Song of the Living Corpses - Japanese Textile Workers' Ballads

As Japan industrialised in the late 19th and early 20th century large numbers of young women were employed in textile mills, often living in tightly regulated dormitories under the control of their employers. Like people in many places they sang songs of despair and defiance.

Here's some extracts from a few textile workers' ballads, from an article by  E Patricia Tsurumi (Female Textile Workers and the Failure of Early Trade Unionism in Japan, History Workshop Journal, 18, Autumn 1984).

Song of the Living Corpses

My family was poor,

At the tender age of twelve,

I was sold to a factory.

Yet though I work for cheap wages,

My soul is not soiled.

Like the lotus flower in the midst of mud,

My heart too,

Will one day blossom forth.

Carried away by sweet-sounding words,

My money was stolen and thrown away.

Unaware of the hardships of the future,

I was duckweed in the wind.

Excited, I arrived at the age,

Where I bowed to the doorman,

I was taken immediately to the dormitory,

Where I bowed to the room supervisor.

I was taken immediately to the infirmary,

Where I risked my life having a medical examination.

I was taken immediately to the cafeteria,

Where I asked what was for dinner.

I was told it was low grade rice mixed with sand.

When I asked what the side dish was,

I was told there weren't even two slices of pickle to eat.

Then I was taken immediately to the factory,

Where I donned a blue skirt and blue shirt,

And put on hemp-straw sandals and blue socks.

When I asked where I was to work

I was told to fasten threads on the winder.

Because my parents were good-for-nothings,

Or, because my parents weren't good-for-nothings

But I was a good-for-nothing myself,

I was deceived by a fox without a tail.

Now I'm awakened at 4:30 in the morning;

First I fix my face, then go to the cafeteria;

Then it's off to the factory

Where the chief engineer scowls at me.

When I return to my room,

The supervisor finds all manner of fault with me,

And I-feel like I'll never get on in this world.

When next I'm paid

I'll trick the doorkeeper and slip off to the station,

Board the first train

For my dear parents' home.

Both will cry when I tell them

How fate made me learn warping,

Leaving nothing but skin and bone on my soul.

We friends are wretched,

Separated from our homes in a strange place,

Put in a miserable dormitory

Woken up at 4:30 in the morning,

Eating when 5 o'clock sounds,

Dressing at the third bell,

Glared at by the manager and section head,

Used by the inspector.

How wretched we are!

Though I am a factory maid,

My heart is a peony, a cherry in double blossom,

Though male workers make eyes at me,

I'm not the kind to respond.

Rather than remain in this factory,

I'll pluck up my courage,

And board the first train for Ogawa,

Maybe I'll even go to the far corners of Manchuria.

Prison Lament

Factory work is prison work,

All it lacks are metal chains.

More than a caged bird, more than a prison,

Dormitory life is hateful.

The factory is hell, the manager a demon,

The restless floorwalker a wheel of fire.

Like the money in my employment contract,

I remain sealed away.

If a male worker makes eyes at you,

You end up losing your shirt.

How I wish the dormitory would be washed away, 

the factory burn down,

And the gatekeeper die of cholera!

I want wings to escape from here,

To fly as far as those distant shores.

My Factory

At other companies there are Buddhas and Gods.

At mine only demons and serpents.

When I hear the manager talking,

His words say only 'money, money, and time

'They sang lovingly and longingly of their parents and siblings at home; they sang angrily and resentfully of the factories and sheds in which they toiled and of the owners and managers who supervised that toil' (Tsurumi)

'And I Dance with Somebody' - Diamonds are Forever & the Yokohama AIDS Conference 1994

In 'And I Dance with Somebody: Queer History in a Japanese Nightclub' (History Workshop Journal, Autumn 2020), Mark Pendleton  reflects on queer spaces, drag and HIV activism (among other things) through the prism of  'a drag-based club night called Diamonds are Forever' which was launched in Kyoto in 1989 and is still going. Pendleton frequented the club while living there in 1998-9 and returned to it recently.

The club was started by the 'artist and activist Furuhashi Teiji, also known by his drag persona Glorias' who while living in 1980s New York  became part of 'the East Village’s burgeoning drag and gay scene centred on the Pyramid Club'. Back in Japan he started the club in Kyoto as well as being involved in 'the radical performance art collective Dumb Type, which challenged social norms around gender, sexuality and identity'.

