Women, Work and the Japanese Economic Miracle

The case of the cotton textile industry, 1945-1975

Helen Macnaughtan

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2004
• eBook ISBN: 9781134335688
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business General
• Index: Business

This book shows how, during the period of the Japanese economic miracle, a distinctive female employment system was developed alongside, and different from, the better known Japanese employment system which was applied to male employees. Women, Work and the Japanese Economic Miracle describes and analyses the place of female workers in the cotton textile industry, which was a crucially important industry with a large workforce. In presenting detailed data on such key issues as recruitment systems, management practices and the working experience of the women involved, it demonstrates the importance for Japan's postwar economy of harnessing female labour during these years.

1 A historical legacy

In the 1979 Japanese film Aa Nomugi Tōge (Ah Nomugi Pass),¹ a story is told of young women from impoverished rural families who make the long trek crossing the snow-covered Nomugi Pass in the Nagano Alps to work in a silk-reeling factory. It is a tale of melancholy and misery which depicts the exploitation of young Japanese women under early industrial advance, and is a narrative which has been woven with fact and fiction to remain both in the history books and in the minds of many Japanese today. The story of female textile operatives is one viewed as having taken place prior to the Second World War, playing an important role in Meiji and Taishō economic and social development. However, it is also a story that continued and evolved into the postwar decades, providing a crucial base for Japan's reconstruction and growth and shaping the lives and roles of a further generation of Japanese women. This book is the result of research into this postwar history and seeks to show how this story of women and textiles has important significance and much broader application than might be first imagined for Japan's postwar development, the evolution of labour and employment practices and in particular the socio-economic role of women in contemporary Japan.

Female labour and textiles in prewar Japan

There is little doubt that the Japanese textile industry was a leading sector of Meiji industrialisation. Beginning in the 1870s, the industry developed to become the world's second largest producer and exporter of cotton goods by the 1930s. A distinctive characteristic of this industry was the high proportion of women among textile workers, consistently at levels of over 80 per cent throughout the prewar period. During the Tokugawa era, cottage industry had rapidly expanded within the context of it being supplementary income to agricultural households, and female labour had been crucial. Women becoming migrant waged labour was consistent with the notion of earning auxiliary income for the family unit. However, what was different from proto-industry was that many now travelled great distances to enter factories and lived independently from their rural family homes, primarily in factory dormitories for several years. Female workers were now actively recruited as a cheap source of competitive labour. With the introduction of the first modern mills from 1873, girls were called upon by the Meiji government to ‘reel for the nation’. It was initially women from lower samurai or wealthier peasant families who entered factories, but by the late 1880s it was predominantly young women from indigent farming families who were called upon to migrate from rural villages and urged to work under the Meiji nation-building goals. The advantage of employing females was that they were considered to be more dextrous, docile, obedient and cheap. Japanese women rapidly came to represent the largest sector of the new industrial workforce and formed a crucial backbone to Japan's industrial revolution. However, as young unmarried women they were also viewed as temporary and expendable labour.

An early work focusing on females in the industry was Hosoi (1925). Hosoi worked in a spinning factory and recorded both his experiences and the working conditions of female factory girls, describing the misery of conditions from the 1880s to 1920s, criticising the factory system and calling for more social recognition of the female workers. His work portrayed characteristics of labour relations in the industry, which came to be almost traits of the industry, including the recruitment contracts between girls' fathers and factories, the confinement of young girls in dormitories and the exploitation of young female labour. His treatise became so famous that the title Jokō Aishi (Pitiful History of Factory Girls) remains as a phrase encompassing the historical image of the industry even today. Hosoi set a tone of ‘dire labour conditions’ and ‘exploitation’, themes which were picked up by other prewar works, including his contemporary Sakura's (1927) work on the miserable conditions of female silk workers in the Okaya Silk Mills. This overriding image of Jokō Aishi outlived the conditions themselves as they saw some improvement in the interwar and postwar periods. In general, traditional scholarship came to view factory girls as predominantly passive victims of the industry, an unskilled and cheap labour source ‘sold’ into the industry by the patriarchal heads of rural households.

Labour conditions were certainly dire during the mid-Meiji period. Women in cotton spinning worked gruelling 12 hour shifts, continually on their feet at the machines, typically with three rest breaks totalling only an hour per shift.² Sanitation in the factories and dormitories was poor, with girls sharing grimy bathing facilities and often bedding. Occupational ailments were widespread, ranging through trachoma, bronchitis, acute weight loss, intestinal problems and tuberculosis. Early reports into labour conditions focused on this issue of the physical well-being of the workers, including Ishihara (1913), who presented research into workers' health and illness in textile factories carried out prior to the promulgation of the Factory Law, focusing on both factory reports and follow-up surveys of those girls who had previously worked in factories and returned to their native villages. Government and industry concern was particularly focused on the issue of tuberculosis, and the concern that factory girls were transporting the disease back to the rural areas. The history of this issue is found in works such as Kagoyama (1970) (a reprint of Ishihara's original work), Hunter (1993b) and Komatsu (2000).

