Outside 1900s
The Burden of Youth (1)

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These girls carrying toddlers are komori (子守). The term covers any person taking care of children. But in the late 1800s and early 1900s the word especially referred to young girls hired for childcare. Enduring great hardships, they carried the burdens of the modern age on their young backs.

During the Meiji Period (1868–1912), young girls taking care of children became a fixture of Japan’s streets. One foreign observer remarked that it was “a remarkable sight to see five children out of six lugging babies upon their backs.”¹

Some of them carried children who were only a year or two younger than themselves. Their feet almost trailed the ground, wrote Japanese author Jukichi Inouye (井上十吉, 1862-1929) in 1911 (Meiji 44).²

At first the girls can hardly walk with such burdens; but they soon get used to them, and they run, romp, and dance with their companions without much concern for their charges, who are often put in very uncomfortable positions.

Not only girls were assigned to babysitting duty. Boys also carried their younger siblings on their backs. Boys being boys, this came with additional risk.³

[They], however, fare worse when they are on their brothers’ backs; for these urchins, being rougher and more careless than their sisters, fly kites, climb up trees, flourish bamboo poles to catch cicadas, run after dragon-flies, and even snowball one another, utterly regardless of the discomfort they occasion their charges, who, if they cry, are knocked with the back of the head, and seem soon to become habituated to the dangers they run through the recklessness of their carriers.

Komori were especially common in Japan’s small rural villages and towns, as well as in merchant families in the city.⁴ They were not only girls hired for the job, but also sisters and brothers taking care of younger siblings, or the children of neighbors.

Many girl komori were indentured, usually for three to five years, but even as long as ten.⁵ Their desperately poor parents, whose main aim was to lessen the number of mouths to feed and keep all their children alive, were paid in rice or money at the start of the contract period.

The girls received room, board, and small gifts like clothing and footwear, but no wages. Some older komori received wages if they also did housework like cleaning and cooking.⁶

From as young as five years old through their early teens komori bore the burden of Japan’s push to modernize and industrialize. Their labor freed up mothers and other family members to work.

Moreover, countless female komori later became factory workers, especially at silk and cotton factories which produced Japan’s top export commodities and powered its industrial revolution.⁷ Uneducated and from impoverished families, becoming a komori marked the start of a hard life as a marginalized working woman.

Ultimate Outsider

Unlike maids in Western countries, komori were not status symbols working at manors and luxurious homes in conditions which broadened their horizon. They were mainly employed by families running enterprises where each and every family member needed to contribute.⁸

This particularly applied to families involved in rice farming. American zoologist and archaeologist Edward S. Morse (1838–1925), who first visited Japan in the 1870s, described how producing rice was so labor-intensive that all family members had to pitch in, regardless of age:⁹

In some of the plots men are at work breaking up the soil; in others distributing from buckets the liquid manure; while in still others the work of transplanting is going on; for every little rice plant, like a spear of grass, has to be put in place by the hands, a task that seems incredible, but the whole family join in the work, old women as well as the children. The smaller children seem to be in attendance as spectators, carrying on their backs the babies.

Not only rice farmers and merchants mobilized all hands. So did manufacturers, silk producers, artisans, innkeepers, restaurant owners. With each family member hard at work, the komori’s job was to keep the babies and toddlers out of their way.¹⁰

This meant that a komori spent most of her day outside the sanctuary of the home, at shrine and temple grounds, river banks, and on the fields and streets.¹¹

They were rarely welcome at these places either. Most komori were hired from other villages, and stayed for a few years only. So, many villagers saw them as transient outsiders and treated them unkindly. A komori song from the period describes the pain of always getting shoved away:¹²

If I go back to the house, the baby’s mother is mad.
If I go out to the yard, the baby’s father is mad.
If I go out through the front door, the baby’s grandmother is mad.
If I go to the gate, the neighborhood children are hard on me.
If I go to the rice paddies, crows peck me.
If I go to the mountains, wild roses prick me.

Some villages had something akin to public facilities where komori found shelter, often shrines and temples. American anthropologist John Embree described how in the 1930s komori and children in a village in Kyushu played at small buddhist shrines that the villagers used as communal spaces.¹³

In each buraku is a small wooden structure called dō [お堂 or 仏堂], usually tile-roofed though sometimes tin- or straw-roofed, which houses some Buddhist deity. The dō plays an important role in the life of the buraku as a gathering and play place for the buraku children. Every day after breakfast the small pre-school-children under seven years of age as well as a number of fourteen-year-old nursemaids carrying smaller babies on their backs gather here. They play until noon—then come back again after lunch and play until nightfall and supper-time. The children enjoy running around the building and playing games on the floor. It forms a shelter in case of rain. The children are in nobody’s way as the dō is left quite unused except two or three times a year when celebrations are held there for the patron deity. The image enshrined gives mothers a feeling that the place is safe for their children.

However, in many villages a komori was effectively homeless during working hours. When it rained she found shelter as best as she could, even just under an eave.¹⁴

It’s hard to stay with a baby all day.
I have no place to avoid rain and wind.
If I stand under somebody’s eaves,
I’m told “Go away, go there. Not there, here.”
They don’t like me. They want to get rid of me.
This is how I spend days while serving as a nursemaid.

Continue to Part 2 : Privations and Resistance.

Notes

¹ Morse, Edward S. (1917). Japan Day by Day. Volume I. Boston, New York: Houghton Mifflin Company, 10.

² Inouye, Jukichi (1911). Home Life in Tokyo. The Tokyo Printing Company, Ltd., 226–228.

³ ibid.

⁴ Asano Tamanoi, Mariko (1998). Under the Shadow of Nationalism. Politics and Poetics of Rural Japanese Women. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 56, 216.

⁵ Initially there were also indentured boy komori, but their number decreased as the Meiji Period progressed. Tamanoi attributes this to the notions of “manliness” and “womanliness” that were emerging as the Japanese nation-state came into being. ibid, 61.

⁶ ibid, 64.

⁷ ibid, 85.

⁸ ibid, 56, 61–64.

⁹ Morse, Edward S. (1917). Japan Day by Day. Volume I. Boston, New York: Houghton Mifflin Company, 10.

¹⁰ Asano Tamanoi, Mariko (1998). Under the Shadow of Nationalism. Politics and Poetics of Rural Japanese Women. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 62.

¹¹ ibid, 56.

¹² Wells, Keiko (1997). Japanese Folksongs Created by Child Nursemaids. 『立命館言語文化研究』 9巻1号, 262.
From: 北原白秋 編（1974）『日本伝承童謡集成』第1巻 (子守唄篇) 改訂新版 三省堂, 181.

¹³ Embree, John F. (1946). A Japanese Village: Suye Mura. London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner & Co., Ltd., 21.

¹⁴ Wells, Keiko (1997). Japanese Folksongs Created by Child Nursemaids. 『立命館言語文化研究』 9巻1号, 263.
From: 『栃木県の民謡』 民謡緊急調査報告書 栃木県教育委員会(1983), 16.

Published July 31, 2023
Updated December 22, 2023 2:11 PM

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