Sheldon Garon is Associate Professor of History and East Asian Studies at Princeton University.

The State and Labor in Modern Japan

By Sheldon Marc Garon

University of California Press

Copyright © 1987 Sheldon Marc Garon
All right reserved.
ISBN: 0520059832

Introduction

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 formation of mass organizations and the rough-and-tumble world of parliamentary politics.7 In the words of one recent synthesis, “The more [scholars] examine the nature of Taisho democracy, the more shallow they find it to be.”8

Rather than dwell on the failure of Japanese democracy, I prefer to examine the social foundations of politics and policy before 1945. How the parties and bureaucracy confronted the complex problems of domestic division and social inequities tells us much more about the life and death of Taisho democracy than either the several accounts of the rise and fall of the parties per se or the attempts to measure the Japanese commitment to democracy as an abstract ideal. Looking back on the experience of Western European nations in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries, one might better describe democratization as a process by which segments of the upper classes broadened the franchise and enacted social reforms in response to assertive working-class movements. What similarly distinguishes the 1920s in Japan as an era of liberalization were the legislative and administrative efforts of the Kenseikai/Minseito and its bureaucratic allies to offer the laboring classes an institutional role in socioeconomic relations and the political process. An idealistic commitment to egalitarian democracy may have inspired some Japanese reformers, but, as in the Western cases, we must not overlook powerful pragmatic motivations—including economic interest, political advantage, and the maintenance of social order. This study accordingly explains why upper-class Kenseikai leaders and Home Ministry officials sought to encourage the autonomous organization of the working class as a practical solution to popular discontent and work stoppages in the 1920s and early 1930s, and it suggests how a related desire for efficient wartime production lay behind the government’s statist reorganization of labor in the face of new circumstances during the 1930s.

It has also become clear that we lack an adequate understanding of the role played by career bureaucrats in the politics of modern Japan. Despite the unquestioned importance of bureaucratic innovation in the postwar period, historians of the pre-1945 era have concentrated on the political parties while generally dismissing the higher civil service as a

bastion of conservative opposition to democratic reform.9 This is unfortunate, for a number of reasons. Whereas the two established parties frequently alternated cabinets during their brief rule in the 1920s, elite bureaucrats and their protégés dealt with labor matters and social movements on a continuous basis from the 1880s to 1945, and indeed well into the postwar era. Second, because they directly confronted problems of social unrest based on their respective ministries’ definition of the state’s interests, professional administrators often divided more sharply than party politicians over concrete solutions. One has only to look at the widely divergent labor policies pursued by the staunchly antisocialist Justice Ministry, the business-oriented Ministry of Agriculture and Commerce (later Commerce and Industry), and the relatively reformist Home Ministry—the last of which held responsibility for maintaining public order and improving social welfare. Third, bureaucratic proposals took on a political dimension during the era of party cabinets as the two major parties relied heavily on the expertise of like-minded civil servants to formulate and promote their policies. Progressive officials within the Home Ministry, particularly in its Social Bureau, supplied the major initiative behind the labor legislation of the Kenseikai and Minseito governments, just as the Seiyukai drew upon the forceful recommendations of conservative or promanagement bureaucrats in the Justice Ministry, the Ministry of Agriculture and Commerce, and other cliques in the Home Ministry.

Any analysis of bureaucracy necessarily examines the complex relationship between state and society. Theda Skocpol has recently argued that states often enjoy considerable “autonomy” from the preferences of the dominant classes, particularly in times of crisis. Such autonomous initiatives structurally derive from (1) officials’ greater access to “international flows of communication,” (2) the state’s basic need to maintain order, and (3) the organizational cohesiveness and insulation of career bureaucrats.10 Empirical studies of the active role of civil servants in the development of labor and welfare policies in Germany, Britain, and Sweden similarly suggest that the state and its officials constitute more than Marx’s “committee for managing the common affairs of the whole bourgeoisie.”11 And yet, how much more?

The Home Ministry’s approach to labor policy in Japan presents much the same problem. Of all the governmental agencies, bureaucrats in the prestigious Home Ministry were the most vocal in their claims to be impartial “officials of the Emperor,” above selfish class interests and partisan politics. During the 1920s, they were frequently praised by

labor leaders and denounced by employers for seeking to elevate the position of workers in society and politics. In the wartime atmosphere of the 1930s and early 1940s, many of these men became known as the “new bureaucrats” or “renovationist bureaucrats” in recognition of their drive to ameliorate socioeconomic problems by imposing stringent controls over all interests—capital as well as labor. Their motivations and programs provide a key measure of the degree of autonomy of the Japanese state vis-à-vis the capitalist classes prior to 1945.

While this analysis underscores the importance of the interwar bureaucracy to social policy, it also highlights the role of the two major political parties, the Seiyukai and the Kenseikai/Minseito. Few of the several accounts of the prewar parties have dealt seriously with the relationship of parties to policy, or in any sense with the political economy of the parties. In an effort to refute the early postwar belief that the parties had been the defenders of liberal democracy, historians have more recently emphasized that prewar politicians were fundamentally seekers after power and representatives of local interests.12 Even those who acknowledge the relatively progressive positions of the Kenseikai/Minseito conclude that much of this was rhetoric which failed to result in significantly more liberal programs than those of the rival Seiyukai.13 Ironically, scholarly treatment of the prewar parties and the bureaucracy has come full circle in Japan. Where once the parties were characterized as liberal and the bureaucracy as conservative, historians increasingly accept the assertions of retired civil servants that it was the bureaucrats who initiated, and the politicians who obstructed, the reformist legislation of the era.14

