kanegafuchi

Updated: May 14, 2025

And as the Kanegafuchi Company has seventeen factories in all, representing several cities and aggregating over 300,000 spindles, being one of the most famous industries of Japan, it will be seen that its example is by no means without significance. The Kanegafuchi's Tokyo factories alone employ 3500 operatives, and they are cleaner, I should say, than most of our stores and offices.

Clarence Hamilton Poe - Where Half The World Is Waking Up : The Old and the New in Japan, China, the Philippines, and India, Reported With Especial Reference to American Conditions

While the hours of labor in Japan generally are inexcusably long and, as a rule, only two rest days a month are allowed, the Kanegafuchi Company observes the Biblical seventh-day rest with profitable results. The work hours are long yet, it is true, ten hours having been the rule up to October 1, and now nine and one half hours.

Clarence Hamilton Poe - Where Half The World Is Waking Up : The Old and the New in Japan, China, the Philippines, and India, Reported With Especial Reference to American Conditions

The Kanegafuchi welfare work is exceptional, but it is in line with the new spirit of the people.

Clarence Hamilton Poe - Where Half The World Is Waking Up : The Old and the New in Japan, China, the Philippines, and India, Reported With Especial Reference to American Conditions

With the best system of welfare work in the empire, the Kanegafuchi Company keeps its laborers two and a half to three years, but in a mill in Osaka of the better sort, employing 2500 hands, I was told that only 20 per cent, had been at work as long as three years.

Clarence Hamilton Poe - Where Half The World Is Waking Up : The Old and the New in Japan, China, the Philippines, and India, Reported With Especial Reference to American Conditions

The ten hours this summer embraced the time from 6 to 6, with a half hour's rest from 9 to 9:30, one hour from 11:30 to 12:30, and another half hour from 3 to 3:30; a system of halfway rests not common in America, I believe. Conditions at Kanegafuchi, of course, are not ideal, nor would I hold them up as a general model for American mills.

Clarence Hamilton Poe - Where Half The World Is Waking Up : The Old and the New in Japan, China, the Philippines, and India, Reported With Especial Reference to American Conditions

Some very notable evidence upon this point came to me Wednesday when influential friends secured special permission, not often granted to strangers, for me to visit the great Kanegafuchi Cotton Spinning Company's plant near Tokyo the great surprise being not that I succeeded in getting permission to visit this famous factory, though that was partly surprising, but in what I saw on the visit.

Clarence Hamilton Poe - Where Half The World Is Waking Up : The Old and the New in Japan, China, the Philippines, and India, Reported With Especial Reference to American Conditions