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Stephen Vlastos is Professor of History at the University of Iowa, and author of Peasant Protests and Uprisings in Tokugawa Japan (California, 1986).

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Mirror of Modernity

University of California Press

The idea that labor-management relations in Japan were based on unique social traditions appeared almost simultaneously with the advent of modern Industry. Oddly enough, although members of Japan's industrial elite declared that traditions of mutual respect between superior and subordinate were ancient "beautiful customs" that made factory life in Japan unique, when they pinned general descriptive labels on these practices they turned to clumsy neologisms: kazoku-shugi , or "family-ism," and onjo-shugi , often translated "paternalism" but literally "warm-heartedness-ism."1 That capitalists had to use invented words to describe reputedly ancient customs is a good sign that we are in the presence of hastily invented ideas about a "traditional" social practice.

The invention of industrial paternalism in Japan was a dynamic process that has continued for a full century, and ideas about unique traditions of management have been articulated in uneven fashion. Japan's rulers first claimed that the nation's factories were exceptional sites of warm-hearted social relations in the 1890s. Over the following century, moments in which capitalists and bureaucrats vigorously affirmed the value and vibrance of distinctly Japanese traditions of managing work have alternated with times in which they presented industrial paternalism as part of a dying past and denied its efficacy or even its existence. Events such as mobilization for war, sudden defeat, unexpected economic "miracles," or the sudden bursting of economic "bubbles" marked sharp breaks in the dominant modes of discussing industrial relations; across these breaks, elements of the invented tradition of industrial relations were recast and reassembled. This essay seeks to describe and explain the protean character and durability of the discourse on Japanese-style management.

On the origins of the terms onjo-shugi and kazoku-shugi , see Hazama Hiroshi, Nihon no romu kanri shi kenkyu (Tokyo: Ochanomizu Shobo, 1978), 45-46, nn. 1 and 2.

An alternative approach to this topic would be to analyze the invented tradition of labor management as a social practice. With varying degrees Of detachment or irony, many observers have noted the presence of "three sacred jewels" in the institutional arrangement of Japanese workplaces: long-term (or "lifetime") employment, seniority-based wages, and factory- or enterprise-based unions. How, one might ask, did these practices come into existence? I have written on the social history of these practices at length, arguing that systems of management in Japan most resembled those in the more advanced factories of Europe or North America during the early days of Japan's industrial revolution.2 Over a contentious century in which workers resisted managerial innovations or appropriated and inverted them, one can identify several discrete though related systems of labor-management relations, marked by varying degrees of job and wage security and shifting forms of factory-based unionism. Some of these practices have been, and remain, quite distinctive when compared to systems elsewhere.

But my concern in this essay is with the ideological dimension of this topic, primarily because the tradition of Japanese management was invented first as a discursive structure. In particular, I will consider the way in which concepts of so-called traditional, paternalistic, or Japanese-style management were discussed among owners, managers, and people outside the firm.3 The threats of a factory law in the early twentieth century and of a trade union law in the 1920s, the mobilization for the hot war of the 1930s and 1940s, and the trade wars of the 1980s and 1990s, have provoked voluminous public discussions, attacks, and defenses of Japanese industry that reveal to us how traditions were invented, denied, and then reconfigured. Looking at cases where Meiji-era capitalists argued in defense of their "beautiful traditions" of management against state intrusion, or where postwar professors of business administration earnestly explained Japan's unique traditions to foreigners, helps us to understand the politics of invented traditions and offers some insight into why modernity "fabricates its 'past' even to the extent of inventing a contrived 'tradition.' "4

Industrial Paternalism Invented: the Factory Law Debate

The pioneering sociologist of Japan Ronald Dore pointed out several decades ago that some of Japan's modernizing elites were proudly and improbably boasting of

Andrew Gordon, The Evolution of Labor Relations in Japan: Heavy Industry, 1853-1955 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Council on East Asian Studies, 1985).

Neither dialogue between workers and their bosses within the firm nor the social practice of labor management in the factory is central to this inquiry. Our focus is on 'Japanese-style management" as a discursive practice rather than a social one. Yet the relationship between these two realms of practice is important, and I will address it briefly in conclusion.

Hashimoto Mitsuru, "Kindai Nihon ni okeru dento no hatsumei shinpojiumu," Soshioroji 37, no. 1 (May 1992): 65.

the nation's unique, traditional management practices as early as the 1890s. He examined a series of discussions among bureaucrats, politicians, and business leaders in the mid-1890s that asked whether Japan needed a law to ameliorate factory conditions. The first of these took place at a conference of bureaucrats, politicians, and business leaders convened in 1896, and this initial round of debate on worker protection and paternalism continued for fifteen years, until passage of a factory law in 1911.5

In these early debates, businessmen dismissed the idea of factory legislation with contempt. Textile industrialists were among the most vociferous, for a factory law banning night work for female or child labor would have restricted their operations and cut off a critical source of workers. But industrialists in all sectors joined the chorus condemning a law as they articulated a powerful collective plea: Japan possessed time-honored "beautiful customs" (bifu ) of obedience and loyalty from below matched by sympathetic understanding from above that would suffice to solve problems such as resistance to factory discipline, low morale, or poor health. A law, by contrast, would legally sanction the interests of workers, thereby undermining the emotional basis of the old, integrated social order. As they made this claim, they invented the notion that warm-hearted paternal relations rooted in pre-Meiji society pervaded modern industry as well.

One of several eloquent spokesmen for this view was Shoda Heigoro, for many years director of the Mitsubishi Shipyard in Nagasaki, the nation's largest. In a magazine column published in 1910 he offers a succinct summary of the paternalistic ideology of Japan's first-generation managerial elite:

Since ancient times, Japan has possessed the beautiful custom of master-servant relations based firmly on a spirit of sacrifice and compassion, a custom not seen in the many other countries of the world. Even with the recent progress in transportation, the development of ideas about rights,...