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Japanese Workers and the Struggle for Power 1945-47

Japanese Workers and the Struggle for Power 1945-47. Joe Moore. Production Control. Democratizing the Yomiuri Shôriki Matsutarô--President of Yomiuri Suzuki Tômin, “fighting liberal” leftist Democratic Study Group sought Employee’s union Democratization of company’s organization

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Japanese Workers and the Struggle for Power 1945-47

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  1. Japanese Workers and the Struggle for Power1945-47 Joe Moore

  2. Production Control • Democratizing the Yomiuri • Shôriki Matsutarô--President of Yomiuri • Suzuki Tômin, “fighting liberal” leftist • Democratic Study Group sought • Employee’s union • Democratization of company’s organization • Better pay and respect for workers as human beings • Independent consumers’ union

  3. Production Control Movement • Shôriki orders Suzuki’s resignation over labor struggle • Workers occupy editorial offices • Elect Suzuki chair of supreme struggle committee • SCAP arrests Shôriki as suspected war criminal and he resigns • Baba Tsunego succeeds him

  4. Similar Story at Keisei Railway • SCAP agrees that worker actions that interfere with economic reconstruction should be banned (1945) • But MacArthur also encouraged the unionization of labor and would brook no interference • So, a mixed message at best.

  5. Ch. 7 The Conservative Reaction • Summer 1946 Yoshida Cabinet seeks to reverse working class gains • Reverse Course in Labor Reform • Production control = core of popular resistance so Yoshida wanted to break the movement • Yoshida and events convinced SCAP that potential for radical change in workplace was genuine

  6. Housebreaking the Labor Movement • SCAP at once pro-labor and anti-communist • Second Yomiuri Dispute June 1946 • 6 communists identified by name including Suzuki • Baba “ordered” by Baker to dismiss them

  7. Struggle committee stands up to Baba’s dismissals • Major Daniel Imboden intervenes, employees accept the 6 dismissals • Theodore Cohen dissents -- no court order, no violence, no public disorder. • Baba transfers 17 union leaders out of Tokyo

  8. Engineers strike • Company strikebreakers grab the striking workers and throw them out. • Yoshida continues to win as heads off General Strike in February 1947

  9. As Moore writes: • In the end, SCAP lent its support to the old guard’s destruction of the militant industrial unions • A working-class democratization of postwar Japan was not to be. Too much was against it… • The fight for a new Japan…must be seen, nevertheless, as one of the peaks in the history of the Japanese working class. (243)

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