Female Textile Workers and the Failure of Early Trade Uni.docx

Female Textile Workers and the Failure of Early Trade
Unionism in Japan
Author(s): E. Patricia Tsurumi
Source: History Workshop, No. 18 (Autumn, 1984), pp. 3-27
Published by: Oxford University Press
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/4288585
Accessed: 28-03-2020 22:22 UTC
JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars,
researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide
range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information
technology and tools to increase productivity and
facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about
JSTOR, please contact [email protected]
Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the
Terms & Conditions of Use, available at
https://about.jstor.org/terms
Oxford University Press is collaborating with JSTOR to
digitize, preserve and extend access
to History Workshop
This content downloaded from 128.195.78.54 on Sat, 28 Mar
2020 22:22:11 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

ARTICLES AND ESSAYS
Female Textile WVorkers and the Failure
of Early Trade Unionism in Japan
by F Patricia Tsurumi
INTRODUCTION
Students of Japanese labour history all agree that attempts to
organize factory
workers in Japan during the Meiji period (1868-1912) were
largely unsuccessful.
During the first phase of Japan's industrialization after the
Meiji Restoration of
1868,1 there were. spontaneous outbursts of protest from
factory workers; and by
the late 1890s a few locally-based trade unions and support
groups aimed at
encouraging trade unionism had been formed.2 Despite the
harsh Public Peace
Police Law (Chian keisatsu h6 of 1900, pioneer socialists like
Katayama Sen
(1859-1933) and K6toku Shtfisui (1871-1911) made strenuous
attempts to develop
a class-conscious labour movement, but strong roots did not
take firm hold during
this first phase of industrialization.3 As the Meiji period was
drawing to a close,
large-scale arrests of suspected left-wing sympathizers and the
execution of 24
anarchists falsely accused of high treason in 1910 dramatically
ended organizing

attempts. Too weak to fight back, the labour movement went
into a state of
suspended animation for almost a decade.4
As Stephen S Large rightly observed, 'The failure of the Meiji
labor movement
is easier to chronicle than to explain.'15This, however, has
never stopped historians
from explaining it. Explanations have to date involved
discussion of all or some
2020 22:22:11 UTC
4 History Workshop Journal
of the following five factors of Meiji labour history: 1)
government repression; 2)
management hostility; 3) class backgrounds of labour leaders;
4) rural backgrounds
of factory workers; 5) high percentages of industrial workers
who were female
(nearly all of these were textile workers in cotton spinning, silk
reeling, cotton
weaving, and silk weaving trades).
Different analysts weigh these five factors differently; not all
see all five as
bearing strong causal relationships to the failure of Meiji trade
unionism. However,
the fifth factor enumerated, the high percentage of women in
the factory work
force, has usually been singled out as an important element.

Frequently it is linked
with the fourth, the rural origins of workers of both sexes. In
the words of Okochi
Kazuo, one of Japan's most venerable labour historians:
The predominance of voung farm girls among factory workers
in the Meiji
period did much . . . to determine the character of the labor
movement. Since
two-thirds of the labor force consisted of ignorant young girls
for whom a
factory job was only a short interlude in their lives, it is easy to
understand why
even deplorable working conditions gave rise to no movements
of protest.6
This essay is about these 'ignorant young girls.' Its aim is to
examine their labouring
lives and discover if they do indeed offer support for the
arguments which connect
the high percentages of female factory workers from rural
districts with the failure
of the Meiji labour movement.7
EARLY INDUSTRIALIZATION AND FEMALE TEXTILE
WORKERS
In 1868 the most urgent concern of Japan's new rulers was
resistance to the
Western imperialist encroachment that had already ensnared
their country in a
web of unequal treaties.8 Resistance required, they had quickly
learned, rapid
industrialization. The earliest industrialization during the Meiji
period, heavy
industry to support the military build-up political leaders

perceived to be the
country's most immediate goal, was entirely government
initiated.9 Engineer
works, arsenals, shipbuilding, railroads, mining and smelting
were developed
under government control with government funding and with
modern equipment
imported and technical specialists hired from abroad. "'
Employed in heavy industry
were two kinds of workers, both of which were mainly male.
Unskilled labour
was used in mining, dockwork, and construction projects; while
engineering,
shipbuilding and large-scale transport enterprises engaged
skilled workers. "
Skilled workers were often recruited through master craftsmen;
unskilled labourers
were generally supplied by labour bosses.'2
Although strategic industry related directly to military
considerations was
established first, it was soon joined by production of consumer
goods, the most
important of which were textiles.'3 The Meiji government built
factories to turn
out building materials and machine tools during the 1870s and
founded during the
same decade a woollen industry to produce Western style
clothing, especially
uniforms for the armed forces, but governmental efforts in light
industrial fields
went most heavily into support of cotton spinning, silk reeling,
and cotton and
silk weaving. This support included extensive aid to private
entrepreneurs -
particularly to entrepreneurs in cotton - as well as

establishment of model govern-
2020 22:22:11 UTC
Female Workers in Japan 5
ment mills with imported technology.'4 Spinning and weaving
products not only
became important exports; they were badly needed to combat
foreign textiles,
which made up more than half of Japan's imports between 1868
and 1882.
Textiles, predominantly private enterprise, were the first
industries to develop
extensive factory production in Japan. Thus textile workers
formed a large propor-
tion of the Meiji industrial labour force. In 1882 when the
government had just
begun to sell its major enterprises to private industrialists,
textile plants, which
accounted for one half of all private factories, employed about
three quarters of
all factory employees in Japan.'5 Most textile workers were
women or girls,
hired by contracted labour recruiters who travelled on behalf of
textile companies

throughout the countryside recruiting daughters of poor peasant
families.16 The
large numbers such recruiters hired put a female stamp upon
private industry
during the Meiji period: in 1900 female workers made up 62
percent of the labour
force in private factories, and ten years later women and girls
were 71 percent of
the workers in private plants.'7
LIFE AND WORK FOR WOMEN AND CHILDREN IN THE
TEXTILE
INDUSTRIES
In 1903, Factory Workers' Conditions (Shokko jijo), five
volumes of official reports
published by the Ministry of Agriculture and Commerce,
revealed the shocking
conditions in the cotton spinning mills, silk reeling plants,
cotton and silk weaving
factories and sheds to governmental and industrial leadership
and to a small
body of social reformers. Unfortunately, among those with
least access to this
information were potential mill hands and their parents. In the
main, these people
were natives of districts remote enough from the factories to
make recruiters' lies
about excellent working conditions with recreational and
educational opportunities

sound plausible. Fathers who signed contracts binding their
daughters to three to
five years labour at a mill would be advanced cash. These
advances would be
deducted from their daughters' future wages. All expenses of
the recruiting agents
such as lodging, transportation, meals, entertainment,
travelling clothes and equip-
ment, as well as the recruiters' fees were paid out of the
recruits' future wages.
This, however, was not explained to the young women and
children or to their
families at the time contracts were signed. New workers
therefore entered factory
employment encumbered by sizeable debts incurred through
recruitment costs and
loans to their poverty-stricken parents.18
Most recruits were young. In 1901, among cotton spinning
hands in 16
companies surveyed, less than one percent were under 10,10
percent were aged
10 to 13, and almost 37 percent were aged 14 to 19. The rest of
the cotton spinners
were aged 20 or over, but most of these appear to have been
under 30.19 In silk
reeling the work force was even younger. Of 13,620 silk
workers in 205 factories

in 1898, one percent were under 10, 16 percent under 14, 46
percent between 14
and 20.20 Weavers were youngest of all. In the numerous
weaving sheds employing
three or four or perhaps six but always less than 10 weavers,
those employed were
frequently children of tender years; while in larger plants ages
varied from district
to district. Factory Workers' Conditions reveals that in 1899 in
one important
textile district near Osaka, 10 percent of the silk weavers were
under 10 years of
2020 22:22:11 UTC
age, 40 percent were aged 10 to 13, 45 percent were aged 14 to
19, and only five
percent were between the ages of 20 and 25.21
Unlike the much smaller number of male employees in textile
plants, who
were usually paid fixed wages, female textile workers were
only nominally paid at
fixed rates; in actuality they were paid on a piece-work basis.
This was because
they were paid according to job performance as well as

seniority. Workers' perfor-
mances were rated daily by inspectors. Hosoi Wakizo, the mill
hand who docu-
mented the plight of Meiji cotton mill women, reports that in
cotton mills workers
given the top rating received their full wages, those with a
second class rating
received 80 percent of their stipulated wages, those with a third
class rating got
only 50 percent of their stipulated wages.22 Thus workers who
produced the most
were paid the wages agreed upon but each time a worker failed
to meet a top pro-
duction target she was fined for poor performance, and
received then less wages
than stipulated in her contract. In addition to a worker's skill
and health, a host
of factors - including machinery breakdowns and the condition
of materials to be
processed - could contribute to a 'poor performance.' Stipulated
wages were often
irrelevant to what the girls and women were paid, because
many companies did
not pay them weekly or monthly. Instead employers would pay
them only once a
year - after deducting interest on and principal installments on
cash advances to
fathers, expenses for room and board, casualty insurance
payments, a host of fines
for low production and innumerable trivial offences against
factory regulations.
Some companies periodically paid their female workers what
amounted to small
amounts of pocket money. These payments were also deducted

