ABSTRACT
Opened in 1872 under the supervision of French foreign workers, the government-owned Tomioka Silk Mill was publicized for its modern architectural forms and industrial technology, in images frequently populated by young factory women. These female figures are depicted in woodblock prints without distinguishable personal features, working in a clean environment and wearing traditional clothing. Such imagined visual tropes provided a continuation from earlier Edo prints, giving viewers a sense of stability, as well as a sense of modernity and economic prosperity in the industrial setting of the mill. Silk constituted a major export good for the Meiji state, yet this commodity, crucial for the modernization project, was produced primarily by women. This inconvenient fact was problematic for maintaining the male-hierarchy that late nineteenth century Japanese society was founded upon, thus the state needed to deny agency to the factory women to simultaneously preserve the social structure and to retain young female workers, sustaining production and keeping export costs low. While prints were not explicitly propaganda, they played a major role in creating public opinion on both the mills and the workers. By examining woodblock prints referencing sericulture in late nineteenth century Japan, this paper investigates how the processes of modernization and Westernization of industry impacted the imaging of women in Meiji society.
