THE INDUSTRIAL MENACE FROM JAPAN.
IT is so seldom one comes across an original thought upon the social question that we have read Mr. Lafe.adio Hearn's paper in the Atlantic Monthly upon the instability of all things in Japan with unusual interest. Mr. Hearn, no doubt, was, like so many others, captured by Japan ; but still, he really knows the country, having taught in it for many years, and he has a right to the attention which sensible men pay to an expert. In this particular essay, he dwells on a side of Japanese life and character which observers in this country have partially failed to realise. Everything in Japan, except the Mikado's authority, is unstable. We have never changed our capital since the Roman time, nor has France ; but Japan has had sixty capitals within her historic period. We build, as a rule, with the ideal of permanency before us, even the base architect who designs for jerrybuilders in- tending his edifices to last during a short lease ; but the Japanese city is made up of houses of mud, bamboos, and paper, put up in five days, and intended to last, with endless repairing, only so long as its owner may not desire to change his abode. There are, in fact, no great buildings in Japan except a few colossal fortresses erected by the nobles while feudalism prevailed. The modern factories in Japan, however extensive their busi- ness or however beautiful and costly their products, are but long-drawn shanties, and the very temples must, by immemorial custom, be cut into little pieces every twenty years, and distributed among the pilgrims. Our workman's first demand in boots is that they shall last, but the Japanese is content if his straw shoes will protect his feet during one stage only of any journey. We intend even our shirts to "wear," but a Japanese unstitches his robe that it may be washed, and then stitches it together again. This custom of instability extends even to the service of the State :—" Nothing is fixed except the Throne. Perpetual change is identical with state policy. Ministers, governors, superintendents, in- spectors, all high civil and military officials, are shifted at irregular and surprisingly short intervals, and hosts of smaller officials scatter each time with the whirl. The province in which I passed the first twelvemonth of my residence in Japan has had four different governors in five years. During my stay at Kumamoto, and before the war had begun, the military command of that important post was three times changed. The government college had in three years three directors. In educational circles, especially, the rapidity of such changes has been phenc menal. There have been five different ministers of education in my own time, and more than five different educational policies." The body of the people, and especially the artisans, keep themselves, like the Administration, in a state of fluidity. A Japanese workman never roots himself or wishes to root himself. If he has any reason for changing his province he changes it at once, dismantling his " house," the paper and mud hut which is so picturesque and cleanly, packing his belongings on his shoulder, telling his wife and family to follow, and trudging off with a light step and a lighter heart for his far - away destination, perhaps five hundred miles off, where he arrives after an expenditure of perhaps, at the outside, 5s., immediately builds him a house, which costs a few shillings more, and is at once a respectable and responsible citizen again. All Japan, says Mr. Hearn, is always on the move in this way, and change is the genius of Japanese civilisa- tion, as it is the specialty of the islands, where from volcanic action the mountains alter, the rivers change their courses, the coasts lose their outline, the lakes appear and disap- pear, and the very scenery, with us the most stable of conceivable things, which in our historic period has been altered only by human action, cannot be relied on to remain.
No society, the British squire will say, so unstable, can be great. Japan is great, says Mr. Hearn, the fluid masses gyrating for ever round the one fixed centre, the Throne ; and her civilisation, whatever its defects—and he admits the smallness and " impermanency " of all things in Japan—is the highest in the East ; while in the great industrial competition of the world, fluidity is the secret of Japanese strength. The worker shifts his habitat without a regret to the place where he is most wanted. The factory can be moved at a week's notice, the artisan at half-a-day's. There are no impedimenta to transport, there is practically nothing to build, there is no expense except in coppers to impede travel ; and if we understand Mr. Hearn, though he has not dwelt sufficiently on this point, the Japanese has either no feeling for place, provided the place be not outside Japan, or he has learned from the discipline of ages to suppress this, as he suppresses almost all other feelings—patriotism is an exception— when they impede his action. Being thus the freest of mankind, with the fewest wants, and the greatest capacity for dispensing with all the fettering forms of expenditure, the Japanese is a competitor with whom no European or American can hope to contend. The European or American is bound in unbreakable withes made up of his wants, his comforts, his habitudes, his desire to live among the usual faces, his rooted belief that the solidity, .permanence, magnitude of his buildings, from the church down to the sleeping place, is essential to their efficiency. The competition between the Western Worker and the Japanese, is a competition between the coast and the sea. in -which the mobile force, however long driven back, must always in the end defeat the immobile one :— "The Japanese man of the people—the skilled labourer able to underbid without effort any Western artisan in the same line of industry—remains happily independent of both shoemakers and tailors. His feet are good to look at, his body is healthy, and his heart is free. If he desire to travel a thousand miles, he can get ready for his journey in five minutes. His whole outfit need not cost seventy-five cents ; and all his baggage can be put into a handkerchief. On ten dollars he can travel for a year without work, or he can travel simply on his ability to work, or he can travel as a pilgrim. You may reply that any savage can do the same thing. Yes, but any civilised man cannot ; and the Japanese has been a highly civilised man for at least a thousand years. Hence his present capacity to threaten Western manufacturers."
