Background. Here, the emphasis is on wage earning women in the modern urban work place. Women workers outside of the home were hardly novel in wartime and Occupied Japan. But there is a link to the past. For over a thousand years, Japanese women had worked at laborious tasks along side of men in the rice fields of Japan. Recent studies of women in the early modern period, Tokugawa Japan (1603-1868), have thrown considerable light on women's productive and reproductive roles in agricultural communities. Moreover, younger and older rural women often worked in small-scale cottage industries that required little capital, light but inventive technology, and long hours—such as weaving cloth.

In the modern period, following the Meiji Restoration of 1868, women were very much a part of the creation of an industrial society by private initiative, the state, and mixed enterprise. Women were in fact were key to the story of early industrialization. In the late 19th century, girls and young women were essential as short-term contract laborers in the cotton and silk textile mills. The statistics are amazing: women were 60 percent of industrial labor force in the textile industry of Meiji Japan (1868-1912) and responsible for 80 percent of the earnings in international trade. For the most part, they were young and unmarried village girls and worked under low-paid, three to five year contracts on behalf of their impoverished families. If they survived the ordeal of closely guarded dormitory, stultifying factory conditions, and abusive supervisors, they returned to their villages and married. Other women, both married and unmarried, worked at heavy labor in the mining industry, also under male supervision.

Harsh Working Conditions. Given these conditions, it is not surprising that women in the mills of the 1880s staged some of the first labor strikes in Japan. For urban working men and women, this did not lead to a sustained labor movement or unionization and collective bargaining in early 20th century Japan. In the liberal 1920s, however, in the aftermath of World War I and Japan's Siberian Expedition, Japanese working women were increasingly visible in the public crowd and in labor demonstrations, though not on the same scale as men in heavy industries or in skilled jobs, such as dockworkers or ironworkers. Farm women and urban housewives had also joined—and in some places perhaps led—the Rice Riots of 1918 which helped to bring down the wartime government and set the stage for Japan's first majority party cabinet. Young women continued to dominate low-paying, temporary work in textile mills, but as Japan continued to urbanize, jobs for women in the lower and middle classes greatly diversified. Either out of necessity or in search of financial independence, they became telephone operators, office clerks, bus conductors, cafe waitresses, or taxi dancers. For women graduates of normal schools, positions opened up as lower level primary school teachers but not as principals. In addition, more married women than before joined the ranks of urban working women.

Protective legislation for women and children was slow to arrive in Japan (as in the United States). The abusive conditions under which Japan's women and children labored began to attract attention from journalists, scholars, and activists and led to several exposés. One of the most graphic and widely read was Jōko aishi (Sad History of Female Factory Workers), published in 1925 by Hosoi Wakizō. His common law wife, Takai Toshio, a factory worker herself, did most of the interviews while he struggled with failing health (decades later, 1982, she told her own story as My Own Sad Story of Female Factory Workers). Japanese women, too, became more self-conscious. They turned out in increasing numbers to march in May Day labor demonstrations, 1920-1936. They participated in protests over the roundup of male labor leaders in Tokyo, 1923-1925. And for several days in November, 1925, they led their own strike against a large cotton mill in Kawasaki City. Socialist women formed auxiliaries of men's labor organizations and wrote for and edited women's labor newsletters and magazines. Women took different positions in debates, sometimes acrimonious, over protection of working mothers and children. Not all were in agreement as to the proper role of the state. Modest protective legislation for women and children was passed by the Japanese Diet in the late 1920s, mainly affecting hours and heavy labor. Despite the concern, women tended to be younger, even teenagers, than men in the work place, and they earned less than half of the pay of men. When the Great Depression hit industrial countries, overseas competitors complained that Japan's successful trade boom in the early 1930s was in part a result of low wages, including the exploitation of women workers in textile mills. It should be noted that many urban women—before, then and later—were self-employed and, in addition to household tasks, worked side by side with their husbands in neighborhood retail shops or Mom and Pop stores.

Total War. As tensions and border incidents with China escalated into total war, 1937, Japanese housewives joined patriotic associations and expanded their domestic role outside of the home. In many cases, they performed the difficult double job of housework and war-related factory work as more and more men were drafted into the armed forces. This became more pronounced following Japan's advance into Southeast Asia and attack on Pearl Harbor, December 1941. During the Pacific War, 1941-45, Japanese women were encouraged, then ordered, to engage in war related work, although not on the same scale as in Britain and the Soviet Union or in the United States. In rhetoric and law, the Japanese state protected the sanctity of motherhood and gave more honor to women who produced many children, preferably male, than to those who produced weapons. In the fall of 1944, Japan's dire defense needs led to the passage of a tougher and more comprehensive labor mobilization act for civilian men and women than previously. In practice, the law tended to have greater effect on the daughters of the lower and middle classes than upper classes. Unmarried women worked in arsenals and factories. Women students in high schools and junior colleges were also recruited for part-time war work—for example, making parachutes. Even in extreme circumstances as the air war came to the homefront, families worried about exploitation and sexual harassment of their working daughters and wives.

