Reckoning

by David Halberstam

  He knew he had risen against the odds. Without the American presence during the Occupation the country might not have changed and he might not have been so successful. It was the Americans’ arrival in Japan at the end of the war that had ended the stifling prewar society and had liberated him in the first place. It had been a rare time, he thought afterward, when the poor but strong could ascend despite their backgrounds, when one’s future was less determined by one’s past. A few years later, he thought, when the old order was more firmly reentrenched, he might not have done as well. He was a man of the streets, and in that postwar moment a man of the streets had a chance.

  It had been a long climb. After the war, desperate to survive, he had seized on the most elemental jobs: semilegal purveyor of food, maker of homemade radios, and dance instructor. (The Americans had brought their dances with them, and almost overnight Western dancing had become a major fad in Tokyo.) He rather liked his job as a dance instructor, and it paid rather well. But his friends were highly critical of that incarnation. “Shioji,” one said, “that is not a serious job. What are you doing, looking for a rich woman?” With that he quit and took a job as a worker with Nihon Paint and Oil. He also went to night school at Meiji.

  In those politically charged days the radical left had been holding protest rallies outside the Imperial Palace, building up to the general strike that was scheduled for February 1, 1947. The crowds they were drawing were massive, and everyone seemed to be carrying a red flag. One day about a month before the strike was scheduled, Shioji encountered a huge demonstration outside the palace grounds, and he stopped to see what all the noise was about. So, apparently, had a uniformed American soldier who had wandered into the area. The left-wingers immediately seized the American as a spy (that was an error; the Americans generally sent Nisei Japanese in civilian clothes as their intelligence agents) and started beating and kicking him. Shioji intervened and stopped the beating. He looked at the soldier, who struck him as singularly innocent and confused. This man would not be a spy. The Americans, as far as Shioji was concerned, had acted only as friends. Shioji, with his broken English, questioned the young soldier. The American said he had seen the stage and the banners and had been under the impression that some kind of quaint Japanese theatrical production was about to take place. The artlessness of the answer matched the guilelessness in the face. With Shioji’s help the American was allowed to leave.

  But the incident did not die there. The next day at a union meeting the presence of the American spy at a rally was given as an added reason for going out on strike. Shioji stood and tried to explain what had happened. He had been an eyewitness to the incident, he said, and it had all been a mistake. He was shouted down as a capitalist dog. That did not deter him. He repeated what he had seen. The head of the union, at first tolerant, soon became irritated with him. “The soldier may not be a spy,” the union leader said, “but the fact that you insist on saying that he is not a spy means that you are a running dog for the capitalists. You should understand that—which side you help when you speak like this.”

  That was the beginning of his politicization. With the Communists, he decided, the truth did not matter; only the cause mattered. The truth should serve their purpose, not its own. A few days later he had a private meeting with the head of the union, who was even more explicit. “We think you are a talented young man,” the union leader said, “but we think you have much to learn. It’s okay when something like this happens to use it for our cause.” The unions, Shioji soon concluded, were run by the Communists. He joined a group that fought the existing union leadership at Nihon Paint. At the time of the red purge he worked to expel the Communists from their positions in the union.

  But although he ended up more conservative than most workers of that era, he was not readily accepted by the managerial elite. He was working for his soap company during the day and studying at night at a not very good college. With a night degree from a lesser university he probably could not get a job with one of the first-line companies. Finally in desperation he quit his job at Nihon and took and passed a difficult exam that allowed him to become a day student, thus partially legitimizing himself. Now, he thought, I am a smart Japanese because I go to school during the day; before I was a dumb Japanese because I went to school at night. Still, he was aware that he might never have been hired at Nissan if it had not been for the strike and management’s needs for newcomers—tough newcomers, at that.

  As he rose in power he liked to accentuate the difference between himself and his contemporaries—he was tougher. Other Japanese were somewhat afraid of foreigners, particularly Americans, and were slightly ashamed if they were too closely associated with them. They might borrow from the foreigners, especially the Americans, but only in the most superficial way. The other men, business executives all, with a few noticeable exceptions wore dark, conservative, Ivy League clothes that were modeled on those of their American colleagues, and wore the Rolex watches that they perceived to be in fashion among American executives, and favored the same Scotch, Johnny Walker Black, that they saw the Americans drink, and they patterned their industrial production lines, too, on the American lines. The Johnny Walker Japanese, Shioji privately called them; they wanted to be part of the larger world without changing at all. Spiritually Japanese, they resisted the Americanization of self to the point where they tried to spend as little time with the Americans as they could. In fact, time spent in a foreign country, they knew, worked against them; those who had spent a long while abroad were never again completely trusted by the home office, for it was believed that they might have picked up some dreaded foreign habits, and when they returned home they often began to atone for their years overseas by becoming even more chauvinistic than their colleagues. The true model was always the Japanese one.

