Fighting on all Fronts (55 page)

The Ministry of Home Affairs Police Bureau reported on the dissatisfactions of workers—including insufficient food, poor wages and conditions—which resulted in increased absconding from factories, absenteeism, sabotage and the production of faulty products right up until the end of the war. In an electrical factory in Nikko in September 1942, 1,500 workers struck to demand higher wages and shorter working hours. However, the workers demands were not realised as they came under increasing repression from the police. In November 1942 in the Hitachi company’s Kameido (Tokyo) factory, workers’ demanded higher
wages and the strike action took the form of a campaign to deliberately produce faulty goods.
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Peasant struggles

Even after the outbreak of war and despite increasing government oppression, tenants won 57 percent of their disputes with landlords—more than ever before. In many agricultural villages tenant farmers gathered together and tilled co-operatively on May Day to show their solidarity against the landlords.
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Table 2
shows resistance by peasants continued until the end of the war.

Table 2: Peasant struggles

Sources:
A Fujihara,
Nihon Minshu no Rekishi 9: Senso to Minshu
(The History of the Japanese People vol 9: War and the People), 1975, p216; S Shioda,
Nihon Shakai Undō Shi
(History of Japan’s Social Movements), 1982, p66.

Resistance inside the military

Unrest among soldiers was more significant than people realised. In Osaka in 1930 a Soldiers’ Committee was established under the auspices of the Japan Communist Party and was very active once the Manchurian Incident began. Committees were also established in a number of other facilities. The Communist Party established a section in the party for organising in the military in July 1932 and in September published a magazine for soldiers called
Soldier’s Friend (Heishi no Tomo)
, while the
Advanced Military’s Bugle (Shingun Rappa)
was established in the Kansai (Osaka/Kyoto) area. These magazines emphasised the freedom and human rights of soldiers and sailors or “workers and farm labourers in uniform”.
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In 1931 the
Soldiers’ Committees tried to set up reading groups and while some were stopped using military laws others succeeded.
Table 3
shows the number of anti-war actions which took place in the military and in military factories.

Table 3: Anti-war actions by the military and in military factories

Source:
A Fujihara (ed),
Nihon Minshu no Rekishi 8: Danatsu no Arashi no naka de
(The History of the Japanese People, vol 8: Amidst the Storm of Repression), 1975, p304.

Soldiers developed tricks to escape fighting—how to get into hospital, how to get a tour at a training camp and how to get the best jobs.
⁶²
Diaries and letters show many
kamikaze
loathed what they were doing and were critical of the war. Diary entries show one pilot, Hayashi Tadao, read Lenin’s
State and Revolution
up to the day before he died. He read it secretly in the toilet, swallowing pages as he read and concluding it was an imperialist war. A sailor wrote: “This journey of ours is meaningless from the point of view of military strategy, and will cause no damage to the enemy. Our purpose is to prove the meaninglessness of such an action, and for this we are going to die”.
⁶³

In 1939 soldiers taken prisoner by the Chinese Communist Eighth Route Army formed the
Nihon Heishi Kakusei Dōmei
(League to Raise the Consciousness of Japanese Troops). Other groups also formed including one in May 1940 under the direction of Nozaka Sanzō, who became a Japan Communist Party politician in the 1950s and 1960s, which focused on the Japanese army, and using leaflets, pamphlets and newspapers demanded improvements to the living standards of soldiers and concentrated on notifying Chinese soldiers and peasants of the anti-war activities of Japanese people.

Japanese prisoners of war in China rallied to the Chinese cause. The
Hansen Dōmei
(Anti-war League) formed by captured soldiers engaged in “megaphone propaganda” at the front, appealing to Japanese troops to surrender or refuse to fight. The League was forced to dissolve in August 1941 by the Nationalist government and its members were returned to prison, but even under repression and with limited freedom they continued their activities. With the cooperation of the Chinese Communist Party, Nozaka also established the Japan Workers and Peasants School
(
Nihon Rōnō Gakkō
) in 1940 to educate prisoners about Japan’s military and in 1942 established the
Nihonjin Hansen Dōmei
(Japanese People’s Anti-war League) and called on Japan’s soldiers to participate in the anti-war movement.
⁶⁴

After the Armistice, Japanese soldiers also deserted in Indonesia to join the national liberation struggle. According to the
New York Times
, perhaps 1,000 did this. Sergeant Fujiyama heard independence leader Sukarno give a speech and decided to join the liberation struggle. He was twice wounded in combat alongside Indonesians.
⁶⁵
Others such as Sergeant Ono Shigeru had been sent to Indonesia to train the local nationalist youth. When the war ended, he stayed in Bandung and joined up with the independence fighters. Later he lost his left arm in an attack on a Dutch post office and lived in Batu, Eastern Java.
⁶⁶

Resistance took the form of both collective and individual actions including strike action by workers but also collective absenteeism. Graffiti, humour and story telling also expressed resistance. It was resistance such as this that the Japanese elite feared. As navy minister Yonai Mitsumasa commented, “The reason why I have advocated the end of war is not that I was afraid of the enemy’s attack, nor was it because of the atomic bombs or the Soviet entry into the war. It was more than anything else because I was afraid of domestic conditions”.
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In combination the research presented indicates a more nuanced picture which challenges the hegemonic vision of Japan’s wartime population as fully supporting the war effort and this may represent just the tip of the iceberg.

