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More than the “Wife Corps”: Female Tenant Farmer Struggle in 1920s Japan

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  18 April 2017

Wendy Matsumura
Wendy Matsumura*
Affiliation:
University of California, San Diego
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Abstract

Struggles over social reproduction intensified and took on new forms in Japan during the interwar period, as the state found it increasingly difficult to secure the foundations for the continued accumulation of capital. Landlord-tenant disputes that erupted nationwide in the midst of Japan's post-World War I agricultural recession was one concrete manifestation of these struggles. While the significance of tenant disputes has been analyzed in great detail by scholars, there has been a surprising lack of historical scholarship on the role that female tenant farmers played within them. This absence is a manifestation of two tendencies: First, gendered assumptions surrounding the figure of the tenant farmer have led scholars of agrarian social movements to work from a relatively limited understanding of what constitutes struggle and by extension, who its protagonists have been. Second, the conflation of waged work as productive work and by extension, non-waged work as unproductive has unwittingly relegated many forms of struggle that working women participated in to the realm of the pre-political. This paper contends that far from being mere supporters – the wife corps – of what was ultimately a male-driven movement, female participants in tenant disputes produced their own powerful critiques of the way that the Japanese state and capital undervalued their lives and labor. As such, they should be understood as one link in a rich history of proletarian feminist struggle both within and outside of the Japanese empire.

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International Labor and Working-Class History , Volume 91: Thinking Labor Rights Through the Coolie Question , Spring 2017 , pp. 127 - 155
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Copyright © International Labor and Working-Class History, Inc. 2017 

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References

NOTES

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11. Ueno Chizuko, Ochiai Emiko, and Nishikawa Yūko are among those who have written extensively about the way that Japan's modern family systems (ie and katei) inaugurated with the Meiji Civil Code of 1898 were the basis for the formation of an emperor-headed national unity and capitalist development based on the cheap labor power of women. All three situate the emergence of the modern family system within the country's incorporation into the interstate system of the second half of the n century. See Ueno, , Kafuchōsei to shihonsei: Marukusu shugi feminizumu no chihei (Tokyo, 1990)Google Scholar; Ochiai, , Kindai kazoku no magarikado (Tokyo, 2000)Google Scholar; Nishikawa, , Kindai kokka to kazoku moderu (Tokyo, 2000)Google Scholar.

12. This tendency is not as stark in histories of labor activism as Vera Mackie's Creating Socialist Women shows. However, studies of female tenant farmer activism rarely take the thought that emerged from within these agrarian village spaces seriously.

13. The representative example of this kind of narrative is Mikiso Hane's passage in Peasants, Rebels, Women, and Outcastes: The Underside of Modern Japan (New York, 1982)Google Scholar in which he says that “housewives of Toyama” triggered the Rice Riots.

14. The actual role of women in the Rice Riots has not received much attention. Some early work includes Chiya, Matsui, “Suwarikomu Toyama no onna tachi”, Rōdō Nōmin Undō 29 (1968): 142–45Google Scholar and Toyoo, Shindō, “Chikuhō no onna kōfu tachi (6)”, Buraku 25 (1973): 80–88 Google Scholar.

15. For an excellent English-language study, see Lewis, Michael, Rioters and Citizens: Mass Protest in Imperial Japan (Berkeley, 1990)Google Scholar.

16. The following authors have utilized oral testimonies in order to gain a clearer view of Toyama's female participants: Mitsuo, Imoto, Mizuhashichō (Toyamaken) no Kome Sōdō (Toyama, 2010)Google Scholar; Masami, Saito, “Onna Ikki to shite no Toyama Kome Sōdō: Josei undō to iu kanten kara no yominaoshi”, Inpakushon 166 (2008): 38–47 Google Scholar; Masami, Saito, “Kōjutsu shiryō ga utsusu Kome Sōdō no josei rōdōsha: Keisatsu shiryō o koete”, Rekishi hyōron 776 (2012): 76–88 Google Scholar.

