CMYME NEW3
کار جیم
Shut the door on the shilling shirt
R
EMEMBER how, fifteen years ago, British folk were shocked by the shilling shirt?
Made in Japan, it was flooding the markets of the world. It was five shillings cheaper than anything the mills of Lancashire could produce. It put Lancashire cotton workers out of jobs by the thousand.
And the busy Japanese were not only making shirts. They sold the world sixpenny socks, 3d.-a- dozen matches, bicycles that were pounds cheaper than anything Britain could turn
All out. seemed like the "genuine article" Britain had been proudly making for decades.
Is it all going to happen again? At this vital moment in Britain's recovery drive is there a chance that we shall have to meet the Japanese on the unfair terms that poorly-paid labour can give the manufacturers of the Far East? Many British businessmen think so.
They see the way things are going by the arrival here of East's first 3s. 6d. the Far shirts. A thousand dozen piled up in a big Manchester ware- house last week.
True, these aren't Japanese shirts sneaked in from Hong Kong under Imperial Preference -they were made in Hong Kong itself from yarn either spun locally or originating in the Empire.
But British manufacturers see the possible danger. Nearer home, too, they see how post-war Ger- many may try to enter their markets with cut-price goods.
Now let us take a close-up of two average workers in Japan and Germany. Sunday Empire News special correspondents yesterday cabled these first-hand reports:
TOKIO
From Richard Hughes
O
a
UT into the snow and
drizzle of
black Osaka winter morning clops 35-year-old Torao Zuzuki, textile worker at Keneguchi cotton mills.
Zuzuki-San, the shabbiest man in the world, wears darned slop clothes, wooden geta (clogs), carries his lunchbox of rice, dried fish and pickles under his
arm.
He faces a half-hour railway trip in a packed car to his factory, where he begins work at 8 a.m. and finishes at 5 p.m. Six days a week, earning 4,000 yen (say £4) a month.
He shares a three-roomed paper and bamboo home near the main Osaka canal with his in-laws, whose own home was burned down in the early American fire raids.
With his wife, his mother-in- law. father-in-law. and two children, he sits, eats and sleeps on the matting floor of his tiny
Once again Britain may face peril from the sweated mills of Japan and a new Germany out to get rich again.
Here is the first-hand background to a story which affects every worker in Britain.
or
Here is the first 3s. 6d. boy's shirt Britain has seen in years. But it isn't a Japanese product -it comes in from Hong Kong,
made from locally - spun Empire yarn. home, where all the fuel for cooking and heating is provided by charcoal.
At the factory, where American rationalisation methods have
recently been spurring on pro- duction and cutting operating costs, he labours earnestly and uncomplainingly to produce inferior textiles at one-third the cost of Lancashire textiles.
Crowding into the stuffy rail- way carriage beside him is his neighbour, Kenichi Takahashi, who wears a 1918-style white mask as a protection against tuberculosis germs and who labours in a gimcrack toy factory near Kaneguichi textile mill.
paint
Takahashi-San smears yellow on mass-produced duck toys made in imitation of an English model and now selling at one-quarter of the English cost in Indonesia, India, South America. Takahashi-San is a relatively unskilled worker, but because he has four children he earns five thousand yen (£5) a month.
nor
Zuzuki-San Neither Takahashi-San, who part with elaborate bows at the factory gates, has money, opportunity, nor leisure-nor the desire for recreation or sport.
Each solemnly throws a base- ball to his companion at the half-hour meal break and the two toss down a few glasses of sake (warm rice wine) or excel-
lent Japanese beer after work on the way home,
They take their chil- dren for a walk on their weekly day off, and they are still far more com- fortable in their yukata (informal Japanese than in kimono) Western-style dress.
They tend to suspect the union organisers, who urge them to unite for higher wages and a higher standard of living. So long as they have enough to eat --and by comparative standards they are eat- ing more than English workers are they content to continue the ancient Japanese tradi-
tion of
Spartan
are
hard work, living,
and
obedience to authority.
They know that their Emperor saved them- and the world-from hardship and suffering by in graciously ending the which the Americans were using hideously unfair bombing, and they know that the Americans are now busily helping them recover industrially.
war
They blandly accept their coolie rice-bowl standards of living-because they still know no other. On the bowed shoulders of eighty million Suzukis and Takahashis Japan is doggedly hoping to win its way back to Asiatic leadership and leader- ship of the world markets.
BERLIN
From Antony Terry
C
UTLERY, cars, cameras, toys, textiles and Rhine wine are some of the things Germany hopes to sell to the world in increasing quanti- ties during the next few years. the Typical of the energy Germans are putting into re- building their export trade is the spectacular post-war come- back of the £2,000,000 people's car plant near Brunswick.
Four miles of factory built by Hitler to make amphibious
to jeeps"
his carry
armies
France
Russia across
and finished up a mass of twisted scrap-iron after a dozen heavy R.A.F. raids in 1944.
When British troops took over the plant the official description was 70 per cent. destroyed." British Control Commission offi- cials who followed the troops immediately set about putting
the Volkswagen factory on its feet again.
The brilliant American-trained director of the Volkswagen plant hopes eventually to oust British cars from Scandinavia and other European markets and to step up output to 60,000 cars a year.
Working conditions in the Volkswagen factory, where 10,000 are now employed, are good by German standards. Forty-nine- year-old Kurt Schroeder, who earns £5 a week fitting "luxury upholstery " inside the £440 export model of the Volkswagen, pays 10s. a week for his spotlessly clean, simply furnished single room on the Nazi-built housing estate and, of course, he has no fares to pay.
He cycles to work, pays £1 a week to his landlady for a single meat-meal a day and takes a packet of brown bread and drip- ping for his mid-shift meal.
My Sidebottens.
MEHA. Hall.
Mr. Faircli
Me Adio
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