Japan’s War Tax and Poverty.

New Zealand Graphic, Volume XLIX, Issue 21, 21 May 1913, Page 34

Japan’s War Tax and Poverty.

The Sufferings of the People Caused byl the Cost of War and by the New Economic Regime.

By’

WALTER J. KINGSLEY.

¥11 E Japane<e < h>\<•) nimmt is doing all that it possibly can to lighten the load of poverty upon tin* people, and at the 'jnie time maintain and strengthen Japan’s high place among the nations. In the north-eastern provinces, where the crops have failed, relief measures were hurricdlv Ket in operation, and 1 he more fortunate provinces gave liberally in proportion to their resources. Everv facility is oiven to Japanese desiring to settle in Formosa. Korea, and Sakhalin. Japan. however. is engaged in a brutal, disheartening struggle for pennies, and to the average Japanese a penny looks as large as a five-shilling piece to an Englishman. ’l'he struggle lor lite its waged by the millions on a scale >o pitifully small that to the prosperous Occidental it seems infinitesimal. What wonder, them, that every steamer from Japan carries its full (plot a in the Asiatic steerage of men and women flying from home to regions where they can (‘arn more in a day than Japan offers them for a prosperous w’eek? I'he tumult and the shouting that followed the cessation of hostilities, the uproar and rioting after the Treaty of 'Portsmouth, and the noisy, lantern-lit welcome to the returning soldiery seem already like historic memories of ancient eras. I'he victorious Japanese are now feeling tin* weight of the war upon their shoulders a crushing burden pressing hard upon the populace in every village, on every farm, and in every fishingboat. In mines and ollices and factories there its repining. Japanese children do not laugh as blithclv as in the old da vs.

Happiness was their heritage then, but now the nation demands that the little ones go to work at a time of life regarded in England as infancy. In the manufacturing cities like Osaka, there are no longer seen thousands of boys and girls playing in dainty, many-coloured costumes like gorgeous butterflies on the grass of temples. You will find them in coarse, dull clothing, working like pathetic dolls in the factories. These babes, toiling for a few pennies a day, form a vast and sorrowful army. Old and New. Japan has been transformed without transition, and the astounding overturn of the feudal system. with its many-hued, easy, and tranquil life, finds the Japanese masses in a state of mind that it is almost impossible to describe. The clash of the old and the new, the resistance of ancient traditions to the ideals of modernity, the numberless new needs, the expanded national egotism, the splendid visions of luxury revealed by the newly rich, and the general intellectual disquiet that has spread like a disease from the other side of the world, have made the Japanese one of the most excitable races on earth. With small means, they desire everything. Tokyo has slums the poverty of which readies the last depth of human degradation. Below’ the cellars of Paris, the alleys of London, and the crowded slums of the New York East Side, the Japanese capital reveals a lower gulf. It is a region that no ray lights. Your mouldy man of Paris and your “hooligan” of London do have at times fierce joys and moments of acid pleasure, but the micro-

scopic intensity of the distress in the Shitaya quarter of Tokyo bars out all hope. Tokyo has far too many poor people, and what is to become of them is a pressing problem. Thousands are shipped to Korea and Formosa, but the pressure steadily increases, owing to the constant migration of ambitious Japanese from the provinces to the capital city. Japan carefully avoids all public reference to these great sores on its body politic. Their existence is hidden from the foreign visitor. Barely does a tourist see the slums, and specialists studying the city for precise information are sedulously kept out of the poorest quarters. Japan is so skilfully press-agented that the existence of these miserable purlieus is not even suspected by the average student of conditions. It is a jouralistic rule in Japan not to say anything that betrays weakness in the life of the people, and it is a rule generally observed. But there are writers in Japan who think that in adopting the civilisation of the Occident the republican form of government should also have been imported, and these give the Ministry trouble at times by telling plain, unpalatable truths. The ’•Kohumin” newspaper instructed a representative to live the life of the lowest and poorest in Tokyo, and his articles dealing with life in the Shitaya district created an immense sensation. When translated into English in pamphlet form, the Government promptly bought up the entire edition and destroyed the plates. Japan's Economy. Even the average Japanese has good reason to be troubled. All the necessaries of life have gone up in price, and he has been educated to scores of new' desires and appetites imported from abroad, while his earning capacity has lagged behind. Between the despotic paternalism of the Government and tin* imported mechanism of the private monopolies, he is drained to the last sen to maintain an army and navy and to fatten the purses of a few favoured capitalists of powerful clans. Government ownership by indirect taxation and the internal revenue and customs, together with heavy direct taxes, have bled the nation. Nothing is wasted in Japan. After watching the poor gathering burned matches and garbage in Tokyo, one must consider the boasted economy of the Chicago packing houses as rather coarse work. The poor devour -every scrap of fish <‘iit rails from the markets, and eat with avidity rotten fruit, stinking Vegetables, sour, spoiled rice, rancid grease,

