Outside 1880s
The Burden of Youth (2)

PART 1 | PART 2 | PART 3 | PART 4

This is Part 2 of an essay about komori (子守), young girls hired for childcare. They carried the burdens of the modern age on their young backs.

Privations

Winter was especially hard on komori. They would wear a special oversized padded haori coat known as a nenneko haori (ねんねこ袢纏) or komori hanten (子守半纏). It had wide sleeves, a larger overhang, was generally filled with cotton and was worn over the baby to keep both the komori and the baby warm.

Photos show that some komori also wore a kind of mini futon which must have been quite heavy and burdensome.

However, the haori and mini futon barely protected against the cold. In her book Autobiography of a Geisha (1957), Sayo Masuda (増田小夜, 1925–2008) recalls how she became a komori around five years old. Cold weather was torture, she writes:¹³

When I was minding a child, even though my back would be warm from carrying it, my feet would be as cold as ice. In winter, no matter how cold it was, I was never allowed to wear socks; and so I would lift one leg up and warm my foot on the thigh of the other leg, doing this over and over again so that I was always standing on one leg. That’s how I got the nickname “Crane.”

One of Masuda’s duties as a komori was washing the diapers. This was done in a nearby stream which froze in winter.¹⁴

They woke me up at about five in the morning and made me do the washing in the stream. There are two kinds of streams in the countryside: streams for washing dishes and streams for washing clothes. In winter, all the streams are frozen, but at the places where everyone does their washing, the ice is thinner. You would break the ice at those thin spots and wash the diapers there. Since I was a child and did things slowly, the washed diapers would already be frozen by the time I was ready to rinse them. Blowing hard on my chapped hands, I’d soak the diapers in the water all over again and then rinse them.

Scorned by adults, picked on by other children, and exposed to the elements, komori naturally sought the company of each other. Often, they formed small groups to roam the neighborhood together and created a world of their own. Contemporary accounts mention their rough manners and coarse language.

Discrimination, neglect, and extreme weather were just three of many challenges a komori faced. Another was a lack of food. Although she carried a crying baby on her back all day long—demanding even for adults—the food she received could often barely sustain her.

Lots of komori songs have references to food. In one song a komori complains that she is always given pickled radish and rice gruel. “Why don’t you sometimes give me fish?” she asks.¹⁵ Masuda recalled that she was fed with leftovers:¹⁶

As for filling my stomach, I was entirely at the mercy of others for my meals. There was a chipped bowl that they left under the sink in the kitchen into which they put their leftover rice and soup. If there were lots of leftovers, then even with just that one bowl I’d be full; but if nothing had been left, then that was that. After everyone had finished eating, I would go to the kitchen and peer into the bowl, and if something was in it, I would quickly crouch under the sink and eat it.

It is not clear how long a komori carried her charge on her back. Some sources mention children as old as four or five. A contemporary source mentioned that children of that age quite naturally “did not want to be on their komori’s back, but wanted to play by themselves.”¹⁷ To prevent their charges from interfering in their games, komori devised imaginative ways to control them. They even tied them to posts, “like horses, persuading them that it will be fun to be tied up.”¹⁸

Resistance

Living a life of slavery, with scoldings, beatings, and a crying baby on their young backs all day long, while being exposed to the elements, komori developed an inward resistance that expressed itself in their songs. Japanese anthropologist Mariko Tamanoi (玉野井麻利子, 1950~) describes this in her book Under the Shadow of Nationalism. Politics and Poetics of Rural Japanese Women:¹⁹

In the songs, komori rarely express “maternal” love for their charges and treat them as objects that often annoy them. They rarely express respect for their masters and mistresses, speaking ill of and caricaturing them. Furthermore, allusive and metaphorical references to body parts and sexual intercourse abound in the komori’s songs.

Komori songs, continues Tamanoi, “fostered a sense of solidarity, through which komori could acknowledge among themselves their freedom to pursue their material and sexual desires.”²⁰ The latter was not always limited to “allusive and metaphorical references” as Japanese folklorist Tsuneichi Miyamoto (宮本常一, 1907-1981) discovered.

In 1941 (Showa 16) he interviewed a “tiny old man, well over eighty” in the village of Yusuhara (梼原) in the mountains of Kochi Prefecture. Tosa Genji, as Miyamoto called him, shared his very personal memories of komori as a young boy.²¹

[Komori] went in packs to the forest by the shrine or to a dry riverbed on the edge of town and played house and fought and sang together. Us boys with no nursemaids somehow just joined those groups. They say, “Children raise themselves, even without parents,” and that’s true.

Like the komori, Tosa Genji did not go to school. He also did not work, so hung out with the komori even in his early teens. An older komori introduced him to a new game. If you are prudish, you may want to skip the next quote.²²

There was no place to play on a rainy day. Three or four nursemaids would gather in a barn somewhere and the children would play. When the children fell asleep, they’d lay them down on straw mats and the nursemaids would play among themselves. “Playing” wasn’t anything in particular. They’d burrow into the piles of straw, sometimes bare their fronts, compare the size of their thighs and the size of their sex, and put their fingers in one another and scream and make a fuss.