17. Anne Walthall critiques this, as well as the remarginalization of women who did participate in peasant disputes in the context of early modern Japan in “Devoted Wives/Unruly Women: Invisible Presence in the History of Japanese Social Protest”, Signs 20 (1994): 106–36CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

18. Critiques have come mainly from social reproduction theorists like Isabella Bakker, Stephen Gill, Sue Ferguson, Sebastian Rioux, and many others. See Bakker, and Gill, , eds., Power, Production and Social Reproduction (New York, 2003)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, Rioux, , “Embodied Contradictions: Capitalism, Social Reproduction and Body Formation,” Women's Studies International Forum (2014): 1–9 Google Scholar, and issue 5 of Viewpoints Magazine for recent debates and theorizations. https://viewpointmag.com/2015/11/02/issue-5-social-reproduction/ (accessed January 4, 2017).

19. For example, Japanese Marxist theoretician Uno Kozo wrote extensively about the difficulty of organizing Japanese farmers who, as half owner-cultivators (jikosakunō), desire land ownership. The predominance of small-scale cultivating farming households willing to work themselves to the point of exhaustion and borrow a portion of the land they cultivated at high rents in an attempt to expend all of their surplus household labor and increase their landholdings was a serious obstacle to the emergence of revolutionary thought and action in the countryside. He explains, “so-called tenant disputes do not have an external, confrontational relationship founded on the separation of ownership and management.” Kōzō, Uno, “Nōgyō no kōsei (1947)”, Uno Kōzō chosakushū (bekkan) (Tokyo, 1974), 458Google Scholar.

20. In these works, the tenant farmer has generally been assumed to be male. Maruoka Hideko, who published a detailed study of the conditions of women in Japan's agrarian villages in 1937 is an exception. While she does not examine women's participation in tenant disputes or other forms of agrarian struggle, her work is extremely valuable for its nuanced treatment of the heavy toll that women engaged in agriculture pay both physically and mentally. Maruoka, , Nihon nōson fujin mondai: Shufu bosei-hen (1937) (Tokyo, 1980)Google Scholar. Thanks to Yukiko Hanawa for bringing this work to my attention.

21. For the significance of this debate in the Japanese context, see Yutaka, Nagahara, Rational Peasants and Village Community (Tokyo, 1991)Google Scholar.

22. Jacques Ranciere has written about the concept of subjectification in the context of historical writing in Staging the People: The Proletarian and His Double, trans. Fernbach, David (New York, 2011)Google Scholar. Jason Read also defines the concept as a technique of the capitalist mode of production that is absolutely necessary for the continued accumulation process in his The Micro-Politics of Capital: Marx and the Prehistory of the Present (Albany, 2003)Google Scholar. Read explains that capital requires an “abstract subjective potential” or the “capacity to do any work whatsoever,” which it has to “develop, through discipline and cooperation.” Subjectification refers to the techniques beyond discipline that are used to develop this potential.

23. See Silverberg, Miriam, Erotic Grotesque Nonsense: The Mass Culture of Japanese Modern Times (Berkeley, 2007), 143–76CrossRefGoogle Scholar for a critique of this issue and of Takamure Itsue.

24. Women's participation in agrarian struggles in colonial Korea during the interwar period have been analyzed by Wells, Kenneth, “The Price of Legitimacy: Women and the Kunuhoe Movement, 1927–1931”, in Colonial Modernity in Korea, ed. Shin, Gi Wook and Robinson, Michael (Cambridge, 1999)Google Scholar; Park, Sunyoung, The Proletarian Wave: Literature and Leftist Culture in Colonial Korea, 1910–1945 (Cambridge, 2015)Google Scholar. Both show that these women took their inspiration from many sources including Marxist-Leninism and Chinese feminism and operated inside and outside of the peninsula including Tokyo.

25. Nancy Folbre and Marjorie Abel addressed the way that government statistics have themselves been plagued with gender biases in “Women's Work and Women's Households: Gender Bias in the U.S. Census”, Social Research 56 (1989): 545–69Google Scholar. Not only has this led to inaccurate accounting of the quantity of work that women have performed, it has also played an active role in reinforcing gendered assumptions about women's work through the very categories that it has used in the accounting process. Kate Broadbent and Tessa Morris-Suzuki have addressed similar issues in Japan in “Women's Work in the ‘Public’ and ‘Private’ Spheres of the Japanese Economy,” Asian Studies Review, 24 (2000): 161–73Google ScholarPubMed.

