company, not content with the best of equipment for every phase of legiti- mate railway work, including handsome stations and railway offices, such as Japan proper never sees, has also erected hotels which, for the Orient, may well be styled sumptuous, in five leading cities of Manchuria. Comparatively few travellers go to Mukden, and yet the hotel which the South Manchurian Railway has erected there, for example, is perhaps not excelled in point of furnishing and equipment anywhere in the Far East.
In buying back the railroads, therefore, China will be expected not only to pay for the railways themselves but for all the irrelevant enterprises — hotels, parks, cities — in which the railway companies have embarked; for lines "improved" beyond recognition, and for lines built not even with a view to ultimate profit, but for their strategic importance to a rival and possibly antagonist nation ! As an Englishman said to me : "It's much the same as if I, a poor man, should rent you a $1000 house, agreeing to stand the expense of some improve- ments when taking it back, and you should spend $10,000 in improving my $1000 house — and largely to suit your own peculiar business and purposes."
More than this, Japan, as I have said, is determined to keep her absolute monopoly on South Manchurian railway facili- ties. In Article IV of the Portsmouth Peace Treaty Japan and Russia reciprocally engaged not to "obstruct any general meas- ures, common to all countries, which China may take for the development of the commerce and industry of Manchuria," but in December of the same year Japan caused China to yield a secret agreement prohibiting any new line "in the neighbor-
JAPAN IN MANCHURIA 87
hood of and parallel to" the South Manchurian Railway or any branch line that "might be prejudicial" to it. Japan, under threat of arms, forced China to abandon the plan for the Hsinmintun-Fakumen line after arrangements had been made with an English syndicate, and later Japan and Russia on the same pretext prevented the proposed Chinchow-Aigun line across Mongolia and Manchuria, although a hundred miles or more away from the South Manchurian line.
That Japan, then, holds the whip hand in Manchuria, and expects to continue to hold it, is very clear. With China as yet too weak to protect herself, Japan is virtually master of the situation. Let us ask then — since this is in an American book — whether the Open Door policy is being enforced even now; to ask it of any one in Manchuria is to be laughed at. I tried it once in a Standard Oil ofl&ce and the man in front of me roared, and an unnoticed clerk at my back, overhearing so absurd a question, was also unable to contain his merri- ment. It is not a question of the fact of the shutting-up policy, Chinese and foreigners in Manchuria will tell you; it is only a question as to the extent of that condition.
The truth is that the ink was hardly dry on the early trea- ties before the discriminations began. The military railroads, which Japan was in honor bound to all the world to use only for war purposes, were used for transporting Japanese goods before the military restrictions with regard to the admis- sion of other foreign goods were removed. The Chinese mer- chant and his patrons were famishing for cotton "piece goods" and other manufactured products, and the Japanese goods coming over were quickly taken up and a market for these particular "chops" or "trademarks" (the Chinaman relies largely on the chop) was established. By the time European and American goods came back their market in many cases
88 WHERE HALF THE WORLD IS WAKING UP
had already been taken away. In some cases, too, their trade- mark rights had been virtually ruined by the closeness of Japa- nese imitation. Even on my recent tour, among consuls of three nations, at Manchurian points, I did not find one who did not mention some recent case of trademark infringement.
Then came the period of freight discriminations and rebates, when the Japanese (principally the Mitsui Bussan Kaisha, the one great octopus of Japanese business and commerce) secured freight rates that practically stifled foreign business competitors. The railway company now asserts that rebates (formerly allowed, it alleges, because of heavy shipments) are no longer given; but in many cases the evil effects of the former rebating policy remain in that Japanese traders were thus allowed to rush in during a formative period and establish permanent trade connections.