from wages. And
some factories also deducted from wages obligatory sums to be
sent home to
parents. In addition, amounts from an individual's pay were
regularly held back to
be confiscated in case she ran away before her term of
employment was completed
or broke some factory rule. Wages varied according to the
location of factories,
and Tokyo mills usually paid more than plants elsewhere, but
female wages were
always lower than wages of male workers - usually 20 to 25
percent lower.23
The Ministry of Agriculture and Commerce reports show that
hours of work
for both sexes were officially 12 or 13 hours per day or night in
the spinning trades.
However, for a variety of reasons, including the requirement
that workers spend
pre-operating hours preparing their machines for work and
post-operating time
cleaning those machines, the actual hours of work were usually
longer. In silk
reeling, during the winter, the hours would be about 12 or 13 a
shift plus machine
maintenance time. But during the seasons when the daylight
hours were longer,
operatives were kept at their machines for up to eighteen hours
a shift, as factory
managers exploited the seasonal work rhythms of the
countryside from which their
workers came. When a plant was on double shifts it was a
particularly hard struggle

for night shift workers to stay awake at two and three in the
morning. They sang
to keep from falling asleep. A former cotton spinning hand,
Yamanouchi Mina,
who started work in a Tokyo mill at the age of 12 in 1913,
recalls one of the songs
from her night shift experience.
At two and three in the middle of the night,
The grass and the trees get to sleep.
Is it too much that I should be sleepy?
If the cotton spinning maids are human beings,
Then the dead trees in the mountains are blooming.24
2020 22:22:11 UTC
In weaving factories and sheds, hours were longer than in the
spinning trades. 12
to 13 hours was a short shift in weaving, and weavers often put
in 17 or 18 hours
of work a day. In some districts, 15 to 18 hour shifts were
standard. In small
weaving sheds it was not unusual for women and girls to labour
from five in the
morning until midnight.25
In both spinning and weaving, employers sought to squeeze as
much labour

out of each individual labourer as they possibly could. Speed-
ups to meet produc-
tion deadlines and competitive systems of rewards and
punishments which pitted
individual operatives against each other were used to get more
work out of a shift.
Workers were organized into competing teams, and individuals
and teams with
the greatest production would win inexpensive prizes or receive
minute monetary
rewards. Those whose production fell below demanded
standards would be heavily
fined. It was not uncommon for a poorly performing worker,
such as an ill worker,
to lose most or all of her wages in this way.
The workers might get two days off work a month if they were
lucky - and
many were not.26 Rest periods during working days were few
and short. They
usually consisted of 15 minutes in the morning, 30 minutes at
noon, and 15 minutes
during the evening. During these breaks, mill hands had to rush
back and forth
from factory floor to dining room as well as to eat meals. Rest
periods were
sometimes shortened during speed-ups, forcing operatives to
stuff their food into
their mouths while they manipulated their looms. Not
surprisingly, workers were
often too exhausted at the end of the day to take a bath if it
were bath night -
though a trip to the bath is the one journey even very weary
Japanese are extremely
reluctant to pass up.

It did not take the women and girls long to gulp down their
meals during the
short rest breaks, because the quantities of food served were
small. Each meal
consisted of a bowl of an inferior grade of rice or of rice mixed
with other grains,
accompanied by a few pickles and soup or vegetables.
Sometimes small portions
of bean curd or dried fish were substituted for the thin soup.
Hosoi Wakizo, who
wrote his classic, The Pitiful History of Female Factory
Workers (Joko aishi), from
first hand experience, describes kitchen workers dishing out
food for thousands of
mill hands on humid summer days, when the food on the plates
began to spoil
before the workers came into the dining room and had a chance
to consume it.27
Hunger drove workers to spend considerable amounts of their
meagre incomes
on sweets and other food sold for profit in company stores or
by vendors who
visited the factories.28
Dormitories, built adjacent to mills, were designed to keep the
women and
girls inside factory walls and 'intruders' outside of them.
Usually dormitories were
either surrounded by eight-foot fences or connected to the plant
by a bridge eight
feet above the ground. On top of fences and walls were broken
glass, sharpened
bamboo spears, barbed wire, and other forbidding objects. To
be on the safe side,
management locked the boarding labourers in the dormitories

when they were not
working. Factory Workers' Conditions contains reports of
women and children
who had been locked in their dormitories after work by their
employers 'allegedly
to protect their morals.'29
Actually, they were locked in to keep them from running away.
This, of
course, rendered them helpless when fires broke out in their
wooden buildings.
In late January of 1900, in Aichi prefecture a fire killed more
than 30 young girls
who were securely locked into the dormitory of a spinning and
weaving factory.
2020 22:22:11 UTC
They could not flee the flames because the door at the only exit
was heavily bolted
from the outside. They could not jump from the windows
because the windows
were covered with thick iron bars. Huddled together crying,
they perished. Their
bodies were burned so severely that identification was
impossible. Awareness of
such fires was expressed in a song the hands sung:
Crowded into an overflowing dormitory,
While the factory burns.

May the doorkeeper die of cholera.
Harder than that of a bird in a cage
Or of an inmate in a prison,
Is the life of those who live in dormitories.30
Dormitories were divided into drafty, japanese-style tatami
rooms, into which as
many workers as possible were crammed. At best a young
woman had one tatami
mat of about six feet by three feet as her living space, but ten
individuals were
often crowded into eight mat rooms. If the plant was on day
and night shifts, two
girls might share the same space, using the same inadequate
bedding. With such
sleeping arrangements there was no place for a sick worker to
convalesce. Toilet
and washing facilities were limited, and access to them was
only permitted at
stipulated times. Lice were an ever-present annoyance.
Each dormitory room was headed by a room supervisor, a
veteran worker
older than most of the others. Supervisors routinely checked all
outgoing post for
any information unflattering to the comapny. When such
information was found,
the letter containing it was thrown away. The supervisor also
tried to scrutinize
each piece of correspondence the women and children under
her charge received.
Authority to withhold incoming parcels and letters was an
important source of
power to supervisors because news from distant families was

all many of the lonely
youngsters lived for. To know that news had come but was
being withheld must
have been unbearable.31
Not to be granted permission to get away from the mill on a
worker's infre-
quent free day was one of the restraints most resented by the
dormitory residents.
If a woman returned five minutes late from an outing outside
the factory gates,
not only might she be kept in for months but all of her
roommates might be denied
permission to leave the grounds. An article entitled 'Our Lives'
(Watakushitachi no
seikatsu) written by a textile worker appeared in a special
women's edition of
Rod6 (Labour), the organ of Nihon Rodo Sodomei (Japan
General Federation of
Labour) in April. 1924. Although the anonymous author of this
article was a
conscientious energetic worker, it took her three months to get
permission to
leave the mill premises on her day off. Even when she finally
gained the longed-for
permission she was ordered to return to the dormitory by three
pm.32 Dormitory
supervisors could deny such permission to the young women
under their care and
this too enhanced their petty power.
On the work floor it was male supervisors who 'could wield
considerable
arbitrary power over the young operatives . . . . The young
operatives, single and
vulnerable, were open targets for personal whims and sexual

abuse by these low-
ranking supervisors, and provocations led to constant tension
between textile
hands and their overseers.'33 Owners in small factories and
sheds were as abusive
as supervisors and managers in larger plants. The verses which
textile workers
2020 22:22:11 UTC
sang warned against sexual exploitation, mentioned it as a
matter-of-fact part of
everyday life, and bitterly resented the humiliating
powerlessness of the sexually
exploited.34
Don't fall in love with male workers.
You'll end up discarded like tea dregs.
At parting one is like a fan,
Discarded when a breeze is no longer needed.
Meet him often and the factory gets upset.
Don't meet him and the master gets upset.
This company is like a brothel.
We are whores who live by selling our faces.

