Gourd Tale

If a woman in an office is a willow,
A poetess a violet,
And a teacher an orchid,
Then a factory woman is a vegetable gourd.

Sung by workers in the textile mills of Meiji Japan.¹

Fans celebrated 2019 as the one-hundredth anniversary of the yuri genre.² In this chapter, I take a final look back at the early twentieth-century Japanese society that gave rise to the genre and tell the story of the unsung girls and women whose work helped bring that society into being.

Sweet Blue Flowers contains many elements that reflect and indirectly comment on contemporary Japan, but one aspect of Japanese society is almost totally absent from its pages: class. It is not alone in this respect. Class S literature, early (proto-)yuri works like Dear Brother, the light novel series Maria Watches Over Us, and the various yuri works influenced by Marimite all feature relatively affluent students in all-girls schools. Often a younger middle-class girl enters into an S-like relationship with an older girl born to great wealth, as Yumi does with Sachiko in Maria Watches Over Us.

In Maria Watches Over Us, in particular, the upper-class half of the pair is depicted as a victim, oppressed by a patriarchal system just as much as any other girl. Their relationship with a representative of the middle class is presented as the cure to heal their ills. This serves to flatter the (presumed middle-class) reader regarding the value and importance of the middle class while artfully distracting that same reader from the power that the truly wealthy exercise over them.³

This trope is present in Sweet Blue Flowers as well, in the relationship between Fumi and Yasuko. Yasuko’s family is shown to be on another level entirely when it comes to their wealth—as Fumi herself marvels when she visits the Sugimoto estate: “Her family’s rich…” (SBF, 1:303). If Sweet Blue Flowers used the trope as did Maria Watches Over Us then Fumi’s love would likely be the key to healing Yasuko’s emotional immaturity.

Sweet Blue Flowers subverts this trope by having Fumi break up with Yasuko and redirect her attentions to Akira, someone of a similar station in life. In the meantime, Yasuko matures on her own, helped perhaps by her getting out of Japan.

But although Fumi and Akira both have middle-class backgrounds, they are arguably nearer the upper end of the middle-class spectrum. Their families live in single-family detached houses, and both families own at least one car. More tellingly, both families can send their children to private schools—in the case of Akira, what appears in all respects to be a very expensive and exclusive school. Kyoko’s family is even more likely to be wealthy; she attended Fujigaya from elementary school on.⁴

Thus Sweet Blue Flowers, like other yuri manga and Class S stories, portrays a world in which the poor and even the lower-middle class are absent, their stories untold.

Where then can we find them? Let’s turn back the clock to the late Meiji era in which shōjo culture and Class S literature were born, and consider a hypothetical girl born on the same day as Nobuko Yoshiya in 1896, but to a poor peasant family eking out a miserable living in the hinterlands of Japan. What might her tale have been?

One option for her family, and a very common one at the time, would have been to sell her to a brothel. But in the Meiji era, another possibility opened up: sending her to work in a mill producing silk or cotton thread. In 1907, when our young girl (like Nobuko Yoshiya) would have been eleven years old, there were over two hundred thousand girls and women working in such mills, with ages ranging from the twenties down to the early teens or even younger.⁵ While Yoshiya was reading the newly-established magazines for girls and looking forward to attending high school, our girl’s parents would likely have been contemplating sending her off to work as a “factory girl” (kōjo).

In earlier times, she might have stayed at home to help with farming or in-home production of goods. But in the Meiji era, families like hers needed cash to pay new government taxes and were at the same time in economic distress due to cheap imports displacing domestic household production. In turn, the Meiji government needed cash to meet foreign exchange needs and economic growth to forestall popular rebellions but saw export opportunities handicapped by free trade agreements forced on Japan by Western countries. These prevented Japan from raising tariffs on imports, including textiles.⁶

The government found an answer in the large-scale production of silk and (later) cotton thread, products that could compete on the international market and drive export growth. After an initial period of government-run mills that trained the daughters of low-rank samurai in new professions, the industry became dominated by private mill owners employing a workforce of poor urban dwellers and poor migrants from rural areas. The vast majority of these were girls or young women.⁷ Our hypothetical young girl might have been one of them.

