The Enigma of Japanese Power (11 page)

The late 1980s also saw momentous organisational changes, prompted by the privatisation of Nippon Telephone and Telegraph (NTT) and the privatisation and regionalisation of the national railways, whose personnel had always been the mainstay of Sohyo. For five years a new umbrella ‘council’, Zenmin Rokyo, had, under the leadership of the DSP-affiliated Domei and under the auspices of the large corporations, been working on a grand scheme to bring all unions together in one moderate national body. In November 1987 this led to the inauguration of the Japanese private-sector trade union confederation, Zenmin Roren, or Rengo for short, and the announcement that Sohyo would disband itself in 1990.
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Rengo is emphatically opposed to organisations affiliated to the Japan Communist Party. At a convention in February 1985 NTT’s Zendentsu, one of its organisational nerve-centres and Japan’s largest enterprise union, scrapped terms such as ‘class’, ‘reaction’ and ‘fascism’ from its vocabulary.
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In June of the same year Zendentsu became the first Sohyo member to call for Sohyo’s dissolution. The dominance of the traditionally very moderate Domei group in Rengo is more marked than sympathetic Sohyo elements and the smaller disbanded federations anticipated.
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Many public-sector unions are softening their ritual militancy so as to be able to join the new federation.

As early as the spring of 1983 a group of leftist union leaders, academics and intellectuals formed a counter-organisation to preserve such cherished concepts as ‘class struggle’, and a small federation consisting mainly of the most leftist-inclined former Sohyo unions will probably remain to remind the country of the ‘sell-out’ of its former associates to ‘monopoly capitalism’ and the ‘right’.
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Rengo’s organisers have presented Japan with a grand scheme for the unification of the socialist JSP with the DSP. But the possibility of a larger and stronger opposition party does not appear to worry the administrators in the least. LDP, bureaucrats and businessmen alike applauded the plans for Rengo and helped them along. Nor must it be forgotten that the DSP, the small political party supported by Domei, has, save for joining the occasional ritual opposition boycott, been virtually indistinguishable from the LDP in its stance in the Diet. Rengo, in fact, fits in very well with the expressed wish of LDP ideologues to expand the party’s constituency to include the labour unions.
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It could become a useful petition group supplying electoral favours in return for mediation by LDP politicians.

Rengo certainly suits management purposes better than the earlier national federations. Its first president – Tateyama Toshifumi, who also led the ground-breaking Zenmin Rokyo – is an executive member of the Japan Productivity Centre, an organisation of the bureaucracy and big business one of whose aims has long been to teach enterprise unions the virtues of management-labour co-operation. Tateyama is, moreover, associated with various LDP-bureaucrat-business advisory groups. Rengo’s main aim, declared at the time of its birth, will not be to seek continual wage increases, but to promote better working conditions and the general welfare of its members and their families. It also declares that it is not in favour of strikes. It is expected that the majority of relatively underpaid workers in the small and medium-sized subcontractor sector will remain outside its sphere of interest.

This further domestication of the federated unions on a national level has been accompanied by a further domestication of many of the enterprise unions. The surviving red flags and red head-bands (worn during lunch-hour strikes) are being replaced by flags of different colours – especially green, symbolising ‘nature’. Where many enterprise unions used to emphasise money in their negotiations, their programmes now increasingly call for self-fulfilment and family happiness.

Japanese Marxism, pre-eminently theoretical, has provided a safe niche from which to criticise the status quo without having to reconcile theory with reality. The intellectuals who determine the priorities of the JSP lack first-hand knowledge of the kind of life led by ‘the people’ on whose behalf they are supposed to be fighting the injustices perpetrated by ‘monopoly capitalism’. The relationship of the Japanese government with the United States has exercised the socialists more than abuses at home for which the government could be held responsible. Their distorted picture of political reality may be seen in their long-time recognition of the Great and Wise Leader Kim 11 Sung as the only representative of Korea and their endless debate (still in 1987) over whether or not to ‘recognise’ the reality of South Korea.

A large and powerful left wing of the JSP has clung to ideological purity as an end in itself, thereby blinding the party to its own possibilities. Its increasingly radical course in the late 1950s caused the most important right-wing faction to break off and form the DSP in 1960. The left wing continued to obstruct attempts at structural reforms and ideological moderation in the 1970s, pushing out more prominent right-wing figures. More recently, the assumption of leadership in 1986 by Doi Takako (the first woman to head a Japanese political party) appeared to have introduced a degree of belated pragmatism needed more than ever following the demise of Sohyo, the party’s traditional power base.

