Histories of women in and around Japan, 1868-1945

Wada Ei was born in 1857 in Matsushiro (present-day Nagano City). Her father Yokota Kazuma was a former samurai turned mayor, while her mother Kiyo was a strict Confucian matriarch who raised at least nine successful children. In 1870, construction began on a government-run silk mill in Tomioka (in Gunma Prefecture) using new technologies imported from France, led by the engineer Paul Brunat. The mill went up in good order, but there was a shortage of mill girls, apparently because the Frenchmen’s fondness for red wine led to a rumor that they drank blood. The first factory manager, Odaka Atsutada, had resorted to hiring his fourteen-year-old daughter Yu, who became influential in bringing in more girls. Asked in his official position to supply extra candidates, Mayor Yokota put forth his own daughter’s name. Once Ei herself (thrilled to be doing some real work for her country and escaping her hordes of younger siblings) was committed, others chimed in with “If O-Ei-san is going, I’m going too,” including her sister-in-law-to-be Wada Hatsu and ten-year-old Kawara Tsuru, who insisted she was thirteen. There was also fourteen-year-old Kasuga Cho (who wrote her family letters saying she enjoyed her work and urging them to send her extra snacks). Sixteen girls in all set off on foot over the Usui Pass to Tomioka, accompanied by an escort of various male relatives. Ei wore the black broadcloth coat in which her father had fought in the Boshin War; she remembered the rice cakes they stopped to eat on the way.

Ei was seventeen when she arrived at the mill in 1873; her intake doubled the workforce to four hundred-odd, mostly the daughters of samurai and landed farmers. The purpose of the mill and its French engineers was not only to produce silk but to train the mill girls in the process, so that they could eventually go on to run mills in their own regions. The work was considered relatively prestigious, and the working conditions were good for the time (eight-hour days, time off, hygienic dormitories, etc., as well as the freedom to wear cosmetics, go shopping, visit the local shrine, eat biscuits with the Frenchwomen instructors, and occasionally see plays), setting Tomioka and its offshoots apart from the later textile mills which, in Japan as elsewhere, became infamous for the misery visited on their laborers (as famously reported in Hosoi Wakizo’s Joko aishi [A tragic history of mill girls] of 1925).

Healthy, hard-working Ei, who became extremely successful at her job, was duly promoted from trainee all the way to first-class worker, coming home to Matsushiro in 1875 to serve as supervisor at the new Rokkusha mill there. In 1878, at twenty-two, she became training supervisor at the prefectural silk plant. In 1880, she left her job to marry her fiancé, a soldier called Wada Moriharu (Seiji?). They adopted a son, Morikazu (Seiichi?), who later succeeded his father as head of the ill-fated Ashio Copper Mine (where the workers apparently favored him and his family even during the riots there); Ei died in Ashio at the age of 73. She is best known now for her “Tomioka Diary,” a record of her time at the Tomioka mill written many years later.

Sources
Nakae
Mori (2014)
https://www.jobu-kinunomichi.jp/en/special/koujyo.html (English) Details about life at the Tomioka Silk Mill
http://www.silkmill.iihana.com/wadaei.php (Japanese) Contains an excerpt from Ei’s diary and a clip from a film based on the Tomioka mill