In Hide geisha get thirty-five sen.
Common prostitutes get fifteen sen.
Spinning maids get one potato.
Work places were hazardous in other ways too. Dust and noise
reached intolerable
levels, and hands were known to pass out from heat and lack of
ventilation. Loss
of fingers and toes on the job was considered so common and
so minor that such
injuries were not even listed in the mills' injury compensation
lists. Yet such
accidents could drastically cut a worker's skill and thus
income. And the compens-
ation for loss of limbs, eyes, hearing, noses, was small. A
worker would not
receive even this unless her injury was so incapacitating that
the company dismissed
her. And compensation came from the workers' pay not their
employers' pockets:
each operative paid a percentage of her wages into the mutual
insurance fund
which provided pittances for disabled operatives.35 Because of
public pressure, the
outraged families of the Aichi girls who burned to death while
locked in their
dormitory in 1900 were bought off with unusually high
compensation payments.
Each family received 170 yen 70 sen (100 sen equals 1 yen) at
a time when 25 sen
bought one kin (1.32 pounds) of rice.36
Fatigue, dangerous and unhealthy work places, unhygienic

dormitories, little
opportunity for wholesome exercise, poor nutirition, constant
close proximity to
a large number of fellow workers, including fatally ill
individuals kept at their
machines until the last stage of their illnesses - all these factors
contributed to a
high rate of disease and death among the women and children
in the textile
factories. In 1913 details of what appears to have been a rather
thorough study of
health and hygiene among female factory workers were
published in the medical
profession's Journal of the National Medical Association
(Kokka igakukai zasshi),
to be picked up by news media catering to a less specialized
readership afterwards.
This study demonstrated that illness and death rates among
women and girls
working in textiles were much higher than those rates among
the population at
large. Illness and death rates were especially high in the 16 to
20 year-old age
bracket. Tuberculosis and beriberi were the worst killers and
disablers.37
What has been described above was general throughout the
textile industries,
although some employers were better than others and food and
accommodation
varied from factory to factory. They no doubt appear more
horrendous to mid-
twentieth-century inquirers than they did to the girls and
women of the Meiji

2020 22:22:11 UTC
period who endured them. These girls and women came from
Japan's poorest
farming families where work was hard and food was often
scarce. However the
high rates of death and illness suggest that life in a silk or
cotton factory could be
as hazardous to survival as life on the farm. And the reluctance
of some families
- sometimes entire villages - to send their daughters to the
textile mills after
conditions there became known suggests that the trials of
factory work were not
always considered lesser than the hardship of agricultural life.
RURAL FEMALE WORKERS ARE DOCILE AND
SUBMISSIVE?
These then were the conditions of work and life for the female
textile workers
who were so difficult to organize into unions because,
traditions holds, their
circumstances led them to passively endure hardship rather
than to protest against
it.38 First, they, like male workers, were overwhelmingly from
the countryside.
Secondly, and this too applies to male as well as to female
labourers, any education

they may have received before they became factory workers
would have helped
make them responsive to employer paternalism because it
would have been 'formal
schooling in which great emphasis was placed on respect for
hierarchy, loyalty to
the State, and the duty of laboring diligently in order to fulfil
one's obligations to
society.'39 To reinforce these values employers provided
'education,' consisting of
regular lectures by factory management. These lectures argued
that the way to
fulfil one's obligation to state and society was to put every iota
of one's energy
into working in the factory. Thirdly, young female workers,
filial and obedient in
their attitudes towards their parents, supposedly responded to
the paternalism of
their employers because the latter stood in loco parentis as
providers of dormito-
ries, meals, and other 'welfare facilities.'40 Fourthly, the
women and.children came
to the factories on short-term contracts, to work only a few
years before returning
to rural districts to spend the rest of their lives as farmers'
wives. Let us now look
a little closer at these four lines of reasoning.
1. Certainly women and girls in the factories were - as were
factory menfolk -
overwhelmingly from rural areas. Those who link workers'
rural origins to the
failure of Meiji unionism often seem to be implying that
Japanese who lived in
the country have been more 'submissive,' less ready to fight in

groups against
perceived wrongs than were Japanese who lived in town. Where
does this assump-
tion come from? (City intellectuals' suppositions about country
bumpkins?) It
appears to ignore the strong strain of peasant rebellions in both
pre-1868 history
and the peasant uprisings which occurred during the first two
decades of the Meiji
period.41 It also seems to ignore the fact that during the 1920s
and the 1930s a
large-scale agricultural tenant movement surfaced in the
villages these rural factory
workers came from. If country people are docile, why did
hundreds of thousands
of them join thousands of tenant unions and take part in from
2,000 to almost
7,000 disputes with landlords every year during the 1920s and
1930s?42 The so-
called proclivity towards humble, docile, passive behaviour of
Japanese peasants
can be argued only at the expense of historical evidence to the
contrary.
2. Formal education as an inhibitor of union organization
among female workers
does not survive close scrutiny either. It is true that public
elementary education
stressing the values mentioned above made remarkable strides
from at least the
1890s. By 1910, 98.83 of the boys and 97.38 percent of the
girls in the elementary
2020 22:22:11 UTC

:~~~~~~~7
Th yon wmnadcidewhwokdithMejtetlfatrecaermte
pors pesn fanlis
.. . ... .
. .. . . . .
... . .. ..... .
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~. .......
The young women and children who worked in the Meiji textile
factories came from th..e..
poorest~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~. peasnt.amiies
.... ~. ,: : ........s .
ww.~~~~~~~~~~~. ...sa.
Young textile workers of elementary school age.
2020 22:22:11 UTC
school-aged population were attending elementary school
regularly.43 Until the

turn of the century, however, factory workers often had little
schooling. Reporting
on surprisingly extensive surveys of education levels among
factory workers in
Osaka area, an educationally advanced district in 1898,
Yokoyama Gennosuke
estimated that 38 percent of factory workers there had no
schooling and another
50 percent had very little schooling.44 The young girls and
women in the textile
trades came from the country's poorest families who were
among the last to send
their children regularly to school. Factory Workers' Conditions
reported a 1900
survey which revealed that out of 958 female factory workers
surveyed only 252
could read simple kana script and that only 62 of the 958 had
gotten as far
scholastically as the fourth year of elementary school.45 The
252 who could read
kana would not have been able to read a newspaper; the 62 who
reached the
fourth grade might have had difficulty reading an employment
contract.
In the textile mills illiterate child workers - nearly all female -
were still
conspicuous at the end of the Meiji period. Thus Japan's first
factory act of 1911
decreed that, from 1916 onward, companies must teach limited
versions of the
public elementary school curriculum to unschooled workers
under the age of 14.
As Hanai Makoto's research regarding silk filature works in

Nagano Prefecture
has shown, factory children with no previous schooling
attended the classes
companies were required to provide until 1926 when
employment of workers
under the age of 14 became illegal.46
In A History of Meiji Women [Meiji josei shi], Murakami
Nobuhiko suggests
that factory owners preferred uneducated mill hands. Managers
were always ready
and able to 'educate' their workers with lectures on loyalty to
the nation expressed
as dedication to the firm and filial piety to parents
demonstrated as obedience
to employers. This kind of education neither required nor
encouraged a public
elementary school training. Public schooling imparted literacy
as well as moral
values and the literate could read and question the contracts
recruiting agents
asked them to sign.47
Recent work by scholars like Hanai Makoto, Murakami
Nobuhiko, and Gary
Allinson points out that low education levels among female
factory workers in the
Meiji period were reality; yet the notion that public elementary
education helped
produce docile workers seems to persist. Although the
education system may
indeed have had some influence,48 there is much circumstantial
evidence to suggest
both that most female textile workers had little or no
elementary education and
that employers made few efforts to engage educated workers.

As late as 1913 a
manager of a cotton spinning plant in Kumamoto dismissed a
hand when he
discovered she was the daughter of a rural elenientary school
teacher. He told her
that a textile factory was no place for the likes of her.49
3. Much emphasis has been placed upon assumed positive
responses on the part
of female workers to employer paternalism. Okocki Kazuo
claims:
Farm girls . . . were unlikely to offer much resistance to the
conditions set
by employers, especially as they were usually housed in
company dormitories,
closely supervised, and provided by their employers with
certain welfare
facilities. The conditions under which they lived and worked
reinforced in
their minds traditional patterns of feudal servitude.50
And one hears more of the same from another usually
impeccable source:
2020 22:22:11 UTC
... Japanese women, long accustomed to obeying family heads
and to playing
a subordinate role in society in general, were if anything even

more responsive
than male workers to appeals for obedience and diligence
couched in tradi-
tional language.51
The assumption that attitudes toward beloved parents and
family members could
be transferred easily to factory managers may sound convincing
- in the abstract.
But the supposed father figure who lectured the young women
and children about
his parental concern for their welfare and the filial duties they
owed him was also
the boss who was frequently responsible for exhausting,
underfeeding, docking
pay, beating, and sexually abusing these same young women
and children. As a
verse of a song put it:
The owner and I are like spinning machine thread;
Easily tied, but easily broken.52
What did the women in the factories actually think about their
employers? One
of the best and most vivid sources of evidence comes from the
songs they sang,
many of which have been collected. Acceptance of employers
in place of their
parents is certainly not reflected in the songs the young mill
hands sang. They
sang lovingly and longingly of their parents and siblings at

home; they sang angrily
and resentfully of the factories and sheds in which they toiled
and of the owners
and managers who supervised that toil.53
Song of the Living Corpses54
My family was poor,
At the tender age of twelve,
I was sold to a factory.
Yet though I work for cheap wages,
My soul is not soiled.
Like the lotus flower in the midst of mud,
My heart too,
Will one day blossom forth.
Carried away by sweet-sounding words,
My money was stolen and thrown away.
Unaware of the hardships of the future,
I was duckweed in the wind.
Excited, I arrived at the age,
Where I bowed to the doorman,
I was taken immediately to the dormitory,
Where I bowed to the room supervisor.
I was taken immediately to the infirmary,
Where I risked my life having a medical examination.

