overcrowded, with three hundred and sixty people to the square mile, as against thirty-three to the square mile in the United States, her population is increasing at the rate of over 700,000 a year. Her rice land is inferior to the best farm land in America, yet it sells for five times as much. Her staple crop is rice. With the production of this the most important food supply increasing at the rate of four per cent a decade while the number of mouths to be fed increases twelve per cent, Japan is forced to import an increasingly large amount of food supplies from other countries.

Worst of all Japan is in the grip of domestic and world competition and is being ground between the upper and nether mill stones of the cheap labor of the Orient, and the massed wealth and efficient industrial organization of the Occident. On the one side she is forced to compete with the cheap labor of China where children of ten are working for a daily wage of five and ten cents, and women for twenty cents a day. The Japanese cannot compete with cheaper Chinese laborers who underlive and out-work them. On the other side are the western countries with their great stores of raw material, well organized factories with modern machinery, and accumulated wealth which make competition so difficult for the new industrial Japan.

According to statistics furnished by the Ohara Institute of Social Research of Osaka,1 92.7 per cent of the families

1 Statistics showing percentage of rich and poor:

in Japan were living on an income of less than $250 a year, or 68 cents a day for a family of five, while at the other extreme 812 families were receiving $10,000 or more a year.

Although Japan is being rapidly industrialized, her rural population is still seventy per cent of the whole. The five

illable and a half million farming families in Japan cultivate some

fifteen million acres, or an average of about two and threefourths acres per family. Nearly half are tenant farmers. The American farmers average 148 acres per family, or over fifty times as much as the Japanese farmer. A growing unrest among the agrarian toilers who cannot pay their rent and taxes or who cannot live upon their slender wages is increasingly manifest. Even in feudal times there were "peasant uprisings" among the oppressed agrarians, but radical ideas are now brought home by members of the farming families returning from the manufacturing districts so that tenant troubles are increasing. In the province of Gifu alone, 114 tenant unions have been organized recently. These unions have been successful in securing their demands and enabling the farmers to obtain better terms from the landlords, to decrease their rent as tenants or increase their wages as workers.

Japan's crucial problem today is economic and industrial. There are now approximately 1,611,990 industrial workers engaged in 43,949 factories.1 A large proportion of these

are women. Independent researches of the Home Office put Japanese child operatives, apprentices, servants, etc., roughly at 1,397,000, of whom 715,000 are boys and 682,000 girls. Their working hours were from ten to eleven a day. As yet Japan has no law regulating child labor outside of factories. Many thousands of children are employed who are below the legal age but "face" is saved by giving their nominal age. A Japanese professor who made a careful investigation found that in Shinshu, Northern Japan, nearly a third of the workers are between ten and fifteen years of age. The fathers are paid from $40.00 to $60.00 for each child delivered to the factory. They are kept in dormitories which are for some of them almost a prison.

Japan has an area a little larger than the British Isles or about equal to the state of California, with a population now estimated at about fifty-six millions for Japan proper, or seventy-seven millions for the Empire as a whole.1

She possesses all of the five conditions necessary for rapid industrialization mentioned by Mr. J. A. Hobson in his "Evolution of Modern Capitalism": "Accumulated wealth, a proletariat or propertyless laboring class, machinery and industrial arts developed to a high degree, large accessible markets and the capitalistic spirit." Japan possesses also the solidarity to move together and act unitedly and effectively in whatever project her leaders undertake in the military, political or industrial field. In the short half century from the time she entered the modern world in 1868, her trade increased from $13,000,000 to $2,141,000,000

1 According to the Census of 1920, the population of Japan was as follows: Japan Proper.

Korea...

55,961,140
17,284,207

in 1920,1 or more than one hundred and sixty-fold. Her trade has increased ten-fold in volume during the last quarter of a century.

No change has taken place as suddenly as in the socalled industrial revolution in England but the simple domestic industries are being gradually transferred to the modern shops and factories. The five great industrial cities have increased in size thirteen times as rapidly as the country as a whole. Tokyo, the Chicago of Japan, has a population of over two millions, and Osaka, the smokecovered Pittsburgh, has nearly a million and a half.

The wages paid to industrial workers in Japan are quite inadequate to the high cost of living since the war. The Japan Year Book states the average daily wage for men is 55 cents and for women 27 cents.2 In the poorer paid industries the women average only 20 cents a day. A thorough investigation conducted by one of the foremost economists in Japan revealed the fact that the average wage paid to the workers in the leading industries in Tokyo is less than fifty cents a day. In some of the iron and steel mills the minimum wage for unskilled labor runs as low as 20 cents for twelve hours' work. The maximum for skilled workers is one or two dollars a day. With their complicated wage scale, which deducts so much in fines for petty

1 The Japan Year Book, 1921-1922, p. 387.

Labor Year Book, 1921, p. 449.

The average daily wage of workers is as follows: (figures in gold):

1920

Japan Year Book, 1921-1922, pp. 176-177, figures in gold.

mistakes on the part of the workers, wages in some factories fluctuate from month to month until the men are never sure of the amount they will receive.

women.

Perhaps the worst conditions among the workers are found in the mining areas. The Report of the Bureau of Mines showed that the number of miners employed at the end of June, 1920, was 439,159, of whom 108,300 were Of the total number of women workers 68,321 were working underground. They go down into the mines where in many places the veins of coal are only about two and a half feet thick. There they work long hours for less than fifty cents a day. Women are employed to push the coal cars to the shafts. Stripped to the waist, they toil for a pittance for twelve hours on each shift. An investigation conducted by Professor Kitazawa, of the Department of Economics in Waseda University, revealed the fact that the actual wages were often below those published in the Government reports. His figures run from a minimum of twenty cents to a maximum of a dollar a day. An investigation concerning hours of work showed that the average working day in the cotton mills was 14 hours. The average working day in steel mills was 12 hours. Only 12 per cent of all the workers have an eight-hour day. The average working week in Japan is 63 hours, or seven days of nine hours each. Many of the workers enjoy two rest days a month.

One night in Tokyo we met the employers in the paternal organization for the "Conciliation of Capital and Labor." They have collected a fund of $1,250,000 for propaganda contributed by employers. The Industrial Club is also a capitalists' organization backed by $5,000,000, the money being used for propaganda in order to get the employers and laborers together that production may be increased.