Japanese Girls and Women, Alice Mabel Bacon [ebook reader library TXT] 📗

as teachers that is steadily increasing. Although in the normal schools the proportion of women to men is still only one to six, and while teaching, even in the primary schools, is not yet mainly in feminine hands as it is with us, there is still a good showing of women employed as teachers. From the figures of the school report of 1898, we find over 10,000 women as teachers and assistants in the public and private schools. The profession of nursing, too, which ten years ago was just opening, has already drawn many women into its ranks. In the Red Cross hospitals alone there are this year nearly a thousand nurses taking the course, and a thousand graduates scattered throughout the country hold themselves ready to answer the call of the society in the time of need, in the mean time practicing their profession wherever they may chance to be. The quality of the Red Cross graduates has been tested now in two wars, and they show the soldierly virtues of their nation, as well as the more womanly qualities of tenderness and gentleness; and a self-respect that has kept them pure and free from stain in the midst of severe temptation. It is impossible for me to gather statistics of the work done by other institutions for the training of nurses, but the figures given above may, I think, be doubled with absolute safety in making an estimate of the total number of nurses trained and in training throughout the empire.

The growth of commerce and industry has greatly increased the demand for feminine labor outside the home. In the old days the two most important industries of the country, tea and silk, were mainly carried on by women in their homes, but the use of modern machinery is rapidly taking the weaving industries out of the homes and making factory hands of the women and children.[44]

One of the most noticeable effects of this new demand for female labor is the extreme scarcity of servants. Although wages are nearly double what they were ten years ago, it is extremely difficult for Japanese housekeepers now to find servants to replace the old ones as they drop out of the ranks, and the women who apply for positions are apt to be far inferior to those who came to the same families to do the same work ten years ago.

In other ways, too, women are learning to fill new places in the world. The telephone, which now connects towns and cities and villages in Japan, employs girls in large numbers. In the printing-offices we find women at work, not as compositors, but as compositors' assistants, darting from case to case about the room and selecting for the compositor the ideographs that he needs in his work. Inasmuch as a small printing-office cannot get along with less than four thousand characters, and as larger ones may have several times that number, the need of quick-witted and quick-footed assistants to each compositor may be easily recognized. As the schools turn out each year more girls fitted by education to do this kind of work, and as the number of newspapers and other printed matter is continually on the increase, the demand for and supply of this special variety of labor are likely to increase proportionately for some time to come.

A few women are now making their way as reporters on the daily papers, a few more are engaged in literary work. One of the best of modern Japanese novelists was a woman, but she died several years ago at so early an age that her work was a promise rather than a fulfillment. Artists, too, there are, who are making names for themselves, as well as a living, in a country where art is so common that success in that line means hard work and special talent. A few young women support themselves by stenography, a few more as clerks and secretaries in business offices. Until a writing-machine has been invented that will write four thousand characters, there will not be much demand for typewriter girls in Japan outside of the treaty ports, where a few are now employed. The Japanese government has found, as Uncle Sam discovered some time ago, that for the counting of paper money women's fingers are more deft than those of men, and it consequently gives employment to a few women in that work. One railroad has recently begun to employ women as ticket-sellers, and three medical schools have already graduated some women physicians, though it is still doubtful whether there is any great opening for them in the country. These are some of the ways in which women now find themselves able to gain a little more independence of life. The whole matter is so new that no statistics are available that will show the exact extent of the demand for labor in these directions, but from my own observation I am inclined to think that there is little change in the employments of women except in the neighborhood of the larger cities, and that the new occupations as yet have a very slight effect upon the conditions in this country at large.

It is not possible to understand the actual progress made in Japan in improving the condition of women, without some consideration of the effect that Christian thought and Christian lives have had on the thought and lives of the modern Japanese. If Japanese women are ever to be raised to the measure of opportunity accorded to women in Christian countries, it can only be through the growth of Christianity in their own country, and for that reason a study of that growth is pertinent to a study of their condition.