I was taken immediately to the cafeteria,
Where I asked what was for dinner.
I was told it was low grade rice mixed with sand.
When I asked what the side dish was,
2020 22:22:11 UTC
I was told there weren't even two slices of pickle to eat.
Then I was taken immediately to the factory,
Where I donned a blue skirt and blue shirt,
And put on hemp-straw sandals and blue socks.
When I asked where I was to work
I was told to fasten threads on the winder.
Because my parents were good-for-nothings,
Or, because my parents weren't good-for-nothings
But I was a good-for-nothing myself,
I was deceived by a fox without a tail.*

Now I'm awakened at 4:30 in the morning;
First I fix my face, then go to the cafeteria;
Then it's off to the factory
Where the chief engineer scowls at me.
When I return to my room,
The supervisor finds all manner of fault with me,
And I feel like I'll never get on in this world.
When next I'm paid
I'll trick the doorkeeper and slip off to the station,
Board the first train
For my dear parents' home.
Both will cry when I tell them
How fate made me learn warping,
Leaving nothing but skin and bone on my soul.
We friends are wretched,
Separated from our homes in a strange place,
Put in a miserable dormitory
Woken up at 4:30 in the morning,
Eating when 5 o'clock sounds,

Dressing at the third bell,
Glared at by the manager and section head,
Used by the inspector.
How wretched we are!
Though I am a factory maid,
My heart is a peony, a cherry in double blossom,
Though male workers make eyes at me,
I'm not the kind to respond.
Rather than remain in this factory,
I'll pluck up my courage,
And board the first train for Ogawa,
Maybe I'll even go to the far corners of Manchuria.t
* The fox, a prominent figure in Japanese folklore, was famous
as a nasty trickster. A
'fox without a tail,' a nasty trickster in human form, was the
factory's recruiting agent.
t Manchuria connoted the ends of the earth - going to
Manchuria for early twentieth-
century Japanese had the same kind of connotation that going
to Siberia had for other
peoples elsewhere in other times.
2020 22:22:11 UTC

Listen to me!
It was my desire to perform my filial duties.
Thus I crossed the sea and mountain,
Coming all this way to an unknown place,
To toil.
The Song of the Living Corpses, like so many of the textile
workers' ballads, had
many more verses than those translated above, as new verses
were constantly
added by spinners and weavers struggling to maintain the
rhythms of their tasks
and of their own spirits. This translation and those of the songs
reproduced below
do not catch the play on words or the rhymes of the originals,
but they do convey
some idea of what the women and children sang about.55
Prison Lament
Factory work is prison work,
All it lacks are metal chains.
More than a caged bird, more than a prison,
Dormitory life is hateful.
The factory is hell, the manager a demon,
The restless floorwalker a wheel of fire.

Like the money in my employment contract,
I remain sealed away.
If a male worker makes eyes at you,
You end up losing your shirt.
How I wish the dormitory would be washed away, the factory
burn down,
And the gatekeeper die of cholera!
I want wings to escape from here,
To fly as far as those distant shores.
Neither spinning maids nor slops
Are promoted to kept for long.
My Factory
At other companies there are Buddhas and Gods.
At mine only demons and serpents.
When I hear the manager talking,
His words say only 'money, money, and time,'
The demon floorwalker, the devil accountant,
The good-for-nothing chrysalis.
If you look through the factory's regulations,
You see that not one in a thousand lies unused.
We must follow the regulations,
We must look at the foreman's nasty face.
2020 22:22:11 UTC

In the Midst of Mountains Everybody Knows
In the midst of mountains everybody knows
Where the sound one hears is the sound of waterfalls
One finds the Fuji Spinning Company of Suruga
I came here as a punishment for defying my parents.
Now I toil at Suruga,
Never to defy my parents again.
People come to Suruga,
Thinking they will save money,
But one cannot make any money here.
We don't sleep at night, we work the evening shift.
Our life spans are shortened.
All of us are wretched, all.
Someday I'll tell my parents back home,
The bitter tale of the factory;
And move us all to tears.
Though the regulations are unjust,
This factory was built on regulations.
And if they are broken it's an offense.

I long to quit and go home,
But there is no return without train fare.
With tearful eyes I watch the railway line.
Stealthily I creep to the gate
To be abused by the gatekeeper.
Weeping, I flee to my dormitory.
By the full moon in the shadow of the clouds,
My parents in the shade of the mountains;
And I in the shadow of the factory's textiles.
The argument that factory girls and women responded
positively to employers
who were parental figures in their eyes must deal not only with
the bitter laments
in their songs but also significantly with the thousands of mill
hands and small
sweat shop workers who defied their employers by running
away from them. This
type of direct action will be discussed below rather than here
because it was an
important ingredient in the short periods female workers spent
in the textile plants.
Female workers not only ran away, they initiated work
stoppages and wild
cat strikes. They did so especially during the 1880s and 1890s
before the dormitory
system became widespread and employer control tight. In 1881
about 800 weavers
in Kurume, Kyushui, carried out a boycott against dye
merchants handling the

weavers' products at rates and in ways which the weavers
considered intolerable.56
One might argue that the Kurume weavers were not yet factory
workers but by
the mid-1880s women working in large textile mills were also
fighting their bosses.
In 1885 a hundred or more hands at the Amamiya Silk Reeling
Plant in Kofu,
Yamanashi prefecture, went on strike against lengthened
working hours and
2020 22:22:11 UTC
lowered wage rates, despite the fact that a severe depression
was ravaging the
country's economy. What brought the Amamiya women off the
factory floor
initially was not wages and hours but unfair, capricious
treatment of workers by
management who practised favouritism towards 'the fair of
face' and treated plain
looking women harshly.57 On June 14 of the following year
with the depression
still in full force, again the Amamiya women walked off the
job, soon to be joined
by over 200 women in four other silk reeling plants in
Yamanashi. This time they
struck against contracts which gave enormous powers to
management. A major

grievance behind these walkouts was lengthened working hours
and heavy fines
for even slight tardiness. Factory dormitories had not yet
become common in Kofu
and commuting workers would have had to leave home at 3.30
am in order to
reach the factory under the earlier starting lines instituted. The
companies yielded
and the workers returned to their old time schedules.58
In 1889 young women in the Tenma Cotton Spinning Company
in Osaka
struck in favour of demands for higher wages which the
management had ignored.
They too were smarting under unequal and discriminatory
treatment, when 300
of them stopped their machines and forced the Tenma
management to negotiate.59
In 1892 there was another strike in Kofu involving 150 silk
workers. This was
against a company that had lowered basic pay from 15 sen to
13 sen a day. The
company sent a popular theatrical performer to inform the
strikers it would cease
paying the lower rate, but the strikers demanded immediate
payment of the daily
two sen they had already been deprived of. In order to
strengthen their solidarity
the women pledged themselves liable for financial forfeits if
they broke ranks. But

the factory management locked them out and halted production.
Without resources
the hands could not hold out; on the fourth day of the strike
they sadly sent five
representatives to negotiate a mass return without conditions.6"
Five years later,
female textile workers were on strike in various prefectures
throughout the
country.61
In 1898 the workers at the model Tomioka Silk Mill went out
on strike. Once
the pride of a government which administered it directly,
Tomioka was sold in
1883 to a private interest, the Mitsui firm, already well on its
way to becoming a
powerful zaibatsu (financial-industrial combine). By 1898 the
silk reelers could no
longer stand the deterioration in salary, working, and dormitory
conditions that
had occurred after the sale. They struck to get back the better
food, longer New
Years holidays, pay arrangements, and freedom of movement
which they had
known when Tomioka was a government enterprise.62
The response of managers to such strikes was to build more
dormitories for
workers, to lock their workers more securely in these
dormitories, to supervise
them more thoroughly both on and off the factory floor, to
strive to keep them
too exhausted to unite and fight. Such responses probably made
strikes less likely
to erupt spontaneously and harder to continue once they had

been begun. In 1886
striking silk workers from several mills in the Kofu area had
been able to meet
together because, in the 1880s, dormitories for female workers
were not yet the
norm, and thus the Kofu hands had been commuters. As
dormitories became an
integral part of factory architecture, undoubtedly it became
almost impossible for
outside labour organizers to reach the women in the textile
mills.63 But there is
little evidence that the textile hands' 'passivity' was anything
but forced upon them
by their employers.
4. Young women and children certainly entered the factories on
short-term
2020 22:22:11 UTC
contracts with the expectation of quitting after a few years of
work to supplement
their families' incomes. As we shall see, some of them actually
stayed much shorter
periods than they initially expected, and the labour turnovers
were high among
female textile workers during the Meiji period.
It would have been extraordinarily difficult to attempt to