What might have been our girl’s experience if she went to work in the mills? She would likely have been recruited by an independent agent working on commission from a mill owner. The recruiter would spin stories of good pay for girls who worked hard, hearty and nutritious meals for the workers, after-work life in comfortable dormitories where she could learn to read or take other classes, and days off work when she could join other girls in sightseeing expeditions. If her parents were swayed by such stories (and who might not be, knowing nothing to the contrary?), her father would sign a contract committing her to work for several years, look forward to the extra money she would bring the family, and commit her to the care of the recruiter.⁸

Assuming that she arrived at her destination safely (as some did not, sold into brothels or to rival mills), she would have found the reality of the mills to be much different than the promises. The productivity of Japanese factory workers was still significantly lower than that of foreign mills, and to successfully compete on price with foreign silk mills, Japanese mills chose not to try to make workers more productive but rather to reduce costs (and thus improve profits) by any means possible.

They did this by lowering wages, forcing workers to work longer hours, running second shifts, and practicing various forms of wage theft: for example, fining workers for relatively trivial infractions, or holding back wages for a year or more—all measures outlined in the contract, the language of which the typical poor farmer (like our girl’s father) would be incapable of reading.⁹

Thus from the time our young girl entered the mill, she would have found herself paying back debts (including the expenses of transporting her to the factory), incurring fines, and having her already-meager wages reduced in various ways. She would have found herself competing with other workers, with the most productive workers receiving the highest wages, and production quotas increasing but wages remaining the same. If she were of relatively plain appearance (like Nobuko Yoshiya), she would likely have found her wages to be lower than others of fairer face more favored by the mill owner.¹⁰

After work hours, she would have been locked in a dormitory to prevent her escaping, surrounded by high fences topped with barbed wire or sharpened bamboo stakes. She would have been fed a meager diet of rice mixed with barley, with the costs of the meals deducted from her wages. At night she would have slept in a room where each girl had a single tatami mat’s worth of space and might have shared her sleeping garments with a girl on another shift.¹¹

As for the promised education, some mill owners offered rudimentary classes in Japanese and arithmetic to their workers, but many workers found themselves too tired to attend such classes after a twelve-hour shift.¹² Our young girl would likely have been left semi-literate at best. She might have had access to shared copies of the girls’ magazines in which Nobuko Yoshiya’s stories appeared (20 to 40 percent of factory workers read magazines¹³) but might have found it challenging to understand Yoshiya’s ornate prose.

More typical “educational” fare were lectures intended to persuade workers to show devotion to their employers, as a loyal retainer might serve his lord. Like the eighteen-year-old Kikue Yamakawa—later to become famous as a socialist and feminist activist—our factory girl might have found herself attending a sermon, in which visiting Christian missionaries would encourage the girls and women to work hard like Jesus the carpenter, be obedient and submissive to their employers, and be grateful for what was given to them. (Yamakawa, who attended one such sermon as a guest of the missionaries, left the mill vowing never to work with them again.)¹⁴

What if she had been a lesbian, like Yoshiya? Watched over like a hawk by supervisors both on the factory floor and in the dormitory, crammed into a room at night with twenty or more other girls, allowed to leave the factory grounds only at long intervals, how could she have sustained a relationship with another factory girl? It’s more likely that she would have been sexually harassed or even raped by a male coworker, a male supervisor, or the mill owner—who had keys to the dormitory rooms.¹⁵

If she were lucky, she would complete her contract and return to her village to live out her life—a life perhaps even harder than that in the mill if her family were still in poverty. If she were unlucky, she might have become sick, be pressed to continue to work while ill, and then (if she took a turn for the worse) be sent home to die. The mills were breeding grounds for disease, including epidemics of cholera and dysentery and chronic cases of tuberculosis and beriberi, to which the girls and young women were made vulnerable by long work hours and inadequate nutrition. Teenaged factory girls were particularly affected: their death rate was over twice that of girls in the general population.¹⁶

What connects our hypothetical factory girl and her real-life counterparts to Nobuko Yoshiya, to the world of Class S literature of which Yoshiya herself was the preeminent practitioner, and to the world of shōjo culture of which that literature was a key element?

