Down and Out in Late Meiji Japan by Huffman James L.;

Author:Huffman, James L.;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of Hawaii Press
Published: 2018-12-15T00:00:00+00:00

Mind and Spirit: The Worst Storms

The effects of crime were terrible; so were the ravages of sickness, fire, and flood. None of these produced a deeper darkness, however, than the shadows of the mind and spirit that took some hinmin families unawares. Disasters, crimes, and sickness were external, incapable in themselves of making life unlivable. But for some in the kasō shakai, they became the precipitating tragedy that opened the door to despair. For others, finances triggered the watershed moment. And for some, the tipping point was the loss of the communal networks that had embraced them before the move to the city. Whatever the cause, the worst darkness of all lay in those catastrophes of the spirit that pushed certain people into the ultimate pit, an abyss from which there was no escape.

The research of an international group of scientists demonstrated early in the twenty-first century that poverty “reduces cognitive capacity,” not because of anything inherent in the skill sets or behaviors of poor people but “because the very context of poverty imposes load and impedes cognitive capacity.” Studying both rural and urban poor populations, the scholars found that “poverty-related concerns consume mental resources, leaving less for other tasks.”140 It is not, they found, innate intelligence or behavior patterns that reduce cognitive capacity but the environmental factors in which the poor are forced to live. As George Orwell put it, so much more pithily, “hunger reduces one to an utterly spineless, brainless condition, more like the after-effects of influenza than anything else.”141 The experiences of the late Meiji kasō shakai make that clear. A recurring theme of the studies of the hinmin world is that poverty placed so many pressures on people that rational thinking and behavior became more difficult. Many of these pressures—the low salaries, the crowded living conditions, the inadequacy of food, the necessity of having children work for pay—already have been examined. A few others, which had a particularly strong impact on the spirit, need yet to be highlighted.

For thousands, the demands of having to work twelve-hour night shifts (with only one day off in seven) posed a special threat to emotional equanimity. The 1903 Shokkō jijō survey of factory workers found that “night time taxes the spirit a great deal more than day time does”; night workers got ill more often and females on the night shift almost always lost weight, while those on the day shift gained weight or lost less.142 For others, the isolation of city living, away from old family and village ties, laid an unusually heavy burden on the spirit: “These lonely girls are homesick,” said Yokoyama when he saw a group of girls huddled around a hibachi at New Year; they “yearn for their dear parents, brothers, and sisters.”143 And for many thousands, an emotional tipping point was created by the calculating “culture of free competition” that governed city work patterns. Cutthroat capitalist competition did more than anything else (even low wages), argues the labor historian Kumazawa Makoto, to undermine coping skills.

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