Showa, Men Had It Tough Too 134: The Concept of a "Bride"

This is the story of Tsugio (my father), who was born in a rural village in Kagoshima in the early Showa period and lived out his entire life there as a farmer until the age of 82.

Tsugio, the only son of a farming family, while attending a prefectural agricultural school, volunteered for the Army Youth Pilot Corps. He completed his duties as a maintenance soldier in a kamikaze unit at the Keijo Airfield in Korea. After demobilization, he devoted himself to the family farm. As the post-war Japanese economy recovered, the trend in Tsugio's region was to clear mountains and plant mandarin oranges. To increase their workforce, Tsugio's family decided it was time for him to take a wife, and they welcomed Miyoko (my mother) from the same village as his bride. This was in March 1954.

A small room in the large house that Kitaro had bought when he was single was assigned to the young couple, and the life of the family, now grown to four, began. Although it was called a room, it was actually a storage room, and each room was only separated by paper sliding doors. Since these were left open during the day, it was only enough to ensure one couldn't see the others sleeping. Miyoko's sewing machine, brought as part of her dowry, was also placed in a corner of that room.

Even in a society changing rapidly due to new laws and systems following the defeat in the war, the mindset of commoners born in the Meiji era in rural villages far from the center did not change so easily.

For Tsugio's father, that is, his father-in-law Kitaro (my grandfather), taking in a bride meant a net increase in labor, which was his primary concern. After all, there were more fields than the three of them could handle. The more labor, the better.

She had to help not only in the fields but also with household chores, assisting Kitaro's wife, Haru (my grandmother). Born in 1889, Haru was already over sixty. She was as strong-willed and energetic as ever, but she needed the bride to learn various things while she was still healthy.

Above all, a bride's role was to bear children. Since the children born would connect to future generations, having children meant the family's future would be secure.

Kitaro, born in the Meiji era, had no doubts that the labor force added to the family—the bride—was a being that should obediently follow the family she married into, or, to put it extremely, exist like a servant. The brides of the main family where Kitaro lived until he became independent and started his own household, his own mother, and every bride he saw in society all followed the head of the household, the father, and the husband, and took on housework and childcare between farm work, so Kitaro believed without a doubt that this was what a bride was.

He never even thought that a bride had a "status" as an individual human being or had thoughts of her own.

Yet, his own wife, Haru, was not necessarily obedient; she would use money she managed without telling Kitaro to buy things he never expected or to scrape together money for the children's school expenses. However, this was within a range that did not damage Kitaro's face as the head of the household, and the capital came from selling vegetables, miso, and soy sauce that Haru had made.

Kitaro thought that daily money matters were also something a bride should manage by "being thoughtful," just as Haru did.

—Tsugio understood Kitaro's way of thinking perfectly well without even being told. Or perhaps it would be more accurate to say that he accepted his father's way of thinking just as it was. To add for the sake of the honor of Tsugio and his father, this way of thinking about brides was also the "normal" perception in the farming, mountain, and fishing villages of that time.

《Note》 The content of this section is an addition and revision to "79 Bride" from "The Meiji Era That Had No Written Records," which chronicles Kitaro's life.