26. Tsurumi addresses this question in her essay, “Female Textile Workers and the Failure of Early Trade Unionism in Japan”, History Workshop 18 (1984): 3–27 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

27. The JFU, a national organization of tenant unions, was formed in April of 1922. For a detailed analysis of the organization as well as its split and formation of the National Farmers’ Union (Zennō), refer to Waswo, Ann, “In Search of Equity: Japanese Tenant Unions in the 1920s”, Farmers and Village Life in Twentieth-Century Japan (London, 2003)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

28. One of the few works that have pointed to this lack of analysis of female activism in tenant disputes is Masakatsu, Ōkado, “Kosaku Sōgi no Naka no Musumetachi: Yamanashi Ochiai Sōgi”, Rekishi hyōron 467 (1989): 45–63 Google Scholar. While this essay is an important starting point for more detailed analyses of female activism in the agrarian sphere, his primary focus is on the link between levels of female participation and membership in other village-level organizations. He mentions the dispute in Okayama's Fujita village and notes that it and most other struggles that prominently featured farming women were dominated by “wife corps” (nyōbodan or nyōboren) that played supporting roles to their husbands.

29. Arruzza, Cinzia, Dangerous Liaisons: The Marriages and Divorces of Marxism and Feminism (Pontypool, 2013)Google Scholar.

30. Most studies of women's new role as household managers of consumption and spending focus on urban areas. For example, Faison, Elyssa, Managing Women: Disciplining Labor in Modern Japan (Berkeley, 2007)Google Scholar; Metzler, Mark, “Women's Place in Japan's Great Depression: Reflections on the Moral Economy of Deflation”, Journal of Japanese Studies 30 (2004): 315–52CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Tipton, Elise, “How to Manage a Household: Creating Middle Class Housewives in Modern Japan”, Japanese Studies 29 (2009): 95–110 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

31. Tama Shinnosuke considers the tenant disputes in Okayama as representative of disputes that took place during the Taisho era. See Tama, , “Nōminteki shōshōhin seisan no hatten to kosaku sōgi—‘Nōminteki shōshōhin seisan gainen’ saikō”, Okayama Daigaku keizai gakkai zasshi 21 (1990): 51–76 Google Scholar.

32. A chōbu is a unit of measurement. One chōbu is approximately one hectare.

33. This is precisely the reason that prewar Japanese Marxist Yamada Moritarō of the Kōza (Lectures) faction and others focused so heavily on it during the post-World War Two land reforms. See Yamada, , “Nihon nōgyō seisanryoku dankai to chūkaku nōminso no gainen”, Tochi seido shiryō hozonkai hōkoku 1 (Tokyo, 1954)Google Scholar. According to Honpō rōdō undō chōsa hōkoku (Tokyo, 1923), 83–108 Google Scholar, the Fujita Farm held 1,277 chōbu of land that was cultivated by 511 families and 258 commuters or agricultural day laborers who lived outside of the boundaries of the farm as of April 1, 1922.

34. Allinson, Jamie and Anievas, Alexander, “The Uneven and Combined Development of the Meiji Restoration: A Passive Revolutionary Road to Capitalist Modernity”, Capital & Class 34 (2010): 469–90CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

35. Daijirō, Hosogai, “Kojima wan Fujita kantaku to Fujita nōjō no chokuei yōshiki”, Kaigai jijō 20 (1972): 39–40 Google Scholar.

36. Aoki Seiichirō provides historical data on the amount of village income that was comprised of company donations in Okayama ken Kojima wan kantaku no Fujita-gumi reizokuka nōmin no tōsōroku (Nagano, 1953), 5–6 Google Scholar.

37. Seiichi, Maeda, Fujita nōjō keieishi (Okayama, 1965)Google Scholar.

38. They became more heavily indebted because they had to pay for seeds, fertilizer, agricultural tools, etc., which they were forced to purchase or rent from the company. These conditions are described in “Sōgi saichū no Fujita nōjō,” Osaka Jiji shimpō, January 19 and 23, 1923. http://www.lib.kobe-u.ac.jp/das/jsp/ja/ContentViewM.jsp?METAID=00490467&TYPE=HTML_FILE&POS=1 (accessed January 4, 2017).

39. The intensity of the disputes and the concrete demands changed dramatically during this time. The fight for permanent tenant rights was a central part of tenant farmer activism. See Zennō Okayama tōsōshi (Okayama, 1936)Google Scholar. The August 1921 dispute in Miyako was also fought over the rate of the distribution of profits. The company did not acquiesce to these demands but did announce reforms that were designed to provide more stability for the sharecroppers and direct cultivators. Honpō rōdō undō chōsa hōkoku, 92.

