This paper examines household-level data on hours actually worked by Japanese peasant families in the interwar period. As a preliminary analysis of a panel-database for the 1931-41 period, currently being compiled under the auspice of Hitotsubashi's prewar Farm Household Survey micro-database project, the paper utilises data for 17 farm households from four prefectures, i.e. Ibaraki, Yamanashi, Osaka and Tokushima, focusing on proximate —rather than market and other economic— determinants of the hours worked by married women and by children. The most important of all factors considered in the paper is the working hours of the husband in the case of married women and those of the parent of the same sex in the case of unmarried children. It is demonstrated that the farm woman readily increased her supply of working hours whenever her husband had to work longer, thereby decreasing her hours spent for domestic tasks. Also shown is that the allocation of her work time was significantly influenced by alternating stages of the family life cycle, shaped under household formation rules of Japan's stem family system.
