Communications: an expanding labour-intensive sector

The modern postal system was established in Japan in 1871. Its development was spearheaded by Maejima Hisoka, who is regarded as the architect of Japan's new postal service. As one of the many Japanese bureaucrats who travelled to Europe and America, Maejima was able in the early 1870s to observe postal systems in Europe, especially in Britain. He admired much of what he saw and his new knowledge was important in developing the new system in Japan and persuading Japanese citizens to use it. Maejima resigned his bureaucratic responsibilities in 1881, though he resumed an official position in communications for a brief period in the late 1880s, when he initiated the early stages of telephone development.Footnote ⁴ Over time, the range of services offered by the communications authorities expanded from mail delivery and telegraph communication to include postal savings, postal money orders, parcel post, telephone services, life insurance, and other services. The branching-out into financial services was in large part the result of seeing existing models in countries such as Britain and Belgium. The centenary of the founding of the post in 1971 sparked a mass of publications on its history, and the development and impact of the system have been explored by a number of scholars. Eleanor Westney's analysis of postal institutions remains insightful, while Sugiyama Shinya has looked at the impact of the new system on regional economies. More recent publications by Patricia Maclachlan, Yabuuchi Yoshihiko, Inoue Takurō, and Hoshina Sadao have added to our understanding. For analysis of some of the adjunct services such as postal savings, we can look to the writings of scholars including Sugiura Seishi, Sheldon Garon, and Tanaka Hikaru.Footnote ⁵ A key message that comes out of this existing scholarship is that the proliferation of services and functions associated with the growth of the system repeatedly brought new challenges in relation to finding, retaining, training, and remunerating employees.

Obtaining accurate statistical data on Japan's communications workforce in this period is made more difficult by the frequent restructuring of responsibilities over transport and communications that characterised the early Meiji years, but previous research and contemporary data published by the authorities in departmental bulletins and government statistical reports help provide an overview of the expansion and diversification of the labour force that fell within the jurisdiction of the early bureaus of communications and, from 1885, the new Ministry of Communications (Teishinshō),Footnote ⁶ which remained the responsible government body for Japan's postal and telecommunications networks through to the Pacific War and presided over its increasing responsibilities. Some of the data are lacking in detail, and there are some significant discontinuities in the official figures that can be attributed to changes in human resource strategies and/or recording methods, but they are sufficient to provide a guide to general trends. The expansion of the system in itself meant an increasing need for workers. By 1889, for example, there were some 200 domestic telegraph offices and over 4,000 post offices. As of 1912, there were over 1,000 telephone exchanges as well. By 1939, the number of post offices had grown to over 12,000.Footnote ⁷ Individual offices also progressively handled more and more business, meaning sustained pressure to recruit and retain ever more employees. The labour force statistics for communications workers shown in Table 1 reflect the expansion that characterised the whole pre-war period.

Table 1. Numbers of postal, telegraph, and telephone workers, 1884–1938

From Yūseishō 郵政省 (ed.), Yūsei Hyakunen Shi Shiryō郵政百年史資料 [Materials on 100 Years of History of the Postal System], 30 vols (Tokyo, 1970–1971), pp. 82–85.