40. Okayama prefecture's women's division repeatedly pushed for the formation of a similar division in the national JFU since the Second National Congress in February 1923. It was established in 1925, but in practice achieved little.

41. Though Shigei does not specify what type of tenant arrangement her family was under during this time, she seems to remember her family as being under the sharecropping arrangement. However, that did not begin in Miyako until 1919. The family may have been converted from a more favorable direct management system where cultivators farmed four or five chōbu per family.

42. The company's official history acknowledges the harshness of these contracts. See Maeda, 117.

43. Kikue, Makise, “Fujita nōjō sōgi no koro: Shigei Shigeko san ni kiku”, Shisō no Kagaku 29 (1974): 49–55 Google Scholar.

44. Ibid., 50.

45. The company used their own advanced machinery, including threshers. The problem was that the farm was an experimental station so they would use one model for a couple of years and then switch to a different one. They would also remove existing infrastructure like bridges to accommodate these new machines, which made it inconvenient and costly for cultivators. Tenants complained about the damage that they incurred from the oil that leaked from the boats that were used on the aqueducts. This was outlined in the October 26, 1922, document that I discuss in the next section. Honpō rōdō undō chōsa hōkoku, 99.

46. Makise, “Fujita nōjō sōgi no koro: Shigei Shigeko san ni kiku,” 50. For more on the relationship between the dismantling of communal rights after World War One and organized tenant struggle, see Keiji, Ushiyama, “Nōson keizai kōsei undōka no ‘mura’ no kinō to kōsei”, Rekishi hyōron 435 (1986): 19–31 Google Scholar; and Yuichi, Hayashi, “Dokusen shihonshugi kakuritsuki—Daiichiji Taisen kara Showa Kyōkō made”, in Nihon nōgyōshi: Shihonshugi no tenkai to nōgyō mondai, ed. Shūzo, Teruoka (Tokyo, 1981): 113–63Google Scholar.

47. Technically, the company did allow all tenants to cultivate secondary crops that they were allowed to keep for themselves. However, because of the long time that the threshing process took, they did not have time to devote to its production. As Sidney Mintz and other scholars who have studied slavery and postemancipation arrangements in plantations throughout the Caribbean, gardens and other plots of land that cultivators were allowed access to were constant points of contention. See, for example, his chapter “Houses and Yards among Caribbean Peasantries” in Caribbean Transformations (New York, 1974)Google ScholarPubMed; Tomich, Dale, Through the Prism of Slavery: Labor, Capital, and World Economy (New York, 2004)Google Scholar.

48. “Sōgi saichu no Fujita nōjō.”

49. Ōnishi Toshio, Nōmin tōsō no senjutsu. Sono yakushin: Nōmin kumiai nyūmon (1928), republished as Shōwa zenki nōsei keizai meichōshū, vol. 22, ed. Inamura Ryūichi (Tokyo, 1979) writes about the use of these calculations in tenant disputes. Ishiguro Tadaatsu, a powerful agricultural bureaucrat who was in charge of tenant arbitration in the mid-1920s, warned that tenants’ awareness of their production expenses gave them more leverage than their urban counterparts in disputes against capital. Ishiguro, , “Kosaku mondai gaiyō”, in Chihō kosakukan kōshūkai kōenshū, ed. Nōmukyoku, Nōrinshō (Tokyo, 1925), 1–99 Google Scholar.

50. These are figures from January 1923 published in “Sōgi saichu no Fujita nōjō.”

51. Ibid. As Zennō Okayama tōsōshi emphasizes, nearby Ooku and Jodo districts had already created a resolution earlier that month, which included the socialization of arable land in the interests of creating a flourishing agrarian village culture and the defeat of capitalism.

52. Zennō Okayama tōsōshi, 20–21.

53. Ibid., 23. This was the first instance of a “no trespassing” order in the history of modern landlord-tenant disputes in the country.

54. “Miyako nōmin fujin tatsu,” Tochi to jiyū, January 25, 1923.