  Shioji liked to think that he had changed not just his outer self but his inner self as well. He boasted of his many American friendships, of his contacts throughout that country. Many Japanese, he knew, had made connections when they served overseas but upon return to Tokyo were careful not to be identified as friends of the gaijin. He was not like that. He often wished that Japan was more like America, more open, more meritocratic. He liked what he had seen in America. He had been taken up and sponsored at a relatively young age by the American labor movement. If the American business community was paying very little attention to its counterparts in Japan, the American labor movement was different. The AFL (and later the AFL-CIO) was eager to strengthen non-Communist labor movements throughout the world. To the AFL people Shioji was a promising young Japanese labor leader who was also earnestly anti-Communist. In the fifties that was the perfect combination. The Americans paid attention to him when few others in his own country had; they courted him and educated him, and he in turn gloried in that attention. In 1961, as a relatively unknown young man, with the help of the American embassy and the AFL-CIO, he went to the Harvard Business School for a seminar of several weeks. He absolutely loved it. One of the first things he noticed about Americans was that in comparison with the Japanese, they were not afraid to make mistakes. It was almost the first thing he noticed about his classmates at Harvard—they felt free to try anything they wanted. If they failed, that was their fault. But the restraints were those they placed on themselves, not invisible ones placed on them by the society. The Japanese, he felt, were afraid to take chances, for they were terrified of failure; the Americans tried, failed, and then tried again. In that sense it was a more open, less cautious society. Men openly coveted success, and if they achieved it, it was their own; that too appealed to him.

  But what impressed him more than anything else was the role of the labor leader in America. There a labor leader had a position of authority, and with that position went respect. He was a public man. Many people, not just workers and employers but average citizens, paid attention. While he was at Harvard, Walter Reuther came to make a speech, and Shioji was awed. Reuther was his great hero. A small hall had b
een set aside for Reuther’s speech, and it soon became apparent that it was much too small, and people scurried around and managed to get access to the Harvard gymnasium. Shioji was astonished. The entire Harvard gym was filled with students. There was standing room only. The idea that a labor leader had so broad a following struck him forcefully. No one in Japan had a following like that. If a labor leader went to Todai or Keio, only a handful of students would show up. After Reuther’s speech there was a reception, and Shioji met Reuther. He had been warned the night before by an American friend that if he shook hands with Reuther he should use his left hand, since Reuther had lost much of the movement in his right hand when he was shot years before during Detroit’s labor troubles. So Shioji stuck out his left hand, but Reuther waved him off and insisted on shaking with his right and then said, “Let’s see which of us is stronger.” They matched grips in a quick test of strength that to Shioji sealed the friendship. Shioji was struck by Reuther’s openness. Reuther wanted to talk about Japan and about Shioji’s problems there.

  That summer, after leaving Harvard, Shioji went to Detroit and stayed with the UAW people at Solidarity House, and the Americans became his friends—Reuther and Leonard Woodcock and Pat Greathouse and Doug Fraser. Years later, even after Greathouse retired, he always came to the airport to meet Shioji whenever Shioji visited Detroit. They were the top people in the union, and they had all treated him as an equal. He worked hard on his English, and he could understand almost all of what they said. In fact he could soon speak fairly good English (though he preferred to use an interpreter, since it gave him added time to hear a question and ponder his answer). When he returned to Japan his confidence was greater; he was now a good friend—an equal—of the most important labor leaders in the world. From then on it was clear in his mind who his role models were: the UAW people, and particularly Reuther. He was proud that he was now Walter Reuther’s friend. When Japanese officials visited Detroit or Washington and met Reuther, Reuther always asked them to send a message back to his great friend in Tokyo, Ichiro Shioji.

  The trip to America confirmed him in his goal, which was to be a union leader. He did not want to go into management, as many of his contemporaries hoped to do. Nor did he want to go into some esteemed but to him essentially powerless and boring position in the Japanese Diet. He would be like Reuther. The American, he noticed, for all his democratic manner ran a very tight ship and kept dissent to a minimum. Shioji decided to do the same thing in Japan. So when he gained power he ran his union like a personal fiefdom. Anyone rising in the union who was a potential rival soon found himself dispatched to a meaningless job in a supplier company. Another potential adversary might be fanned out to the Diet. Shioji demanded complete loyalty. Those who crossed him, even in the smallest way, were soon gone. He played very tough. If a worker who was somewhat to the left of Shioji tried to distribute leaflets criticizing company policies, he was likely to find himself attacked by goon quads. Shioji was always kept well informed about any political stirrings of which he would not approve. Criticism of the company (as long as Kawamata was president) was the same as criticism of the union. If a worker complained about his wages to another worker, he was likely to be brought into a room with a foreman and have his words repeated back to him in the most ominous manner. The threat was both overt and covert. Without words the foreman was conveying: You are unhappy, and we know exactly what you are thinking and saying. But, to be certain, a warning was issued against any subsequent violations. It was barely needed. The union was clearly omniscient.

  Shioji dealt with Kawamata and only Kawamata on any issue of importance. They decided what the raises would be. He was the union, and the union was he. He was to be neither questioned nor doubted. He believed in democracy, but, like many powerful men, he favored democracy of the most personalized sort. In 1962 a young man named Shunichiro Umetani joined the company and went to his first union orientation meeting. There he heard Shioji make a speech about the union and the company. It was during a period of some trade liberalization. This, said Shioji, was a difficult time for the company, and so the union had decided to cooperate by asking for only a fraction of the normal wage increase. Umetani, who did not understand the politics of the union and the company, stood up and asked what Shioji was getting in return. He could understand the need for sacrifice, but he knew that if the risk paid off, the company was going to receive considerable benefits. Was there anything for the union in this deal, since its salaries were relatively low?

