Housework and the Nature of Consumption Goods

Very little data, either quantitative or qualitative, exists to demonstrate the content and nature of household labour over the course of Japan’s development. This chapter attempts to use what we know of the characteristics of Japanese consumer goods to derive the nature of their production and the likely contribution of female household labour to the process. Small-scale cultivation, and the high rate of household self-sufficiency in agricultural goods that it facilitated, meant that the production, processing and cooking of home-grown food made heavy demands on household labour but generated the housework-intensive forms of production that have come to characterise Japanese cuisine. Although home-production of textiles themselves largely disappeared with the growing availability of factory-made cotton cloth, the nature of the Japanese-style clothing that continued to prevail until after World War II meant lengthy and skilled work in sewing remained a significant task for the female household labour force. For the inter-war period, as Chapter 3 demonstrated, such quantitative information as we possess confirms the correlation between rising living standards and the persistent deployment of unpaid household labour, in the context of the Japanese consumption pattern.