55. “Fujita nōjō sawagi tsui ni haretsu shita,” Osaka Asahi shimbun, January 21, 192,3 focused on the battle between the JFU faction and the Fujita farm/police. http://www.lib.kobe-u.ac.jp/das/jsp/ja/ContentViewM.jsp?METAID=00490465&TYPE=HTML_FILE&POS=1

56. “Tsunashima no Fujita-tei ni oshiyoseta onna tachi,” Osaka Asahi shimbun, January 23, 1923. http://www.lib.kobe-u.ac.jp/das/jsp/ja/ContentViewM.jsp?METAID=00490469&TYPE=HTML_FILE&POS=1

57. Jirō, Kondō, “Nihon Nōmin Kumiai no Seiritsu to Hirakata no Kosaku Sōgi”, Nōringyō Mondai Kenkyū 10 (1967): 90–98 Google Scholar.

58. For details of these conversations, refer to Shizue, Takui, “Kantō fujin dōmei—Nihon ni okeru saisho no puroretaria-teki taishū-teki tan'itsu fujin soshiki no kokoromi”, Rekishi hyōron 280 (1973): 83–94 Google Scholar. In English, see Silverberg, Miriam, “The Modern Girl as Militant” in Recreating Japanese Women, 1600–1945, ed. Bernstein, Gail Lee (Berkeley, 1991): 239–66Google Scholar.

59. The total number of delegates was 486. In addition to the three female representatives from Okayama, two other representatives, Kuribayashi Fusae from Kagawa and Sugitani Tsumo from Kumamoto, were women. Tochi to jiyū printed a seating chart for its delegates in their February 20, 1925, edition. Tochi to jiyū, February 20, 1925, reprinted in Tochi to jiyū (fukkōban) 2 (Tokyo, 1975), 56. This was in the midst of debates within the Hyōgikai over the role that women's division should play in the organization.

60. Makise, “Fujita nōjō sōgi no koro: Shigei Shigeko san ni kiku,” 51.

61. Hayashi criticizes these calculations for including wage costs at levels of agricultural day laborers but does not point out that they also do not include the costs of social reproduction that were born disproportionately by women.

62. This was something that the first ILO meeting in 1919 took up for consideration. In addition to debating the problem of night work for women, the protection of maternity rights was also on the agenda. See Maryse Gaudier, “The Development of the Women's Question at the ILO, 1919–1974: 75 Years of Progress Towards Equality,” ILO Discussion Paper Series, 1996. On the debate in Japan, see Molony, Barbara, “Equality versus Difference: The Japanese Debate over ‘Motherhood Protection,’ 1915–1950”, in Hunter, Janet, ed. Japanese Women Working (London, 1993): 122–29Google Scholar and Laurel Rasplica Rodd, “Yosano Akiko and the Taishō Debate Over the “New Woman,” in Bernstein, Recreating Japanese Women, 175–98. As Kondō (Sakai) Magara, one of the central members of the Sekirankai stated, at the first May Day that women's organizations participated in (May 1921), demands for an eight-hour working day, equal pay for men and women, and the protection of motherhood were included. “Jyosei to Shite Hajimete May Day ni Sanka Shita Sekirankai no Hitobito: Kondō Magara san ni Kiku,” interview by Suzuki Yūko, Sōhyō (May 1979): 49–59.

63. This was also called tegokoro, roughly translated as consideration, or thoughtfulness. The company did not want to formally change the contract but agreed to count more leniently so that the tenant farmers received more of the chaff than the strict 72:25 distributions would have allowed. Zennō Okayama tōsōshi, 20–21. The language of “appropriate discretion” brings to mind the characterization of women's wages as “discretionary income” that feminist scholars have critiqued for decades. In addition to reinforcing paternalistic relations between the company and tenant farmers, the language assumes that the terms agreed upon in the contract were fair and that the distribution was adequate for families to make ends meet.

64. Prior to the harvesting season in 1927, the company announced that it would put an end to this discretion. It sent out flyers announcing, “[W]e will prosecute if even one go of chaff is dropped.” This refers to the practice whereby during the division of the chaff between tenant farmers and the company, the part that was “dropped” was granted to the cultivator. Following their announcement, the company kept close watch over its tenants through binoculars. The police also conducted searches of homes several days after the rice stalks had been bundled up. These draconian measures by the company intensified the dispute in Fujita. Zennō Okayama tōsōshi, 77.

