OCR Text |
Show i'l A SERIES OF WS"- (special articles 'bythe leading I i j Japanese Women j ! Trained and Ready By Robert Bellaire (WNU feature Through special arrangement arrange-ment with Woman's Home Companion.) More than in any other nation at war with the single exception of Soviet Russia the women of Japan are today carrying the main burden of fighting on the home front. The war work of Japanese women has released at least 2,000,000 able-bodied able-bodied men for military service. Probably another 2,000,000 men have been made available for vital war production jobs because women have replaced them in nonessential positions. posi-tions. Not only are Japanese women hit harder than the women of other nations na-tions by government demands for sacrifices in the standard of living; they are also more active in "front line combat duty." That is the way the Japanese government describes their work in civilian fire-fighting squads which combat incendiary bombs such as those dropped on Tokyo by Jimmy Doolittle's raiders last year. Hundreds of thousands of Japanese Jap-anese women are working in munitions muni-tions plants, road construction crews and auxiliary police work. Thousands Thou-sands of others work on trains and streetcars. Some work as stevedores on the same docks where American prisoners of war have been put to work. Yai-san, cook in my Tokyo home, headed one of the thousands of neighborhood neigh-borhood firefighting squads which the authorities hope will save them from being burned out when Japan's enemies carry out mass incendiary bomb attacks against Japan. First Aider in Every Home. At least one woman in every household has been trained to fight incendiaries and administer first aid to the wounded. And the training has gone far beyond theory. For four years millions of Japanese women have actually been tackling real bombs, tossed into the streets from army trucks during highly realistic maneuvers. They are taught to operate and repair re-pair emergency water pumps, scale high walls without ladders, climb ropes up the walls of four and five-story five-story buildings. They are trained to carry wounded down fire-truck ladders from smoke-filled buildings. Among these women are many experts ex-perts in handling the high explosives with which they intend to blast out antifire lanes around burning areas to prevent fires from spreading. All of us who saw the Doolittle raid on Tokyo were impressed by the fact that the dozen incendiary bomb fires which broke out before our eyes in the capital were brought under control con-trol within a few hours. The job was done largely by these predominantly predomi-nantly female fire-fighting units. Because Be-cause it wasn't a mass bombing attack, at-tack, the Doolittle raid was by no means the final test. But whenever it comes, these women are trained and ready. To conserve manpower, transportation transpor-tation and marketing facilities, the Japanese today eat about one-third as much as they ate 10 years ago. At first glance you might expect this to simplify the task of home-making home-making for Japanese women. But they have even less time to themselves them-selves now. Jap Rationing. Today they must spend from two to four hours daily standing in queues in front of their local food shops, hoping to be able to cash in their ration tickets before the meager stocks are exhausted. For two years the authorities have prohibited the sale of any materials containing cotton, wool, rayon, linen or silk. The wearing of prewar kimonos by women also has been outlawed, on the theory that their riotous colors are out of keeping with the grim times. Consequently Japanese women today clothe themselves them-selves in the only material available I to them artificial cloth made from wood pulp. They soon discovered, to their chagrin, that this material disintegrates when washed, won't hold a press and is a haven for every species of woodboring insect In order to simplify production of ready-made clothes for women, manufacturers now are limited to one standard pattern and only three sizes small, medium and large, into which every figure has to be fitted. Japanese women once were among the world's heaviest users of cosmetics cos-metics but today extremely few Japanese Jap-anese women appear in public with painted faces. Most of them probably prob-ably would like to use a bit of powder, pow-der, rouge and lipstick but these can no longer be purchased in Japan. The generation of Japanese girls growing up during the war may not miss their permanents and lipsticks because they can no longer see western west-ern beauty standards in American motion pictures. But something more vital was lost when Tokyo banned the showing of American films. |