A Working Woman in the Early Showa Period

A photo of my grandmother and my mother in front of their house in Ashiya in 1948.

When my maternal grandmother, Sugayo, passed away in 2001 shortly after 9/11, my mom told me not to fly back to Japan for the funeral. “I don’t want to be worried about your safety on an airplane flying back to Japan.” I understood my mother’s concern and decided to stay in Seattle, but I had a hard time with the fact that the grandmother with whom I shared some girlish secrets — secrets I couldn’t even tell my own mother as I was growing up — was no longer with us in this world.

If I am asked to describe my grandmother in one word, I would say that she was “well-groomed.” She carried herself well in chic clothes, accessories, shoes and handbags and had her hair beautifully styled every week by a local hair stylist up to the point when she had to be hospitalized six months prior to her death.

“Was she like that because she was a wasaishi?” I asked my mom. A wasaishi is a professionally trained kimono tailor. Grandmother trained to become one as a teenager in Osaka.

“No, it was because of Sayo-chan,” my mom replied with a quick giggle. Sayo-chan was my uncle’s wife. She had married my mom’s eldest brother, and Mom remembers her as a particularly beautiful bride.

“She was so pretty when I first met her that I felt excited to have such a pretty sister in law,” my mom recalled. “Sayo-chan made sure that grandma was clean and presented herself well, and your grandma took her advice without protest after she started living with Yasuo-san and Sayo-chan.”

My maternal grandmother was born in 1912 in a small town in Shimane Prefecture located on the north side of western Honshu Island along the Sea of Japan. “I’d say her family was well-to-do because they could afford the training Grandma underwent to become a professional wasaishi in the 1920s,” my mother explained. Although my grandmother once told my mother that she hated the training, she started a career as a wasaishi tailoring everything from tomesode (formal wear for women) and furisode (kimono for young single women) to bridal kimonos.

The political landscape changed rapidly in Japan after the Manchurian Incident in 1931. Civilians were struggling to make ends meet. In 1935, when grandmother was 23 and had been enjoying her career as a wasaishi, she met her husband-to-be, who was 28, at an arranged meeting. They married two years later, when Japan officially entered the war against China. Soon, they had their first son, Yasuo, then a few years later, their second son, Yoichiro. But they were dragged deeper into the hardships of life during wartime, as all civilians were. The war zone expanded as the Japanese Army invaded more countries in Asia and declared war against the US on December 8, 1941. After her husband was forced into conscription, grandmother worked as much as she could to survive with her two small children. Life was not easy because people weren’t allowed to make new or expensive kimonos.

Grandmother never told me how she survived the massive air raids by the US Air Force, which killed thousands of civilians in my hometown, but I learned that the air raids were still vivid in her mind 49 years after they occurred. When she visited me in Seattle in 1994, I lived in an apartment on First Hill near the hospitals. When an ambulance would speed past my apartment in the middle of the night, its sirens blaring, Grandma would jump up in bed and yell, “Air raids!”

When the war finally ended on August 15, 1945, she was reunited with her husband. They started a new chapter of their life in Ashiya, a city adjacent to Kobe. My mother, their third child and first daughter, was born in the following year. “The room we lived in looked like a store or a warehouse,” Mom recalled. “Many people tried to survive in places like that during those postwar days. We transformed a piece of land into a vegetable garden and grew vegetables while raising chickens for eggs.”

My mother was in kindergarten when her family moved to a new house in a small town on the eastern edge of Kobe. My grandmother’s reputation as a good wasaishi quickly spread by word of mouth, and her business took off. Orders poured in regularly from individual customers, dealers in kimono fabrics and even from businesses called araihari-ya that specialized in washing kimonos.

It wasn’t common for women to have a professional occupation in Japan in the 1930s and 1940s, but Grandmother was highly regarded for her professional skills. “My dad changed his job and was hospitalized for a stomach ulcer and then stomach cancer, so Yasuo-san told me that Grandma had to work to support the family.” My mother was only 24 when her father passed away at 61, after suffering for years from stomach cancer.

“Grandma looked especially happy when she was spreading a new roll of kimono fabrics,” my mom said. “She never disappointed her customers. I still remember this beautiful kimono she tailored with a pattern that wrapped around in one piece, as if by magic. I was proud of her.”