Japanese Labor After World War II

Japan 1945-1960

Synopsis

Post-World War II Japan faced a monumental struggle between labor and management. American postwar occupation goals included democratization to be achieved, in part, by the fostering of unionism. Management control of production and of the workplace in general eroded until the Mitsui Miike coal mine strike of 1959-1960. Management threats to discontinue safety precautions that been in place at the mine prompted the massive action, which lasted for more than nine months and involved 10,000 picketers a day and solidarity demonstrations by more than 300,000 workers across Japan. Ultimately, management reasserted its formerly eroded levels of control in a mediated settlement that addressed other worker concerns but not the safety issues. Historians are split on whether the resolution constituted a defeat or a victory for labor when viewed through the lens of Japan's future economic successes in the world marketplace.

Timeline

• 1932: A "Bonus Army" of unemployed veterans marches on Washington, D.C. Many leave after Congress refuses their demands for payment of bonuses for wartime service, but others are forcibly removed by General Douglas MacArthur's troops. Also participating are two other figures destined to gain notoriety in the next world war: majors Dwight D. Eisenhower and George S. Patton.
• 1937: In the middle of an around-the-world flight, Amelia Earhart and her plane disappear somewhere in the Pacific.
• 1942: The women's military services in the United States are established.
• 1947: Great Britain's Labour government nationalizes coalmines.
• 1948: Israel becomes a nation.
• 1949: North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) is established.
• 1950: North Korean troops pour into South Korea, starting the Korean War. Initially, the communists make impressive gains, but in September the U.S. Marines land at Inchon and liberate Seoul. China responds by sending in its troops.
• 1951: Julius and Ethel Rosenberg are convicted and sentenced to death for passing U.S. atomic secrets to the Soviets.
• 1954: The French military outpost at Dien Bien Phu falls to the communist Vietminh. France withdraws after decades of trying to suppress revolt; meanwhile, the United States pledges its support for the noncommunist government in the South.
• 1956: Elvis Presley appears on Ed Sullivan's Toast of the Town, where he performs "Hound Dog" and "Love Me Tender" before a mostly female audience. Nationwide, 54 million people watch the performance, setting a new record.
• 1961: President Eisenhower steps down, warning of a "military-industrial complex" in his farewell speech, and 43-year-old John F. Kennedy becomes the youngest elected president in U.S. history. Three months later, he launches an unsuccessful invasion of Cuba at the Bay of Pigs.

Event and Its Context

The Chaotic Aftermath of War

In the aftermath of World War II, Japan as a nation lay low militarily, politically, and economically. Destruction, food shortages, and poverty were rife. On the other hand, in the same period the Japanese working class displayed moments of great vibrancy and power. This strength had a dual cause: the disaffection caused by the ravages of war, which stoked the rebellion that was to erupt once the war was over, and the early occupation policy of encouraging union growth in Japan as a means to stimulate the development of Japanese democracy.

Japan's contemporary political economy can best be understood by grasping the crucial historical forms that industrial relations in Japan assumed in the 15 years from 1945 to 1960. This requires an accurate outline of events during the immediate postwar period to discern its relationship with the economic process, which effectively led to the defeat of Japanese industrial unionism in 1960. The strike at the Mitsui Miike coal mines on Kyushu in the southwestern island of Japan was a key event in this process.

The war and the American occupation were two crucial factors that stimulated the growth of Japanese trade unionism in the post-World War II period. Another factor was the tradition of and familiarity with both the concept and the practice of trade unionism in Japan, which dates to at least the 1890s.

A disastrous war for Japan and its leaders produced a crisis of legitimacy for the imperial system. Defeat, occupation, and economic and institutional chaos all impressed upon ordinary Japanese people the eminent contestability and incompetence of the established forces in Japan. Initially pushed and prompted by the new occupying force to form unions and assert their own claims, workers became far more assertive in this period. The release of thousands of political prisoners only added to the sense of freedom and liberation that must have been a heady brew, particularly given the collapse of the oppressive authoritarian regime under the emperor. Japanese leadership was under the spotlight, and a democratic backlash for all the repression and authoritarian control that had been meted out during the bleak war years was long overdue.