and fragments of meat. Nothing that is or ever was edible is neglected in Tokyo’s garbage. Every ounce of material goes to cheap eating-houses in the slums to be retailed to the poor. A corporation has been formed to control the collection of garbage and its distribution to the restaurants which nrake up their bill of fare from the filthy mess brought to them daily. The Man in the Street. With work scarce in comparison with the I’abour sunnly, wages low, and food and clothing high in price and going higher, the man jn the Tokyo street is becoming a grumbler. With the newly rich ■evincing a class despotism that, the kindly old aristocracy never dreamed of, the Japanese is beginning to resent his wholesale exploitation. The artistic pride that Japanese artists once took in their work is disappearing in many places. The huge factory is driving out

the little shop where the worker was an artist carrying out his own ideas of beauty in the commonest things, and making his humble trademark Famous in his locality. But. hardest of all. the Japanese capitalist is the most remorseless devourer of little ones the world has known. He has prevented any legislation whatever to protect the children, and they ’are remorselessly used as factory hands. The Japanese newspaper men work for salaries that would be despised by a London oilice boy. Scholarly, brilliant fellows for the most part, they are underpaid even in a land of inlinitesinrally small salaries, and their general

reception by officials and public men is contemptuous to a high degree. They have their revenge by printing the minutest details of scandals involving well-known men. The Government lets them blow off steam in this wa’-. Many returned soldiers are finding it hard to settle down in their old places, or to find means of livelihood anywhere. Thousands of them are roaming the highways or starving in the city slums. The fact that a Japanese once in possession

A street of Yokohama decorated to celebrate Admiral Togo's victory. of a job cannot be dislodged made it hard for the veterans to get the stay-at-homes out of the places they preempted when the fighting men went to the front. These poor follows found that while cheered in the streets they were politely, but none the less firmly, rejected in shops and offices. There was no room for them. It is interesting to follow the history of ’.in individual known to the writer:

A Personal History. Taki Zenzaburo was one of the first of the Tokyo rickshaw men to quit the profitable stand at the Shimbashi railway station and go to war. He had been earning from 1/ to 2/ a day, and was esteemed a very lucky fellow. He sold his rickshaw to raise money for the support of his aged father, whom he left alone in the little house of a few mats they rented not far from the busy station. After sixteen months he returned, a sturdy, healthy figure broadened *and benefited by campaigning. He wore his war medal proudly and marched with his comrades along cheering lanes of little men and women under canopies of Hags, and felt himself more than compensated for his sacrifices when the Son of Heaven reviewed the army in Uyeno Park. Taki was happy; he had offered his all to his country, and surely good fortune pursued those who dared the patriot’s death. As soon as Taki was mustered out he hurried to his home, which he found occupied by strangers. Mis father had died a few days before, and his effects had been sold to pay the funeral expenses and doctor’s bills. For a time he was welcome everywhere and was entertained by patriotic citizens who took delight in receiving heroes of the great war, but soon the enthusiasm died out and Tokyo returned to its monotonous daily life. Taki was unable to find employment, owing to the glut of unskilled labour. In all that city of five hundred thousand houses and two million souls there was no niche for him. He could not re-enter the ranks of the rickshaw men at Shimbashi station, as he had no money to buy or rent a vehicle and to pay the £5 deposit required of those human coach-horses who have the monopoly of this rich territory. He found the rickshaw coolies, discouraged by the competition of the railways, the tramcars and the carriages, organising to keep out newcomers and to protect themselves. They felt that the sixty thousand able-bodied rickshaw men of Tokyo ought to make themselves a force