The overall numbers were often categorised according to rank rather than function. The highest levels of appointment were at the standard chokunin, sōnin, and hannin categories of bureaucratic rank. Overall numbers at the top two levels were relatively small, but some of those appointed initially as hannin, the third rank in the hierarchy, could expect to progress into the highest levels of the bureaucracy, often moving between ministries and other government appointments as they did so. Kawamura Takeji, for example, worked for the Teishinshō as a postmaster in Shikoku and as head of the Osaka Post Office before later becoming governor of Kagawa Prefecture, president of the South Manchurian Railway, and eventually minister of justice in 1932.Footnote ⁸ Initially, these top groups were exclusively male but, by the early twentieth century, there were a small number of women working as hannin, to whom we will return in the next section. Below these levels were the many government workers who were not formally classed as government officials (kanri). These employees were divided between koin and yōnin, which in one contemporary government publication were respectively translated into English as ‘employee higher class’ and ‘employee lower class’. The division between these two groups has been subject to debate in the literature but, in general, koin were likely to be more highly educated (having perhaps gone beyond compulsory education) and to be engaged in white-collar work. Some might even be promoted to hannin status. By contrast, yōnin tended to be those undertaking manual or physical work.Footnote ⁹ There was some fluidity between and within these two groups and their relationship to the work that was actually being undertaken. In the mid-1880s, the earlier category of yūbin toriatsukaiyaku (toriatsukainin)—literally someone tasked with handling mail—disappeared, to be replaced by koin. At the same time, postmen (delivery men), who had been categorised separately, now became included in the general category of yōnin. In the Teishinshō, the broad division between koin and yōnin was maintained until the late 1930s, but the numbers reported for 1939–44 indicate that almost all former yōnin had been recategorised as koin.Footnote ¹⁰ Given these shifting categorisations, therefore, interpreting the available statistical data is not always straightforward. We also find that annual reports issued by the new Teishinshō from 1886 through to the mid-1890s somewhat misleadingly suggest a massive reduction in the overall workforce, but this appears to be largely due to the non-inclusion of most delivery workers in the statistics during these years. Whereas there were reported to be only around 5,000 postmen and yōnin in 1896, the following year, there were over 44,000 out of a total workforce of nearly 69,000. There is a further dramatic mismatch between the 1907 and 1908 data, which show the total number of Teishinshō employees as falling from over 170,000 in 1907 to slightly over 87,000 in 1908. This is explained by the abolition of the Teishinshō-administered Railways Bureau (Tetsudōkyoku) in December of 1907, to be replaced by a new Imperial Railways Bureau (Teikoku Tetsudō Chō) within the Home Ministry.Footnote ¹¹ The numbers working in communications (post, telegraph, and telephone), however, were relatively unaffected and resumed their upward trajectory, as suggested in the general ballpark figures provided in Table 1. So, while these estimates must be approached with some caution, we can be left in no doubt that the Ministry of Communications was a very large employer.Footnote ¹²

Knowing exactly what many of these employees did, however, is a major challenge. Although the extent of employee data broken down by task is limited, some broad trends can be identified. Firstly, the post, telegraph, and telephone together accounted for a significant proportion of all Ministry of Communications employees throughout the pre-war period and, particularly in the early decades, a significant majority of workers were involved in mail-related work. In 1872, the year after its founding, a high proportion of the more than 1,200 workers said to be employed were designated as yūbin toriatsukaiyaku (toriatsukainin)—those handling the post—with only 119 being recorded as shūhainin—those specifically engaged in collection and delivery. By 1884, the total number of employees had reached over 20,000; the number designated as yūbin toriatsukainin had reached over 5,000, while the number of shūhainin had expanded rapidly over the previous three years to well over 12,000.Footnote ¹³ These employees, who were generally categorised as yōnin, were recorded as numbering over 100,000 by 1907, although lower figures were offered for some later dates.

Secondly, the data show that a growing proportion of the total workforce comprised koin, reflecting the growth of clerical and office tasks associated with the expansion of new services such as postal savings, postal money orders, and telephone communications. By 1918, reports indicated that the number of koin surpassed the number of yōnin and the Ministry of Communications annual bulletin reported that, in 1938, there were over 122,000 koin as opposed to nearly 99,000 yōnin.Footnote ¹⁴ Thirdly, the expansion of clerical and office employment within the communications system was associated with a small but significant growth in female employment. In 1906, official data recorded only around 3,300 female post, telegraph, and telephone employees but, by 1919, the number had increased to over 23,000. This increase in female communications workers was part of the broader growth in women's white-collar employment, especially in the interwar years.

The expansion of the post and telecommunications workforce, and the increasing number of workers employed in the associated financial and other services of the system, therefore confirms the existence of labour-intensive growth outside the manufacturing sector—the focus of my first question. Of course, there was also capital expenditure. Developing the physical infrastructure for the transport of mail and parcels required significant investment, as did the construction of the telegraph network, telephone exchanges, and telephone equipment. Office workers not only needed buildings to work in, but increasingly required typewriters, calculators, and other supplies. Yet, through into the interwar years, as in most service industries, the communications sector continued to rely to a major extent on human capital. The very nature of its business made it difficult to substitute for human capital and, as the demand for its services grew, so too did its need for more workers. An indicator of this is the amount of expenditure on labour. At the time of its founding, around 83 per cent of the total budget of the post office was estimated to be spent on personnel and that proportion remained fairly constant over subsequent decades.Footnote ¹⁵

