Page:Brinkley - Japan - Volume 6.djvu/246

RV 218 cheap labour, and her people are exceptionally gifted with intelligence, docility, manual dexterity, and artistic taste. Everything points to a great future for them as manufacturers. This is not a matter of mere conjecture. Striking practical evidence has already been furnished. Cotton-spinning may be specially referred to. As long ago as 1862, the feudal chief of Satsuma started a mill with five thousand spindles. During a whole decade he found only one imitator. In 1882, however, a year which may be regarded as the opening of Japan's industrial era, this enterprise began to attract capital, and in the course of four years fifteen mills were established, working fifty-five thousand spindles. By foreign observers this new departure was regarded with contemptuous amusement.

The Japanese were declared to be without organising capacity, incapable of sustained energy, and generally unfitted for factory work. These desponding views had soon to be radically modified, for by 1897 the number of mills had increased to sixty-three; the number of spindles to some eight hundred thousand; the capital invested to twenty-one million yen, and the average annual profit per spindle was three and one-half yen, or thirteen and one-third per cent on the capital. The rapidity of this development suggests unsoundness, but speed is a marked characteristic of Japan's modern progress. In 1880, for example, a man named Isozaki, of