Amamiya Silk Mill Workers' Women's Dispute Skit: The Cries of 1886 and the Questioning of the 2020s

Amamiya Silk Mill Workers' Women's Dispute Skit: The Cries of 1886 and the Questioning of the 2020s

In June 1886, workers at the Amamiya Silk Mill in Kofu, Yamanashi Prefecture, abandoned their workplaces and holed up in a nearby temple. More than 100 people took part in the protest, which eventually ended with a concession to relax the union's rules. This event is considered the first strike by factory workers in Japan, and was a pioneering case in which women workers defied the contradictions of modern labor.

In Kofu at the time, raw silk exports were the pillar of the nation's economy, and young women were at the center of the labor force. While working low wages and long hours, these women had the mobility to move from one factory to another in search of better conditions, so management sought to prevent them from being recruited and tightened regulations. The Amamiya Dispute was born out of resistance to the tightening of regulations, and the spinning industry was plagued by a series of disputes thereafter.

This dispute was significant in that women spontaneously rallied and visualized their bargaining power on the eve of an organized labor movement. Although in the short term only "some concessions" were made, it put a stop to restrictions by the industrial world and created a trend in the women's labor movement that continued into the 1927 Okaya-Yamaichi forestry union dispute, one of the largest of its kind before World War II. The Amamiya Silk Mill Workers' Dispute is still talked about today as an event that symbolizes the intersection of labor and gender in modern Japan.