By the end of the Meiji period (1868-1912), decades of rapid industrialization and energetic participation in a rapidly expanding global economy gave Japan one of the world’s strongest and most vital economies. Those same processes called into being a complex socio-economic structure that included a small but vibrant urban middle class. Although the term middle class never was defined precisely, scholars have tended to use occupation, income, and education as the standards by which to define a category of salaried professionals who could be distinguished from persons who farmed, engaged in manual labor, or ran small-scale commercial enterprises. In general, surveys conducted in the 1910s and 1920s routinely included male government officials, military officers, policemen, teachers, doctors, company executives, and bank employees as the core of the middle class. Another characteristic of economic modernity in Japan was that working women became increasingly conspicuous within the ranks of white-collar employees. By the early 1920s, a wide range of occupations were open to women who possessed a high school or college diploma, including those of teacher, bus conductress, telephone switchboard operator, typist, office worker, department store clerk, midwife, nurse, and even doctor after Japan’s first medical college for women received full accreditation midway through the Taishö period (1912-1926).
The overall size of the middle class and the proportion of working women expanded dramatically throughout the 1910s and 1920s. Although reliable statistics are scarce, scholars estimate that the middle-class population of Tokyo swelled from roughly 6 percent of the city’s work force in 1908 to nearly 22 percent in 1920, when approximately 8.5 percent of Japan’s total population of 56 million persons fell into the middle class. Concurrently, by 1922 approximately 3.5 million of Japan’s 27 million women worked outside the home, slightly more than one-quarter of them in middle-class occupations. Moreover, the trend lines arched upward. By 1926 there were 57,000 female nurses, in contrast to just 13,000 in 1911, and the number of female white-collar workers in government offices doubled between 1926 and the end of the decade.
The new middle-class carved out for itself a lifestyle that stood in visible contrast both to the traditions of the past and the preferences of other contemporary Japanese. For one thing, the middle class created new sorts of family units. Before the twentieth century, the so-called ie— a multigenerational household where grandparents, parents, and children lived under the same roof — had been held up as the ideal family configuration, and in the 1920s most farm families still hoped to have three or more generations share the same hearth. In Japan’s urban centers, however, the preponderance of middle-class families consisted simply of a conjugal couple and their offspring. More specifically, a great deal of social commentary pictured the new nuclear family as consisting of a working father and stay-at-home mom who cared for the growing children.
As more married women entered the workforce, however, some social critics began to valorize dual-career couples who succeeded in their chosen professions while deftly raising two or three well-adjusted children. One of the more prominent spokespersons for that new family orientation was Hani (née Matsuoka) Motoko. A member of the initial graduating class of the prestigious Tokyo First Higher Girls’ School in 1891, Motoko established another benchmark when she became Japan’s first woman reporter, writing for the Höchi shinbun, then the country’s most popular daily newspaper. Not long thereafter, in 1901, Motoko married Hani Yoshikazu, a fellow journalist. The couple soon had two daughters; launched the monthly Fujin no tomo (“Woman’s Friend”), whose paid circulation of three million copies made it one of the most widely read magazines in the Taishö period; and founded a college, the Jiyü Gakuen, which opened in 1922 in a building designed by Frank Lloyd Wright.
Fujin no tomo featured public intellectuals who trumpeted the Hani’s vision of middle-class modernity. In issue after issue, writers called on Japan’s “new women” to cultivate their talents and abilities and have the courage to pursue careers in such professions as teaching and medicine. At the same time, articles explored issues important to modern wives and mothers, including women’s suffrage, household budgeting, and children’s education. In all, the influential monthly celebrated marriage and family and created the vision of a Taishö Supermom, an idealized woman capable of balancing the demands of a career with a home life. Motoko herself saw the publication as a means to awaken “new visions” and encourage the “genuinely free development of the individual.” Similarly, she often explained, the jiyü in her school’s name meant “freedom” and signified that modern women should be “free” to think for themselves and seek individual self-fulfillment. In her autobiography, Motoko held up herself and her husband as an example of the new middle-class couple. “Our home has been the center of our work,” she wrote, “and our work has been an extension of our home life; the two are completely merged without demarcations of any kind. I am truly grateful for this ideal union that is the very essence of both our work and marriage. Together, we have found our place in life.”
Motoko’s glowing rhetoric about blissful marriages notwithstanding, the middle class included a considerable number of single women. Indeed, more than 10 percent of the female respondents to a survey conducted in Tokyo in the early 1920s identified themselves as unmarried. Many young women, as might be imagined, preferred to hold a job for a few years between school and marriage, while more often than not widows and divorcées had to work to support themselves, and perhaps dependant children or parents as well. But the availability of socially respectable occupations also had made it possible for some women to opt out of marriage all together, yet lead economically stable and emotionally satisfying lives. “I am making no preparations for marriage,” wrote one female telephone switchboard operator to a 1922 survey question, “and I want to learn an occupation that will make me self-reliant.”
Whether single or married, the middle class occupied a physical as well as a psychological space in Japan during the 1910s and 1920s. In Tokyo, most of the new professionals worked downtown, in the Kasumigaseki, Marunouchi, and Ginza districts. Located near the expansive grounds of the Imperial Palace, the Kasumigaseki area rose to prominence in the early decades of the century when the government put up modern brick structures to house the Supreme Court, Metropolitan Police Department, and other bureaucratic agencies. Eye-catching, up-to-date office buildings also sprang up in the Marunouchi district, which was rapidly emerging as the center of big business and corporate Japan. Symbolic of that transformation was the construction of the world’s largest office complex, the Marunouchi Building, in 1923. Other middle-class men and women worked nearby in the Ginza, Japan’s best known center of banking and retailing.
