Industrialism, Working Conditions and the Zaibatsu in Prewar
Japan
As Duus points out, the foundations of the modern textile industry were laid
in 1882 when Shibusawa Eiichi founded the Osaka Spinning Company. He powered
a 10,000 spindle mill with steam power. To make the steam, he had to burn something
so these kind of modern factories stimulated the demand for coal. Moreover,
cotton and silk needed to be shipped and the coal had to be transported to the
factories, so there was growth in the transportation sector as well. In turn,
with all the wage labor in both the mines and the factories, there was generated
effective demand for a wide variety of fordinary consumer products.
Who worked in the mills? Mostly young women who were known as joko
or female laborers. See the following account by Patricia Tsurumi:
Begun initially as largely government enterprises that received government
support and encouragement after they were in private hands, the machine
silk-reeling and cotton-spinning industries of Meiji were the first in Japan
to develop extensive factory production. Their work forces, heavily female,
formed a large proportion of the labor force during the first period of
Japan's industrialization. This pattern would remain long after the
Meiji era had ended.
Although throughout the Meiji period some cotton-mill hands came from urban
homes, the vast majority of the silk-reeling and cotton-spinning operatives
were women and girls from a rural background. During the first decade of
the new era, daughters of debt-free and even well-to-do farming families
went to work in the new silk mills, but thereafter the female workers in
both silk and cotton plants tended to be from poor peasant families. By
the turn of the century these kojo [factory girls] came from some of the
poorest tenant-farmer villages in the entire country. The women and girls
who became textile factory workers, including those from independent cultivator
or prosperous farming homes, were no strangers to hard work. They knew that
many generations of country women had contributed to the well-being of their
families by laboring both at home and away from home. Like their mothers
and grandmothers before them in pre-Meiji times, they had routinely seen
female as well as male offspring of peasant families "going out to
work" (dekasegi) in a place beyond commuting distance....
During the Edo era (1600-1867), female offspring of peasant families were
sent away to labor as dekasegi workers, usually in a local village or town.
This immediately reduced the number of mouths that had to be fed, and the
girls might gain valuable skills and experience, eventually bringing in
some remuneration. The ones who remained at home were essential workers
within the peasant family economy, producing and processing food and other
items for the family subsistence, caring for the young and the incapacitated,
and playing key roles in the production of marketable commodities, including
silk and cotton thread.
E. Patricia Tsurumi, Factory Girls: Women in the Thread Mills of Meiji
Japan, Princeton: New Jersey: Princeton UP,
1990, pp. 9-10.
Takai Toshio went to work at the Ogaki Woolen Mill when she was barely
12 years old. The folowing is taken from her memoir, Watashi no joko
aishi. She begins by noting the discrepancy between what the recruiter
had told her family about working conditions in the mill, and the reality:
. . .[B]ut what we heard and what the conditions actually were, were
two quite different things. What we had heard was paradise, turned out
to be hell. The 13-sen we were supposed to earn per day was before deductions
were made for food (9-sen), and for the soap and toilet paper, and straw
sandals we had to buy each month (3-sen), so we were left with less than
one-sen. So, in effect, all we were left with was our fatigue. At that
time, Kao soap was 9-sen for a bar and toilet paper was 3-sen for a bundle.
In the dormitories, they put 20 people in a 12-mat room. When we rolled
out our futon to sleep at night, we had to sleep in two rows separated
by not more than 3 centimeters. So if anyone talked in their sleep or
snored, everyone would wake up. For someone as high-strung as myself,
I could barely sleep at all. The dining hall was filthy, dark and gloomy,
there were virtually no side dishes with meals. All we got everyday was
miso soup and pickles but even the picked radishes were old and smelled
bad, and there was nothing of real substance in the soup though occasionally
a fly or a cockroach might float to the surface. We called it "Teppo
(rifle) miso." Moreover, the rice was imported; it was long grain
and not the sticky variety, so it scattered all over the place. You needed
a stick as well as your chopsticks to eat it. . .
Toshio was small of stature, so initially, they kept her away from machines
and had her collect scraps from the floor:
"Until she gets bigger, let’s have her collect the waste thread."
So all I got to do was clean up waste pieces of thread. For twelve hours
a day, from 6:00 a.m. to 6:00 p.m.—with 30 minutes for lunch and
15 minute breaks at 9:00 a.m. and 3:00 p.m.—I was standing or walking
and collecting left-over pieces of thread. No matter how much I collected,
there was always more that would fall from the machines. My legs became
stiff and my feet were swollen so that I was stumbling around. Nevertheless,
sitting or resting during work hours was not permitted, so I was constantly
in tears, just trying to hang on. And for the whole year, I was ridiculed
as nothing but a kid. So that whole year with filled with painful and
embarrassing moments…(17-21)
The machine which reeled the mill-spun thread was long and narrow—about
20 meters long—and right in the middle was the gear mechanism with
lots of small and large teeth which twisted and coiled the threads. One
time, a piece of scrap got coiled up in the large gear teeth and before
I even realized it, my right hand was pulled into the teeth of the gears.
I pulled my hand out with all my might but a lost a chunk of flesh off
of my wrist the size of a small coin and you could see right down to the
bone.
The machine boss and the supervisor came running over saying "You
stupid idiot! All the threads are cut. If your hand hurts, it serves you
right. You weren’t paying any attention. You’ve really created
a substantial loss for the company. There’s no excuse for that."
They scolded me severely and no one offered me any treatment at all. So
I went to the gatekeeper by myself and when I said, "I’m going
to see a doctor," he replied "What? You have an injury? I’ll
put a little medicine on it. If you go to see the doctor without any money,
he won’t see you anyway." He slapped a little phenol on my wound
and bandaged it, so I returned to the mill only to be accosted with "Where
the hell did you go during work hours? You really are a lazy one!"
