For days he kept up the search, made occasion to linger about Kanda-bashi, visited the places where they had been together. He even had Ishii make , but beyond that she had left her at Kanda, he could learn nothing. Again he went for council to Karsten. He laughed a little.
"By the gods, but you are the damndest man for losing ladies, for amours. However," he added more seriously, "it's probably as well that things have turned out as they have. The fact is that you have not the light, care-free touch to make a successful . You're a 'one woman' man. You take your affairs of the heart seriously, and for that reason it's the more essential that you make no mistake. As I say, you're a born monogamist. It's an enviable condition; you'll be happy, , content with just one woman, provided you find the right one. These affairs you have had recently count for nothing. You've been lonesome, in a mood. Let it[Pg 226] pass. Some day you'll run into the right one and your problem will be solved for good. And, one thing more, you're not the sort of a fellow who is cut out for a Japanese woman. Run along, go to the dances, play with Kimiko-san and the rest, but don't get involved, for their sake, for they take such matters seriously and you have no right to cause them heartache; and for your own sake as well, for you, too, take such matters seriously. Go to work and forget serious thoughts about women, Sadako-san and the rest. Heavens knows, there ought to be enough going on in Japan just now to keep a newspaperman occupied."
It was true. The atmosphere had become . The railroad strike had alarmed capitalists and . The police were , and strike leaders and , any one thought to be harboring the "dangerous thoughts," were being jailed right and left. Strikes became frequent. Those who them were put away by the police mercilessly. The method seemed successful, but soon the workers resorted instead to what they called "sabotage," grasping fondly at the foreign word, though the movement involved no violence, but consisted in organized effort to do as little as possible; "going slow" was a more descriptive phrase for it. The men went to work as usual, went through the motions of performing their tasks, remained at their posts during the prescribed number of hours, but production fell to a minimum. as busily as usual, but raw material was fed to it but sparingly; tools moved around, back and , but found no steel to shape, whirred hummingly but empty of . It was especially in the case of the tramcar men, who would run a car a block or so, stop for half an hour while making of [Pg 227]searching for some break, then progress a block or two only to halt again. Fights were staged in all the big cities between car crews and passengers. The police were helpless; there was no way of making men work quickly. The capitalists ; here were the calling all the time for reduction of production cost in order that Japanese goods might meet the competition of foreign , and yet their output was becoming absurdly expensive. But the workers were in high feather. Capital had closed so many factories and had discharged so many workmen in order to keep the stock of goods in the domestic market so low that prices would remain high—unable to grasp any theory except that high prices meant high profits—and now it was compelled to employ more workers in order to make up for the loss caused by the "go slow" tactics.
leaders, Socialists, Communists, Syndicalists, and all the worshipers of half-understood 'isms found fine fishing in troubled waters, certain of responsive audiences wherever they might find places in which to shout their , . The police were ubiquitous. By scores, even hundreds, they would attend meetings, breaking them up and jailing leaders whenever occasion offered. The Seiyukai party hired bands of soshi, professional ruffians, to raise at these , and free fights and broken heads became commonplace. Still, the various movements gathered force, came together in common interest as streamlets flow together and form a river. The many feeble unions joined hands, formed . Where heretofore strikes had been mainly , men in this shop or factory striking in the interests of their own personal concerns, demanding discharge of unpopular foremen, shorter hours, higher pay, they now and struck[Pg 228] together, the entire body of workers of one industry, striking in sympathy with other unions. The dockyard workers went out because the employers would not pay a full year's salary to discharged workmen; the threatened to follow suit unless the demand were granted, and the employers gave in. Capital became frightened, tried to stave off the evil day by paying ever greater allowances, hoping to the clamor by of money; but the situation had gone beyond this. The day of the old relation between master and workman, the personal touch of a feeling of common interest, had passed. As if born over-night, class consciousness forth, overshadowed the entire situation. Demands for higher pay, shorter hours, became subordinated, fell into the background; now the cry was for a share by the workmen in control of industries, of .
It became almost impossible to fact from fiction. One could not know what might have happened. It was impracticable to depend on the reports of the press; one knew that the most important news was not allowed to see the light of day. Kent tried to get what he could from original sources. What was capital thinking of all this; what was it doing about it? He sought bankers and industrial leaders. They all that there was no cause for great worry, brought forth sheafs of statistics compiled by various government offices and capital-labor harmony societies, trying to console themselves with patently absurd figures proving that there was no unemployment, that more men were given work than lost employment, that all was serene. Ostrich-like they buried their heads in the convenient mess of figures, on not seeing the truth.