to be reckoned with. Taki was not a member of the new union, ami was not desired. One day Taki bethought himself of Harris, the rugged young Englishman employed on the staff of the ••Japan Tinies,” a daily ncwspa|M*r published in English. When Harris had lived in the neighlumring village of Kanagawa. Taki hail been his rickshaw coolie. So Taki

went to the very British Harris, and after many bows and felicitations stated his condition and asked the “honourable” writer’s advice. Harris said to him: “Shove, your condition is that of thousands of your comrades; everywhere your countrymen are suffering; in several provinces they are dying of starvation. Japan is weak with exhaustion; it finished the war on nerve. You and your fellows must go on paying the price of victory. Peace will la* harder than war for many years to come, ami ’.ill Japan —men. women and children must suffer together. Japan has puffed out

its chest and feels that it mtbt maintain the expansion; it will be a hard business. I am sorry for you, Taki. Here are live yen (5 2). It i- all that I can afford. Please do not come again, for you are but one of many good friends in equal distress.” Tlie Home of the Heroes. Taki prostrated himself with thanks ami left, broken-hearted. He felt that Harris had spoken all too truly. fie clung desperately to hK live yen while he hunted employment. Ever\ where he met veterans in the same straits. Taki and two other soldiers pook*d their little capital and rented a tiny house* in a street in the Shitaya quarter. This street, occupied by the poorest of the poor, is tilled by two thousand houses separated by alleys crossing one anotlnr al right angle-. One large house under one long low root is divided into many little habitation- by partitions. These places arc* called nagaya. There are little -hops among them called yorozuya or ••sellers of ten thousand things.” There are hor-c lle-h restaurants ’.’.nd cafes where spoiled rice and fish entrails are the stock in trade. Second-hand stores and pawnshops abound, for in Japan the pawnbroker will make an advance* on any article that does not fall lielow a penny in value. The three veterans opened a little restaurant called the •Home ( >f the Honourable Ten Thousand Heroes.” The average bill for a gur-t was 2.1. but there were plungers who ■s<piandere<l as much as 4d. and these had a feast. r<ceixing for this sum three bottles of sake, a dish of sashimi or raw fish served with horse-radish, a cup of bean soup, and a saucer of stewed fish. To them came many old soldiers asking food, which was never rt'fu-ed. Had it not been for the coolies employed in the larger simp-, who came in their working kimonos bearing the -ign of their em ployer on the back, the three xoteranwould have soon 10.-t their ill. As it was they lost, despite the fact that a basket of shark entrail- pundiased for I 3 retailed for 2 . and the heads of

lunnv fish purchased for 1/ brought, in various dishes, fully 4/0. As times 4H A harder trade grew shack; the num lx*r of soldiir visitors increased, and it was impossible to refuse the poor fellows something to rat when they patheli rally gazed in silence at the tempting cuttlefish and fresh corn. Then the rent was advanced and the veterans, ’after borrowing money at ISO per rent in terest. finally gave up and moved to a cheaper lion* • of three mats with a bark vard just two fret wide. One by one they pawned their clogs, s’.mdals, an I socks, their umbrellas, braziers, lift I low tables, rice kettles, and miserabl. bedding —'everything that could Ik pa wiled. Tokyo Skylocks. The Government rate of interest ir the pawnshops is .supposed to be about 1 per cent a month, 'but by deviou? devices tin* Tokvo Shvlocks secure iron

