THE MATSUYAMA WORKING GIRLS' HOME

THE origin and history of the Matsuyama Working Girls' Home cannot be told apart from the story of the man who has been its heart and life, Mr. Shinjiro Omoto. Born in 1872 and graduating from the common school at fourteen, he at once went into business, first as an apprentice and later with his father. At nineteen he opened a sugar store, which flourished and before long overshadowed the father's business. Money came in so easily that he soon entered on a life of licentiousness, and for several years he was as famous for his drunken carousals as he had been for his phenomenal business success. His parents cut him off, refused him admittance to the house, and for years he did not even speak to his father.

In 1899, we held a preaching service in a theater. Mr. Omoto happened to be drinking in the saloon opposite. Hearing of our gathering, with some rowdy comrades, he thought he would break it up, with the result that we experienced persistent opposition throughout the meeting. But the sermons on Pessimism and the New Life, and my statement of the reasons that had brought me to Japan attracted his attention, and the next day I received an anonymous letter asking for tracts. These seem to have produced a profound impression, particularly the tract entitled "Two Young Men." It told of two hardened prisoners who had been transformed by the gospel and became highly useful and well-known members of society. Mr. Omoto thereupon set himself definitely to learn about Christianity, but privately, unwilling to make public his new hope. He bought and read through, quite by himself, the entire New Testament. Though he gained some idea of the gospel, he soon found he had lost none of his passion for drink. After a while he went to Kobe and joined a temperance society; but soon finding that the society had members who broke their pledges, he began to break his. In despair he went to Okayama and tried to join himself to Mr. Ishii, head of the well-known Christian orphanage, asking to be made a Christian, but he was told to return to Matsuyama and join the church there in his old home; only so could he be saved. Greatly disappointed, he returned and called on me early in June, 1901, but without telling fully about himself. He also called on Mr. Nishimura, an earnest Christian worker, who prayed with him, telling him that to be saved he must receive the Holy Spirit.

That summer, quite exceptionally, I returned in the middle of the vacation. Mr. Omoto appeared at the prayer-meeting for the first time and was evidently in a state of great excitement, so much so that only with difficulty could we understand his remarks and his prayer. The gist was that he had that day received the Holy Spirit, that he was now saved, and that his joy was too great for utterance. Tears rolled down his cheeks as he talked and prayed. After the meeting I had a few words with him, and urged him to ally himself with our experienced workers. He was so excited that I feared for him, and wondered whether this might not be a tornado of emotion due to drink and to the nervous condition incident to his riotous life, an emotion which he mistook for the gift of the Holy Spirit. I urged him to begin at once to live the Christian life, cutting loose from all bad companions and bad habits.

To gain an honest living he entered the Matsuyama Cotton Thread Spinning Factory. This required twelve hours of work daily, sometimes by day and sometimes by night, a hard pull for one who had done no steady work for years. He attended Christian services faithfully, so far as his hours of work allowed, and became quite intimate with two or three of our best Christians. Before long he began to talk about the wretched conditions and immoral life of the factory girls, telling us of the situation already described in Chapter IX.[9] His first thought was to give these tired children wholesome recreation. He secured the use of our preaching place in the vicinity of the factory and invited the girls to attend what he called the Dojokwai (Sympathy Society). He soon persuaded the girls to add a little reading and writing to their play, and later also, sewing. These meetings had of course to be held after the twelve or more hours of work in the factory had been completed. Care had also to be taken that the studies and the fun should not absorb time needed for sleep. Membership in the Sympathy Society rose rapidly and soon numbered seventy girls.

At first meetings were held only in the evening three times a week, and lasted but an hour. But as the educational element of the society developed, others were induced to help and every evening save Sunday was occupied. In order that girls on the night shift might continue their studies similar classes were also held from seven to nine o'clock in the morning. Before six months had passed the play aspect of the society was largely superseded by the educational.

But opposition of Buddhists now began to show itself. A few parents refused to let their girls attend. The most determined opposition however came from the manager in the factory who had charge of one of the shifts. Members of that shift were so treated that gradually they dropped out of the Dojokwai, and new members from that shift could not be secured. The hostile manager was however himself dropped some months later, and all opposition to the work from within the factory ceased.

In a previous chapter we have noted the facts discovered by Mr. Omoto as he went the rounds of the boarding-houses in which the girls were required to live.[10] As these conditions became clearer and more appallingly impressive, he began to say with increasing frequency and insistence that the Sympathy Society, however successful, could not do what was needed. Only a Christian home would answer. Not only do the girls need to learn to read and write and sew, but even more than these do they need a home free from temptation, clean and pure and helpful, and elevating morally and religiously. The difficulties however in the way of such an enterprise seemed insuperable. To say nothing of the financial problem, a still greater obstacle, it was felt, was the securing of "recognition" from the factory, for Buddhist influence in the factory was at that time still dominant. During these months the Sympathy Society was winning its way among the girls and their parents, and Mr. Omoto himself was learning valuable lessons.

