TOKUNOBU, Japan -- The early morning schedule for many women hasn't changed in hundreds of years: up at 5:30 a.m. to make the family a miso soup breakfast and a box lunch of rice and pickles, then laundry and cleaning.
The traditional domesticity, however, is all done by 10 a.m. Then begins job No. 2: assembling mechanical pencils -- hundreds a day, thousands a week, more than 100,000 a year.
Though far removed from the country's famed automation and from the minions of gray-suited Tokyo businessmen, women in small towns in Japan play a critical, albeit usually invisible, role in nearly every major industry. They are the modern-day pieceworkers, doing at home what could be done in factories only at far greater cost.
There is, for example, Kazuko Sasaki, 39, spreading boxes of bright plastic and metal parts onto her dining room table every morning. For four hours a day, she assembles the pencils designed and marketed by the Pilot Precision Co.
At least 750,000 women in Japan work at home at jobs beyond housework, and the official figure does not include those earning less than $10,000 a year, the trigger for filing tax returns.
No matter the industry, piecework is the oldest method of production. Toothpicks used to be the preserve of Samurai honing their swordsmanship. The bulk of the traditional piecework performed by women -- the making of toys and clothes -- moved first to factories and now, abroad.
The work performed by women now is usually obscured by the Byzantine structure of Japanese companies. The major car manufacturers, for instance, say that they don't buy parts, they buy components. The components have, of course, many smaller parts. And at the bottom of this industrial pyramid, said Mari Osawa, a Tokyo University professor, are women -- assembling the inside of a brake component or soldering a circuit board.
Ms. Sasaki's employer, Pilot Precision, offers a window into the system.
In the 1970s, the production and assembly work was done by 300 full-time employees in a factory in nearby Hiratsuka. But salary increases and a soaring yen made those factory workers among the most expensive in the world; including benefits, the cost of a midlevel factory workers exceeds $100,000 a year.
With little growth in demand for pencils, and with potential competition emerging from countries with far lower labor costs, Pilot needed to find a less expensive production method.
In the United States, the answer might be simple: Close the plant, and move operations abroad.
"That kind of thought doesn't exist in Japan," said Teruhiko Eto, director of Pilot's Mechanical Pencil Products Division. "People working here for a long time have a life in this area. The company has a responsibility to them."
Instead of moving the plant out of the country, Pilot gradually moved work out of the plant. From the peak of 300 employees, factory employment has dropped to about 85.
In their place, Pilot uses 300 to 500 women working at home. Almost all are aged 30 to 50, have children and have a husband. And they live in relatively small communities and recruit their friends, creating an informal cooperative network. The result is a factory under many roofs rather than one.
The bulk of Pilot's line has been designed to allow unskilled workers to do much of the assembly work at home, and the pencils manufactured in that way account for more than 80 percent of the company's production, 1.2 million pencils a month.
Automation is the alternative, and it would have one obvious advantage: "It's easy to improve the quality of a machine; it is difficult to do that with people," Mr. Eto said.
But the cost for automating the assembly of a single model exceeds $1 million -- too much for a production run that may last less than a year.
The piecework system works because the women are honest, flexible, fastidious and cheap. Quality is consistently high; theft of components and products is non-existent. And the hourly wages are among the lowest in the country.
Part-time fast-food clerks earn $10 an hour in Tokyo, about $7 in smaller towns. That's the bottom of the normal pay scale, but women working at home make less.
The pay is determined entirely by how much is produced, and the women employed by Pilot receive $300 to $500 a month -- a few cents for each pencil. If productivity is taken into account, the pieceworkers cost the company about one-fifth as much as a full-time employee in its factory.
A bad deal?
"I think the workers themselves think they are not badly treated," said Ms. Osawa, the Tokyo University professor. "But from an objective perspective, wages and piece rates are low."
Some of the women talk of their desire to have work that does not interfere with family life and gives them flexibility -- characteristics absent from full-time jobs in Japan. "I can manage this job the way I want," said Setsuko Harada, adding that she was able to work for Pilot while taking care of an ill child. "I wouldn't know how to spend my time otherwise."
As for Kazuko Sasaki, again spreading out parts in her dining room, she had envisioned a future that offered more prestige, money and intellectual challenge. She had hoped to be a geologist. That was before marriage, before children and before Pilot.
So that idea is long gone. "There is," she says with a small sigh, "little work a woman can do."