The recording of the everyday lives of factory girls has contributed to a detailed understanding of their history. Takase (1972, 1979) looked at the history of female workers in the Tomioka silk mill, based on the author's survey of female workers' gravestones, factory registers, prefectural histories and local historical newspaper reports. Yamamoto (1979, 1980) is a two-volume series recounting the history of the many young girls who crossed the famous Nomugi Pass to enter employment in regional silk factories. Tsurumi (1990) describes the working lives of factory girls (kōjo) during the period from 1872 to 1912. Focusing on aspects such as recruitment, working and living conditions within factory and dormitory compounds, and the working girls' interaction with employers and their families back home, Tsurumi (1990) uses personal diaries, factory songs, letters and documentation from the period to tell the story from the perspective of the daily lives of the young female operatives. She tells how they worked for a few years to supplement the incomes of their families, who lived in poor rural areas, or to save up for a dowry. Although, as she herself agrees, such written accounts should be treated with caution, her analysis of the records provides a rich commentary on the daily conditions for female workers during this period.³

An excellent account of the prewar years is provided in Hunter (2003). Based on extensive research into the workings of the female textile labour market during the decades before the Second World War, the story of women and textiles is placed firmly within Japanese economic history. The issue of recruitment has been an important one in the story, serving to highlight both the practices of the industry and the historical link between the textile mills and the poor rural areas where recruitment took place. Hunter describes the methods employed by textile industries to recruit young female workers from the rural areas between the 1870s and 1930s. The heavy dependence on the recruitment of female workers was partly a result of the textile industries being traditional proto-industrial employment for females as well as the belief that women were more dextrous on spindles, but for the most part was based on the fact that young females were an extremely cheap source of labour. Competition to recruit girls became so severe that the dominant method of recruitment was for factories to employ a recruiting agent (boshuū juūjisha). Hunter notes that recruitment strategies often used deceptive tactics to hire girls and work conditions did not live up to promises made. Such policies, while advantageous to employers and to the economic development of the textile industry during this period, no doubt contributed to problems of high turnover and the continued low status of female workers. Saxonhouse (1976, 1977) and Saxonhouse and Kiyokawa (1985) used econometric methods to examine the high turnover in the industry, noting that the industry relied upon a labour force of young women who worked on average for no longer than two years. The high turnover in the industry was attributed to young girls ‘escaping’ from the factories because of unhappiness with poor working conditions. They noted, however, that the industry was able to improve upon the organisation, quality and productivity of the labour source, despite the continuance of high levels of absenteeism and turnover, through improvements in technology, accumulating worker experience and increasing levels of basic education.

The use of female workers in Japan's prewar textile industry received much international attention. Japan's rival powers in the West persistently accused Japan of making its industrial advance based on social dumping, that is the exploitation of cheap (female) labour, thereby having an unfair wage-price advantage.⁴ The employment conditions of female textile operatives therefore became the focus of both national and international debate surrounding industrial work conditions and workplace reform. While traditional scholarship had highlighted the plight of women in textiles, particularly during the Meiji period, research into the Taishō and early Shōwa period, particularly the interwar years, highlighted that worker consciousness and industrial labour movements led to some improvement in working conditions. Some revisionist arguments have also suggested that the conditions for female factory girls were not as bad as those of their counterparts, such as those who were forced to work in brothels or who remained behind in poor rural households, as well as relative to the conditions for female textile workers in other nations at similar periods of industrialisation. What is clear from the historiography is that some movement towards gradual improvement in labour conditions in the industry took place through pressure on the industry, legislation and partly as a result of worker activism.

The involvement of women in labour disputes and early activism has therefore been an important focus of research. Strikes had been recorded as early as 1886, though they became more frequent and effective in the 1920s.⁵Tsurumi (1995) notes the ‘small acts of everyday resistance’ utilised by the girls.⁶ Labour activism among women aimed at improving their working conditions, and gradual reform took place. The abolition of night work (between 11:00 p.m. and 5:00 a.m.) officially shortened working hours after 1929,⁷ though not necessarily per worker, and the textile industry played an influential role in the establishment of this early factory legislation (see Akamatsu 1977; Kojima 1983; Hunter 1989). Shimazu (1970) viewed factory women as having been integral to the existence of a proletarian labour movement in Japan, while Shibata (1975; Shibata and Yamada 1983) noted that the struggles of working women throughout Japan's modern industrial history played an important role within the history of the grassroots labour movement. While the majority of female textile workers were employed out of economic necessity, it is believed that many used the opportunity to develop an ethos as workers and establish a degree of independence and self-fulfilment. Although scholars like Saxonhouse had noted the high turnover in the industry, attributing it to young girls fleeing from the factories, others commented that this turnover did not solely suggest that the girls left to return to the country and marry, as many actually moved between factories in attempts to gain skills and better working conditions, with many eventually marrying and remaining in urban areas. Such arguments pointed out that it was important that female operatives should not be seen purely as having been ‘expendable farm daughters’. Bernstein (1988) suggested that the earnings of factory girls provided indispensable support to the rural ie (household) and enabled rural society to persist alongside industrialisation.⁸

Although, as various traditional studies have noted, many workers were no doubt unhappy, a key point is that many were nevertheless highly motivated, and achieved subtle gains. Despite early coercive motivational techniques, industrial employers gradual...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• RoutledgeCurzon Studies in the Modern History of Asia
• Full Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of illustrations
• Acknowledgements
• Note on Japanese terms
• Frequently used abbreviations
• 1 A historical legacy
• 2 Shaping the female labour market
• 3 Recruiting women workers
• 4 Managing women workers
• 5 Educating and training women workers
• 6 Wages and welfare for women
• 7 Japanese female textile workers in context
• Appendix: fieldwork interviews and survey
• References
• Index