H 381 Japan in the 1920s-30s, Takai Toshio

Interwar years = tumultuous times for Japan. 

A "Second IR" gets underway, new factories producing chemicals, fertilizers, machine tools, electrical goods. 

Pre-WWI = mainly light industry, mainly textiles, female workers.  After WWI, most factory workers were male employed in large steel and machine factories; labor unions grow as does labor unrest.   Radical ideologies appear and flourish.

Andrew Gordon: one of the most turbulent periods of working class conflict in Japanese history.  There is now a “dispute culture” emerging among the working classes in the urban areas.

Japan was growing more than twice as fast as Germany and 3.5 times as fast as U.S.  Urban populations swelled as folks left the countryside and migrated to the city.  In 1920, Japan had two major urban concentrations: Tokyo-Yokohama and Kobe-Osaka-Kyoto. But all cities were growing!

Rice Riots 1918 a harbinger of modernism.  Strikes, labor agitation, riots, political violence became regularized = “the modern” had arrived.

Historian Kano Masanao notes formerly sedentary culture for women was transforming as many were becoming more active.

Telephone, cinema, radio, private RR lines, Department stores, cafes = the new urban lifestyle, pursuit of leisure.

Tipton and Clark note how modanizumu became the watchword of the times. 

Jordan Sand, cultural life, culture boom, culture houses in Ueno.

Harry Harootunian, change in women’s position: end of seclusion and isolation; women developed new sense of subjectivity. The marks of this new culture were western clothing, cosmetics, and the beauty salon.” Announced the end of the seclusion and isolation of women who had been held as virtual prisoners of the household.  Now they became actors in the drama of modernity. (27)

Yukiko Tanaka: 1920s = “New Women.” women worked to gain a sense of independence and do something exciting. 

E. Taylor Atkins, writes in Blue Nippon, a history of jazz in Japan pointing to dance music, automobiles, sports, movies = all symbols of modernism.

Kano points out that much of the spirit of the new age was captured in the title of Yamamoto Sanehiko’s new magazine, Kaizô [Reconstruction].  Began in April 1919; cover figures included Marx, Freud, Kropotkin, Lenin, H.G. Wells, Edward Carpenter, William Morris, Ellen Key, Gandhi, Henri Barbusse (proletarian literature and arts) , Karl Kautsky, Havelock Ellis, Gorky, Trotsky, Rabindranath Tagore, Charlie Chaplin, Mussolini, Churchill, Bernard Shaw, and Chinese writer Lu Xun.  The feeling was that not only was Meiji Japan the old Japan, but even the Taisho era was now dated. Great Kanto Earthquake reinforced the notion that this was the age of “Reconstruction.”

NOTE: Yamamoto Sanehiko and his publishing company, Kaizôsha, were the publishers of Hosoi Wakizô’s book, The Sad History of Female Textile Workers.

Also this was the era of Ero, guro nansensu [The Erotic, the Grotesque and the Nonsensical], and mobo [modern boys] moga [modern girls]. Taylor notes that mobo and moga represented the worst fears of the guardians of traditional morality and culture.  And Barbara Sato, writes that while flapper styles may have only been sported by a few women = they still represented the possibilities that were now open to all women. There was a new way of thinking about women afoot. 

This was what was "in the air" during these "Interwar Years."

 

Ch. 3 Takai Toshio: “Changing Consciousness”

Watson: a new kind of womanhood, redefining womanhood and personhood for contemporaries, i.e., constituting a new female subject. 

Childhood Years:

Younger sister, Shizue became ill and died suddenly; then younger brother Shigeyuki dies of burns.  Deep pain; Toshio’s own leg becomes malformed. 

Into the Factory:

Joins Ogaki Tokyo Woolen Goods—20 people in a 12-mat room; dining hall filty, dark and dirty.  Work grueling.  Injured on loom company had no sympathy; her stupidity cost the company money! 

Writes about discrimination against Korean female workers at Yamato Koriyama cotton spinning mill. She sympathized with them but also felt angry about their treatment.  

Mother dies September; after 35 days of mourning, father moves back in with lover whom he marries; she is very young –22 yrs old and Toshio is 17.  Awkward!!

A Single Pamphlet

Toshio becomes inspired by Christian activist and Politcs professor, Yoshino Sakuzô who authored a pamphlet, "The Discovery of Individuality," calling on workers to unite, awaken to their own value and individuals have to define and develop their individuality.  Toshio was inspired; leaves Koriyama and headed for Tokyo.  Goes to Kameido which was a haven for labor union organizers.  The Nankatsu Labor Union wass headquartered there —her consciousness is shaped and radicalized by "the spirit of Nankatsu." 

Model Textile Worker

Wanted to study and begin to live like a human being, not a pig.  Inspired by Yoshino, she wanted correct injustices and join the worker’s struggle. She did not have to send any of her earnings home as most other young female workers did, so she had discretionary funds to spend. She bought and read books at library, Tolstoy, Ibsen, Zola and Turgenev. Saw the Ibsen play, A Doll's House. 

 

Strike

May 2, 1920, May Day Demo at Ueno.  Huge crwod of people waving Red Flags.  Strike at Tokyo Muslin; she speaks up at strike committee meeting for better food. 

Harassed by company and police; arrested and detained for 1 week—beat, tortured, hit and kicked. 

May, 1921, meets Hosoi Wakizô.  He introduces her to the writings of feminsm of August Bebel; Hosoi's own mother committed suicide by drowning at 27; his grandmother raised him.  He was like a teacher or mentor to her: feminist writings and stories of labor activism. He treated her as a human being and as an equal.  Lived together for 3 years.

The Great Kantô  Earthquake.  September 1, 1923. She saw Koreans rounded up and murdered; labor union activists were attacked, too.  They had to get out of Kameido.  Their trip was like their honeymoon. 

Sweet potatoes and rice balls on the train but bourgeois women talk of losing a maid but she was just a maid!  Toshio incensed and called them out.

Toshio becomes café waitress.  After a while, Wakizô wanted to return to Kameido—it suits his working class character. 

Wakizô dies 18 August, 1925 6:00 pm.  Acute peritonitis. They had just checked him in to Kameido Charity Hospital but while Toshio out trying to scrape together some money, he died. 

Yammoto Sanehiko, the editor and publisher of Kaizô comes.

Toshio recalls how Wakizô had taken her to lectures by Abe Isô, Yoshino Sakuzô, and Yamamoto Senji, a sex educator. 

Toshio was pregnant and son was born, Akatsuki, but he died; second generation of fatherless sons.  Lived just one week.  Toshio received substantial royalites of 300, then 200, and another 300-yen.  600 more?  Then she was cut off because of her behavior--seen out in the company of men.

Meets Takai Shintarô, an unemployed carpenter fired by Mitsukoshi furniture manufacturing plant. Photo of them out together appears Hochi shinbun April 1926, with the headline, “Profligate Ways of Hosoi’s Widow.”  Yamamoto cuts off her royalties.  She rocked the boat, was being an unruly woman.  Takai wanted to marry her but she felt at 23 she needed to get out of Tokyo. 

Toshio tried working in cotton spinning mills but when they found out who she was, she would get fired. 

Remarriage—Kagawa Toyohiko, the Christian Labor Activist, officiated.  Children born; Takai arrested by the Tokkô, the Special Higher Police; he was held 3 months. She had to search for him and finally, a week later, he is freed.  1942 second son Yoshihide dies; older son Masanobu had died in 1933.

1945 bombing and hell on earth.  August 15, war ended.  Takai died in his bed.  Her poem p. 328. 

 

 

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