Institutional development in post, telegraph, and telephone

In line with our focus on labour intensity, this section addresses my second question by suggesting some examples in the communications sector of what might be thought of as labour-absorbing institutions. These embraced both formal institutions in the form of rules and regulations and informal ones, whereby the authorities drew on pre-existing systems and cultural assumptions to persuade employees to think about and undertake postal system work in a particular way. An in-depth analysis of the institutionalisation of communications employment lies beyond the scope of this article, but it is apparent that many of these strategies were devised in an attempt to recruit and retain workers in the face of financial and other constraints that limited the ability of authorities to rely purely on wage incentives. We find that problems in securing human capital took multiple forms and also generated sometimes unanticipated responses. Recruitment of postmen to undertake collection and delivery was obviously a major element of the whole system in the early years, but how were the authorities to ensure, for example, that such employees possessed appropriate attributes? We have limited information on the mechanisms whereby many postmen were employed and vetted for the task, but the Tōkyō Nichi Nichi Shinbun reported the year after the founding of the service that better numbering of residential houses was becoming more important given that many postmen were still illiterate.Footnote ¹⁶ Dishonest postmen were another problem mentioned in contemporary reports. One postal chief in Osaka was said to have resigned because a local postman had thrown thousands of letters into the river.Footnote ¹⁷ And there was little experience to draw on when it came to understanding better the speed or efficiency with which many of the new tasks facing employees could be carried out. Trial and error were invariably the order of the day. Maejima's passion for the new initiative was such that he reportedly made his family and servants participate in letter-sorting trials, to see how fast these things could be done.Footnote ¹⁸ Whether they shared his enthusiasm is unclear.

The remainder of this section focuses on three areas of institutional development that proved crucial to the growth of the postal and telecommunications system and the services associated with it. One was the authorities’ extensive reliance, particularly in the early years of the 1870s, on individuals and groups who were already involved in existing communications systems—systems with which the new postal service was initially forced to compete, but whose employees might also have skills that were transferable to the needs of the new network. A second, closely associated strategy was the decision to mobilise many employees indirectly: instead of being direct employees of the government or the postal authorities, they were utilised on a subcontracting or franchise basis, with their remuneration contingent on the economics of the services that they undertook. That such workers were often not included in the official headcount of employees means that official data if anything underestimate the number of workers in the sector. Thirdly, the authorities increasingly made use of the national importance of the service as a tool to attract and motivate employees. Working for a service marketed as critical for the formation of the nation and for national and international identity came to be seen as a badge of honour.

Let us start with the mobilisation of existing communications workers. In the early days, the new postal service (initially limited to the Tōkaidō route) faced serious competition from the courier (hikyaku) system that had prevailed under the aegis of the Tokugawa regime.Footnote ¹⁹ The work of the couriers, who undertook the actual carriage of goods and information, was closely integrated with the operation of the postal relay stations along the country's main highways; many of the forwarding agents (toiya) were also postal station managers or officials. In the early months, when there was no national monopoly, there was serious potential for conflict over the differential rates charged by the official service and the couriers between the major cities. Competition on the routes between Tokyo and Yokohama, and between Tokyo and Kyoto, was particularly fierce. Yet buying out the couriers was a remote prospect. The Communications Bureau was subject to the dictates of the Finance Ministry, and so it had to compete for funding with a host of other imperatives. New initiatives tended to need new finance, which was in itself something of a discouragement to move away from the existing communications system. The government just did not have the necessary funds to buy out the couriers, and the perceived threat to their livelihoods aroused concern and hostility among them. One government leader, Ōkuma Shigenobu, reported that feelings were running so high that there were rumours of assassination threats against the government officials involved.Footnote ²⁰

A possible alternative strategy to a buy-out was rapidly conceived. In extending the government service west from Osaka, the authorities chose to solicit the services of the Osaka forwarding agents as official subcontractors,Footnote ²¹ and this was the model that would be followed as the service expanded to cover the country's major routes. The adoption of such a policy nationwide was not straightforward, and the sustained negotiations between the postal authorities and representatives of the couriers over the months after autumn 1871 often took place against a background of ill-feeling and antagonism. Sasaki Sōsuke, deputy head of one of the largest forwarding agents in Tokyo, acted as something of an intermediary between the two sides. The negotiations culminated in a proposal in the spring of 1872 that existing couriers should collectively form a transport company undertaking the carriage of goods, money, and passengers. The government would also have the option of delegating to the company the transport of specified mail items or mail routes. In May 1872, a group of the major Tōkaidō couriers submitted to the government a formal petition to be allowed to found such a transport company and for it to become the government's ‘official carrier’.Footnote ²² The resulting Riku'un Moto Kaisha (later Naikoku Tsū’un Kaisha) helped to sustain the courier companies’ livelihoods while minimising the cost of expanding the carriage of the post. Over the initial years after its founding, the company benefited from substantial government commissions and supportive measures. The Finance Ministry, for example, exempted the new company from any claims made on the basis of the historical debts of the courier companies and post stations that had merged into it.Footnote ²³ Over time, all remaining private courier companies were compelled to join the new company. A similar collaboration was extended in the early days to the postal station system. Outside the large post offices (yūbin yakusho), the first 179 post-handling bureaus (yūbin toriatsukaisho) were mostly located in former relay stations, under the management of former courier or post station employees with long experience in the handling of transport and communications.Footnote ²⁴