Meanwhile, too, the relations between the Japanese Govern- ment and the Mitsui Bussan Kaisha are so close that competi- tors are virtually in the plight of having to ship goods over a line owned by a rival — without any higher tribunal to guar- antee equality of treatment. As was recently declared:
"Two directors of the South Manchurian Railway are also directors of Mitsui Bussan Kaisha. The traflBc manager of the railway is an ex-employee of Mit- sui. The customs force at Dalny is not only entirely Japanese — no other foreigner in charge of a Chinese customs office employs exclusively assistants of his own nationality — but a number of the customs inspectors are ex-employ- ees of Mitsui. The Mitsui company also maintains branches all through Manchuria in and out of treaty ports. In this way they escape the payment of Chinese likin, or toll taxes. The Chinese have agreed that these taxes — 2 per cent, on the value of the goods each time they pass to a new inland town
— shall not be paid so long as they remain in the hands of the foreigner. Amer- ican piece goods often pay likin tax, two, three, or four times, while the Japa- nese — sometimes legitimately by reason of their branch houses, sometimes illegally by bluffing Chinese officials or smuggling through their military areas
— manage to escape likin almost altogether." " • -^ '
It may not be true that the Japanese customs officials at Dairen (the treaty provides that China shall appoint a Japanese
JAPAN IN MANCHURIA 89
collector at this port), ignorantly or knowingly, allow Japanese goods to be smuggled through to Manchuria — although con- suls of three nations a few months ago thought the matter serious enough to suggest an investigation — but the evasion of likin taxes in the interior is an admitted fact.
More flagrant still is another violation of international treaty rights. Under Chinese regulations foreign merchants are not allowed to do business in the Manchurian interior away from the twenty-four open marts, but it has been shown that several thousand Japanese are now stationed within the pro- hibited area, and Japan's reply to the Chinese Viceroy's protest is that he should have objected sooner and that it is now too late. Meanwhile, many Chinese merchants both in the in- terior and along the South Manchurian Railway, themselves paying the regular likin and consumption taxes, are finding themselves unable to compete with the Japanese, who refuse to pay these taxes. Thus Japan is gradually rooting out the natives who stand in her way, and, day by day, tightening her grip on the country.
She is advancing step by step as she did in Korea.
On the whole, the Mikado's subjects seem already to count themselves virtual masters of the country. Inside their railway areas and concessions they have their own government; in the majority of cases while in Manchuria I found it more convenient to use the Japanese telegraph or the Japanese postal system than the Chinese; and where I stopped at the little towns along the line it was a Japanese oflBcer who came to inquire my name and nationality. When I was in Mukden the German consul there had just had two Chinese meddlers arrested for spying on his movements, only to find that they were acting under the direction of Japanese oflacials who claimed immunity for them! The fact that they have their soldiers back of them, and that they can be tried only in their own courts, also gives the Japanese unlimited assurance in bullying the natives. At Mukden the Japanese bellboy struck my Chinese rickshaw
90 WHERE HALF THE WORLD IS WAKING UP
man to get his attention. At Taolu some weeks ago some Japa- nese merchants who were there doing business illegally (for it is not an open mart) were interfered with, with the result that the Japanese authorities when I was in Mukden were preparing a formal demand for satisfaction, including indemnity for any injury to an unlawful business !
Manifestly, the new masters of Manchuria propose to teach the natives their place. " If a Chinaman is killed by a Japanese bullet," as a Chinaman of rank said to me in Manchuria, "the fault is not that of the man who fired the bullet: the Chinaman is to blame for getting in the way of it!"
VI
Those who apologize for Japanese aggressiveness in Man- churia, those who excuse or sympathize with her evident pur- pose to make Manchuria walk the way of Korea, have but one argument for their position — the pitiably abused and thread- bare plea that the Japanese have won the country by the blood they shed in the war with Russia. The best answer to this is also a quotation from the distinguished and witty China- man just mentioned. "The Japanese," said he, "claimed they were fighting Russia because she was preparing to rob China of Manchuria; now they themselves out-Russia Russia. It is much as if I should knock a man down, saying, 'That man was about to take your watch,' and then take the watch myself!"
The aptness of the simile is evident. My sympathy, and the sympathy of every other American acquaintance of mine as far as I can now recall, was with Japan in her struggle be- cause of our hot indignation over Russian aggressiveness. But if Japan had said, "I am fighting to put Russia out only that I may myself develop every identical policy of aggrandize- ment that she has inaugurated," it is very easy to see with what different feelings we should have regarded the conflict.
JAPAN IN MANCHURIA 91
Moreover, Japan's legitimate fruits of victory do not extend to the control or possession of Manchuria. As one of the ablest Englishmen met on my tour in the Far East pointed out, Japan's purposes in inaugurating the war were four: (1) to get a preponderating inj3uence in Korea; (2) to get the control of the Tsushima Straits, which a preponderating influ- ence in Korea would give her; (3) to drive Russia from her ever-menacing position at Port Arthur; and (4) to arrest (as she alleged) the increasing influence and power of Russia in Manchuria.