The life of a factory girl, the life of a schoolgirl, and indeed the life of Nobuko Yoshiya herself were made possible because Meiji Japan lacked one of the prime characteristics of other patriarchal societies. Although fathers in Japan typically exercised strict control over whom their daughters could marry, they did not seek to isolate them entirely from the outside world.

In this respect, Japan differed from patrilineal societies in the Middle East and—more germane in this context—on the Indian subcontinent. In Japan, there was a long tradition of peasant boys and girls “going out to work” (dekasegi), that is, leaving the family home to seek employment elsewhere. Poor families were willing to send their daughters off to work in the mills, accepting the risk that they would be raped, seduced, or otherwise bring “dishonor” to the family in return for the economic benefits that they could provide. In other words, “South Asia had a stronger preference for female seclusion, and East Asia a stronger preference for female exploitation.”¹⁷

There were several notable women active in the nascent Japanese labor movement, including Kikue Yamakawa. However, the fact that the vast majority of mill workers were girls and women likely made the Japanese factory workforce easier to control than the male factory workers on the Indian subcontinent, where teenaged girls and adult women were isolated and kept out of the labor market. This improved the ability of Japanese factory owners to repress worker unrest, which helped drive the rapid and profitable growth of the Japanese manufacturing sector.¹⁸

Just as poor families were willing to risk sending their daughters to the mills, so more affluent families were willing to risk sending their daughters to schools, even to relatively distant schools where the girls lived beyond the immediate reach of parental control. If the Japanese patriarchal system had been more strict, then the very premise of Yoshiya’s Yaneura no nishojo would have been absurd: the virgins of the title would have had their virginity assured by their fathers never allowing them to leave the family home.

In the end, the girls and women in the mills helped make the lives of both the readers and writers of Class S fiction possible. Japan’s rapid industrialization and its rise as an exporting nation led to strong economic growth, urbanization, and the emergence of a thriving middle class. Middle-class families became affluent enough to educate their girls through middle and high school, and allow the girls themselves to afford subscriptions to the girls’ magazines in which the Class S genre began.

A growing Japanese economy also drove the creation of an urban service sector in which women could find employment as office workers. The shōjo who read girls’ magazines during her teen years gave rise to the stereotypical “modern girl” (moga) who set fashion trends and read women’s magazines in her twenties. Behind the shōjo and the moga stood the kōjo, so that when Nobuko Yoshiya’s writings in those magazines made her one of the richest women in Japan, she stood at the top of an economic pyramid built in large part by the anonymous, ill-compensated, and often back-breaking labor of hundreds of thousands of Japanese factory girls.

If the lives of Japanese factory girls found scant representation in the Class S stories of the shōjo magazines, where if anywhere can we find their voices, their dreams, their hopes and fears?

Mill owners themselves commissioned reading materials for the workers, short textbooks glossed with furigana for those girls who were at least semi-literate. They celebrated the factory girl as the backbone of Japan, who through her hard work would make Japan a great nation and fulfill her filial duty to her parents, her employer (who supposedly treasured her more than his own child), and the emperor.¹⁹

Mill owners also commissioned songs for the workers to sing while at their work: “Thread is the treasure of the empire! / More than a hundred million yen worth of exports, / What can be better than silk thread!”²⁰ But the factory girls preferred their own songs. If our young girl were as gifted with words as Nobuko Yoshiya, she might have been one of the many anonymous creators of the workers’ songs that have come down to us.

Sometimes they sang of the hardships of life in the mill: “Factory work is prison work, / All it lacks are iron chains.” Sometimes they sang of how they were viewed by others, as in the song with which this chapter begins, or defended themselves against those who looked down on them: “Don’t sneer at us / Calling us ‘Factory girls, factory girls’! / Factory girls are / Treasure chests for the company.” And sometimes they looked to the future, to a time when they would be free of the mill: “Looking out at the growing darkness / I recall the evening bell at Takayama Temple. / When my term expires I’ll cross the Nomugi Pass / And they’ll say, ‘Our daughter is home!’”²¹

I am far in time and space from the lives of the factory girls who sang these songs. But in writing about the Class S stories of yesteryear and the yuri manga of today and tomorrow, I would be remiss if I did not take the opportunity to honor the memory of the girls and women whose work helped make that literature possible, but who rarely if ever grace its pages.