Most of the women appearing on this site are well-known to the Japanese and in several cases to an international audience. They appear frequently in popular and scholarly accounts of Japanese women and their accomplishments in the 20th century or in studies of U.S.-Japan relations. In other words, they are iconic figures, not obscure figures in the crowd. They are part of the heroic narrative of women's history. Sakaue Toshie is very different: an unknown person born into a tenant farming family in the mid-1920s and representative of young rural women who experienced the war and occupation years. Her family engaged in day labor as well to eke out a living. Toshie belongs to grass roots or people's history and is important in helping us to see the impact of Occupation land reform and the end of tenancy through the eyes of someone at the lowest level in the countryside. Her story has been brought to life recently by historian Simon Partner, who interweaves her memories with larger historical trends and questions about state power and technological transformation at the local level. All quotes below are from Partner's book.

Through Toshie's life as presented by Partner (see excerpt on this site), we first learn about life at the poverty level in a small village (Kosugi Hamlet, Yokogoshi village) in the years of the great depression and the Asia/Pacific War. The village was located in the northern part of Honshu not far from the city of Niigata. To survive, Toshie would join other family members in becoming an unskilled manual laborer, first working on the docks. She would remain a day laborer for many years. When she was young, the family at least had a radio for outside news and entertainment, and they read the magazine Ie no hikari (Light of the Home). These two forms of mass communication, however, were closely monitored by the state. Both of Toshie's brothers died in the war--the eldest son, at Guadalcanal, 1943, from malaria, and the second brother in Sumatra, 1944, from beriberi. Her family's grief was shared with others in the village, which lost 30 percent of its men in warfare.

In 1945, there was huge destruction to Niigata from B-29 bombing raids. Toshie's village was once strafed, but no one was killed. In obedience to spiritual mobilization of the populace, she and others in the local Women's Defense Association had practiced with bamboo spears for use against any would-be invaders (Partner, alas, does not provide details as to what the women thought about the efficacy of this military drill or who their instructors were). In late July 1945, there was considerable excitement when a B-29 crashed near the village, killing four American airmen. Unrecognizable from their burns, they were pulled from the wreckage and given burial on the spot. Seven survivors who had parachuted were caught and beaten severely before the military police arrived and took charge. There was some talk later about local complicity in atrocities. Toshie and a group of villagers heard the Emperor's recorded broadcast announcing "the unendurable" on her father's home radio, August 15, 1945. According to Partner, she "has never forgotten the profound sense of shock, betrayal, and despair as she grasped the meaning of the emperor's speech."

Twenty years of age at the start of the Occupation, Toshie was among the many young women who were warned by authorities to stay indoors and evade the eyes of enemy occupation troops. Her life at first changed very little. Although the defense association disbanded, rationing was not ended, and food supplies in the severe winter of 1945-46 were scarce. Toshie, we are told, envied the glamorous life in Niigata of her cousin, a trained geisha. Villagers, especially the ones with a fair amount of land, took advantage or city dwellers who flocked to the countryside to barter for food. Here Partner illumines rural life during the Occupation and provides insight into the means by which tenancy was ended and small bits of land were transferred by village and prefertural committees to former tenants as personal plots. Toshie herself was not part of the decision-making. And her family, never having had much land even to rent, received little benefit from the reform and instead slipped further into the category of wage earner. Also, her family was without an eldest son to carry on. On the other hand, the Ito family, the largest landholders in the area, lost heavily in the land transfers.

In other local activities, there were attempts to help Japanese refugees from Manchuria. As for Americanization, it was not as extensive in Toshie's rural community as in the cities. As Parent points out, radio programs and magazines performed the same job as before, but in contrast to wartime they brought new fashions, including a desire among rural women for permanent waves. It should be mentioned, however, that radio broadcasting and magazines were closely monitored by Occupation censors and information officers. It would be interesting to know what precisely Toshie listened to or liked, such as the "Women's Hour," or the "Farm Hour," both new programs promoted by radio personnel in the Civil Information and Education Section of MacArthur's headquarters. Also, permanent waves were not exactly new to Japan, though perhaps to Toshie, and had been banned as Western or frivolous during the war. In other ways, the Occupation tried to make a difference: home life extension courses were offered, emphasizing bread, potatoes, and cheese. Information about pesticides and fertilizers accompanied soil surveys. In Toshie's case, it is unclear whether new social welfare legislation did much to improve her health.

At age twenty-two, still rather early in the Occupation period, Toshie married. Equal rights under the new Constitution were not observed. Toshie's father chose her groom, Hideshiro, a poor but hard-working man who was willing to live with her family and take her father's name. He, in fact, was chosen without her even knowing what was going on, and certainly not with her consent, even though the Constitution decreed that marriage should be by mutual consent. She was unhappy, embarrassed, but acquiesced although she might have wished to have a romantic experience. "Acceptance," says Partner, "was a part of village culture." There was no time for a honeymoon, only for work. Toshie suffered several miscarriages and gave up hope for a child. A highlight in her life came 1948 when she went with fellow villages to Tokyo to help restore the palace grounds. Partner suggests that she had a kind of residual patriotism from the previous spiritual mobilization of the masse and held simplistic views of the emperor and war guilt. Here, too, it would have been valuable to let her articulate these thoughts in her own words. Toshie was profoundly moved, adds Partner, by the emperor's personal thank you to the work groups, spoken in idiomatic Japanese and not the obscure and formal court language of his August 1945 recorded broadcast.

Hideshiro's highest income was not from farming but from collecting gravel on the river. So in 1951, Toshie went to work in the cold and snow of early winter on a project to control the flow of a nearby river. Her mentally ill sister, a constant worry, was a night wanderer, often slipping out and getting far from home with rides from strangers. The following year, she adopted the two year old daughter of a philandering laborer, the relative of a village neighbor. The end of the Occupation in 1952 does not seem to have been a particularly important date in her consciousness. At that time, her father died of stomach cancer, age 70 (in Japanese fashion, he was not told the truth about his condition). Partner sums up his life as one of harsh labor, near poverty, and debt.

It was the years following the Occupation that gradually brought transformation to Toshie's life and a measure of rural affluence even to the point of securing "The Three Treasures" of the housewife--refrigerator, dishwasher, and television--and in time a better home in the village. Miraculously, Toshie had her own child, a daughter, and lived to see her well-educated and happily married, though preferring to take up residence in a town with more cultural life than in her mother's village. Her full story is very much worth reading.

The one thing we lack in Partner's skillful recreation of Toshie's story, as indicated in the biographical fragment above, is the use of her own words. We learn about her life but do not quite share it with her. Another personal story, set later in rural Japan but with some gloss on the Occupation years, is Gail Bernstein's Haruko's World (1983). Bernstein, also a historian, lived in a Japanese rural community in Shikoku, 1974-75, and returned for an update in 1982. She makes herself a subject (as anthropologists do), and frequently relies on conversations with Haruko and others from the farm community in creating her narrative. Haruko, by the way, was born in the early 1930s, met her husband-to-be in 1949, and was blessed with a love match, though she and her husband had very different temperaments. Bernstein's work is more representative of oral history than is Partner's methodology. Also useful for comparative purposes is the late Mikiso Hane's Peasants, Rebels, Women, and Outcastes. Although the second edition (2003) does touch on the post World War II period, it is primarily devoted to stories of the underclass from the Meiji period to early Showa. However, it is distinguished by Hane's use of the actual words, poems, and oral histories of so-called ordinary people.