Just as people in the countryside filled a complex array of statuses, so those in the cities of the early twentieth century consisted of more than the wage-earning masses and their wealthy employers. The homes and shops of a vast and diverse pool of middling classes gave urban life a measure of stability and community, and much vitality.
In Tokyo in 1908, for example, the category of “merchant and tradesmen” ac
counted for 41 percent of all employed people.14 A stroll through any neighborhood in a major city presented a jumble of fishmongers, rice dealers, tofu or vegetable sellers, bath-house proprietors and booksellers, barbers and hairdressers, charcoal deal
ers, toystore and photo shop owners, all interspersed with tens of thousands of small restaurants. In alleys behind the retail lanes, one found tens of thousands of whole
salers who distributed goods to such retailers and comparable numbers of petty man
ufacturers who produced goods in the back of their homes: sandal or tatami or um
brella makers, as well as tiny producers of machine parts, cast metal objects, ceramics, or foodstuffs.
These small home-based businesses were invariably family operations. Wives would work alongside husbands.15 The more successful of these people were anchors of the community. Local businessmen sought elected roles as representatives in the ward assembly or city council. They organized trade associations to press the state for various protections such as tax relief. Beginning in the years after World War I, municipal governments enlisted thousands of these men in cities, towns, and villages throughout Japan to carry out welfare services on behalf of the state. By 1920 around ten thousand such community leaders nationwide served in this role of “district com
The lower end of the “old middle class” in towns and cities was made up of hundreds of thousands of small family businesses, both retail and wholesale trade and small-scale manu
facturing, such as this store selling dolls, photographed in 1920. Sitting in the storefront opening out into the street, the owner and his daughter wait on two customers, a mother and her daughter.
Courtesy of Mainichi newspaper.
missioner,” making home visits to impoverished neighbors and handing out modest welfare payments.16
Lower level office workers and even factory laborers in major corporations could earn better wages than many of those in the middle-to-lower levels of this vast group of small business owners. But the attraction of being one’s own boss was considerable.
The manager at one of Japan’s premier engineering firms lamented in 1908 that factory workers were uppity and restless: “Teaching them anything is like trying to teach a cat to pray.” At the same time, he admitted that these people were extremely resource
ful when they worked for themselves. His company often lost contracts to “shrewd workers” who pulled up the floorboards of their homes, installed a machine or two, and started in business for themselves.17
These millions of shopkeepers, wholesalers, petty manufacturers, and their ill- paid employees made up what historians call the “old middle class” in Japan’s modern cities. This was a group with some roots in the commoner society of the Tokugawa era, although their members in the early twentieth century included former samurai as well. Around the turn of the century, observers began to identify a smaller new group emerging beside them. This was the “new middle class” of educated salaried employees of corporations and government bureaus and their families.
Traces of this social class appeared in the late nineteenth century. Since about 1890 corporations such as Mitsui and Mitsubishi had recruited future managers from universities. Some graduates of the top private and public schools began to view private sector employment as an attractive option to positions in the government bu
reaucracy. The numbers of vocational middle schools also increased substantially in these years. A multitiered system of recruitment came to link such schools, as well as higher schools and universities, to corporate and government employers. Gradually but steadily, the proportion of private and public sector office workers in major cities increased. In Tokyo, their numbers rose from 6 percent of those employed in 1908 to 21 percent in 1920.18 These employees were the primary breadwinners in the “new middle class” of the twentieth century. This was a group with some antecedents in the civilianized samurai administrators of Tokugawa times. But contestants for these more numerous jobs in the early 1900s included not only the children of former samurai. The offspring of the old middle class of urban shopkeepers or manufacturers, or middling farmers in the countryside, also sought entry into the ranks of the new urban middle class.19
Middle-class office workers included daughters as well as sons. The first well- known case of a major corporation hiring young women for clerical positions came in 1894. The manager of the Osaka branch of the Mitsui bank was inspired by a visit to the Wannamaker department store in Philadelphia to hire several teenage girls. They had recently graduated from higher elementary school, and he put them to work in the accounting section. The practice of hiring young women to work in offices and retail sales in department stores gradually spread over the next two decades.20
Only a minority of city-dwellers could take much advantage of these glamorous shopping emporiums with uniformed young women at the sales counter. The poorly paid clerk was a common figure of sympathy or ridicule in social commentary of the day. One observer in 1928 specified the lower range of income for the male office worker to be 20 to 30 yen per month. By contrast, the average wage of a skilled male machinist in 1927 was 2.6 yen per day, roughly double the clerical wage. Pay for a female textile worker stood at roughly 1 yen per day, similar to that of a female typist.21 It is thus not surprising that schoolteachers and even employees at major trading houses at the height of the inflation of World War I formed impromptu struggle groups demanding wage increases. In Tokyo such groups converged by 1919 into the Tokyo Federation of Salary Earners. In March 1920, typists working in companies in Tokyo and Yokohama likewise formed Japan’s first union of female office workers.
