Christopher Gerteis

Gender Struggles: Wage-earning Women and Male-Dominated Unions in Postwar Japan

In the formative years of the Japanese labor movement after World War II, the socialist unions affiliated with the General Council of Trade Unions (the labor federation known colloquially as Sohyo) formally endorsed the principles of women’s equality in the workforce and put in place measures to promote women’s active participation in union activities. However, union leaders did not embrace the legal framework for gender equality mandated by their American occupiers; rather, they pressured thousands of women labor activists to assume supportive roles that privileged a male-centered social agenda. By the late 1950s, even Japan’s radical socialist unions had reestablished the primacy of conservative gender norms, channeling women’s labor activism to support political campaigns that advantaged a male-headed household and that relegated women’s wage-earning value to the periphery of the household economy. By showing how unions raised the wages of male workers in part by transforming working-class women into middle-class housewives, Christopher Gerteis demonstrates that organized labor’s discourse on womanhood not only undermined women’s status within the labor movement but also prevented unions from linking with the emerging woman-led, neighborhood-centered organizations that typified social movements in the 1960s—a misstep that contributed to the decline of the socialist labor movement in subsequent decades.

THe Erotic and the Vulgar: Visual Culture and Organized Labor's Critique of U.S. Hegemony in Occupied Japan

ABSTRACT This essay engages the colonial legacy of postwar Japan by arguing that the political cartoons produced as part of the postwar Japanese labor movements critique of U.S. cultural hegemony illustrate how gendered discourses underpinned, and sometimes undermined, the ideologies formally represented by visual artists and the organizations that funded them. A significant component of organized labors propaganda rested on a corpus of visual media that depicted women as icons of Japanese national culture. Japans most militant labor unions were propagating anti-imperialist discourses that invoked an engendered/endangered nation that accentuated the importance of union roles for men by subordinating, then eliminating, union roles for women.

Selected bibliography on labor in Japan

A senior American historian once told me that there were hardly any books on Japanese labor. His perception was understandable; indeed, there have been far too few English language books on labor and the working-class in Japan. Yet, I was chagrined to discover that he, along with many other labor historians, have based their understanding of Japan on a very small number of books published in the 1980s. This selected bibliography, organized in reverse chronology, lists no books published earlier than 1990. Regrettably, the two dozen-plus books listed still reflect the majority of English language scholarship, and the only way to get a good bead on the field still is to read the Japanese literature. Years of intensive language study not withstanding – a path that I strongly encourage all current and future graduate students to consider – I hope the following book list will provide a solid base of recent scholarship for those wishing to broaden their understanding of the history of work and labor in the first non-Western industrialized nation. By a quick survey of titles in this list, most readers easily will recognize many tropes made standard by scholarship on labor in Europe, Australia and the USA. Not all the books selected, however, necessarily fall into the conventional rubric of labor history. James Roberson’s and Nobue Suzuki’s Men and Masculinity in Contemporary Japan, for example, is an edited collection of essays examining the extent to which popular notions of the Japanese ‘salaryman’ have over-determined how many Japanese men themselves think of their lives as male while-collar workers and family men. Yuko Ogasawara’s Office Ladies and Salaried Men, however, examines the extent to which pink-collar workers navigate a workplace structured to discourage their advancement by acollectively working (in a distinctly white-collar variation on John Scott’s theory of peasant foot-dragging) to bolster, or undermine, the careers of the salaryman generally credited with Japan’s postwar economic success. Readers also will note the number of works on women and labor. This is in part the result of my particular interests as a labor historian and also is due to a specific trend in English language studies of Japanese labor since 1990. Indeed, the past 15 years of scholarship have shown how the story of industrialization in Japan can be told through the experiences of the wage-earning women who, until 1930, comprised the majority of Japan’s factory workers. This list starts and ends with works on female textile workers, and I think there is no better way to understand the history of work and labor in Japan as well as the trajectory taken by scholars in the field.