The Birth of the Japanese Labor Movement Takano Fusatarō
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The Birth of the Japanese Labor Movement Takano Fusatarō. (Courtesy of Iwanami Shoten) The Birth of the Japanese Labor Movement TAKANO FUSATARŌ AND THE RŌDŌ KUMIAI KISEIKAI Stephen E. Marsland Open Access edition funded by the National En- dowment for the Humanities / Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Humanities Open Book Program. Licensed under the terms of Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 Inter- national (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0), which permits readers to freely download and share the work in print or electronic format for non- commercial purposes, so long as credit is given to the author. Derivative works and commercial uses require permission from the publisher. For details, see https://creativecommons.org/li- censes/by-nc-nd/4.0/. The Creative Commons license described above does not apply to any material that is separately copy- righted. Open Access ISBNs: 9780824883874 (PDF) 9780824883867 (EPUB) This version created: 5 September, 2019 Please visit www.hawaiiopen.org for more Open Access works from University of Hawai‘i Press. © 1989 University of Hawaii Press All Rights Reserved CONTENTS Preface ix 1 The Setting 1 2 Takano Fusatarō 46 3 Birth of the Labor Movement 62 4 The Metalworkers’ Union 74 5 Growth of the Labor Movement 87 6 The Turning Point 112 7 Crisis and Collapse 126 8 Legacy of the Movement 148 Appendixes 159 A Constitution of the Alliance for Industrial Organization 161 B Constitution of the Tokyo Ship Carpenters’ Union 167 C “A Summons to the Workers” 172 D Rules of the Rōdō Kumiai Kiseikai 180 E Constitution of the Metalworkers’ Union 183 F Constitution of the Reform Society 195 G Printers’ Friendly Association Rules 201 H Proposed Factory Law of 1898 204 I Constitution of the Printers’ Union 211 J Reference Tables 220 Notes 225 Bibliography 249 Index 267 viii PREFACE This work has two purposes. The first is to chronicle the birth of the Japanese labor movement, which until now has received only a few scant pages in other works. The second is to document early union structures, constitutions, and ideology for those who wish to compare the early Japanese labor movement to that of other coun- tries. Many books that deal only briefly with this period contain errors and inconsistencies, or omit notes to explain sources. Ac- cess to Labor World, the labor newspaper of the period, and other documents recently compiled by the Tokyo University Committee on Labor Movement Documents enabled me to resolve many of these problems. I am deeply indebted to this committee, whose careful research made this book possible. Throughout the book I have given Japanese family names first, which seems most natural to me. I have used the Hepburn system at the publisher’s recommendation even though I prefer the sys- tem developed by Eleanor Harz Jorden, which I feel more closely parallels how the Japanese write in hiragana. Labor World had both English and Japanese sections in each issue. A typical issue was ten pages, nine in Japanese and one in English. From the perspective of an English reader, the Japanese title, Rōdō Sekai, appeared on the last page. The English title, La- bor World, appeared on the first page. Issues were numbered in Japanese sequentially from one to one hundred. The English title page carried a numbering system of volumes and numbers. Thus the issue numbered 67 in Japanese was volume three, number one in English. Pagination started from the Japanese title page, except that the English title page was unnumbered. ix x Preface To avoid confusion, I have used the English title, Labor World, but followed the Japanese numbering system. Thus the English ti- tle page in a ten-page issue would be page ten. Quotations are from the English section except where I have indicated “my trans- lation.” I owe a great deal to many individuals who helped in the creation of this work. I began work on this manuscript during my junior year abroad at Keio University while a student at the New York State School of Industrial and Labor Relations at Cor- nell University. Professors at both schools, as well as scholars and staff at the Japan Institute of Labour to which I was attached that year, guided and assisted my studies. Professor Emeritus Alice Cook directed my research from Cornell, while in Japan Profes- sor Komatsu Ryūji of Keio took me under his wing and fueled my interest in the Meiji-period labor movement. I am indebted to Pro- fessors John P. Windmuller, Gerd Korman, and Walter Galenson at Cornell, who fostered my love of history, economics, and com- parative industrial relations. In Japan Professors Sumiya Mikio, Ōkōchi Kazuo, Iida Kanae, Ōshima Kiyoshi, and Umetani Shun’- ichirō all took time to clarify various aspects of Japanese labor history. Hirota Osamu and Yamamoto Hisao at the Japan Institute of Labour went