Democratization from Above and Below

Democratization, called for and implemented from above by the Americans, was not only imposed from on high by the occupying forces. The Japanese masses eagerly adopted it as a slogan and a practice. Ironically kick-started by revolts of Chinese forced laborers at the Mitsubishi Bibai coal mines and then later by revolts of Korean forced laborers at the Yubari coal mines on Hokkaido, this spirit of working-class self-empowerment soon led to demands such as those developed by the Democracy Study Group at the Yomiuri Shimbun. In some cases, it resulted in seizure of production control by the workers, as happened famously in the case of the Yomiuri itself.

A Revolutionary Situation

Some experts contend that in this period (particularly in 1946) a revolutionary situation existed in Japan. The Supreme Command for Allied Powers (SCAP) eliminated the possibility of revolution. Thenceforth Japanese working-class self-confidence and autonomy were to be steadily restricted and eroded. One scholar estimated that there were close to 50 production takeovers involving at least 30,000 workers per month in the spring of 1946. These figures fell to roughly 25 such takeovers per month with between 5,000 and 6,000 participants in early 1947. SCAP condemned production control, and the conservative Japanese government quickly suppressed any further takeovers and outlawed the general strike planned by Zento (the All-Japan Union Council for Joint Action in Labor Disputes) for 1 February 1947.

Production control may have declined, but labor offensives continued, most notably in the "October Struggle" of the Congress of Industrial Unions of Japan in 1946. This action involved close to 100 strikes and 180,000 workers throughout the country. Such offensives achieved many gains, including a degree of control in the organization and pace of the production process and a high level of wage (and other forms of) equality between white-and blue-collar workers, which had not existed before. In some cases, unions determined wage decisions as well as promotions, the pace of work, and the parceling out of job assignments. There were even shop committees that decided overtime assignments and employee transfers. Labor asserted a high degree of control, which it had earned because of the substantial clout it wielded in council deliberations and collective bargaining. It was a powerful force and often held the upper hand in the workplace.

The Conservative Counteroffensive

Labor's power began to wane in early 1947, given the assistance of the Americans. The conservative prime minister Yoshida Shigeru expressed his attitude toward striking unionists in his New Year's speech in which he denounced strikers as "lawless scum." This class hatred manifested by the conservative leader indicated the seriousness with which the threat of worker hegemony was viewed at this time. With the authority and power of SCAP behind it, management began to engineer its comeback and to regain the "right to manage" that had been lost over the preceding year and a half.

Nikkeiren, the Japan Federation of Employers' Organizations, which was formed in April 1948, was at the center of this push. One commentator on the period argued that Nikkeiren was the crucial ingredient that gave the period from 1948 to 1960 its singular character, namely the struggle and ultimate success of Japanese management to reassert its hegemony in the workplace. Nikkeiren was, for example, heavily involved in breaking the Toho Film strike in 1948. The objective was to break the union and its control, as the people drafted to help with film production appear to have known very little about filmmaking. The intervention of 1,800 armed police on 19 August 1948, supported in turn by hundreds of American troops, a number of whom were in armored cars, heralded the beginning of the end for the dispute, despite the fact it lasted an additional two months. Unsurprisingly, the workers were defeated. Many other disputes went a similar way, with the underlying motif being the reassertion of control by management in the work-place.

The Mitsui Miike Coal Mine Dispute and the End of Union-led Industrial Relations

The coal strike at the Mitsui Miike mine in Kyushu was clearly the most important dispute in the postwar era up to that time. It was arguably even more significant than the failure of the "Suto-ken Suto" (the Public Sector Worker Strike for the Right to Strike) of 1974. As one scholar explained, the power of the action grew from a mix of shop-floor control, study groups, and community organizations involving miners' wives and local residents. The labor offensives at Miike from 1953 to 1960 reversed the arbitrariness and favoritism habitually practiced by mine supervisors and gave concrete substance to the union principle of "democratization."

The defeat of the 1959-1960 strike at Miike marked the most fundamental turning point in postwar Japanese industrial relations and—equally controversially—in the nation's political economy. The strike's meaning is heavily contested in the academic literature. Some scholars regard it as the inevitable demise of an old and decrepit form of warring politics and industrial relations, inaugurating a brilliant and harmonious new social contract between moderate unions and management that helped catapult Japan to the advanced guard in the comity of industrial nations. Others argue that the event was a severe defeat for independent working-class unionism and thereby for democracy, autonomy, and safety in the workplace. This is sometimes construed as an historic defeat of the working class in Japan, which opened the gate for the increasing hegemony of management-controlled, so-called yellow unions, which have dominated the landscape of Japanese industrial relations to the present.