organize the large
numbers who so quickly and often abruptly left factory
employment. There were,
however, small percentages of female textile workers who
stayed in the same mills
for much longer than the two, three, or five years they initially
contracted to work.
Were these women, out of whom senior workers and
supervisors were selected,
closely allied with management? Unfortunately it is not
possible at this point to
generalize about the role of these women. When more becomes
known about
them, our understanding of the world of the Meiji textile
labourer should be
substantially enriched.64
The much more numerous girls and women who were
responsible for the high
labour turnover were far from submissive tools of paternalistic
employers against
whom they were reluctant to protest. Rather than obey
employers' demands that
they honour time commitments in their contracts, they ran
away. Despite the
physical difficulties involved in getting outside of factory
walls they managed to
escape. Although they knew full well that members of Japan's
efficient police
force would bring back runaways, the same individuals would
escape again and
again. They did so knowing the terrible punishment they would
suffer when they
were returned to their employers. A runaway was beaten and

marched through
the mill naked; her wages were confiscated the 'privileges'
lifted. Yet running
away was the chief method of terminating employment in the
textile industries.65
Even from mills with the best conditions, women and children
ran away. A
government survey in 1900 reported that in an unnamed mill
near Osaka, which
was probably a branch of the Kanebo Cotton Spinning Works,
2,800 dormitory
residents and 2,046 commuting women terminated their
employment by fleeing.66
The former figure represented 81 percent of the mill's
dormitory residents, while
the latter number was 86 percent of its commuting female
workers.67 Kanebo was
a model among model firms which continually made highly
publicized boasts about
its welfare facilties including elaborate dormitories, a hospital,
nutritional meals,
educational and recreational programmes. In 1973, economist
Gary Saxonhouse
discovered what Hosoi Wakizo had documented more than half
a century earlier
- that Kanebo's welfare endeavours were 'heavy on publicity
and fundamentally
flawed.'68 Still, Kanebo mills were better places to work than
many other factories.
Between 1905 and 1915, each year between 63 and 67 percent
of Kanebo's
mill hands left employment without permission.69 Concluded
Saxonhouse about
Meiji cotton spinners, 'Notwithstanding barbed wire, high

walls, guarantee depo-
sits, and company regulations, running away in defiance of
contractual obligations
seems to have been the typical means of separation during this
period. '7" Indeed,
six months appears to have been the average time cotton
spinners remained at a
factory.71 Even allowing for the high rates of death and serious
illness, this was
an extremely high turnover. As they silently leapt over
dangerous walls the women
and children protested loudly, albeit primitively. It was not
that, resigned to their
fates, they were loath to fight against their employers. They
simply did not know
how to do so - other than by running away.
The concepts and methods of Meiji trade unionism, imported
from the West,
were totally foreign to these workers' thoughts and experiences.
Stephen Large
2020 22:22:11 UTC
Weaving on machine-powered looms.
A room in a factory dormitory, probably shared by twelve to
fifteen workers. (Since this
was a 'model' dormitory room shown off to the camera, this
particular room might have
had fewer inmates. But rooms like this would be crammed full
of workers, each of whom

had about one tatami mat - see the floor divided into tatami
mats - on which to lay her
bedding.) The factory is a large cotton spinning mill.
2020 22:22:11 UTC
has argued that these women and children 'were
psychologically [as well as phys-
ically] out of reach' of labour organizers because 'they longed
to return to their
families in the villages once their labor contracts were
completed.'72 But so many
left before their contracts were completed and thousands who
made it back to
their villages returned to factory work again. Yet labour
organizers never even
attempted the admittedly difficult task of going to the villages
to organize. During
the Meiji period groups of factory owners organized themselves
into employer
associations which went into the villages to ensure the would-
be-workers faced a
united front of recruiting employers.73 In the 1920s tenant
union organizers, closely
associated with urban labour unions, went to the countryside to
help set up tenant
unions. No similar attempts were made to reach rural-based
female textile workers,
and certainly Meiji labour organizers were much more

interested in male workers
than in female workers.74
Attribution of the failure of the Meiji labour movement to the
fact that a
large segment of the factory work force was female, rural,
educated in passivity,
and at least hoping to be temporary, has to date tended to be
the product of
superficial analysis. Assumptions about docility and passivity
on the part of the
women and children in the Mieji textile trades are largely
ahistorical. In all
likelihood there are important 'inks between the female, rural,
impermanent
nature of much of Meiji industrial labour and the failure of
Meiji trade unionism.
But unwarranted assumptions will conceal, not discover these
links; only serious
scrutiny of the historical evidence will do that.75
A NOTE ON SOURCES FOR STUDY OF MEIJI TEXTILE
WORKERS
Reliable data on the period before the late 1880s is limited, but
for the 1890s
onward there exist substantial public and private records. The
former began with
the five volumes of official reports entitled Factory Workers'
Conditions (Shokko
jijo) published by the Ministry of Agriculture and Commerce in
1903. These were
followed by similar volumes put out by the same ministry in
subsequent years.
They contain the results of statistical surveys of a host of
subjects including ages

of female and male workers, specific jobs performed by male
and female workers,
health and hygiene in factories, hours of work and rest periods,
diet, sleeping
arrangements, workers' recreation, dormitory accommodation,
recruitment,
lerrgths of employment, reasons for leaving employment,
educational levels of
workers, disciplinary action against workers, incentives to
increase production.
Contemporaries and interested parties in later years have
generally regarded these
reports highly. All indications are that the information in them
was carefully
gathered. On the other hand, the information in Factory
Workers' Conditions is
by no means complete or comprehensive. Data from every
relevant factory is not
included in every survey: and factories surveyed are sometimes
unnamed. After
the first volumes of Factory Workers' Conditions appeared,
individual prefectures
began to publish their own statistical records of labouring
conditions. These
regional reports contain the same kind of information as the
publications of the
Ministry of Agriculture and Commerce. Like the Factory
Workers' Conditions of
1903, the earliest prefectural reports contain valuable
information regarding the
1890s and sometimes the 1880s too.
In addition, there are important non-official sources of
information about

2020 22:22:11 UTC
female workers during the Meiji period. Perhaps the two most
valuable private
studies are Yokoyama Gennosuke's extraordinary The Lower
Classes of Japan
(Nihon no kaso shakai) published in 1898, and Hosoi Wakizo's
lifework, The
Pitiful History of Female Factory Workers (Joko aishi), which
documents the
working lives of cotton spinning mill hands from the 1880s to
the early 1920s.
Hosoi was himself a mill hand from 1908 to 1923, his wife also
worked in the
industry and had lived in a mill-owned dormitory before her
marriage. Hosoi
gathered a wide variety of material from older co-workers and
retired workers
and carefully used what was available in the government
reports. His book often
goes far beyond those reports: for instance, it includes an
extensive collection of
songs sung by the workers in the mills. Everyone who studies
the early Japanese
cotton spinning industry uses Jok6 aishi, usually heavily.
More recently Yamamoto Shigemi has attempted documentation

of the lives
of the women and girls in the silk reeling industry. The result,
a book published
in 1968, also relies upon a wide variety of sources, including
recollections of elderly
women, other oral sources, and local records. Done so much
later than Hosoi's,
the personal case histories in this work generally go back no
further than the turn
of the century, but the book contains valuable material on the
1890s and 1880s.
It also includes an interesting collection of songs sung by silk
mill workers.
Although the format of this study, Ah, the Nomugi Pass! (Aa
no mugi toge), is
quite different from Hosoi's, its inspiration is clearly Hosoi's
book, as the subtitle,
One Pitiful History of the Female Silk Factory Workers (Aru
seito kojo aishi)
suggests. Aa no mugi toge has been followed by Zoku aa no
mugi toge (The Sequel
to Ah, the Nomugi Pass!) published by Yamamoto in 1982.)
There are also a number of descriptions of textile factories and
workers
written by visitors to late nineteenth and early twentieth-
century plants. Many of
these appeared in contemporary newspapers or magazines. For
example, in 1897
a journalist named Ushiyama Saijiro travelled around Japan

visiting factories
employing women and writing about what he discovered in
instalments in the
newspaper, Jiji shimpo.
The author is grateful to the Social Science and Humanities
Research Council of Canada
for support which made the research for this article possible.
1 Thomas C Smith reminds us that the foundations of Japan's
industrialization were
actually laid before 1868, during the last years of Tokugawa
rule. See chapter one of Thomas
C Smith Political Change and Industrial Development in Japan:
Government Enterprise,
1868-1880 Stanford 1955. After the Meiji Restoration in 1868
the new government immedi-
ately began to expand and build upoi, tnese foundations.
2 American influence went into the formation of Japan's first
labour union: about 1890
a dozen Japanese met at the YMCA in San Francisco-and
designated themselves Shokko
Giyuikai (Knights of Labour). In April 1897, the Shokko
Giyuikai was established formally
in Tokyo under the leadership of Takano Fusataro (1868-1904),
an admirer of Samuel
Gompers and the American Federation of Labor. Takano had
been one of the original
dozen in San Francisco. In July of the same year Takano and
Katayama Sen (1859-1933)
organized the Rodo Kumiai Kiseikai (Society for Establishment
of Labour Unions). Under
Katayama the Rodo Kumiai Kiseikai soon began to publish a
journal, Rodo sekai (Labour

World) and to organize a number of small, mainly Tokyo-based
unions among iron workers,
printers, ship carpenters, plasterers, dockers, cooks, and
locomotive engineers. In the Osaka
area Oi Kentaro (1843-1922) organized the Dai Nippon Rodo
Kyokai (Greater Japan Labour
Association) with a concrete programme for improving living
and labouring conditions
among the working class. See Iwao F Ayusawa A History of
Labor in Modern Japan
2020 22:22:11 UTC
Honolulu 1966, pp 59-66; Katayama Sen The Labor Movement
in Japan Chicago 1918, pp
29-55; Sumiya Mikio Nihon r6d6 undo shi (A History of the
Japanese Labour Movement)
Tokyo 1966, pp 22-64.
3 See Okochi Kazuo Reimeiki no Nihon r6d6 und6 (The
Dawning of the Japanese
Labour Movement) Tokyo 1952; ed. Hayashi Shigeru and
Nishida Katetoshi Heimin shimbun
ronsetsu shCu (Collected editorials from The Common People's
Newspaper) Tokyo 1961;
Sumiya Mikio Nihon r6do undo shi pp 22-64; Ayusawa pp 66-
75. Japanese names are given
according to Japanese practice. The surname is given first,
followed by the given name.
Thus, Katayama is the surname; Sen the given name.

