明治時代の繊維工場の女工

This paper calls for more weight to be given to how Meiji textile factory women perceived their own lives. Were they aware of the roles they played in Japanese industrialization or in maintaining landlord-tenant relationships in the countryside. If so what were their views of these roles? In what ways--if any--did they see themselves as victims? Did they see themselves as belonging to a group called factory workers? How did they define themselves

The Erotic and the Vulgar: Visual Culture and Organized Labor's Critique of U.S. Hegemony in Occupied Japan

This essay engages the colonial legacy of postwar Japan by arguing that the political cartoons produced as part of the postwar Japanese labor movement’s critique of U.S. cultural hegemony illustrate how gendered discourses underpinned, and sometimes undermined, the ideologies formally represented by visual artists and the organizations that funded them. A significant component of organized labor’s propaganda rested on a corpus of visual media that depicted women as icons of Japanese national culture. Japan’s most militant labor unions were propagating anti-imperialist discourses that invoked an engendered/endangered nation that accentuated the importance of union roles for men by subordinating, then eliminating, union roles for women