Reckoning

by David Halberstam

  Takashi Suzuki, leader of the Prince union, had never seen anything like Shioji before. He walked into his first meeting with the Prince union people not like a labor leader but like a board member. He opened no doors himself. There was always someone to open a door. No one walked in front of him. Someone carried his attaché case. Even the way he introduced himself, saying only, “I am Shioji,” had a certain presumptive style, as if nothing else need be said. During the meetings he loved to come up with small errands on which he could dispatch any of the numerous assistants who were sitting around him. Everything was about the exercise of power. In all this confrontation between the two sides, Suzuki met Shioji only once, at a meeting early in the negotiations. “Shouldn’t we compare our records,” Suzuki suggested, “to find out how much each company pays?” Shioji grumbled his assent, but he was angry, and Suzuki knew immediately that he had made a mistake.

  The announcement of the merger came in May 1965. The Prince labor people at first were somewhat pleased by the news. Nissan was a stronger company, and that was an asset. The Prince union people had checked around and found that their own wages and benefits were greater than those of Nissan workers. That pleased them and made them confident of their ability to hold on to their own members and survive the merger in some form, but it also lulled them into complacency. As a result they had not done very much organizational work.

  The Nissan people, by contrast, had done a lot. Shioji had been through all this during the Masuda strike, and he had learned that the critical factor was organizational skill and peer pressure. He had notes on every worker at Prince, compiled with help from Prince labor executives who had switched over at the start, and with the aid of these notes he broke down the entire Prince work force into five categories. An A worker was already pro-Nissan and would work for Shioji. In the B category were men who were good workers and whose politics were coming around. The C workers were in the middle; attention had to be paid, for they could go either way, but they were generally solid workers. D workers were considered political and probably on the other side. Some of them might be flexible enough to come around, though if they did, it would be not until the end. E workers were the enemy, likely, in Shioji’s opinion, to be radicals or even covert Communists.

  The tactics were not unlike those used during the crushing of the Masuda union. The upper level of the Prince union, the executive board members, were taken to good restaurants, and they were promised a bright future in the new company if they cooperated and switched unions. If they did not, they would almost certainly be out of jobs. Shioji worked hardest on the leaders; he was sure if he reached them, the average workers would come along. His pitch was very elemental: At Nissan the union and the company were the same thing. Those who crossed Shioji were crossing Kawamata as well. Most got the message. Those leaders who resisted soon had toughs harassing them.

  As for the average workers, Shioji’s men simply took them to the local noodle shops and worked on them. There they suggested that when the merger was completed, perhaps not everyone who had worked at both companies would have a job. It was hard to tell about mergers, because they were funny, and there was likely to be a lot of overlap. In that case it would be a great mistake to be with the wrong union. The jobs would go to the men who came over to Shioji’s union; the good jobs would go to those who had come early and brought their friends. Loyalty was important at a great company like Nissan. Shioji’s people said they could understand resistance on the part of someone who did not intend to work at Nissan after the merger; but for anyone who wanted to keep a job, there was no point being in the Prince union. They would be out of jobs very quickly. Each worker who came over was asked to bring five colleagues with him to the next meeting. It was the same tactic that had worked before: an educational process, Shioji called it, the Nissan school. But it was more than a school, Suzuki thought, and he quite bitterly called it a “Nissan education.”

  It was over almost before Suzuki realized what had happened, that he had been caught asleep, and that he was fighting a brilliantly organized adversary. He tried to fight back and form an instant metalworkers school with which to indoctrinate his men, but it was too late. Even his best people were afraid to come. He tried to hand out leaflets exposing Nissan’s tactics and showing that the Prince workers had better contracts, but Shioji’s people intimidated his men and tore up the leaflets. None of the physical violence came from Shioji himself, and Shioji made no threats. But the threat of violence was always there, and the prospect was very real. Once when Suzuki started to protest to some of the Nissan people about their handling of his people, one of them, a real bully, turned to him and said, “Watch out or I put my hand in your mouth and shake you.” That was pure gangster talk, Suzuki thought. On another occasion Suzuki went to his own management people to ask for some help or at least some protection, but they simply turned away in embarrassment. He had disgraced them, he realized, by showing that they had failed, first in not running the company well enough to prevent the merger and second in not being able to protect their own working men as the merger was taking place.