5 to S per cent per month. 'Then, whenever an article was taken out. ’.in additional charge of li per u'lit was made. In the matter ol pipes, the pawnbrokers, after advancing, would rent them out to their owners for a few mills a day so that th. 1 unfortunate might still have his smoke of a thimbleful of the horrible stull’ supplied by the Government monopoly. The three veterans huddled together on their ragged old mats and lived on the entrails of fish, horses and cattle, which, prepared in itinerant kitchens by kerb restaura tours. were sold nicely browned on long wooden skewers. (Inc skewer cost jd and in common with many of their neigh hours, they chewed the very wood to ex tract the last at >m of nourishment. Fo

amusement they read newspapers whicii when twelve hours old were sold to the very poor for one-third of the original priees. One day, while roaming sorrowfully in the desolate wilderness of low, Hat houses. Taki met his old colonel, who received him kindly and gave him one yen. With this the veteran purchased a stock of salt mackerel, dried cuttie. salmon trout, and codfish on skewers, and started out as an itinerant merchant in the country, lie found the farmers and villagers so poor that they could not afford to pay Tokyo prices for his delicacies, and ho was compelled.to sell at a loss. He trudged along manfully, however, hoping that lurk would change. He washed his coarse blue kimono in the wayside streams. He was still self-respecting Japanese. On 1 he road and in the hamlets of (’hichibu and Omiya he met homeless veterans and beggars of all sorts. It seemed to him that Japan had become the saddest country on earth. Then he sold the last of his stock and found that he had hut 5d loft. lie determined to return to Tokyo. There was a stroke of good luck on the way. Ten miles from the city a farmer hired him to draw a load of vegetables to the market. The clumsy cart carried fully seven hundred pounds, hut Taki tugged it to its destination and received 4d for his labour. 'That was a large sum. as 4d in-the market had a having power of thirteen cucumbers or twenty egg-plants. It meant a temporary supply of food. Hack in Tokyo. Taki gave a swindling employment agency his last sen and secured employment in a rice shop which sold the leavings of large restaurants and public institutions. His wages were 2Jd a day and all the spoiled rice he could eat. It was a repulsive business. The dilapidated shop boasted a little yard, and in this were stretched old mats upon

which the rice was dried. Inside, bottles, casks, broken boxes, tubs, and kettles were filled with refuse rice. Everything was very dirty, and yet to the neighbourhood it was a mainstay for food cheap enough to be within reach. Twice a day Taki and the other assistants made a round of the restaurants and public institutions, such as the hospitals and the Military College, and bought the rice and the bits of food that had been left over. They also picked bits of fish and decayed fruit from the garbage receptacles. A tub of rice weighing 125 pounds could be bought in this way for 2/1. It was retailed to the poor at the shop for Ad a pound. The rice, the fragments of bread and fish, the spoiled fruit, the stale pickles and the like were carefully sorted. A Japanese is dirty only when he cannot help himself, and Taki shuddered at the filth of this garbage gathered like precious metal and weighed out to tinlast ounce by the stewards of the restaurants and the officials of the public buildings. Poverty made him and his fellows live in dirt and eat dirt; it was not to be escaped. He learned to speak the slang of the second-hand food dealers. Rice scorched in tin* kettle was termed •’tiger’s skin,” while rice washed out in cleaning was known as “slop”; fragments of bread they called “stove” in jocular allusion to the warmth they did not give the stomach; and bits of vegetables were sold as “stumps.” Taki soon became a connoisseur in the variou.-. forms of edible swill. Of course, there were doleful days occasionally, when the patrons of the cafes and the students in the colleges and tin* hospital patients cleaned up their plates and there was little refuse to gather. On such days the throng at the shop which awaited the return of the laden carts made a lugubrious assemblage. When there was not enough to go round, the repulsive mess was divided up so as to (mable each patron to buy a fractional meal. Taki worked here for several months, but at the time tin* combination to control the second-hand food-supply was being perfected, and when it finally took over the various collecting carts and routes the veteran found that he was not wanted, owing to new economies m gathering the garbage in central stations. Taki began once more a weary round of labour-seeking. He even joined the homeless coolies who made their headquarters on Reiganjima, an island in Tokyo formed by the River Sumida. Here the poorest class of coolies resort, bearing a pad on their shoulders and wearing a single coarse garment. Not having employment by the day. they seek piece-work and odd jobs. They haunt the lumber yards and the vegetable markets. They pull heavy carts

