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
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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
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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-
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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
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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
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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.
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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 …

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