All these things she has gained. Furthermore, she now has actual possession of Korea. The menace of a great Russian navy has been swept away. Again, she has become (with the consent of England) the commanding naval power in the eastern Pacific; and she has gained an influence in South Manchuria at least equal to that which Russia had previous to the war.
And yet one hears the plea that unless she gets Manchuria her blood will have been spilt without result! Unless she can do more in the way of robbing China than she went to war with Russia for doing, she will not be justified !
Among representatives of five nations with whom I discussed the matter in Manchuria I found no dissent from the opinion that Japan will never get out of Manchuria, unless forced to do so by a speedily awakened China or by the most emphatic and unmistakable attitude on the part of the Powers. Chinese, English, Americans, Germans — all nationalities — in Man- churia agree that thus far the way of Manchuria has been the way of Korea and that only favoring circumstances — a rebellion fomented in China or whatever excuse may serve — is needed for the same end to be reached.
Then with Japanese customs duties to complete the shutting out of foreign goods, now made only partially possible by the discrimination of a railway monopoly, and with the entire Chi- nese Empire and foreign trade rights within it menaced by the added preeminence of Japan, the people of Europe and America
92 WHERE HALF THE WORLD IS WAKING UP
may wake up too late to find out at last that the Open Door in Manchuria is a matter of somewhat more general impor- tance than the disturbances in Turkey or the change of govern- ment in Portugal.
Be it said, in conclusion, however, that if the white nations take heed in time all this may be prevented. China's walking up may serve the same purpose, but it is doubtful whether she will develop sufficient military strength for this. In any case there need be and should be no war, and in describing con- ditions as I found them my purpose is to help the cause of peace and not that of bloodshed. For if the Powers realize the seri- ousness of the situation and give evidence of such feeling to Japan that she will realize the bounds of safety, there will be no trouble. But a continued policy of ignorance, indifference, or inactivity means that Japan will probably go so far that she cannot retreat without a struggle. Tru.th is in the interest of peace.
Mukden, Manchuria.
LIGHT FROM CHINA ON PROBLEMS AT HOME
1AM here in China's ancient capital at one of the most in- teresting periods in all the four thousand years that the Son of Heaven has ruled the Middle Kingdom. The old China is dying — fast dying; a new China is coming into being so rapidly as to amaze even those who were most expec- tant of rapid change. The dreams of twelve years ago, that have since seemed nothing but dreams, are coming into actual realization.
Great reforms were then proposed — twelve years ago — and the Emperor sanctioned edict after edict for their intro- duction. But their hour had not yet come.
I talked yesterday with one of the men whose voice was most potent at that time: a man whose heart was then aflame with the idea of remaking China. They dared much, did these men, and Tantsetung, a Chinaman of high rank and a Christian, consecrated himself on his knees to the great task, with all the devotion of a Hannibal swearing allegiance to Carthage. But reaction came. The Emperor was deposed and the Empress Dowager substituted, and Tantsetung and five other leaders were beheaded.
Now, however, dying Tantsetung's brave words have already been fulfilled: "You may put me to death, but a thousand others wiU rise up to preach the same doctrine." A new reign has come; the Empress Dowager, dying, has been succeeded by a mere boy, whose father, the Prince Regent, holds the imperial sceptre. But the sceptre is no longer all-powerful.
93
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For the first time in all the cycles of Cathay the voice of the people is stronger than the voice of the Throne. Men do not hesitate any day to say things for which, ten years ago, they would have paid the penalty with their heads.
There are many things that give one faith in the future of China, but nothing else which begets such confidence as the success of the crusade against the opium habit. Four years ago, when the news went out that China had resolved to put an end to the opium habit within ten years — had started on a ten years' war against opium — there were many who scoffed at the whole project as too ridiculous and quix- otic even for praise; there were more who regarded it as praiseworthy but as beiaig as unpromising as a drunkard's swearing off at New Year's, while those who expected success to come even in twice ten years hardly dared express their confidence among well-informed people.