Pendleton honours the club founders but also warns against 'a narrow focus on creation.. A scene is created, sure, and that act of creation is fundamentally important, but what is created is also experienced by participants, who may or may not be known to the creators themselves and who make those spaces their own through their acts of resistance, or their dance moves'.

In Japan and elsewhere, Pendleton argues, queer spaces can be 'A retreat from the heteronormative world outside. A place to grow into cultures and histories marginalized from that world. That flash of bliss that gives a sense of a future beyond those dull places that fettered us. And a damn fun night of dancing, as a political act in and of itself'.

The 1994 International AIDS Conference in Yokohama

Pendleton highlights the significance of the Tenth International AIDS Conference held in Yokohama in August 1994, a decade into the AIDS crisis and the first event of its kind held outside of Europe or North America. The conference was attended by 10,000 people from 140 countries, with researchers, clinicians, policy makers, community workers, activists and others gathered under the slogan ‘The 

global challenge of AIDS: together for the future’.

Pendleton is critical of a framing of this conference as a culture clash between 'the conservative Japanese society and the western activists' (International AIDS Society), noting that it 'also featured Japanese artists and activists joining with those from elsewhere to remind scientists and policymakers that HIV positive people continued to live their lives through the crisis'. Specifically, Furuhashi and others involved with Dumb Type and Diamonds are Forever  intervened at the conference 'hanging red banners and hosting a party to reflect this insistence and the mechanism through which they understood that life could continue to be realized – collective acts of dancing and love. The AIDS acronym was stripped of its association with illness, stigma and death to become 'And I Dance with Somebody, accompanied by the slogans LOVE POSITIVE in English'.

Yokohama 1994 - image from Mori Art Museum

I attended the Yokohama conference and the party mentioned here so it was great to see this documented, and I thought I would contribute my fading memories of this event and my small collection of documents related to it (I wish I'd taken more photos now of course - I did take some of Yokohama street art which I've featured here before)

'Love Positive' with its slogan 'And I Dance with Somebody' was a series of cultural events, including a Symposium involving the US art critic and ACT UP activist Douglas Crimp. The Love Ball was an evening event taking place in the Plaza in front of the Pacifico Yokohama International Convention Center, the main conference venue. The Ball was described as 'A party to conference participants and the general public' with 'appearances by Diamonds are Forever's drag queens from the Kyoto club scene'. 

'And I Dance with Somebody' - postcard from AIDS Poster Project, Japan

More details are included on this fyler which lists DJ Lala and performers including Ms Glorias (Furuhashi), Simone Fukayuki, Maria Le Reina, OK Girls, Blue Day Girls and others:

As I recall there were a few hundred people there. It wasn't the wildest party, starting as it did in daylight in the humid outdoors, but it was a striking departure from the conference format of endless presentations. The drag acts would certainly have disabused anybody with misconceptions about Japan being a homogenously conservative nation! Of course I was familiar with drag, but I guess the mainstream UK conception of it at the time was of men dressing up as versions of women. If I had to describe it now I would say in Yokohama it was people (who may have defined themselves as men, women or neither) dressing up in outrageous costumes that were beyond anything usually worn by anybody and in a sense beyond gender.

There was a kind of utopian energy, captured in the slogan on this postcard featuring OK Girls, one of the acts participating in the Love Ball: 'O Developed Nations of Desire! O Superpowers of Fantasy' . As described by Pendleton, Japanese slogans on the banners 'imagined a dissolution of binary divisions, whether HIV+/-, man/woman or citizen/foreigner: "I have a dream that my status disappears. I have a dream that my sex disappears. I have a dream that my nationality disappears"'.

 After the performances everyone was invited up on the stage where we danced to disco.

The Plaza venue for the Love Ball (though this photo is of another event at the conference)

My encounter with the Kyoto crew was fleeting but it cheered me up, the conference itself was (understandably) a sober affair. At that point the World Health Organisation was estimating that 6000 people were being infected with HIV every day and that at least 17 million people had acquired HIV world-wide. Medical treatments had not progressed much beyond AZT, which had first been licensed in 1987. There was some positive news at the conference, such as a study that showed AZT could prevent babies being born with HIV to HIV+ mothers. But even the limited treatments available were out of reach of many in Sub Saharan Africa where the  majority of people living with HIV resided.  In her speech at the closing ceremony, 'Noerine Kaleeba from Uganda said that many young women there were asking why, if AZT was effective in reducing mother-to-child transmission, did they not have access to it' (quoted in Orr, Children, Families and HIV: The Global Picture, 1994).

