The Intimate and the Public in Asian and Global Perspectives. Leiden; Boston: Brill, 2022. xiii, 457 pp. (Tables, graphs, B&W photos.) US$186.00, cloth. ISBN 9789004464421.
The importance of the silk industry in Japan’s industrialization has long been recognized by scholars, but there remains considerable scope for further contributions. Focusing on how silk workers subjectively viewed their lives and working experiences, this volume provides further evidence of the diversity of life stories that characterized Japan’s silk industry over the period from World War I to the 1950s. The introductory section of the book explains author Sandra Schaal’s objective, which is to draw on the approaches of the Annales school and make an original contribution to the existing social historiography by utilizing individual accounts that offer a more nuanced view of how women’s work in the industry developed. Our existing understanding, Schaal argues, has been excessively dominated by what can be termed a jokō aishi (pitiful history of female workers) approach, a reference to a classic 1925 publication on female workers with that title, in which female silk reelers, as well as other female workers, were depicted as the pitiable victims of exploitation. This trope was replicated in much of the subsequent literature, to some extent reinforced by the dominance of Marxist conceptual frameworks in many areas of Japan’s economic historiography throughout the twentieth century. The book’s underlying objective is to revise this dominant interpretation.
The core of the book consists of three main sections. The first short section offers a historical summary of the development of silk-reeling in Japan through the century after 1850 to provide context for the more substantive material that follows. Section 2 offers transcription and analysis of 45 thread-reeling songs that can mostly be dated to the late nineteenth to early twentieth centuries. The author distinguishes these songs from what she calls “songs for the struggle,” which can be explicitly tied to worker activism. Rather, these songs were associated with the overall process of mechanization, being used initially to help structure and regularize working patterns, and later on for encouragement and the expression of feelings. The content of these songs, argues Schaal, demonstrates that women were far from seeing themselves as passive victims. The songs were one of the “weapons of the weak” that these women had at their disposal. This section as a whole offers a more detailed analysis of such songs than the analysis found in the work of writers such as E. Patricia Tsurumi, who first noted their importance.
Section 3 focuses on transcription and analysis of interviews with former mill workers, combining interview material collected by the Okaya Sericultural Museum with interviews arranged and conducted by the author herself. The interview transcripts are used in significant detail to suggest why workers left their homes to work in the mills, how they coped with the conditions of life and work that they faced, the extent of agency that they were able to demonstrate, and their overall views of their experiences. Schaal argues persuasively that workers and their families were active agents; their main commitments were to their families and home communities. And while they recognized that life was hard, it was not always harder than their experiences in their home villages. Workers’ subjective experiences do not, therefore, always match neatly with the standard assumptions of heartless capitalist exploitation. The material presented in this section further underlines the diversity of worker experience as well as the importance and potential of oral history. These core sections of the book are followed by a conclusion and a series of appendices aimed at providing the reader with more substantive information about different aspects of the history of Japan’s silk industry in this period.
The book includes lengthy extracts from both interviews and songs, contains many illustrations and a large bibliography, and notwithstanding deviations from standard romanization and referencing, is a nicely presented volume. As suggested in the title, its main contribution lies in the transcriptions of the songs and verbal testimonies of the workers that fill its pages. As such, it makes an important contribution to the literature by providing detailed access to the voices of the workers, which will be of interest to many readers.
This reviewer, however, was concerned that the book’s contribution is limited by insufficiently nuanced writing and weakness in analysis. In terms of writing, more care should have been taken in the actual presentation of the argument, while emotive and highly contested terms such as “capitalist managers” and “feudal” are scattered throughout the text with no clear explanation of what the author actually means by their use. Like other scholars working on this topic, Schaal has little choice but to draw on sources that do indeed fall firmly within the jokō aishi approach, many of which contain valuable historical data, but this does not mean having to use the same language. More seriously, the original contribution of the author’s analysis is called into question by the fact that, as she herself acknowledges, scholars since the early 1980s have consistently questioned the universal validity of these longstanding jokō aishi assumptions. While the author has certainly read widely, works by scholars such as Matsumura Satoshi, Nakabayashi Masaki, Kanbayashi Ryō, Enoki Kazue, and Elyssa Faison, who have contributed to this revisionism, are not referenced. The case for a novel challenge to the jokō aishi orthodoxy is further weakened by issues relating to the importance of chronology. The evidence for the assumptions of unmitigated victimhood and exploitation comes disproportionately from the last decade of the nineteenth century and the first decade of the twentieth century, and it is widely acknowledged, including by the author of this volume, that conditions did improve thereafter, although not across the board. The testimonies in the book support the argument that many of the interviewees, who worked during the decades from World War I onwards, enjoyed more freedom than their earlier counterparts. They rarely sang the songs from earlier decades. More recognition and exploration of the tensions inherent in this historical dynamic would have strengthened the research design as well as the core argument the author seeks to make.
Janet Hunter
London School of Economics and Political Science, London