They demanded higher pay and status on a par with regular male employees.22 These typists were following the example of increasingly assertive factory labor
ers, women as well as men, who clustered in and around the growing cities in the early decades of the century. Beginning in 1916, hundreds of female textile workers began to join the Friendly Society, founded in 1912 by social reformer Suzuki Bunji.
The male union leaders assumed that husbands and fathers were the primary wage earners in families. They placed these women in a separate category of “auxiliary member.” In textiles and other industries the average pay for women was under half that of men. While pay for men in this era tended to rise gradually over a lifetime of factory labor, women in their forties earned barely 10 percent more than those in their twenties. At first, the women were relatively quiet about such working conditions.
This situation began to change in the mid to late 1920s. For several reasons, Japanese women joined labor actions with unprecedented vigor.
First, as the industrial economy expanded, women began to work in a greater variety of sites. They labored not only in large textile mills but also in smaller factories especially in chemical and food-processing industries. Those in smaller workplaces typically commuted from home rather than live in a dormitory. Their greater freedom of action, and closer ties to men working side by side, allowed them to join labor disputes more easily than textile workers in large mills.
Second, even among textile workers, increased numbers had completed an ele
mentary education and were able to read the pamphlets and leaflets of the organizers.
A third factor was the government’s decision, in 1922, to lift the ban on female attendance and speaking at political meetings. This made union organizing and dem
onstrating less perilous for women. Over the following years, women joined unions and launched disputes in unprecedented numbers.
Discontent over low wages and insecure jobs prompted these actions. But in addition, a profound sense of alienation from mainstream culture motivated women workers to seek greater respect in their working lives. The writer Sata Ineko nicely evoked this spirit in a story titled “From the Caramel Factory,” set in a Tokyo neigh
borhood in the late 1920s. The heroine, Hiroko, reluctantly takes a job at a candy factory at the urging of her alcoholic father. As she works she gazes out of the window at billboard ads for soap mounted on the roofs of houses across the river. The ads reflect sunlight all day long, while her work room receives only shade: “The sunlight [shining on the ads] seemed happy.” She and her coworkers complain that “we can’t even afford to buy New Years gifts.” On their once-daily break, the workers are allowed outside to buy snacks in pairs. In Hiroko’s eyes, the poorly clothed factory girls appear somehow deformed walking along the main street. And at the end of the day, the employees line up at the gate for a body check. Waiting in a sharp, cold wind, each woman has her kimono sleeve pocket, breast pocket, and lunch box inspected for stolen candies, and Hiroko and her friends complain bitterly of the inspector’s arrogance.23
In the words of a female union organizer who founded the Women’s Labor Acad
emy in Tokyo in 1929, which offered classes in “proletariat economics” as well as more typically female pursuits, the chance to learn to sew and to cook was the school’s great attraction. She wrote that the women “all said they just wanted to do what human beings do.”24 Women in the textile mills of Osaka and Tokyo took the lead in seeking what they viewed as “human treatment.” In addition to protesting wage cuts, they were especially concerned with changing the restrictive rules of dormitory residence. At most large companies, especially in the textile industry, women were still required to live in oppressively managed company-owned dormitories. They were allowed out only to go to work and for an occasional company-sponsored outing. In major strikes involving thousands of women in the late 1920s, they won better food and greater freedom to come and go from their dorms. This was part of a struggle among some women, which reached a prewar peak at this time, to live what they called “human”
lives. At base, they sought minimal freedom and respect for themselves and their contributions to their families or to their nation.
