number 8,471,610 families, totaling 44,558,025 individuals. The eta were elevated, hence popularly called shin-heimin (new common people) and allowed to live anywhere and take up any desirable calling. The hi-nin also were classed along with the rest of humankind. As a matter of fact, the eta and hi-nin were but a small fringe of the whole population, the descendants of the former being now estimated at something less than one million, and those of the latter amounting to about 35,000.

With the national reorganization it was inevitable that the new executive offices from the highest to the lowest should be given to men of experience. At first, therefore, the reorganization amounted to little more than a great shuffle of names and titles. Peers took the highest governmental positions, while Samurai and their sons as a rule filled the lower posts. Many Samurai, however, received no appointments and had to go to work. In time, as education has progressed, sons of farmers and merchants have become qualified and have been appointed to government offices. The new departments, such as the educational, the postal and telegraph offices, the railroads, and especially the army and navy, call for large numbers of efficient men. These posts are filled almost entirely on the basis of fitness. While ancestry is not entirely ignored in the making of appointments, nevertheless old class distinctions are gradually being obliterated.

The fortunes of the women have naturally followed those of the men. All families that lost their hereditary income had to go to work; this was true chiefly of the Samurai. Where the men were fortunate, the women could maintain the old customs, limiting themselves to their familiar domestic work, with a servant or two to help, but tens of thousands of Samurai families found themselves reduced to the direst poverty; women having generations of genteel ancestry were forced to enter the ranks of the workers.

Let us define what we mean by a working woman. Women whose husbands or parents provide the support of the family are not to be included in this term. These women may, and indeed doubtless do, labor abundantly and fruitfully in the home; their time is fully occupied. Probably no working women toil more diligently or for longer hours than do these wives and mothers in hundreds of thousands of homes, in most of which there are no servants. All the cooking, sewing, and housecleaning is done by them, so that they are indeed workers. But they are not "working women." They are the true gentlewomen of Japan, whose culture, graces, and charms are not easily described.

By "working women" we mean only those women who, in addition to the regular duties of the home, must share in the labor of earning the daily bread. In Japan the number of such is exceptionally large, if compared with that of some countries of the West. They may be divided into eleven classes, according to the nature of their occupations, namely: school-teachers, nurses, clerks and office girls, farmers, home industrial workers, factory hands, domestics, baby-tenders, hotel and tea-house girls, geisha, and prostitutes. Omitting the teachers and nurses, these are the classes whose conditions, numbers, education, and character we are now to study. Taken as a whole we do not hesitate to say that the working women of Japan, while probably lower in point of moral and physical energy and personal initiative than corresponding classes of the West, are not inferior to them in point of personal culture. And if civilization is defined, as it should be, in terms of personal culture rather than in those of mechanical contrivances and improvements, then Japan will surely take her place among the highly civilized nations of the world.

CHAPTER II

FARMERS' WIVES AND DAUGHTERS

JAPAN has three leading wealth-earning occupations: agriculture, sericulture, and factory work. In each of these women take an important part. In the cultivation of the soil farmers' wives and daughters share equally with men the toil of planting and reaping the crops. For instance, in the cultivation of rice, the most important and the hardest work of the farmer, it is often the women who plant it spear by spear in regular rows, and it is they who "puddle" the paddy-fields with their hands four or five times in the course of the season. In some districts, however, men and women do this work together. The toil and the weariness involved cannot be appreciated by one who has not actually shared it. Fancy, if you can, the fatigue of standing more than ankle deep in mud, stooping all day long as you set out the tiny rice plants in regular lines! And at short intervals of a few days each you must repeatedly puddle the whole paddy-field: that is, stir up the mud with your hands in order to destroy the sprouting weeds and prevent the soil from caking and hardening around the tender rice roots, preventing their best growth. And remember that you must do all this regardless of the broiling summer sun, or the pelting rain, for the planting must be done at exactly the right time, and the successive puddlings must follow in due order. So severe is the strain that, after the planting and each puddling, the whole village takes a rest. My gardener, an ex-farmer, speaking of those summer days of toil in the rice-fields, expatiates on the extreme fatigue and the joy of the rest days, and as women take the brunt of the stooping-work, theirs is the lion's share of the weariness. He says that, during the rice-planting season, the women are so important that those days are called the "women's daimio days," and adds that we must not forget how during that time the regular work of the women must also go on, for they must cook the food and care for the children. For this, indeed, young girls and grandmothers are pressed into service as far as possible, but the responsibility and care rest nevertheless on the wives and mothers.

SEPARATING THE WHEAT HEADS FROM THE STRAW
AT THE LOOM

Also in the harvesting and threshing of the rice, barley, wheat, and millet, women take an important part. But it is needless to enter into details. Enough to say that, in general farming, women share with husbands and brothers the heavy toil and fatigue of agriculture. It should be added that this is not because men shirk heavy work, but only because Japanese agriculture is so largely done by hand that every possible worker is pressed into service. As a fact, men do the heaviest part of the work, preparing the soil for the successive crops and carrying the heavy loads.

So varied are the modes of agriculture in different parts of Japan that general statements are dangerous, but I know that in some districts the weariness and drudgery of rice-planting and puddling are relieved by the singing or chanting of old folk-songs. The chorus leader intones a descriptive phrase, oftentimes improvising his own story, and is answered with a refrain from a dozen or a score of women. A story slowly evolves as the hours pass, and thus the work is lightened and the time