The authorities’ establishment of a government monopoly over the carriage of all post in 1873 precluded any further competition from the private sector, but the objective of providing a universal service to all parts of the nation posed new challenges that required different solutions, leading to a rather different form of subcontracting. The traditional forwarding agents and relay stations were almost entirely restricted to the main routes between large towns and cities. Particularly after the formal abolition of the relay stations (shukueki) in 1872, recruiting competent individuals to operate thousands of local post offices away from these major routes and to administer the mail-related services they supplied proved a major challenge. It was also potentially very costly. While the authorities felt that they had little choice but to directly employ full-time workers to run the larger post office operations in the cities and major towns, extending such a system to thousands of communities across the archipelago was logistically challenging and expensive in terms of personnel and other resources. The problem was addressed through the system of what were initially referred to as ‘post-handling offices’ (yūbin toriatsukaiyaku) and, after 1886, ‘third-class post offices’ (santō yūbinkyoku), renamed in 1941 tokutei yūbinkyoku (privately owned post offices).Footnote ²⁵ Under this system, there were three tiers of post office. The workers in first-class and second-class offices, which were located in major towns and cities, were direct government appointees working in offices directly controlled by the postal authorities. Those in the smaller third-class offices, which were scattered across the country, were not. Workers at the third-class offices vastly outnumbered those in the higher-tier post offices. In the mid-1880s, there were already over 4,600 ‘franchised’ post offices as opposed to only 56 directly controlled ones.Footnote ²⁶ This system, which has been discussed in some detail by scholars such as Patricia Maclachlan, Tahara Keisuke, and Yabuuchi Yoshihiko, was in effect the recruitment as local postmasters of local headmen, village chiefs, businessmen, or landlords—individuals now often referred to as ‘local notables’ (meibōka). Potential appointees were men of at least 20 years of age, who possessed some property, and were resident in the area. They were allowed to undertake their postal duties in conjunction with other ‘respectable’ income-earning activities and were expected in return to offer their house and land for postal system use. They were also required to be literate and numerate, with some knowledge of Western script. They could appoint employees where necessary to carry out local postal work and offer them a wage for doing so.Footnote ²⁷ Individuals deemed suitable for the post of local postmaster were identified through the use of public announcements and personal contact. Local government officials were often asked to try and find appropriate appointees. When the Hakodate Post Office opened in 1872, Maejima Hisoka himself wrote to the mayor to solicit his assistance in finding suitable individuals.Footnote ²⁸ This franchising strategy not only played a key role in the provision of human resources; it also at a stroke addressed two other key problems: lack of public trust in the service and shortage of capital. Utilising existing local hierarchies and values made for respectability and enhanced community confidence in the new system that was being offered. In some cases in which the appointed individuals were conservative enough to remain contemptuous of payment in cash, they were initially even paid in rice, as under the traditional pre-Restoration stipend system.Footnote ²⁹ The result was a nationwide system that has been seen as somewhat analogous to the sub-post offices that emerged in Britain, which, by the First World War, numbered over 23,000 compared with little over 1,000 main post offices.Footnote ³⁰