Male laborers in factories and mines used a similar language of protest. They too
called for improved treatment befitting a human being and a full-fledged member of the nation. Reflecting deeply rooted assumptions about proper gender roles, their working lives followed different patterns from those of women. For this reason, they defined “human” treatment in different ways and used different methods to seek it.
In the late nineteenth century, textiles dominated the industrial economy, and women outnumbered men in the industrial labor force. Over the next several decades, growth in heavy industries that hired primarily men—shipbuilding, iron and steel, machine engineering, and metalwork—outpaced that in light industries. In 1933 the number of male industrial workers nationwide reached about 968,000, just a shade more than the female wage labor force of 933,000.25
While close to 50 percent of female workers were teenagers in the 1910s and 1920s, more than 80 percent of male workers were adults over age twenty. Both men and women quit their jobs frequently, but the patterns of mobility differed. A typical female factory hand might change jobs once or twice and then exit the labor force for marriage. Male workers tended to move around as part of a strategy to advance over the long term in the working world.
Many aspired to eventual independence. An anonymous machinist in 1898 left a comment that remained the motto of the so-called travelers of the early twentieth century: “A worker is someone who enters society with his skills and who travels far andwide . . .finally becoming a worker deserving of the name.26 Uchida To¯shichi was one man who exemplified this spirit over the following decades. At the age of twenty he began working at the huge naval arsenal in Tokyo in 1908, but he believed that in order to rise in the world he needed to polish his skills. He took a second evening job in a small metal-casting shop. After two years he could turn out hibachi grills on his own. He stayed at the arsenal, but “I felt that this hibachi work was a guarantee for the future, and I kept at it, all the while buying as many of the necessary tools as I could.” Eventually, in 1939, age fifty-one, Uchida opened his own metalworking factory.27 For men in Japanese factories, this was a common career path, and an even more common aspiration.
The simple act of quitting one job for another was one form of protest against unacceptable conditions. In addition, in the years during and after World War I, many of these same men protested by joining unions and organizing strikes for higher pay or better treatment. Uchida To¯shichi was one of them. He joined Suzuki Bunji’s Friendly Society (Yu¯aikai) in 1913, just months after its founding. As he later recalled:
I was psychologically on the verge of exploding. The arsenal was rigidly stratified.
. . . Pay raises were given twice a year, but bribes had great influence, and since I believed in a world where one depended on one’s skill and was rewarded for one’s efforts, I was truly discontented.28
By 1919, the Friendly Society boasted a seven-year history and thirty thousand members.29 It adopted a new name, the Greater Japan Federation of Labor (Dai Nihon Ro¯do¯ So¯do¯mei), and a newly militant strategy. The group officially declared itself a labor union that would consider strike actions to win its demands. That year witnessed the largest number of organized labor disputes in Japan’s history, 497 strikes and another 1,891 disputes settled short of a strike. Together these actions involved 335,000 working people, the great majority of whom were men.30
Over the next decade, many other unions formed as well. Some supported revo
lutionary politics and on occasion built ties to the fledgling Japan Communist Party.
Others, including the Japan Federation of Labor, sought to raise the status of working people within the capitalist system. Strikes remained frequent throughout the decade, and they gradually spread to smaller workshops as well as large factories. At their prewar peak in 1931, labor unions enrolled roughly 8 percent of the industrial work force (369,000 members).31
At first glance, this is a modest proportion. But one must keep several points in mind while judging its significance. Unions had no legal protection. This meant that joining a union was a very risky decision. A worker fired for union activity had no legal recourse. In addition, because turnover among members was high and many strikes took place even in the absence of unions, the number of men and women who gained some experience of unions or strikes was far higher than the official member
ship at any one moment. Rates of union membership in most nations with similar legal contexts at similar stages of industrialization were comparable.32
Corporate owners and managers in the 1920s came to view the high mobility of skilled workers as a major cost. They were also alarmed at the spread of organizing and strikes. They responded with policies to both combat unions and retain valuable skilled men. Looking to Western models, they set up in-house “factory councils” as forums for the exchange of views, which might drain support away from independent unions. They began to offer in-house training programs for favored male workers.