There is, of course, nothing in the official rules to prevent a real opposition from becoming strong enough to take over the government; and some have argued that had the JSP taken a less doctrinaire ideological position and proposed workable policies, this party could have become a genuine opposition party. There is some truth to this, but it begs the question of why the JSP became so irresponsibly impractical and unattractive as to deprive the voter of a credible alternative to the LDP. The answer to that seems simple: the collusion of industrialist-bureaucrats behind the merger of the ‘conservatives’ into the LDP, and the symbiotic relationship of the ruling party with the ruling élite that had served in the pre-war and wartime bureaucracy, indicated to the realists among the Japanese left that there was very little if any chance that alternative political forces would ever be allowed to take over.

It is a widely observed phenomenon that when parties are far removed from the possibility of participating in government, their leadership tends increasingly to rely on radicalised posturing. The ‘expressive’ aims tend to overrule the ‘instrumental’ ones in their political manoeuvres. The JSP is a textbook example of this tendency.

As early as 1960 one of Japan’s foremost political historians concluded that the LDP and the JSP should not be seen as confronting each other over substantive issues, but rather as fighting different kinds of matches in separate rings.
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Thus neither side can lose to the other, and the function of the JSP is not even to compete but to absorb negative elements that naturally gravitate towards it. Small interest groups that for some reason or other will not be accommodated into the main System thus have the opportunity to join a leftist mini-System that can give them, not subsidies, but publicity and moral support. A good recent example is the group of Koreans who refuse to be fingerprinted for alien registration purposes, along with sympathetic Japanese activists and fingerprint refusers of other nationalities.

In one very special case the JSP, together with the communists, helps defuse what might otherwise be a permanent source of trouble: the ‘former outcast’ communities. Euphemistically called
burakumin
(‘hamlet people’), the members of these communities, though indistinguishable physically from non-
burakumin
Japanese, are descendants of a combination of ritually ‘unclean’ people (butchers, leather-workers, gravediggers) and lower-class itinerants. In the past, their exclusion from society was so complete that maps did not even show their villages. As Japan modernised, the official regulations declaring them a special community with special tasks – and thus privileges – were scrapped. But discrimination could not be legislated out of existence and, since
burakumin
had lost their monopoly over their allotted trades, their economic deprivation increased. Today, many try to escape the stigma by moving out of the neighbourhoods, but lists of
burakumin
locations and the services of private detectives are routinely used by employers and families to determine whether a job applicant or marriage prospect comes from a former outcast community.

Burakumin
communities are mainly concentrated in the Kansai area, around Osaka, Kyoto and Kobe, and in Shikoku. In many other parts of the country, people are not aware of the existence of this minority or the extent of the discrimination it experiences. It is not a subject that is easy to raise, even with better-informed Japanese.

In association with the JSP, the Burakumin Liberation League (BLL) has arrived at a
modus vivendi
with the System. The BLL has developed a method of self-assertion through ‘denunciation’ sessions with people and organisations that it decides are guilty of discrimination. Confessions and apologies are usually forthcoming, but they have little significance. The BLL does not use legal channels to combat discrimination, an attitude appreciated by the bureaucrats, who actually encourage ritualised protest. The administrators prefer ceremonial self-criticism (as well as spending on special facilities and grants) to the development of norms necessitating a policy of integration, which would deprive the System of much peace and quiet and cut down on an important pool of low-cost labour.
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There are some three million
burakumin
, and their household income, even with over half the married women at work, is between half and two-thirds the national average. Much of this workforce is engaged in hard physical labour, and it sustains back and shoulder injuries at rates six times the national average.
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At odds with the BLL are the
burakumin
allied with the Japan Communist Party, which is in favour of making use of the courts and inveighs against the BLL’s increased dependency on government handouts. But the JCP sees the former outcasts in narrow ideological terms as oppressed in the same way as other Japanese victims of ‘monopoly capitalism’. Neither side, in competing for
burakumin
allegiance, shows interest in any serious campaign to promote their emancipation.

There remain a few elements actively opposed to the System that are intransigent and unassimilable. The student movement, notable even in its heyday for the ritualism of its opposition, dwindled almost to vanishing point in the course of the 1970s, but not before giving birth to highly radicalised extremist groups such as the ‘Red Army’, the Chukaku-ha and Kakumaru-ha, kept in the public eye mainly through terrorist activities abroad and the revenge killings of each other’s leaders.