One was that the girls were not all eager to be in a Christian home. We of course forbade all drinking, irregular hours, and more irregular "friendships." Attendance on prayers, night and morning, and at the school, was required. It looked for a time as if we should fail, for lack of girls to meet the expenses.

But in spite of discouragements we kept on. The earnings of the girls who lived in the home, for the first year, were 1,361 yen. Of this sum they paid for board 905 yen, and sent to their parents 456, whereas girls in the other boarding-houses were able to save nothing, although the amount paid for board was the same in all the houses, being fixed by the factory at 3.60 yen per month, or twelve sen (six cents) per day.

In February, 1903, a representative of the government who came from Tokyo to inspect the conditions of labor in western Japan, heard of the Dojokwai (Sympathy Home), and was so much interested in the story of its work that he took time to visit it with several local officials. He was greatly pleased, for he knew of nothing just like this, in any other part of Japan, particularly in its hygienic, educational, and moral advantages, and he expressed the wish that there might be many such. This was our first notice from government officials.

As time went on, Mr. Omoto was found by the factory officials to be exceptionally faithful to its interests; he was rapidly promoted from one position to another, and in December of the same year was made "visitor" and "employing agent." This required him to visit neighboring towns and villages and collect new girls when needed. He tried to decline this work, saying that he could make no false promises to the girls or to their parents, nor in any way delude them as to the nature of their work, the amount of their wages, the conditions of the boarding-houses; being strictly a temperance man, also, he could not treat with sake (sah'-ke) and so get into friendly relations, all of which things employing agents constantly do; he had no expectations of gaining any recruits; the factory would better send some one else. They told him at least to try. To the surprise of all, and of himself the most, from his first trip he brought back with him fifteen girls. For three years he continued in this work and was always successful in securing girls for the factory. Because of his refusal to touch liquor in any form, his traveling expenses were much less than those of other employing agents, much to the satisfaction of the management; and the girls he secured on the whole remained longer and more contentedly at work, because he had always told them the truth. This made his position in the factory more secure and influential. After about two years' employment by the day he was promoted to the rank of a regular employee and paid by the month. His hours of official service were also largely reduced in order that he might have time for his educational and Christian work in the Home—a striking testimony of appreciation on the part of the factory officials.

As the months passed by it gradually became clear that the effectiveness as well as the permanence of the work demanded suitable quarters. The heavy rental paid for the house made self-support impossible. Results already attained seemed to warrant appeal to friends for gifts, for the purpose of buying land and the erection of a building. Responses to our appeals provided the needed funds, land was purchased and a contract made with a carpenter on exceptionally favorable terms, just two days before the opening of the Russo-Japanese war (February, 1904). Immediately prices went up by leaps and bounds; but our contract was so well made and the carpenter had already made such full subcontracts for the lumber, etc., that we were not troubled because of war prices.

As we entered our new quarters in June, 1904, however, the factory shut down the main part of its work and discharged the majority of its workers. This was a severe blow to the Home. The occupants were reduced to seven girls. Although the factory opened again after a few months, the conditions during and after the war made it difficult for the factory to secure girls, and the Home, together with the other boarding-houses, suffered from lack of boarders. Beginning with March, 1907, however, special circumstances combined to fill the Home to its utmost capacity; during the three months of April, May, and June thirty applicants were refused admittance and as many more who desired to enter the school were declined.

Increasing acquaintance with the disastrous effects of factory labor,—the lint-filled air so often producing consumption, and the excessive heat of summer sometimes resulting even in sunstroke,—made Mr. Omoto unwilling to persuade girls to enter upon such a life. The needs of the Home also pressed upon his time. These considerations led him, in 1906, to give up his work in the factory altogether, in order to devote his entire time and strength to the Home and to the upbuilding of the moral and religious life of the girls.

In July, 1906, Mr. Omoto attended in Osaka the first convention of factory officials convened to study the problem of the proper care of operatives. Representatives were present from sixteen factories having night schools, and specimens of the work of the girls were compared. Mr. Omoto was fairly lionized because of the superior quality of the work sent in from our Home and many newspapers made special mention of him and his work.

