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"Probably about two hundred here; there are several branch houses. In this shop the work is very hard; but the working-hours are shorter than in most of the silk-houses,—not more than twelve hours a day."
"What about salaries?" I inquired.
"No salaries."
"Is all the work of this firm done without pay?"
"Perhaps one or two of the very cleverest salesmen may get something,—not exactly a salary, but a little special remuneration every month; and the old superintendent—(he has been forty years in the house)—gets a salary. The rest get nothing but their food."
"Good food?"
"No, very cheap, coarse food. After a man has served his time here,—fourteen or fifteen years,—he may be helped to open a small store of his own."
"Are the conditions the same in all the shops of Osaka?"
"Yes,—everywhere the same. But now many of the detchi are graduates of commercial schools. Those sent to a commercial school begin their apprenticeship much later; and they are said not to make such good detchi as those taught from childhood."
"A Japanese clerk in a foreign store is much better off."
"We do not think so," answered my friend very positively. "Some who speak English well, and have learned the foreign way of doing business, may get fifty or sixty dollars a month for seven or eight hours' work a day. But they are not treated the same way as they are treated in a Japanese house. Clever men do not like to work under foreigners. Foreigners used to be very cruel to their Japanese clerks and servants."
"But not now?" I queried.
"Perhaps not often. They have found that it is dangerous. But they used to beat and kick them. Japanese think it shameful to even speak unkindly to detchi or servants. In a house like this there is no unkindness. The owners and the superintendents never speak roughly. You see how very hard all these men and boys are working without pay. No foreigner could get Japanese to work like that, even for big wages. I have worked in foreign houses, and I know."
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It is not exaggeration to say that most of the intelligent service rendered in Japanese trade and skilled industry is unsalaried. Perhaps one third of the business work of the country is done without wages; the relation between master and servant being one of perfect trust on both sides, and absolute obedience being assured by the simplest of moral conditions. This fact was the fact most deeply impressed upon me during my stay in Osaka.
I found myself wondering about it while the evening train to Nara was bearing me away from the cheery turmoil of the great metropolis. I continued to think of it while watching the deepening of the dusk over the leagues of roofs,—over the mustering of factory chimneys forever sending up their offering of smoke to the shrine of good Nintoku. Suddenly above the out-twinkling of countless lamps,—above the white star-points of electric lights,—above the growing dusk itself,—I saw, rising glorified into the last red splendor of sunset, the marvelous old pagoda of Tennji. And I asked myself whether the faith it symbolized had not helped to create that spirit of patience and love and trust upon which have been founded all the wealth and energy and power of the mightiest city of Japan.
Perhaps only a Japanese representative of the older culture could fully inform us to what degree the mental soil of the race has been saturated and fertilized by Buddhist idealism. At all events, no European could do so; for to understand the whole relation of Far-Eastern religion to Far-Eastern life would require, not only such scholarship, but also such experience as no European could gain in a lifetime. Yet for even the Western stranger there are everywhere signs of what Buddhism has been to Japan in the past. All the arts and most of the industries repeat Buddhist legends to the eye trained in symbolism; and there is scarcely an object of handiwork possessing any beauty or significance of form—from the plaything of a child to the heirloom of a prince—which does not in some way proclaim the ancient debt to Buddhism of the craft that made it. One may discern Buddhist thoughts in the cheap cotton prints from an Osaka mill not less than in the figured silks of Kyoto. The reliefs upon an iron kettle, or the elephant-heads of bronze making the handles of a shopkeeper's hibachi the patterns of screen-paper, or the commonest ornamental woodwork of a gateway—the etchings upon a metal pipe, or the enameling upon a costly vase,—may all relate, with equal eloquence, the traditions of faith. There are reflections or echoes of Buddhist teaching in the composition of a garden;—in the countless ideographs of the long vistas of shop-signs;—in the wonderfully expressive names given to certain fruits and flowers;—in the appellations of mountains, capes, waterfalls, villages,—even of modern railway stations. And the new civilization would not yet seem to have much affected the influence thus manifested. Trains and steamers now yearly carry to famous shrines more pilgrims than visited them ever before in a twelvemonth;—the temple bells still, in despite of clocks and watches, mark the passing of time for the millions;—the speech of the people is still poetized with Buddhist utterances;—literature and drama still teem with Buddhist expressions;—and the most ordinary voices of the street—songs of children playing, a chorus of laborers at their toil, even cries of itinerant street-venders—often recall to me some story of saints and Bodhisattvas, or the text of some sutra.
Such an experience first gave me the idea of making a collection of songs containing Buddhist expressions or allusions. But in view of the extent of the subject I could not at once decide where to begin. A bewildering variety of Japanese songs—a variety of which the mere nomenclature would occupy pages—offers material of this description. Among noteworthy kinds may be mentioned the Utai, dramatic songs, mostly composed by high priests, of which probably no ten lines are without some allusion to Buddhism;—the Naga-uta, songs often of extraordinary length;—and the Jruri, whole romances in verse, with which professional singers can delight their audiences for five or six hours at a time. The mere dimension of such compositions necessarily excluded them from my plan; but there remained a legion of briefer forms to choose among. I resolved at last to limit my undertaking mainly to dodoitsu,—little songs of twenty-six syllables only, arranged in four lines (7, 7, 7, 5). They are more regular in construction than the street-songs treated of in a former paper; but they are essentially popular, and therefore more widely representative of Buddhist influences than many superior kinds of composition could be. Out of a very large number collected for me, I have selected between forty and fifty as typical of the class.
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Perhaps those pieces which reflect the ideas of prexistence and of future rebirths will prove especially interesting to the Western reader,—much less because of poetical worth than because of comparative novelty. We have very little English verse of any class containing fancies of this kind; but they swarm in Japanese poetry even as commonplaces and conventionalisms. Such an exquisite thing as Rossetti's "Sudden Light,"—bewitching us chiefly through the penetrative subtlety of a thought anathematized by all our orthodoxies for eighteen hundred years,—could interest a Japanese only as the exceptional rendering, by an Occidental, of fancies and feelings familiar to the most ignorant peasant. Certainly no one will be able to find in these Japanese verses—or, rather, in my own wretchedly prosy translations of them—even a hint of anything like the ghostly delicacy of Rossetti's imagining:—