4 The only substantial labour organization on the scene from
1912 until the beginning
of the 1920s was the Yuiaikai (The Friendly Society). Until its
transformation during the
early 1920s this was not so much a labour union as a loosely-
structured self-help society for
workers, pledged to cooperation with management and to the
practice of moderation in all
endeavours. Until 1919 the Yuaikai was dominated completely
by Suzuki Bunji (1885-1946),
whose endorsement of that mythical figure, the benevolent,
compassionate, paternalistic,
Japanese capitalist was every bit as enthusiastic as that of
factory owners. For a succinct
example of Suzuki on Japanese 'benevolent capitalists' see
Byron K Marshall, Capitalism
and Nationalism in Prewar Japan Stanford 1967, p 79. Suzuki's
outlook is communicated at
length in his Nihon no rodo mondai rodo undo nijunen (Twenty
Years in the Labour
Movement) Tokyo 1931. For a laudatory account of the Yuaikai
and Suzuki Bunji see
Stephen S Large The Rise of Labor in Japan: The Yuaikai,
1912-1919 Tokyo 1972.
5 Large p 5.
6 Okochi Kazuo Labor in Modern Japan Tokyo 1958, p 20. See
also Reimeiki no
Nihon rodo undo pp 23-24 where Okochi describes the female
factory workers of the Meiji
period in similar terms, contrasting their acceptance of their lot
with male workers of the
period whom Okochi saw as much more likely to protest. The
great ethnographer, Yanagida

Kunio (1875-1962), considered the father of folklore studies in
Japan, came to the same
type of conclusion in his study of the changing lives of rural
Japanese during the Meiji
period. See Yanagida Kunio Japanese Manners and Customs in
the Meiji Era Tokyo 1957
translated and adapted by Charles S Terry, pp 249-250.
7 For a brief survey of major sources for research concerning
female textile workers
of the Meiji period see A Note on Sources for Study of Meiji
Textile Workers at the end of
this essay.
8 Jon Halliday A Political History of Japanese Capitalism New
York 1975, pp 60-61,
persuasively argues that Western imperialism and the unequal
treaties pushed Japan into
two sets of relationships with the outside world:
Under the impetus of imperialism, these [armaments and
shipbuilding sectors] were the
only sectors of heavy industry which were developed to the
level of other advanced
capitalist countries while, overall, industry remained
concentrated in light industry right
up to the Pacific War. Thus while developing as an imperialist
power itself, Japan
remained in an essentially 'third world' relationship with the
West commercially, while
holding the position of an 'advanced' capitalist country vis-a-
vis the rest of Asia - and
here the domestic structure of Japanese industry forced by the
unequal treaties tended
to push Japan further along the road of imperialism which its
own political and military

leaders were backing for other relatively autonomous reasons.
9 See Thomas C Smith, pp 42-53.
10 These developments were supported by government
initiatives to establish banking
and credit institutions, communication networks, and a
centralized police system.
11 Ronald Dore British Factory - Japanese Factory, The
Origins of National Diversity
in Industrial Relations Berkeley 1973, p 379.
12 Koji Taira Economic Development and the Labor Market in
Japan New York 1970,
p 107.
13 Long ago E Herbert Norman suggested that light industries
such as textiles were
also strategic 'because of their importance in export industries
intended to compete against
foreign products and hence requiring subsidy and protection'. E
Herbert Norman Japan's
Emergence as a Modern State New York 1940, p 117.
14 Textiles were the most important of the industries in private
hands before 1880.
Up until this date the government dominated industrial activity.
2020 22:22:11 UTC

15 Sumiya Mikio Nihon chinr6do shiron - Meiji zenki ni okeru
r6do shakaikyu no
kisei (A History of Wage Labour in Japan: The Formation of
the Labouring Class in Early
Meiji) Tokyo 1955, p 114.
16 By 1890 local labour supplies for textile plants had been
exhausted and it was
necessary for labour recruiters to travel to villages distant from
the location of factories.
Taira, p 108.
17 Inoue Kiyoshi Nihon josei shi (A History of Japanese
Women) Tokyo 1967, p 212.
This pattern continued in the textile industries beyond the
Meiji period. See Shuichi Harada
Labor Conditions in Japan New York 1968 (reprint of 1928
edition), p 119; Tsuisansho
(Ministry of International Trade and Industry) Kogy6 t6kei
gojunen shi (a 50 year history
of industrial statistics) Tokyo 1961.
18 Recruitment and factory conditions described below are
discussed at length in
Noshomusho (Ministry of Agriculture and Commerce) Shokko
jijo (Factory Workers' Condi-
tions) 1903, reprinted 1967 (citations from reprint); Yamamoto
Shigemi Aa no mugi toge
(Ah, The Nomugi Pass!) Tokyo 1968; Hosoi Wakizo Joko aishi
(The Pitiful History of
Female Factory Workers) 1925, reprinted by Iwanami Tokyo
1954 (citations from reprint);
Nagoya josei kenkyukai (Nagoya Women's Research Society)
Haha no jidai: Aichi no josei
shi (Mother's Era: A History of Aichi Women) Nagoya 1969,

pp 57-64; Yokoyama Genno-
suke Nihon no kaso shakai (The Lower Classes of Japan) 1898,
reprinted by Iwanami Tokyo
1980 (citations from reprint). A song sung by textile workers
expresses the shock new recruits
felt when they arrived at the factory recruiters had painted in
glowing terms: 'I didn't know
I would end up at such a company. I was fooled by the
recruiter.' Joko kouta (Ballads of
female factory workers) quoted in Haha no jidai, p 59.
19 Shokk6 jij6, p 6.
21 Shokk6 jijo, p 221. For ages of women and girls working in
Meiji factories see also
Yokoyama, pp 159-161.
22 Hosoi, pp 132-133.
23 Hosoi, pp 139-140, offers examples of wage differentials
between male and female
cotton mill workers; Aa no mugi t6ge, pp 40, 48-49, 180-183
offers examples of female
wages in the silk industry. See also Takano Fusataro 'Typical
Japanese Workers' ed. Hyman
Kublin Meiji rod6 undo shi no hitokoma (One Phase of the
History of the Meiji Labour
Movement) Tokyo 1959, p 32. This article was originally
published in Far East 2:4 20 April
1897.
24 Yamanouchi Mina Yamanouchi Mina jiden: juni sai no
boseki joko kara no shogai
(Autobiography of Yamanouchi Mina: Her Career from the
Time She Was a Twelve Year-

old Cotton Mill Hand) Tokyo 1975, p 20. For a dormitory
resident's view of dormitory life
see Yamanouchi, pp 16 -33. See also Shokk6 jijo, pp 19-23,
166-176; Murakami Nobuhiko
Meiji josei shi (A History of Meiji Women) 4 vols Tokyo 1973,
IV p 151. See also 'Amamiya
seishi sogi' (The Amamiya Silk Reeling Dispute) Nihon fujin
mondai shiry6 shusei (Collected
Data Regarding the Problems of Japanese Women) 10 vols, III
Rodo (Labour) Tokyo 1977,
pp 377-384; Orimoto Sadayo 'Myonichi no josei: joko o kataru'
(Women of Tomorrow:
Talking About Factory Women) Chdo6 koron 44:12 reproduced
in Nihon fujin mondai shiryo
shusei, III pp 239-243; Yokoyama, pp 162-167; Haha no jidai,
p 49; Sanbei Koko 'Nihon
ni okeru fujin rodo no rekishi' (A History of Female Labour in
Japan) ed. Okochi Kazuo
and Isoda Susumu, Fujin rodo (Female Labour) Tokyo 1956, pp
39-40.
25 Shokko jijo, pp 230-239; Haha no jidai, pp 92-93.
26 In cotton spinning and weaving trades the only real holidays
to look forward to
were New Years and the midsummer Obon festival when
businesses customarily closed for
a few days. 'For technical and financial reasons, the operation
of a silk filature was unecon-
omical during the winter months, so the period covered by an
employment contract was
customarily a year.' Taira, p 111.
27 Hosoi, p 202.
28 Orimoto, p 240. Yamanouchi, p 21, recalls that the company

store was located at
the entrance to the dormitory.
29 Shokk6 jijo, p 303. It seems that although the government
compilers of Shokk6
jijo saw through the employers' excuses about concern for the
'morals' of working women
and children, some modern researchers lack the Meiji
bureaucrats' perceptiveness. In an
2020 22:22:11 UTC
article published in English translation in 1976, Professor
Hazama Hiroshi writes about
female textile workers:
How the many young women living in dormitories were to
spend their leisure time was
a problem for their employers. It was not a question of labor
unionism but one of
morality. The young women's work was so tedious and boring
that it led to a heightened
interest in sex as one of the few available pleasures, and thus to
attracting male factory
workers, who frequently abandoned the women when they
became pregnant. (Hiroshi
Hazama, 'Historical Changes in the Life Style of Industrial
Workers' ed. Hugh Patrick
Japanese Industrialization and Social Consequences Berkeley
1976, p 41.