New radical groups that appeared in the mid-1980s caused great concern among the authorities (and a considerable strengthening of the riot police) when they managed, with impunity, to launch a number of primitive home-made rockets that missed their targets. To this day, Narita Airport remains heavily protected by sunken fences, electronic detection devices and a large police contingent. All this demonstrates that Japanese society is not free from deep political conflicts. But aside from the radical fringe – and in the 1980s it was very marginal indeed – the System has been able to eliminate virtually all genuine political opposition.

What would have happened to the interest groups if they had fought the System instead of joining it? This is not a hypothetical question, since one major Japanese group has in fact resisted attempts to neutralise it: the Japan Teachers’ Union, better known as Nikkyoso. Its experiences show that the administrators’ determination to bring oppositionist groups under control can hardly be exaggerated.

After Japan’s defeat in 1945 the vast majority of Japanese agreed that the war had brought great suffering to themselves and had therefore been a mistake. But the teachers could not easily, as did most of their compatriots, shrug off further responsibility for that mistake by laying it at the feet of faceless ‘militarists’. Ever since the closing decades of the last century, they had been the chief civilian channel for the spread of the nationalist ideology, and in the 1930s the authorities had relied on them for the propagation of beliefs and attitudes designed to make young Japanese want to sacrifice their lives for Japan’s expanding empire. Even when teachers knew they were being asked to spread lies, their only choice had been to conform or face dismissal. Many felt guilty. Even today, the main slogan of their union, repeated at every congress and during every interview, is ‘Never send our students to the battlefield again’.

Nikkyoso dates from 1947, when communist and socialist groups merged, establishing a mixed moderate-radical Marxist leadership which it has retained into the 1980s. Partly because of the Red Purge, the moderate Marxists gradually gained strength, and they have dominated the federation since the early 1960s. The Ministry of Education is its sworn enemy.

Relations between Nikkyoso and this ministry were bound to be problematic. Ideologically, the two could not be farther apart. The leftist Nikkyoso adamantly opposes anything that might suggest a hankering after pre-war days. The Ministry of Education, whose wartime ranks remained relatively intact, with ‘depurged’ officials rejoining it in 1950—1 along with former Naimusho officials, has never stopped believing in the need for ‘right thinking’ in the schools, for ‘moral education’ to inculcate such thinking and for formal obeisance to the unchanged pre-war symbols of flag and anthem. Since the ministry supervises the content of school textbooks, it has managed gradually to tone down the earlier unambiguous rejection of the old nationalism, and has sponsored a euphemistic treatment and partial rationalisation of Japan’s imperialist past.

From the very beginning, the teachers were suspicious of the aims of the post-war Ministry of Education. The communist-dominated Zenkyo, which later became part of Nikkyoso, warned at its inaugural meeting on 1 December 1945 that government-affiliated unions were being organised to allow the Ministry of Education to evade responsibility for its wartime activities, and to suppress the free union movement.
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Conversely, the main ideological evidence against Nikkyoso in the eyes of the Ministry of Education and its allies among the politicians was that it declared itself to represent ‘educational labourers’. This was a loaded term in pre-war days, one that implicitly rejected the Confucianist view, exploited by the ultra-nationalists, of teaching as a ‘divine mission’.
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A leftist bias, moreover, is the last thing that the officials want in Japanese education. It must be emphasised that the opposition of the bureaucracy and LDP to Nikkyoso has never been inspired by a concern with the quality of education. In the LDP, improvements in and budgetary allotments for education as such have no priority, while ‘programs intended to weaken . . . Nikkyoso are vigorously championed’.
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A law passed in 1950, containing clauses designed to undermine the organisational foundation of Nikkyoso, marked the almost total severance of communication between teachers and the government and started a war that is still in full swing.

Until the mid-1980s the tenacity of the highly ideological teachers’ union in the face of frequent attempts by the Ministry of Education to subdue it was impressive. In March 1954 Nikkyoso carried out massive school boycotts and rallies in opposition to legislation prohibiting organisations that incite teachers to engage in political activity. The law was passed amid fist-fights in the Diet between LDP and JSP parliamentarians.
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Two years later the government introduced regulations requiring local school-boards to be appointed rather than elected. The president and a former president of the University of Tokyo declared their objections to a bill that ran ‘counter to what we have been advocating since the war’.
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On 18 May half a million teachers walked out of their classrooms. On 1 June socialist Diet members fought hand to hand with LDP members on the Diet floor, and the next day the law was passed with five hundred policemen on guard in the chambers of the Lower House.

