The Cannery Boat
V
Two or three excited fishermen rushed along the deck. When they reached the end they reeled and grasped hold of the railing. The carpenter, who was doing some repairing on the saloon deck, looked over in the direction the men had gone. The cutting wind brought tears to his eyes, so that at first he could not see clearly. He turned his head aside and blew his nose vigorously.
The port-quarter winch was rattling. As all were out fishing now there was no reason to be working it. Something was dangling from it, and that something was shaking. The wire, which hung down vertically, was swinging round, describing circles. “What is it?”—his heart gave a leap.
“He’s at it again.” Wiping his tears on his sleeve again and again, he assured himself that it was so. From where he stood he could see, against a background of livery-grey sea, the jutting-out derrick of the winch, and hanging from it one of the workers, completely bound, defined in clear black. The winch was raised up as far as it would go and he was left hanging there like that for a long while—twenty minutes at least. After that it started to move downwards. He seemed to be straining and twisting his body, and was waving both his legs like a fly caught in a spider’s web.
At last he was lost from sight behind the saloon, and only the wire stretching down vertically could be seen, swaying now and then like a swing.
Tears seemed to have got into the carpenter’s nose, for it was trickling all the time. Again he blew it. Then, taking out the hammer which had been moving round in his side pocket, he started to work.
Suddenly, pricking up his ears, he looked round. The wire rope was shaking as if someone below was pulling at it and a dull, uncanny splashing sound was heard.
The strung-up man’s face had changed colour. From between his lifeless, tightly-closed lips foam was coming. When the carpenter went down below he passed the foreman with a lump of wood under his arm. “That’s what he hit him with,” thought the carpenter, glancing at the wood.
The fishermen, through long-continued overwork, gradually found themselves unable to get up in the mornings. The boss found an empty petrol can and walked round hammering on it close to the ears of the sleepers. He hammered on it desperately until they opened their eyes and got up. Those with beri-beri half raised their heads and said something, but the boss, pretending not to have noticed them, went on hammering. After he had hammered what he considered a reasonable amount he shouted at them: “What’s wrong; are you not going to get up? If this work is for the sake of your country, then you’ve got to count it like war. You’ve got to risk your lives for it, you bastards.”
The sick men had all their coverings pulled off them and were then pushed up on to the deck. Those with beri-beri banged their toes against the stairs. They climbed up, clutching the rail with one hand, grasping their feet with the other to help them up. At every step each heart would give a horrible kick.
The boss and the foreman tormented the sick men very slyly. When they were working at canning the meat they would be driven out and set to breaking claws on deck. When they had been at that for a little while they would be sent off to paste labels. They were made to stand in the bitter cold until their legs had less feeling than artificial limbs. If they just relaxed their knee-joints would crack like a hinge coming apart and they would almost double up in a heap.
One student started to tap his brow lightly with the back of a hand all dirtied with breaking the crabs. Then just in that position he fell backwards. A pile of empty cans beside him clattered over noisily and nearly buried him. Because of the ship’s slope some of them rolled among the machinery and the cargo. The student’s mates carried him towards the hatchway and ran into the boss. He glanced at them and said, “Who’s stopped their work?”
“Who?” echoed one student, looking as if he would like to strike him.
“Who … you bastard?” Then, suddenly twisting up his mouth and stretching himself up, he burst out into a loud laugh.
“Fetch some water.”
He took the pail of water and dashed it on the face of the student, who had been left lying prone on the floor like a railroad sleeper.
“He’ll be all right—there’s no need for you to be looking at what’s not your business. Get on with your work.”
Next morning the hands saw the student of the day before tied up to one of the pillars. His head was sunk down on his chest like a chicken whose neck has been wrung, and just at the nape one big round bone of his back showed, sticking out clearly. Then in front of him, like a child’s pinafore, a piece of cardboard was hanging with something written on it, obviously in the boss’s handwriting:
“As this is a disloyal malingerer it is forbidden to undo the rope.”
When they felt his forehead it was like touching cold steel. Up to the time they entered he had been jabbering to himself, with no one to answer him. When they heard the voice of the foreman coming down after them, they moved on from the machine to which the student was bound, dividing into two streams until they had all reached their proper places.
When the crab-fishing got busier things became worse. They had their teeth smashed in and spent all night spitting blood; they fainted from overwork. Their extreme tiredness made them more helpless than if they had been drunk. At stopping time they breathed sighs of relief, as much as to say, “That’s the end,” and then for a moment everything went blank.
Just as they were clearing up the boss came along and thundered at them, “Work until nine o’clock to-night.”
Once again they all dragged themselves up like figures in a slow-motion picture. They had no energy left to do anything else.
Sometimes the boss would lecture them. “D’you understand? We can’t come back here a second time or a third time. And we can’t get the crabs just at any time we please. Just because you’ve worked ten hours or thirteen hours in a day, if you go stopping exactly at that, it’d be a hell of a mess. This work is different. D’ye get me? But to make up for it, when there are no crabs, it’s almost a cruel waste the easy time you have.
“The Bolshies, no matter how many shoals of fish come right in front of their eyes, if time is up they’ll throw up the work. That’s what they’re like and that’s why Russia’s like she is. You Japanese men must never go copying them.”