out of their way to make me feel at home and intro- duce me to scholars in the field. Professor Earl Kinmonth was kind enough to evaluate and direct editing of the manuscript while I was at Cornell, and Professors Solomon Levine and Robert Cole offered much encouragement while I was rewriting the manuscript. My parents, Bill and Amy Marsland, did an excellent final editing. The best support a man could ask for was given by my wife Yaeko, who strongly encouraged me to finish rewriting the manuscript. Early Japanese labor history fascinates me because it rep- resents an early convergence of Japanese and American ideas. The founder of the Japanese labor movement traveled to the United States and studied American unions for years. He be- came an organizer for the American Federation of Labor and wrote many articles for the Federationist. Labor World’s English section reflects this close association, as does the fact that many of the original source documents are in English. The blend of Japanese and American labor ideologies created at that time, Preface xi which continues to have a major impact today, is an example of how international cultural exchange can produce a result that is greater than the sum of the parts. I fervently pray that today’s deeper contacts between Japan and the United States will foster creativity, mutual respect, and appreciation between the people of these two great nations, following the example of the labor leaders of the 1890s. The Birth of the Japanese Labor Movement 1 THE SETTING N THE morning of January 3, 1868, troops under the command Oof Saigō Takamori of the Satsuma feudal domain seized the imperial palace gates in Kyoto. A council of those favorable to the coup approved a decree stripping the ruling dictator—the shogun—of his lands and office. In place of the shogun, the Em- peror Meiji was returned to power. It was this event that inspired the name the Meiji Restoration and marked the end of the feudal dictatorship that had governed Japan since 1603. With the change of government came changes in policies. The feudal dictatorship had tried to shut Japan off from intercourse with foreigners and spurned foreign technology. The new govern- ment sought out foreign contact and foreign technology in an effort to modernize the country. As Japan became more open to new ideas and modern technology, sweeping changes began to take place. It was in this rapidly changing and evolving situation that Japan began to develop modern labor organizations and a labor movement. The environment of the early labor movement must be understood to appreciate how and why the unions appeared when and where they did. Many factors—politics and government, the legal framework, the structure of industry and employment, the labor market, labor relations and conditions of labor in the pe- riod—influenced work stoppages and labor organizations. Even as Japan changed rapidly, certain aspects of Japanese culture and tradition remained unchanged. Labor relations, even as they evolved, still relied strongly on hierarchical traditions such as the fictional parent-child relationships established be- 1 2 Chapter 1 tween superior and inferior, senior and junior, or master craftsman and apprentice. These relationships formed the basis of the oy- akata (“parent”) or labor boss system, which dominated heavy industry and mining. Labor relations for the women workers in textiles depended on the “learning to be a woman” tradition (jochū minarai) whereby poor peasant girls worked in wealthier house- holds as servants for several years and then returned home to be married. As Japan industrialized, these traditional relationships between people within households became the basis for relation- ships between workers and managers. Another tradition unchanged by modernization was the strong desire for harmony within the Japanese culture. This made indus- trial disputes such as strikes and lockouts unacceptable and kept the level of physical violence low when they occurred. It also forced managers and union leaders to resign their positions if their differences caused a strike, much as feudal officials had to resign or commit ritual suicide if their actions caused dishonor or inconvenience to the government or society. This combination of strong continuing traditions with rapid changes in industry and society caused Japan to evolve a union movement very different from the West’s. The first Japanese unionists sought to include all workers at a particular workplace regardless of trade, age, or skill level. This inclusive structure was in direct contrast to the narrowly defined craft-based unions in the West during early industrialization, which, disregarding work- place, sought to group together all those in a single highly-skilled trade excluding apprentices, the unskilled, and coworkers in dif- ferent trades. The inclusive shop-based structure of the Japanese system became the basis for Japan’s company-based unionism of today.