Nationalism and Patricia Tsurumi’s Findings on Japanese Female Labor

With Japan’s goal of making a competitive nation of itself in the Meiji period, its many reforms and changes were directed towards the nation’s nationalism. Its inorganization, however may have hurt their goal more than enforced it in the case of poor families and their daughters.

According to Tsurumi, many young girls in poor families wanted to go to textile factories to make money for their families. At the time, women of the family working for supplemental income was encouraged and seen as positive from the outside. In many cases it wasn’t necessary and the girls, sometimes hardly over 10, wanted to go work help their family and support them. Even if their family didn’t need or want them to go, the responsibility or desire to help was enough for them. Recruiters who took over the girls’ ignorance lead them into a bad situation that was bad for their health while also making a pittance.

I think there had to be some sort of nationalism or at least social sense of wanting to provide for ones family that drove women to helping in the first place, but by breaking their trust, how could they have been inspired to have any nationalism? Tsurumi’s descriptions on conditions made these textile factories seem like prisons, like slave labor, and no matter what their intentions were going into that, I find it hard to believe that many would come out with any sort of nationalism. Maybe a shared sense of struggle would build a trust between each other, even between women at other factories around Japan, but for the country? It seems like they would be divided against the country that allowed this to happen to them.

Aside from nationalism, I think that this could have also separated Japanese women from each other. In the factories women of higher status, even just barely, were pitted against their peers for their monetary gain. Between classes, women of low class were trying to make money for their families, but higher class were focusing on education and ways to properly support their family in accordance with Empress Haruko. Even though these women were all trying to support their families in some way, I think the ways that were provided to them to support them ended placing them in opposite corners from each other.