The Enigma of Japanese Power (10 page)

The first Japanese labour unions were organised around the turn of the century by intellectuals acquainted with European socialist thought. They were immediately legislated virtually out of existence.
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But this did not forestall the bitter labour disputes that occurred after the Russo-Japanese War (1904–5), or the occurrence of considerable labour unrest in the 1920s.

The picture of a government relentlessly conspiring with big business to exploit the workers would not be altogether accurate. Indeed, the ‘labour bureaucrats’ (operating out of the Naimusho) actually initiated legislation to improve working conditions, for they were interested in minimising unrest engendered by exploitation, as well as in keeping the workforce healthy.
³²
They even exerted themselves (unsuccessfully) on behalf of a trade union law. It appears that their somewhat protective attitude towards the workers was also intended to restrain the power of the
zaibatsu
.

Even so, the only union federation permitted to exist was Sodomei, which timorously steered away from any confrontation. At its pre-war peak, membership in the unions accounted for less than 8 per cent of the workforce.
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Yet even this seemed bad enough to Japan’s administrators, especially when the labour movement became more strongly inspired by Marxism. From the early 1930s onwards the fight against the unions, as hotbeds of ‘dangerous thoughts’ that would undermine the purposes of the nation, was relentless. By then the effort to suppress worker interests undoubtedly had the blessing of the government.

The ultimate solution for ensuring administrative control over Japan’s labour movement was discovered as a result of heightened wartime production pressures. In the 1920s some firms had begun to pretend that they were large substitute families for their workers. Understanding the advantages of this for social control, the Naimusho promoted on a national scale the company-as-family idea, which dovetailed nicely with ideas of Japan as a family state. Between 1938 and 1940 ‘councils’ of workers and management were set up to spread enthusiasm for the war effort. They also ameliorated unhealthy conditions to some extent, and established minimum benefits for the workers.

By the end of 1938 local police and companies had organised more than nineteen thousand of such councils – ‘patriotic industrial associations’ or Sangyo Hokokukai – with three million members.
³⁴
By the end of 1940, some two-thirds of the industrial labour force belonged to 60,495 units under centralised leadership.
³⁵
All enterprises were ordered to co-operate; the reluctant among them faced unbending Naimusho bureaucrats who could call upon the police (supervised by the same ministry) to enforce their scheme. The above-ground unions had melted into this organisation by about 1941, much as the political parties and youth organisations were to dissolve into the Imperial Rule Assistance Association.
³⁶

In retrospect, the success of the Sangyo Hokokukai movement deserves to be considered one of the milestones of Japanese economic history. The generally accepted culturalist explanation of worker attitudes holds that enterprise unions are a result of a ‘natural’ Japanese inclination to identify with the interests of one’s superior. This interpretation overlooks the fact that Japan’s post-war labour unions were formed (and have continued up to the present) as enterprise rather than trade unions largely because the wartime associations ‘simply shed their old skins and continued their existence after the war ended’.
³⁷
Under the influence of the Sangyo Hokokukai the understanding, already gradually emerging, that workers should not move to other enterprises had suddenly been turned into a command. And, although many circumstances were different in the postwar period, this understanding, rooted by now in years of enforced habits, remained: employees should be loyal to their firm, do their utmost to increase production and not change jobs in mid-career.

The Sangyo Hokokukai reorganisation of labour was to a large extent inspired by the example of Nazi Germany and Mussolini’s Italy. In fact, the movement’s most direct inspiration was a proposal adopted by the Naimusho that was ‘a thinly veiled version of the Nazi labor program’.
³⁸
These pre-war European fascist ideas still survive in Japanese labour-management relations today, yet immediately after the war Japan saw the fastest spread in history of unionism of a predominantly Marxist hue. Thanks to the encouragement of General MacArthur’s occupation staff, three million workers were unionised within one year, and ten years later there were six million members. Nor were all of these unions patriotic association chapters in a new guise. The occupation had freed communists and left-wing socialists from jail, so that in the immediate post-war years Japan had no dearth of serious labour organisers. Within a year of Japan’s surrender the moderate pre-war Sodomei was resurrected. Around the same time communists, who had gained the upper hand in staging radical disputes, organised Sanbetsu Kaigi, which drew twice as many members (1–6 million).

