poorly cooked and of inferior quality; often low, damp, floors in houses situated on flats which are flooded with every heavy storm; sanitary conditions which breed contagion and dangerous sickness; long hours of work, standing from twelve to sixteen hours at high powered machines; unhygienic factory conditions, with dust and chemicals in the air; overcrowding of dormitories; night work for women and girls; child labor with the stunting of growth. The approximately half million workers recruited annually from the best blood of the country is like a pure mountain stream polluting itself as it pours into the stagnant waters of a swamp.1

1

Generally speaking labor in Japan is working long hours for low wages under conditions of poverty. A living standard for Japan has been calculated by the Rev. T. Kagawa of Kobe and his industrial research department for an average family of five persons. They require two rooms, each a little less than ten feet square, and a wage of $41.25 for five persons, or about $8.00 a month per person. The majority of the workers in Japan, however, receive less than $35.00 a month per family, or about a dollar a day, and have less than this housing accommodation. According to the official inquiry of the Home Office in 1915,

1 The Japan Chronicle states: "Few can stand the strain for more than one year, when death, sickness or desertion is the outcome. Thus eighty per cent leave the mills every year through various causes, their places being taken immediately by new hands.

The women on the day and night shifts are obliged to share the same bed. Consumption and other epidemics take a terrible toll of the workers. The number of women recruited as factory workers each year reaches 200,000. Of these, 120,000 do not return to the parental roof. Either they become birds of passage moving from one factory to another, or go as maids in dubious tea houses or as illicit prostitutes. Among the 80,000 who return home, 13,000 are found to be sick, 25 per cent having contracted consumption."

An investigation in the Shinshu district showed that 20 per cent of the industrial patients in the hospital were there because of undernourishment and approximately 40 per cent on account of tuberculosis.

the monthly earnings of the poor in the industrial slums ranged from $2.50 to $10.00 a month.1

It is one thing to note these facts on poverty in abstract statistics, but it is quite another to see them in actual life. We went through the foul slums of Tokyo where 34 per cent of the people in this section of the city are working, eating and sleeping in one small room which affords each family of five less than eight feet square, or about the space of a double bed. The other 66 per cent in the slums have an average space of less than ten feet square for a family. In each block there are from twenty to thirty little alleys. Each alley six feet wide serves as a street for twenty or more families which inhabit the little one room hovels.

In Osaka and Kobe we found conditions worse than in Tokyo. Crowded into two small districts are thousands of people living in little dark, dog kennels, six feet wide and eight feet long. Twenty-eight families live in each alley, at either end of which are two filthy latrines used by all. The inhabitants are underfed, overcrowded until they have to sleep side by side, men, women and children, all together. There is the foul air from the open sewers and the smoke of the factories, the people die like flies. We could see the great chimneys of the factories where Osaka, with her rapid industrialization, is making money, but is burning up her childhood under the dark pall of factory smoke. Here in the heart of the greatest industrial district is Osaka with the highest death rate of any city in the world, and Kobe which ranks fourth, following two starving German cities. Here are the diseased, the feebleminded, criminals, deserted wives and children, the families of men who are now in prison, ex-convicts and masses of the poor. Twenty thousand human beings herded together like dumb beasts are trying to live on less than twenty

1 Japan Year Book, 1922, p. 178.

cents a day each. From such families eighty per cent of the prostitutes have been driven to their present life on account of poverty. A father of a starving family can now lease his daughter for three years for the sum of $800.

The majority of the people in Japan have no home of their own, no land, no tools, no certain means of livelihood. Wages are quite inadequate for the present high cost of living. Thousands of the factory girls are working from twelve to seventeen hours a day and receiving a daily wage of from twenty to thirty cents. About one-fourth of the laborers of Japan are boys and girls. These patient toilers show signs of breaking under the terrific strain of modern industrialism.

The average family consists of five persons, but in very many cases two or more families occupy the same room. In addition, many laborers board in such homes and sleep indiscriminately with the family. The moral conditions of the dormitories for girl workers in some factories, especally certain spinning mills, are extremely bad. Unscrupulous overseers and wardens in some cases are known to hold girls in virtual moral slavery. One expert on factory conditions states that it is not uncommon for one-half of the girls employed in certain mills to lose their virtue within a year after entering the mill.

Long working hours and extreme fatigue induce the desire for unhealthful excitement and vicious pleasures. After working, the laborer finds it easy to spend his spare time in heavy drinking, gambling and in other forms of vice. The "Kitchin Yado," or cheap workingmen's boarding houses in which thousands throng, give little else but bestial or degrading amusements for the inmates. The wretched women of the neighborhood are on hand to sell themselves for five cents or more, while gambling and drinking to

gether with venereal diseases take a terrible toll of the stalwart workers of the industrial district.1

Working with such wages, hours and conditions, it is not to be wondered at that there is a widespread spirit of unrest spreading among Japan's patiently toiling multitudes. The infection is everywhere. From their own impoverished conditions, from the daily press, from the International Conference of Labor at Washington, from the stimulus of revolutionary Russia, from labor leaders and agitators, from the intellectuals, professors and students in the universities, from the very atmosphere of the time, unrest is spreading.

As a result of this growing unrest on the part of labor, there were three or four hundred strikes a year, even in the hard times following the war.2 The Japanese laborer, though usually patient and hard working, when aroused is volcanic in temperament like the molten lava underlying his mountainous islands. This was manifested in the sudden and fierce rice riots of 1918 when some 300,000 took part in violent demonstrations against the high cost of living. The assassination of Mr. Yasuda, the millionaire miser and profiteer, and of Premier Hara also showed the temper of the times.

Japan Year Book, 1922, p. 180; World Almanac, 1922, p. 291. According to Article 17 of the Police Order of 1900, which is still in force in Japan strikes are forbidden and all acts of agitation which might lead to a strike are punishable by imprisonment. "Those who, with the object of causing a strike, seduce or incite others shall be sentenced to major imprisonment of one to six months with additional fines." A closed safety valve means explosion; autocracy and repression cause revolution,

The strike in Kobe in 1921 was typical of the new spirit observable after the war. This strike was led by the Reverend T. Kagawa, perhaps the most spiritual pastor in Japan. He himself thus describes it: "On Sunday, the tenth of July, 35,000 workmen made a great demonstration, marching in a procession about five miles long. The Kawaski and Mitsubishi Shipbuilding Yards did indeed at last put down this disturbance by closing the works and enlisting military force, but it required the exertions of two battalions of soldiers and four thousand police for its suppression, when for the first time in Japan blood was shed in this connection. The strike failed, but the sympathy of Japan was with the strikers. During the forty days that the strike lasted, the city people gladly bought wares of the six thousand peddlars in order to help on the success of the strike; and they set out thousands of pounds of ice in front of their shops for the refreshment of the strikers. I was sent to prison, charged with the crime of disturbance of the peace, with a hundred and twenty other leaders."

The workers' program comprised in the main these conditions: joint control of workshops, recognition of workers' right to form or join labor unions, collective bargaining, adoption of an 8 hour day, increase of wages, allowance in case of dismissal, etc. Is it to be wondered at that in the midst of such conditions labor has struggled to organize? Today the majority are controlled by radical leaders. Many of the members who called themselves socialists a few years ago have gone over to the radical Third International of Russia. At the presnt time there are about forty radical groups in and around Tokyo, deeply tinged with the ideas of revolution and influenced by Bolshevism.

The first trade unions were organized some forty years ago by Christian leaders who had studied in foreign lands. The intellectuals in the labor movement of the early days