Again I wish to call attention to the fact that the prominence of children and young people is in part the cause of the appearance of general happiness.  The Japanese live on the street as no Western people do.  The stores and workshops are the homes; when these are open, the homes are open.  When the children go out of the house to play they use the streets, for they seldom have yards.  Here they gather in great numbers and play most enthusiastically, utterly regardless of the passers-by, for these latter are all on foot or in jinrikishas, and, consequently, never cause the children any alarm.

The Japanese give the double impression of being industrious and diligent on the one hand, and, on the other, of being lazy and utterly indifferent to the lapse of time.  The long hours during which they keep at work is a constant wonder to the Occidental.  I have often been amazed in Fukuoka to find stores and workshops open, apparently in operation, after ten and sometimes even until eleven o’clock at night, while blacksmiths and carpenters and wheelwrights would be working away as if it were morning.  Many of the factories recently started keep very long hours.  Indeed most of the cotton mills run day and night, having two sets of workers, who shift their times of labor every week.  Those who work during the night hours one week take the day hours the following week.  In at least one such factory, with which I am acquainted, the fifteen hundred girls who work from six o’clock Saturday evening until six o’clock Sunday morning, are then supposed to have twenty-four hours of rest before they begin their day’s work Monday morning; but, as a matter of fact, they must spend three or four and sometimes five hours on Sunday morning cleaning up the factory.

In a small silk-weaving factory that I know the customary hours for work were from five in the morning until nine at night, seven days in the week.  The wife, however, of the owner became a Christian.  Through her intervention time for rest was secured on Sunday long enough for a Bible class, which the evangelist of the place was invited to teach.  After several months of instruction a number of the hands became Christian, and all were sufficiently interested to ask that the whole of the Sabbath be granted to them for rest; but in order that the master might not lose thereby, they agreed to begin work at four each morning and to work on until ten at night.  With such hours one would have expected them to fall at once into their beds when the work of the day was over.  But for many months, at ten o’clock in the evening, my wife and I heard them singing a hymn or two in their family worship before retiring for the night.

In certain weaving factories I have been told that the girls are required to work sixteen hours a day; and that on Sundays they are allowed to have some rest, being then required to work but ten hours!  The diligence of mail deliverers, who always run when on duty, the hours of consecutive running frequently performed by jin-irikisha men (several have told me that they have made over sixty miles in a single day), the long hours of persistent study by students in the higher schools, and many kindred facts, certainly indicate a surprising capacity for work.