In September, 1908, there was held in Tokyo under the auspices of the Home Department of the Imperial government an eight weeks' school of applied sociology. Mr. Omoto was among the 376 persons who attended. Again he received exceptional attention and was asked to tell his story. At this school no less than thirty-six learned specialists gave lectures on every conceivable topic suitable for such a school. Among the speakers so many were professed Christians, and of the rest so many advocated such markedly Christian ideals, that some Buddhists are said to have taken offense, regarding the whole affair as a part of the Christian propaganda.

In the spring of 1909 there occurred an event of considerable significance. Without a preliminary hint of what was happening, Mr. Omoto saw in the paper one day the amazing statement that the Matsuyama Working Girls' Home, along with seventy-nine other selected institutions throughout the country, was the recipient of a specified sum (200 yen) as a mark of government approval! A total of 40,000 yen were thus distributed in varying amounts, Christian institutions being recognized to an unexpected degree. Later, word came from the Prefectural Office summoning him to receive the gift. In the entire prefecture six institutions had been thus honored, and of these, two were Christian. This gift from the Department of the Interior has been repeated each year since.

Again in May, 1910, a Conference of Social Service Workers (Chu-o Jizen Kyokwai) was held at Nagoya at the time of the Exposition, and Mr. Omoto was among those invited to attend. His address and statistical report received much attention. Mr. Tomeoka, representative of the government and chairman of the conference, spoke in unstinted praise of the work of the Home, which he characterized as "Kokka Jigyo" (a national enterprise), and recommended the adoption by others of several of its special features.

In the spring of 1911, the Home Department of the central government published a small volume describing one hundred and thirteen model philanthropic institutions of the country, in which we were of course pleased to see that the Home was included, being the only one from the prefecture.

As opportunity offered and means were available, following the advice of friends, four small adjacent lots were purchased, one of which we were almost forced to secure for self-protection, because of the evil character of the buildings upon it. We now own altogether about two acres of land on the north side of the beautiful Castle Hill, around which Matsuyama is built. Here have been erected at different times six buildings (three of them two-storied), for residential, dormitory, chapel, night school, weaving, hospital, bath, and other purposes. We have space for a playground, of which the girls joyously avail themselves, after returning from twelve hours of confinement in the dust and clatter of machinery. The garden, too, provides fresh vegetables of an assured character at a minimum of expense, adding much to the variety and the wholesomeness of the diet. The present value of the property is more than its original cost, for land and buildings are constantly rising in price, as is the case in other parts of the country.

The city educational authorities in 1906 asked Mr. Omoto to open his night school to the poor of the district. For this he had to have a regular school license from the National Bureau of Education at Tokyo. This was to be a Christian school—the only license of exactly that kind in the empire, he was told.

Industrial newspapers have been noticing the Home and its work for some time.[11] During the past five years the favorable attitude of local and national government officials has been particularly pronounced. Government inspectors have repeatedly been sent from the Prefectural Office and occasionally even from Tokyo to visit the Home. One such expressed himself as amazed at the excellent mental work done by the girls, in view of the fact that all their study takes place after twelve hours of toil. Nothing but good food, sufficient sleep, and a wholesome and happy home life could account for their splendid health and superior school work. One man remarked that the girls in the Home do better work than pupils in the same grade in public schools.

Even so early as the autumn of 1906 the Home Department of the central government sent down special instructions to the prefectural office in Matsuyama to investigate our work, with the result that of nine benevolent institutions throughout Japan selected for commendation, ours was the one most carefully described and unqualifiedly praised. A recent government pamphlet concerning industrial problems makes special reference, covering two pages, to the work of the Home. Thus has a small institution begun to serve as a model for the country.

The good health of the girls in our Home has been in strong contrast with the health of those in other boarding-houses, even in the best dormitories of the best factories in other cities.

Statistics recently compiled by the government show that the average death-rate among factory operatives throughout the country is extraordinarily high. The highest, fifty per cent. on account of an epidemic, was reported from a certain factory owned and managed boarding-house in Niigata prefecture. Not one girl has ever died in our Home. Of the 301 girls who had lived in our Home by 1911, only eight, all told, died.

In 1912 the Home passed through a crisis that threatened to destroy it. Late in 1911 the one factory in Matsuyama, where all the girls worked, was sold out to parties living in Osaka. A new manager was sent down who introduced many drastic changes. The change most affecting us was the stopping of the night work and the lengthening of day work to fourteen hours: namely, from 6 a.m. till 8 p.m.

The girls in the Home soon became dissatisfied, and not many months passed before all had left the factory. Mr. Omoto was urged by the manager to find and bring in new girls. He refused however on the ground that he could not ask anybody to work such brutally long hours.