"It's only a phase of the depression which we are[Pg 229] passing through just like other countries," they insisted. "Things are no worse here than they were in America and Europe a few decades ago when your workmen were in a similar condition. Remember, we have in a few years almost caught up industrially with the countries which were several centuries ahead of us. Give us a few years more and conditions here will be the same. Anyway, the situation here is not as bad as in the United States and England, for example. Our strikes are in comparison. We have never had business held up for weeks and months by nation-wide strikes. In New York and Chicago you have daylight bank robberies and hold-ups. In Japan a man may walk safely anywhere with a roll of bank notes in his hand, even in the poorest quarters. And the industrial workers are too few in proportion to the total of population to count for much; only they make lots of noise. The bulk of the people is agricultural. There's nothing very much to worry about."
He out that danger lay in the fact that the agricultural population also had become infected with against capital. Thousands of unions of farmers, who constitute half of the agriculturists, had been formed and clamored against the exactions of landlords. Some of them had made united demands for rent reduction, had refused to till the soil when such were not granted, and had proclaimed that if other were brought in to cultivate the land, these men would be ; so the fields now lay idle. What about the formation of the gigantic of farmers' unions and its great convention in Kobe? What about the report that soldiers who had served their term in the army in Siberia were sowing the seeds of Bolshevism throughout the peasantry? Did not that show that the farmers[Pg 230] were likely to make common cause with the industrial workers?
But they remained stubbornly here also. This, too, was only a phase. A general of the Siberian expedition had said that this Bolshevism was only on the surface, like face powder, which would speedily wash off. So that was that, so to speak. Presently there would be a big rice crop; there were all indications of a yield, and then the farmers would be happy again, and quiet. Anyway, capital was doing what it could. A of scholars and statisticians was studying the situation, and obviously it would be unwise to move in the dark, until these experts had reported. And the Government had appointed a commission for studying the problem of universal , which would report some day. It was a grave question whether the masses were ripe for the vote. It would not do to be over-hasty.
The task of obtaining reliable data with respect to the other side of the situation was equally baffling. A woman had sprung into fame through her articles in various magazines advocating the cause of the masses; partly, also, from the fact that her husband, a university professor, had been placed in jail. Kent went to see her in her small house from floor to ceiling with books and pamphlets, the Karl Marx tomes forth with glorious . She hailed him with joy, chanted a of almost unbelievable ; the capitalists were holding the workers—men, women, and even children—in slavery. Many of them were kept far underground in mines and were not allowed to see light of day for months; they tried purposely to kill them by means of unwholesome food and unsanitary quarters in order to prevent them from going back to the country districts and spreading the cause of[Pg 231] Socialism. It was easy to get young men and girls to replace them, owing to the general unemployment. But he wanted something more definite, data, figures. Certainly, he should have them. She would send him such in a few days. She sent him a vast bundle of papers, a mass of of figures, going back into the early days of Japanese industrialism, showing by minutely statistics that one-half of the factory work women died from consumption within two years of employment in the great textile mills. It seemed almost incredible, and as he went into the matter he found that figures had been given for periods before the time when vital statistics of any kind had been kept by the Government or any one else; still closer examination showed that the tables did not check, were wildly in many cases. Evidently the author had her data, enthusiastically, from her inner consciousness. He went back to her, told her that her information must be more consistent, more reliable. She tore the bundle from his hands. A few days later one of the papers published a lurid account from her, mentioning him by name as a capitalist spy who had been by the famous lady Socialist.
He called on Ikeda, the head of the federation of labor, a rotund, pleasant-faced man with humorous eyes beaming from behind great round spectacles. "Yes, it is getting worse all the time," said the leader. "Of course, all this helps to bring the unions together, but it is difficult to keep them in hand. We all want abolition of capitalism, but while some of us want it peacefully, by evolution, many of the workers, most of the smaller unions especially, want nothing short of revolution. They are Sovietists, Communists, Syndicalists, , all kinds. They are getting more and more out of hand."
[Pg 232]
"Would universal suffrage content them any?" asked Kent. "I should think if you centered on the suffrage movement, gave them that to think about, you might maintain control. Anyway, it seems to me that labor must remain powerless as long as it is voiceless and has no control in the government. I take it that you people will back up the universal suffrage at the next session of the Diet?"
The eyes behind the great lenses became serious. "No, we're going to leave it alone. In fact, we dare not take it up. The workmen look upon that as futile, a , a process that's altogether too slow to suit them. We're afraid that if we took up suffrage as an organized movement, the unions would get out of hand; it would set them thinking of more revolutionary measures; they would insist on them and would sweep aside us who are trying to lead them along a line of action. Anyway, the masses are hardly ripe for suffrage yet. They must be educated first; that's what we are trying to do now, to educate them."