  When it was all over Suzuki realized how skillfully it had been handled, that the man who had sat across from him was an immensely gifted organizer and a great street fighter. He was also hard and remorseless. He had absolutely destroyed the Prince union. Of Suzuki’s top policy group of eleven men, Shioji had captured five; of the even more important forty-five-man central deliberating body, which actually decided practical policy for the union, Shioji took forty-three. He had cut the core right out of Suzuki’s union. With that strength at the top it had been relatively easy to take over the rank and file. Of the 7500 workers, Shioji had gotten more than 7300 and left Suzuki with 150. Suzuki decided he had not been defeated so much as conquered. It was not just Shioji’s union, Suzuki finally decided, it was his company, and he was so good at it that the man he supported, Kawamata, probably never even knew it.

  Those were hard years for the workers at Nissan. The workplace had gone from chaos to absolute control, with no dissent possible. There was inevitably a considerable amount of grumbling among the hourly employees. But Sanosuke Tanaka, the worker who had left his village in Kamagawa prefecture before the war and had taken a job at Nissan and thus had been there for many years, was not very sympathetic to these complaints. He did not like it when younger workers would go out for drinks after work and criticize their working conditions and their lack of freedom. They were not respectful enough, he felt. Tanaka was convinced that this was a far better, more orderly company than it had been. What did these men want? This was not some club, this was a place where you went to work and made cars. No one had ever said it would be easy.

  Tanaka would not put up with complaints about the union either. He liked Shioji and trusted him, and he had in fact become one of Shioji’s most valued men. The longer Shioji ruled, the more committed to him Tanaka became. He had been relieved when the 1953 strike ended and Shioji won. It was not that he had preferred Miyake and Shioji to Masuda, not at that point, for he had not really known which of the two unions was telling the truth; everything that each of them said always sounded right to him. But there was no doubt in his mind that the Masuda union was causing disruption and was making it almost impossible for him to work, and so he had been quite willing to join the new union. He never knew Miyake very well, but he liked Shioji from the beginning, because Shioji was so confident.

  The younger workers did not know how lucky they were. They did not know how hard life could be. Sometimes he wanted to tell them that, and what he, Tanaka, knew about hardship and loneliness. His own brothers’ lives had been more difficult than his. One brother died in the war in China before he was thirty; another had wanted to farm but had ended up with such a small sliver of land and so much debt that he was forced to sell it right back to the landowners. But Tanaka did not argue with the younger workers. Sometimes after he left them he would wonder why they had come to work in the first place.
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  He was proud of what he had accomplished at Nissan and how successful he had become. During the 1953 strike he had hoped the company would do well once the strike was finished, and in fact he had been one of the early beneficiaries. In 1954, with Shioji’s help, he was able to borrow 200,000 yen, about $600, from the company, which he added to his modest savings and used to buy a house. The house was very small, but it was larger than his previous one, where all five family members were forced to sleep in one room. Now there were three rooms, and he and his wife had a room of their own. He regarded the ownership of the house as a major accomplishment, and he was sure that it made him seem worthier to the rest of his family. The food on the table was, he knew, better than what most of his neighbors were eating, and there was nothing now that his family needed that he was not able to buy for them. In 1957 he bought them a black-and-white television set. He was pleased with his life.