“What’s he talking about, the damn fool?” thought some and did not listen. On hearing the boss’s words the majority felt that Japan was indeed a great country. The hardships they suffered every day seemed somehow heroic, and that was at least some consolation for them.
While working on deck they saw a cruiser moving across the horizon towards the south. They could see the Japanese flag waving at the stern. Their eyes filled with tears and they waved their hats. “That’s our only protection,” they thought.
“Damn it all, when I see her it makes me blub!”
They watched it as it got smaller and smaller, until it disappeared wrapped up in smoke.
Returning to their quarters they all shouted, “Blast!” In the darkness their voices, full of hatred, sounded like the bellowing of bulls. Although they did not know against whom they were aimed, the thoughts, the words and actions of these 200 men, talking freely together day after day, came imperceptibly to move in one direction. It was morning. Climbing slowly up the companionway the miner said, “I can’t keep it up.”
The day before he had worked almost till ten, and his body was like a half-broken machine. As he was climbing up he dozed off. Shouted at from behind, he began to move his feet and legs mechanically. He slipped but continued crawling up on his belly.
Before beginning work they gathered together in a corner. Their faces were the colour of clay.
“I’m going to try sabotage. I can’t work,” said the miner.
They all looked expressively silent for a while, and then someone said, “It means a big branding——”
“I’m not shirking. It’s because I can’t work, I tell you.” The miner rolled his sleeve right up and then held his arm out level with his eyes and examined it.
“It won’t be long. I’m not shirking, I tell you.”
“If you’re not, then it’s all right.”
That day the boss stamped round again like a fighting cock. “What’s the matter? What’s the matter?” he shouted. As it was not just one or two men, however, who were taking their time, but almost everyone, he could do nothing but fume inwardly as he went round. It was the first time that the fishermen and sailors saw the boss like this. On the deck hundreds of crabs let out of the nets made a grating sound as they crawled about. The work accumulated like a blocked drain. “The transport! The transport!” This cry from the upper deck was heard below. Everyone jumped out of his bunk just as he was, in his sleeping rags. The transport aroused the men more than a woman would. It alone did not smell of the salt sea, but had a breath of Hakkodate clinging to it. It smelled of the land, the land which did not move and which they had not trodden for many months. And this boat delivered letters, shirts, underwear, magazines and many other things.
Seizing their parcels in their knotted, crab-greasy hands, the men rushed back excitedly to their quarters. Then, sitting up in their bunks with their legs crossed, they undid their parcels. All sorts of things came out: letters in their children’s unsteady handwriting, written with the mother standing near telling them what to say; towels, tooth paste, tooth-brushes, toilet paper, kimonos, and underneath all these, unexpectedly, letters from their wives. All the men tried to get from these things a sniff of their homes. They sought for the milky smell of children or the strong fleshy smell of their wives.
Those sailors and fishermen who had received nothing mooned around with their hands stuck in their trouser pockets. Everyone teased them, saying, “I wouldn’t be surprised if she hasn’t called in some other fellow to keep her company while you’re away.”
With his face buried in a dark corner, heedless of the others’ noisy clatter, one man stood counting over and over again on his fingers. He had received news of his child’s death. The child had died two months ago, but he had received no word till now. The letter said that there had been no money for a wireless.
On the other hand there was just an opposite case. In another letter was a photograph of a baby, podgy like a young octopus.
“This, mine!” laughed the father in a funny voice. Then, with a grin on his face, he paraded it round, saying, “What d’ye think of it? They say this has arrived.”
In their parcels were trivial little things, but things which only the careful forethought of a wife remembers. At the sight of them their hearts began to beat strangely, and they felt a strange longing to be home.
On the transport had come a party of movie men sent by the company. It was arranged to have a movie show on the ship the night the cans were loaded on the transport.
Two or three young men, all very much alike in appearance, with flattened caps a little on one side and bow-ties and wide trousers, came aboard carrying a heavy-looking trunk.
“What a smell!” they said as they took off their coats, and then, whistling a tune, began putting up a screen, measuring off the distance and fixing up the stand. The fishermen got from these men the feeling that they were not of the sea, and therefore were different from themselves, and this attracted them very strongly. Both sailors and fishermen, in a light airy mood, helped the newcomers with their work.
The oldest and flashiest of them, who wore gold-rimmed glasses, stood a little apart and wiped the sweat from his neck.
“Look out; if you stand there you’ll have lice crawling up your legs.” He gave a shriek and jumped up as if he had trodden on a sheet of red-hot steel. The fishermen burst out laughing.
“But I say, this is a dreadful place to be in, isn’t it?” His voice was husky. Then he continued, “I don’t expect you know, but how much profit do you think this company makes by coming here and doing this. Something tremendous, I tell you! Five million yen in six months! Ten million a year. If you say it quickly it doesn’t sound much, but actually it’s tremendous. Not many companies in Japan can pay the huge dividend of 221/2 per cent. to shareholders. The head director is going to become an M.P., they say, and then everything will be rosy. But I suppose with all that they wouldn’t make the profits they do unless they treated the men as badly as this.”