"If there is anything which all our contact with the Chinese has taught more unquestionably than anything else, it is that the Chinaman will always be a slave to the opium habit." So said a professedly authoritative American book on China, published only five years ago, and to hold any other opinion was usually regarded as contradictory to common sense. " We white Americans can't get rid of whiskey intemperance with all our moral courage and all our civilization and all our Chris- tianity. How then can you expect the poor, ignorant China- man to shake off the clutches of opium?" So it was said, but to-day the most tremendous moral achievement of recent history — China's victory over opium-intemperance already assured and in great measure completed, not in ten years, but in four — stands out as a stinging rebuke to the slow progress our own people have made in their warfare against drink- intemperance.
To shake off the opium habit when once it has gripped a man is no easy task. Officials right here in Peking, for example, died as a result of stopping too suddenly after the
LIGHT FROM CHINA 95
edict came out announcing that no opium victim could remain in the public service. But a member of the Emperor's cabi- net, or Grand Council, tells me that 95 per cent, of the public officials who were formerly opium-smokers have given up the habit, or have been dismissed from office. Five per cent, may smoke in secret, but with the constant menace of dismissal hanging like a Damocles sword over their heads, it may be assumed that even these few are breaking them- selves from the use of the drug.
Formerly it was the custom for the host to offer opium to his guests, but the Chinese have now quite a changed public sentiment. Because they recognize that opium is ruining the lives of many of their people, and lessening the efficiency of many others, because they regard it as a source of weakness to their country and danger to their sons, it has become a matter of shame for a man to be known as an opium-smoker, even "in moderation." To be free from such an enervating dis- sipation is regarded as the duty not only to one's self and one's family, but to the country as well : it is a patriotic duty. I saw a cartoon in a native Chinese paper the other day in which there were held up to especial scorn and humiliation the weak- ling officials who had lost their offices by reason of failure to shake off opium. In short, the opium-smoker, instead of being a sort of "good fellow with human weaknessess" — and with possibilities, of course, of going utterly to wreck — has become an object of contempt, a bad citizen.
The earnestness of the people has been strikingly illustrated in the great financial sacrifices made by farmers and land- owners in sections where the opium poppy was formerly grown. The culture of the poppy in some sections was far more prof- itable than that of any other crop; it was, in fact, the "money crop" of the people. In fact, to stop growing the opium poppy has meant in some cases a decrease of 75 per cent, in the profit and value of the land. Farms mortgaged on the basis of old land values, therefore, had to be sold; peasants who had
9G WHERE HALF THE WORLD IS WAKING UP
been home-owners became homeless. And yet China has thought no price too great to pay in the effort to free herself from this form of intemperance. Well may her leading men proudly declare, as one did to me to-day: "While America dares not undertake the task of stopping the whiskey curse among less than a hundred million people, we are stopping the opium curse among over four hundred millions." It should also be observed that there is little drunkenness over here. At a dinner party Friday evening my hostess thought it worth while to mention as a matter of general interest to her guests (so rare is the occurrence) that she had seen a drunken China- man that day. I have not yet seen one.
China is waking up, and I am glad she is. She is going into industrial competition with all the world, and I am glad that she is. I believe that every strong and worthy . nation is enriched by the proper development of every other nation. But in this coming struggle the people whom vice or dissipation has rendered weak sooner or later must go down before the men who, gaining the mastery over every vicious habit, keep th^ir bodies strong and their minds clear. In thunder tones indeed does China's victory over opium speak to America. If we are to maintain our high place among the nations of the earth, if we are to keep our leadership in wealth and industry, we can do it only by freeing ourselves, as heroically as the yellow man of the Orient is doing in this respect, from every enervating influence that now weakens the physical stamina, blunts the moral sense, or befogs the brain.
The new China is devoting itself to a number of other reforms to which the people of America may well give atten- tion. The curse of graft among her public officials ("squeeze" it is called over here) is one of the most deep-rooted cancers with which she has to contend. Officers have been paid small salaries and have been allowed to make up for the meagre- ness of their stipends by exacting all sorts of fees and tips. Before the coming parliament is very old, however, it will
LIGHT FROM CHINA 97
doubtless undertake to do away with the fee and ** squeeze" system, stop grafting, and put all the more important offices on a strict salary basis. Under the old fee system of paying county and city officials in the United States, as my readers know, we have often let enormous sums go into office-holders' pockets when they should have gone into improving our roads and schools. The Chinese system not only has this weakness, but by reason of the fact that the fees are not regularly fixed by law, as is the case with us, the way is opened for number- less other abuses.
