Memories of Silk and Straw
...hey could and would be overworked and underpaid. One instance was when a husband decided he didn’t really want to work so the “Mother was out in the fields working herself to the bone” (206) to provide food for her family. She had to do all the work otherwise her family would starve and because she was a women and that is what was expected of her. Others would be “sold into a geisha house” so the family could have some money. As a geisha they would learn how to entertain men for money by “dancing, as well as playing the shamisen and drum” (158). Men would make women wear their hair in different ways so they could “always tell how old she was, whether she was a spinster or married, and even what sort of work she did” (153). Some upper class married women were not even allowed go outside of their houses. They would “spend almost all their time in the gloomy back parts of their houses; it was rare if they went outside at all” (139). Women did not have much freedom in the town, and it was due mainly to the fact that the men put them in that position. But women did have the children who would hold a position in the town unlike grown men or women. The position of children in the town was that of a blessing and as a curse. They were a blessing because they were part of the family and if they survived, “many of them died young” (61), they could work and continue the family line. They were a curse because if they had too many children some families could not afford them. This would make children disposable and “Thinning out babies was pretty common in the old days” (203). If a child was a twin, deformed, or considered unattractive they would kill them because they felt these were problems the family could do without. This kind of treatment of children is very different from the way children are treated in America today. The treatment of children in America differs from the treatment of the children of Tsuchiura in so many ways. American children today are required to go to school to a certain age, in Tsuchiura it was not uncommon for children to only go to school for a couple years or not even at all so they could work in the fields or do other work to support their family. It is also a crime to smother an American child after being born but in Tsuchiura it was just part of the norm if you did not or could not keep your child. Although Americans do have more advanced techniques of abortion which in Tsuchiura they did practice which is kind of similar to being able to choose whether your baby lives or dies but before they are born, not after. Also there are child labor laws in the United States which make the work that the children had to do in Tsuchiura when they were younger against the law. Today in America children have more rights then they did in Tsuchiura but still they are just children and the property of their parents until they reach a certain age. But it seemed throughout the story that even though the children were treated in this different matter most of the elderly longed for how things were when they were younger. When it came to the town of Tsuchiura it seemed like a lot of the elderly longed for how things used to be when they were younger. Such as when a child in the town would celebrate a seventh birthday they had a tradition known as “untying the string” (60) where children would be able to eat sweets and the one child who’s birthday it was would visit the local shrine and then “he’d visit all the houses in the neighborhood, and at each he’d have some money tied onto a piece of string that he carried with him” (60). Or how on New Year’s everyone in the town would vis...