Paper short abstract:

This paper analyzes the relationship between the Japanese state and women in wartime mobilization by examining waste reduction and collection campaigns. Women's wartime mobilization was largely directed by the state, but in some cases women organized their own independent waste campaigns.

Paper long abstract:

In many countries involved in the Second World War, campaigns encouraging waste reduction and scrap collection were largely aimed at women, who took on new roles on the "home front." In Japan, these wartime mobilization efforts were nothing new, as women had been directed to participate in state initiatives to improve the domestic economy, such as the Daily Life Improvement campaigns and the campaign to Promote Diligence and Thrift, since the late 1910s. This type of economic mobilization of women continued in much the same fashion as Japan entered the Second Sino-Japanese War in the 1930s. Until the last years of the war, in an explicit effort to preserve the family system, Japanese mobilization of women on the home front focused on the primacy of their domestic roles as mothers and housewives. This paper analyzes the relationship between the Japanese state and women in wartime mobilization through an examination of wartime waste reduction and collection campaigns.

Waste is an ideal arena to examine this relationship between women and the state because of its inherent connections between the private and the public. During the war years, waste became a topic of particular interest to the state because of its potential to improve the wartime economy: reducing household waste could stretch scarce resources a little further, and collecting certain types of waste could provide materials necessary for the war effort. Efforts to mobilize women for waste campaigns during the war was largely directed by the state from above, but there were also occasions in which women organized their own "mobilization" efforts, with their own goals and targets, in support of the nation and the war. These events show that even those women who embraced cooperation with the state and actively worked to support state goals did not necessarily accept this relationship uncritically. Rather, they acted as full (if not equal) participants in their relationship with the state, contributing their own ideas, initiatives, and even criticism to wartime mobilization efforts.