Currency reform is in China a matter hardly second in importance to the abolition of "squeeze." There is no na- tional currency here; each province (or state, as we would say) issues its own money when it pleases, just as the different American states did two generations ago. I remember hear- ing" an old man tell of going from the Carolinas to Alabama about 1840 and having to pay heavy exchange to get his Car- olina money changed into Alabama money. So it is in China to-day. You must get your bills of one bank or province changed whenever you go into another bank or province, paying an outrageous discount, and a banking corporation will even discount a bill issued by another branch of the same corporation. Thus a friend of mine with a five-dollar Russia-Asiatic banknote from the Peking branch on taking it to the Russia-Asiatic's branch at Hankow gets only $4.80 for it.
Nor is this all: All kinds of money are in circulation, the values constantly fluctuating, and hundreds and thousands of men make a living by "changing money," getting a per- centage on each transfer. Take the so-called 20-cent pieces in circulation; they lack a little of weighing one fifth as much as the 100-cent dollar; consequently it takes sometimes 110 and again 112 cents "small coin" to equal one dollar! The whole system is absurd, of course, and yet when the govern- ment proposes to establish a uniform national currency it is
98 WHERE HALF THE WORLD IS WAKING UP
said that the influence of these money-changers is so great as to make any reform exceedingly slow and difficult.
And yet let not my readers at home with this statement be- fore them proceed too hastily to laugh or sneer at China for unprogressiveness. For my part, as I have thought of this matter of money transfer over here, the whole question has seemed to me to be on all-fours with our question of land title transfers at home, and the more I have thought of it the firmer has the conviction become. In fact, China's failure to adopt a modern currency system is perhaps even less a sinning against light than our failure to adopt the Torrens system of register- ing land titles. The man who makes a living by changing money and investigating its value is no more a parasite than the man who makes a living changing titles or investigating their value; the hindrance of trade and easy transfer of prop- erty is no more excusable in one case than the other; and the 90 per cent, that China might save by a better system of money transfers is paralleled by the 90 per cent, that we might save by a better system of title transfers.
Mr. Money-Changing Banker, fattening needlessly at the expense of the people, prevents currency reform in China — • yes, that is true. But before we assume superior airs let us see if Mr. Title-Changing Lawyer, also fattening needlessly at the expense of the people, does not go to our next legis- lature and stifle any measure for reforming land-title registra- tion. And in saying this I am not to be understood as making any wholesale condemnation of either Chinese bankers or our American lawyers. The ablest advocates of the Torrens system I know are lawyers, men who say that lawyers ought to be content with the really useful ways of earning money and not insist on keeping up utterly useless and indefensible means of getting fees out of the people. Such lawyers, indeed, deserve honor; my criticism is aimed only at those who realize the wisdom of a changed system but are led by selfishness to oppose it.
LIGHT FROM CHINA 99
After all, however, the most revolutionary and iconoclastic reform in the new China is the changed policy of the schools. For thousands of years the education has been exclusively literary. The aim has been to produce scholars. A thorough knowledge of the works of the sages and poets, and the ability to write learned essays or beautiful verses, this has been the test of merit. When Colonel Denby wrote his book on China five years ago he could say:
" The Chinese scholar knows nothing of ancient or modern history (outside of China), geography, astronomy, zoology or physics. He knows perfectly well the dynastic history of his own coimtry and he composes beautiful poems, and these are his only accomplishments."
But now all this is changed. The ancient system of selecting public officials by examination as to classical scholarship was abolished the year after Colonel Denby's book was published, and the new ideal of the school is to train men and women for useful living, for practical things, and to combine culture with utility. Japanese education now has the same aim. There, in fact, even the study of the languages is made to subserve a practical end. Where the American boy studies Latin and soon forgets it, the Japanese boy studies English and con- tinues to read English and speak it on occasion the rest of his life, increasing his efficiency and usefulness in no small measure as a result. In Japan, too, I found the keenest interest in the teaching of agriculture to boys and domestic science to girls; and in all these things China is also moving — blunder- ingly, perhaps, but yet making progress — toward the most modern educational ideas.
