The Japanese Silk Reeling Industry and Women’s Labor: The Case of the Tomioka Silk Mill

This chapterTomioka Silk Mill depicts the intertwined histories of women’s labor and the economic development of modern JapanJapan through the lens of the silk reeling industry. By exploring the shifts in governmental control, capital ownership, and gendered working conditions at the Tomioka Silk MillTomioka Silk Mill (in operation from 1872 to 1987), I re-evaluate women’s industrial working environments within broader trends in scholarship on global history. Tracing the working lives of women connected to this mill demonstrates not only the international connections created by the global silk industrySilksilk industry, but also the development of modern Japanese capitalism and historical shifts in labor policies. The Tomioka Silk MillTomioka Silk Mill tells us the story of industrial development and automation, the restructuring of skilled and unskilled labor, the long-term impacts of labor laws, and the eventual collapse of a gendered workforce at the end of the twentieth century.