open to serious criticism. They have proved themselves to be efficient in the lines of work in which they have been permitted to engage. Even their enemies agree that they are thrifty, industrious, capable, and ambitious. From the economic standpoint the chief charge brought against the Japanese has been their tendency to live below the American standard of living. It is claimed that one important factor in their success is their willingness to put up with conditions that the white man will not tolerate.

Without doubt the Japanese have been less successful in adapting themselves to American standards of living than to American methods of work. Accustomed as they were in Japan to live on what we regard as a low economic scale, they have faced in America the temptation to increase their savings by retaining their old standards as far as possible. Cheap living and long hours they regard as a matter of course. Their simple diet suits their taste better than the more expensive American food. Long hours of labor in Japan are the ordinary thing. The farmers toil from sunrise to sunset while in the small shops and factories work frequently goes on from early in the morning until as late as ten or eleven o'clock at night. The laborers have never learned to protest against bad working conditions. That unscrupulous American employers should take advantage of these facts and employ Japanese on terms with which Americans could not compete is to be expected. It is still more unfortunate that even after most of the inequalities in wages have been abol

ished, many of the Japanese still tend to live on a lower economic scale than their wages would seem to justify. The rigid economy practiced by the ordinary Japanese laborer in America is thus described by Kawakami :

Wherever he may be employed, he has reduced subsistence into a science. Not the cost of food alone enters into his scientific solution of the problem, but his entire existence is regulated on a basis of rigid economy, so that he reduces the expenditure for essential subsistence to approximately twenty per cent of his average wages. He practices economy on the basis of his earning power and does not permit his expenditure to increase in the same ratio as his earnings may increase. The Japanese earning from $1.25 to $1.50 a day will spend from twenty to thirty cents a day for subsistence, while the average maximum cost of subsistence for those earning from $1.75 to $2.50 is thirty-five cents. Though spending so small a portion of his earnings for subsistence, he is enabled to subsist comfortably by eliminating unnecessary waste.1

While this economy is commendable from the standpoint of thrift, it is at once apparent that it is a scale of living with which Americans cannot compete. To the Japanese peasant, however, this amount of expenditure seems amply sufficient when compared with his former mode of life in Japan. The following quotation from a Japanese writer shows the wide gap between the standards of living in America and in the Far East:

1 American-Japanese Relations, pp. 349-50.

Though rice is considered the staff of life in Japan, it is not freely indulged in by the peasants who raise it. The poorer classes cannot afford to take unmixed rice; therefore they boil with it cheaper barley and millet. In some southern provinces sweet potatoes form the chief part of daily food. . . . . A laboring man can get his food for about twenty sen a day, and he can feed his family (wife and a couple of children) on an additional thirty sen.1 In fact, if he makes eighty sen and his wife thirty sen, a sum total of a yen and ten sen a day, they can keep a little house with two rooms, paying a rent of three yen per month, read newspapers (for the humblest can read), take daily baths (a racial necessity), send their children to school (for education is compulsory), and put in the savings bank two or three yen a month. Does this sound delectably Arcadian? And yet of families like these the duties of modern citizenship are demanded, viz., the payment of taxes, service in the army, and attendance at school on the part of the children.2

While the low social and economic status out of which many of the Japanese immigrants have come does influence their reaction to American environment, there is noticeable a growing tendency on the part of those who can afford it to live according to American standards. In so far as they have failed, it must be recognized that this has largely been because of economic reasons and not because of a dislike of American food and ways of living. Within recent years the Japanese have been insisting on high wages to such an

1 A sen equals one-half cent and a yen one-half dollar, approximately.

2 The Japanese Nation, p. 216.

extent that the charge of underbidding can no longer be made against them. They have even availed themselves of the western method of strikes, and as they are highly organized they usually win the point for which they are contending.

When due consideration is given to the enforced segregation of the majority of the Japanese in America, it can readily be seen that they have made considerable progress in their attempts to compete with American workmen. Probably no other people, handicapped as the Japanese have been by race prejudice, could have surpassed them in making so large a place for themselves in American economic life.

CHAPTER VII

ORGANIZATION AND SOLIDARITY OF JAPANESE

IMMIGRANTS

ONE of the striking characteristics of the Japanese

in America is the thoroughness of their organization. Practically all the Japanese immigrants are bound together in groups of some kind, ranging in size and importance from laborers' gangs and local guilds to a national association. In their tendency to organize and in their ready response to group control, the Japanese have been equaled by few, if any, of the European immigrant groups. Probably the only immigrants who have surpassed them in this respect are the Chinese, whose marked leaning toward exclusiveness has served to bind them very closely together.

Among the various Japanese organizations, the one that is most helpful to the mass of the Japanese immigrants, who belong to the laboring class, is the gang" system, or the organization of laborers into groups under a Japanese boss or contractor. When a Japanese laborer wishes to secure work, he does not usually apply to employers directly. If this were necessary, language difficulties together with his ignorance of local conditions and rates of wages would seriously handicap him and result in dissatisfaction for both parties concerned. The simplest method for him to

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