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Abstract

This chapter examines how in Occupied Japan customary expectations about gender roles combined with the ideological stand-off that characterized relations between labor activists and military government bureaucrats to reenforce women’s secondary status within the Tokyo-based film worker’s union of the Tôhô Motion Picture Company. Scholarship to date has deployed the 1948 strike at Tôhô as a colorful anecdote of the moment when the American Occupation made clear its intent to ‘housebreak’ Japan’s militant unions. Gerteis argues that events which unfolded around the Tôhô Strike not only illustrated the changing tenor of labor relations in Occupied Japan, but also laid bare the fact that, despite the professed liberation of Japanese women, women of postwar Japan would continue to be expected to play subordinate roles in a labor movement that primarily represented the interests of men.