The past ten years in Japan have been discouraging to the missionaries in many ways, and it is not unusual to hear from the less hopeful of them the statement that their work has been at a standstill, or even going backward, during that time. The statistics of missionary effort show a steady, though slight, increase in the number of professing Christians, but if the sum total of the results of missionary effort were the number of converts made, it might, perhaps, be doubtful whether the money spent on missions in Japan might not be better turned to other purposes. There are now in Japan, of Christians of all sects, Protestant, and Roman and Greek Catholic, 121,000, or about one half of one per cent. of the total population of the country; but the influence of these Christians as leaders of thought is out of all proportion to their number. Christian men are found in the Diet, in the army and navy, in the universities and colleges, and in the newspaper offices, in a proportion far beyond their ratio to the total population, exerting their influence in many ways for the uplifting of the nation to loftier moral ideals. The proportion of Christian men and women in the government schools with which I have been connected is rather surprising. In the Higher Normal School, training young women to go out into the whole country as teachers, the proportion of professing Christians upon the teaching staff is striking; and in the Peeresses' School, which is as conservative and anti-foreign as any educational institution in Japan, there are five professing Christians among the thirty-five teachers. While, on the one hand, the Japanese Christians are not all models of all the virtues, while there is with many of them a tendency to modify their Christianity so as to accommodate a considerable amount of worldly wisdom, it is true, on the other hand, that the most active workers in the cause of philanthropy are men who have accepted the Christian faith, and who are striving in all earnestness to model their lives after the life of Jesus of Nazareth. The Christian Church in Japan to-day has its heroes and its back-sliders, and has between these two extremes a rank and file of every-day, commonplace men and women, who amidst frequent failures and in the midst of many temptations are making the name of Christian stand for a certain kind of life and a certain standard of virtue quite above and beyond the lives and standards of their countrymen. It is largely because of them that a Christian public opinion is growing up among non-Christian Japanese. Men to-day who have no special leanings toward Christianity shake their heads over vices and sins which a few years ago were not even thought of as wrong. There is a great deal of talk about the growth of moral depravity in the country, but as a matter of fact, the standards of virtue have never been so high since Japan was opened as they are to-day: it is only that Christian thought has held up a mirror to an un-Christian society, in which it views all too clearly its own defects. There is, to my mind, no more hopeful sign of the times than the growing discouragement over the present condition of morals. When there is added to this a steadily increasing respect for the honesty and strength of character of Christian men and women, it must mean that a great and lasting impression has been made. To-day banks, business offices, and other places requiring trustworthy clerks and employees, prefer, other things being equal, Christian young men, for it is generally known that they are more worthy of confidence than the majority of applicants for such places.

One instance of this increased moral sensitiveness may be cited in the recent successful efforts to limit the power of the brothel-keepers over their victims and virtual slaves, the jōrō or licensed prostitutes. As I have stated in a previous chapter, the women who carry on this business in Japan are, many of them, unwilling victims of a system which allows parents to sell their children to a life of shame; and they enter upon that life so young that they can hardly be regarded as morally responsible for their condition. Even after the actual sale of girls was forbidden by an imperial ordinance in 1872, the purchase price was called a loan to the parents of the girl, and subsequent loans for clothing entered upon the books of the establishment kept the unfortunates so continually in debt to their masters that they could never escape from the bondage in which they were held except through death, or by purchase by some infatuated admirer. Public opinion, while it indulged in some sentimental pity for the hard lot of the jōrō, did little or nothing to aid any one who desired to help them, regarding the profession as a necessary one, and caring not at all for the injustice to which the girls were subjected. Ten or twelve years ago, a movement started by some prominent Japanese Christians against the jōroya fell flat for want of a public opinion behind it. Speeches on the subject were hissed down by audiences of young men, and nothing could be done to help even the most innocent and unhappy of the girls to a better life. In the new code, perhaps as an effect of this movement, a new law provided that the jōrō might leave her calling by giving notice to the police. A police regulation, however, forbade any girl to cease her employment, or to leave the house in which she was kept, unless her official notice of cessation was countersigned by the keeper of the jōroya, so that by her own effort she could not free herself.

In the year 1900, one of these girls in a provincial city appealed to an American missionary for help in getting her liberty. Through his aid, and that of his Japanese helpers, her case came