It sometimes felt that such issues were as at risk of being sidelined in the increasingly professionalised AIDS industry of doctors, drugs companies and NGOs. Of course many of these people were doing good work and I was in the latter category myself. But there was a need for a strong activist challenge to put the lived experience of people with HIV at the forefront, and to maintain a sense of urgency.

There were some people in Yokohama from direct action group ACT UP, and they staged a protest at the closing ceremony focused on immigration restrictions on people living with HIV. New York activists reported that  'ten ACT UP members from New York, eight from Paris, and more than 100 members of Tokyo's OCCUR spearheaded several events during the week, including an unprecedented AIDS/coming out march in Yokohama on the opening day of the conference' (The Advocate, 15 November 1994)

ACT UP New York Press Release for Yokohama
(full publication here)

OCCUR (Association for the Lesbian and Gay Movement, based in Tokyo) had established  'The Executive Committee for Learn from PWA and Minorities' in May 1994 and had spent the months leading up to the conference lobbying against immigration restrictions on people with AIDS, sex workers and drug users that would have prevented many people from attending the conference. While some flexibility seems to have applied for the conference, the Committee continued to argue against discriminatory immigration laws and that 'The fight against AIDS has no border and so efforts must be made to assure all PWA/H's [People with AIDS/HIV] freedom of international mobility and to encourage solidarity through global networking, cooperation and actions of community-based organisations'. 

Newsletter published by 'The Executive Committee for Learn from PWA and Minorities'/OCCUR for Yokohama conference (full text of document here)

As well as discrimination against people with HIV, another big issue in Japan at the time was the blood products scandal. At least 1,000 haemophiliacs had been infected with HIV through blood products and those affected were taking legal action against the Government and drug companies for failing to take action when the risk was known. Japan did not switch to heat-treated blood products until more than two years after the US had taken this action.

With language barriers and time constraints I didn't engage with Japanese activists other than picking up their literature and attending the Love Ball. But with the visible presence of OCCUR, Love Positive and the large numbers of young people who acted as volunteers to help conference attendees, there was no sense that Japan was in need of enlightenment from outside. The issue of discrimination, including in relation to immigration, was one faced in most parts of the world.

I didn't do that much networking and socialising on my all too brief visit, I diligently spent my time in conference sessions as I was writing a report on it. I did meet some interesting people though, including hanging out with some folks involved in a HIV prevention project with young women sex workers on the German/Czech border (we went on a trip to see the Amida Buddha statue in Kamakura). With so many people present there must have been many connections made, some with lasting significance. For instance, a meeting in Yokohama led to the foundation of the Asian Pacific Network of Sex Workers.

[Mark Pendleton, a historian of Japan, is conducting research on the Yokohama conference, so I am sure would be interested in any memories or reflections - you can find him on twitter]

Commemorative stamp from Yokohama conference 1994

Music for the Middle of the Night

From Haruki Murakami's 'After Dark', 2004:


'The record ends. the automatic turntable lifts the needle, and the tone arm drops on to its rest. The bartender approaches the player to change records. He carefully lifts the platter and slips it into its jacket.  Then he takes out the next record, examines its surface under a light, and sets it on the turntable. He presses a button and the needle descends to the record. Faint scratching. The Duke Ellington's 'Sophisticated Lady' begins to play. Harry Carney's languorous bass clarinet performs solo. The bartender's unhurried movements give the place its own special time flow.

Maria asks the bartender, 'Don't you ever play anything but LPs?'

'I don't like CDs', he replies.

'Why not?'

'They're too shiny'....

'But look at all the time it takes to change LPs', Mari says.

The bartender laughs. 'Look, it's the middle of the night. There won't be any trains running till morning. What's the hurry?'

Karou cautions Mari, 'Remember this fella's a little on the weird side'.

'It's true, though: time moves in its own special way in the middle of the night,' the bartender says, loudly striking a book match and lighting a cigarette, 'You can't fight it'.

... The sound of the needle tracing the record groove. The languorous, sensual music of Duke Ellington. Music for the middle of the night.'

Ko-Uta: Geisha Blues

Ko-uta is a genre of Japanese music which developed from the 19th century. It literally means 'little song' and indeed the songs tend to be short, accompanied by the shamisen (a three stringed, long necked instrument). It is most associated with the geisha, for whom learning to master the shamisen is one of the traditional arts.

