Outside 1900s
The Burden of Youth (3)

PART 1 | PART 2 | PART 3 | PART 4

This is Part 3 of an essay about komori (子守), young girls hired for childcare. They carried the burdens of the modern age on their young backs.

Child of Meiji

Komori are very much children of the Meiji Period (1868–1912). They are mentioned during the Edo Period (1603-1868), but were limited to elite families. Japanese anthropologist Mariko Tamanoi (玉野井麻利子, 1950~) believes that the custom spread to ordinary families during the Meiji Period.²⁶

This was a time of incomprehensible change. To create a “rich country and strong military” (富国強兵, fukoku kyōhei ) the Japanese government transformed an isolated feudal society with a “rice economy” into a powerful modern and industrialized nation-state increasingly exporting commodities such as silk, cotton, tea, and coal. Old institutions that had survived for centuries were destroyed, totally new ones were created.

One can hardly overstate the change. To illustrate, at the start of the Meiji Period Japan barely had a navy and was at great risk of being colonized by Western powers. Only 37 years later it decimated Russia’s Baltic Fleet and inflicted a crushing defeat on the Imperial Russian Army—at the time the largest in Europe.

Social change was even more profound. For example, until the 1860s children were almost exclusively socialized and taken care of at home with caregiving tasks and responsibilities shared by all family members.

By the 1930s bringing up children was seen as the mother’s job, assisted by specialized institutions such as public schools, kindergartens, day-care centers, and child consultation centers.²⁷

The government policies that brought about this epochal transformation unleashed powerful forces. The girls and young women of Japan’s lower classes especially felt their impact. Simultaneously crucial instruments and vulnerable victims of the government policies, they were like flowers thrown into a raging river, mostly powerless to influence this domination of their lives.

Particularly significant were the fiscal policies to restrain the rampant inflation of the 1870s. They caused one of the worst economic depressions Japan experienced in its modern history, the Matsukata Deflation (松方デフレ) of the early 1880s. It was compounded by a cholera epidemic (1882), growing military expenditures, and a global financial panic.²⁸ Between 1881 (Meiji 14) and 1884 (Meiji 17) the price of rice fell by half on the Tokyo exchange.²⁹

Crashing crop prices and rising taxes hit farmers like a sledgehammer. By 1884, 70 to 80 percent of farm households were in debt.³⁰ Many fell into a debt spiral leading to bankruptcy, dispossession, and tenancy.³¹ Terrible weather conditions that devastated agricultural crops in 1884 worsened their distress.

Destitution created vast migration to major cities—where slums mushroomed—as well as Japan’s first large emigration wave, especially to Hawaii (1885).³²

The consequences were particularly tragic for girls and young women of the lower classes. In the following decades the most destitute families had no choice but to sell off their daughters to brothels and geisha houses, or indenture them as komori. Additionally, hundreds of thousands of daughters were contracted out to work at factories. With many parents receiving a large advance loan against the girl’s future earnings, this effectively indentured her.³³

The similarities and connections between prostitutes, geisha, komori, and factory girls are not incidental. They were all daughters of poor families that bore the brunt of the Meiji reforms, had to support their suffering families, and led miserable lives.

Many komori actually ended up working as prostitutes, geisha, or factory girls. Sayo Masuda (1925–2008), author of Autobiography of a Geisha, did three of these jobs. She started as a komori, then became a geisha, and later worked as a prostitute.

Sadly, lots of girls did not survive long—conditions in the spinning industry for example were so harsh that a large number died of tuberculosis.³⁴

Crucial but Scorned

The Japanese nation-state and its industrial base were in large degree built on the labor of these women. From 1889 (Meiji 22) through 1937 (Showa 12) between 76 and 91 percent of all workers in Japan’s textile industry—the foundation of Japan’s industrialization—were young unmarried women. No other industrializing economy saw such a high percentage of women in its workforce.³⁵

Their cheap factory labor created the products that earned Japan its much needed foreign reserves, and the funds that built its military, while laying the foundation for its future heavy and chemical industries.³⁶

Companies proudly referenced this and lectured their employees that their “patriotic labor” enabled Japan to take its place among the nations of the world. “There can be no loyalty to the country greater than” working “to the utmost of your abilities from morning to night,” exclaimed a 1911 (Meiji 44) textbook for young female textile workers.³⁷

The Owari Plant of the Toyo Cotton Spinning Company (東洋紡績, Toyo Boseki ) even included this sentiment in its anthem:³⁸

Your labor is known to be precious.
The treasure of our precious country
Is produced by your working hands.

In a very real sense, these women were the instruments of the government’s modernization policies. As komori, their unpaid labor allowed a large swath of Japan’s population to work, as factory workers they cheaply powered its industry.³⁹

In spite of this vital contribution, the new middle class—bureaucrats, journalists, teachers, and other white-collar workers—eyed them with suspicion. They saw these girls and young women as a moral danger to the emerging nation-state, and found their behavior intolerable.

