Such idealistic public statements probably reflected the sincere beliefs of many busi
ness leaders. Yet the goal of developing industry for the nation rarely led to generous treatment of working people. Female laborers—often the teenage daughters of the farm families who suffered in the Matsukata deflation—bore a particularly heavy burden.
By 1911, government statistics reported that just under 800,000 people labored in factories or mines with ten or more employees. About 475,000 of these worked in textile mills, either cotton or silk spinning or weaving. More than four out of five textile workers were women. They typically were required to live in company-owned dormitories that were locked at night. When fires occasionally broke out, these literally became death traps. A belief that women were fragile creatures was widespread among the upper classes of the time, but it had little impact on the treatment of the female textile laborers. They worked twelve to fourteen hours a day or more, compared to about twelve hours per day on average for males in industries such as machine man
ufacturing. Their wages were 50 to 70 percent of those paid to men in the same industry, and 30 to 50 percent of average male wages in heavy industries. Wages were based on the results of competition over output and quality. Discipline was harsh and sometimes arbitrary. Sexual harassment by male supervisors cannot be documented with numerical certainty, but it was a constant theme in the songs of these women.
Finally, the poorly ventilated mills were incubators of disease, especially tuber-
TABLE 7.1 Labor Force Numbers, Early Twentieth Century
1902 1911
Men Women Total Men Women Total
Textiles 32,699 236,457 269,156 67,128 408,257 475,385
Machine/tool 33,379 983 34,362 67,271 3,817 71,088
manufacturing
Chemical 38,615 43,683 82,298 47,159 22,414 69,573
engineering
Food and drink 16,837 13,316 30,153 34,202 12,922 47,124
Miscellaneous 20,729 11,579 32,308 37,831 20,123 57,954
Electric or gas 475 21 496 4,476 40 4,516
utilities
Mining and 42,888 7,230 50,118 59,321 8,924 68,245
refining
Total: All 185,622 313,269 498,891 317,388 476,497 793,885 Industries
Source: Nihon ro¯do¯ undo shiryo¯. Dai 10 kan. To¯ kei-hen, edited by Ro¯do¯ undo¯ shiryo¯ iin-kai. (Tokyo: Chu¯o¯ ko¯ ron jigyo¯ shuppan, 1959), pp. 104, 106.
culosis, which was the AIDS of its day: debilitating, incurable, and fatal. This disease had been a chronic but limited problem in Tokugawa times. It became an acute epi
demic from the late nineteenth into the early twentieth century. The means of trans
mission were poorly understood. Women who contracted the disease in the mills were sent home to rest, and die. They spread the plague to their home villages.
The alternative to textile labor was not a life of leisure. Those who stayed with their families in rural villages had to help out with equally or more demanding farm labor. The memoirs of many textile workers offer divided judgments. They present a grim picture of unhappiness at harsh discipline and punitive incentive wages. They also recall pleasant friendships with other workers, full stomachs, and better food than on the farm. Wages were low compared to those of men, but they were high compared to most alternative work for women, such as unpaid labor on a family farm or home- based piecework for a manufacturing broker.
One job that paid higher wages to young women was prostitution. After textiles, the sex industry was the largest employer of women in the late nineteenth century.
Textile workers such as these young women in a silk-reeling factory in Nagano prefecture in the late Meiji era would have been among those singing the official or the “underground”
songs about factory life. They are pulling threads off cocoons in very hot water in the basins in front of them. This photograph, in which the women are wearing makeup and elegant hairstyles, would appear to be a staged public relations shot authorized by the manufacturers to project a positive image of the workplace.
Courtesy of Okaya Silk Museum.
Prostitution was legal. Brothels were licensed and regulated by the state, although there were many unlicensed practitioners as well. At the turn of the century, about fifty thousand licensed prostitutes worked in Japan, not far below the sixty thousand women in cotton spinning mills (although less than the number in silk spinning and far less than in weaving). If the pay was relatively high, so too were the costs in health, in dignity, and in loss of freedom. Families often took substantial advances in
“selling” a teenage girl to a brothel. She could not quit until the advance was repaid, which usually took three to five years.
It is not easy to discover how women workers in the early industrial era viewed their situation. Most had only an elementary education. They did not leave behind extensive memoirs. Until recent decades they have not been seen as important subjects of history writing. But some clues survive in accounts of social reformers, journalists, and government surveyors. Not surprisingly, statistical surveys of factory labor show that many women responded to poor conditions by quitting. Annual rates of turnover in excess of 100 percent of the work force were common. A famous government study, entitled Workers’ Conditions, published in 1902 using data from the Kanega
fuchi Cotton Spinning Mill, the largest in Japan, offers some dramatic numerical ev
idence of this. At the start of the year 1900, the company employed 4,500 women.
