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

Abstract

Lonny E. Carlile's book is welcome on two counts. First, it provides a lively narrative of the political history of the Japanese labor movement from 1945 to the early 1960s. Second, it puts that history into comparative perspective by interspersing detailed chapters on Japan with chapters on parallel developments in France, Italy, and Germany, to emphasize that the political trajectory of Japanese labor was largely determined by the same global forces that shaped the course of European labor in this period. “Divisions of labor” refers to ideological and organizational divisions within the labor movement and its allied political parties and also to “divisions” in the sense of labor organizations mobilized for “war,” be it class war, the struggle for power in the labor movement, or taking sides in the Cold War. The first two chapters, on European and Japanese labor from 1920 to 1945, respectively, serve as valuable background to the rest of the book. Carlile shows that, as in France, Italy, and Germany, the Japanese labor movement fragmented into rival social democratic, communist, and left-socialist camps in the 1920s, and that, again as in France and Italy, the Japanese left-socialists tried to build a popular front to resist fascism in the 1930s. But as he relates in later chapters, whereas the momentum of the wartime resistance in France and Italy led to “resistance coalition” governments intent upon modifying capitalism in a socialist direction soon after World War II, the Japanese popular front was crushed by the imperial state. Although the idea of a popular front continued to animate the resurgent postwar Japanese labor movement and indeed facilitated the rise of the socialist Katayama Tetsu cabinet in June 1947, the increasingly conservative policies of the American Occupation and the rapid revival of prewar labor splits precluded any possibility of a viable “resistance coalition” in Japan; the Katayama cabinet, which lasted only eight months, was a very brief exception to the pattern of conservative party rule throughout, and well beyond, the period covered by this book. In this respect, labor's postwar political context closely resembled the German case.