Nowhere in this article does Hazama mention the ever-present
sexual exploitation of female
operatives by male workers, who were usually in positions
superior to them. References to
this exploitation and the favouritism shown by male
supervisory personnel towards 'cooper-
ative' female workers crop up again and again in the sources
for study of the history of
Japanese textile workers. See Yokoyama, p 105; 'Amamiya
seishi s6gi', p 378; Hosoi, pp
331-333; Yamamoto, pp 130, 393-395; Shokko jijo, pp 250-
256. On the other hand, else-
where in his article Hazama presents a disparaging description
of female textile workers
taken, apparently at face value, from management sources.
(Hazama, p 30.) Although many
Japanese scholars of their country's labour history write about
factory workers with enormous
sympathy, such work is rarely translated into Western
languages. Hazama's unsympathetic
account of dubious accuracy is one of the few studies to be
translated into English.
Dormitory conditions are discussed in detail in Hosoi, pp 194-
212 and Yokoyama, pp
175-176 who described inadequate bedding, washing facilities,
sleeping space, and ventil-
ation. Yokoyama tells us that Percy Holden, an English
settlement house veteran of the
London slums visited a Japanese cotton spinning mill and
'grieved at the workers living in
a dormitory without religion or friendship. He said they were
living in a desert. The cotton
spinning women not only lived in a desert of thoughts; their
physical environment was also

a kind of desert.' Yokoyama, p 175.
30 See Sanbei, p 43 for the song and Haha no jidai, pp 52-55
for a vivid description
of the Aichi weaving plant fire. Workers who did not live in
dormitories or weaving sheds
had commuting time added to the long hours they worked, but
they could expect emotional
support and comfort from the family members they lived with.
And it was easier for them
to run away from the factory. In Otani Koichi Onna no kindai
shi: fuisetsu o okita gojunin
no shogen (A Modern History of Women: The Testimony of
Fifty Who Lived Through The
Storm) Tokyo 1972, pp 47-51, are the recollections of Hayashi
Masano, a woman who first
went to work in a cotton spinning plant in 1901 when she was
12. She was from a city family
of small shop keepers and both before and after she married she
commuted to work in
spinning mills. Although always poor and accustomed to
putting in 12-hour shifts, in her
old age at least, her recollections of this life were not unhappy.
Noting how unusual this
was Otani, the memoir collector, and Hayashi herself decided
(see p 51) that the lack of
bitter memories was due to the following: 1) Hayashi had been
a commuter not a dormitory
resident, as were the majority of female textile workers; 2)
loans and advances had never
been made against her future wages by parents or anyone else;
3) she had always been in
excellent health.
31 Yamanouchi, p 27. As late as 1928 in a survey of female
factory hands who

were asked to state what brought them most happiness, most
difficulty, most sorrow, the
overwhelming first choice for what brought most happiness was
'getting letters and parcels
from home.' 'Watakushitachi wa ika ni shiitageraretaru ka?'
(And How Are We Oppressed?)
Rod6 fujin (Labouring Women) no 4, March 1928. Reproduced
in Nihon fujin mondai shiryo
shuisei, III p 6.
32 'Watakushitachi no seikatsu' (Our Lives) in Rod6 (Labour)
15 April 1924, repro-
duced in Nihon fujin mondai shiry6 shusei, III pp 235-236.
This incident took place in
1924 by which time factory conditions were supposed to have
improved greatly. There are
indications from other sources that some of the worst
conditions could still be found in some
factories during the 1920s. See Haha no jidai, pp 104-112.
33 Gary Allinson Japanese Urbanism: Industry and Politics in
Kariya, 1872-1972 Berk-
eley 1975, p 50. See Kajinishi Mitsuhashi and others Seishi
r6d6sha no rekishi (A History
of Silk Workers) Tokyo 1955, p 89. In her autobiography
Yamanouchi Mina recalls the not
uncommon results of sexual exploitation at the hands of male
employees. She remembers a
2020 22:22:11 UTC

beautiful, young operative from Akita prefecture who had been
seduced by an employee in
a cotton mill in Tokyo. When this young woman became
pregnant, her lover ignored her.
She lacked money to return to her home in Akita, so she
continued working at the mill until
the end of the ninth month of her pregnancy. She had called
upon her lover's wife, begging
her to take in the child when it was born, but this hope was
quickly dashed. Finally she
managed to get to her family in Akita, just as she gave birth to
a dead child. Within a month
she was back in Tokyo working in the cotton industry again.
Yamanouchi, p 23.
34 Yamamoto, pp 393-395.
35 Murakami, IV pp 171-172; Shokko jij6, pp 113-132.
36 Haha no jidai, p 54.
37 Ishihara, Osamu, 'Joko no eiseigaku teki kansatsu'
(Observations of Health and
Hygiene Among Female Factory Workers) Kokka igakukai
zasshi (Journal of the National
Medical Association) no 332 November 1913, reproduced in
Nihon fujin mondai shiry6
shusei, III pp 244-276.
38 The tendency to assume passivity on the part of these
women and girls unfortunately
appears to be true of even the most sensitive discussions of
female textile workers and labour
organizations. See Allinson, p 49.
39 Marshall, p 91.

40 Much has been written elsewhere about the paternalism of
Japanese employers.
For an interesting, critical discussion of the concept of
employer paternalism in Japan see
Taira, pp 111-114.
41 See Yokoyama Toshio Hyakusho ikki to gimim densho
(Peasant Rebellions and
Martyr Legends) Tokyo 1977; W Donald Burton, 'Peasant
Struggle in Japan, 1590-1760'
Journal of Peasant Studies 5:2 January 1978, pp 135-171; Irwin
Scheiner, 'The Mindful
Peasant: Sketches for a Study of Rebellion' Journal of Asian
Studies 32:4 August 1973, pp
519-591; Roger W Bowen, Rebellion and Democracy in Meiji
Japan Berkeley 1980.
42 Ronald P Dore, Land Reform in Japan London 1959, pp 54-
85; Ann Waswo
Japanese Landlords: The Decline of a Rural Elite Berkeley
1977, pp 94-134.
43 Kaigo Tokiomi Japanese Education, Its Past and Present
Tokyo 1968, p 65.
44 Yokoyama, pp 179-180.
45 Cited in Yamamoto, p 411.
46 Hanai Makoto 'Seishi joko to gakko kyoiku' (Silk
Manufactory Girls and School
Education) Nihonshi kenkyCi (Journal of Japanese History) 191
July 1978, pp 25-47. A
survey of educational levels of female factory workers in Aichi
prefecture revealed that as
late as 1920, 5,412 or 7.43 percent of female factory workers in

