The Kitchen Revolution: Catalyst for Women's Liberation under Postwar Consumer Capitalism?

Just as the shift from the traditional kimono to Western dress revolutionized Japanese women’s clothing under prewar capitalism, preparing meals in an “electric house” standing up and eating around a table seated on chairs altered the patterns of women’s everyday lives under postwar capitalism. This paper shows how the government's post-World War I Daily Life Reform Movement, one of the earliest organized attempts for achieving efficiency and simplifying living, and Suzuki Shogyō’s use of prefabricated parts in the 1920s to create a “System Kitchen” unintentionally contributed to the postwar reconfiguration of domestic space and social relations.

Small western-style kitchens became a reality with the construction of large public apartment buildings (danchi) in the 1950s and 1960s. Electric refrigerators and washing machines were not luxury items by the 1960s. If prewar kitchens symbolized the government’s efforts to introduce Western thought and daily customs, postwar rationalized kitchens became a driver of social change that helped effect the liberation of housewives paving the way for the feminist movement of the 1970s when women took charge of their lives in more assertive ways.

One woman in the 1970s expressed doubt that abolshing the civil code had changed society, criticizing housewives as “backward” and mentally tethered to the home. Yet in 1924 Marxist Hirabayashi Hatsunosuke predicted that home “mechanization,” rather than a full-scale social revolution, would facilitate women’s liberation. Indeed, kitchen reform was a propelling force in promoting Japanese postwar consumer capitalism, but it also acted as a catalyst for change for women.