They’d tell me to pull mine out, and they’d make me pull it out, and they were amused by it. In time, an older nursemaid said, “to have sex, you put a boy’s in here. The other day I saw my older sister with a young boy, in the shade of the tall reeds behind the house. Why don’t you try putting it in me.” And saying that, she put mine in. That was my first knowledge of women. I didn’t think it was particularly good and the nursemaid said, “well that was nothing.” She was suspicious because her older sister had seemed so happy.

Just the same, from then on there was one more way to play and the nursemaids said “put it in me,” and “put it in me,” and because I was the only boy I put it in all of them. So, mostly just on rainy days we played that way in the barn. I didn’t think it was that good, but all in all it was the most interesting way to play.

Such behavior may not have been that exceptional in the countryside. Frequent and strong sexual references during everyday conversations were commonplace in rural areas. Children picked up on that and would have become curious.

In the fall of 1935 (Showa 10) anthropologists John and Ella Embree (Ella’s name later became Wiswell) arrived at the small agricultural village of Suye in Kyushu’s Kumamoto Prefecture and studied the community for a year. Theirs is the only “corpus of data, secured by direct observation, on the day-to-day behavior of Japanese villagers before the Pacific War.”²³

The aspect that especially startled the Embrees was the villagers’ continuous sexual joking and play, especially by women. Many villagers were excited to instruct Wiswell in the “vocabulary of sexual references and very curious to learn about how Americans dealt with this ever-absorbing topic.”²⁴

Mrs. Tanimoto informed me that the thumb thrust between the second and third fingers stands for vagina, while the equivalent male sign is the forefinger stretched out, as if pointing. A forefinger thrust between the second and third fingers of the other hand is one of the signs for copulation. At once the conversation turned a bit free. They wanted to know how Americans make love. Mrs. Fujita assured me that at her age people use their tongues because they can do nothing else. She concluded that at my age we still make love and so are too bashful to discuss it. When she was my age, she said, they had intercourse at least twice every night, but now they do not do it even once.

Making sexual references was not limited to adults, the Embrees discovered. Young komori girls did so as well.²⁵

After a while the little nursemaids began to ask riddles. “What is this?” asked Yaeko. “Only six inches long. Not used in daylight. Used at night. White liquid comes out. (Go sun bakkari. Hiru tamenaran. Ban ni tamenaru. Shiroi shiru deru mono.)” Before she got halfway through Fumie began jumping around and yelling. “It’s that! (Sono koto da!)”

Said Yaeko, after a few moments’ excitement, “It’s a candle—there! (Rōsoku desu—hora)” Then Fumie went over to her and whispered what she thought it was. “Well!” said Yaeko, “Fumie thought it was a penis!” There was much laughter.

The coarse language, the roaming around, the presumed promiscuity, but especially that these “rough” girls effectively raised Japan’s next generation, horrified Japan’s elite and newly emerging middle class. An increasing number of schoolteachers and journalists expressed their revulsion of what they considered extreme vulgarity.

Intend on showing the world that Japan was “enlightened and civilized,” and turning komori into productive subjects of the new nation-state it was building, the Japanese government launched programs to “abolish the evil ways of the past” and “reform” the komori.

Continue to Part 3 : A Danger to the Nation-State.

Notes

¹³ Masuda, Sayo (2003). Autobiography of a Geisha. New York : Columbia University Press, 13.

¹⁴ ibid, 14.

¹⁵ Asano Tamanoi, Mariko (1998). Under the Shadow of Nationalism. Politics and Poetics of Rural Japanese Women. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 77.

¹⁶ Masuda, Sayo (2003). Autobiography of a Geisha. New York : Columbia University Press, 12.

¹⁷ Asano Tamanoi, Mariko (1998). Under the Shadow of Nationalism. Politics and Poetics of Rural Japanese Women. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 64.

¹⁸ Smith, Robert J.; Wiswell, Ella Lury (1982). The women of Suye Mura. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 234.

¹⁹ Asano Tamanoi, Mariko (1998). Under the Shadow of Nationalism. Politics and Poetics of Rural Japanese Women. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 80.

²⁰ ibid, 81.

²¹ Miyamoto, Tsuneichi; Irish, Jeffrey (2010). The Forgotten Japanese: Encounters with Rural Life and Folklore. Berkeley: Stone Bridge Press, 110.

²² ibid, 111.

²³ Smith, Robert J.; Wiswell, Ella Lury (1982). The women of Suye Mura. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, ix.

²⁴ ibid, 61.

²⁵ ibid, 70–71.

Published August 1, 2023
Updated December 22, 2023 2:11 PM

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