“I cannot tell you how far these provisions are enforced.  I can only say that I have not yet heard of employers being punished for violating the Factory Law.  Can it be supposed that employers are so honest as never to violate the Factory Law?  As to working hours, in some factories they may work less than fourteen hours as the law indicates.  In others they may work more, because ’there are necessary reasons.’  This is especially true of the factories in the country parts.  As 200 inspectors have been appointed, the authorities must by now know the actual situation pretty well.”

Dr. Kuwata, a former member of the Upper House, with whom I frequently discussed the labour situation, declares the Factory Law to be “palpably imperfect and primitive.”  At the end of 1917 there were, according to official figures, 99,000 female factory operatives under fifteen years of age and 2,400 under twelve.  Some 20,000 of these children were employed in silk factories.  What protection have they?  Before passing this page for the press I have shown it to a well-informed Japanese friend and he says that he has never seen any newspaper report of a prosecution under the Factory Law.  Obviously a Factory Law under which no one is ever prosecuted is not operative.[153]

It is excellent that Japan has sent a large permanent delegation to Switzerland to establish a system of liaison with the International Labour Office of the League of Nations.  This company of young men will keep the Japanese Government well informed.  There is undoubtedly in Japan, under Western influence, a steady development of sensitiveness to working-class conditions and a rapid growth of modern social ideas.  But the Government and the Diet will not step out far in advance of general opinion, the most will naturally be made by the authorities and trade interests of bad factory conditions on the Continent of Europe and in some industries in the United States, and the majority of a public which has been carefully nurtured in the belief that a profitable industrialism is the great desideratum for Japan will not be restive.  Real factory reform is not to be expected until an enlightened view is taken by Japanese in general of the exploitation of girls for any purpose.  It is not in commercial human nature, Eastern or Western, that factory directors and shareholders should forgo without a struggle the advantage of possessing cheaper and more subjected labour than their foreign rivals.  Some influence may be exerted in the right direction by the fact that those who are profiting by cheap and docile labour may themselves be undersold before long by cheaper and still more docile labour in China.[154] And in 1922 Japan is under an obligation, accepted at the Washington Labour Conference, to stop women working more than eleven hours a day and to abolish night work.  Meantime the labour movement makes progress.  It is significant that many of its leaders are under the influence of “direct action”