Reckoning

by David Halberstam

  Many of the Asahara people, who fancied themselves old-style car and product men, came to dislike Kawamata. He was a man from the wrong world, meddling in their company, and they called him “the banker” with special disdain, though not to his face. “The banker would like a car that will sell more but cost less,” one might say sarcastically. “Can you please design such a car for the banker?” One of them even sketched a car to take a banker to and from the bank. It was specially designed so an unusually heavy man (Kawamata was not that heavy, but in their caricature they made him so) could get in and out as easily as possible. There was room for only one person in it. The rest of the space was filled with huge baskets in which he could put all the money he took to the bank. For Japanese working in a company like Nissan this was an unusually irreverent act, and though the sketch was passed around and enjoyed, the artist made sure he destroyed it that night. But laugh though they might at Kawamata, there was no doubt that he was taking over Nissan. What was worse for Asahara, the longer the labor crisis seemed to go, the more it strengthened Kawamata—who took a harder line against the union—and weakened Asahara.

  Kawamata liked letting everyone at Nissan know that he was tough. He was almost deliberately crude in his manner. Bankers, even in the days right after the war, were comparatively well dressed. Kawamata, however, never dressed well. He wore suits, to be sure, but they were badly cut, and they never seemed to fit him. His shirt was always wrinkled, and his tie, one associate noticed, never was tied quite right and was always off to the side. His language was coarser than that of most of his colleagues. He seemed to take pleasure in the fact that the other men around him were more polished. “I know you’re fancier than I am,” he would tell the others. “I’m from the country, I don’t move in the world you move in. All of you grew up a lot richer than me—we were very poor.” But that, they soon decided as they found out more about him, was odd, since he came from Mito, which was fairly near, not really country, and since his family had moved to Tokyo when he was still young. Besides, his father had been a perfectly respectable middle-level functionary, and Kawamata himself had gone to quite a good college. For his own reasons, however, it seemed important to him to cast himself this way. If he was bored at meetings—and most high-level meetings were boring—he would take a little nap; his arms and head would hit the table, and he would promptly be asleep—indeed, snoring quite loudly. Asahara did not know how to handle these scenes and, being genteel, would let him sleep on. Soon it became clear what engaged Kawamata—money—and what did not—technology. If the subject was technology, his eyes soon closed; when it came back to money he was wide awake and very much in charge.

  At first some of the others thought it was merely rudeness, and wondered whether Kawamata knew how much he shocked and offended his colleagues; only later did some of them realize that that was precisely what he had intended to do. It was, they realized belatedly, a power play. “What he was telling us—and we did not realize it at first—was that what interested us did not have to interest him,” one of them said years later, “but what interested him had to interest us.”

  The dismissal of nearly two thousand men at Nissan at the time of the Dodge Line changed all the relationships there. Kawamata stood almost alone among management on that issue in the beginning.

  “Are you sure that you are not being too hard?” one of his colleagues asked him.

  “I am not sure that I am being hard enough,” he answered.

  “Why?” the colleague persisted.

  “Because I am not sure what kind of jobs any of us will be able to get when we tell people we came from an auto company that just closed.”

  The union conducted constant negotiations trying to head off the dismissals, but Nissan, like every other company in Japan, was feeling the crunch of the Dodge Line. The bank was being squeezed by the government, and it in turn was squeezing Nissan. Day after day Tetsuo Masuda shuttled back and forth between meetings of his union and meetings with management. After each meeting with management he would go back to the Yokohama factory and speak to the massed workers, and his words would be picked up and broadcast to the Yoshiwara plant. As a speaker he was at his best. He had a rich, powerful voice and an almost perfect sense for the mood of his audience. There was a hypnotic quality to these speeches. “He was, and I hate to say this,” said Hatada, “almost like Hitler. I would stand there transfixed listening to him, and I would wonder, ‘Is this my old friend the baseball player?’” In the end Masuda lost. The cutbacks were not just what management and the conservative leaders of the Nikkeiren, the industrialists’ labor-policy board, wanted; they were what the Americans under the Dodge Line were insisting on.

  Masuda became more bitter after this. It was as if management and especially Kawamata were his personal enemies now. He spoke of them in a new, more hostile way. For Kawamata, it was a victory. The fact that he had pulled it off increased his power within management immeasurably.