From the end of October to the beginning of December 1945 workers on the
Yomiuri
newspaper took over their company in an attempt to manage it themselves. Other bitter labour disputes followed. They included a 195-day strike at the Toho film company in 1948, a 56-day strike by the Toshiba unions, power industry strikes in 1946 and 1952, a postal workers’ strike in 1947, a 63-day strike by coal-miners and steel workers’ strikes in 1954. The number of worker hours lost by strikes in those days was comparable to that in the USA and Europe. Most famous of all was the move to hold a general strike in February 1947. Fearing that such a strike might get out of control and exacerbate the dismal economic state of the country. General MacArthur prohibited it, whereupon the labour movement’s euphoria evaporated.

Shortly afterwards new laws forbade government employees to strike at any time.
³⁹
And a subsequent shift in attitudes on a variety of politically significant matters showed that United States priorities had changed, giving the signal to the pre-war labour bureaucrats (who had remained in office) that they could begin to rein in the union movement. In this, the ‘Red Purge’ of 1949 whereby communists and left-wing socialists were removed from official positions, together with the return of pre-war and wartime officials following their ‘depurging’ in 1950, helped supply the necessary climate and bureaucratic personnel.

From a concentrated campaign to ‘democratise’ Japan by purging it of its pre-war and wartime leadership, US aims had shifted, with the revolution in China and the Korean War, to building a bulwark in the Pacific against Asian communism. Thus the early post-war communist-guided labour movement, which had been encouraged by the US occupation, was deliberately crushed in the 1950s with US consent.

Some companies brought in gangsters to break up strikes. Nikkeiren, the Japanese federation of employers’ organisations, was formed by business bureaucrats formerly in the forefront of wartime industrial organisations, for the specific purpose of combating the labour movement. A preferred tactic of companies with troublesome unions was to establish a moderate rival union. Within a short time this alternative union would generally attract many more members than the activist union, since employees soon realised that not to co-operate would block their promotion prospects.

In large corporations one may still find remnants of the more radical unions. Generally, however, management is happy enough to let them survive, since they provide a wonderful means for the more frustrated employees to let off steam. Whenever these radical unions go into action-usually concerning the size of the semi-annual bonus – they notify the management between which hours of what day and on which floor of the office building they will demonstrate. With their megaphones and chorused slogans, their red head-bands and their rhythmically raised clenched fists, these demonstrators look formidable enough; but I have never failed to sense order beneath the surface fury.

Radical communist unions have dug themselves in in some foreign companies. Foreign banks and airlines in particular are occasionally racked by their intransigent tactics, which have helped give some foreign businessmen operating in Japan an exaggerated impression of the strength of the labour movement. In one well-known instance, a radical union kept a noisy and embarrassing case going for years concerning the dismissal of a temporary employee from the office of the delegation of the European Community. The System is served by this kind of action in at least two ways: the communist activists have territory they can call their own, without needing to bother Japanese big business; and the foreign companies and delegations are reminded of the fact that operating in Japan requires a readiness to accommodate.

An essential aspect of the post-war union system is that a large segment of low-cost labour is supplied by a pool of non-unionised ‘temporary’ workers, who are often in fact permanent but at a lower level of the economic hierarchy. Enterprise unions shut out workers formally classified as temporary, even though they may have worked for the firm for many years, for the very reason that they are not in the lifetime-employment category. According to one estimate, only about one-fifth of all Japanese workers enjoy the lifetime employment and other benefits that supposedly characterise Japanese labour relations.
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In the smaller companies whose existence as low-cost sources of subcontracted work is a decisive factor in the competitiveness of many large firms, unions are very rare, and no attempt is made by the national federations to establish them. Lower-class workers are paid considerably less than union members, risk losing their jobs in periods of economic downturn and would obviously benefit most from worker protection. But unions are not welcome on this level, and the administrators have sufficient control to allow no other significant movement to flourish alongside the tame federations. The System would be seriously undermined if workers in the subcontracting sector were ever effectively organised.

Employers learned in the 1920s and 1930s that it was not difficult to make workers forget unionisation by threatening dismissal. Loyal employees were rewarded with permanent employment and wages based on seniority, such programmes often being carried out with encouragement from the government.
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In a devastated post-war Japan, where the inevitable craving for security again became the main motivation of employees, this practice of skilful union-busting led them to settle for the tame corporate unions. At the same time, many of these unions were worried lest affiliating themselves to the central trade-union federations might embroil them in ideological warfare. Thus the administrators, fearful as they were of industry-wide unionism, enjoyed a constant advantage.

