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Walking With The Wind Haruko's World

1324 Words6 Pages

Work, we can’t really avoid it. Human civilization has been built on work. The laboring of many billions of people throughout history has created the cities, farms, industries, armies and infrastructure which have marked our time on the planet. Even before human civilization emerged, the role of labor and the development of different kinds of tools have been central to our evolution from the more primitive primates. Work, therefore, becomes a relevant factor in studying the culture of any particular place or group of people. Work determines the ability of a population to survive and accounts for the majority of their time. In Walking with the Wind, Haruko’s World, and A Year in Provence, the main characters experience and describe the types …show more content…

To begin, in John Lewis’ Walking with the Wind he reveals the work he did on his family’s farm during his childhood. The descriptions provide insight into far more than the labor itself. For example, …show more content…

Bernstein provides a wealth of information about the day to day life of farm women like Haruko. Like in Lewis’ memoir, these depictions provide insight into what is valued in that culture. For example, Haruko was responsible for growing and preparing all of the vegetables for her family but only wage labor is considered to be actual work. Bernstein comments that “this invites deceptive answers, because even women who farm almost entirely on their own …might reply ‘I do not work, I stay at home.’” (Bernstein, 1983). This reveals the value this culture places on monetary wealth rather than material abundance as well as the effect of the deeply gendered roles of production in Japanese agriculture. In addition, once when she was falling behind in her duties her husband offered to help but he did not know what to do which reveals the lack of shared knowledge and intense specialization of the area. The specialization in this example reveals how this particular area viewed and dispersed knowledge as each person was only knowledgeable about their specific duties (i.e. better to know a whole lot about one small thing than to know a little bit about a lot of things). In addition to her work on the farm Haruko was also responsible for helping her neighbors prepare food for receptions following funerals or weddings (Bernstein, 1983). This type of work indicates the

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