Enlightened Japan has striven to establish a perfect prison system—New prisons—Deportation to the island of Yezo—Agricultural labour and work in coal mines—Two fine prisons in Tokio—Description by Mr. Norman—The gallows—Training school for prison officials—Disciplinary punishments and rewards.

Japan as an enlightened and progressive country has made strenuous efforts to establish “as perfect a prison system as possible; one which is in harmony with the advancement of science and the results of experience.” These reforms were commenced in 1871 and were continued in various new prisons at Tokio, Kobold, Kiogo and upon the island of Yezo, all admirably organised and maintained. This movement was hurried on by the great overcrowding of the small provincial prisons on account of the accumulation of long-term prisoners. No proper discipline could be applied and there was absolutely no room for short-term offenders. Most of those sentenced to hard labour and deportation are now sent to the penal settlement on the island of Yezo, where they are employed both within the prisons and at agriculture in the open air. Every advantage is taken of the natural aptitudes of the Japanese, and the inmates of gaols prove the most expert and artistic workmen. The very worst criminals are sent to the prison of Sorachi in the remote island of Yezo, beyond Poronaibuto—a bleak, desolate spot surrounded by the usual bamboo fence—which holds about sixteen hundred convicts. They are to be seen squatted on mats at work, each in front of his own sleeping place, and on a shelf above are his wadded bed-quilt, with a mosquito curtain on top of each. The place is so isolated and surrounded by such an impenetrable jungle that escapes are out of the question. A little further on is the prison of Poronai, in a delightful spot, where the most extensive coal fields of Japan are located. A small building houses some six hundred convicts who work in the coal seams on the side of the hill. “Hard labour indeed,” says Mr. Wingfield. “Heavily chained, by light of a safety lamp the wretched convicts were crouching in holes where there was no room to raise the head or stretch the limbs, and here they had to remain for eighteen hours at a time.” Their sentences were for twelve years, although remission might by good conduct be secured after seven. Yet these luckless Japanese bore their irksome lot with a light heart. “As we were leaving Poronai at 5 A. M.,” says the same observer, “we met a batch of miners marching to face their ordeal and many after the eighteen hours are completed have to be removed to hospital. They were clanking their chains right merrily, talking and laughing loudly, bandying quips and jokes.”

Japan is a land of rapid transition and nothing has changed more completely in recent years than Japanese prisons. Still there was some system, even in ancient days. The sexes were kept apart, the penalty of the log worn round the neck and fastened to the ankle was not imposed upon the aged or juvenile offender, nor upon dwarfs, invalids or pregnant women. In the sixteenth century a prison reformer arose who organised five new prisons in Yeddo for five different classes of prisoners, comprising females and persons of different conditions of life. Proper prison officers were appointed, and security was obtained without despising sanitary needs. Still there must have been much mutual contamination, owing to the indiscriminate herding together, and the maintenance of internal order was left to the prisoners who chose among themselves a nanoushi, or head, with eleven assistants to control the whole body. Flogging was inflicted and handcuffs were universally worn. In 1790 a house of correction was established on the island of Yshikavoy in the Bay of Yeddo, to which were committed all vagabonds or incorrigible prisoners whom it was thought unsafe to set free lest they should relapse into crime. The work on this island was chiefly the manufacture of oil. In cases of escape and recapture the fugitives were branded with a certain tattoo mark on the left arm.

Even in the middle of the nineteenth century the same brutal methods of torture prevailed as in China (from where their bloody codes were mostly borrowed), and there are preserved collections of instruments of torture as diabolical as any known to history. Crime, too, was not lacking in those “isles of the blest,” and every species of moral filth and corruption abounded, which was shown in its true colours when the liberty of the press was granted, in 1872-1874. The number of executions and deaths in the native prisons at that time was said to average three thousand per annum.

The chief prison of the empire, in Tokio, as described by Mr. William M. Griffis, who visited it in 1875, was very different in its sanitary appointments and general condition from the prisons of Tokio to-day. A curious feature was a small roofed in structure in the prison yard, with open sides, where condemned men of rank were allowed to expiate their crimes by plunging the dirk into their own bodies, after which the executioner cut off their heads. The head, laid on a tray, was then inspected by an officer of justice. There were very few of such executions after 1871. The ordinary criminal was beheaded in the blood-pit, so-called, which was a pit surrounded with a much stained and slashed wooden curb, and kept covered by a sort of trap-door. In the pit were mats, one above the other, which had been soaked with the blood of many criminals. “The faint odour that ascended,” says Mr. Griffis, “was more horrible in the awful cloud of associations which it called up than the mere stench.” It was then April and twenty-five heads had fallen there since the year began. The criminal was led to the pit blindfolded and was beheaded with an ordinary sword, sharp as a razor. Death followed frequently on the day of sentence and never later than the day after.

