出稼ぎ衰退期における女性の「役割期待」変容

―― 旧多紀町発行の酒屋出稼者向け慰問雑誌分析を中心に ――

抄録

In Japanese villages that sent out male migrants, women took the initiative to maintain and revitalize their homes and villages in the absence of these men. These women not only assumed this responsibility independently but were also explicitly expected by the men to fulfill this crucial role. Postwar Japan developed a series of policies specifically targeted at the subject formation of rural women, institutionalizing their critical role in community preservation. Previous studies considered women to be in a subordinate position and focused on the process of their subject formation a critical question emerges: How, then, did men’s expectations of women’s roles in migrant-sending villages, where they were already proactive, change with the implementation of policies that encouraged women’s subject formation? In this paper, we analyzed comfort magazines distributed for male migrant workers in the old town of Taki, which served as a long-established migrant-sending village and our primary research site. Our findings reveal that women initially played numerous vital roles in their homes and villages, and men recognized and appreciated their activities. However, as migrant labor entered a period of decline, women began to be repositioned by the non-migrant men who held editorial control of the magazines as complementary, temporary personnel serving only in the absence of men. This repositioning was partly the result of a broader social context in which migrant labor itself was viewed negatively, and partly due to external factors such as difficult discussions on the mergers of towns and villages. Although previous studies have reported cases in which women were empowered and expected to exert political power when men left rural regions or worked outside the farm. Our research partly demonstrates that women were deliberately excluded from and not expected to exert any form of political power, despite their essential contributions to community maintenance.