Women and the Labour Market in Japan's Industrialising Economy

Hunter, Janet

doi:10.4324/9780203634134

Cited by 5 publications

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“…The theoretical approach to analyzing Nagano's female labor force in Japan's raw silk industry during the Meiji period is consistent with the recent scholarship on the importance of tradition in Japan's modernization in the mode of dual economy [15][16][17][18]. This scholarship made a significant contribution to understanding Japan's economic development, previously often perceived as shaped by the imported Western industry only.…”

Section: Open Accesssupporting

confidence: 69%

“…In 1921, there were 623 filature plants in Nagano Prefecture [25]. The size of the plants varied greatly, and a twenty thousand total workforce would not be an overestimate, because just 203 silk mills in Nagano in 1903 already employed a total number of 13,620 workers (12,519 females and 1,101 males) [15]. In 1896, Japan had 593,809 female workers and 32,500 male workers in the raw silk industry [25].…”

Section: Nagano's Female Workers In the Raw Silk Industrymentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Work schedules for other months fell between 12 and 1/3 hours and 14 and ½ hours. There were obvious seasonal variations in the length of working hours [15,24]. Nevertheless, the work schedules themselves speak volumes about the female workers' hard life at the plant.…”

Section: Nagano's Female Workers In the Raw Silk Industrymentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Cooperative hand reeling was introduced in 1884 [24], though further technological innovation in 1907 allowed large plants to re-reel hand-reeled raw silk, so that the traditional production was able to be firmly integrated in the industry [17]. In addition, there was a fair amount of labor migration, at least in the post-Meiji, years such that Nagano's silk industry drew labor from the neighboring prefectures of Gunma, Niigata and Yamanashi [15]. Perhaps no words other than these from the two verses (out of the six) of the prefectural anthem of Nagano can better portray the great resources of the region and the importance of the silk industry (author's translation based on Nagano Prefectural Government [32]).…”

Section: Population Growth During the Meiji Eramentioning

confidence: 99%

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Population, Resources and Female Labor in the Raw Silk Industry of Nagano in Meiji Japan

Liao

2013

Social Sciences

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Gendered realities in local regions are a prominent issue in today’s global economy. However, the process of globalization in the late-19th century already involved the local Nagano women in an indispensable role in Japan’s raw silk industry. This paper studies the interplay between population growth and relatively limited resources in Nagano vis-à-vis the demand for female labor during the Meiji era, when Japan became a major raw silk producer. The local/regional constraints in Nagano interacted with economic globalization and gave Nagano its position in the global market. Therefore, we cannot ignore the consequences of local/regional constraints and advantages in global processes on female workers. Population pressure and environmental squeeze are found to have been important forces that integrated the local and regional in the global process of industrialization and trade, and together, they produced social outcomes, such as gender hierarchies in globalization and glocalization processes

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Section: Open Accesssupporting

confidence: 69%

Section: Nagano's Female Workers In the Raw Silk Industrymentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Nagano's Female Workers In the Raw Silk Industrymentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Population Growth During the Meiji Eramentioning

confidence: 99%

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Population, Resources and Female Labor in the Raw Silk Industry of Nagano in Meiji Japan

Liao

2013

Social Sciences

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“…63 Janet Hunter's Women and the Labour Market in Japan's Industrialising Economy: Female Textile Workers in the Prewar Period also highlights the complexity of the labour market, the interdependence of the agricultural and manufacturing sectors, and examines the textile industry from the 1870s to the 1930s. 64 Kazuko Tanaka's 'A Short History of the Women's Movement in Modern Japan, Dee Ann Vavich's 'The Japanese Woman's Movement: Ichikawa Fusae, a Pioneer in Woman's Suffrage', and Mioko Fujieda's 'Japan's First Phase of Feminism' consider the history of the women's movement. 65 Cecilia Segawa Seigle's Yoshiwara gives detailed descriptions of the Yoshiwara, a major pleasure quarter of the Edo period, and the lives of courtesans who lived there.…”