The most important element of this particular labour-absorbing institution was perhaps that the new third-class postmasters were employed at a fraction of the cost of a direct government employee. In Maclachlan's words, the attraction of the new system for the Meiji state was that ‘it promised to facilitate the expansion of communications without draining public coffers or forcing unpopular increases in postage rates’.Footnote ³¹ Having permission to engage in other income-earning activities was an open acknowledgement that third-class postmasters were not expected to make a living purely by acting in a postmaster capacity. The authorities themselves acknowledged in their 1874 report that ‘the post offices in the provinces are owned by the postmasters, whose salaries are very small and entirely insufficient to compensate them for their services alone’.Footnote ³² Such income as they received was largely related to the extent of the business that they undertook. One later recollection stated that a third-class postmaster was initially paid 4 mon for every 100 mon of stamps that he managed to sell.Footnote ³³ Four per cent of turnover was of itself never likely to bring riches, even where a local post office was generating significant income for the coffers of the ministry, but, in localities that were sparsely populated or where there were relatively few users of the service, the income accruing to the postmaster was likely to be particularly low. Table 2 provides a comparison of the monthly earnings in the early years of full-time postal officials (kan'in) and their counterparts in the local post offices, referred to here as yūbin toriatsukai yaku. It should also be noted that few third-class postmasters had any access to even a modest pension scheme.

Table 2. Numbers and remuneration of selected postal employees

Data collected by Tahara Keisuke and reproduced in Y. Yabuuchi 藪内吉彦, Nihon Yūbin Sōgyō no Rekishi 日本郵便創業の歴史 [History of the Founding of Japanese Post] (Tokyo, 2013), p. 241.

A third crucial institutional element was the promotion of a national narrative to underline the expansion of a national postal service. The belief that the new postal service was a system of national importance was not universally shared, particularly in the early 1870s. Even officials of the new regime responsible for communications could be hostile. In the autumn of 1871, Maejima Hisoka, who had just returned from his period abroad, met with the newly appointed head of the Communications Bureau, Hamaguchi Goryō, and was horrified at Hamaguchi's statement that, while the telegraph, as a new innovation, would naturally come under government control, the post was ‘a lowly trade’ long carried out by couriers and, if the new system was successful, it too would be transferred to the existing couriers.Footnote ³⁴ It was in response to such conservative attitudes that the preamble to the Postal Regulations of spring 1872 included the statement that ‘in the countries of Europe and America importance is attached to the postal authorities’ and emphasised that these foreign governments underlined that importance by the allocation of significant public funding.Footnote ³⁵ The allocation of significant funding was, as noted earlier, a major problem for Japan, but the subcontracting of much of the work to the private sector noted above not only helped to minimise the consequences of a shortage of national funds, but also had the added advantage of providing an opportunity to promote a broader national narrative.

Although a number of senior members of the early Meiji government, including Maejima himself, were committed to rejecting the traditional doctrine of kanson minpi (respecting officials, deriding the public), this did not prevent them from using it as an inducement to work for the new regime and the services it offered. The concept of an official position remained attractive to many even well before the institutionalisation of the bureaucracy from the 1880s.Footnote ³⁶ Designating the early post offices as yakusho, making specific use of the word used to refer to government offices, helped to highlight this official status. Although they lacked formal bureaucratic rank, the third-class postmasters were effectively treated in the same way as hannin, denoting their honourable status and work in the community. The prestige attached to official positions was, in Maejima's words, used to attract ‘gentlemen of appropriate capital’.Footnote ³⁷ That the Meiji government could get away with paying the local postmasters so little in the early years was precisely because of the attraction of having an official position in what was trumpeted as a key national endeavour. For the present, the Ekiteiryō reported,

But the benefit was far from being one-directional. While the postmasters might benefit from the kudos attached to a quasi-official position, the mobilisation of men of local influence and prestige had the capacity to enhance the public reputation of the new service and increase the levels of trust in its operation. Similar appeals were utilised to promote other parts of the service. Garon notes how the government later sought to mobilise the new middle class and other elements of society to make injunctions to savingFootnote ³⁹—in effect an additional form of ‘subcontracting’. Informal as well as formal institutions were thus developed to enhance the labour intensity that characterised the communications infrastructure.