Aichi had received no formal
education at all while another 23,484 or 32.31 percent of the
prefecture's female factory
workers had received some years of elementary schooling but
had not completed elementary
school. Haha no jidai, pp 93-94.
47 Murakami, IV pp 144-149.
48 It is much easier to generalize about values the education
system was designed to
impart than it is to gauge how successful the education actually
was in imparting values. For
a penetrating study of differences between what children are
supposed to believe and what
they actually believe, see Robert Coles 'What Children Know
About Politics' New York
Review of Books 22:2, 28 Feb 1975, pp 22-24; Coles 'The
Politics of Middle Class Children'
New York Review of Books 22:3, 6 March 1975, pp 13-16;
Coles 'Children and Politics:
Outsiders' New York Review of Books 22:4, 20 March 1975, pp
29-30.
49 Takamure Itsue Hi no kuni no nikki (Diary of a Woman of
the Land of Fire)
Takamure Itsue zenshCi (Collected Works of Takamure Itsue)
10 vols Tokyo 1967, X p 115.
50 Okochi, Labor in Modern Japan, p 2.
51 Marshall, p 65.
52 Hosoi, p 405.
53 The following are, of course, not the only songs sung. There
were also verses in

the songs which refer to the hard life at home on the farm and
mention rural occupations
which are worse than factory work. But home sickness for their
families in the countryside,
hatred of their employers' and superiors' ill treatment of them,
and the difficulties of factory
work and life are definitely dominant themes in the workers'
songs that have been collected.
I am indebted to Susan P Phillips for translations of songs
reproduced below. I alone am
responsible for the final versions of the translations and thus
for any flaws in them.
2020 22:22:11 UTC
54 The verses from the Song of the Living Corpses reproduced
here were taken from
Hosoi, pp 409-412.
55 Prison Lament was taken from Yamamoto, pp 388-389; My
Factory from Yama-
moto p 391; In the Midst of Mountains Everybody Knows
Hosoi, pp 413-414.
56 Tokyo keizai zasshi (Tokyo Economic Journal) 70, July
1881, reproduced in Nihon
fujin shiryo shusei, III p 377.
57 Yamanashi r6do undo shi (A History of the Yamanashi
Labour Movement) 1952,

partly reproduced in Nihon fujin mondai shiryo shusei, III pp
377-384; Kajinishi and others,
pp. 36-39.
58 Nihon fujin mondai shiryo shCusei, III especially pp 380-
383; Kajinishi and others,
p 39. The women worked from 4.30 a m to 7.30 p m with no
time out to go to the toilet or
to get a drink of water. Food was gulped down on the job.
Commuters had to leave their
homes about 3.30 a m knowing they would not return to them
until about 8.30 in the
evening.
59 Osaka Asahi Shimbun (Asahi Newspaper of Osaka), 4 Oct
1889 reproduced in
Nihon fujin mondai shiryo shCisei, III p 384.
60 Kajinishi and others, p 44.
61 Nagahata Michiko, Ya no onna - Meiji josei sekatsu shi
(Private Lives of Women:
A History of the Daily Lives of Meiji Women) Tokyo 1980, p
172.
62 Nihon fujin mondai shiryo shulsei, III pp 386-388. Takase
Toyoji, Kanryo Tomioka
seishij6 kojo shiryo (Data on the Women Workers of the
Government Tomioka Silk Factory)
Tokyo 1979, p 247. For accounts of this silk mill before the
unhappy sale to Mitsui see Wada
Hide, Tomioka nikki (Tomioka Diary) Tokyo 1976. Unlike the
poor, illiterate peasant
women working in most factories, the Tomioka workers had at
least originally been from
the proud samurai families the government urged to send

daughters to work in this model
government enterprise. Wada was one of the samurai daughters
who were recruited by the
government to go and work in the Tomioka showpiece in
Gumma prefecture when it opened
in 1872. 15 year-old Wada arrived at Tomioka in 1873 to spend
eight years as a model mill
hand. At age 50 she wrote Tomioka nikki about her experiences
at the mill.
63 The difficulty of access to the women mill workers by
outside labour organizers is
a point made by those who note the failure of labour unionism
among textile workers. See
Stephen Large Organized Workers and Socialist Politics in
Interwar Japan Cambridge 1981.
p 16, and his 'Perspectives on the Failure of the Labour
Movement in Prewar Japan' Labour
History Canberra no 37 November 1979, pp 15-27. Large's
quick dismissal of the female
textile workers as impossible to organize because so many of
them were 'locked up' in their
dormitories without considering the failure of the labour
organizers to try alternative ways
of reaching these workers is typical of the lack of serious
attention scholars have given
female textile workers.
64 Some of the mill hands signed new contracts when their
terms of employment were
finished, or left one factory to go to another. Certainly
recruiters did all they could to lure
experienced workers back to the factories. There was strong
competition for workers and
raiding another employer's pool of veteran workers was
common. In the Kansai area a

survey of 16 cotton spinning mills revealed that nine percent of
workers surveyed remained
at the plant in which they had already completed five years
servitude. Shokk6 jij6, p 70. See
also Gary R Saxonhouse 'Country Girls and Communication
Among Competitors in the
Japanese Cotton-Spinning Industry' Hugh Patrick, pp 102-106.
65 Saxonhouse, p 104.
67 Shokko jijr, p 69.
72 Large Organized Workers and Socialist Parties in Prewar
Japan, p 16.
73 Taira, pp 111-114.
74 The Yfuaikai, for instance, which defined 'workers' as 'male
workers,' did not allow
women to be full-fledged members during the first five years of
its existence. Women in the
Yuiaikai only managed to turn their associate memberships into
regular memberships in 1917
after a struggle. It was this experience with heavily male-
oriented leadership which made
2020 22:22:11 UTC

the feminist Ichikawa Fusae (1893-1981) leave the Yuiaikai
and seek more effective structures
for organizing women shortly afterwards.
75 One approach to possible links between the failure of Meiji
trade unionism and
the female, rural, temporary nature of much of the Meiji labour
force would be to examine
the other reasons given for the failure of trade unionism
mentioned at the beginning of this
paper, namely government repression, management hostility,
and class backgrounds of
labour leaders, with a watchful eye for connections between
each of these and the above
mentioned nature of much of the labour force. For instance,
government oppression, rightly
emphasized by such researchers as Sumiya Mikio and Okochi
Kazuo, should not be underesti-
mated or underplayed because government implements of
repression were not designed for
the sole reason of crushing labour unions. (See Large The Rise
of Labor in Japan, pp 5-6.)
But it should be remembered that government repression was
applied to women quite apart
from its application to labour unions. The Law of Assembly
and Political Associations
(Shfikai seisha h6) of 1889 barred women from joining
political parties or even from attending
meetings where political matters were discussed. Article five of
the notorious Public Peace
Police Law of 1900 reiterated these prohibitions in detail. With
an efficient national police
enforcing these laws there was little encouragement or even
opportunity for women to

emerge as visible leaders in the early trade unions and socialist
parties dedicated to union
organizing.
History Workshop Series
Sex and Class in Women's History
Edited by JUDITH L. NEWTON, MARY P. RYAN
and JUDITH R. WALKOWITZ
These important and influential essays all appeared initially in
Feminist Studies, a notable American journal, thus emphasizing
the Anglo-American connection with feminist historical
scholarship.
0-7100-9529-5, paperback ?4.95
Fenwomen
A Portrait of Women in an English Village
MARY CHAMBERLAIN
First published in 1975 this social and oral history of the
women of
Gislea, an isolated village of the fens, covers 150 years of a
community which has changed little in that time.
0-7100-9567-8, illustrated, paperback ?4.95
Routledge & Kegan Paul
14 Leicester Square, London WC2H 7PH

2020 22:22:11 UTC
Contents[3]45678910[11]12131415161718[19]20212223242526
27Issue Table of ContentsHistory Workshop, No. 18 (Autumn,
1984), pp. 1-231Front MatterEditorial [pp. 1-2]Female Textile
Workers and the Failure of Early Trade Unionism in Japan [pp.
3-27]Zion Undermined: The Protestant Belief in a Popish Plot
during the English Interregnum [pp. 28-52]The Peasantry of
Nineteenth-Century England: A Neglected Class? [pp. 53-
76]The Zoot-Suit and Style Warfare [pp. 77-91]Learning and
TeachingA Liverpool Socialist Education [pp. 92-101]Workers'
Education: The Communist Party and the Plebs League in the
1920s [pp. 102-114]The Labour Publishing Company 1920-9
[pp. 115-123]CritiqueSome Notes on Karl Marx and the English
Labour Movement [pp. 124-137]RH Tawney and the Origins of
Capitalism [pp. 138-159]Archives and SourcesGenerations of
Women: A Search for Female Forebears [pp. 160-169]Songs I
Learned from My Grandad [pp. 170-173]Labour Records at the
University of British Columbia [pp. 174-176]Reviews and
EnthusiasmsReview: untitled [pp. 177-182]Review: untitled [pp.
182-185]Review: untitled [pp. 186-192]Review: untitled [pp.
192-196]Review: untitled [pp. 196-198]Review: untitled [pp.
199-203]Review: untitled [pp. 203-204]Short NoticesReview:
untitled [pp. 205-206]Review: untitled [p. 206]Review: untitled
[pp. 206-207]Review: untitled [pp. 207-208]Review: untitled [p.
208]Report BackJohannesburg History Workshop Conference
[pp. 209-211]Writing History in Portugal Today [pp. 211-
212]The Fifth Massachusetts History Workshop [p. 213]Echoes
in America [pp. 213-214]Noticeboard [pp. 215-
225]LettersHobsbawm Bibliography [p. 226]Martin Luther King
1 [pp. 226-228]Martin Luther King 2 [pp. 228-229]People's
History in Costa Rica [p. 229]Back Matter [pp. 230-231]

Female Textile Workers and the Failure of Early Trade Uni.docx

Female Textile Workers and the Failure of Early Trade Uni.docx

Recommended

Recommended

More Related Content

More from ShiraPrater50

More from ShiraPrater50 (20)

Recently uploaded

Recently uploaded (20)

Female Textile Workers and the Failure of Early Trade Uni.docx