So here, too, was . Labor leaders, like capitalist leaders, were trying to play for time, to avoid facing the music, while the steam in the kettle kept becoming and stronger, with ever more insistent force striving against the walls of . But how much was there really behind all this clamor of labor? He came to wonder to what extent these complaints were . It was true, what the capitalists said, that conditions in Japan were no worse, or not much worse, than they had been in America and Europe not so many decades ago. Of course, the unrest was due to the fact that workers and farmers, heretofore satisfied with feudal conditions not knowing that they could be otherwise, had suddenly been shown by the Socialists, the soldiers coming back from[Pg 233] Siberia, the press, that workmen in other countries lived in what seemed to Japanese eyes the luxury of millionaires, and now they wanted similar privileges, yes, rights. But capital was right in its that workers who could individually bring forth only one-fifth the result produced by the white workmen could be paid wages only in proportion to their output capacity—otherwise Japanese production cost would rise to the point where Japanese goods would be helpless in world competition and industry must cease. The point seemed to be whether capital was holding down labor to harsh conditions.
He took to about in the poorer quarters of Tokyo, but could learn but little. The houses were , of thin boards and paper, but so were those of the wealthier classes; it was the form of construction adopted by a people. Even if these buildings were dirtier, , the population showed no sign of poverty, of . Children played merrily in the streets; men and women moved about or sat chatting in the open stores. A Japanese might have learned something, might have more intimately into their lives, might have entered their , have drawn from them their thoughts, but as a foreigner he felt himself baffled by an invisible veil of reserve. They were , friendly, but impenetrable. Only occasionally might he detect a hostile, wondering glance—what might this foreigner be doing in such places—or he might hear childish voices behind his back uplifted in song to the effect that the foreigner's father was a cat. One night a couple of fellows by sake wanted to take him to their , tried to embrace him, overcome by all-enfolding love of mankind generally, insisted on his joining them in their circumambulations. It was annoying. They were harder to deal with than[Pg 234] if they had been unpleasant. He was trying to hold them off, irritated at the laughing crowd that had gathered, to escape, in some way. Suddenly the ranks of the parted and a Japanese in foreign clothes strode through, a man, muscular, . "Here, you fellows, run along; can't you see that this foreigner wishes to pass?" The men stood back shamefacedly, murmured some apology. "All right, now run along." He cleared a way through the crowd. "They mean well enough," he explained to Kent, "but probably you had better let me go with you for a moment."
"Oh, I'm all right. Still, I want to thank you for your help." He began to explain why he had come; it was only due this unknown rescuer, and then the man had spoken in English, and evidently held some authority that the people here recognized. Who might he be, anyway?
"So you come to see poverty," the man laughed. "Well, if you really want to see it, the real thing, I think you may find no better man to guide you. That's my , you see." He went on to explain. He was an official, it appeared, had charge of a government home for , where men might sleep for fifteen sen a night and board for forty sen a day. "But there are too few of these places," he complained. "We can take care of less than one tenth of the thousands who need it. There are no free sleeping places, no free food. The Capital-Harmony Society has provided a few reading rooms, playgrounds and all that; every now and then some rich man gives a small park; but they all give a few hundred thousands where they ought to be giving in millions. They can't see that if they don't give now, freely, these people will come some day and take it from them by force. If you care to come along, I'll show you how these people live."
[Pg 235]
He led Kent through a of narrow , into the Fukagawa quarter, through dark lanes illumined only by faint light from open . They must walk over rotten boards covering the slimy which served as , to avoid the deepest of the universal mud. Presently they came to a collection of buildings more squalid than the rest,—long, barn-like houses of , rotting wood.
"Here you are," said the guide. "These are the 'Nagaya Tunnels'; they are famous for being the worst place in the city."
They entered. Through the length of the building ran a narrow passage, faced on both sides by of three mats each, spaces of six by nine feet, each housing a family, several adults and of children. In the passageway all cooking and washing was done. It was with hibachi, firewood, cooking , buckets for water brought from a pump outside, . Women were busy cooking, and smoke idly against the roof, escaping through a large hole and numerous cracks and . As they passed down this corridor they could look into the minute rooms, packed with goods, futon, clothing, poor of every kind, leaving only a space in the middle where humans sat together or lay asleep. Some of the rooms, particularly those where a few men maintained bachelor housekeeping, were ill-kept, with paper hanging in streamers from broken shoji , and goods about . Others formed striking contrast with desperate attempts at cleanliness, where woman hands had tried pathetically to create some kind of home atmosphere in the box-like spaces them in this of poverty. Kent caught a glimpse of a family seated about a low Japanese table, father, mother and a couple[Pg 236] of children, sitting decorously, with the same display of
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