Improving the quality of human capital for the imperatives of new technologies

In response to the third question, I show in this section how some of the labour-using strategies that were adopted resulted in a gradual improvement in the quality of labour. The proliferation during the decades after 1871 of the number of tasks associated with the operation of the communications system required workers with different attributes and skills. Post offices alone, it has been observed, operated not only as centres of mail handling, but, by the early twentieth century, as banks, insurance agents, and providers of social welfare.Footnote ⁴⁰ Even jobs considered menial and categorised as yōin required a range of skills. A postman, for example, was expected to possess both physical health and personal integrity. In some cases, he might also be required to possess or drive a vehicle of some kind. Hand-drawn carts were common across the country well into the Taishō period, while horse-drawn carts were used for both longer and shorter distances. Some of the longer-distance horse-drawn postal carts operated on a subcontracting basis, from which some drivers made significant profits, but the communications authorities also had their own carts. In 1911, Tokyo's central post office was reported as possessing a total of 85 horse-drawn carts for the local carriage of regular mail and parcels.Footnote ⁴¹ Only in the 1920s did the use of mechanised vehicles for the carriage of mail in cities really take off, in turn requiring the recruitment of drivers and maintenance workers. When it came to longer-distance services, some major postal routes in both Kantō and Kansai were, from the late 1870s onwards, able to make use of the new railways and such use expanded rapidly in conjunction with expansion of the railway network. This too demanded a new range of skills. Maintaining the machinery that loaded and unloaded mail on and off trains required engineering skills, for example, while workers sorting mail on long-distance night trains expected to be provided with food or drink. The number of new jobs seemed inexhaustible.

Some of the proliferating tasks were related to existing technologies, meaning that skills and manpower might be transferable; others were completely new, so experience and knowhow were totally lacking. The need for more skilled or specialised human capital that progressively arose was met through several means. One was the expansion of school education. Take-up was initially low but, by circa 1910, over 90 per cent of school-age children, both male and female, were in receipt of six years of compulsory education. The growth of compulsory education provided the communications system with an expanding pool of literate and numerate workers, who could be directed into the many communications jobs for which such skills were essential. A postman needed to have some literacy to deliver letters correctly. Compulsory education also helped to equip men and women to serve at post office counters, handle postal savings, keep records, and draft reports. It served as the foundation for the huge growth of white-collar employment that took place after the turn of the century. Such education was not in itself, however, sufficient training for the enormous range of tasks that the operation of the service entailed, leading to the institution of a second response in the form of internal training programmes to provide employees with requisite skills. Some of these training courses were short—maybe just a few weeks. Others were somewhat longer and were geared to the expectation that the recipient employees would commit to long—if not lifetime—service with the postal and communications authorities. Thus, although many aspects of the postal system relied on existing skills and learning by doing, the concept of in-house training was recognised as important even in the early days. In May 1872, for example, a limited apprenticeship system was introduced whereby the Ekiteiryō sought to recruit ten young men aged around 20 to learn how to handle international mail. The background of those who applied is unclear, but candidates were expected to possess some knowledge of English and of Western-style accounting, implying that they would have to have received a good level of education. A range of tests included translating up to 30 English sentences and demonstrating understanding of a high-school-level geography book. They were to be paid ¥7 per month for two years, although the authorities had the right to transfer them to formal employment earlier than that. They were trained in translation and also spent time in the foreign post offices in Yokohama that were run by countries such as Britain, France, and the USA. Other postal employees were designated to work with Samuel Bryan, the American who was put in charge of the new Japanese post office in Yokohama, and Bryan was paid an additional ¥100 per month for training them in international mail management.Footnote ⁴²

If specialised training was required in the case of the operation of the post, this was even more true in the case of other hitherto unknown technologies. The telegraph gave rise to some of the first instances of internal training in communications. Reliance on foreign engineers was very costly in the face of increasing demandFootnote ⁴³ and, in the second half of 1873, a training school was established in Tokyo in what is now Shiodome. New facilities included a telegraph line for students’ practice. Recruits were aged 12 to 20, ideally with knowledge of a foreign language. Additional training facilities were subsequently established in Osaka to serve the west of Japan. By the 1890s, there were more than 1,500 graduates of what was initially the Tokyo Telegraph School (Denshin Gakkō). Among them was the author Kōda Rohan, who worked as a telegraph engineer in Hokkaido before turning to literature.Footnote ⁴⁴

The introduction of the telephone from the late 1880s posed similar challenges, requiring the training of engineers, telephonists, and a host of other workers. The number of telephone operators in the ministry was reported to have mushroomed from just 69 in 1890 to over 2,000 by 1895.Footnote ⁴⁵ With the telephone system initially serving the largest cities, a high proportion of this workforce was concentrated in Tokyo, Yokohama, Nagoya, and the cities of Kansai. As the system expanded, so did the number of employees. By 1903, post, telegraph, and telephone offices employed nearly 3,000 telephone operators as well as a host of engineers, technicians, and other telephone workers. During the Taishō period, the number of telephonists increased rapidly to over 38,000 in 1919.Footnote ⁴⁶ In these cases, too, skills were provided through several channels. Compulsory education gave workers essential literacy and mathematical skills, while communications was among the many beneficiaries of the new higher education offered by institutions such as the Imperial College of Engineering (Kōbu Daigakkō), which produced over 20 graduates specialising in telegraphic engineering in the early 1880s.Footnote ⁴⁷ For many scarce skills, however, the service looked to internal training programmes and, in a few cases, foreign study. In 1903, for example, three engineers were sent for a year's foreign study in either Britain or the USA to learn about telephone and telegraph connections, telephone equipment, and the operation of exchanges,Footnote ⁴⁸ but such foreign study was for the most part limited to the acquisition of skills that were deemed to be unavailable in Japan. The majority of workers continued to be trained at home, either on the job or through designated internal training courses.

