Japan -- Social life and customs; Women -- Employment -- Japan; Women -- Japan
Our Home was designed to meet just such a situation and has to a
remarkable degree, we think, succeeded. It has provided not only
sufficient fresh air, nourishing food, adequate bedding, clean rooms,
and wholesome recreation, but also moral and religious instruction, and
some education. The girls in our Home have enjoyed conspicuously better
health and have done better work and earned and sent to their parents
more money than those of the other boarding-houses of Matsuyama. But
better than these have been the educational, moral, and religious
results. Their womanhood has been raised. They have been better fitted
for life's duties and for motherhood than they would have been without
the training which has been given them.
Moreover, the results of the Home have been such as to break down
opposition. The good-will and cooperation of the factory officials were
won. Factories in other parts of the country also have recognized our
Home as presenting a splendid ideal which, in a measure, many of them
are already following. The local and the central governments, as already
shown, have repeatedly sent officials to inspect us, and in their
reports have not only praised us, but have described our Home in detail,
saying that we have solved the difficult problem of how to care for
factory hands.
Through the Home we are reaching the lowest strata of the working
classes of Japan, and are providing them with ideals, motives, and
education, and in a way, too, which does not tend to pauperize them, for
each girl pays as board a sum sufficient to cover actual living
expenses. It is also exerting an influence on the townsfolk. The
attitude of the people toward Christianity has undergone a marked
change. Villages in the interior likewise have altered their attitude on
seeing how their daughters, graduates of our Home, have improved both in
intelligence and character, in marked contrast to those who have been in
other boarding-houses. All in all, Mr. Omoto has attained remarkable
success. He is absorbed, heart and soul, in his work of bettering the
moral and religious conditions of the working girls of Japan, and is a
man continuously growing in spiritual life, Christian character, and
knowledge of men. I have never known a man more thoroughly converted or
more enthusiastic in his chosen field of work. The Omoto of to-day is a
different person from the reformed debauchee of thirteen years ago, who
began this service for factory girls as the outcome of his sincere
question, "Lord, what wilt thou have me to do?" His family have become
possessed with the idea of social service, and his five children are
being brought up in this atmosphere and in the fear of the Lord.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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