In 1887 (Meiji 20), women’s magazine Jogaku Zasshi (女学雑誌)—which targeted women in this new middle class—wrote a scathing editorial of komori:⁴⁰

The majority of indentured komori were born into poor families and are totally illiterate. We often cannot tell whether they are boys or girls, as they often resort to violence. When they are sent into the street carrying their charges, they do not care a bit about the babies. When they cry, komori shake thern ruthlessly. If they do not stop crying, komori pinch them on their buttocks or put sweets stolen from the store in their mouths.

To define themselves as a “separate class”, writes anthropologist Mariko Tamanoi, the “emerging middle class in Nagano scorned both komori and their employers.”⁴¹

In 1893 (Meiji 26) a schoolteacher in Nagano Prefecture wrote the following in the Shinano Kyōiku-kai Zasshi, a publication for educators in Nagano:⁴²

Komori have nothing to do except to soothe the charges on their backs so that they will not cry. They sing vulgar songs, damage carts and horses, and make fun of people passing by them. One cannot even mention their behavior which is too crude, nor their language, which is too rude.

This critical view of komori was born out of a new mother-centered view of child-care developed in the latter half of the 1800s. Changing economic conditions allowed upper and middle class women to devote more time to raising their children. Mothers, it was now argued, had to be “educated and scientifically minded” to “raise children of and for Japan.”⁴³

Encapsulated in the phrase Good Wife, Wise Mother (良妻賢母, ryōsai kenbo ), the construct envisioned new gender roles, with a “modern sexual division of labor allocating work to men and housework and childrearing to women.” It was integral to the creation of the modern nation-state and the modern family.⁴⁴

According to American historian Sheldon Garon “urban women activists” were actively involved in the construction of these new roles:⁴⁵

The development of the woman-centred family occurred in dialogue between urban women activists and the state, which increasingly perceived the advantages of mobilizing married women to raise healthy children, organize neighbourhoods, care for the family’s elderly and take responsibility for saving the family’s money.

Education

The new ideology persuaded teachers and journalists to visualize komori as “surrogate mothers” instead of individual children with rights and needs. These surrogate mothers, they insisted, were not raising the kind of subjects that a powerful nation-state required for working in its factories and fighting its wars.

Emphasizing the need to reform the komori’s morality and to abolish “the evil ways of the past”, they saw education as the solution.⁴⁶

Compulsory education was introduced in 1872 (Meiji 5), but was far from universal. Small family run farms and businesses that depended on family labor, as well as the poorest of the poor, resisted sending children to school. They could not afford the loss of the children’s labor.

In 1894 (Meiji 27) the governor of Osaka admitted this grim reality when he said that “if we were to force [poor children] to attend school, their families simply could not make ends meet.”⁴⁷

Especially girls from poor families remained out of reach. An 1883 (Meiji 16) report for a school district in Nagano noted that poverty prevented 111 children from attending school—96 were girls, 56 worked as komori.⁴⁸

The same year a Nagano newspaper editor expressed the commonly held belief that there was also a lack of motivation:⁴⁹

Because many parents do not believe in the necessity of education for girls, they must work as komori or at silk filatures. These are the primary reasons for the poor school attendance record for girls.

Soon, special classes for komori (子守学校, komori gakkō ) were opened, the first one in 1883 in Ibaraki Prefecture. They eventually spread to 41 prefectures. The komori were separated from other students and the educational focus was on child rearing, “how to feed babies, how to asses their health, how to clean them, how to select the right toys.”⁵⁰

Material that would benefit the girls themselves barely got a chance. The aim was to teach komori how to suitably raise their charges as subjects of the new nation-state.⁵¹ A convoluted interpretation of the doctrine of ryōsai kenbo.

Komori generally came to school with their charges. But usually there was no staff to take care of these infants and toddlers—most komori attended classes with the literal weight of their work on their shoulders.

However, in spite of these drawbacks the classes were deemed a success and greatly helped change attitudes towards education for girls.

The positive experiences with komori classes created the conditions for additional change. The nationalistic fervor following the Sino-Japanese War of 1894 and 1895 persuaded the government to promote primary school attendance for all girls.

It improved sewing and needlework education and extensively trained female teachers. Improved attendance created a self-reinforcing effect—when more girls attended school, more girls wanted to attend.⁵²

Official attendance rates for girls at primary schools went from 44 percent in 1895 (Meiji 28) to 72 percent in 1900 (Meiji 33). When tuition for primary school was abolished in 1900 attendance improved even more. By 1920 (Taisho 9) the attendance rate for girls reached 98.8 percent. Over a span of less than 50 years illiteracy had been virtually eradicated.⁵³

Unwittingly, the girls that worked as komori—barely fed, beaten, discriminated and looked down upon—had helped promote universal access to education and erase illiteracy in Japan.

They really did carry the burdens of the modern age on their young backs. In many ways they helped build modern Japan. We should lovingly cherish the memory of these tough little women.

Continue to Part 4 : Legacy.