  1954 was probably the last year when he worried about the future of the company. The strike had so badly shaken the company that it was thinking of laying off two thousand workers. But the union intervened and suggested that wages for everyone be temporarily lowered so that no one would have to be laid off. That helped save jobs and strengthened loyalty to the union among many workers. To Tanaka it proved the union’s validity. Soon the company was doing well, and the wages were back to their normal levels. For a time Tanaka thought that there might be too little work, but in the late fifties, as Nissan began to become more prosperous, he wondered if the reverse was not more likely, that the danger might be too much work and too much pressure. Those years, the late fifties and the early sixties, he remembered as the most physically punishing in his life. His body was always sore. It was the moment when the company was exploding into the new age, expanding its production, changing its lines, and trying to modernize. The workers had to drive themselves to keep up with the machines. Each year, Tanaka remembered, they seemed to double the production of the previous year, and he would think, that is it, that is all a man can do, it is impossible for a man to do more. Then the next year they would double the production once again. He was proud of the fact that Nissan was becoming a modern company. In 1957 when they had finally gone to five thousand units a month there was a celebration and a 5000-yen bonus, and then a few years later, in 1960, when they reached ten thousand a month, there was a 10,000-yen bonus. He felt that he was a part of that victory. Ten thousand vehicles in one month! No one on the line really believed it could be done until they did it. They had gone out that night and had a few drinks, and they said to each other, as if repeating the unbelievable, Ten thousand cars a month.

  But the price was enormous. At first Tanaka welcomed the new machines that Nissan was installing on the line, not just because they were good for the company, a sign that the company was up-to-date, like the great companies in America, but also because he was sure it would make the life of the workers easier. That had not turned out to be true, however. Instead, those years of enormous growth proved even harder on the workers. There was always more to do, and it had to be done faster, in pace with the machines, which never tired. Always, just when you reached what you thought was your absolute limit, some young management man came along and set even higher goals. These young men seemed to Tanaka to be like people from a different planet. The work they were discussing had nothing to do with the work he did. The work they talked about was easy and comfortable and painless and above all logical. They were very polite as they outlined what they needed, and they talked about the good of the company and the exports to America. He wondered if they really knew what they were asking for. Words were so easy for them, but when he had to carry out their instructions, it was so much more difficult than the mere words implied. Sometimes he wondered if the management realized that there were limits to what human beings could bear. I am not a machine! he wanted to scream.

  The company was changing fast. He knew hardly any of the faces anymore, and sometimes, looking around him at work, he no longer felt that he was in an old familiar place surrounded by trusted colleagues; he might have been in some train station at rush hour. At the beginning of the decade of the sixties there had been around seven thousand workers, and by the end of the decade there were sixty thousand. Once he had known and liked almost everyone he worked with. Then almost overnight it was as if he did not know anyone in the company. Now he could no longer depend on his colleagues. The company was expanding so quickly that it was hiring all kinds of untrained, incompetent workers. Tanaka and his friends, the few old-timers left, liked to joke about the newly hired.

  “Why was he hired?” one would ask.

  “Because he was alive,” came the answer.

  “What makes them so sure of that?”

  The turnover was incredible. People were coming in on Monday morning, and Tanaka barely had time to learn their names when, by the end of the week, they were gone—gone, Tanaka liked to say, before they even had time to find out what they didn’t like about the job. The turnover in the middle of the sixties was almost 90 percent annually. At one point, Tanaka remembered, some three thousand young trainees joined the company at once, none of them with any experience. He was now the section chief, so he had to teach them. He did not mind teaching them; it was exhausting, but if the company told him it was his duty, then he accepted it. What he minded was that it was so wasteful, for these young men were not serious. They would accept their lessons and their first paychecks and then quit. It was like dealing with intruders in your own home, and he disliked that. When Tanaka talked about the job, he was talking about something he loved. Yet he could see in their eyes that it did not matter to them.

