Labor's Love Lost

Japan's adolescent trade unions last week had discovered that democracy, like the art of love, is hard to learn (or practice) as long as Pop is in the parlor with the lights on.* For Supreme Commander Douglas MacArthur, who fathered the Japanese union movement in October 1945, the problem was how to get out of the parlor with grace and dignity. Necessary occupation discipline had at last collided head on with Japan's experimental democracy.

By intervening on Feb. 1 to prevent a scheduled Tokyo general strike, SCAP (Supreme Command, Allied Powers) probably saved the conservative Yoshida Government (the strike's real target), but it also pushed labor toward the left--and persuaded many unionists that MacArthur had developed a filicidal anti-union bent. Since then, Premier Shigeru Yoshida's failure to curb inflation has increased tension, and has confronted SCAP with a set of unattractive alternatives: 1) to abandon all strike control and risk governmental and production collapse; 2) to take over immediately full economic direction of Japan, thus puppetizing the government; or 3) to invoke drastic measures to prevent all strikes, in violation of U.S. teachings.

Two Big Jumps. Whatever MacArthur's resolution of the prickly puzzle, the new and strangely hybrid Japanese labor movement will be an important factor in Japanese life for a long time to come. In a little more than a year of organizing, 4,400,000 workers have joined 17,000 unions in the two big federations, the revived N.F.L.U. (National Federation of Labor Unions) and the N.C.I.U. (National Congress of Industrial Unions). This literally represents a jump up from nothing. The N.F.L.U. and its predecessors never got more than about 400,000 members in prewar Japan, never bargained effectively. Imperial Japan's "cheap labor" economy had no taste for unions; her Shinto gods were made to view them with alarm. After 1937-5 "China Incident," the militarists smashed them flat.

Superficially, the new Japanese labor movement looks like a blurred carbon of the U.S. model. The N.F.L.U. came back under one of its old leaders--dignified, Christian, 59-year-old Komakichi Matsuoka, who has been called the "William Green of Japan" and hates Communists just as much. A more radical group promptly established the N.C.I.U. as a Japanese counterpart of the C.I.O., made a smart but little-known newspaperman named Katsumi Kikunami its chairman. Kikunami (who had a Nisei nephew killed in Italy fighting with the U.S. Army), though no Red himself, accepted Communist support. From this springboard of U.S. patterns, the Japanese jumped into the blue.

Penman's Progress. Some of the things Japanese unions do would make Tom Girdler scream for John L. Lewis. Japanese labor techniques grew out of the Japanese worker's effort to reconcile the paternalistic structure of Japan's industry with relatively alien class-struggle ideas. The labor-relations adventures of the Pilot Fountain Pen Co. is a microcosm of this effort.

The chairman of the Pilot Workers Union is quiet, sad-faced Sanshi Ishizuka, a 35-year-old electrician whose wistful eyes peer through the inevitable hornrimmed spectacles. Ishizuka, a loyal war worker, came back to his prewar job at Pilot soon after Japan's defeat, helped organize Pilot's 300 workers, with them won several immediate improvements. Then, last summer, with inflation booming, the union asked for more money and a formal contract. Management said no, promptly fired eleven union leaders.

By this time Japan's Government, as MacArthur urged, had legalized U.S. labor safeguards. The union at first ignored all of them, partly because court action would have cost the once paternalistic company "face." Said Ishizuka: "It would have affected the company's social standing." On the other hand, a strike would have halted much-needed production, and the union had no treasury. Picketing would have been impractical, because many bombed-out workers lived in the plant.

"Production Control." The alternative chosen by mild little Sanshi Ishizuka and his fellow workers was one no U.S. union would dare suggest. They called it a "production control strike." Instead of walking off the job, the Pilot union members kicked the management out. They set up a 30-man committee, divided just as management had been divided, into departments--production, sales, electric power. Then they stepped up production, used receipts to pay wages and buy materials. Ishizuka posted notices: "To the

Management: If you should come to the factory, please keep to the Board Room and do not come to any factory buildings." Workers greeted violators in hushed, polite tones: "Will you kindly observe the rules of etiquette and refrain from entering these premises?"

The strikers kept producing pens and ink all through the fall months, did not swing toward American-style action until the company tried strikebreaking. Then Ishizuka got a mediator, and the homesick executives came back. They gave the union everything it asked, got back a going business that had suffered no stoppage losses.

Out of the Parlor. The failure of the February strike taught both labor and industry one lesson--to look to each other rather than to Yoshida or SCAP. Union leaders Kikunami and Matsuoka met with top industry executives, formed the "Economic Rehabilitation Congress" to work for better labor relations, supply allocation, distribution and price control.

This week in Tokyo, Douglas MacArthur, emboldened by this and other demonstrations of constructive leadership, bypassed the distasteful alternatives that had kept him locked in the parlor with Japanese labor. At an historic press conference, MacArthur proposed an early end to the U.S. military occupation, urged future "control and guidance" by the United Nations. MacArthur's reasoning: Japan has been demilitarized; the framework of political democracy has been established; now the Japanese need an opportunity to solve their economic problems free of the military shadow.

*For news of a perplexed pupil, see EDUCATION.

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