CHAPTER XII.

SERVANTS.

The servant question—Holidays—Hours of rest—Incessant work—Servants trusted—Relations with their mistresses—Decrease of mutual confidence—Life in the kitchen—Servants’ character—Whence they are recruited—Register-offices—The cook—The housemaid—The lady’s maid—Other female servants—The jinrikisha-man—The student house-boy.

The servant question is as great a domestic problem with us as it is in other parts of the world. We too complain of our servants’ insubordination, idleness, wilfulness, talkativeness, and general contrariness. Old folk are constantly drumming into our ears that servants are not what they used to be in the good old days and that they have ceased to have their masters’ interests at heart and are ready to leave their present situation whenever better terms are elsewhere obtainable. That the character of servants has deteriorated admits of no doubt; but the fault lies as much with their masters and mistresses as with themselves. However, such as they are, they still retain many good qualities; and on the whole we are better off in this respect than our fellow-sufferers in the West.

Our servants are usually willing workers; they do not ask, nor would they indeed dream of asking, for free Sundays. They toil from day to day, week in week out, month after month, without a murmur at being put to incessant work. Like the clerks and apprentices in mercantile houses, they have by immemorial custom two holidays a year, on the sixteenth of January and July; but as in busy families they cannot all be spared at the same time, they are often given some other days in turn. Those who have homes in town pass the day with their families; but others from the country, that is, a majority of domestic servants, spend their holiday wandering aimlessly about the streets and parks in gaping wonder at the sights of the city.

The servants are, moreover, expected to work without intermission from morning till night. In some families a fixed time is given them daily for rest; but in most houses no such hour is set apart and they snatch what rest they can in the intervals of their work. They get up early in the morning, about five or half-past; but as those from the country are used to early rising, it is no hardship to them. It is the late hours that they succumb to. Where the master has a large social connection, is given to entertaining friends, or is found of cards, chequers, or other games, the house is often kept open till midnight or later. In such cases, however, the cook and others who have to rise early to prepare the breakfast, are allowed to go to bed at ten or thereabouts; but the servant who waits on the guests and brings them tea or wine has to sit up till they leave. It would also be a breach of hospitality for the family to go to bed and leave the host alone to entertain his guests; and so, with the exception of the children, the rest of the family wait patiently till the last guest departs. Indeed, the drowsy servants often resort, as a charm for expediting the lingering guest’s departure, to burning a pinch of moxa on his clogs or setting up a broomstick on its handle.

As the servants have no regular hours of work and rest, they have often to take their meals at odd hours. Punctuality is not a Japanese virtue, and the members of the family are not always regular in their meals. The hours are governed by the movements of the master of the house, and they are fairly regular if he is a government official, a professional man, or an employee of a private firm or company, who has to be at his office at fixed hours; but if the master’s habits are irregular from necessity or inclination, the family meals suffer accordingly. The servants are also expected to be ready at every beck and call, for a great deal of trivial task is imposed upon them. They are, for instance, often called from the kitchen to the parlour or sitting-room and then sent to fetch an article from an adjoining room. But as most houses in Japan are only of one or two stories and the living-room is always on the ground-floor, it is no difficult matter to clap our hands, which is the usual way of summoning a servant, or to holloa to her, for the sound has merely to penetrate one or two sliding-doors or probably none at all in summer. Thus, from the very ease with which a servant may be summoned, she is made to do a great deal which could be readily done without her help.

The servant is trusted to a great degree. The lack of privacy which is one of the principal characteristics of a Japanese home places every room at the mercy of its inmates; and when the house is left for the day, as sometimes happens, in the servant’s charge, a dishonest domestic could easily purloin articles which would not be missed at the time. That such petty thefts are comparatively rare, must be put to the servant’s credit. On the other hand, she becomes a member of the family whose service she enters, to a greater extent than would be the case in other lands. The very lack of privacy makes her a party as it were to the private affairs of the family. She is set to work unmaking dresses or sewing them under her mistress’s eye and is often taught needlework, especially on long winter evenings, when mistress and servant talk together with less reserve than at other times, and a close sympathy arises between them, which may last through their lives. And many servants retain their love and respect for their mistress after they leave her service and call on her regularly every year with their husbands or children when they are married.

