Japanese Women Working.

• Author: Rodgers, Yana van der Meulen

In Japanese Women Working, researchers in economics, history, and anthropology describe Japan's evolution of female labor market conditions, institutions, and policies since 1880. The book provides students and professional academics with a penetrating inquiry into the working lives of the handmaidens of Japan's economic growth. With her choice of descriptive essays, Janet Hunter effectively persuades the reader that overall, Japanese women have experienced fairly unpleasant labor market conditions during the last century. The book's exposure of historical precedents, assuming a representative sample of accounts, provides useful lessons for those in a position to change labor market institutions and policies in Japan and in Asia's newly industrializing countries.

With the organization of essays in approximate chronological order, the reader notes the emergence of lessons in three key areas: labor market conditions across sectors (domestic service, textile mills, mining, diving, and hospital care); time allocation decisions between work and home life; and effects of changes in institutions and policies on the female labor market experience. Several contributors merit highlight.

Janet Hunter's own analysis describes the contribution of environmental factors to tuberculosis incidence, with a focus on young female textile workers. Hunter points to the extremely harsh factory and dormitory conditions, highly conducive to the spread of tuberculosis, which these workers endured as Japan's textile industry prospered. She rightly suggests that factory owners may have saved money in the short run by not improving conditions, but in the long run they lost money through sickness-related worker inefficiency and high turnover costs from recruitment and training.

Regine Mathias's vivid account of female coal miners reinforces the theme of poor labor market conditions and limited time for domestic responsibilities. Unlike other contributors, the author provides some data with which to construct gender wage differentials; the data indicate that jobs which required strenuous physical labor had the smallest wage differentials.

Eiko Shinotsuka's study of health care assistants from 1918 to 1988 serves as a useful bridge from the book's historical analysis of labor market conditions to the examination of contemporary female labor market status. The controversial intervention of private employment agencies in the health care market during much of the period has...