Tokio has now two prisons; the first and chief is situated upon the island of Oshikawa at the south of the city, and the second, the convict and female prison of Ichigawa, is in the centre of the city. The former is completely isolated, all communication with the mainland being by police ferry, and can accommodate two thousand men and boys, who are serving terms of ten years or less. The prison of Ichigawa usually contains fifteen hundred men and about one hundred women, among whom are many serving life sentences. Attached to the prison is a convict farm, and it is here that capital punishment is carried out. Otherwise the two prisons resemble each other closely and a description of one will answer for both, says Mr. Norman, who described them in 1892, and gives the following account:

“The entrance is through a massive wooden gateway, into a guard-room adjoining which are the offices of the director and officials. The prison itself consists of a score or more of detached one-story buildings, all of wood and some of them merely substantial sheds, under which the rougher labour, like stone-breaking, is performed. The dormitories are enormous wooden cages, the front and part of the back formed of bars as thick as one’s arm, before which again is a narrow covered passage, where the warder on guard walks at night. There is not a particle of furniture or a single article of any kind upon the floor, which is polished till it reflects your body like a mirror. No boot, of course, ever touches it. The thick quilts, or futon, which constitute everywhere the Japanese bed, are all rolled up and stacked on a broad shelf running round the room overhead. Each dormitory holds ninety-six prisoners, and there is a long row of them. The sanitary arrangements are situated in a little addition at the back, and I was assured that these had not been made pleasant for my inspection. If not, I can only say that in this most important respect a Japanese prison could not well be improved. In fact, the whole dormitory, with its perfect ventilation, its construction of solid, highly-polished wood, in which there is no chance for vermin to harbour, and its combined simplicity and security, is an almost ideal prison structure. Of course the fact that every Japanese, from the emperor to the coolie, sleeps upon quilts spread out on the floor, greatly simplifies the task of the prison architect in Japan.

“On leaving the dormitories we passed a small, isolated square erection, peaked and gabled like a little temple. The door was solemnly unlocked and flung back, and I was motioned to enter. It was the punishment cell, another spotless wooden box, well ventilated, but perfectly dark, and with walls so thick as to render it practically silent. ‘How many prisoners have been in it during the last month?’ I asked. The director summoned the chief warder, and repeated my question to him. ‘None whatever,’ was the reply. ‘What other punishments have you?’ ‘None whatever.’ ‘No flogging?’ When this question was translated the director and the little group of officials all laughed together at the bare idea. I could not help wondering whether there was another prison in the world with no method of punishment for two thousand criminals except one dark cell, and that not used for a month. And the recollection of the filthy and suffocating sty used as a punishment cell in the city prison of San Francisco came upon me like a nausea.”

In Japan a prison consists of two parts—dormitories and workshops. There is nothing whatever of cells or regulation prison buildings properly speaking. It is a place of detention, of reformation, and of profitable work. The visitors found in the first workshop, to their great surprise, a couple of hundred prisoners making machinery and steam boilers. One warder, carrying only a sword, was in charge of every fifteen men. The prisoners were working on contract orders for private firms, under the supervision of one skilled master and one representative of the firm giving the contract. They work nine hours a day, and are dressed in cotton suits of a peculiar terra-cotta colour. When the foreigners entered, the warder on guard came to attention and cried, “Pay attention!” Every one ceased work and bowed with his forehead to the floor, remaining in that attitude until a second order bade them rise. They were making large brass and iron steam pumps, and the workshop, with its buzz of machinery and its intelligent labour, was much like a part of an arsenal here or in Europe.

Another shop contained the wood-carvers, where more than a hundred men, with blocks of wood between their knees, were carving with keen interest upon all sorts of things, from simple trays and bowls to fragile and delicate long-legged storks. “I bought,” says our author, “an admirably-carved tobacco box, representing the God of Laughter being dragged along by his cloak by six naked boys, and afterward I asked some Japanese friends who supposed I had picked it up at a curio-dealer’s, how much it was worth. They guessed ten yen—thirty shillings. I paid sixty-eight sen for it—less than two shillings. It is a piece of work that would be admired anywhere, and yet it was the work of a common burglar who had made the acquaintance of a carving tool and a prison at the same time.”