A third means was diversification of the workforce to employ workers with a wider range of attributes. Perhaps most conspicuous here was the growth in the number of female employees. The gendered labour market was exploited to help meet a number of recruitment challenges, resulting in the recruitment of female workers not only to undertake tasks that were deemed suited to feminine attributes, but also in some cases to compensate for shortages of male workers. A prime example of a communications job deemed appropriate for a woman was telephony. As early as 1890, the popular press was noting how women were being trained to operate the new telephone exchangesFootnote ⁴⁹ and the proportion of female workers in the overall workforce, while initially very small, grew considerably from the 1890s onwards. The ministry's report for 1890 noted the existence of 13 female employees within the bureau who were responsible for telegraphy and telephony, paid on average 15 sen per day.Footnote ⁵⁰ By 1900, 75 per cent of the cohort of over 700 telephone operators were female and statistics for 1919 indicate the existence of only two male telephone operators working alongside nearly 39,000 women.Footnote ⁵¹ In a highly gender-segregated labour market, being a telephone operator, with its associated koin status, had become a woman's job; by contrast, even after the First World War, few women were employed in capacities such as engineers or postmen. While telephone operators were almost exclusively female, dispatch and delivery workers were all male.Footnote ⁵²

The employment of women more broadly was a major factor in enhancing the overall quality of human capital in parts of the communications infrastructure. After the turn of the century, we find a growing number of women in jobs that were associated with koin status, in line with the overall growth of female white-collar employment. The 1903 ministry report notes the existence of nearly 15,000 female koin, while the 1908 report identifies nearly 8,000 women employed directly by the ministry (including in first-class and second-class post offices). By 1921, the Ministry of Communications claimed to be employing over 26,000 female koin, many of whom served as clerical staff in first-class or second-class post offices, often engaged in the administration of services such as postal savings, money transfers, and, from 1916, postal insurance (kan'i hoken).Footnote ⁵³ As noted earlier, a small number of women also actually began to be appointed to hannin status—the lowest tier of official bureaucratic appointment. The appointment of women to hannin employment has been analysed by Matsuzawa Yūsaku, who shows how the employment of women in the Savings Bureau was driven by the need for cheaper labour associated with the administrative reforms that followed the Russo-Japanese War and an attempt to attract women who could earn more in the private sector by offering them higher official status. Women progressed and were promoted more slowly than their male counterparts, but a small but growing number worked for extended periods, including after marriage.Footnote ⁵⁴ That women were potentially and actually an important resource for the expansion of the service was acknowledged quite explicitly by the authorities. The ministry's 1908 report, recounting efforts to incentivise employees by improvements in status and higher pay, noted the importance of categorising telephone operator trainees as koin, relaxing the approval procedures for the appointment of female office workers, clarifying the kinds of work that women were permitted to undertake, and allowing the employment of married women as telephone operators where this was deemed to be appropriate.Footnote ⁵⁵ While women were never paid equally to their male counterparts, nor provided with access to the highest levels of the bureaucracy or formally recognised as crucial to the operation of the third-class post offices, they were nevertheless increasingly important in the work undertaken under the aegis of the Communications Ministry, making a significant contribution to enhancing the quality of the human capital in the sector.

