The Birmingham age-herald., 1909-04-11

(Copyright, 1909, by Frank G. Carpenter.)
 Kobe 1909 IF you want to see how wideawake the
 Japanese are, come with me and takt 4 look at the Kanegafuchi cotton mill which lies on the outskirts of Hiogo. It is the biggest spinning establishment of the empire, and 1t belongs to a company which. has a capital of seven million gold dollars and paid last year a dividend of 22 per cent The company has altogether 19 mills in operation and in course of construction. It has already more than 100000 spndles at work and the four new mills, now building, will add to this ss,O00 more. It is putting up mills for weaving as well as for spinning; and when all are completed it will still have a million dollars worth of working capital to go on.
 The company began it's work 20 years ago by erecting a spinning mill at Toko It has now two there and is building a third. It has silk mills at Kyoto, which are rapidly approaching completion, and at will soon have 16,0OO spindles in oper- Rtion there.
 Japan Biggest Cotton Mill.
 Of all the establishments of this big corporation the one here at Hiogo is the largest. It covers many acres and em- ploys 4000 hands. It's works run day and night, and they turn out cotton yarn by the thousands of bales annually. Much of the product is consumed here in Japan. but great deal goes to the rapid 1y developing market of China, where it competes with that from our country
 Hiogo Is the native city for which Kobe Is the port. It has, all told. more than 100000 people; and in going to the cotton mill our jinrikishas take us through sew eral miles of Japanese stores, over the bridge which crosses the river and almost into the country. We can see the great emokestack of the works long before we come to 1t. It rises high above the low warehouses and spinning mills, and its dense volume of black smoke peisons the air. The smokestack is made of iron 1nstead of brick, in the United States This is that 1t may the better withstand the earthquakes which occur here every few days, and which at times are so great that they might send tall brick stack to the ground. For the same reason the large mills almost all of one story. They are built of brick and are so walled with glass that they are splendidly lighted
 I do not know the acreage, but I went through a wilderness of moving pulleys whirling spindles. cotton opening ma CfiHeS aHu OlDeT WOrhS or Vd1lOuS Xmas, which took more time than a Sabbath days journey. Single buildings seemed to reach on and on till one could hardly see the end and In all was the busy hum of machinery and of Japanese men, wom- en and children working away
 have seen many of our great mills in the United States, but none in which the cotton is more rapidly and efficiently handled than here ] doubt if we have any in which the work is done with less labor. The finest of up-to-date machinery is employed, and when it wears out 1t goes to the scrap heap In some rooms. covering an acre, no more than two score men were at work, and one little girl was tending to every machine In the spinning and reeling rooms there were more, and in some I saw hundreds of girls and women at work
 Steam Engines Homemade.
 asked whence the machinery came and was told that some was from the United States, but that more came from England. Japan has not yet begun to manufacture cotton machinery. although 1t Is experimenting with work of all kinds. for instance, the engines which run these big works were constructed at Tokio. One of them is of 15Oo horse power, and 1t is fine as any engine of the kind anywhere
 Connected with the establishment is an experimental weaving mill, which will soon be increased to 400 looms. As it is now, the cotton comes into the mill in bales, being imported from China, India and the United States. and it goes out in smaller bales of cotton yarn, ready