Activism among Women in the Taisho Cotton Textile Industry

Where are the organized women workers? Alice Kessler-Harris asked in 1975.1 Her question unleashed an unabating torrent of provocative studies of proletarian women in a number of countries, particularly in the United States and Europe.2 This deluge of solid research notwithstanding, activist women, to paraphrase Anne Firor Scott, continue to be seen and not seen.3 Pre-World War II Japanese women textile workers suffer the. same,...if not indeed a more pervasive, invisibility. When they are not generally overlooked, they are pitied as passive victims incapable of acting on their own initiative. When instances of activism are so obvious they cannot be ignored (as when silk reelers carried out a major strike in 1885), they are dismissed as unique, aberrant events. Women\u27s failure to become the backbone of an enduring union movement confirms the conventional view of them as passive. Their gender, it is argued-or, as one scholar suggests, their youth4-made them hard to organize. Further research on women\u27s collective action should modify this assertion. Even if the focus on collective action is limited to institutionalized, organized activism (that is, unions), we must ask whether structural factors like the organization of the factory itself or attitudinal factors like the hostility of male unionists, and not women\u27s nature or culture, explain the lower rate of female participation. Louise Tilly argues persuasively that proletarian women\u27s lower rate of participation in collective action in nineteenth-century France needs no special psychological or gender-attribute explanation : that is, a similar set of conditions may be used to predict men\u27s and women\u27s propensity to activism. 5 Societal constraints, restrictions by management on the economic independence of female workers, and, in certain circumstances, the workers\u27 own views of what was appropriate behavior for women may have slowed female labor organization in Japan; yet when conditions for activism existed women workers responded. The question of activism, however, should not be limited to formal political or union actions. This chapter attempts to expand the definition of the term activism to connote the opposite of passivity. Thus, activism manifested itself as much in the decisions of rural Japanese women and girls to enter employment in the cotton textile industry as in their collective actions as workers. To understand why farm women would be motivated to enter the mills, one must examine general attitudes regarding appropriate behavior for women in the 1920s. To be sure, what women saw as suitable for themselves as women was itself in a state of evolution. As Teresa de Lauretis notes, Self and identity ... are always grasped and understood within particular discursive configurations. Consciousness is never fixed, never attained once and for all because discursive boundaries change with historical conditions. 6 The converse is equally true: women\u27s contributions to the definition of gender helped produce shifts in their historical context

The Quest for Women\u27s Rights in Turn-of-the-Century Japan

This chapter will discuss the goals of women\u27s rights advocates and the meaning of their demands in the context of turn-of-the-century state and society formation. It examines women\u27s rights discourses in late nineteenth-century periodicals, some of them directed to a female readership and some directed to a general, often male, audience. Sources include journals like Meiroku zasshi, Jogaku zasshi, Joken, Tokyo fujin kyofukai zasshi, and some regional publications. 25 Nineteenth-century advocates for women were, of course, of varying minds about the definition of “women’s rights,” but all agreed that women did not have rights at that time. Some argued for a communitarian inclusiveness reminiscent of the Rousseauian ideas espoused in the 1870s when neither ordinary men nor women had political rights. Others, inspired by Mill, stressed improved education as a way for women to gain the subjectivity (personhood or identity) that would make them eligible for rights. There were also those who believed inclusion must follow the elimination of patriarchal sexual privileges, such as those implied by polygamy, prostitution, and patrilineality.26 This chapter examines these different positions and their similarities and differences with late nineteenth- century arguments for expanding men’s inclusion in the state

Hiratsuka Haruko (Raichō)

