The Future of the Japanese Labor Movement

[marmar]

from Dissent magazine:




The Future of the Japanese Labor Movement
C.D. Alexander Evans - August 13, 2011


FOR THE last one hundred years, Japan has experienced one of the most unusual organized labor movements in the modern world. Triumphing despite fierce oppression in the decade before the Second World War, the modern Japanese labor movement has been at once wildly successful and deeply coopted. Its history shows how principles of shared governance and social harmony work in practice, and the consequences of a labor movement strategy that seeks, above all else, to avoid confrontation.

The roots of the movement are in the early 1910s, during the Taishō Democratic Era. Disillusioned with what they saw as the false consciousness of the principles of racial hegemony and common divine descent, labor activists fought to establish democratic socialism and universal suffrage. Strikes and protests soon became commonplace, including large but peaceful protests in 1919 and 1920. Despite police efforts at suppression, by the mid-1920s Japan seemed on its way to a functional two-party parliamentary democracy. But Japan then suffered what is now called the Shōwa Financial Crisis. In an effort to bolster a struggling economy, the Japanese government issued discounted bonds to banks throughout the country. When the government tried to redeem the bonds in January 1927, fear that the banks would default spread panic throughout the system. The Japanese economy collapsed, and the country plunged into depression.

In America, the Great Depression gave new life to a labor movement that had suffered in the booming 1920s. While American labor won organizing rights with the Wagner Act passed under President Roosevelt, Japan experienced the rise of a militaristic, state-capitalist oligarchy unfriendly to unions. Drawn from the conservative elite, these new, unelected leaders set Japan on a course that would eventually lead to the War in China and the Second World War.

It is difficult to overstate the devastation that the Second World War wreaked upon the Japanese economy. Extensive allied strategic bombing campaigns completely destroyed the nation’s industrial capacity. Throughout the difficult early rebuilding process, Japanese scholars and old heroes from the once-active Left came to enjoy a new prominence, using their position to advocate a new type of economic order, rooted in a long-standing Japanese aversion to social inequality. If Japan was to rebuild, wrote these professors, public intellectuals, and essayists, the Japanese people needed to unite. All economic actors, from laborers to investors, had to work together. This intellectual movement had a profound impact on subsequent Japanese business culture, leading Japan toward a labor renaissance. ..........(more)

The complete piece is at: http://dissentmagazine.org/online.php?id=518