But I soon found the cherry blossom fairyland was being destroyed by the advent of machinery. In Yokohama and Kobe you heard factory whistles and saw tall smokestacks, new shipyards, and great steel cranes. The Industrial Revolution, accomplished in our Western countries gradually, had invaded the Island Empire with an impact and a shock the repercussions of which were still evident. It had not brought freedom to the women whose low status was admirably suited to the purpose of manufacturing with its ever-increasing demand for cheap and unskilled labor. Practically half the female population, some thirteen millions, were engaged in gainful occupation though few were economically independent. In the mill districts mothers scolded their small daughters by threatening, “I’ll sell you to the weavers.” These _kaiko_, or “bought ones,” served as apprentices generally from three to five years. Modern Japanese industrialism had been able to take advantage of an ancient Oriental habit of thought which placed slight value on the girl child. I spent half a day as the guest of the Kanegafuchi plant, the largest cotton mill in the Empire and the ideal industrial institution which was to be a model for others, comparing favorably with one of our best. But Kanegafuchi was the exception. On the average, employees in other mills worked a twelve-hour shift, day and night, amid the deafening roar of relentless power engines. Dust and fine particles of fabric fell like minute snowflakes upon them. Their growth was stunted, their resistance to infection and malignant disease broken down. In a silk-spinning mill at Nagoya conditions were only slightly better. I found over seven hundred girls, some no more than ten years of age, swiftly twirling off the slender threads from the cocoons and catching them on the spindles. They were pathetic, gentle, homeless little things, imprisoned in rooms with all windows closed to keep them moist and hot. A quarter of their seven dollars a month wages had to go for board. Only by the graciousness and charity, in a sense, of the upper classes were the household servants saved from institutions. When the Baroness, for example, had married, some of them—cooks, maids, and nurses—had stayed with her parents, some had gone to another sister, some had come to her and been set to training the new ones. With her they had a home for life. This system accounted in part, at least, for the fact there were no beggars or mendicants in Japan. Essentially conservative, essentially the product of a strange and scarcely understood past, the Japanese woman in my opinion did not possess in her typical psychology any strong leanings towards rebellion. This was true even among the many women writers on papers and magazines. Those who interviewed me were intelligent, but I was constantly amazed at their ancient and domesticated outlook.