Hiratsuka Haruko (1886-1971), pioneering Japanese feminist. Hiratsuka took the pen name Raicho (meaning snow grouse ) when she founded the women\u27s literary magazine Seito (Bluestocking) in 1911. Her manifesto-like poem in Seito- In the beginning, Woman was the Sun -symbolizes Japan\u27s self-affirming feminism of the 1910s and 1920s, the era of the New Woman. Feminists in the 1970s claimed Hiratsuka as a foremother for this inspirational manifesto. At the center of feminist activities for a decade, Hiratsuka withdrew from leadership roles in 1921 but nevertheless contributed to the consumer, birth-control, and women\u27s arts movements before World War II. After 1945 she devoted herself to peace organizations. Other feminists are better known for specific causes-Ichikawa Fusae for women\u27s suffrage, Oku Mumeo for consumerism, Yamakawa Kikue for workers\u27 rights, and Kato Shidzue for reproductive rights-but Hiratsuka, involved in each of these movements, inspired other women\u27s activism

Introduction to Gendering Modern Japanese History

Gender, as Joan Scott asserted in 1986, is a useful category of historical analysis.1 In the last quarter century, gender has emerged as a lively area of inquiry for historians and other scholars. Gender analysis has suggested some important revisions of the master narratives of national histories-that is, the dominant, often celebratory, tales of the successes of a nation and its leaders.2 These narratives, like all histories, are provisional and incomplete and, to varying degrees, reflect the changing material, discursive, and ideological contexts of their times.3 To mention just two of the fields of history that had traditionally formed the core of national(ist) narratives-colonial history and political history- bringing in gender has begun to alter the dominant narratives in those fields.4 Recent colonial studies examine such issues as gendered notions of expansion; virility among colonizers and colonized; and relations between men and women, women and women, and men and men on the colonial periphery. Because political histories look at the meanings of citizenship and participation, gender, like race and class, clearly has utility as a category of analysis. While modern Japanese history has not yet been restructured by a foregrounding of gender, historians of Japan have, indeed, begun to embrace gender as an analytic category. Interested readers can barely keep up with the exciting new scholarship in the form of journal articles and monographs in both Japanese and Western languages. If the experience of previous turns in Japanese historiography is any guidefor example, in the 1950s and beyond, interest in the course of Japan\u27s modern development led to the categorizing of historical patterns as stages of modernity, and interest in social groups defined by categories such as material circumstances, cultural identities, occupation, religion, or residence has complicated and enriched the master narratives of Japanese history-gender too will emerge as an important issue in redefining master narratives in modern Japanese history. This interdisciplinary volume attempts to ignite the process of redefinition by bringing together research by Western-trained historians of Japan and historically minded scholars in other disciplines. 5 Problematizing gender in an anthology on modern Japanese history recognizes the stimulating developments in that field of scholarship. 6 A number of Japan scholars, including some of our contributors, have been engaged in research in women\u27s history for over a decade, and are now producing works in the area of gender history. Gender history emerged from women\u27s history outside the Japan field as well, although the sometimes rivalrous tension between women\u27s history and gender history in other fields has not been replicated in Japan studies.7 This volume, which assembles articles on men as well as women, on theories of sexuality as well as on gender prescriptions, and on samesex as well as on heterosexual relations, takes the position that history is gendered. To say that history is gendered is to make two interrelated claims. First, historians invariably, though perhaps unconsciously, construct a gendered notion of past events, people, and ideas. That is, we engender the past, creating ways of thinking about the past through our notions of gender (and other categories we take for granted) in the present. A gendered history, like any type of history, is an invention of historians. History attempts to view ideologies, discourses, practices, bodies, and institutions as both derived in part from notions of gender and, conversely, constantly reifying these notions

Noguchi Jun and Nitchitsu: Colonial Investment Strategy of a High Technology Enterprise

In 1868, as the Meiji period (1868-1912) began, Japan\u27s countryside was largely untouched by the technologies then rapidly developing in the West. In little more than a century, Japan has become an archetypal high-technology society and economy. The course of Japan\u27s technological development was, of course, radically affected by World War II and its aftermath, but its basic contours were already evident before the war. By then, the defining characteristics of a technologically advanced society and economy were underway. These included the creation of a sophisticated consumer population, the recognition of the need to import and innovate technology to remain competitive, and the establishment of research organizations and a school system to create a pool of scientists and engineers able to commercialize new ideas. This chapter will examine the investment strategy of one of Japan\u27s most important technology-intensive companies. It will indicate the important role played by this non-zaibatsu firm in high-technology innovation. It will also suggest some of the reasons for the interaction of government and business, and tell how one Japanese entrepreneur became involved in colonial expansion

