The Encounter of "Jo-kou" with the Neighborhood Community

要旨

The term "jo-kou", which means female laborers working at spinning factories, has been used with discriminatory implications. The reality raised by this term leads us to imagine the group life of girls, the extremely hard work and the poverty, associated with a disdainful perception towards them. As a result, female laborers at spinning factories have also experienced severe social discrimination in neighborhood communities.The author proposes that these discriminatory conditions have been observed more strongly in the encounter with the neighboring residents outside of the factory rather than in labormanagement relations inside the factory. The author also asserts that a perspective which focuses only on matters inside factories tends to mask workers' independence and potential, which are necessary to clarify in this study. Therefore, this paper stresses an important perspective: that is, to direct our attention to the encounters of spinning female laborers with the neighborhood community outside factories.In the study area of Oda district at Muko county (since 1936, Amagasaki city) in Hyogo prefecture where the Kanzaki factory of Toyo Spinning Company was located, many reminiscences of spinning laborers are available, and the author adds personal interviews with neighboring residents. These narratives are helpful in clarifying the ways in which the residents viewed female laborers and how laborers shared their life world with the surrounding community. The impact of the neighborhood's discrimination of laborers and their reactions to it are also examined.The results obtained here are as follows: (1) The company's management was largely conditioned by the laborers' emotions that arose as a result of encounters with the neighborhood community. (2) The laborers' independence, which tends to be unclear if we focus on labor-management relations inside the factory, can be recognized through an analysis of relations between female laborers and the neighborhood community.

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