Even though it cut back the work force to about 3,500 women by the end of the year, the company was forced to hire 4,762 new workers over these twelve months because of massive attrition. Fully 4,846 female employees “escaped or fled” their jobs, 692 were fired, 255 left due to illness, and 31 (nearly 1 percent) died.6
On occasion these workers came together in acts of collective protest. From 1897 to 1907, textile workers went on strike thirty-two times at spinning mills and weaving sheds large and small to demand higher wages or improved working conditions. Most of these actions lasted only one or two days, or a few hours. Few succeeded. The fact that the women lived in tightly supervised company dormitories made it difficult for them to organize protests or link up with social activists outside the factory walls. If they did protest, they were typically fired and had no choice but to return home.
The improvised songs of the textile workers were written down by observers.
They reflect the attitudes that led to high quit rates and strikes. They reveal the anger and despair of the workers, but also dreams of better lives for themselves and pride in their contribution to Japan’s national income and power. This pride was the message promoted every day by the mill supervisors and recruiters. They taught an offical message to silk spinners as they hiked together across mountain passes on the way to the factories:
Raw silk,
Reel, reel the thread.
Thread is the treasure of the empire!
More than a hundred million yen worth of exports, What can be better than silk thread?
Factory girls,
We are soldiers of peace.
The service of women is a credit To the empire and to yourselves.
There are trials and hardships, yes, But what do they matter?
The songs that the women improvised on their own were different:
If a woman working in an office is a willow, A poetess is a violet,
And a female teacher is an orchid,
Then a factory woman is a vegetable gourd.
Or,
How I wish the dormitory would be washed away, The factory burn down,
And the gatekeeper die of cholera,
At six in the morning I wear a devil’s face, At six in the evening a smiling face.
I want wings to escape from here, To fly as far as those distant shores.7
Communities of skilled male factory workers also came into being in Japan’s early industrial era, although their numbers were smaller than the number of women factory laborers. By 1902, approximately 33,000 men worked in shipbuilding, machine and machine tool industries, and railroad companies. Another 40,000 worked in mines and metal refineries—alongside a significant minority of female coal miners. An ad
ditional 100,000 men labored in a wide variety of different industrial sites.
These men mixed a sense of humiliation at the condition of their lives, and even self-loathing, with pride, assertiveness, and a commitment to self-help. They were footloose. Unlike the well-known “lifetime employees” of the decades after World War II, male workers in early industrial Japan believed that the only way to become a skilled worker deserving of the name was to gain experience at a number of factories, learn diverse skills, and thus advance. These men were as quick to leave their jobs as were the textile women. But where the young women were often escaping to leave factory work altogether, the men—called “traveling workers”—were job-hopping as part of a career strategy. They typically aspired to save money and start up their own small factory. A few succeeded.
They also organized a number of strikes, and in the 1890s undertook a few short- lived drives to organize unions. A union of metalworkers founded in 1897 enrolled nearly three thousand at its peak. But turnover among members was high, and by 1899 the union was losing support. In 1900 the government passed a Public Order Police Law that made organizing difficult, and the union collapsed. Strikes and labor organizing reflected anger at dignity denied as much as a desire for higher pay. The best organized strike of the era took place among locomotive engineers at the Japan Railway Company in 1899. They argued that “our occupation is not base but noble;
it should be accorded respect, not contempt.” One core demand of the workers was for a change in the wording of their job title, which conveyed an image of low-grade status in comparison to clerks and station-masters whose jobs required less skill and who bore less weighty responsibility.8
Male workers in a lathe shop of the Shibaura Engineering Works in 1896. A supervisor, in Western cap and formal dress in the center, stood at the top of the workplace hierarchy, and tensions between such supervisors and the ordinary workers were common. Workmen in jobs that drew on traditional artisan skills tended to wear the Edo era craftsman’s coat (lower left).
Courtesy of Toshiba Corporation.
Their bosses saw such skilled workers as notoriously unreliable. One manager at a major engineering firm vented his anger in a magazine for young boys after a visit to the United States in 1908. Well-educated young workers were uppity and did not know their place, he fumed. Older laborers were stubborn men who relied only on past experience, so that “teaching them anything is like trying to teach a cat to chant Buddhist prayers.” Unlike America, he claimed, where workers were docile and “car
ried out a job after just one order . . . inJapan things don’t get done without constant instructions and the lot of a supervisor is difficult.”9
This negative view of workers must be viewed critically. It contrasts sharply with testimony from many workers themselves. They told of their determination to study, improve their skills, and one day open their own small workshop. The managerial
view that employees were stubborn and poorly disciplined did not reflect a genuine deficit of talent or energy among laborers. It reflected the unwillingness of these workers to devote themselves to bosses who offered unreliable treatment.