Notwithstanding their shortcomings as a democratic force, it is highly misleading to divorce the parties from discussions of interwar social policy or any other programmatic area. They, too, formed a part of the state structure. Presiding over most cabinets between 1918 and 1932, leaders of the Kenseikai/Minseito and Seiyukai successively held responsibility for handling the pressing social and economic questions of the age. Whether liberal or conservative, the parties’ ministers of state, like their bureaucratic subordinates, formulated strategies on how to respond to domestic ferment. Although often depicted as provincial hacks, many were former higher civil servants themselves, well qualified to advance policy initiatives or champion the recommendations of their old ministries. Moreover, it was party-led cabinets that ultimately determined which bureaucratic proposals would reach the Imperial Diet and which would perish in the minefield of sectional rivalries. Nor should we ignore the role of the major parties as representatives of the various

economic interests concerned with the labor issue. Although many have assumed that strong ties to big business prevented both parties from undertaking meaningful labor reform, the Kenseikai took up the cause of labor union legislation, in part because the issue appealed to a broad range of its constituents. The party not only sought new support among the working class, but also represented an influential segment of the business community which believed that the legal recognition of unions would improve, not impair, industrial relations.

Politicians and bureaucrats sought solutions to social problems based on their nation’s economic reality and indigenous ideas of state and society, but Japanese politics and policy did not evolve in isolation. Throughout the interwar decades, Western models of industrial relations influenced Japanese labor policy to an extent seldom recognized in current historiography. In an effort to give Japanese creativity its rightful due, American scholars have tended, during the last two decades, to minimize the impact of foreign influences on Japanese society. Japanese leaders, it is now argued, did not slavishly imitate; rather, they engaged in “selective borrowing,” whereby they selected what was necessary from various Western models and then skillfully adapted it to their native culture. As welcome as this new look is in many respects, it reduces the recurrent phenomenon of emulation to nearly tautological insignificance—in other words, the Japanese adopted “Japanese” solutions and nothing else because they themselves were Japanese. In actuality, borrowing between industrial nations has been an important factor in the development of social and economic policies over the last century and a half. Nineteenth-century German reformers studied British factory laws; early twentieth-century British politicians and civil servants, in turn, emulated Bismarckian social insurance; and European industrialists enthusiastically took up American-style scientific management in the 1920s15 The time has clearly come to examine the process of Japanese emulation from a comparative perspective without, of course, denying the existence of indigenous innovation and adaptation.16

Whereas the Seiyukai, conservative bureaucrats, and many employers professed to find solutions to labor unrest in Japan’s “beautiful customs” of paternalistic social relations, most leaders recognized that there was little of substance in their traditions to prepare them for the modern industrial problems of strikes and unionization. In the 1920s, Home Ministry officials and Kenseikai strategists carefully studied the labor policies of Britain and other European nations before proposing a comprehensive set of reforms designed to encourage the development of

labor unions within an English-style framework of universal manhood suffrage, a union law, and a labor disputes conciliation law. Even the Seiyukai and its conservative and business allies often found themselves opposing the Kenseikai’s English model with other Western precedents, most notably the anti-union and antisubversive policies favored by industrialists and federal and state governments in the United States. During the 1930s, many Home Ministry officials and younger politicians turned to newer Nazi and Italian Fascist models of a state-organized labor federation, claiming that the liberal English system of autonomous trade unions and freely competing interest groups was incapable of meeting the nation’s needs for economic recovery and military-industrial mobilization. Each of the models carried with it a complex set of assumptions about social organization. Selected by different elites as the inspiration for competing domestic strategies, these models often propelled Japanese labor policies in a more systematic direction than would otherwise have been the case.

Finally, a word of explanation is in order about this study’s use of such categories as “liberal,” “national socialist,” and “corporatist” to describe Japanese policies. Fraught with ambiguity and ethnocentrism, European labels have largely gone out of fashion in recent discussions of prewar Japanese politics.17 This may be for the better if liberalism is simplistically defined as individualism, or national socialism as charismatic dictatorship. With a proper appreciation of the complexities of these phenomena in Western nations, however, the comparative approach adds a whole new dimension to an analysis of competing Japanese visions of social stabilization. Indeed, in their open emulation of foreign models, Japanese at the time often linked their own policy alternatives to ideological debates then raging in the West. To progressive Japanese politicians and officials in the 1920s, liberalism was no longer identified with the laissez-faire principles of J. S. Mill and Gladstone. Rather, it conjured up the more contemporary “New Liberalism” of Britain’s Liberal Party governments (1906-14), which had committed the state to providing social welfare, guaranteeing the workers’ right to organize, and mediating in industrial disputes.18 German National Socialism and, to a lesser extent, Italian Fascism were similarly attractive a decade later because of their proposed socioeconomic solutions, which aimed at restructuring the free-market system into compulsory corporate organizations.

By charting these changing conceptions of social policy, we gain a more subtle understanding of the twists and turns of twentieth-century

Japanese politics—from oligarchic repression before 1918 to the liberal attempts to accommodate popular movements during the 1920s, and from the wartime reorganization of autonomous associations to the fuller, yet still managed, pluralism of the present postwar era. Although the focus is Japan, the challenges and responses presented here were hardly peculiar to that nation. An appreciation of how the Japanese resolved these questions should enhance the comparative study of state and society in the industrial world.

Continues…
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