I thought to myself, "You sons of bitches—are you even human?
I’ll get even with you, you better believe it!" (25-27)
Duus mentions that tired workers often injured themselves and this seems
to have been Toshio's experience. He also notes the prevalence of tuberculosis,
something one historian refers to hit as the AIDS of its time. Since the
women were forced to live and work in damp (from the steam), poorly ventillated
spaces, the chances for contagion were high. In fact, Toshio was married
to a young man, Hosoi Wakizo, who was ill with a disease that often accompanies
TB and he died at the age of 25. Before he died, though, he published one
of the most famous expose's of working conditions in the mill, Joko Aishi
or The Pitiable History of the Female Textile Workers, a title Takai
played upon for the title of her own memoirs. Before Hosoi's painstakingly
detailed work appeared, Yokoyama Gennosuke had published his demographic
survey of working conditions in the early 1900s, Nihon no kaso shakai
(Japan's Lower Classes) to which Duus refers (p. 165)
ZAIBATSU
Most agree that the most unique feature of Japan's pre-WWII economic development
was the vertically integrated economic combines or conglomerates called
Zaibatsu. The most prominent zaibatsu of the 1910s and 1920s were names
still familar today: Mitsui, Mitsubishi, Sumitomo and Yasuda. Duus also
mentions Daiichi. Here is a brief encyclopedia entry on Zaibatsu:
[Literally=money or financial clique], the great family-controlled banking
and industrial combines of modern Japan. The leading zaibatsu (called
keiretsu after World War II) are Mitsui, Mitsubishi, Dai Ichi Kangyo,
Sumitomo, Sanwa, and Fuyo. They gained a position in the Japanese economy
with no exact parallel elsewhere. Although the Mitsui were powerful bankers
under the shogunate, most of the other zaibatsu developed after the Meiji
restoration (1868), when, by subsidies and a favorable tax policy, the
new government granted them a privileged position in the economic development
of Japan. Later they helped finance strategic semiofficial enterprises
in Japan and abroad, particularly in Taiwan and Korea. In the early 1930s
the military clique tried to break the economic power of the zaibatsu
but failed. In 1937 the four leading zaibatsu controlled directly one
third of all bank deposits, one third of all foreign trade, one half of
Japan's shipbuilding and maritime shipping, and most of the heavy industries.
They maintained close relations with the major political parties. After
Japan's surrender (1945) in World War II, the breakup of the zaibatsu
was announced as a major aim of the Allied occupation, but in the 1950s
and 1960s groups based on the old zaibatsu reemerged as keiretsu.
The decision on the part of these groups in the post?World War II era
to pool their resources greatly influenced Japan's subsequent rise as
a global business power.
The Columbia Encyclopedia, Sixth Edition. Copyright © 2002 Columbia
University Press
The Mitsui logo: 
The Mitsubishi logo: 
Another take on the zaibatsu is:
Zaibatsu were seen as monopolistic organisations, which
originated in the Meiji era. At this time Japan was dominated by three
large zaibatsu: Mitsubishi, Mitsui and Yasuda, later to be joined by Sumitomo.
These four were later to be known as the old zaibatsu.
Each zaibatsu was usually rigidly controlled by families, through a "gholding
company" (honsha) which held a controlling block of shares
in the subordinate companies. A typical zaibatsu consisted of several
key subsidiaries which were more often than not engaged in manufacturing,
mining, trading and financial concerns.
The zaibatsu was a family like community because its entire organisation
would be based on family principles of hierarchy, loyalty and dependency.
Most zaibatsu were always very strong financially because of their shear
size, allowing them to buy out and absorb/suffocate smaller competitors.
This ultimately resulted in them developing into very powerful monopolistic
organisations, which controlled the market in a number of commodities.
The industrial organisation of the Japanese economy in the pre-war days
can be summarised as consisting of a family like hierarchy of business
firms of varying size with huge zaibatsu corporations at the top and one
family workshops at the bottom.
This fairly unpleasant account of Mitsui activities in Manchuria
comes from John Robert's book on Mitsui.
Japan's Mitsui zaibatsu financed and profited from Japan's
Opium Monopoly Bureau in Manchukuo (Japan's Manchurian colony), in the
1930s. Roberts writes:
Opium was an important source of revenue for the Manchukuo
government, through the Opium Monopoly Bureau set up by Hoshino [1]. Following
the example of the British in another part of China about a hundred years
before, the Kwantung Army used opiates to weaken public resistance, and
deliberately fostered drug addiction in Manchukuo and occupied areas of
China. One means of hooking new users was the distribution of medicines
containing morphine and of special cigarettes bearing the popular trademark
"Golden Bat" but with mouthpieces containing small amounts of
heroin. These various narcotics supplied quite legally to the Opium Monopoly
Bureau by Mitsui and other trading companies, induced euphoria not only
in the unfortunate victims but also in the members of the "ni-ki-san-suke"
[2] clique, because the traffic was racking up profits of twenty to thirty
million yen per year for financing the industrial development of Manchukuo
(according to testimony presented at the Tokyo War Crimes trials in 1948).
A witness testified further that Hoshino [1] negotiated one large loan
from Japanese banks against collateral in the form of a lien on the profits
from Manchukuo's Opium Monopoly Bureau. Another authority stated that
the annual revenue from the narcotization policy in China, including
Manchukuo, was estimated by the Japanese military at 300 million dollars
a year.
Source: Mitsui: Three Centuries of Japanese Business,
by John G. Roberts, Weatherhill, New York, 1991, pages 312-313.