In February 1942, Japanese paratroopers launched a surprise attack on Palembang in the Dutch East Indies. Within hours they captured two oil refineries that were vital for Japan’s wartime oil supply. Newsreels, patriotic songs, and propaganda films celebrated the victorious airborne troops as Japan’s “heavenly soldiers.”

This presentation explores new aspects of wartime Japan’s industrial mobilization by analyzing how the country’s struggling silk industry effectively exploited the emerging myth of Japan’s paratroopers. With the outbreak of the Pacific War in 1941, Japan’s silk manufacturers suffered from the government’s ban on luxury goods and the collapse of the US export market. After the spectacular Palembang operation, however, the Dainippon Silk Foundation successfully campaigned for the large-scale production of parachutes made from “military-grade silk.” Japan’s silk output increased significantly, and silk weaving companies became designated munitions factories.

These companies mobilized female students to overcome their acute labor shortage. A new, highly gendered propaganda image emerged: young seamstresses devotedly sewing parachutes stich by stich for Japan’s airborne troops fighting at the faraway battlefront. The new myth of the death-defying paratroopers matched the spirit of female workers’ self-sacrifice.

Such a rich symbolism blended with Japan’s wartime slogan of “factories as battlefields.” By August 1944, the government’s rhetoric and coercion intensified. Women were now conscripted for work in the munitions factories and declared as sangyōsenshi or “industrial warriors.” Like the paratroopers, they belonged to a teishin tai, an attack corps of volunteers for high-risk assignments.