In conclusion: incentives and disincentives

Particularly in its early years, when citizens had to be ‘educated’ in the concept of a state-run postal network with universal access,Footnote ⁵⁶ and when the new system had to contend with the existence of other, long-established means of communication, the challenges of appointing individuals to transport letters, to engage in delivery and collection, and to run the offices that were essential to the provision of services were enormous. A range of attributes were required, ranging from literacy and numeracy through to physical strength and integrity. At the same time, new technologies such as the telegraph and the telephone demanded specialised knowledge and skills, as did the proliferation of new services, such as postal savings and postal money orders. Taken together, these strategies enabled the communications authorities in Japan to secure the workforce that they needed to develop the expanding national postal, telegraph, and telephone services from the 1870s, as well as the adjunct services that were also developed, such as postal savings or postal insurance. These strategies undoubtedly served to improve the quality of the workforce, but also had limitations when it came to keeping workers happy and retaining their services, as evidenced in the attempts to employ additional measures to reward and retain employees. The cachet of official employment would only go so far if an employee still found it difficult to make ends meet. The third-class postmasters, as we have seen, were paid a pittance. Unlike full-time government officials, they were permitted to undertake other work, although we know relatively little about the extent to which they did so. It is clear, however, that a system that relied on confirmation of local status and quasi-official position to outweigh complaints about the minimal remuneration offered potential pitfalls from the start. We know that some third-class postmasters sought to resign because their incomes were totally insufficient and, from early on, the responsible authorities saw the potential for defections as a serious problem. The financial situation of some relatively underused offices was particularly problematic and some ceased to exist in the early-mid-1880s, as evidenced by the numbers in Table 2.Footnote ⁵⁷ The evidence regarding actual levels of income is conflicting, with some reports giving figures for monthly income and others referring only to ‘allowances’ (teate) from the government, but one 1907 report stated that, on average, third-class postmasters received an income of ¥10.90 per month, which amounted to a shortfall of ¥4.21 on the estimated living costs for a couple. By comparison, the starting salary for employees of the first-class and second-class post offices was ¥10 and increased with seniority. Many other areas of work, including gardening and carpentry, paid considerably more.Footnote ⁵⁸ Other data suggest that, in some cases, a third-class postmaster was being paid significantly less than the amount received by the average postman working under his jurisdiction. By the end of the Meiji period, the kudos assigned to being a local postmaster was less and less able to outweigh the disadvantages of inadequate remuneration. Some third-class postmasters were subsidising the operation of the postal system out of their own funds, while others found themselves having to borrow funds or sell off their landholdings. The result was that some gave up the struggle, while others neglected their duties to engage in other activities, in some cases passing them on to their wives or other family members who had often de facto been discharging most of the responsibilities.Footnote ⁵⁹ Not until well into the 1930s were serious attempts made to improve the conditions and incomes of these postmasters with a view to retaining their services.

It was not just the third-class postmasters who were increasingly disincentivised. Both direct and indirect employees below the top levels were concerned about status and pay levels. The ministry's report for 1908 shows that, while the sōnin heads of the first-class post offices were earning on average just under ¥150 per month, their hannin colleagues who had been appointed as communications assistants received on average something over ¥16 per month, while postmen and other communications administrators (tsūshin jimuin) averaged circa ¥0.4 per day, equivalent to around ¥12–13 per month. In response to the difficulties in retaining direct employees, the authorities did increasingly look to enhancing commitment to long-term service not just through a narrative of social prestige, but also through improved remuneration packages. The measures taken to secure more female workers mentioned earlier were part of this broader strategy. However, this was in many respects easier to implement with directly employed workers. To the heads of the third-class post offices, who, according to the same 1908 report, received an average allowance (teate) of ¥2.9 per month, such salaries must have seemed something of which they could only dream. The national narrative, it seems, could only extend so far.

Despite these difficulties, the authorities clearly recognised the importance of human capital to the operation and development of the communications system, and sought as far as possible to strengthen the quality of the workforce on which this labour-intensive sector depended. Financial constraints were probably the most important factor in shaping a system that, over time, proved less than perfect, but Maejima Hisoka himself regarded the good treatment of employees as a sine qua non for the operation of any business, whether state-run or private. In effect, being good to one's employees was good business. In pursuit of this strategy, soon after the founding of the postal service in 1871, Maejima articulated the idea of forming a kind of friendly society to support postal employees, in particular to provide them with assistance when they became sick or retired. Such a welfare organisation, he believed, would help to motivate employees and ensure that the service benefited from the human resources on which it depended. Despite approval within the ministry, the plan failed to materialise, but it in many respects foreshadowed the postal insurance (kan'i hoken) introduced by the Ministry of Communications in 1916. It was remarkable for its time, however, and it is worth citing the stated justification for the original plan at some length, as it demonstrates the commitment to labour-absorbing institutions and improvement in the quality of labour identified with the labour-intensive industrialisation process: