Japanese Women Working.

In Japanese Women Working, researchers in economics, history, and anthropology describe Japan's evolution of female labor market conditions, institutions, and policies since 1880. The book provides students and professional academics with a penetrating inquiry into the working lives of the handmaidens of Japan's economic growth. With her choice of descriptive essays, Janet Hunter effectively persuades the reader that overall, Japanese women have experienced fairly unpleasant labor market conditions during the last century. The book's exposure of historical precedents, assuming a representative sample of accounts, provides useful lessons for those in a position to change labor market institutions and policies in Japan and in Asia's newly industrializing countries.

With the organization of essays in approximate chronological order, the reader notes the emergence of lessons in three key areas: labor market conditions across sectors (domestic service, textile mills, mining, diving, and hospital care); time allocation decisions between work and home life; and effects of changes in institutions and policies on the female labor market experience. Several contributors merit highlight.

Janet Hunter's own analysis describes the contribution of environmental factors to tuberculosis incidence, with a focus on young female textile workers. Hunter points to the extremely harsh factory and dormitory conditions, highly conducive to the spread of tuberculosis, which these workers endured as Japan's textile industry prospered. She rightly suggests that factory owners may have saved money in the short run by not improving conditions, but in the long run they lost money through sickness-related worker inefficiency and high turnover costs from recruitment and training.

Regine Mathias's vivid account of female coal miners reinforces the theme of poor labor market conditions and limited time for domestic responsibilities. Unlike other contributors, the author provides some data with which to construct gender wage differentials; the data indicate that jobs which required strenuous physical labor had the smallest wage differentials.

Eiko Shinotsuka's study of health care assistants from 1918 to 1988 serves as a useful bridge from the book's historical analysis of labor market conditions to the examination of contemporary female labor market status. The controversial intervention of private employment agencies in the health care market during much of the period has provoked current debates on the optimal allocation of health care assistants.

Finally, Alice Lam examines the impact of the 1985 Equal Employment Opportunity Law on the worker management practices of Japanese companies. Using a descriptive before-and-after analysis, she finds little improvement in employment opportunities for women in Japanese companies following the law change. The disappointing conclusions indicate that Japanese women must lobby harder for policy and institutional changes that will bring Japan's labor market closer to the standards of other industrialized countries.

The strength of the book lies in its meticulous description of Japanese women's working lives. The book shall rudely awaken any reader who has preconceived notions of passive Japanese women who have historically served tea and shopped all day. The cross-disciplinary studies soundly weave together the themes of tough working conditions, high constraints on time for required domestic tasks, and mixed success of policy and institutional changes.

Unfortunately, the cross-disciplinary nature of the book does not excuse the wide variation in focus and organizational styles of contributed articles. The more focused studies, particularly Eiko Shinotsuka and Alice Lam, begin their analyses with clear summaries and the questions to be addressed. At the other extreme, Kathleen Uno's arguments are extremely difficult to follow at times, and Regine Mathias provides no initial questions for the reader to bear in mind as the essay develops. Both studies provide a wealth of vivid, detailed information on the strenuous working and domestic lives of Japanese women in the early 1900s, without challenging the reader with opportunities to use that knowledge. Are the accounts just for the record?

Closely related, the editor's unfocused introduction does little to add to the insightful nature of the book. The introduction appears mostly to address the uniqueness of the book's content and multi-disciplinary nature, rather than clearly address the most important lessons we may learn or major themes we should follow. The editor's introduction could also benefit the reader enormously by providing a battery of labor market statistics, such as gender comparisons of employment population ratios, labor force participation rates, and occupational distributions, from as many years between 1880 and 1990 as possible. The reader must have an indicator of the magnitude and dispersion of Japan's female working population over time in order to comprehend the relevance of the overall book and its essays on different sectors.

While the book is a worthy descriptive study, it offers little empirical analysis to explain the trends. Konosuke Odaka, the only male contributor, provides the book's only formal hypothesis testing. The study has major problems with estimating the determinants of aggregate wages and employment in order to answer questions that may require micro survey data and a Heckman selection type model. The wage equation does not correct for endogeneity of the employment variable, further rendering the analysis as only suggestive of possible trends. However, other contributors have access to micro data which they only use for simple cross-tabulations. Rather than elicit improvements in the Odaka study or additional empirical work from other authors, the editor apologizes for including only one male contributor.

Despite the lack of focused questions in some of the studies and the highly descriptive nature of almost every essay, together the contributions form an extremely congruous book with persuasive lessons about the Japanese female labor market experience in the last century. Any seminar course on women's economic status or on Japanese society is incomplete without Japanese Women Working on the reading list. Researchers on gender differentials in Asian labor markets will also gain valuable descriptive information. The book certainly begs a follow-up study when Japanese women come closer to achieving equal employment opportunities.

Yana van der Meulen Rodgers The College of William and Mary