That is a very noteworthy sketch, and we acknowledge frankly, as we have always acknowledged, that Japanese competition is a very formidable thing, which some day may deeply affect all the conditions of European indus- trial civilisation. But it seems to us that Mr. Hearn, who with all his depth of insight is a little dreamy, mis- takes altogether the main reason of this formidableness. It is from his poverty, not from his readiness to move, that the Japanese derives his power of underselling. There is no particular advantage if the place selected for a trade is the best to be found, in readiness to travel on an im- pulse as light as that which moves a bird, even if you can travel with a bird's facility. You are only quitting the most suitable spot. Trades are drawn to special places by some natural advantage to be found in those places, as water or fuel, or means of transport, and when that has been ascertained, why move ? If the Clyde is better adapted for shipbuilding than the Thames, let the shipwright depart from London, as he has departed; but if the iron-worker finds a spot where the ore he works on is close to fuel and to a flux, or the brewer discovers wells which ensure quality to his beer, he is but a fool to move. He certainly will not by moving gain any strength in the great competitive battle. On the contrary, he loses this immense advantage, that the " fettered " community which remains ages in one spot becomes singularly adapted to the industry of that spot ; a puddler of Staffordshire faces a furnace which dis- mays the man from the distance, and the glass-worker of Murano can give a turn to his wrist as he shakes the molten "metal," which is absolutely incommunicable to any one without the hereditary gift. When men work separately in their trades, facility of locomo- tion may be an advantage, as we see among thatchers, and, in a less degree, among painters ; but modern work is associated work, and the presence of a great body of skilled labourers is the key to success in in- dustrial enterprise. The absence of fixed buildings is, we suspect, but a doubtful gain, for not to mention that the shanties are specially exposed to the weather, and to fire, they exhaust on perpetual repairs an immense fund of energy, probably greater in the end than solidity of original construction would demand. That the West overdoes many things may be admitted, it being doubtful, for instance, whether science could not, if it chose, super- sede tall chimneys, and if we do not waste fuel beyond any reasonable need ; but permanence of plant must in the end be an advantage to the manufacturer. To say otherwise is to say that the barber would be better off if his hone cost a penny and would break with each day's using. The freedom of the Japanese from wants is, no doubt, an advantage, because with low wages one can undersell ; but we cannot forego altogether the belief that a low standard of wants means a low standard of energy and enterprise, or doubt that as wealth flows into Japan so also will a tide of new requirements. Human beings gad when they must gad, not because they love gadding. No man wants so little for his work as the Ben galee copper- smith ; and we doubt if he can undersell his Western rival except in artistic work ; and he certainly has not risen to the same level of civilisation.
We have hardly left ourselves apace to notice the effect on character of this universal instability. Mr. Hearn thinks that, combined with his creed, which, like all varieties of Buddhism, dwells on the impermanency of earthly things, and especially of things that are material, this peculiarity of his life has made of the Japanese the docile being which he seems to be. He acknowledges, however, that the receptivity of the Japanese does not extend in the least into the regions either of the intel- lectual or the moral, and as for the economic region, though the capacity to suppress the desire for comfort has certain great advantages, it has also two heavy drawbacks. The diminution of desires implies the diminution of energy in gratifying them, and extreme readiness to endure poverty means, among other things, ability to put up with ruin. We do not see how Mr. Hearn, or anybody else, can get out of those two propositions ; and they contain the two weak points of what we fully admit to be the threatening industrial civilisation of Japan.
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