An Absence of Change: Women in the Japanese Labour Force, 1937–45

Abstract

The part played by Japanese women in economic development has until recently received little attention from most economic historians of Japan. Writers on the war period, too, have given the bulk of their attention to technological, structural and institutional developments, and the ultimate inadequacy of raw materials, fuel, manpower and functioning machinery to sustain the prolonged campaign against the United States. Takafusa Nakamura has stressed the significance for postwar development of, for example, welfare measures, technological advances and labour skills, and the spread of subcontracting. With others, he has identified the control associations used by the state to coordinate private enterprise and achieve production targets as the forerunners of postwar industrial policy.² ‘Patriotic’ labour unions assisted the later dominance of the now famed company unions.³ Likewise, the economic developments of 1937–45 were equally the product of earlier developments. The China and Pacific Wars, notwithstanding the prostration of the economy in August 1945, did not produce in Japan’s economic history the dramatic discontinuity which some historians have identified as characterising developments in social or political history.

An earlier version of this paper was given at a seminar at Manchester University. My thanks are due to those who made helpful comments (not all of which, I suspect, I acted upon!), and to Alan Milward for assistance with data on women in the German labour force during World War II.