FAMINE IN JAPAN.

Press, Volume LIII, Issue 9582, 24 November 1896, Page 3

FAMINE IN JAPAN.

The Japanese . Government. is issui_j§ wholesale legal permits to destitute parents to sell their daughters. According to a letter recently received from a resident id Tokio, Japan is in the grim clutch of famine, a famine so bitter that the Government has encouraged this general vending of maidens to provide means of sustenance for tha head* of' suffering families. This is the firafc serious famine ever known in Japan, and the horrors of it cannot be told in language lurid enough to furnish an adequate portrayal. Entire households are living- on the equivalent of fourpence a day, and of families are without even that..:.The||B has been little or nothing done in the. of charity. The Government haa been incon"'prehensibly slow to act. Rice (and the drop everywhere has failed) is but sparsely raised there, and its price has been increased by the shippers as the misery . has grown. Speculators in it are enormously rich. * Thta is the state of things which occasions sale of Japanese girls. From her earliest childhood the Japanese girl is trained**.-in courteous ceremonial.. To be amiable* to those about her js ' instilled, in her btftm almost before she. learns to apeak. Filife! affection and devotion is a tradition of tha country. The absence of it is the mo«& heinous of crimes. Any sacrifice would b* made by a Japanese child to secure parentis against privation. The Japaneaft daughter may be sold as a supplementary wife to. some wealthy Japanese who'JS already wedded, but wishes to add to'tha attractiveness of his home. With the very poor it ib a case of starvation, suicide, ot selling their daughters. The minimum mge at which a girl may be sold is twelve, year?, and the prices have now fallen as low as £1. The price, under ordinary conditions,''>''.«.. about £40, and these figures show the »wMf need that exists. Before the sale Is completed the deeds are signed before a polfc* magistrate. If everything is satisfactory the girl's name and a minute descriptiqii'.jjf her are entered in a book, and this bookio solely devoted to the record of her life hereafter. At the end of thres yearß the purchaser is bound to release the girl if ; l money he has expended upon her during that time is repaid to him. The law declare*; the girl free at the end of six years, whether the money is repaid or not.