  All the heroic battles between 1946 and 1950 were waged over precious little, for there was in fact not much to Nissan Motors. It was an antiquated place with two worn-out factories producing very little. In 1950, for example, Nissan built a grand total of 11,072 prewar-type trucks and 865 cars. It lost a great deal of money. Wrangles between labor and management were almost like a fight for possession of a carcass. Suddenly, this all changed. The reason was simple: the Korean War. The Americans urgently needed Japan’s industrial facilities, they needed trucks and jeeps and repair shops, and they poured money into Japan. “A gift from the gods,” Prime Minister Yoshida called the Korean War, in that it fixed American policy into a permanent position of anti-Communism and at the same time boosted the Japanese economy at a critical moment. It was a shot of plasma for an anemic economy. Six months before the Korean War, Toyota was in the red, and six months after it started, Toyota was in the black. Much the same happened at Nissan. It made trucks and jeeps. It made casings for napalm shells as well, though that was something of a secret at the time; the union might have been radical and its leadership somewhat anti-American, but the union needed the work so desperately that it put its politics aside and worked for the Americans. Even with the benefits from the war, however, feelings were bitter. Workers who had once complained about a lack of work now complained about the primitive work conditions and having to work overtime without any choice. Overtime was a particular sticking point. The workers were poorly paid, and they needed the small sums that the overtime brought, but they came to believe that management had deliberately set the base wage so low that only with overtime could they make enough. It was, the workers believed, a management gimmick for expanding the basic work day.

  By late 1952, as the Korean War slowed down, the artificial boom in the Japanese auto industry began to end. But the inflation caused by the war did not. The workers were making more than they ever had, management argued. Yes, the union replied, but the wage increases were being wiped out by inflation. Masuda wanted a market-basket formula; the workers would have the right to earn enough to fill a market basket to a certain level. Management resisted. It felt that if the company was to have any kind of future, it had to have some control over its finances and simply had to have new machinery. It had succeeded in making vehicles using possibly the most ramshackle, outmoded equipment in the industrialized world. Only the sheer doggedness of the work force had allowed Nissan to overcome what were immense technological handicaps. The Americans and the Europeans, the Japanese knew, had modern factories which by comparison were wondrously automated. In America there were fine new machines, some of which did the work of thirty men; the American plants were dazzling. The facilities the Japanese were using in the mid-fifties were probably more primitive than what America had in the mid-thirties. To the men who ran Japan, the need to modernize placed an impenetrable ceiling on wage raises. To the articulate and forceful men running the union, workers came before machines. This meant that there was a division of the most fundamental sort in a capital
ist society: How would the money be used—to whose benefit?

  In the spring of 1953, then, as the Korean War drew toward a truce, Masuda was more eager than ever for confrontation with management. His wife, however, who came from a good family, was uneasy about his plans. She kept asking him to pull back. Some of his close advisers in the union were uneasy as well. They detected what seemed to be a real change in the mood of management that spring; it was less accommodating, even less willing to negotiate. Something was happening. Japan had just signed a peace treaty with the United States, which meant that whatever restraints the American presence had brought to labor relations had ended. There were reports of secret meetings involving Nissan management and executives from other companies. There were rumors that Kawamata had obtained secret loans from the banks in order to finance a strike. There were still other rumors that the IBJ had decided that this time it wanted Nissan to take the strike, and to crush the union once and for all. Masuda’s longtime friend Michio Hatada was terrified by the path Masuda was on. He believed that Masuda had placed himself on a collision course with management, that he lacked flexibility, and that he was now surrounded largely by people who played to his vanity. Hatada gathered a group of Masuda’s old friends together—the Malayan Language Study Group, he called it—so that they could try to make him see his situation. “You have to slow down,” Hatada told him. “This whole thing is out of control and they are not going to let you get away with it. You are asking for too much. They are not going to stand for it, and they have too many allies, too many weapons. They are going to destroy you.”

  The more Hatada and the others warned Masuda, the less impact they had. His contempt for them was obvious. It was as if he were laughing at them, a lone man of religion scoffing at the apostates. When one of them mentioned the fragility of the company’s finances, he brushed the point aside. “If the company collapses,” he declared, “the union survives.” It had all gone to his head, Hatada believed: Masuda did not deal with mortals anymore. Certainly he did not listen to them. He did not listen when some people whose sources of information were quite good warned him that the company had started to hire toughs in preparation for the showdown. Nor did he listen to Miyoji Ochiai, one of his principal assistants. “The nail that sticks out gets hammered in,” Ochiai said, citing a Japanese proverb. “You,” he added, “are the nail.”

  8. THE TURNING POINT

  IT WAS A HEADY time for Tetsuo Masuda. He was at the height of his popularity. The more management challenged him, the stronger he became in the eyes of the workers. His ability to reach them seemed almost perfect that spring, as if each was perfectly tuned to the other. He could address five thousand workers and, no matter what doubts they might have harbored when he started speaking, they were once again in his hands. Everything he had said sounded so simple and so right. Part of it was that for the first time in their lives a man of Todai—Tokyo University—had taken on the world of Todai in their behalf. In so doing, he had touched something latent and deep within them, more psychological than political. All their lives, from the time they were born, they had been confronted with total hierarchy, total authority. It was the essential obligation of Japanese society that each person accept the authority of those above him. The lowly were not to have secret grievances over their lowliness. Indeed, they were not to think of their resentments as resentments but to accept them as life itself. All their lives the system, the fact of being Japanese, had forced them to bury whatever grudges they had had—against parents, teachers, bosses—if they were to be good Japanese. But Masuda’s appeal was unique. They had a right to listen to him because he was a leader—a labor leader, a figure of authority. Yet Masuda, a leader, a figure of authority, was telling them they were justified in having these hidden complaints, that the secret self was real, the hardships and indignities not imagined. Thus they did not blindly have to accept life as it was. It was a powerful appeal. The crowds Masuda drew that spring were remarkable. Thirty years later his colleagues could still remember him addressing an outdoor rally on a wet day. At first the heavy drizzle subdued the meeting. The workers stood stolidly, spread out over a considerable area, separated from each other and from the rostrum by their umbrellas. Then Masuda started to speak.