Under occupation

Resistance continued during the Western occupation and for good reason.

The occupation was supposed to be humanitarian, foster democracy and work for peace. In practice it was racist, vindictive, favoured the rich and began rearmament. According to Australian cameraman William Carty, the first orders from General MacArthur, commander of US Army Forces in the Far East, to his foreign correspondents’ club included no fraternisation or feeding the Japanese although many were starving. The Office of Strategic Services, ancestor of the CIA, said censorship under the occupation continued the “authoritarian tradition” in Japan. Men of influence, said a parliamentary report, wore a mask of democracy but in reality they “swaggered on black markets”.
⁶⁸

Western attempts to reform Japan were half-hearted. In less than a decade, moreover, the US was pressing Japan to create new fighting
forces to be directed against the Communists in Korea and China. The needs of economic reform likewise took a back seat and the purging of elements considered dubious became less of a priority after late 1947. Under the watchword “Reverse course” Japan began to fit into the Western alliance.

The International Military Tribunal for the Far East, also known as the Tokyo War Crimes Trials, judged the chief (so-called Class A) war criminals. Many thought Tribunal president Sir William Webb was biased. The British judge Lord Patrick saw Webb’s absences along with those of one other judge as “the gravest blot that had yet stained the honour of the court”.
⁶⁹
After 18 months of prosecution Webb suggested each accused should get only two days rebuttal, prompting outraged protests from the defence.
⁷⁰

Webb himself agreed that the crimes of which the German leaders at Nuremberg were accused were far more serious than those of the Japanese defendants. He acknowledged that the Tribunal was flawed because Emperor Hirohito, the leading criminal, had received immunity.
⁷¹
The prosecution indicted Japanese leaders for promoting racial superiority in a trial where few of the judges were non-whites. Thus the credibility of the trials was dubious.

The occupation never really finished. Rather a new global political alignment arose with Japan as a crucial strategic base against Russia and China in the Cold War, complemented by a hot war in Korea. As this new global conflict emerged, the US’s Japan policy changed dramatically. The new phrase on everybody’s lips was “Reverse course”. Wartime villains who might once have expected to be purged were now allies against Communism. They were “de-purged” and the occupiers hounded leftists instead.
⁷²
Ambitious plans to break the monopoly power of the
zaibatsu
mega-corporations were quietly abandoned because opening up the Japanese economy to US capital became less important than immediate economic stability and the imperatives of winning the Korean War:

the changes turned out to be considerably more modest than some had hoped…shifts in American foreign policy towards east Asia…and calls from the Congress to guard against unnecessary overseas spending left the core of Japanese finance unimpaired… The old combines regrouped and returned to something akin to their former status.
⁷³

In a speech marking the first anniversary of the surrender MacArthur had remarked that Japan’s strategic position could make it either a mighty bulwark for peace or a perilous springboard for war. Millions of
Japanese yearned for the former but once Korea blew up US leaders opted for the latter.
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The fate of the labour movement expressed wider social patterns. With the end of the war, interest in trade unions had revived quickly. Total union membership was 600,000 in late 1945, rising to 6.7 million or 53 percent of the workforce by June 1948.
⁷⁵
Conventional accounts attribute this to encouragement by the occupation forces but MacArthur was more interested in a new version of corporatism. Unionisation did not proceed in the normal way, by persuading individuals to join; instead almost the entire company workforce would join
en masse
. According to Japanese expert Kazuo Nimura, most doubt that all these workers joined as a result of freely made individual decisions.
⁷⁶
Closed shop arrangements can, of course, be a mainstay of genuinely independent trade unionism but that was not the case here. Another writer, Taira Koji, argues that when large enterprises were “unionised” overnight it was really an extension of the corporatist
Sanpō
methods used by the wartime regime to integrate workers.
⁷⁷

While these devices sought to restrict unions, large numbers of workers had ideas of their own. In addition to work stoppages they used workers’ control strategies (taking control of production) to get around MacArthur’s anti-strike restrictions. When employees took control of the
Yomiuri
newspaper and shifted its editorial line to the left, circulation rose sharply. The first peak of struggle was the Food May Day demonstrations of 1946. This attracted some 2 million workers, half a million of them in the capital. Communist leader Tokuda Kyuichi drew prolonged cheers when he shouted “Down with the emperor!” The day was filled, one observer wrote, “with a curious kind of joy—perhaps the kind of luminous joy a war prisoner feels on regaining freedom”.
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MacArthur’s team began looking for ways to get trade unionism back under control. When workers announced a general strike for 1 February 1947, the situation became urgent. US labour adviser Ted Cohen, supposedly a leftist, thought the general strike such a “fearful prospect” that he suggested MacArthur ban it—which he eventually did. Labour leaders who had taken the occupation’s pro-union rhetoric at face value were so shattered they wept publicly. From this point labour’s position deteriorated steadily. Fourteen months later, in March 1948, the occupation authorities banned regional strikes by postal workers. Then in July MacArthur directed the Japanese government to deprive civil servants and other public sector employees of their right to strike. In December an injunction was issued against a miners’ strike. In 1949 the qualifications for legal strikes in the private sector were tightened.
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