great distances for £d. After a day of killing toil scattered over half the seu tions of the city, they regard a total earning of 5d as a great harvest. Then they begin to think of the sake shops and a hilarious evening. A dish of cooked food can be had for a farthing, and this, washed down with sake sold in little square wooden cups, makes them forget the toils of the day. In winter they drink “white hoi «e,“ a very cheap sake, and in summer when their thirst is great they satisfy it with shochu, a fiery liquor made from the dregs of tin* sake breweries. After a time Taki left the wharves and markets and found employment with a lender of quilts who lived in Shin Ami Clio, a street in the Shiba quarter. It was getting on in the winter, and his duties consisted of keeping count of the quilts rented to the poor and collecting payment. For this he received 3Ad a day and his food. In this one street there were seven quilt lenders who supplied the 350 houses. The poor cannot afford to own quilts, but when the cold becomes intense they rent coverings

made of rags sewn together, which can be had as low as a farthing a night. In the nipping winter air, an entire family will huddle under a single flimsy quilt. The rent must be paid before midnight. If not paid, the collector takes the quilt and leaves the unfortunates shivering. Taki. though he had charged machine guns, was a veritable coward when it came to depriving the poor of their quilts. Many times he went away leaving a penniless mother with her children in possession of a quilt they could not pay

for and gave up his own money. Sometimes tlie niiserables would take a rented quilt and pawn it. A collection of rags that rented for a penny a night would bring 7Ad at a pawn shop, and then, reckless of consequences, a family would dine. The quilt merchant was relentless in such cases, and the head of the family was invariably arrested and imprisoned. Taki hated his occupation; he liegan to think better of the fat and prosperous rickshaw men and hangers-on of the yoskiwara district, who lived off the out casts and tips from revellers. Once he had esteemed them as the lowest scum of Tokyo, but now he felt that he was in an even lower station. He incurred the dislike of his employer by interceding for patrons who were unable to pay quilt rent, ami was discharged in January. He went forth into a dreary, drizzling day. With his few remaining sen he sought a night’s refuge in a cheap lodging house, where mendicants, beggars, paupers, and the homeless crowd together in the midst of filth and insects for a penny a night. He was so overrun with vermin that sleep was impossible, and he left the horrible den early in the morning, and as a last resort endeavoured to find a comrade who occupied one of the little habitations of three mats’ area which, like rows of dry-goods boxes, filled the street. After a long search he found his friend sick at home and suffering deplorably from hunger and lack of medicine. The house was so small that the household work was done outside, yet the rent was lAd a day. When the family of five slept they were crowded on the three mats which covered the floor. The sick soldier declared that if he could earn £1 a month he could live and support his family. To be sure, they could have no amusements, could buy no new clothing, and would have to subsist on fish offal, bad fruit, and spoiled rice, but they would have* a roof over their heads. Taki had come with the intention of borrowing, but went away regretting that he had not been able to lend. He walked blindly through the fog. hungry and heartbroken; a dog. he thought, fared better than a veteran soldier. As he turned a coiner a carriage bearing a rich nobleman came at a rapid pace from the Maple Club. Taki walked directly before the horses and was run down. He died in a little shop near by in a few moments, and the newspaper which chronicled his end quoted his last words. Thev were: —

•‘Honourable countrymen, 1 give my life to great Japan. May Heaven bless and preserve our illustrious ruler. 1 go. a soldier, to join my warrior ancestors.”

With his last words Taki expressed the dominant spirit of Japan. Sutler as they will, object to the rise of the moneyed aristocracy, grumble over taxes, work for preposterous wages, they are loyal. The worst grumblers are the first to insist upon war when the nation’s honour has been called into question. In the slums of Tokyo one can hear as revolutionary expressions of opinion as in Paris, but they are not really meant. The average citizen realises that Japan, having stepped into the arena, cannot withdraw without losing everything that it now holds dear. Therefore he is steadfast in his patriotism, saying always as do the storytellers in the Tokyo streets: “When the Emperor and his soldiers have finished with the foreigners, he will make Japan an earthly paradise with their wealth.” . And the Government says officially: “Although the national burden was rendered very heavy by the increase in taxation, such was the loyalty and patriotism of the whole nation that no trouble whatever was experienced!”