65. This was articulated in the Hyōgikai’s “Theses on the Women's Divisions,” which Yamakawa Kikue drafted on behalf of Mitamura Shirō in the fall of 1925. For details, refer to Suzuki's commentary published in Yamakawa Kikue Shū, vol. 4 (Tokyo, 2011), 296–97Google Scholar.

66. Makise, “Fujita nōjō sōgi no koro: Shigei Shigeko san ni kiku,” 52.

67. Faison writes about the establishment of women's divisions in these labor unions in Managing Women.

68. Itō made this clear in Itō Noe Zenshū, vol. 3, (Tokyo, 1970), 162–69Google Scholar. They also were inspired by the gains women made during the reforms of the early Bolshevik regime.

69. The fujinkai referred to patriotic women's associations that grew in membership and scope from the Taishō period. These were middle-class organizations, often affiliated with religious institutions that assisted with state-driven projects like lifestyle reform, disaster relief, education, and so on. They often received state support for their activities.

70. Zennō Okayama tōsōshi, 61.

71. The debate on this issue is reproduced in Rōdō kumiai fujinbu secchi o meguru ronsō to “fujin dōmei” kankei shiryō (1926–1928) (Tokyo, 1955)Google Scholar.

72. This exchange is recorded in “Dai futsuka,” Tochi to jiyū, March 25, 1924, 4. There were other recorded cases of discontent with the radicalism of some of the female activists, even in Okayama, which was known nationally as a place where the women's division was strong. See, for example, “Okayama ken rengōkai iin taikai,” Tochi to jiyū, January 25, 1924.

73. Tochi to jiyū has an article that contains reports of the women's division. Yamagami and Takahashi Fumie gave lectures in May 1925 to over 3,000 people. Of these, 780 were women. “Kagawa ken rengōkai hōkoku,” Tochi to jiyū, July 25, 1925.

74. The flier is reproduced as document 15 in Rōdō kumiai fujinbu secchi o meguru ronsō to “fujin dōmei” kankei shiryō (1926–1928), 51.

75. Even though the Peace Preservation Law had already been passed that month, it did not come into effect until May, which meant that the more restrictive Public Peace Police Law of 1900 remained in effect. For more on the changes, see Mackie's, Vera “Picturing Political Space in 1920s and 1930s Japan”, in Nation and Nationalism in Japan, ed. Wilson, Sandra (New York, 2002)Google Scholar. The nōminka that they sang is reprinted in Rōdoka oyobi kumiaika (Tokyo, 1927), 17–20 Google Scholar. It was written by Okayama's Mitsutomo Mantaro. All eight verses are printed in the April 25, 1923, edition of Tochi to jiyū.

76. Zennō Okayama tōsōshi, 62.

77. For background on International Women's Day, see Kaplan, Temma, “On the Socialist Origins of International Women's Day”, Feminist Studies 11 (1985): 163–71CrossRefGoogle Scholar and Ruthchild, Rochelle Goldberg, “From West to East: International Women's Day, the First Decade”, Aspasia 6 (2012): 1–24 CrossRefGoogle Scholar. On its commemoration in Japan and for more on Tanno, see autobiography, Tajima Hide's, Hitosuji no michi: Fujin kaihō no tatakai 50 nen (Tokyo, 1968), 77–84 Google Scholar.

78. Consumer cooperatives were also being promoted by state actors interested in strengthening welfare programs during this time. See, for example, economist Hon'iden Yoshio's promotion of these associations in his Fujin to shōhi kumiai undō (Kobe, 1925). For detailed figures that the Okayama prefecture compiled on women's organizations in Kojima as of 1915, see Okayama ken Kojima gunshi (1915) (Kyoto, 1986)Google Scholar. According to this document, there were already over 6,500 women who were in women's organizations in 1915. See pp. 433–35 for figures.

79. Zennō Okayama tōsōshi, 62–63. The signatories were Shigei, Tajiri, Yamagami, Hiramatsu Masako, Matsuda Okayo, and Sugita Otome.

80. Tochi to jiyū describes Okayama's “wife corps” as a local specialty (meibutsu).

81. Shigei Shigeko, “Kumiai fujinbu wa hitsuyō ka? Shikari!” Musansha shimbun, May 22, 1926.

82. This continued until April 5, 1928. While they also participated in the women's alliance (fujin dōmei) that included organizations identified as petty bourgeoisie, Okayama's female activists clearly saw women's liberation as inextricably linked to a class struggle. See “Nōmin undō no gaikyō.”

