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The State and Labor in Modern Japan

University of California Press

Japan entered the 1980s with anew confidence in its institutions and culture. In the present age of MITI and microchips, the Japanese have clearly laid to rest their former reputation as mere imitators of the West. Indeed, Americans now speak of the singular success of Japanese institutions in coping with the problems of modern industrial society, and many point to specific aspects as models for our own country.1

This has been particularly true in the case of Japan's famed labor-management relations. The worker's "lifetime" commitment to his company and the preponderance of cooperative enterprise unions are the envy of many a Western manager. Japanese businessmen, and a number of Western observers, term this system "Japanese-style management," and several assume that present-day industrial harmony naturally flowed from the country's traditional social relations.2 In their view, industrial relations in Europe and the United States evolved from a different tradition of horizontal competition between distinct classes represented by trade unionists, on one side, and employers, on the other. In Japan, the argument continues, employers evaded crippling labor unrest by relying on age-old vertical bonds between the paternalistic master and his loyal subordinate—whether they be the feudal lord and his retainer, or the modern manager and his employee.3

This study suggests that confidence in Japan's distinctive industrial relations did not originate under the mythical Emperor Jimmu, or even the prewar Emperors Meiji (1868-1912) and Taisho (1912-26). When

the Japanese first faced the problems of modern factory labor during the 1880s, they were far from united on a "Japanese" solution. Their lack of consensus became all the more apparent by the 1920s and 1930s. The nation had just emerged from World War I, and the wartime industrial boom had given rise to a shocking new phenomenon: the massive outbreak of strikes and the widespread formation of assertive labor unions. In search of a higher position in a deeply hierarchical society, the young labor movement confronted the ruling classes with demands for universal suffrage, the legal recognition of labor unions, and the right to strike. As the industrial nations of Europe had earlier discovered, labor unrest constituted a genuine "social question" which governmental officials and party politicians could no longer simply proscribe or leave to the "paternalism" of employers. The question of how the state should deal with the rising unions divided Japan's governing elites and became bound up with a fundamental debate over the desired organization of society.

This is the story of the Japanese leadership's consideration of a series of often conflicting social policies vis-à-vis industrial labor. Throughout the period preceding World War II, there were those in business and government who regarded any organization of workers into economic interest groups as deleterious to prosperity and antithetical to the nation's traditions of social harmony. One of the two major political parties, the Seiyukai, strenuously opposed the legal recognition of labor unions. Senior officials within the conservative Justice Ministry similarly directed campaigns against "dangerous thoughts," striking workers, and alleged Communist organizers. More remarkable, however, were those interwar civil servants and party leaders who welcomed the development of workers' organizations as essential to sound labor-management relations and social peace. During the 1920s, the Ministry of Home Affairs and the rival party, the Kenseikai (later the Minseito), came forward with a set of liberal labor policies premised on the right of workers to advance their interests through labor unions. Kenseikai and Minseito governments enfranchised adult workmen and repealed antistrike regulations. They also repeatedly sponsored (but could not enact) labor union legislation that would have legally protected the right to organize unions.

Nevertheless, in the wake of the Great Depression and Japan's seizure of Manchuria in 1931-32, labor policy took a decidedly authoritarian turn. Between 1938 and 1940, the government maneuvered the nation's labor unions into dissolution, and it reorganized workers into

the Greater Japan Industrial Patriotic Association. Although few scholars discuss the continuities between this drive and the liberal labor programs of the 1920s, the Industrial Patriotic movement was spearheaded not by Japanese conservatives and industrialists but, ironically, by many of the former proponents of trade unionism within the bureaucracy. Nor did the continuities end there. Strangely enough, several of the same elite bureaucrats again switched gears after World War II to advance democratic labor policies under the American Occupation (1945-52).

This is also the story of interaction between the labor union movement and the state. Much like the first generation of social historians in the West, Japanese scholars have generally written labor history from below (or from the middle, considering how many studies concern sectarian divisions among labor leaders). Defiant strikes and radical working-class consciousness figure prominently in these accounts. When "the state" appears, it invariably takes the form of a faceless, outside oppressor.4 However, as historians of Europe and America have recently argued, such theories of "social control" exaggerate the unity and self-confidence of the ruling elites while virtually ignoring initiative on the part of "the controlled"—that is, the workers.5 In Japan, as well, the relationship between organized labor and political authority was much more of a two-way process. In their struggle against employers, labor activists often worked closely with sympathetic allies within the bureaucracy and established parties. The partnership was rarely an equal one, to be sure. Yet the Japanese labor movement shaped state initiatives, just as bureaucrats and politicians helped shape the economically oriented union movement we see in Japan today.

By focusing on the relationship among organized labor, bureaucratic cliques, and party governments, this study offers a new perspective from which to judge the seemingly abrupt shifts in Japanese politics during the first four decades of the twentieth century. Historians have long puzzled over the meaning of the era of "Taisho democracy" or the "liberal twenties," an extended decade sandwiched between the pre-1918 oligarchic regime and the authoritarian 1930s. Why did a broad-based movement for the democratization of Japan's political and social institutions develop after World War I? Moreover, why did it so totally collapse after 1931, and how should one describe the repressive system that replaced it? Some historians have addressed these questions by examining the brief ascendancy of the political parties and party cabinets during the 1920s. They have generally concluded that politicians

were unable or unwilling to build a mass following and a firm constitutional base against military and bureaucratic rivals.6 Others analyze the thought of such progressive intellectuals as Yoshino Sakuzo to reveal a disturbingly elitist and idealistic understanding of democracy, which prevented even the champions of Taisho democracy from fully supporting the...