Japanese Women and the ‘Cult of Productivity’

Women workers in Japan — costed, not valued. It would be quite easy to paint this picture of Japanese women workers since the late nineteenth century. Until the late 1970s women’s enormous contribution to Japan’s industrialisation was not recognised by historians. In Japan, it was a book by Yamamoto Shigemi (Yamamoto, 1977) written for a popular audience, and later made into a film, that exposed the deplorable conditions of women workers in the early textile mills. Then in the early 1980s Mikiso Hane conveyed the picture to Western audiences to reveal the ‘underside’ of Japan’s economic success story (Hane, 1982). Meanwhile, the wave of women’s liberation movements in the early 1970s had stimulated the emergence of a feminist women’s history that also depicted the exploitation of women industrial workers. But while all these pioneering studies were obviously sympathetic to women, they tended, like earlier labour histories, to portray the women workers as passive victims, uninterested or incapable of protest.