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115 have argued that the silk industry was a central feature of Japanese nationalism from the very beginning of the Meiji period. Even after the 1880s, silk factory women were national subjects , while constantly being monitored for their “women’s morality” and their sexuality. What was their status when the silk industry declined in the 1920s? To answer this question, I must depend on the formulation of “the country(side) and the city.”1 This is because certain nationalist discourses during this period manipulated this dichotomy in order to keep the factory women in the silk industry as national subjects: those who returned to the countryside upon losing their jobs remained national subjects, while those who migrated to the city (to work in the manufacturing or service industries) lost their status. In this and following chapters, I will focus on the discourses of Japanese folklore studies or native ethnology (Nihon minzoku-gaku) and of agrarianism as two important components of Japanese nationalism in the 1920s through 1940s.2 Both relied on the division between the countryside and the city. Both favored the countryside and its women over the city and its women. Since the early twentieth century, rural women in Nagano had to face a dramatic increase in their work load because of economic recessions and a series of wars that caused shortages of male labor. Yet the reader will not hear their voices in this chapter and the next one, for the discourses of Japanese native ethnology and agrarianism spoke for them, suppressing their voices. The Country and the City is the title of a book by literary critic Raymond Williams.3 According to Williams, “the country and the Chapter 5 The Countryside and the City 1: Yanagita K unio and Japanese Native E thnology i city are changing historical realities, both in themselves and in their interrelations” (1973, 289). In England, the country became “subsidiary , and knew that it was subsidiary,” in its relationship to the city in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries (p. 248). The general industrial and financial development in the city completely overshadowed life in the country. Although “our social experience is not only of the country and the city,” it is significant that “the ideas and the images of country and city retain their great force” even to this day (p. 289). And it is always in a period of exceptional change in the rural economy, such as the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in England, that people reflect on the relationship between the country and the city (p. 291).4 Likewise, many intellectuals in 1920s Japan were struck by the images of the countryside and the city. Prominent among them was folklorist Yanagita Kunio (1875–1962). Indeed, he published a book with a title almost identical to Williams’, Toshi to nòson (The city and the country) in 1929, when the countryside in Japan became “subsidiary ” in his own eyes.5 “A new question should be posed frankly. First of all, the ruination of the countryside (nòson) is wrong” (Yanagita 1962d, 256). Yanagita criticized not so much the ruination of the countryside as the “sacrifices it was being forced to make for an entirely new kind of social order based on urbanization and massive industrialization” (Harootunian 1990, 100). For Yanagita, urbanization and massive industrialization, which the Meiji state had mobilized, caused the ruination of the countryside. They triggered the migration of farmers to the city. They made it difficult for farmers to find marriage partners in the countryside. And they further impoverished farmers with the ever-increasing need for cash to purchase the products of industrial capitalism. Consequently, Yanagita and his students had to find a “resolution of the question of social determinacy—the principles of social cohesion, if the survivors of the past were not to be subdated by capitalism and its theory of social relationships” (Harootunian 1990, 100). For them, such a resolution was the agrarian mode of economic and cultural production. In her article “The Transformation of Rural Society, 1900–1950” (1988), historian Ann Waswo brilliantly captures the moments of decline in rural Japan. With the sudden end to the post–World War I economic boom, on the one hand, crop prices began to fall in 1920 and fluctuated unpredictably at lower levels for the next several years (1988, 583). On the other hand, local tax burdens continued to increase. Farmers of middling and lower status were most affected by 116 Countryside and City 1 [18...

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