Women in Wartime

One of Japan's favorite excuses for the "China Incident" has been population pressure--so many people on such dinky islands. Nevertheless the Japanese Ministry of Public Welfare announced last week that it plans to distribute bonuses amounting to $60,000 among mothers who have more than ten children.

For the past ten years, Japanese women have been bearing between 2,000,000 and 2,200,000 babies a year. The net annual population increase (births minus deaths) has hovered around 900,000. Government statisticians recently got a shock when they audited vital statistics for 1938. Births had fallen by 230,000, were 210,000 below the ten-year average. Simultaneously the death rate had increased, leaving a net population gain of only 668,519. Furthermore, war casualties, which are too holy to be reduced to statistics, were not included in the death total. The War Office has announced war deaths as 60,000; actually they are probably three times that. The actual net gain was perhaps as low as 500,000.

Alarmed by the sudden drop, the Government has been urging women to marry early, bear often. Alarmed, too, by the gaps left by warriors departed for China, it has urged women into jobs. On farms they have virtually supplanted men. Factories, particularly heavy industries, are hiring more & more.

A conspicuous sight in Japanese streets nowadays are crowds of housewives in khaki smocks or calico aprons--uniforms of the Women's Patriotic Society (750,000 members) and of the Women's Organization for National Defence (4,500,000 members). Their activities include Banzai parties for departing soldiers, visiting military hospitals to "comfort" the wounded, taking part in anti-British rallies.

Wartime emergencies have worked a near revolution in the position of Japanese married women. Traditionally homebodies who brewed tea and arranged flowers, they have found to their surprise and delight that they can walk in the streets unashamed, can even do men's work.

Japanese spinsters, too, are making hay. Hundreds of them have been hired by the Government as Peeping Thomasinas. Some of them loiter around the luxury counters of department stores, taking notes on their sisters who squander yen on beauty creams instead of patriotically investing in Government bonds. Other, luckier maidens, steal at dusk to vantage points near geisha-houses, machiai (waiting-houses) and licensed prostitute quarters, and there scribble down the automobile license plates of bloods who waste their money during the national emergency. Sometimes, when the young scalawags arrive by taxi, the guardians of national thrift have to slip right inside the house to get a good look at who is misbehaving--and for how much.

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