  “Put away your umbrellas,” he called out to them. “Come nearer. I want to hear you, and I want you to hear me. How can we be close to each other when our umbrellas are in the way, keeping us from being with each other?”

  The umbrellas came down.

  “Now come close,” he said, “so I can see you and you can see me.” They gathered around the rostrum. The rain no longer mattered. Once again he had them.

  It was an unruly time. Workers deliberately arrived late to work and went to the cafeteria early. Near the close of the day, before the end of the shift, they played chess or mah-jongg. They held frequent shop-steward meetings, one almost every day, and they demanded to be paid for the hours they spent at these meetings. The production process fell into chaos. How anything got manufactured at all, let alone anything as complicated as a car, mystified anyone who visited the plants. The company countered with the most basic policy of all: no pay for no work. At the same time it tried to split the ranks of the union. It declared that the kachos, or section chiefs, were no longer part of the union but were now part of top management. That was an ingenious move. The kachos were not only important in the shops but respected personally, and their membership in the union had given it additional legitimacy. Now suddenly, instead of being allies, they were enemies. Now they shunned the workers, refused their demands, and in any confrontation repeated the company line. That enraged Masuda, and in retaliation he decided to use physical intimidation. He reasoned that although management might have its titles and privileges and higher pay, if the factory floor belonged to the workers—if the managers were too frightened of the workers to venture onto the floor—then the union would control the company. The tactic he chose was a kind of kangaroo court held on the factory floor itself. The proceeding was known as suribachi, which meant mortar and pestle, implements used to grind something down. The something was the kachos, the section chiefs, now the highest level of management actually working on the floor.

  Each day the workers marched down the aisles and surrounded a kacho. They avoided assaulting the particular kacho they worked for, for this would be deemed impolite; they chose some other section’s kacho. Japanese amenities, after all, had to be observed. (Besides, by going after an alien kacho the workers were protecting themselves; the victim was unable to punish his tormentors the next day.) They would tightly surround their victim’s desk—some would actually sit on it. Others would pack in closely from all sides, and still others would stand on the neighboring desks. All of them were prosecutors. The kacho was the accused, cut off from everyone else in the factory by the wall of bodies. No one could get through to help him, and for those who tried, the penalty was to be accused and tried themselves the next day. They started with the strongest kachos first, on the theory that if they broke them, the weaker ones would fall more readily into line. They would demand that a kacho repudiate the company position on no-work-no-pay. If he did not, they went at him. At first they vilified him: You murdering dog of the capitalist class, you useless bastard, you killer of little children. Then they would interrogate him. The prosecutors were kept fresh. Each would interrogate for twenty or thirty minutes, pour his full fury into it, and then go off to lunch or to rest while another would take up the cudgel. The accused felt totally alone. At first he would try to defend himself, but there was no defense. No matter what he said, they would simply come at him with more charges. He might be able to withstand the pressure for three or four hours, but eventually they wore him down. Even the strong ones stopped resisting after five hours and simply remained silent. That, however, did not stop the harassment: It was like an endless wave of punishment, always someone fresh leading it, the cast of characters changing as the workers replaced each other and som
e went home for the night. If his accusers were lenient, the accused might be allowed to go to the bathroom.

  The ordeal was exhausting and terrifying. “I sat there,” one kacho said years later, “and by the fourth hour I thought to myself that this had been going on for all of my life, that nothing had ever existed before it, and worse, that it was going to go on for the rest of my life. It seemed my destiny.” The trials would last for twenty or thirty hours. The company could not protect its own people on its own factory floor. Yet as the kangaroo courts continued, the kachos, who had at first been turned against the union by company decree, now turned against it in their hearts as well.

  Asahara seemed stunned by that growing confrontation. He was caught between forces far too strong for him. When some of the union leaders went to see him to talk about the next year’s wage levels, he seemed pessimistic and depressed. One of the union people asked what was wrong. “I don’t think Nissan wages are that much higher than those of other companies,” he answered, “but all I hear from the Nikkeiren is how soft we are. They make me feel like a failure—whatever I do, it won’t be enough.” That, thought Nakamura, when he and his fellow labor leaders left Asahara’s office, is a scared man. Not scared of us, but scared of his own side.