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confidence: 99%

Introduction

Tomida¹,

Daniels²

2005

Japanese Women: Emerging From Subservience, 1868–1945

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I n the 1970s Gerda Lerner, a pioneering American women's historian, wrote:'The striking fact about the historiography of women is the general neglect of the subject by historians.'This remark accurately describes the state of historical writing on Japanese women before 1945. 1 More specifically, the Japanese writer Yamazaki Tomoko wrote: 'The majority of history books, from Nihonshoki published in the Nara period to the complete works of Japanese history which existed before 1945, were written by men who had ruled our country, and narrowly focused on male political leaders.' 2 Somewhat earlier the Marxist historian Inoue Kiyoshi recorded that: Almost all the scholarship of Japanese history before 1945 was not the history of ordinary men and women, who accounted for over ninety percent of the population, but the history of a very limited number of men who had dominated ordinary people. Accordingly, it was a common practice for the majority of women to be omitted from history. 3 Hiroko Tomida and Gordon Daniels -9789004213838 Downloaded from Brill.com03/13/2023 12:36:54AM via free access THE HISTORY OF JAPANESE WOMEN: JAPANESE WRITING BEFORE 1945Closely related to the low status of women, Japanese women's history hardly existed before 1945. As Inoue Kiyoshi observed, Japanese women's history was small in quantity, surprisingly poor in quality, and normally comprised either biographies of famous ladies from the imperial family, aristocracy and warrior class, or romantic stories on women written from male perspectives. 4 Indeed, only a very few exceptional women were singled out for attention by male writers on account of their social status and political power. These included Empresses Suiko (554-628) and Ko ¯ken (718-770), Ho ¯jo ¯Masako and Hino Tomiko, and well-known literary figures such as Murasaki Shikibu and Sei Shonagon.Although Japanese women's history was in an undeveloped state, a few publications existed before 1945. For example, Sakai Toshihiko, one of the first Marxists in Japan, published Danjo So ¯to ¯shi ('The History of Struggles between Men and Women') in 1920, which was a pioneering example of women's historiography. 5 This work was followed by another Marxist historian, Watanabe Yoshimichi's Nihon Bokeijidai no Kenkyu ¯('A Study of the Matrilineal Era in Japan') in 1932. 6 In June 1936 a special issue of the historical journal Rekishi Kyo ¯iku featured a collection of articles on ordinary women's history by left-wing historians. 7 Takamure Itsue, who had already established her name as a poet, commenced her pioneering research on Japanese women's history in 1931. She studied matrilineal practices in ancient Japan, consulting numerous family records, anthropological data, as well as mythology and early literary sources such as the Manyo ¯shu ¯and Kojiki, and produced her first book on Japanese women's history Bokeisei no Kenkyu ¯in 1938. This book played a significant role in undermining the established view that women's low social status was long-standing and inevitable. It argued that women's ...

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The Japanese textile sector and the influenza pandemic of 1918–1920

Okubo

Strobl

2023

Journal of Regional Science

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The ongoing global pandemic has brought into sharp relief the possible interactions between the epidemiology of a virus, the structure of the economy and society that becomes exposed to it, and the actions chosen by government, individuals, and communities to combat it or ameliorate its economic impact. Surprisingly, there has not been sufficient research on these economic and policy interactions of the 1918–1920 influenza pandemic—the deadliest pandemic of the 20th century. This paper focuses on Japan, which as a minor participant of and was not directly affected by World War I. We exploit the diversity of experiences with the pandemic and its attendant policy responses across Japanese prefectures; and investigate the importance of the pandemic's toll (measured by excess mortality), and of nonpharmaceutical policy interventions (NPIs), in determining the pandemic's economic impact. We do so by focusing on the production and employment in the textile sector, given the availability of data and the general importance of the textile sector for emerging economies (as Japan was at the time). We find a significant adverse impact of the pandemic on textiles (almost 30% for an average prefectural excess mortality shock) and indeed find that the implemented NPIs were effective in ameliorating around one half of the pandemic's adverse economic consequences, especially for textile output (rather than employment). Furthermore, these NPIs were more effective when the excess mortality was higher. In this case, there was no trade‐off between money and life, but rather the two were complimentary.

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Women and the Labour Market in Japan's Industrialising Economy

Cited by 5 publications

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Population, Resources and Female Labor in the Raw Silk Industry of Nagano in Meiji Japan

Population, Resources and Female Labor in the Raw Silk Industry of Nagano in Meiji Japan

Introduction

The Japanese textile sector and the influenza pandemic of 1918–1920

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