Glamorized Exploitation: Visual Images of Meiji-Period "Factory Girls" (jokō)

The cover image of this issue of Technology and Culture is a collage crafted from two figures in this essay. On the right side of the image is a detail of a black and white photograph from around 1900 of female silk mill workers () juxtaposed on the left with detail of a color woodblock print from 1877 depicting a mock-up of the Tomioka silk mill featured in an industrial exposition staged that year in Tokyo (). The collage was composed by reversing the two figures to create a dynamic "V" designed to draw the viewer's eye from left to right and, by implication, from the glamorized rendition of silk mill work in the woodblock print to a more real-world photograph documenting actual working conditions in a silk mill. This essay provides a socio-historical matrix for, and critical analysis of, representative visual images of sericulture and silk mills.