Enterprise and the Female Factory Worker

How bad were conditions in the textile factories? To what extent do the anthropometric measures allow us to draw conclusions about the supply pool from which the girls were drawn and about conditions in the factories themselves? Many studies, for example, E. P. Tsurumi's (1990), have documented the fact that the mills were dirty, noisy, and poorly ventilated. But how much of a toll did these conditions exact on the girls who entered the mills?

We have some evidence on both points. As a result of the passage of the Factory Act of 1911 factory inspectors began to enter the larger mills in 1916 and to file reports on an annual basis thereafter.^[8] From the tables compiled from these reports it is clear enough that mortality rates among workers and former workers in the factories exceeded those for persons of comparable age in the prefectures in which the factories were located. Moreover, rates of airborne infection were especially high in the factory mills, particularly for workers who resided in factory dormitories and were thus exposed both at work and at their place of residence.

Anthropometric data for spinning mill recruits and spinning mill workers of various lengths of job tenure allow us to supplement the qualitative impressionistic accounts penned by factory workers and social critics. The data appear in table 18. On the basis of these figures we can make the following points. First, factory recruits were considerably shorter than students at all ages; second, factory recruits seem to have matured at later ages than did students (the gap in height between recruits and students decreases between ages 15 and 20); third, in comparison to students, recruits are heavier at any given height (i.e., recruits have larger body mass indexes than do students). Therefore, there is no doubt that there were rather large differences in the population quality of the supply pool from which the spinning mills drew and that of the female student population who were, in general, daughters of middle-class and well-to-do families.

But what about operatives who had worked in the mills a year or two? What was the extent of the impact of the work and living environment of the mills? As we can see from panel B of table 18, the pattern is a bit erratic, but in general the argument that more years of work in the mill adversely affected physique is not confirmed by these data. It is possible that there is a selectivity problem. That is, it is possible that the less healthy and sickly voluntarily or involuntarily left the mills early on in their work careers. But if we compare recruits with those

having mill experience, the superiority of the latter is evident. This does not really prove the argument of the mill owners that the "beautiful Japanese relations" between employer and employee were promoting enhanced health. After all, the mills drew from some of the lowest income groups in the country and it is quite possible that the food provided to the factory girls in company cafeterias, which was designed to keep up the stamina of the workers, was superior to that eaten in poor agricultural households. But the data do not contradict the argument of the mill owners, either. Perhaps the most reasonable way to put the matter is this: by the early twentieth century socioeconomic differentials in population quality were becoming very large. This was in part due to widening income differentials as the incomes in the industrial conurbations like Tokyo and Osaka increased and those in rural areas increasingly lagged behind; the process whereby differentials widened was not rapid as economic growth was balanced, but it was steadily occurring nevertheless. But more important were the debilitating effects of physical work and disease. The female students were not accustomed to doing physical work on a regular basis, and they came from households that could afford to spend more time and resources on coping with infectious disease. In short, net nutrition was far better among the young adult student population of Japan than it was among the young adult factory worker population. And the fact that central government was relying heavily on the market and was not aggressively promoting entitlement programs to supplement market outcomes was contributing to the widening of the differential.