As a matter of fact, much as America has talked these last ten years of making the schools train for more useful living, China and Japan have actually moved relatively much farther away from old standards than we have done, and if they should continue the same rate of advance for the next thirty years we may find their schools doing more for the efficiency
100 WHERE HALF THE WORLD IS WAKING UP
of the people than our American schools are doing. And when I say this let not the cry go up that I am decrying culture. Already I anticipate the criticism from men who cling to old standards of education with even more tenacity than absurdly conservative China has done. I am not decrying culture, but I am among those who insist that culture may come from a study of useful things as well as from a study of useless things; that a knowledge of the chemistry of foods may develop a girl's mind as much as a knowledge of chemistry that is with- out practical use; and that a boy may get about as much cul- tural value from the knowledge of a language which does put him into touch with modern life as from the knowledge of a language which might put him into touch with ancient life but which he will probably forget as soon as he gets his diploma. Slow-moving and tradition-cursed China and Japan, as v/e thought them a generation ago, have already committed themselves to making education train for actual life. Has America given anything more than a half-hearted assent to the idea?
The practical value of this article, I am reminded ]ust here, has to do almost entirely with legislation. You may wish to remind your member of the legislature of the parallel be- tween the wasteful and antiquated money-transfer system in China and the equally wasteful and antiquated title-transfer system at home; you may wish to inform your member of the legislature and your school officials of the advance of practical education in the Orient; and you may wish to remind both your member of the legislature and your congressman of China's successful crusade against the opium evil as an incen- tive for more determined American effort against the drink evil. Let me conclude this letter, therefore, with two more facts with which you may prod your representatives in Wash- ington. (Which reminds me to remark, parenthetically, that every reform the Chinese are getting to-day comes as a result of persistently bringing pressure on their officials; and this
LIGHT FROM CHINA 101
parenthetical observation may be as full of suggestion as any idea I have elaborated at greater length.)
The two facts with which you may stir up your servants in Washington are just these:
First, in regard to the parcels post. Here in China the other day I mailed a package by parcels post to another coun- try for about half what it would have cost me to mail it from one county-seat to another at home. How long are we going to be content to let so-called "heathen" countries like China have advantages which so-called enlightened, progressive America is too slow to adopt?
Secondly, the tariff. Here in the hotel where I write this article one of the foremost journalists in the Far East tells me that the average tariff -protected American industry sells goods to Asiatic buyers at 30 per cent, less than it will sell to the people at home. Thirty per cent., he says, is the usual discount for Oriental trade. An electric dynamo which is sold in America for $1000, for instance, is sold for Chinese trade at $550 or $600. Quite a number of times on this trip have men told me that they can get American goods cheaper over here, after paying the freight ten thousand miles, than we Americans can buy them at our own doors. For example, a man told me a few weeks ago of buying fleece-lined under- wear at half what it costs at home; a missionary tells me that he saves 20 cents on each two-pound can of Royal baking powder as compared with American prices; Libby's meats are cheaper in London than in San Francisco; harvesting machinery made in Chicago is carried across land and sea, half- way around the world, and sold in far-away Siberia for less than the American farmer can buy it at the factory gates.
And these are only a few instances. Hundreds of others might be given.' How long the American people are going to find it amusing to be held up in such fashion remains to be seen.
Peking, China.
XI
THE NEW CHINA: AWAKE AND AT WORK
WITHIN eighteen months China will have a parlia- ment or a revolution (she may have both). Such at least is the prediction I am wilhng to risk, and it is one which I believe most foreigners in Peking would indorse.
And the coming of a parliament, popular goverment, to guide the destinies of the vast empire over which the Son of Heaven has reigned supreme for more than four thousamd years — this is only one chapter in the whole marvelous story, not of China Awakening, but of China Awake. For the breaking with tradition, the acceptance of modern ideas, which but yesterday was a matter of question, is now a matter of history. "China Breaking Up" was the keynote of every- thing written about the Middle Kingdom ten years ago; "China Waking Up" has been the keynote of everything treat- ing of itj these last five years.
