September 10, 2025

I am just going to put the dates at the top of the posts so everyone knows when these were supposed to be uploaded because I guess i am just going to be chronically late until I get my shit together.

Since I dropped my political science class these posts should be shorter which also means my class days are as well. Less assignments too which is why I dropped it in the first place, it had too much overlap with other classes which meant I would not e able to churn out quality work. I am an inefficient student but at least I am self aware of this.

So today was my women’s history class and before the lecture started my professor asked us i we ever had to do pledges before the school day old start back in elementary/junior high/high school. She asked us this because of our last class, where we learned that Korean people under Japanese colonial rule were forced to say a pledge to the emperor. There is one girl who is from the US and she stated that she had to stand for the pledge while some students would sit in defiance, which would cause them to get into trouble. I do not know about other provinces, but in mine all we had to do was stand for the national anthem, which I hated but never sat because I was a huge coward. When I was in catholic school I believe we had to say the Lord’s Prayer. I cannot actually remember though since I only went to catholic school from kindergarten to grade 5.

Anyway, the actual lecture was about how women entered the industrial work force in Korea. This started with the emergence of the textile industry but in the 30s, heavy industries were introduced. First we started with learning about the working conditions in these textile factories. They were not what the women who were lured there thought it would be. The work day was 12 to 14 hours, and there was constant, sometimes violent, surveillance. A Mae would typically watch over the workers but sometimes it would be an older woman. Many of these factories didn’t even allow their “employees” to leave the work site or go back home to visit. Communication with family was non-existent as well.

Next she lectured about women’s motivations for working in these shitty factories. One of the reasons was that the Japanese recruiters would promise work training and improved living conditions. Many women joined to relieve their family’s economic burden. We were then shown a quote from the reading in which women on Korean families were considered the wings, as in they are expected fly away and leave the nest. The third, and final reason we were given was that some younger, unmarried, women would become employees to gain a higher financial position which would in turn increase their marriageability. This money would increase a woman’s favour with her potential in-laws.

We ended class with the scansion of labour in the 1930s, where the industries shifted from light to heavy. In 1932, the Japanese empire created its puppet state Manchukuo in Manchuria and accelerated its economic development, specifically in the heavy industries such as metals, machinery, electricity, ceramics, chemicals, and much more. Textiles were mainly in the south, but heavy industries were established in the north which meant there was quite a bit of migration. Thus the percentage of women workers in the heavy industries increased quite a bit while there was a decreased in textiles and food-processing.

That is where the lecture ended and I headed home for the day.