There were also paper-makers, weavers (who were making the fabric for the prison clothing), fan-makers, lantern-makers and workers in baskets, mats, and nets. A printing shop, too, there was, where the proof-reader was a criminal of more than ordinary interest. He had been secretary of legation in France and had absconded with a large sum, leaving his shoes on the river bank to lead the authorities to believe he had committed suicide, but he had been arrested eventually in Germany with his mistress.

In one of the shops jinrikishas were being made, in another umbrellas were being carved elaborately and in another every kind of pottery was being turned out. To the amazement of the visitors, they found sixty men, common thieves and burglars, making the exquisite cloisonnÉ ware—“cutting by eye-measurement only the tiny strips of copper to make the outline of a bird’s beak or the shading of his wing or the articulations of his toe, sticking these upon the rounded surface of the copper vase, filling up the interstices with pigment, coat upon coat, and firing and filing and polishing it.” The finished work was true and beautiful and it was difficult to believe that these men knew nothing at all about it before they were sentenced. It would be hard to imagine teaching such a thing to the convicts at Dartmoor or at Sing Sing. In the prison at Tokio the convict is taught to do whatever is the limit of his natural ability. If he cannot make cloisonnÉ, he is assigned to the wood-carving department, or perhaps to make pottery. If he cannot do these, he can possibly make fans or basket-work, or set type or cast brass. And for those who cannot reach so high a limit as these occupations there is left the rice mill or stone-breaking, but of two thousand men only thirty were unable to do any other work but that of breaking stones.

Prisoners receive one-tenth of the sum their handiwork earns. A curious custom is that every adult prisoner is kept for an additional six months after his sentence expires unless he is claimed by friends in the meantime, and if he has not reached adult age he is detained until that is attained. During the added six months these prisoners wear blue instead of the universal reddish garb.

“The women’s quarter at Ichigawa,” continues Norman, “is separated from the men’s by a high wooden fence and gateway guarded by a sentinel, and consists of two or three dormitories and one large comfortable workshop, where all are employed together at labour let out by contract. When I was there they were all hemming silk handkerchiefs, each seated upon the matted floor before a little table, and very neat they all looked, and very pretty some of them, with their loose red gowns and simply twisted hair. ‘Those are forgers,’ said the officer, pointing to three of them; ‘I do not like them to be so pretty.’ One of the women had a young baby playing beside her, and another of them as she glanced up at us showed a face entirely different from the rest, pale, sad and refined, and I saw that her hands were small and very white. It was Hanai Ume, the once famous geisha of Tokio, famous for her beauty, her samisen-playing, her dancing, her pride, and most famous of all for her affaire d’amour. Two years ago a man-servant managed to make trouble between herself and her lover, whom she expected to buy her out of the life of a professional musician at anybody’s call, and then offered to make peace again between them on his own terms. So one night she called him out of the house and stabbed him to death with a kitchen knife. Now music is mute for her and song is silent and love is left behind.

“To the gallows is an easy transition, as it is a natural conclusion. In a secluded part of the grounds at Ichigawa, there is a forbidding object like a great black box, raised six feet from the earth at the foot of a long incline cut in the grass. A sloping walk of black boards leads into the box on the left-hand side. The condemned criminal is led up this and finds himself inside upon the drop. The rope is adjusted and the cap fitted, and then at a signal the bottom of the box falls back. Thus the Japanese method is exactly the opposite of our own, the official spectators, including a couple of privileged reporters, being spared the ghastly details of the toilette on the scaffold, and seeing nothing until an unrecognisable corpse is suddenly flung out and dangles before them.”

The state of Japanese advancement in matters of penology is shown by the fact that in Tokio a school is maintained for the training of prison officials in theory and practice, with an annual attendance of from eighty to one hundred students. They are instructed in the laws relating to prisons and prisoners, in the general outline of the penal code, the sanitary care of prisons, the treatment of criminal patients, and kindred subjects.

The number of felons and misdemeanants is decreasing annually, while there has been a slight increase, on the other hand, in the number of contraveners. There are three disciplinary punishments in the prisons: first, solitary confinement in a windowed cell; second, reduction of food supply; third, solitary confinement in a dark room.

Medals are granted by the prison governors as rewards to any prisoners who have worked diligently and conducted themselves properly in prison, but no medal can be awarded more than three times to any one individual. Medallists enjoy certain privileges and leniency of treatment, and pardons are based on the medal system.

PRISONS OF EGYPT