Sir John Jordan, British Minister to China, does not exagger- ate when he declares that in a European sense China has made greater progress these last ten years than in the preceeding ten centuries. The criticism one hears most often now is, not that the popular leaders are too conservative, but that they are if, anything, too radical; are moving, not too slowly, but too rapidly.
Instead of the old charge that China is unwilling to learn what the West has to teach, I now hear foreigners complain that a little contact with Europe and America gives a leader
102
THE NEW CHINA 108
undue influence. "Let an official take a trip abroad and for six montlis after his return he is the most respected authority in the empire." Instead of English missionaries worrying over China's slavery to the opium habit, we now have Eng- lish officials -embarrassed because China's too rapid breaking loose from opium threatens heavy deficits in Indian revenues. Instead of the old extreme "states' rights" attitude on the part of the provinces, as illustrated by the refusal of the others to aid Manchuria and Chihli in the war with Japan, the begin- nings of an intense nationalism are now very clearly in evidence. Even Confucius no longer looks backward. A young friend of mine who is a descendant of the Sage (of the seventy-fifth generation) speaks English fluently and is getting a thoroughly modern education, while Duke Kung, who inherits the title in the Confucian line, is patron of a government school which gives especial attention to English and other modern branches — by his direction. Significant, too, is the fact that the ancient examination halls in Peking to which students have come from all parts of the empire, the most learned classical scholars among them rewarded with the highest offices, have now been torn down, and where these buildings once stood Chinese masons and carpenters are fashioning the building that is to house China's first national parliament — unless the parlia- ment comes before this building can be made ready.
And so it goes. When a man wakes up, he does not wake up in a part of his body only, he wakes up all over. So it seems with Cathay. The more serious problem now is not to get her moving, but to keep her from moving too rapidly. In his Civic Forum address in New York three years ago, Wu Ting Fang quoted Wen Hsiang's saying, "When China wakes up, she will move like an avalanche." A movement with the power of an avalanche needs very careful guidance.
The one question about which every Chinese reformer's heart is now aflame is that of an early parliament. By the imperial decree of 1908 a parliament and a constitution were
104 WHERE HALF THE WORLD IS WAKING UP
promised within nine years. At that time there was little demand for a parliament, but with the organization of the Provincial Assemblies in the fall of 1909 the people were given an opportunity to confer together and were also given a taste of power. For the first time, too, they seem to have realized suddenly the serious plight of the empire and the fact that since the deaths of the late Emperor and Empress Dowager, and the dismissal of Yuan Shih-Kai by the Prince Regent acting for the infant Emperor, the Peking government is without a strong leader. Consequently the demand for a hastened parlia- ment has grown too powerful to be resisted. True, when the delegates from all the Provincial Assemblies voiced this demand to the Prince Regent last spring his reply was the Edict of May 29, declaring that the programme outlined by their late Majesties, like the laws of the Medes and Persians, could not be changed. Furthermore, the Throne remarked significantly: "Let no more petitions or memorials upon this subject be presented to Us; Our mind is made up."
Unfortunately for the peace of the Regent, however, John Chinaman is absurdly and obnoxiously persistent on occasion. If you will not heed other appeals, he may commit suicide on your doorstep, and then you are bewitched for the rest of your days, to say nothing of your nights. The talk of an earlier parliament would not down even at the bidding of the Dragon Throne. Quietly unmanageable delegations waited upon vice- roys and compelled these high officials to petition for a reopening of the question. Down in Kiang Su a scholar cut off his left arm and with the red blood wrote his appeal. In Union Medical Hospital, here in Peking, as I write this, a group of students are recovering from self-inflicted wounds made in the same cause. Going to the Prince Regent's, they were told that the Prince could not see them. "Very well," they declared, "we shall sit here till he does." At length the Prince sent word that, though he could not receive them, he would consider their petition, and the students then sliced the
PU YI, THE SON OF HEAVEN AND EMPEROR OF THE MIDDLE
KINGDOM
The baby sovereign of one of the vastest and oldest of empires is shown here in
the lap of his father, Prince Chun, the Regent
HOW CHINA IS DEALING WITH OPIUM-INTEMPERANCE
Burning a pile of pipes of reformed smokers at Hankow. The amazing success of Chinas crusade to free her people from the opium curse may be justly reckoned one of the greatest moral achievements in history — a chal- lenge to our Western world
THE NEW CHINA 107
living flesh from their arms and thighs as evidence of their earnestness, coloring their petition with their blood.
