ABSTRACT
This chapter examines how employers in the Japanese cotton textile industry approached the employment and management of women workers during the early post-Second World War decades. The textile industry in Japan had long been a significant employer of female labour since its establishment in the early Meiji period and had built up a distinctive pattern in its employment of young females. However, the years after Japan’s defeat in the Second World War brought a new and rapidly changing socio-economic environment, within which the industry was re-established and in many ways forced to reorganise its labour management strategies. This chapter examines why and how textile employers responded to these challenges.
