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Japan: Its Rise from Feudalism ...
From The Militant, Vol. VI No. 1, 7 January 1933, p. 3.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’ Callaghan for the Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL).
The turn-over of labor in industry is a vital index of workers’ living conditions. In Japan this index is artificially lowered by the method of involving workers in debt at the beginning of employment so as to keep them in bondage, and by the virtual imprisonment of labor in dormitories. Factory workers are allowed but two rest days a month by law and those in dormitories can only leave two to four times a month by special permission. Even so the turn-over in “normal” times is extremely high, official figures setting it at from 60 to 100 percent before the present crisis. The costliness of this turn-over may be gauged by the fact that it takes a year in silk mills to bring a recruit’s productivity up to average, yet the average term of work is but slightly more than one year. Nor do the girls who represent more than half of all factory workers (and 80 percent of all textile workers) transfer to other factories. They prefer to return home to marry – or they are forced into prostitution.
The first attempts at organizing trade unions were ruthlessly suppressed by the government. The anti-union Act of 1900 remained in force with but minor changes up to 1926 when, following the English models of opportunist “harmony” unions designed with the aid of the ruling class to blunt and render harmless the weapons of working class organization, the Japanese government decided to foster and encourage company unionism by a new act recommending arbitration in labor disputes. This act has remained a dead letter on the statute books although company unions have spread. Trade unions still possess no legal status, the government cautiously tolerating reformist unions but ever ready to suppress “dangerous tendencies” without warning.
As the cost of living rose to dizzy heights during the War, the workers were driven more and more by need to strike for higher wages. Whereas in 1914 there were only 50 strikes involving 7,900 workers, the number of strikes rose to 308 in 1917 and to 417 in 1918 involving, in the latter year 66,000 workers. The existing scarcity of food was aggravated by the Siberian adventure which necessitated the buying-up and diversion from the market of large stocks of rice. The pinch of hunger was felt everywhere by the masses.
Suddenly, without previous warning, the storm broke and there came the thunderclap of the spontaneous uprising of 1918. Starting in the obscure fisher village of Toyama where some fishermen’s wives stormed the rice shops for food for their starving children, the movement spread like wildfire among workers and peasants. The agrarian movement revealed its elemental power by the burning of the homes of large landowners in forty-two provinces, and the looting of granaries. In the space of a few days the workers in practically every large town and city poured out into the streets, banded together and, where they did not loot the shops directly, forced the sale of rise to pre-war prices. Troops were called out in every large city. The workers faced the troops and called on them not to fire on their brothers and sisters. The government, realizing the ultimate possibilities of the situation, threw the troops into the shops to sell food over the counters at low prices, yes, and to give free rice to the poor. Only when the movement began to recede were the troops used for shootings and brutal suppression, many of those who had bought rice at the lowered prices being thrown into prison for indeterminate periods.
Had there been the barest kernel of a Bolshevik party in Japan at this time, the year 1918 might well have been hailed as the “1905” of the Japanese working class. But no such organization existed, ready to place itself consciously at the head of the masses in action and to formulate the necessary political slogans in the light of the existing situation and the relation of forces. The masses were not aware of developments in Russia, the censorship acting as a “cordon sanitaire” to prevent the infecting of the Japanese workers. Whatever leadership did exist was more under the influence of anarcho-syndicalism than under that of Communism. Hence the complete lack of preparation for events, the sporadic character of the outburst and the lack of political demands that could have served as a focal point for later organization. Soviets were out of the question but demands to end the war, to grant universal suffrage, to recognize the right of the workers to organize – under the circumstances the democratic slogans could have been linked up with the more elemental demand for bread and peace.
Nevertheless the rice riots of 1918 form a turning-point in Japanese history. The masses learned their own power and the utter helplessness of the ruling class in the face of a mass outpouring into the streets. The seed was planted for making the workers conscious of their historic role. Consciously or not, the first step had been taken on the road to the conquest of power. Immediately the riots resulted in a great impetus to unionization. The unions became a force to be reckoned with, one that could no longer be safely suppressed by the ruling class. Instead the government and the “enlightened” capitalists were impelled to resort to the new methods of “boring from within” the unions, helping to create organizations for “harmony” and the “mutual interests” of capital and labor.
In 1906 the worker-intellectual Kotoku returned to Japan from the U.S. where he had been active in the ranks of the IWW. Kotoku brought to Japan the best traditions of this movement, an insufficiently grounded but revolutionary precursor of Communism. The movement thus founded was ruthlessly hounded by the police until temporarily suppressed after the discovery of a bomb plot against the Emperor in 1911 for which eleven men and one woman were executed. Despite this inevitable result of individualist terror, the basic ideas of syndicalism, direct mass action and industrial unionism, penetrated deeply into some of the unions, particularly those organized in the newly-built dockyards, destined soon to closure under the blight of the after-the-war crisis of 1920. Encouraged by the uprising of 1918 in which they had taken a leading part, the syndicalists led several great dockyard strikes during the years 1919 and 1921. In the Kawasaki and Mitsubishi dockyard strikes of 1921 there was exhibited the inspiringly heroic solidarity of thousands of workers. To combat the rapid spread of unemployment now engulfing the working masses, the strikers set up the slogan of workers’ (syndicate) control and management of the shops. Many strikers felt that the proletarian revolution was at hand.
These strikes were the high point of syndicalist influence in Japan. They illustrate the splendid fighting qualities of the syndicalists but also the inevitable downfall of a workers’ movement that attempts to ignore the state with its special armed forces prepared to crush any revolt. These strike struggles and the political consequences form an object lesson of the absolute need of a revolutionary vanguard in the form of the Communist party armed with the Marxian theory of the state, analyzing every hew situation by means of its dialectic class approach and thus prepared to put forward correct tactics based on correct policies.
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