#HIEA115
Q: Why is Tsurumi’s argument about the importance of Japanese women’s labor power to nation-building an important intervention to week 1’s theorizations of nationalism? On the flip side, what experiences might focusing too much on this point occlude?
A: E. Patricia Tsurumi’s paper, “Whose History Is It Anyway?” speaks to the textile koojo (“textile factory women/factory girls”) and how their tireless efforts spurred great economic development in Japan. Tsurumi makes the point that historians often depict these women as victims, painting pictures of terrible living and working conditions, sickness that ravages the dormitories, sexual harassment and beatings that were a regular occurrence. She references Michel Foucalt and writes: “…power is not a monolith separate from and above those it dominates but is imbedded in the social body from the lowest local levels all the way up to the top of the nation-state” (Tsurumi, 19). Thus, this perspective comes from articles, books, and government investigations in reports written by men who observed these women or who may have had close relations with these women, but very rarely the women themselves. We paint these women in a sacrificial lens, as individuals forced to give up their freedom to earn money for their families, those who gave up their livelihoods to produce goods for trade to economically improve upon their nation. But we have little to no way of understanding how they viewed themselves. In her paper, “Family Feuds: Gender, Nationalism and the Family”, Anne McClintock writes: “Excluded from direct action as national citizens, women are subsumed symbolically into the national body politic as its boundary and metaphoric limit… Women are typically construed as the symbolic bearers of the nation, but are denied any direct relation to national agency” (McClintock, 62) In essence, these women worked in silk and cotton mills “for their country”, as some historians might argue, but their contribution to Japan is limited by the ability of their male supervisors and stockholders to distribute and profit from the textiles. The koojo are painted as the “bearers of the nation”, but the irony stems from the fact that they themselves may not have been privy to this knowledge. There is little evidence that they held strong identity with the nation, but there is ample evidence in the songs they sing and the stories they tell that their identity lies primarily in their families and the villages they come from. The identity of the koojo, a group apparently so important to Japan’s Meiji era history, remains largely unknown… a phenomenon that could have only occurred to a female population.
On the other hand, when we focus too much on the nuances of gendered contribution to the development of a nation or even nationalism as a whole, we can lose sight of the overall effect of a historical event. McClintock writes: “Different genders, classes, ethnicities and generations do not identify with, or experience the myriad national formations in the same way; nationalisms are invented, performed and consumed in ways that do not follow a universal blueprint” (McClintock, 67). With so many countries in the world with unique identities and paths to development, it would be narrow-minded to attempt to understand Nation X through a lens made in the perspective of Nation Y. It’s difficult enough to determine background and intent for any historical event, but to apply all the possible perspectives to each situation of any significance would be, in a word, difficult and it would take an army of historians, as well as ample amounts of time to carve out any meaning to anything.