They made nonbinding promises of long-term job security to these trainees. They also began setting up health clinics and savings plans (sometimes these were compulsory savings programs). They started to offer bonuses and pay raises every six months on a regular basis to skilled loyal men.
Workers responded in a variety of ways. Facing a weak job market for much of the 1920s, some abandoned the ideal of the “traveler” and clung to a job at a single company. To win the favor of bosses, especially in larger factories that offered more generous new benefits, these men often turned their backs on unions and supported factory councils instead. But other workers were less impressed or reticent. They insisted that bosses match words with deeds. As one historian has noted, they de
manded the “right to benevolence.”33 Even at times of business depression in the 1920s and early 1930s, some launched strategically dubious strikes to demand that a com
pany honor its promise of paternal care by revoking dismissals. Others went on strike to insist on regular semiannual pay raises for all workers, and not just a favored few.
Much like British workers who laid claim to “the rights of a freeborn Englishman,”
these Japanese workers insisted that “we are all equal before the emperor.” They called for “human treatment” befitting a Japanese subject.
Some employers replied harshly that “while we sympathize with your plight, we cannot take responsibility for your poverty.”34 Others agreed to improve severance pay or implement a more systematic program of seniority-linked raises. By the end of the decade, although it was often betrayed in practice, the expectation had begun to take root that a good employer offered a long-term job and predictable pay increases to loyal male workers.
Two other social groups on the margins of urban society struggled to make a living and win some dignity in these years. Beginning around the turn of century,
small numbers of Koreans migrated to Japan in search of jobs. By 1910, when Japan annexed Korea as a colony, about twenty-five hundred Koreans lived in Japan, mainly in Osaka and Tokyo. Migration increased sharply over the next decades. By 1930, the Korean population numbered around 419,000. The immigrants tended to live in run
down slums, taking dangerous and ill-paying jobs such as construction work, coal mining, and menial labor in rubber, glass, and dyed-goods production.
The Koreans, like ethnic immigrants the world over, were greeted with racism and discrimination. The Japanese tended to explain their poverty with stereotyped assumptions that the immigrants were lazy or stupid. Working-class Japanese who were themselves struggling to get by were especially resentful of job competition from these newcomers. These prejudices boiled over with tragic consequences in the wake of the 1923 Kanto¯ earthquake. Within hours of the earthquake, rumors began to spread:
Koreans and socialists had started the fires; they had poisoned the wells; they were planning rebellion. Encouraged by the authorities, residents throughout the region organized nearly three thousand vigilante groups. Their stated goal was to keep order in devastated neighborhoods and protect property from looters as well as rebellious Koreans or leftists. But some groups turned violent. They forced passers-by to speak a few simple phrases and then murdered those believed to have Korean or Chinese accents. The press, the police, and the military fueled the hysteria. One paper reported that “Koreans and socialists are planning a rebellious and treasonous plot. We urge the citizens to cooperate with the military and police to guard against the Koreans.”
Police and military troops themselves rounded up and murdered several hundred Ko
reans in at least two incidents in Tokyo. No precise death toll can be compiled, but the massacre took between three thousand and six thousand lives.35
The other important group that reacted with new militance to discrimination were the former outcastes, now called burakumin. These were the descendants of Edo era outcaste communities who had been officially liberated with the reforms of the 1870s.
About half a million in number, they continued to face both official and unofficial discrimination. They clustered in urban and rural neighborhoods throughout Japan.
The largest numbers lived in and around Kyoto and Osaka. As in the past, they worked in occupations associated with the slaughter of cattle and marked as polluted in Bud
dhist thinking: leatherwork, shoemaking, meatpacking, and meatselling.
But in a new departure, they began to organize to improve their lot. Around 1900 young male burakumin founded a number of moderate self-help organizations. They argued that by seeking education and working hard, burakumin could win acceptance by the mainstream society. Such efforts bore little fruit. In 1922 a more militant spirit led to the founding of the Levellers Association (Suiheisha). Members would confront and denounce those accused of discriminatory practices. They threatened and some
times resorted to violence. The government responded with close surveillance and occasional crackdowns.