During the US occupation, education ministers had been non-political, non-bureaucratic figures with academic backgrounds. But almost immediately after the Americans left, the Ministry of Education was fortified with heavyweight former bureaucrats in order to help deal with the Nikkyoso challenge. In 1953 Odachi Shigeo, who had been mayor of Singapore during its notorious Japanese occupation, was made education minister. He came from the Naimusho – the only body of bureaucrats disbanded by the occupation authorities for its repressive activities before and during the war. With him he brought several purged officials and some former associates from the Naimusho. A number of officials of the Ministry of Education resigned in this period in protest against growing political influence over their department.
⁵⁵

Another former official of the dismantled Naimusho, Nadao Hirokichi, was education minister for an unprecedented four terms under four prime ministers from 1957. He was to gain an unusual reputation among ministry officials for toughness and strong-willed leadership,
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and became Nikkyoso’s most feared enemy because he was given the task of reversing the ‘excesses’ of occupation policy on education. A law for more stringent textbook controls was unacceptable to the Diet, being too reminiscent of pre-war censorship, but he achieved them in practice thanks to the Ministry of Education’s version of ‘administrative guidance’.

The biggest clashes, involving bloodshed in some localities, took place between 1957 and 1959 in the context of a protest against a government-sponsored efficiency rating system for grading teachers, which threatened to provide principals with a weapon against Nikkyoso members. The forms to be filled in for the rating asked vague and ambiguous questions, and the criteria adopted seemed highly arbitrary. The World Confederation of Organisations of the Teaching Profession, meeting in Washington in 1959, passed a resolution declaring the rating system to be harmful both to education and to the teachers themselves, and sent a telegram of protest to the Japanese government.
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This particular clash with the Ministry of Education cost Nikkyoso the withdrawal of an estimated 80,000 teachers, including 15,000 principals. More than 200 teachers were arrested, more than 400 dismissed or suspended, more than 1,000 demoted and more than 3,000 reprimanded, while more than 52,000 suffered a reduction in salary.
⁵⁸
Nikkyoso’s financial problems, which in the mid-1980s helped interested parties in the LDP and the Ministry of Education to drive a wedge into the organisation, date from this period.

The ideological disposition of Nikkyoso has made it easy for the System to portray it as out of touch with reality and disruptive of the national harmony. It is true that, besides opposing the reintroduction of moral education, Nikkyoso has also fought on the front line in an array of left-wing causes: opposition to Japan’s so-called Self-Defence Forces, the mutual security treaty with the United States, US bases in Japan. But foreign scholars who have studied the subject conclude almost unanimously that the motive for supporting Nikkyoso among the majority of its rank-and-file membership has been concern for independent education rather than Marxist ideology.
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The organisation, indeed, is sometimes referred to as
tanchozuru
, a white crane with a red head.
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It is the activists within Nikkyoso who are usually considered the best teachers, ‘the ones who are most energetic, who wish to improve the educational system, who are forward looking’.
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Whether Japanese education would have profited from a teachers’ union with leaders who saw themselves primarily as teachers rather than as social activists committed to a bitter struggle is a moot question. What seems fairly certain is that if they had been just teachers they could not have opposed so strongly the reintroduction of control by Japan’s administrators over moral instruction. This is borne out by the fate of other opposition groups that, by yielding to ‘the embrace’, have lost their ability to wage effective opposition.

The war between the LDP and the Ministry of Education on the one side and Nikkyoso on the other has torpedoed most attempts to introduce badly needed education reforms. It continues to smoulder, with the forces of the System gradually gaining ground, since the forces of the Japanese left as a whole are diminishing. Developments in 1987, with Nikkyoso’s head and part of its membership cultivating friendly ties with central figures in the education-related groups of the System, suggest a gradual loss of resolve in the face of relentless pressure.

Nikkyoso is also a favourite target of the newer groups of rightists, who attack it with barrages of noise from their sound-trucks. Ever since rightists managed to abduct staff members of Nikkyoso headquarters as ‘hostages’, the entrance has been heavily guarded. Twice a day, rightist sound-trucks circle the building for ten to fifteen minutes, subjecting it to high-decibel harassment. Physical clashes have occurred regularly when rightists tried to prevent Nikkyoso from holding its annual conventions. In September 1968, 270 rightist groups mobilised 2,620 members to harass one such a meeting, and it has become increasingly difficult to find venues for them; many municipalities have withdrawn permission for the use of public halls on the grounds that the chaos resulting from the attentions of the rightists disturbs ordinary people. The police refuse to protect Nikkyoso from this rightist disruption.