  Management kept apologizing to him for sending him so many green kids, explaining that the company could no longer find the workers it wanted. Management was wary of city boys, because they were likely to be spoiled and sophisticated. Anyone who was ambitious and intelligent and who was from the city would not work in an auto plant for long. City boys complained too much and caused problems and tended to be political. The ideal worker as far as management was concerned was a country boy, ambitious (but not too ambitious), with a ninth-grade education. That description fit men like Tanaka. Even young men from the rural areas were often a problem if they had graduated from high school. They seemed grateful for the job at first, and the salaries seemed immense to them in comparison to what they might make back home in Kyushu. But by the end of six months they were always complaining about how boring the work was, and many would quit and go back home and to do something else. So ninth-graders it was, neither more education nor less than that. This was, of course, what every other major industrial company had also discovered, and so there was an intense search for these solid, trusting, somewhat malleable young men. Golden eggs, the executives at Nissan called them, because they were so scarce. There were never enough. In desperation, the company began to hire more high school graduates and to pay them more. As a means of making the job more interesting and giving the workers more sense of community, it organized quality-control circles—discussion groups—throughout the plants. They took some of the impersonality out of the job and were as much an attempt to improve the social fabric of the workplace as to improve quality.

  All of this pressure was becoming a psychological strain on the foremen as well as a physical one. Once a manager came to Tanaka’s friend the foreman Saburo Watanabe and chastised him. “You have the most inefficient operation in all of the Orient,” the manager said, and Watanabe apologized and said that he would work hard to make it only the most inefficient shop in all of Japan. At night, men like Tanaka and Watanabe and their friend Tadayoshi Enju would sit around and talk about how difficult it was to work with such green help. They spent so much time training, replacing, and training again that they were barely able to do their own work. That wasn’t all. Under the pressure the machines were frequently breaking down, and because most of the workers were new, it was again the older hands who were having to do much of the repai
r work.

  But in all his travail Tanaka always remembered that he was working for one of the most important companies in Japan, that his work was appreciated (he had a house, a television set, and all kinds of new appliances to show for it), and that he was making Japanese cars that were now being bought by people in faraway places like America. His superiors kept talking about that all the time, that Americans were buying these cars, and that they were in a great competition not just with Toyota, but with Ford and General Motors as well. Tanaka understood that he had a personal obligation—he had to excel and to make those cars even better. A great deal depended upon him and the men underneath him.

  In 1963 he became a real consumer, no longer just a laborer but a member of Japan’s middle class, for that year Sanosuke Tanaka, former indentured peasant, bought his first car. It was a Nissan car, of course, a Bluebird. He had owned a motorcycle for several years, but he had always wanted a car, for commuting to work and for taking his family for rides. A car would make him a completely free man, free to go where he wanted to go. In 1963 the company announced that those in certain levels of management, the kachos and above, could apply to buy cars. Tanaka was a section chief, a kakaricho, technically below the required level, but since he had the same qualifications as a manager, he was permitted to apply. He wondered for a time whether he was being presumptuous in applying, since in those days only the richest and most powerful people owned cars. But then he decided he was a Nissan worker and it was a good thing for a worker to own a car; it would show the other workers that they did not have to be rich executives to have a good life. The car was expensive for a working man, but because Tanaka did not smoke and rarely drank, he had some savings. On an overall price of 680,000 yen (roughly $1800) he made a down payment of 150,000 yen. The rest came from his salary; it took two years to pay off what he owed. In order to own a car he had to show that he had a place to garage it. Though he did not have a garage himself, there was an old farmhouse about a hundred yards from him. The owner was a friend, and he allowed Tanaka to build a small shack at the corner to house the car. Tanaka built it himself with the help of a friend. As soon as he could after receiving the car, he drove his entire family to Kawasaki Taishi, a famous shrine. There he prayed for the safety of his family and the car, and the priest chanted to get all the devils away so that they would never have any accidents. For 1500 yen he also bought a charm at the shrine which he hung in the car to prevent accidents. Twenty years later he was convinced he had done the right thing, for there had been no accidents. He was not sure which gave him more pleasure, the freedom that the car offered to go and come as he pleased, or the pride he felt that he, a poor workingman, had earned so extraordinary a vehicle in his lifetime.