Editor’s Overview: Technology, Governance, and Public Policy

From monitoring traffic and parking to manipulating the tiniest of cells, or from spreading the scope of participatory democracy to defining the optimal limits of government, new technologies are leading to revolutionary interactions in public policy and governance. These innovations have grabbed the attention of some of Santa Clara University’s finest scholars. Since 1999, the Center for Science, Technology, and Society (CSTS), through its Research Grant Program, has funded 26 faculty scholars in a variety of disciplines in Arts and Sciences, Business, Law, and Engineering. These grant recipients have produced books, articles, and conference papers. This issue of STS NEXUS presents the work of five CSTS grant recipients whose works address one of the key issues of the day—the mutual interaction of technology, governance, and public policy

Historical Perspectives on Technology and Society

Silicon Valley is a unique place in a unique moment of time. To say that it exists within history seems obvious; what might be less apparent is that Silicon Valley also has come to define both the practice and the subject of history. History and the exciting technologies born and bred in Silicon Valley are intimately linked. These ties were highlighted in a remarkable series of events and presentations sponsored by the Center for Science, Technology, and Society (CSTS) in October 2001. This issue of STS NEXUS captures the insights of those presentations

The State and Women in Modern Japan: Feminist Discourses in the Meiji and Taisho Eras

The relationship of women to the Japanese state has been the object of much discussion in Japanese studies in recent years. To be sure, there are as many ways to approach this topic as there are conceptions of ‘the state’ and of ’women.’ Both of these terms are embedded in complicated and historically contingent discourse fields, making it impossible to posit just one or two types of relationships linking the two categories, as they are not fixed. Some scholars look at women as the target of government policies;1 some examine women as agents of some part of the state;2 some are interested in women in organized or institutionalized politics or movements;3 some study women in groups that articulate with state power;4 and others look at the discourses about women and the state.

Gender, Citizenship, and Dress in Modernizing Japan

Between the 1870s and 1945, dress was one of the signifiers ofJapan\u27s transition from being objectified as an Oriental country subordinate to the West to playing a dominant role as the bearer of universal (Western) modernity to East Asia. 1 In the late nineteenth century, Western dress indicated a yearning for international respect for Japan\u27s modernity; by the early twentieth century, when Japan had largely achieved diplomatic equality with the West and colonial dominion over parts of Asia, Western dress had come to be taken for granted by modern Japanese men. In some cases, colonial subjects could be distinguished by their traditional clothing and bodily adornment, although this traditional dress was likely to be part of an invented tradition encouraged py Japanese anthropologists to distinguish quaint and backward natives from modern colonists. Ethnic considerations cannot be unbundled from those of gender, as modernity was projected by masculine Japanese in Western dress. Modernity and imperialism toward the rest of Asia and modernity and anti-imperialism vis-a-vis the West were, thus, linked through dress

Women’s Rights and the Japanese State, 1880 to 1925

Recent scholarship on the relationship between women and the state in Japan has approached this question from a variety of perspectives. Among other subjects, scholars have looked at women as targets of government policies;1 agents of specific parts of the state;2 participants in organized or institutionalized politics or movements;3 members of groups that interacted with state power;4 and objects of discourses about women and the state.5 This chapter explores the relationship of women and the state by examining discourses on “women’s rights” in the late nineteenth century (especially the 1880s and 1890s) and the interwar era (especially the 1910s and 1920s). Rights were a frequent topic of discussion among Japanese intellectuals and political activists, including feminist advocates, throughout this period.6 But the notion of rights underwent a change as the structure of the state, and Japanese people’s understanding of it, changed. Indeed, the discussion of rights in all their forms constituted a key element in the building of the modern Japanese nation