There doesn't seem to be a lot about it in English, other than Liza Dalby's book 'Little songs of the Geisha: traditional Japanese Ko-Uta' (Tuttle publishing, 1979). The author trained as a geisha, and has translated some of the lyrics (she has also put out a DVD, Geisha Blues). Some of them remind me a little of the blues or Greek rembetika, songs of sensuality, longing and intoxication - albeit with more of the natural world imagery found in Japanese lyrics and poetry.

One of the songs, 'Sake to onna wa', Dalby translates as 'Wine and women'. A song associated with wandering minstrels during the late Edo period (first half of the 19th century), it could be out of the Mississipi delta:

Wine and women
Balm for the soul
This floating world is
Women and wine
Just a taste, and now
Karma leads me to this fate
Praise the lord, praise the lord!
To heaven or hell,
Women and wine,
You and me, babe
Till the end -
With a honey like you
With me in hell,
Emma and Jizo might forget
They ever renounced the world.
Oh, the demon drink

[Emma is king of the buddhist helll, Jizo is a patron deity of traveller. The last word 'onigoroshi, literally means "demon killer" and was the name of a cheap type of alcohol which was the drink of these peripatetic minstrels, not able to afford sake' (Dalby)]

I haven't found much of this music online so far - I suspect that I need to be able to search using Japanese characters which I can't read - but there are some examples at http://kouta-renmei.org/english.html.

Ichimaru (1906-1997) was a singer and geisha who developed her own style of Ko-uta singing:

Yokohama Street Art (1994)

I wish I'd taken some more and better photos during my one and only trip to Japan, back in the 1990s. But I remember wandering around Yokohama and coming across this seemingly endless strip of graffiti, I think it was underneath a railway line. Interesting that it features quite a bit of English language text.

Marx Cartoons

Yesterday's Telegraph reports that a Manga introduction to Marx's Capital has recently been published in Japan - cover below (for more about this publication see this).Something that has been around for while is Jesse Drew's Manifestoon, an animation of the Communist Manifesto, a subversive detournement of Disney and other cartoons. According to Drew: 'Manifestoon is an homage to the latent subversiveness of cartoons. Though American cartoons are usually thought of as conveying consumerist and individualistic ideologies, as an avid fan of cartoons as a child, these ideas were secondary to a more important lesson--that of the "trickster" nature of many cartoon characters as they mocked, outwitted, and ultimately defeated their stronger, more powerful adversaries. In the classic cartoon, brute strength and heavy artillery are no match for wit and humor, and justice always prevails. For me, it was a natural process to link my own childhood concept of subversion with an established, more articulate version of subversiveness'.

Jesse Drew has also been involved in Free Radio and lots of other interesting stuff.

Dancing Questionnaire (9): Tracy K - 'music was everything and the possibilities were endless'

Tracy K recalls nights out dancing from Tamworth to Tokyo, via London and Aberystwyth. The tale of dancing in Tokyo with Belle and Sebastian made me very jealous

1. Can you remember your first experience of dancing?

I can remember my mum, who had me at 19, dancing me round the room as a baby to Aretha Franklin and Sam and Dave. I know I've inherited my dancing gene from her!

2. What's the most interesting/significant thing that has happened to you while out dancing?

Too many to mention, but I've met a lot (a LOT) of my significant others in clubs, so I would say the dance as mating ritual. I would also have to mention the kind of shamanic ritual of mass dancing to Jah Wobble at Glastonbury in the 1990s and dancing onstage with Belle and Sebastian in Tokyo to Dirty Dream #2 on my 33rd birthday.

3. You. Dancing. The best of times…

Being at a generic indie club in 1995 at the Marquee with my very best friend in the world and realising we were the only two women in a sea of cute indie boys. Being young, single, moderately attractive and a feeling that the music was everything and the possibilities were endless.

4. You. Dancing. The worst of times…

Again, London in 1995, having been dumped by charming bastard, I went to see Gene at the Forum and cried my eyes out in the moshpit to Olympian. Alone at the aftershow club, I danced broken hearted to The Smiths, pursued hopelessly across the floor by a lad in a Morrissey shirt too shy to make eye-contact. Pathetic...in both senses!

5.Can you give a quick tour of the different dancing scenes/times/places you've frequented?