The unionisation rate has steadily declined, from 55.8 per cent in 1949 to 28.2 per cent in 1986. Except for seamen, teachers and groups of public workers whose nation-wide unions could not so easily be tamed, there are today only management-supported company unions, which more often than not actively participate in campaigns to maximise production, at the cost of worker comfort. The leaders of these company unions usually have a close working relationship with members of the management, and they themselves will often join management at a later stage, similarly commanding obedience from their underlings in the union. Thus there is no conflict between management and ‘organised’ workers. The enterprise unions do little more than guard the so-called lifetime-employment ‘rights’ of their members, and hold largely ritualistic negotiations concerning wage increases and the size of the semi-annual ‘bonus’, for which there are national standards.

The radical communist union federation, Sambetsu Kaigi, was dissolved in 1950, and initiative in the labour movement passed to Sohyo, which until 1987 remained the largest and most significant of Japan’s central labour organisations. Sohyo relied largely on public-sector employees. When first formed it was moderate and earned the blessing of the US occupation by indicating that it would stay on the non-communist side of the cold war. But before long it became identified with the activist ‘left’, and actually helped set the tone of its rhetoric, which was later to include protest against the mutual security treaty between the USA and Japan, and against the US bases.

In 1954 a number of formerly socialist unions that had belonged to the earlier moderate Sodomei broke away from Sohyo and formed Domei. This organisation, whose membership came mainly from the private sector, supported the Democratic Socialist Party (DSP, a breakaway from the JSP), which has consistently supported the LDP in parliamentary voting.

Once radical union activities had been crushed, Sohyo settled down to inspire and guide a series of national actions that posed no threat to anybody. In 1956 it invented the
shunto
, ‘spring offensive’. Every spring until the mid-1970s personnel of the (now privatised) Japan National Railways played the leading role in nation-wide go-slow activities or, at a later stage, full strikes. The change of tactic to full strikes was made in accordance with the wishes of the authorities after irate passengers, who had been trapped for hours in packed commuter trains, went on the rampage at several stations. The
shunto
came to constitute an annual ritual. Along with the maps showing the advance through the islands of the ‘cherry-blossom front’, the newspapers would print detailed tables showing which railway lines would be affected during the one or two weeks of the campaign, thus warning loyal company employees as to when bedding should be brought to their offices. The word
shunto
was even added to the list of terms officially considered suitable as ‘season indicators’ in Japanese poems (which are regularly composed by hundreds of thousands of amateurs).

Sohyo’s rite of spring was not entirely unwelcome to management. Restless employees, even if they did not participate, could derive some vicarious satisfaction from such massive action. And, despite the preponderance of ritual, these annual actions were at least more substantial than the lunch-hour strikes organised by company unions, in that they helped establish the yearly standard of wage increases for the nation as a whole.

When in 1981 the railway unions held their last strikes worthy of the name, they had already lost leadership of the
shunto
to unions in the metal-processing sector. From the late 1970s onward, standards for wage increases were decided through negotiations between the Japan Council of the International Metalworkers’ Federation and the eight largest companies in the most important metal-using industries: steel, shipbuilding, cars and electrical machinery. Workers in these industries, however, have shown little muscle, so that the
shunto
in the 1980s tends to come and go almost unnoticed. The labour movement, deprived of its teeth and claws in the 1950s, would seem finally to have lost its voice as well.

At first sight the situation for Japanese labour does not look bad at all. May Day parades are big annual events, and newspaper editorials talking of ‘demands’ or the ‘strategy’ of labour create the impression of a lively movement. Such things hide the fact that Japanese labour does not participate in national decision-making. Domestication of the unions has forestalled the destruction of particular industries at the hands of powerful union bosses, but it has also deprived members of the chance to participate in any kind of discussion on the future course of the economy.

This was made abundantly clear once again in the spring of 1986. Amidst strong calls from industry and the bureaucracy for more consumer spending as a way of increasing domestic demand, and despite Japan’s promises to its trading partners that it would undertake a gradual shift from exports to domestic spending as the main spur of its economic growth, Japanese firms were investing abroad their large profits of the previous years. Wage increases, moreover, were even less than the already low increases of the previous several years. There was no public comment on this from any official union representative.