Night came.
Partly to celebrate the “ten thousandth can,” sake, raw spirits, dried cuttlefish, boiled vegetables, cigarettes and caramels were distributed among them.
Four or five in the front row began clapping and all the others followed suit. The boss appeared before the white screen. He straightened himself and, folding his arms behind him, started to speak, making use of such polite words as “gentlemen” which rarely came from his lips, mixed in with his usual stuff about “you men of Japan” and “national wealth.” Most of them did not listen to him. They chewed away at cuttlefish.
“Shut up, shut up!” someone in the rear yelled.
“Sit down, you!”
They began to whistle and clap madly.
In such circumstances the boss could not very well get angry. His face went red and he said something (which no one heard because of the uproar) and then sat down. The movies began.
The first was “educational.” Scenes of the Imperial Palace, Matsushima, Enoshima, Kyoto flickered across the screen. After that followed some Western and Japanese dramas. Then men were all absolutely enthralled. When a fine-limbed Western girl appeared they whistled and snorted like pigs.
The Western picture was an American one, built round the opening up of the West. It told of men attacked by savages, overwhelmed by the ravages of Nature, but rising up again and laying the railroad foot by foot. The towns which sprang up overnight seemed just like joints of the railway. As the railroad was pushed forward new towns appeared further and futher westward.
All these various trials and hardships were interwoven with the love story of a navvy and the director’s daughter; sometimes the one and sometimes the other was in the foreground. In the last scene the man who showed the picture raised his voice:
“Helped on by the countless sacrifices of these young men, the hundreds of miles of railroad were at last completed and linked together mountain and valley, transforming lands which until yesterday were a wilderness into National Wealth.”
The end showed the director’s daughter and the navvy, now changed miraculously into a gentleman, in the act of embracing.
Between this and the next film was a short Western comic, pure nonsense which made them all laugh.
The Japanese one was a film showing a poor young man who started by peddling beans, then sold newspapers and step by step came to shoe shining; next he entered a factory, became a Model Worker, was made much of and finally became a millionaire.
The lecturer added, though it was not in the titles, “Verily if industry is not the mother of success, what is?” The young hands applauded earnestly. From among the fishermen and sailors came a loud voice, “Bloody lies! If that was true I’d have been director before now!” and again everyone laughed.
Afterwards the lecturer said that he had been ordered by the company to lay special stress on places like that to bring the moral home to the men.
The last picture showed the company’s different factories and offices. Many workers were depicted working “industriously.”
When the movies had finished they drank the sake given to celebrate the ten thousandth can.
Not having tested sake for ages and being worn out, the men soon became drunk. Dense clouds of tobacco smoke hung round the dim electric light. The air was thick and stuffy. Stripping off their clothes, twisting towels round their heads, sprawling about crosslegged or tucking the bottoms of their kimono up to their waists, they shouted out all sorts of things in chorus. Sometimes fish fights developed.
This did not stop till after midnight.
One fisherman came rolling like a great sack down the stairs. His clothes and right hand were smothered in blood.
“A knife! A knife! Get me a knife!” he cried, crawling along the floor. “Where’s that devil Asakawa gone. He’s not there. I’m going to kill him!”
He was one of the fishermen whom the boss had ordered to be beaten. He seized a poker and, blind with rage, rushed out again. No one stopped him.
Next morning they discovered that every thing on the boss’s table had been smashed to pieces. The boss, however, was unhurt, as he had been elsewhere. [For various reasons it is impossible to give this story in full. The translator summarizes the conclusion in the following note. It is hoped that later circumstances may permit a full version.]
Summary of the Remaining Chapters
In the concluding chapters conditions become worse. One man dies of beri-beri and at the all-night vigil held beside the body one man gets up and makes a fiery speech, telling them to revolt before they themselves are killed. A committee is formed and the men are organized. One morning they are ordered to set out fishing in the boats, although a storm is clearly approaching. One boat refuses and the revolt spreads all over the ship. A student goes down below to tell the firemen and a mass meeting is held. A deputation goes to the boss with demands, which he refuses. The deputation attacks the boss. He is afraid to use his revolver. Everyone is jubilant but later the cruiser is seen approaching and the men realize they have been fooled and that the boss has sent a wireless. Still the cruiser is their protection and will understand their point of view, think the simple ones. Sailors come aboard and the nine ringleaders are seized and carried off. Everyone is at first dazed by this failure but gradually they realize that cruisers are owned by capitalists and plan to organize a new revolt more carefully.
A short appendix is added with the following notes:
(a) The second revolt succeeded perfectly. The boss found they had taken possession of the wireless room and could do nothing.
(b) The Hakko Maru was not the only ship that had strikes and sabotage at the end of the season. Red propaganda was found at work on two or three ships.
(c) The boss and the foreman, faithful dogs of the company, were not awarded for their services, but dismissed. The boss is said to have said. “Ah, I’ve been deceived by the company.”
This work is one page of the History of the Penetration of Capitalism into the Colonies.
30th March, 1929.
Translator's Notes
1. The business quarter of Tokyo.
2. A well-known brand of cigarettes.