83. If we take Shigei's example, her dramatic life story takes her to and from Okayama and Hokkaido, where she participated in the largest tenant dispute in the country, the Hachisuka tenant dispute, which was a conflict over 5,000 chōbu that involved 1,000 tenant farmers. See Makise, “Fujita nōjō sōgi no koro: Shigei Shigeko san ni kiku,” 54 for her account of this struggle.

84. Kimie, Yamagami, “Nōson fujin to kazoku seido”, Mirai 3 (1926)Google Scholar, reprinted in Nihon fujin mondai shiryō shūsei, vol. 8, ed. Hideko, Maruoka (Tokyo, 1976), 578–80Google Scholar. Mirai was a journal that Tajima Hide, a feminist activist from Nagoya started when she started the Fujin rōdō chōsajo in 1926. She writes about her activism and this journal in Hitosuji no Michi.

85. Yamagami, “Nōson fujin to kazoku seido,” 578.

86. Ibid.

87. Ibid., 579.

88. Ibid., 580.

89. Tosaka Jun examined the devaluation of the societal position of women through the naturalization of domestic work as women's work in the home (katei) in “Fujin to shakaiteki rōdō”, Fujin bungei 4 (1936): 114–21Google Scholar reprinted in Nihon fujin mondai shiryō shūsei, (1978) 367–70.

90. Cooper, Melinda and Mitropoulos, Angela, “The Household Frontier”, Ephemera: Theory and Politics in Organization 9 (2009): 363–68Google Scholar. The quote is from 364.

91. It is also plausible that this was related to the farm's proximity to Kurashiki, a town whose main industrialist, Ōhara Magosaburō, was intent on providing female factory workers at his rayon factory with an “enlightened” work experience. He founded the Institute for Social Problems in 1919, which is currently housed at Hōsei University.

92. Kamezō, Okuda, Nōson kyūsai: Tochi seido kaiseiron (Tokyo, 1927), 17Google Scholar.

93. On women's early contributions to industrial development, see Hunter, Janet, Women and the Labour Market in Japan's Industrialising Economy: The Textile Industry before the Pacific War (New York, 2003)Google Scholar.

94. Okuda, Nōson kyūsai: Tochi seido kaiseiron, 18.

95. As Harry Harootunian points out in Overcome by Modernity: History, Culture and Community in Interwar Japan (Princeton, 2000)Google Scholar, the woman, even more so than the worker, was the “true other of modernity” that had to be tamed (17). Female tenant farmers-turned-activists were doubly threatening to state authorities because they threatened both gender and class relationships that had more or less coalesced since the enactment of the civil code in 1898.

96. Ishiguro's aforementioned lecture to regional tenant arbitrators reflected his concern that around seventy percent of farming households were tenant farmers or were half-owner cultivators. We see this figure confirmed by an article by Yutaka, Arimoto, Tetsuji, Okazaki, and Masaki, Nakabayashi, “Agrarian Land Tenancy in Prewar Japan”, The Developing Economies 48 (2010): 293–318 Google Scholar. They explain that the figure of more than five million farming households remained relatively steady from the late nineteenth century until the end of World War One, and of this figure, nearly seventy percent cultivated some plots as tenants. The proportion of tenanted land in relation to all arable land was approximately forty-five percent, a significant amount.

97. For its report on this and other activities by the women's division, refer to “Nōmin undō no gaikyō: Tokubetsu kōtō keisatsu shiryō, dai 9 go (March 20, 1929)”, in Senzenki keisatsu kankei shiryōshū, vol. 5 (Tokyo, 2012), 321–22Google Scholar.

98. Details of this incident as well as the sentencing of the four women in November 1927 are included in an annual report on landlord-tenant disputes compiled by the Ministry of Agriculture and Forestry's Agriculture Bureau, Kosaku Nenpō, vol. 3, March 1928.

99. Zennō Okayama Tōsōshi (Okayama, 1936), 74Google Scholar.

100. According to figures presented by Chūichi, Sone, Shakai undō torishimari kōwa (Yamagata 1930), 29Google Scholar, there were 1,884 women in 67 divisions nationwide in 1930.