Notes

²⁶ Interestingly, as the custom spread to ordinary families during the Meiji Period, elite families started to think of the mother as the sole caregiver. See Asano Tamanoi, Mariko (1998). Under the Shadow of Nationalism. Politics and Poetics of Rural Japanese Women. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 61.

²⁷ Uno, Kathleen S. (1999). Passages to Modernity : Motherhood, Childhood, and Social Reform in Early Twentieth Century Japan. Hawaii: University of Hawaii Press, 9.

²⁸ Ericson, Steven J. (2014). The “Matsukata Deflation” Reconsidered: Financial Stabilization and Japanese Exports in a Global Depression, 1881–85. The Journal of Japanese Studies, Vol. 40, No. 1, 7, 12.

The Meiji scholar Maeda Masana estimated in 1883 that 57 percent of all Japanese were in the lower classes. See Huffman, James L. (2018). Down and Out in Late Meiji Japan. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 272.

²⁹ Ericson, Steven J. (2014). The “Matsukata Deflation” Reconsidered: Financial Stabilization and Japanese Exports in a Global Depression, 1881–85. The Journal of Japanese Studies, Vol. 40, No. 1, 5.

³⁰ ibid, 16.

³¹ Ericson, Steven J. (2019). Financial stabilization in Meiji Japan : the impact of the Matsukata reform. New York: Cornell University Press, 112.

³² Huffman, James L. (2018). Down and Out in Late Meiji Japan. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 12.

³³ Fujino Kakinami, Atsuko (2009). History of Child Labor in Japan in The World of Child Labor. New York: Routledge, 883.

³⁴ ibid, 884.

³⁵ Dixit, Aditi; Van Nederveen Meerkerk, Elise (2022). Supply of labour during early industrialisation: Agricultural systems, textile factory work and gender in Japan and India, ca. 1880–1940. The Indian Economic & Social History Review, 59 (2), 223–255.

³⁶ ibid.

³⁷ Tsurumi, E. Patricia (1990). Factory Girls: Women in the Thread Mills of Meiji Japan. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 93–94.

³⁸ Tsurumi, E. Patricia (1995). Whose History is it Anyway? And Other Questions Historians Should Be Asking. In this Case about the Cotton and Silk Thread Factory Women of Meiji Japan. Japan Review, 6, 17–36.

From: 細井和喜蔵(1925). 女工哀史. 改造社, 287.

³⁹ ibid. Japanese farms mainly consisted of family workers; female farm workers formed about 40 percent of the total farm labor force. The komori’s virtually free childcare allowed these women to provide their labor full-time to the farm.

⁴⁰ Asano Tamanoi, Mariko (1998). Under the Shadow of Nationalism. Politics and Poetics of Rural Japanese Women. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 66.
From: 女学雑誌 57 (1887-03): 121-123.

⁴¹ ibid, 69.

⁴² ibid, 69–70

From: Maki, Yoshitaro. 1893. “Yashiro Jinjō Shogakkō Komori Gakkō Setsuritsu-shui Kisoku” [Prospectus of a Class for Komori at Yashiro Primary School]. Shinano Kyōiku-kai Zasshi 77, no. 2: 30–35.

⁴³ ibid, 66–67.

⁴⁴ Garon, Sheldon (2010). State and family in modern Japan: a historical perspective. Economy and Society, 39:3, 317-336.

⁴⁵ Filler, Stephen; Koyama, Shizuko (2013). Ryōsai Kenbo: The Educational Ideal of ‘Good Wife, Wise Mother’ in Modern Japan. Leiden, Boston: Brill, vii–viii.

⁴⁶ “Evil customs of the past shall be broken off and everything based upon the just laws of nature (舊來ノ陋習ヲ破リ、天地ノ公道ニ基クヘシ)” was one of the five clauses of the Charter Oath (五箇条の御誓文, Gokajō no Goseimon ) that outlined the main aims of Emperor Meiji’s reign.

⁴⁷ Huffman, James L. (2018). Down and Out in Late Meiji Japan. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 16.

⁴⁸ Asano Tamanoi, Mariko (1998). Under the Shadow of Nationalism. Politics and Poetics of Rural Japanese Women. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 69.

⁴⁹ ibid.

From: Shinano Mainichi Shinbun, March 17, 1883.

⁵⁰ ibid, 74.

⁵¹ ibid, 72.

⁵² Filler, Stephen; Koyama, Shizuko (2013). Ryōsai Kenbo: The Educational Ideal of ‘Good Wife, Wise Mother’ in Modern Japan. Leiden, Boston: Brill, 36.

⁵³ Saito, Yasuo. Gender Equality in Education in Japan. National Institute for Educational Policy Research, 3. Retrieved on 2023-07-31.

Saito, Yasuo (2014). Development of Modern Education System and its Socio-Political Background in Japan. Nagoya University, 6. Retrieved on 2023-07-18.

Meiji Era School Attendence in World History Commons. Retrieved on 2023-07-31.

Published August 3, 2023
Updated July 18, 2024 9:25 PM

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