At this period of our drama there came upon the stage a new actor, at first little heeded, but quickly becoming the dominating figure — the Tzucheng Yuan, or National Assem- bly. This body, consisting of 100 nobles and men of wealth or scholarship appointed by the Throne, and 100 selected members of Provincial Assemblies approved by the viceroys, was expected to prove a mere echo of the royal wishes. "It is evident that the government is to have a docile and sub- missive assembly. Mediocrity is the chief characteristic of the members chosen." So wrote one of the best informed Americans in China, some weeks before it assembled, October 3. Renter's press agent in Peking predicted through his papers that a few pious resolutions would represent the sum total of the Assembly's labors.
And yet the first day that these two gentlemen went with me to look in on the Assembly we found it coolly demanding that the Grand Council, or imperial cabinet, be summoned before it to explain an alleged breach of the rights of Provincial As- semblies !
From the very beginning the course of this National Assem- bly in steadily gathering unexpected power to itself has re- minded me of the old States-General in France in the days just before the Revolution, and I could not help looking for Danton and Robespierre among the fiery orators in gown and queue on this occasion. Significantly, too, I now hear on the authority of an eminent scholar that Carlyle's great master- piece is the most popular work of historical literature ever translated into Chinese. May it teach them some lessons of restraint as well as of aggressiveness!
Be that as it may, the Assembly has proved untamable in its demands for an early parliament, not even the hundred government members standing up against the imperious pres- sure of public opinion. In late October the Assembly unani-
108 WHERE HALF THE WORLD IS WAKING UP
raously petitioned the Throne to hasten the programme of constitutional government. The day this petition was pre- sented it was currently rumored in Peking that unless the Prince Regent should yield the people would refuse to pay taxes. But he yielded. The trouble now is that he did not yield enough to satisfy the public, and there is every indication that he will have to yield again, in spite of the alleged unalter- ableness of the present plan, which allows a parliament in 1913 instead of in 1916, as originally promised. A parli- ament within eighteen months seems a safe prediction as I write this.
It also seems safe to prophesy that the powers of the parlia- ment will be wisely used. In local affairs the Chinese practi- cally established the rule of the people centuries before any European nation adopted the idea. Nominally, the local magistrate has had almost arbitrary power, but practically the control has been in the hands of the village elders. When they have met and decided on a policy, the magistrate has not dared run counter to it. In much the same fashion, gov- ernors and viceroys of provinces have been controlled and kept in check. Thus centuries of practical seK-government in local affairs have given the Chinese excellent preparation for the new departure in national affairs. What is proposed is not a new power for the people but only an enlargement or extension of powers they already exercise.
Parliamentary government is the one great accomplish- ment the Chinese people are now interested in, because they propose to make it the tool with which to work out the other Herculean tasks that await them. Happy are they in that they may set about these tasks inspired by the self-confidence begotten of one of the greatest moral achievements of modern times. I refer, of course, to the almost marvellous success of their anti-opium crusade which I have already discussed.
Mr. Frederick Ward, who has just returned from a visit to many provinces, finding in all the same surprising success in
THE NEW CHINA 109
enforcing anti-opium regulations, declares: "It is the miracle of the Middle Kingdom and a lesson for the world."
China's next great task is the education of her people, and the remedy for pessimism here is to compare her present con- dition, not with that of other nations, but with her own con- dition ten years ago. A reported school attendance of less than one million (780,325 to be exact) in a population of 400,000,000 does not look encouraging, but when we compare these figures with the statistics of attendance a few years ago there is unmistakable evidence of progress. In the metro- politan province of Chihli, for example, I find that there are now more teachers in government schools than there were pupils six years ago, and the total attendance has grown from 8000 to 214,637!
Even if China had not established a single additional school, however, or increased the school attendance by even a per- centage fraction, her educational progress these last ten years would yet be monumental. For as different as the East is from the West, so different, in literal fact, are her educational ideals at the present time as compared with her educational ideals a decade ago. At one fell blow (by the Edict of 1905) the old exclusively classical and literary system of education was swept away, made sacred though it was by the traditions of unnumbered centuries. Unfortunately the work of putting the new policies