Had it not been for a little weaving department with which we had already been experimenting, the Home would have been compelled to close. More looms were secured and those girls who wished to remain with us were given opportunity for work. Mr. Omoto's attention was at that time directed to the condition of the weaving girls in the scores and even hundreds of little establishments in the city and its suburbs. He soon found that an educational, economic, moral, and religious condition existed among them not unlike that which he had found among the factory girls of Matsuyama a dozen years before. The weaving establishments are, as a rule, small private affairs, usually having less than ten girls each, and are therefore wholly outside of the supervision of the government. The treatment of workers and the hours of labor are entirely settled by the individual owners.

As a rule the girls are apprenticed for from two to three years immediately on leaving the primary school, at an age therefore of twelve or thirteen. They barely earn their living, although they work from daybreak to ten or eleven at night, and in some establishments even till midnight—from fifteen to eighteen hours a day! There are no night shifts and rare holidays on occasional festivals. The hygienic and moral conditions are about as bad as can be. It is estimated that one half of the girls are ruined before the close of their apprenticeship. Our Home is now deliberately attacking the new problem, which in many respects is more difficult than was the old one. We have put up two small buildings on our own grounds, enabling us to have thirty looms to give opportunity for work to thirty girls.

The uniform quality of the cloth produced by our girls, the central portions of each piece equaling the ends in quality, shows unflagging moral attention, without effort to rush the work and stint the material; this has already won such approval from merchants that the "Sympathy Home" brand can be sold for a little more than other brands, and Mr. Omoto is assured that there is no limit to the amount which could be marketed.

An owner of several weaving establishments has become so impressed with the quality of the work and the character developed in our girls that he asked Mr. Omoto if he would not take charge of a hundred of his weaving girls. This new departure is especially promising, for we have complete supervision of the girls throughout the entire twenty-four hours. The girls, moreover, are already remaining in our Home as a rule much longer than they used to when getting work in the spinning factory.

As successive chapters of this book have shown, no more urgent problem faces New Japan than that of the moral development of her workers. This is particularly true of the hundreds of thousands of girls in the larger and smaller factories and industrial establishments. The wretched physical, economic, social, and moral conditions under which the majority of these girls lived and worked at the time when our Home was started are not easily described.

Many of the factory authorities[12] are neither ignorant nor unmindful of the situation, and are striving to remedy it. The government also has enacted laws not a few. But laws and official actions alone provide no adequate solution of the serious problems raised by the extraordinary industrial and social transformations sweeping over Japan. A new spirit must be evoked, both on the part of capital and labor, and new moral ideals and relations established. This cannot be done by laws alone. Only love and contagious personal example are sufficient for the needs.

Our Home was designed to meet just such a situation and has to a remarkable degree, we think, succeeded. It has provided not only sufficient fresh air, nourishing food, adequate bedding, clean rooms, and wholesome recreation, but also moral and religious instruction, and some education. The girls in our Home have enjoyed conspicuously better health and have done better work and earned and sent to their parents more money than those of the other boarding-houses of Matsuyama. But better than these have been the educational, moral, and religious results. Their womanhood has been raised. They have been better fitted for life's duties and for motherhood than they would have been without the training which has been given them.

Moreover, the results of the Home have been such as to break down opposition. The good-will and cooperation of the factory officials were won. Factories in other parts of the country also have recognized our Home as presenting a splendid ideal which, in a measure, many of them are already following. The local and the central governments, as already shown, have repeatedly sent officials to inspect us, and in their reports have not only praised us, but have described our Home in detail, saying that we have solved the difficult problem of how to care for factory hands.

Through the Home we are reaching the lowest strata of the working classes of Japan, and are providing them with ideals, motives, and education, and in a way, too, which does not tend to pauperize them, for each girl pays as board a sum sufficient to cover actual living expenses. It is also exerting an influence on the townsfolk. The attitude of the people toward Christianity has undergone a marked change. Villages in the interior likewise have altered their attitude on seeing how their daughters, graduates of our Home, have improved both in intelligence and character, in marked contrast to those who have been in other boarding-houses. All in all, Mr. Omoto has attained remarkable success. He is absorbed, heart and soul, in his work of bettering the moral and religious conditions of the working girls of Japan, and is a man continuously growing in spiritual life, Christian character, and knowledge of men. I have never known a man more thoroughly converted or more enthusiastic in his chosen field of work. The Omoto of to-day is a different person from the reformed debauchee of thirteen years ago, who began this service for factory girls as the outcome of his sincere question, "Lord, what wilt thou have me to do?" His family have become possessed with the idea of social service, and his five children are being brought up in this atmosphere and in the fear of the Lord.

Thus has the Matsuyama Working Girls' Home survived many threatening vicissitudes, attained conspicuous successes, and is now embarked on a new line of endeavor. May it exceed in the future its successes of the past and make still more substantial contributions to the uplift of the working women of Japan!