4 ideas
A labour contractor pays a rural family a small lump sum for a three-year contract on their daughter, then houses, feeds, and hires her out to the mill while keeping all her wages. Because the payment settles a family debt and the girl never touches her earnings, she becomes the contractor's property in all but name, and the deal is presented as a favour to the poor.
Japanese mill owners preferred contract girls because they were locked in dormitories, cut off from family and outside workers, and watched by contractors tied to gangs and police. This isolation made them more docile, easier to replace, and unable to join unions or strikes.
A girl, starved thin enough to earn the nickname 'Reed Stick,' falls ill and is beaten and forced back to the machines rather than treated. The contractor calculates her body only as an asset to be worked until its value is used up. The case shows that the system replaces care with a running tally of how much labour is left in each girl.
Just as each sleeper of a railway can be seen as resting on a dead labourer, every bolt of cotton cloth carries the wrecked bodies of the girls who spun it. Looking at finished goods this way makes hidden labour conditions part of what the product is, rather than a distant fact about where it came from.