The dispute at Miike was truly on an epic scale, lasting for 282 days in total. By July 1960, some 10,000 people, a mixture of workers, wives, and sympathizers, picketed the mine every day. Massive demonstrations also took place: nearly 300,000 total unionists from all over Japan showed up at Miike at the height of the dispute between March and July 1960 to show solidarity with the miners. This conflict coincided with the massive popular movement to resist the renewal of the Security Treaty with the United States. The strike itself was a reaction to the dismissal of union officials at Miike by a management that was scrapping to reestablish its right to manage. A precursor to today's "radical restructuring" or "reform" in Japan and Britain, it was management's attempt to improve productivity by defeating the power of the union in the workplace. The Miike union was considered the most powerful union in Japan, so management failure could not be countenanced, as there were bound to be national repercussions for management control arising from such a scenario.

Eventually, after much struggle, one murder (of Kubo Kiyoshi by management-hired thugs), and mediation, the dispute came to a settlement. The original aim of the striking workers was to protect the safety procedures that had been in place prior to the struggle. Although relief and retraining measures for workers were included in the package that ended the strike, it actually constituted a big defeat, as the settlement package did not cede the safety measures that had originally triggered the action. The death and injury statistics from Miike in the following years illustrate the loss. In 1959, under the first union-controlled safety system, one worker died in an accident and more than 3,600 sustained injuries. Two years later, during the first year of rationalization under the second union that cooperated with management, 16 people died and more than 4,200 sustained injuries. The following year in 1962, 15 workers died and 3,855 were injured. In 1963, however, 458 workers were killed in the worst mine disaster of Japan's postwar history.

Conclusion

The impact of this defeat was inestimable. It heralded a revolution in labor-management relations away from the union-led system of the immediate postwar era and toward the management-dominated "new common sense" of the later postwar years. The tension between narrow economic rationality (that is, the overriding goal of productivity) and the broader concerns of safety and autonomy in the workplace, choice, quality of life, and democracy within and beyond the workplace defined much of the debate about Japanese politics, economy, and society that took place subsequently at all levels of society.

If the productivity-and enterprise-oriented culture of early twenty-first century Japan had not been so stark and narrow, it might have had better resources upon which to draw in the face of the recession, deflation, and an imbalanced economic system facing the country. Some measure of union independence might have presented resources for the development of a much richer Japanese model of economy and politics. On the other hand, Japan's ambition and the narrow focus of its enterprise orientation helped lift the country to the top of the world's economic rankings. Japan still grapples with the resolution of this conflict.

Key Players

Kubo, Kiyoshi (1928-1960): The worker Kiyoshi Kubo was murdered by right wing thugs during the Miike dispute.

Nakayama, Ichiro (1898-1980): Nakayama studied at Tokyo University of Commerce (formerly Hitotsubashi University) under Fukuda Tokuzo, one of the members of the Social Policy Study Association. He also studied in Germany under Joseph Schumpeter at the University of Bonn. Nakayama was one of the mediators in the Miike dispute, as he was based in the Central Labor Relations Commission of the time.

Ota, Kaoru (1912-1998): Born 1 January 1912 in Okayama Prefecture, Ota was chairman of the left-wing union Sohyo (the General Council of Trade Unions of Japan) from 1958 up to 1966, in which capacity he was involved in the intricate negotiations for mediation during the Miike dispute.

Yoshida, Shigeru (1878-1967): Yoshida was one of the most important prime ministers of postwar Japan and arguably the most influential.

See also: Japanese Labor Unions Dissolved.

Bibliography

Books

Dower, John. Empire and Aftermath: Yoshida Shigeru and the Japanese Experience, 1878-1954. Harvard East Asian Monographs. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988. (Original work published 1979.)

Gordon, Andrew. The Evolution of Labor Relations in Japan: Heavy Industry, 1953-1955. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1985.

——, ed. Postwar Japan as History. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993.

——. The Wages of Affluence: Labor and Management in Postwar Japan. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998.

Kawanishi, Hirosuke, ed. The Human Face of Industrial Conflict in Postwar Japan. London and New York: Kegan Paul International, 1999.

Kinzley, W. Dean. Industrial Harmony in Modern Japan: the Invention of a Tradition. London: Routledge, 1991.

Moore, Joe. Japanese Workers and the Struggle for Power,1945-1947. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1983.

—Nik Howard