Showa, Men Had It Tough Too 131: The Marriage Proposal Is Decided

This is the story of Tsugio (my father), who was born in a farming village in Kagoshima in the early Showa era and lived out his 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 Air Corps. He joined a kamikaze unit as a maintenance soldier and saw the end of the war at Gyeongseong Airfield in Korea.After being demobilized, he devoted himself to the family farming business.

With the special procurement demand from the Korean War, the post-war Japanese economy recovered rapidly and pushed forward into a period of high economic growth. Demand for luxury food items also increased. The administration also promoted the conversion of agricultural crops, and in the region where Tsugio and the others lived, there was a movement to clear the mountains and plant mandarin oranges, so the issue of finding a bride for Tsugio became a realistic concern in order to increase the number of workers.

As mentioned in the previous section, his mother, Haru, had her sights set on a daughter of one of her relatives to be Tsugio's bride. It was a well-known girl from a well-known family, only about a 15-minute walk from the village where Haru was born and raised, and it would have been convenient for teaching her about future matters.

However, Tsugio's feelings were leaning toward Miyoko, a girl from the same village who had returned from a spinning mill in Saga and was helping out at home. He had known her since they were children, but when had she become so beautiful? Her modest nature toward everyone and everything was what he liked most of all. Finally, Tsugio told Haru, who kept bringing up the same marriage proposal over and over. "I want Miyoko." His father, Kitaro, didn't care who the bride was as long as she was healthy and a hard worker, but Haru was dissatisfied. Even so, Tsugio, an only child who had rarely had to endure anything, stood his ground here, just as he had when he volunteered for the Youth Air Corps without telling his parents. That might sound good, but one could also say he got his own way. In the end, Haru gave in, and they formally appointed a matchmaker to propose the marriage to Miyoko's parents. As for Miyoko, there had been hints of several marriage proposals for her as well. She was a woman of marriageable age who had returned from the "city" of Saga, and she was quite beautiful to boot. She was a figure who drew attention not only in the village but also in the town. If she had wanted to, she might have had a path to becoming the "wife" of a stable salaryman, but perhaps because the matchmaker was skilled at "the matchmaker's talk," the marriage proposal with Tsugio was decided smoothly.

In that whole sequence of events, Miyoko's own wishes were reflected almost not at all. This is in contrast to Tsugio, who insisted, "It has to be Miyoko."

Tsugio's daughter, Fumi (me), who was born later, once asked her mother, Miyoko, about the circumstances under which her marriage was decided. "Mom, did you think for yourself that he (Tsugio) was the one you wanted to marry?" Miyoko hesitated for a moment and said, "I didn't really have any thoughts on it. My parents said, 'This (this marriage proposal) is good,' so I just thought, I guess that's how it is."

That way of thinking was likely shared by most Japanese women before and during the war, who were taught—drilled—that it was "womanly" not to assert oneself, and in some cases, to suppress oneself and live according to the ideas of those around them. Incidentally, men, too, were not able to live according to their own ideas. One could say that they were just given priority over women and had more social places prepared for them than women did.