In the old days it was considered to betoken a lack of fidelity for a servant to change her situation; and many girls remained in the same family until they were grown-up women. In such cases the master would find for them suitable husbands or, if they were married through others’ good offices, give them the means to set up for themselves. The servants, too, looked upon it as a great honour to be so assisted by their master as it was a conclusive proof of their faithful service. This close mutual understanding is now less common, because there has been, so their employers complain, a serious falling off in the quality of the servants; but their masters, or rather their mistresses, are also to blame in the matter, for their attitude towards their subordinates has also changed. They no longer look upon them as permanent members of their household, and consequently take them less into confidence than formerly; which, however, is unavoidable since the good behaviour of the servants is not now guaranteed so securely as it used to be. In the old times servants were almost as much under their master’s authority as a vassal under his liege’s. To disobey a mistress’s order or to contradict her was considered an act of disloyalty, and the servant was kept in a state of complete subjection. On the other hand, a conscientious mistress had also on her part a sense of duty towards her servant, and looked after her and cared for her as for her own family.

Nowadays, however, this bond between mistress and maid has been loosened except in rare cases, at least in Tokyo. If the mistress has no definite knowledge of the servant’s antecedents, the latter has as vague an idea of the real standing of the family. Formerly, reputable families remained permanently settled in the same locality for generations, so that their social position was well known in the neighbourhood; while as for the samurai who came up to town with their lord, the name of the daimyo whom they followed was a sufficient guarantee of their respectability though they themselves might not be personally known. Hence, the servants could without difficulty obtain any information they desired respecting the family whose service they proposed to enter, and they had only themselves to blame if they were not, upon being installed therein, satisfied with its ways. But there is now in every grade of society such a large proportion of families from the country that the servant is often unable to find out their standing, past or present. She may not suffer from arrearage of her wages, though such a thing is by no means rare; but she does not feel quite so much at home as she would if she entered a family whose history is known to her. There is then mutual reserve, not to say distrust, when neither the employer nor the employee knows anything of the other’s antecedents. The servant may be dismissed one fine morning at a moment’s notice, or she may obtain leave to visit a sick relative, to whose bedside she would pretend to have been urgently summoned, and a few days later send to her employer’s for her belongings. It is not necessary to give warning; a few days’ notice may be thought due to the other party, though of course, in the case of old and tried servants, a greater consideration is mutually accorded, the domestic usually consenting to remain until a suitable successor has been found. The servant’s tenure of service is, then, generally precarious, and at the same time her mistress is never sure of having permanently secured a good servant. Indeed, if the servant is honest and diligent, it is seldom the fault of her employer if she leaves her service; for the mistress cannot do without a servant and if she has got hold of a good domestic, she is not likely to let her go willingly. The servant, on the other hand, may be quitting service to live at home, to be married, or to look for a better situation. She has more motives for parting company than her mistress.

The truth is that young women have discovered that there is a great demand for their services elsewhere, as at cotton mills, tobacco and other factories, and for house-industries; and there is in consequence a dearth of servants, let alone good ones. Still, many prefer domestic service, because they have not to work with mechanical regularity as at factories, and they are on that account content with lower wages. For hard as she is worked and though she is without a young man to console her on Sunday for the week’s drudgery, her life is not altogether an unhappy one. There is at least variety in it. The tradesmen’s boys come to the kitchen for orders and most people of the artisan and trading classes go in and out by the kitchen. They have therefore plenty of chance company, The tradesmen’s boys take it easy and linger in kitchens which find favour with them. When visitors come and are entertained in the parlour, their jinrikisha-men are given a meal in the kitchen. Still another chance of gossip is afforded where a common well is used by two or more families. Here they congregate and discuss the affairs of their respective households, tearing to pieces the character of one mistress and extolling another to the skies. The “well-side council,” as it is called, is the great market for scandals of all sorts, though it would not be fair to attribute its notoriety entirely to the servants’ love of gossip, for the worst scandal-mongers in such cases are the wives of poorer tradesmen and artisans who bring their washings to the common well.

But the servants are on the whole good-natured, thoughtless, and careless of the morrow. They are satisfied if they are well fed; they are merry and grow fat. It is comparatively rare to find a black sheep among them. Such a woman usually commits petty thefts; she dares not steal anything of value, for if she takes it to the pawnbroker, she is sure to be discovered as he is completely under the surveillance of the police who can look over the pawn-accounts and seize any article that they may suspect to have been purloined. The woman may take the stolen article to an accomplice; but sooner or later, it finds its way to the pawnbroker’s, or if it is an article of clothing, to the second-hand clothes-dealer’s, who is similarly under police control, and so the crime is discovered. She steals most commonly stray coins, or handfuls of rice or other food which can be pilfered without much risk of detection. A woman whose mother or husband is in needy circumstances and comes often to call her out on mysterious business is most likely to be guilty of such dishonest practices.

