Divisions of Labor: Globality, Ideology, and War in the Shaping of the Japanese Labor Movement (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Divisions of Labor: Globality, Ideology, and War in the Shaping of the Japanese Labor Movement Tom Gill Divisions of Labor: Globality, Ideology, and War in the Shaping of the Japanese Labor Movement. By Lonny E. Carlile. University of Hawai'i Press, 2005. 328 pages. Hardcover $60.00. What a fateful year was 1955 for the Japanese labor movement. Famously it saw the birth of the Liberal Democratic Party, a conservative political force that would dominate Japanese politics for most of the following half century, and the Japan Socialist Party, which would battle hopelessly against the LDP for thirty-eight years. But Lonny Carlile reminds us that 1955 was also the year of the sixth national conference of the Japan Communist Party, which set the JCP on a course away from revolutionary struggle and in the direction of moderate Eurocommunism. In the labor movement itself, 1955 saw the fall of Takano Minoru, the charismatic left-wing socialist who had led Sōhyō, the biggest Japanese association of labor unions, for the previous four years. He was defeated in the election for secretary-general by Iwai Akira, who, with his associate Ōta Kaoru, would be Japan's most influential labor leaders for the next fifteen years. Iwai and Ōta were the architects of the Shuntō, or spring labor offensive, which to this day remains an important focus of union activism in Japan. The first Shuntō, carried out by only five of the labor federations within Sōhyō, was also launched in 1955. Iwai and Ōta were by no means apolitical, and Sōhyō campaigned throughout the 1960s on the Japan-U.S. Security Treaty, the Vietnam War, the reversion of Okinawa, and other issues not directly related to workers' standards of living. Nevertheless, Carlile argues, Iwai and Ōta's shift of emphasis away from left-socialist political issues towards a heavier emphasis on wages can be described as "embracing economism on behalf of political transformation," and "this effectively redirected much of the organizational power of the labor movement away from the goal of toppling the sociopolitical order while leaving its ultimate revolutionary goals and rhetoric intact" (p. 232). I know from personal experience exactly what Carlile is talking about. When I was working at Kyodo News in the mid-1980s, the Shuntō in the media industry had ossified into a strange institution. All Kyodo employees were in the union except for the "desk-men" (editors) and nonpermanent staff such as us foreigners. Every spring, union officers would stride through the building, sporting splendid red bandanas and armbands, shouting through megaphones that the management had refused to yield to union demands and that a strike had been called for the same afternoon. They would also condemn the LDP government and refer to other political issues. The strikes generally lasted for fifty-five minutes, spent chatting in a coffee shop, since the company would dock workers an hour's pay if they struck for a whole hour. The outcome of the pay negotiations was known in advance, moreover, since a league table of settlements reached at other media companies was circulated, and tradition dictated that Kyodo would settle higher than some but lower than others. (Carlile points out how the coordination of wage claims within the same industry at Shuntō time helped to overcome the structural weakness of a union movement organized by enterprise rather than trade. This was very clear at Kyodo: settlements at the big national newspapers and broadcasters set the framework for the entire industry.) Thirty years on from the [End Page 577] fall of Takano, it might be said that only the rhetoric was left-I do not believe the well-educated members of the Kyodo union had any revolutionary goals, even theoretically. Many of the union leaders would eventually be promoted to management positions and would then sit on the other side of the table at Shuntō negotiations, something that apparently brought no particular discomfort. This book goes a long way to explaining the origins of the striking disjuncture between radical rhetoric and pragmatic accommodation with management so often seen in Japanese unions. For a nonhistorian like myself, Carlile makes useful reading because he unravels the tangled...