  “This question is not even necessary,” Shioji said.

  But Umetani did not let go, and he asked again if there was any quid pro quo.

  “We don’t have to get anything back,” Shioji answered.

  “But if you’re giving them something when they’re in trouble,” Umetani asked, “isn’t it natural that they have to promise to do something for you when they’re in better shape?”

  “Why do you talk like this?” Shioji asked. “We have their word.” He looked hard at Umetani. He did not like the way the debate was going. “I do not need a piece of paper, I have their word and I trust them,” he added.

  Umetani, not knowing that he crossed some sort of line, persisted. “What guarantees are there?” he asked.

  “I guarantee it,” Shioji said, openly angry now. “I, Shioji. Is that good enough for you?”

  Umetani for the first time heard the total silence in the room, and he looked around him and saw the other workers trying to look away from him.

  Umetani thought Nissan a very difficult place in which to work in the early sixties. He suspected that later it became a little easier. After all, in the early sixties the shadow of the 1953 strike still hung over the factories. No one was allowed even to talk about it. What bothered him about the company was not so much the atmosphere of poverty but the atmosphere of fear. His fellow workers were curiously mute about their jobs; he was sure there were many grievances, but almost none of them were ever articulated. Indeed, it was a mark of the company at that time that if a man was unhappy and he sensed that a coworker was also unhappy, he would not, as in most other places of work, seek out that kindred spirit; rather he would stay as far away from him as possible for fear of being accused of politicizing discontent and forming a clique. Umetani thought his fellow Japanese workers were in many ways thoroughly admirable. But he also thought their participation in programs like quality control was less voluntary than many people liked to think. They participated not just because they wanted to but at least in part because they were afraid not to.

  About a year after Umetani joined Nissan and confronted Shioji, Shioji and his people made a move on him. The union officials knew that Umetani was more intelligent than most other workers and that he was a holdout, at least spiritually, from the authority of the union. One day he was summoned to a meeting with the local union people. He was smart and skilled, they said; therefore they wanted him to run for union representative. He knew immediately that they had been shrewd enough to understand his doubts and that he was being tested, that they were calling on him to decide, one way or another, what his course was. The union, as far as he was concerned, did not so much represent the workers to the company as it delivered the workers to the company. The workers might get some benefits from their participation, for the salaries were by now acceptable, but the union was about political control more than anything else. He turned down the offer to run for union office, knowing that as he did, his career at Nissan was ruined. He got out of Nissan as quickly as he could, and he went ahead with plans to get a graduate degree and teach. He thought he was exceptionally lucky, for it was a rare man in Japan who was able to get out of a job in a big company and go on to something different and more satisfying. Most of his colleagues were not so fortunate. Many of them for whom the work and the workplace were intolerable simply slipped away into the night, to less remunerative but more congenial work; others, for whom the paycheck was critical, simply drowned their grievance in alcohol each night.
Some fifteen years later, long after he had become a professor, Umetani ran into Shioji at a conference. “I used to work for you at one time,” Umetani said.

  Shioji gave him a very long look and said, “So you’re one of the ones who escaped.” It was a cool look, not at all friendly, Umetani thought. It was clear to him that Shioji did not like men who had escaped from his net.

  It was Nissan’s merger with Prince, another auto company, that showed just how tough Shioji was and what a force he had become within not just the union but the company. Mergers were extremely rare in Japan, but this one was part of the rationalization being urged on the auto industry by the Ministry of Trade. MITI felt, somewhat justifiably, that there were too many domestic auto makers in Japan; it also felt that this would hurt the Japanese in their competition with the Americans. (Actually, the fact that there were many car makers made the competition so frenzied that when the Japanese finally met the Americans, their companies were leaner and tougher by virtue of the domestic struggle than the American companies, whose competition had become increasingly marginal and whose survival seemed almost government-guaranteed.) MITI’s request had generally fallen on deaf ears, except at Nissan and Prince. Nissan was delighted to go ahead; it wanted the extra financing that MITI would throw in as a sweetener. In addition, already short of facilities, Nissan coveted Prince’s two plants.

  But Prince was a weak and troubled company. While the Nissan people were merely contemptuous of the Prince management, they truly feared the Prince union, which they considered radical, far more like the old Masuda union than the new, more company-oriented unions that existed at the other major auto firms. The union affiliation of the Prince workers was to the Sohyo federation, thought to be left-wing and alienated, while Nissan employees belonged to Domei, which the industrialists regarded as more cooperative. Thus Shioji never considered any kind of amalgamation with the Prince union; instead from the start he sought to destroy it. The sides were never even. Prince was failing, and the Prince management desperately wanted the merger. That meant they were dealing with the Nissan executives hat in hand. In the negotiations between the two unions the Nissan union was backed completely by its management, while the Prince management, sensitive about offending its new partners, never helped its labor people.