Aged 11, I frequented the local youth club, which had an excellent nightclub room: I tended towards the Mod, with my southern soul mum and ska loving dad, so it was The Jam, Madness etc all the way back then.

Aged 16-18, my male friends and I went into Tamworth's premier (ie only) club, fondly called the Imbecile (Embassy). We would storm the floor for the token indie half hour (The Cure/Smiths/Pixies/Wonder Stuff etc) and then sup our cider and black morosely for the rest of the night. this was enlivened by regular trips to Rock city in my mates' clapped out mini. Very heady days!

Aged 18-21, university days. My friends and I went to the local footy Club on a Friday night every Friday night for 3 years. A mixture of poppy chart stuff, cheesy old music and the occasional cool track. We all loved dancing and had little routines to Loveshack etc. We could never work out why we almost never got asked for the end-of-the-night slowie, when we were a group of 13 girls who were inseparable...hmmm...

Aged 21-25 and then again from 28-30. A downstairs club in a seafronty hotel in Aber, painted black, which attracted the local Goths, indie, metal and mistfit kids [The Bay Hotel, Aberystwyth]. I was DEVOTED to this place, I went 3 times a week and danced my arse off every week, always one of the first on the dancefloor, always one of the last to leave. The happiest and most carefree times of my life. I met the best people, heard the best music and felt at home there. Actually, I felt like the queen of the scene there. Everyone knew each other, there were never any major stresses or fights (there was a cheesy nightclub upstairs, a similar atmosphere but more fights) and it had a devoted crowd of habituees. Wonderful place, I miss it still.

Aged 29-32. Moved to London, went to lots of okay clubs but discovered the After Skool Klub (not a horrible school disco type place, despite the name), the right mixture of indie, retro and classic music with kids who just didn't care. I took lots of people there, used to love staggering out in the early hours of a summer morning and watching the sun rise sitting by Embankment. Around this time I also used to go to the Metro midweek: there's always something special about clubbing midweek, when everyone else is going to work in an hour or two and you have just staggered out of a dingy basement, mascara in rivulets down your face and your clothes soaked with sweat. Around this time I met a girl who was a great dancer, we danced for the love of dancing. People thought we were lesbians, because we were so in synch with each other. People are generally idiots though.

Now. I go out dancing less frequently, though the will is still there and I get itchy feet about 11:30 on Saturday nights. Our local club is a bit too student disco for me these days and I can't take anywhere seriously that actually plays Razorlight. I look back fondly at my dancing days and think they were some of the happiest of my life: the freedom, the music so loud it's in your blood, the hypnotic state you get into when the dj keeps them coming, the sense of communion with people you love, the ritual of getting ready. I love all of it. I miss all of it.

6. When and where did you last dance?

I had a little dance at the ASK with my friend a couple of Saturdays ago, but she was working, so it wasn't for long. Before that, it was my hen night in Manchester the weekend before and we danced in a mental little basement club which played Fun Boy Three and Sinatra. A couple of my best mates who had stamina and cocktails running through our veins. Magic!

7. You're on your death bed. What piece of music would make your leap up for one final dance?

Probably Pixies Debaser or The Breeders Cannonball. The Cure's Boys Don't Cry would do it too, or Stevie Wonder's Superstition. I love a good bassline...

All questionnaires welcome- just answer the same questions and send to transpontine@btinternet.com (see previous questionnaires)

Japanese Silk Workers Songs

In late 19th century and early 20th century Japan, thousands of young women workers were recruited from villlages to work in the cotton and silk mills. The work was hard with long hours and dangerous conditions, and even outside of work the companies controlled their workers' lives, keeping them in dormitories and controlling their movements.

'Many did not get out of their dorms until the end of the year when they were allowed to visit their homes for New Year's. In order to keep the girls confined, factories built tall fences around the compounds - much like those of a prison camp. In fact, factory girls used to sing:

Working in a factory is like working in a prison
The only difference is the absence of iron chains'

In 1927, silk workers went on strike in Okaya. They 'marched through the town of Okaya singing labor songs, one of which went:

Harsher than prison life is life in the dormitory
The factory is like hell
The foreman is the devil,
and the spinning wheel is a wheel on fire

I wish I had wings to fly away to the other shore,
I want to go home, over the mountain pass,
to my sisters and parents.'

Source: Mikiso Hane, Peasant, Rebels and Outcastes: the Underside of Modern Japan (New York: Pantheon, 1982, p.185-196.