Many are aware of the World War 2 internment of Japanese in the USA due to the experience of George Takei and the play Allegiance. Few will be aware of the internment of a handful of Japanese chicken sexers in World War 2 Britain.
Here I will describe the introduction of chicken sexing from Japan to Britain and the subsequent furor when they were released from internment to work in World War 2.
Day old chicks in the early 21st century are sexed with females retained and most males killed by being dropped into a shredder. This is clinical and grim, but a necessary practice to supply large populations with affordable chicken. The other aspect is that male chicks are bastards in that they will go about killing other birds as I have witnessed with many ignorant amateur rearers that have failed to segregate them as they grow. In 2020 there are moves in Germany, France and Italy to replace the practice of killing male chicks by sexing the eggs and destroying males before they hatch. Such technology has been attempted since the 1930’s but has been too slow, inefficient or inaccurate in the past.
It was Japan that developed the skill of sexing day old chicks in the 1920’s and then exported that skill abroad in the 1930’s. In the 1920’s the Japanese discovered that chicken sexing could be taught to very high levels of accuracy and speed. The Zen Nippon Chick Sexing School was founded and by 1933 had trained well over a thousand chicken sexers. They were trained over two years and when they graduated they could discern day old pullets from male cockerels at the rate of over 8000 a day with 99.7% accuracy.
They exported their skill initially into the British Empire. In 1935 five Japanese chicken sexing experts were employed by a farm in Victoria, Australia with a condition of their entry into the country being that they taught Australians to sex chickens. At that time an expert Australian chicken sexer could determine the sex of about 400 in an hour at an accuracy of no more than 95%. In contrast the Japanese chick sexers in Australia could sex 1000 an hour with accuracy of 99.7%. The saving on large Australian poultry units of not rearing 5% cockerels was considerable and the payment of an old Australian penny a chick meant the sexers were paid over £4 an hour.
The first Japanese chick sexers arrived in Yorkshire, in Britain the same year (1935). They were an instant success and this in turn stimulated the poultry industry to expand both in Yorkshire and in the neighbouring counties of Lancashire and Lincolnshire where the Japanese sexers worked in the following year.
An electric ray egg sexer was developed by a Nottingham research scientist to sex eggs by reading the yolk colour. It was a “pig in a poke” in that it was inaccurate and slower than any British sexer let alone the Japanese.
However we need to remember that this was a period of great economic hardship and unemployment. The typical agricultural wage in England was £1 12s. a week and the Japanese were earning £20 to £25 a week. There was considerable resentment of these foreigners earning large sums of money despite the fact it was seasonal, the number of Japanese were low (in 1936 no more than 30) and the poultry industry was benefitting from huge financial savings and resulting expansion. To quell this dissatisfaction in a particularly British ham-fisted fashion government (then the three party National government) stepped in to regulate the situation with bureaucracy.
It was established that the National Poultry Council would set up a Chicken Sexing Board. This would set up a chicken sexing licensing process that could determine whether “alien chicken sexers” were required or whether the service could be met by British chicken sexing experts. If not, the National Poultry Council could apply to the Board of Trade to admit foreign chicken sexers into the country. In an act of almost xenophobic madness the Chicken Sexing Board determined that they would license people as proficient chicken sexers if they could check 300 chicks an hour with 90% proficiency. At this time the Japanese chicken sexers in Britain could sex 1400 chicks an hour with an accuracy of over 99% and 95% accuracy was deemed commercially desirable.
This bureaucracy enabled a corrupt system of bribery and exploitation by agents touting Japanese experts out and taking a fee. A descendant of a Lincolnshire poultry farmer told me his father countered this by employing the Japanese sexer himself and then letting him out to other farmers or allowing people to bring in their chicks to be sexed.
By March 1939 the Japanese government were highly concerned about the exploitation of their chicken sexers and Mr. Tacnikawa, a member of the Japanese House of Representatives and vice chairman of the Japanese Central Council of the Poultry Industry came to England and got the then 20 or so sexers living in England at the time to form a Union to prevent abuse.
In December 1941 Japan declared War on Britain and almost immediately all Japanese, including people thought to be Japanese were interred in prisons and camps alongside Germans, Ukrainians and some Russians. Jews that had escaped Hitler found themselves imprisoned as Germans. However, with food production becoming a focus and manpower in short supply (as chicken sexing was deemed men’s work and in some areas even immoral for women), the British Poultry Council appealed for the release of the Japanese chick sexers. There reintroduction to work coincided with the fall of Singapore and press stories of Japanese brutality fueled a hatred of Japan and its people.
The furor was greatest in Lancashire where despite the needs of the country in war time workers threatened to go on strike as seven Japanese chicken sexers were released by the Ministry of Agriculture under strict conditions of reporting to police twice a day (a Home Office measure that effectively increased the security of the unpopular Japanese as their disappearance would be discovered quickly if they were killed). Their lives were threatened, they were denied housing and were initially treated very badly, but they did their job retaining their high levels of payments which further irked Lancashire poultry workers.
At Horncastle in Lincolnshire the community turned against the Japanese chicken sexers ostracizing them and raising petitions to have them interred. As the War progressed with more foreign refugees and foreign prisoners of war working on farms feelings softened even to the Japanese sexers for a while. The Japanese started to teach women to sex chicks and the dominance of women in this role continued after the war. For many of the chick sexers it was 1947 before they could return to a broken Japan and in the immediate aftermath of the War, whilst they continued to work, they suffered a backlash as British soldiers returned having been treated appallingly by the Japanese as prisoners. This attitude towards Japanese carried through certainly to my childhood in the 1970’s.
The Japanese chick sexers left a legacy of highly competent British chick sexers trained by them. In 1947 at Hallmark Hatchings in Stoke Ferry, Norfolk their top British chick sexer could sex 17000 chicks in a day at 99% accuracy, and it was a woman.
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