Occupation Years. As in so many other cases about the experiences of Japanese women, we know less in Western scholarship about urban working women during the actual Occupation period than about trends in the work place before 1945 and after 1952. Until very recently, scholars have tended to leap over the Occupation years, forcing us to look hard for evidence. The early postwar Japanese government encouraged women to return to their households as solders were demobilized from the armed services or repatriated from overseas and returned to peacetime jobs. However, the daily survival needs of widows and families without able-bodied males brought women back into the work place if not into prostitution. Though labor unions grew rapidly, even to unanticipated numbers, in the years immediately following the war, women workers were relegated, as before, to auxiliary women's groups. Women and men once again marched in May Day demonstrations and engaged in labor disputes, though usually in separate contingents. The drop in silk demand in U.S. markets, in part because of the shift from silk stockings to nylons and to synthetic materials, was hard on Japan's silk mills. Production of cotton goods was in direct competition with the U.S. cotton industry. Other possibilities for Japanese women were service positions in the homes and billets of the occupiers or in hotels catering to foreigners. And, if skilled in English, they could apply for low-level positions as interpreters, translators, or clerks in the special staff sections of GHQ.

Japanese working women were afforded some protection in an important new law, the Labor Standards Act of April 1947, which followed an examination of the labor scene in Japan by a special mission of U.S. labor leaders to advise General MacArthur in the summer of 1946. The sole woman on the Mission, writer Helen Mears, had had been in Japan in 1935 and had observed the plight of working women. She shared similar concerns with the few American women serving in the Labor Division of the Economic and Scientific Section, GHQ of the Supreme Commander, such as Gloria Stander. The new law, which remained in force until the mid-1980s, gave special consideration to women and minors by protecting them from overtime or late-night work and by extending menstrual leaves to women. This 1947 law was not intended to advance women's working careers or workplace authority—or to enforce equal wages. Critics would later charge that the law had the unintended effect of preserving certain jobs for men in the guise of protecting or liberating women.

Collaborating closely, Japanese and American reformers, again primarily women of various backgrounds and positions, promoted the creation of a Women's and Minors' [Children's] Bureau in the new Ministry of Labor established in September 1947. Following considerable debate among the backers, the initial leadership of the bureau fell for three years to seasoned socialist intellectual and critic, Yamakawa Kikue. Serving under her was a veteran labor administrator and inspector, Tanino Setsu, who later became the head for ten years, 1955-65. Both gave emphasis to provisions for child care, maternity leave, and equal pay; they had a long way to go to improve working conditions for women, but the bureaucratic apparatus was at least in place. In April 1949, Yamakawa initiated the annual commemoration of Women's Day as a way of drawing attention to women's achievements and needs. Her immediate successor for five years, 1950-55, was Fujita Tani, a prominent educator and president of a leading private women's college (Tsuda College), and an internationalist with friends overseas.

In 1950, according to labor surveys, 13.9 million Japanese women were employed in industrial jobs within a population of 85 million; 60 percent were in primary industries since women still lacked the desired technical knowledge for jobs held by men. With the increase of U.S. expenditures in Japan following the outbreak of the Korean War, June 1950, more jobs opened up to both men and women in war related and consumer industries. Exploration of archival records, newspapers, and magazines is overdue in reporting and analyzing the full story. Photographs are another important source of information during the Occupation period, but, apart from May Day marches or food protests, where men and women appear in separate groups, one has to look very hard to find images of women in the work place. They are in fact there, but in a lesser or minor role. Working women, too, have been neglected in studies of Occupation literature, art, and film, although there was renewed intellectual and creative interest in social and proletarian themes. Among leftist magazines for women, the most important was Hataraku fujin (Working Women). It was also one of the magazines most carefully watched and frequently censored by Occupation media officers, 1945-1949. It merits close scholarly review for its contents, theme, authors and readers. Another journal, Shufu no tomo (Women's Friend), had been a patriotic supporter of Japan's war effort. Though it made a return as a popular postwar magazine for rural and less educated women, it has been overlooked for its essays, fiction, fashions, and cartoons—and for its coverage of urban working women in comparison with domesticity and the family. Finally, there were magazines for intellectual women, such as Fujin no koron (Women's Review). What concerns did they express for working women? Young and older women in popular culture or making a living as actors, singers, dancers, or musicians are still another part of the story of working women, but less neglected.

Post-Occupation. The story of women and the workplace underwent more change in the mid-1950s and 1960s, as Japan's economy recovered and then grew at double digit rates in the aftermath of the Korean War; the First and Second Five Year Economic Plans; and refinement of industrial rationalization policies. One of the most sensational strikes immediately following the Occupation took place for over a hundred days in the summer of 1954 at the Ōmi Mills, a string of cotton manufactories which had once specialized in silk. Thousands of young unmarried women became involved, marched in the streets waving banners and placards, and turned the strike into a human rights protest. However, housewives, after child rearing, came to be the chief source of low-paid labor, often part-time, especially in manufacturing or sub-contracting firms where women's presumed dexterity and single-mindedness were deemed more important than technical knowledge. Young single women also worked at varied low level or pink collar jobs as waitresses, store clerks, typists and office assistants, or tourist guides between graduation and marriage. Though working women (and unpaid household labor) were essential to Japan's emergence as number three in the world in Gross Domestic Product by 1967-68, they did not become leaders on the factory floor or union bosses. In large corporations, women employees did not benefit from lifetime employment, year-end bonuses, or the seniority wage system. Corporate Japan rarely welcomed them as section chiefs or executives. As before, giving birth and child rearing were viewed by society, by women themselves, and by the media as women's primary function or role. A revival of the feminist movement in the early 1970s, including a Japanese version of “women's lib,” would challenge these presuppositions and prescriptions.