This article takes up the example of Gunze Silk Manufacturing Co., Ltd. (present-day Gunze, Ltd.), which handled everything from the training of nurses to the establishment of hospitals. Focusing on nurses assigned to factories, the article sheds light on the creation of nursing professionals and their working conditions in interwar Japan. Japan in 1909 became the largest exporter of raw silk in the world, with Gunze becoming the second largest company in the industry after Katakura. The nurses who worked at Gunze were, while being repeatedly transferred from location to location, able to remain continuously employed and acquire midwifery certifications for the future. However, by the 1930s, quitting jobs to get married had become commonplace, and nursing had become a temporary occupation until marriage. The Taishō period (1912–1926) was an era that saw nursing and those involved with it establish a new place for nursing in society, in keeping with the establishment of provisional occupational qualifications and the rapid increase in practitioners. However, during this period, it may also be said that among those companies that embarked on training nurses, a human resources management strategy was brought to fruition such that, even among female employees, young girls were educated as they were made to take up labor-intensive jobs.

The dramatic expansion of women’s participation and presence in clerical work after World War II was a phenomenon that marked a critical turning point in both how Japanese women worked and how they lived their lives. This paper traces changes in the employment patterns of female clerical staff over a considerable historical span—from the early twentieth century through the period just after the 1970s oil crisis—through a case study of the Japan Wool Textile Co., Ltd. Analysis reveals that hiring numbers surged between the interwar years and the 1950s, a period during which the company developed a unique system for batch-hiring new graduates that had roots in strong relationships with local new postwar high schools. The average length of service among female employees also increased significantly during the period but eventually reversed course in the 1960s, trending shorter. This shift reflected a decline in the uncertainty that had long surrounded women’s life courses, with full-time clerical employment becoming an increasingly prevalent approach in the process of preparing for the next stages in many women’s lives: getting married and raising children.

Research on prewar Japanese technical education is an area where education history and business/economic history have interacted considerably in the twentieth century. The key historical findings that have emerged, however, are distinctly “his”-tory—centered overwhelmingly on men. This paper, drawing inspiration from gender-aware research in business and economic history, attempts to examine both the rapid expansion of vocational education for women in the prewar period (1920s–1930s) and the emergence of new service-sector occupations for women, referred to at the time as “working women.” In aiming to bridge these two developments, the paper offers a foundation for future studies of the relationship between high-speed growth in vocational education for women and the diversification of female clerical employment in company settings during the period.

This article is a reexamination of the relationship between the diversification strategy that Westinghouse Electric pursued in the postwar years and the decline in the competitiveness of its turbine business that resulted. It has been undertaken from the perspectives of management’s strategic awareness and its ability to adapt to the environment. In contrast to the vast amount of previous research that holds unrelated diversification to be the root cause for Westinghouse’s decline, this article clarifies that the primary factors for this were the constraints on human resources of the 1950s and the errors in innovation investments of the early 1960s. Furthermore, it points out that the strategic justification for diversification contained both a “strategic narrative” meant to conform with existing resources and the “strategic belief” that would support it.