Carol’s Reviews > Memories of Silk and Straw: A Self-Portrait of Small-Town Japan > Status Update

We ate what was available and just got on with it when there was nothing else in the house; but now that life’s become much easier, it seems people are never satisfied, never grateful.

In our village a meal of a mixture of rice and barley, with 6 parts barley to 4 parts rice, would’ve been considered above average…. I remember the excitement of having a guest from a long way off come to visit. ‘We’ve got a guest coming, so we must have proper rice without barley,’ my father would say: guests and pure white rice always went together. We children loved the ‘silver rice,’ as we used to call it…

Comedians quite often tell jokes about geisha getting their maids to take letters to severally different clients, all saying exactly the same thing, like “I’m pining away because you never come to see me any more.” But when I was a shitajikko this sort of thing did actually happen: I used to have to go and deliver identical letters to men all over town.

I was lucky to finish my full six years of primary school; many girls were taken away from school at only eight or nine and sent into service or found work as babysitters. I don’t think you can really blame anybody in particular for this; it’s just that everyone like us was poor…. [W]hen a daughter was sold into a geisha house… her parents were given a hefty sum of money: a hundred yen….

The trouble was that country girls, who were made to work in the fields from a very early age, had learned to eat their meals as fast as possible so they could get straight back to work; otherwise they were told off by their parents. They even used to pour water over their rice and barley to make it easier to swallow quickly. A girl needed at least two large bowls per meal to keep her going….

Even in the Gion festival, upper-class women couldn’t slip outside to watch the floats going past. There was a thin lattice partition between the women’s quarters and the shop so, instead of watching the parade like anybody else, the lady of the house would have to sit inside, with a fan in her hand, watching in secret behind the partition. … She’d have loved to go…, but back then festivals were thought of as vulgar.

In television dramas you quite often see samurai chatting to their servants; but this is rubbish — it would never have happened. In the feudal period, the difference in status between the various classes was extreme, and although these distinctions broke down quite a lot toward the end of the nineteenth century, something of them survived for a long time afterward.