Overview. Although much attention has been given to farm life and especially to land reform in Occupied Japan, little has been done to study the lives of rural women in this period. Aside from noting the hard work of farm women in the fields and households—the combined productive and reproductive tasks of a fixed routine—the full story remains untold. In the countryside in 1945, tenants were still fifty percent of the local farming population. To what extent did rural women become activists in this period and participate in the process of reform, or is the question relevant to their daily experience? How were their lives affected by land reform in the countryside, especially women in tenant households? And to what extent did farm women experience liberation under the new Constitution and Civil Code? The best way to approach the lives of rural women and chart change is to take the transwar historical approach, covering the 1930s to the 1950s.

Demographic Shift. Since the early years of the Meiji Restoration in 1868, many rural girls and young village women had been recruited for temporary contract labor in the textile mills of industrializing Japanese. Confined to dormitories and suffering from low pay and poor working conditions, they continued to play a major role in the economy as mill hands in the 1930s. Rural women also joined husbands, even children, as cruelly exploited labor in the mining industry. As the demographic shift continued from rural settings to towns and cities in the early 20th century, close ties were maintained by single and young married working women with their rural families. Often, they returned home after their contract labor was over. Exposes of the plight of working women and children led to improvements in protective legislation in the 1920s, but not to recognition of unions or collective bargaining. Then the Great Depression hit Japan, bringing harsh effects to the countryside and forcing many young women into prostitution to aid family survival.

Field Studies. American anthropologists were among the first scholars to take a close look at village Japan and to conduct ethnographic studies. Joint research conducted in 1935-36 by the husband and wife team, John Embree and Ella Lury Wiswell, in the village of Suye Mura on the island of Kyushu is valuable in comparing and contrasting village life before and after defeat in 1945. Wiswell's diary, which was not published until the early 1980s, is of special interest in questioning stereotypes of village women and sounding out their views and attitudes. Her fluency in Japanese gained trust and encouraged the women to reveal their emotional lives. After the war, anthropologists from the Center for Japanese Studies, University of Michigan, were allowed to enter Japan, beginning in 1947, to conduct community research in rural Okayama Prefecture, located in southern Honshu. These scholars were primarily male. Although they did not focus on gender and class, their work yielded valuable information on the structure of women's lives in the 1950s. The final results, published in 1959 as Village Japan, help make it possible to trace and analyze change in the lives of rural women during the late Occupation years and immediate aftermath.

Land Reform Directives. In the meantime, General MacArthur's directives to the Japanese government, 1945-1949, to carry out land reform and end tenant farming were among the most ambitious programs of the Occupation. Although Japanese bureaucrats in the Ministry of Agriculture and Forestry had advocated limited reforms since the 1920s, the tenancy issue had not been solved when the Occupation began. By 1949, however, a drastic set of reforms, far more stringent than had been originally planned by American policy makers, had begun to transform land ownership in the countryside. In large part, this was a result of pressure on GHQ from the Russian and Australian members of the Far Eastern Commission in Tokyo, an outcome which some American lawmakers in Washington, D.C. interpreted as communistic. Tenant farming was abolished in Japan, and farm families ended up owning an average of about 2.5 acres. There are few signs that women participated in the farm cooperatives or local councils which assessed payments, arranged low interest loans, and redistributed the land. Back-breaking, labor intensive work was still the norm for all family members, and especially for women who engaged in the transplantation of rice seedlings.

Emancipation? Mechanization was slow to arrive in the form of hand tractors and other machinery suitable for small fields; and when machines did make inroads in the late 1950s, men were the operatives. In the kitchen, there were benefits to households from running water, but electrical appliances were not yet affordable. On rare days off, rural folk took pleasure in local festivals, feasts, and entertainments. Two important links to the outside world for women were radio programs and the magazine, Ie no hikari (Light of the Home). Although the Civil Code of 1947 outlawed the old ie or household system under a single patriarch and granted all women and younger sons rights of property and inheritance, rural women were reluctant to break up household property and often went to family courts to give up their rights to older sons or brothers. Village culture still expected new wives to be submissive to the husband's family, especially to the mother-in-law. Women of marriage age might dream of finding instead an eligible non-farmer mate in a nearby town. Under the new education laws, rural children were encouraged to attend school longer than in the past. In the 1950s, middle and high school graduates left rural communities, sometimes in a mass exodus, for work in the cities. For young women, the jobs ranged from maids in well-off households to factory workers; for a few, there might be work as office ladies or department store greeters. Most of the migrants remained in urban Japan as the rural population sank to less than than thirty percent by the end of the 1960s.

In May, 1949, the English language newspaper, Nippon Times, ran a two part series, "Freedom for Farm Women Still Far From Actuality." This was based on visits the previous year to various rural communities along the Inland Sea and the Eastern Sea road between Osaka and Tokyo, also to villages in the prefectures of Shizuoka and Nagano. The author felt sympathy for a war widow, a licensed teacher, who was under pressure from in-laws to marry her late husband's brother, sixteen years her junior. "Being of agrarian extraction myself, I knew the force of the shackles of convention in the farming communities and I could well appreciate the awkward predicament in which she was placed." Most war widows had little access to social welfare and lacked the means to make a living for themselves and their children. "Even today, most village women have no idea of their own and lead a life of drudgery on the farm and in the kitchen for the sake of their families—their 'houses'—and take it as a matter of course." In a more democratic village, also one better off economically, the author learned that young husbands had adopted the custom of giving their wives a "Free Day for Women" once a month—a day of "learning a new method of cooking, taking lessons in making children's dresses or enjoying doll-plays staged by the village young men." Diversion was fine, but the lost hours had to be made up. The author believed that true liberation of rural women under the new Constitution mandated a reduction in work, or making it "possible for them to do more work with less labor." Advances in mechanized farming would help everyone, but women could also advance their own cause by joining together in communal cooking and day care. In May 1953, the same newspaper ran a photographic essay by the chief women's editor, "Farm Wives Get Together Monthly to Improve Lot." Women, said the report, enjoyed the outings, "once or twice a month to learn cooking, sewing and the rational way of housekeeping." This time, guidance was provided by field workers from the Life Improvement Section of the Labor Ministry, perhaps a reminder of the state of everyday lives in prewar Japan.

Fishing Villages. Another group rarely studied is the women of Japan's fishing and forest villages. As a tourist attraction, there was much curiosity among Occupiers about ama or sea persons, the half nude female abalone and shellfish divers, often referred to as pearl divers; photographs are abundant. However, women in fishing villages did not go out to sea or captain boats. Until the late 1970s, that was men's work. Women also were not full members of fishing cooperatives. They were not welcome even to board boats, especially during menstruation. Their job was to serve as household managers and look after children. Their sea work was confined to the shore: picking up firewood, hauling nets, sorting the catch of the day—and peddling fish in the local market. Since the lives of their men, the fishers, were rough and often dangerous, one wonders how emancipation of women was initially understood in these communities.

Research Challenge. Until more archival research on the Occupation period becomes available, it is possible to gain a useful perspective and insight from the few existing field studies, interviews, and oral histories available in English—and from photographic records. A recent oral history which includes the Occupation period is Toshie, A Story of Village Life in Twentieth Century Japan. An older oral history which focuses on the 1970s but contains passing references to coming of age during the Occupation years is Haruko's World.