Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2018. xi, 349 pp. (Tables, B&W photos, illustrations.) US$68.00, cloth. ISBN 978-0-8248-7291-5.
The goal of James Huffman’s powerful study is “to understand how it felt to live the life of a hinmin, or poor person” (11) during Japan’s first phase of industrial growth around the turn of the twentieth century. The hinmin, those at the very bottom stratum of urban society, constituted between 12 and 20 percent of Tokyo’s burgeoning population: 275,00 to 400,000 people. Many lived crowded into a few working-class neighbourhoods, where the population density approached 100,000 per square mile. Their daily wages averaged from 0.10 to 0.50 Yen ($0.03 to $0.25 at the 1900 exchange rate), of which 70 to 80 percent went on food (usually a combination of cheap rice and tofu lees). The only way they could make ends meet was by labouring day in and day out for long hours, by putting their children to work, and by scrimping on necessities and foregoing most comforts. They lived in crowded wooden houses, one or two rooms per family (usually no more than 150 square feet), with shared toilet and cooking facilities, and no running water. They suffered disproportionately from disease, including tuberculosis, syphilis, and cholera, as well as from accidents and natural disasters such as flood and fire. And if their lives were upended by one of these events, they had no social safety net to protect them from destitution.
Using contemporary journalists’ reportage, government reports, literary works, and later analyses by Japanese social scientists, Huffman presents an extraordinarily vivid portrait of the daily lives of these families at the margins of Japanese society. He describes, for example, a day in the life of Ueki Noriko, who helps pay the rent by rolling cigarettes at home while her husband and two children all work long hours: her husband as an errand runner, her fifteen-year-old son in a print shop, and her thirteen-year-old daughter in a textile factory. Huffman describes the steamy August weather, the “rattling sounds of the night soil collector” (139), the “ragged futon and patched mosquito net” (140) in the family’s shabby tenement, and the drab and patched laundry hanging in the alley. The Ueki family’s combined wages cover the rent for a single room (the daughter boards at her factory), and minimal meals of cheap rice gruel, seaweed, and the occasional piece of tofu or fish from the shop that resells food left over by the army. Elsewhere in the book, Huffman describes washerwomen pawning their clients’ clothes to tide them over a few days; rickshaw pullers holding “their chopsticks and cup at ready, keeping one eye on the people coming and going and another their food—looking in all directions for customers” (110); and cheap restaurants where “your nose is attacked by the stinging smell of cheap saké” (154) and boiling horsemeat. Such vivid details add up to an extraordinarily intimate and compelling portrait of urban poverty in the back streets of industrial Tokyo and Osaka.
Despite the generally grim picture he so strikingly paints, Huffman sets out to demonstrate that these conditions were not the defining features of the hinmin’s lives. Contemporary observers portrayed them as “automatons who went through life’s daily motions with neither the ability nor the inclination to control their own destinies” (8). Huffman vigorously pushes back against this view, arguing (and, through vivid examples, showing) how poor families exercised control over their own lives through the decisions they made, through the resilience and even joy they found in their small pleasures, and through their occasionally subversive actions. Poor though they were, most families held some money back for small pleasures, such as a hot bath, a glass of sake, or a ticket to a popular entertainment. Some freely admitted to filching food, charcoal, or other household necessities from their employers, to help them alleviate their families’ difficult living conditions. Workers, both male and female, also engaged in various forms of political activism, both in the workplace and on the streets. Huffman also emphasizes the enormous variety of life experiences among the broad class of hinmin, as well as the diverse ways they made their living, making generalization impossible. The book describes the lives and working conditions of railway workers, postal and telegraph delivery men, carters, night soil collectors, rickshaw pullers, blind masseurs, apprentices, bathhouse workers, street performers, food vendors and servers, sex workers, beggars and more.
While Huffman develops a convincing profile of the diversity and individual agency shown by his subjects, he could perhaps have offered a more critically nuanced analysis of his sources. Since hinmin were generally unable to directly record their own experiences and thoughts, Huffman relies on second- or third-hand accounts, mostly written by urban intellectuals. Social reportage was a distinct genre in the late Meiji era, with its own conventions and political and commercial agendas. It should not be taken uncritically to equate to the actual experiences or thought processes of its subjects.
Another area I would have liked to see Huffman further develop is the specific impact of industrial modernization on the lives of the urban poor. Huffman frequently refers to the late Meiji hinmin—working as they did in the industrial economy, and enjoying the entertainments of the modern city—as both the motive power and the victims of modernity. But Japan’s great cities had seen high levels of rural in-migration for centuries, and eighteenth- and nineteenth-century accounts suggest many parallels with both the material deprivation and the cultural vibrancy portrayed by Huffman. How exactly was the “modern” version of urban poverty different from its Edo-era precursor?
Simon Partner
Duke University, Durham