Servants are recruited from various quarters. They may be daughters of poor artisans or tradesmen in Tokyo, of peasants in the country, or of fishermen on the coasts. They naturally come, many of them, to ease the straitened means of their families and to save up enough to buy clothes to take with them when they marry. Others come from the country to see the town and learn its manners, which they do effectually, though perhaps not exactly according to their original intention. Such girls are of the better class of peasants; for the majority of peasants are kept pretty busy with the cultivation of their rice-paddies, and in spring-time whole families are engaged knee-deep in mud in planting rice, while they are equally busy at harvest-time, so that a girl at home does enough work to pay for her maintenance. It is therefore more often the girl’s ambition to see Tokyo and save up something than family necessity that prompts the country lass to seek service. Girls living in Tokyo are in a different position. Here girls in a large family can do little to earn their keep by helping their mother, unless they are engaged in some house-industry which calls for the whole energy of the family. If they have a small shop or an eating-house, one or at most two may be useful at home; while among artisans and labourers an extra girl means only one mouth more to feed, and accordingly she is sent out to service. But even in Tokyo it is not always poverty that supplies the vast army of domestic servants. It may be irksomeness on the girl’s part of parental authority which is not unfrequently exercised with severity, or fear on the parents’ part that the child would be spoilt under their roof and rendered unfit to bear the trials and hardships which must press on the poor man’s wife with a troop of children at her heels. In the latter case she is sent out among strangers to be buffeted and knocked into shape. Sometimes, again, the girl prefers absolute strangers’ society to the sway and, too often, ill-treatment of a stepfather or stepmother; or, being an orphan, she is unwilling to be a burden to a near relative who would as a matter of duty offer to take her in. Again, a young woman who has lost her husband by death or divorce would seek service from a desire in the former case to remain faithful to his memory, which would otherwise be difficult if she has no means of support, and in the latter from disgust of conjugal life or to look for another opportunity of trying her luck in matrimony. Or, she may still be married but has, through inability to make both ends meet, to break up her household and wait in domestic service while her husband knocks about, until fortune smiles upon them when they will keep house again. Finally, even fairly well-to-do tradesmen send their daughters sometimes to a family, noble, wealthy, or noted for its strict management, to learn in service deportment and etiquette. Thus, the domestic servant enters service from diverse motives.

A servant is sometimes engaged on the recommendation of an acquaintance, which is a good plan if she proves satisfactory. But if she does not, her employer is placed in an awkward position; he hesitates to dismiss her as he would have to account for her discharge to that acquaintance, to whom he is naturally unwilling to speak ill of her, especially if he is related to the girl or intimate with her family. Indeed, friendships have been brought to an abrupt termination by the misconduct of a girl so engaged. Most people, therefore, prefer to engage the servant through a register-office, for there are many such offices in Tokyo as they do not require any capital to start. Word is sent to the register-office, and the woman, for it is generally a woman who runs it, brings a girl who is likely to suit the service required. The girl stays one night; and if neither she nor the mistress takes to the other, the woman brings another in her place, and yet another, until a suitable person is found, Then the woman draws up the contract of service, usually for six months, fixing the girl’s wages. For this she receives a small fee from both parties. If, at the end of six months, the girl elects to stay on, the woman receives her fees again for the renewal of the contract; but apparently, for some of these register-offices a sixmonth is too long a time to wait, for they often make tempting offers to the servant and try to persuade her to throw up her situation. And if she follows the advice by making to her mistress some plausible excuse for the breach of contract, she is introduced into another family, but finds her position in no way improved and herself poorer by the commission she has again paid the woman. The register-office is naturally responsible for the servant’s conduct; but if she is found dishonest and discharged, the office, on being taken to task for bringing such a woman, wriggles out of its responsibility by an eloquent flow of virtuous indignation and profuse apologies to the family, and if called upon to indemnify any loss or damage, asks for time to make necessary inquiries and prolongs the delay until the matter is forgotten or at least given up as hopeless.

