gets
sick or is injured, a committee, assisted 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 sentiment of the country is loudly and insistently
demanding a law {33} 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
manufac