Japanese Silk Factories DBQ

Beauty Doesn’t Come from within a Silk Factory

Machines rumbling, tears falling, hands aching, this was the plight of the Japanese silk workers, during the Industrial Revolution. The Industrial Revolution came to Japan in the 1800’s, according to the background essay reading: “The Industrial Revolution had a quiet beginning but by the mid-1800s the movement from farm to factory was producing an all-out ruckus - Steam engines belching, gears grinding, conveyor belts slapping. This was true in Europe, in America, and beginning in the 1880s, it was true in Japan,” (Silk Factories: DBQ: Background). During this time, many women were employed in silk factories. These jobs didn’t pay well and the conditions were poor. Silk is made from harvesting

They were signed away by contracts to a silk mill. It was extremely expensive if they quit their jobs at the silk factory, so it made it almost impossible to leave. Family was important to the Japanese and it still is today. It must have been painful to leave their homes and see their family give them away, just for extra income. The money they earned in the mill was not nearly enough to pay for them to leave the job at the mill. The family also received earnest money for selling their daughter into the mill. As you can see by this line in a silk workers contract, “If there should be any infringement [violation] of this contract whatsoever, as reparations we will pay without question a sum of (20x) the said earnest money.” (Doc E), the penalties were intense. This would be a large financial hardship on these families, since lots of female workers were working to get out of poverty in the first place. Women were not valued greatly, as well. This could mean the girl would have to work in the mill, just because her family did not think her happiness was worth that amount of money required to buy their

In a picture from 1910, it showed women in a dirty factory hunched over pools of steaming hot water pulling threads of silk away. (Doc A). Of course, this was after the Industrial Revolution. This gives you the clue that working during the Industrial Revolution would not have been any better and most likely was much worse. The hot water burnt many women, as you can imagine. Since their hands and fingers were imperative to their job, injuries often left them unable to work. The women were exhausted and had one job that had to be repeated again and again. It would have been easy for them to faint, while working. Occurrences like these would increase the injury rate even more. According to the graph from Government Report on Mill Workers in Japan, it says that three hundred ninety-three people left their job in 1909 from issues related to work. (Doc D). Working there must have been bad if that many people left in one year. Silk mill workers were treated like animals. It dehumanized them, making their managers disassociate with them and lose empathy. Respect between the employees and the managers could not have been high. This would leave them treated like the machines they worked