Though the number of servants naturally varies with the size, wealth, and social standing of their employer’s household, there are usually three in a well-to-do middle-class family. Of these the most important is the cook. In wealthy families there are _cuisiniers_ for the preparation of the dishes, in which case the cook proper confines herself to boiling rice and keeping the kitchen tidy; indeed, the boiling of rice is in any case the cook’s principal function, as is implied by her Japanese designation, which means “rice-boiler”; but in middle-class families she undertakes general cookery as well. If, moreover, she is the only servant in the house, she sweeps the rooms, scrubs the verandahs, lays and puts away the beds, sets the meal-trays, washes the clothes, and does many other things which are of daily necessity in a Japanese household. Her mistress, however, naturally helps the maid-of-all-work. But if there is an upper servant, the cook boils rice and prepares meals, scrubs the wooden flooring of the kitchen, washes the meal-trays, bowls, and crockery, and helps in washing clothes. The tea-pots and tea-cups, being in constant requisition, have to be often washed in the course of the day. The cook gets up early as the rice has to be boiled for breakfast, and if late hours are kept in the family, she is sent to bed before the others; but as soon as the day’s work is over, she is generally found nodding over the brazier or snoring aloud stretched out on the mats. As the cook’s duties are of the simplest kind, girls fresh from the country become “rice-boilers” and are noted for their dull wits and rough manners.

The housemaid’s chief duty is to keep the rooms tidy. She is called in Japanese the “middle-worker,” as she stands midway between the cook and the lady’s maid. She dusts the paper sliding-doors, shelves, and other woodwork, sweeps the mats, and scrubs the woodwork, especially the grooves of the sliding-doors, the shelves, the wooden edges of the alcoves, the pillars, and the verandahs. She lays the beds every night, takes them up in the morning, and puts them into the closets. She has plenty of work in keeping the rooms tidy, above all the sitting-room where almost everything, except the brazier and tea-shelf, has to be cleared immediately it is done with. Besides, the shelves have such a knack of getting untidy as all sorts of things are for the moment put on them. If there are children in the family, she looks after them, which is no light task as they roam all over the house and after their nature scatter things about wherever they go. She also does a great deal of needlework; she mends the clothes and does most of the work where skill or delicacy is not required. Washing, too, is no child’s play in a large family.

The lady’s maid is in most cases a young girl from thirteen to sixteen years old. She looks after the clothes; as soon as they are taken off, she folds them and puts them into a chest of drawers or hangs them up if of daily wear. She waits at meals and does work about the sitting-room. She attends to the visitor, sets the cushion for him, and brings in tea, cake, and the brazier and “tobacco-tray.” She helps, too, to look after the children. Where there is a nurse for the little children, she naturally attends to them and carries them about; but generally the housemaid and the lady’s maid divide the duty between them; and as the latter is a young girl, she has to be very much helped by the housemaid.

The infant is commonly fed with its mother’s milk and is not as a rule weaned until its position as the pet of the family is threatened by a new arrival. Where the mother has no milk or is too sickly to give healthy milk, a wet nurse is engaged who has to be well fed and royally treated to make sure that her charge does not fare ill at her hands. Where there is a great deal of needlework to do, a needlewoman is employed. She is usually a woman of mature years, a widow, probably, and ‘a lone ’lorn creetur,’ who acts as a damper upon the exuberant spirits of the younger servants. In a large and well-to-do family there is sometimes a head-servant, a sort of housekeeper, who came in all probability into the family as the bride’s waiting-woman at the marriage of the present mistress or her mother-in-law. As the oldest servant with the authority she exercises over her younger fellow-domestics, she is held in hardly less reverence than her mistress, and every opportunity is seized to please her; for to cross her would be worse than to offend their mistress, and she is certainly more touchy than the other. She knows her power, too, and enjoys it to the full. She lets them serve her even more assiduously than her lady; and they help her to dress, and when she is tired, offer to shampoo her. She plays, in short, the retired lady more completely than her mistress’s honoured mother-in-law.

Of male domestics there are only a few. The jinrikisha-man is the only servant of that sex worth speaking of, that is, in a well-to-do middle-class family. He is in most cases engaged from a jinrikisha-master, who has a number of young coolies under him. He is well fed, as his is a severe physical work, and going as he does with his master to all sorts of places, he has to be treated well for fear he should give exaggerated accounts of petty family affairs at the houses where he waits for his master. He has his faults; but on the whole, he is a faithful, diligent, and willing servant.

In many houses, especially of government officials and professional men, there is a young fellow or two, who would probably object to being classed with the servants, but who certainly do menial work. They are as a rule gentlemen by birth, distant relatives from the country or sons of friends in narrow circumstances. They are willing to do the house-boy’s work in return for their keep; and they are allowed to attend school or college. When they graduate, they are able to set up for themselves. Of this class of young men come a majority of those who have risen by tact or ability to high and responsible positions in the government and in the professions.