THE UNHAPPY JAPANESE.

Wairarapa Age, Volume XXXII, Issue 989, 8 March 1910, Page 4

THE UNHAPPY JAPANESE.

Popular fancy depicts the Japanese women of all classes as blithesome, ethereal little creatures, devoting their sunny lives to chasing butterflies or braiding their raven hair, tilling in the joyous interstices of time with sipping tea or tending mop headed chrysanthemums. But alas J this delectable conceit finds no room for application to the lives of Japanese women ol the lower orders. They are, mostly/the hewers of wood and drawers of water—ill fed, illi conditioned beasts of burden. Although the humbler classes can live on about fourpence per day, the peasant woman, paddling knee-deep in the mud-dams and irrigation ditches 1 of the green rice fields, cannct afford to eat the rice they grow. Rice is a luxury, to be brought out only on high days and holidays, or to be resorted to in cases of sickness. Potatoes, dried fish, and seaweed, form I the staple diet. Women do most of the rough carrying work in the lead mines. In the factories, children of five and six years old are largely employed. Here the females often work fourteen, fifteen, sixteen, and even eighteen hours a day. Sweating is rampant everywhere. Of 1850 hands employed by a Tokio muslin manufacturing firm, 1,700 are girls of from thirteen to twenty-two years of age, recruited from the country, and under contract for three years. Each girl receives 12 sen (about 3d) a day, and has to pay 7£ sen for her board and bed in one of the factory dormitories. This leaves her 4J sen, or a penny farthing, for her day's i work. The highest wages paid in Tokio are equivalent to a shilling per diem, but thousands of women operatives receive not more than six pence. In Japan, according to a recent writer, women may be seen swaying on the ropes of pile-driving machinery, dragging heavily-laden vehicles through the streets, mixing mortar, or coaling ships at Kobe or Nagasaki. There is not much time, and there is little inclination, for chasing butterflies, in the lives of these unfortunate creatures. They are ground under the nether millstone of a remorseless industrial system which combines within itself all the scientific brutalities of civilisa- | tion and barbarism, and contains none of the compensations of either.