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ahorbinskiBibliographic Data: Gordon, Andrew. Labor and Imperial Democracy in Prewar Japan. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1991.
Main Argument: Gordon argues that, rather than seeing a movement for "Taishô democracy" that began in 1905 and climaxed in 1918 (though mass male suffrage was not achieved until 1925), paying attention to "the history of workers, the urban poor, and the urban crowd" (2) shows that the movement for democratization in early 20thC Japan is better understood as what Gordon terms "imperial democracy," and that this movement "grew out of a profound transformation of society" (2-3) that was not limited to the urban bourgeoise.
Historiographical Engagement: Gordon is engaging with and arguing against the Japanese historiography of Taishô democracy. Although some Western scholars are cited in the footnotes, the fact that at the time most Western historians did not take the democracy movement in prewar 20thC Japan seriously means that Gordon does not have much to discuss with them.
Introduction: Argument, Sources, Examples After outlining his main argument, Gordon moves on to outlining his objectives: first, "to understand the political role that woking men and women have played in twentieth-century Japan" and "to reconstruct the intellectual world of factory laborers" (3). In this, Gordon argues against both what he calls "culturalism" but which I might simply call the racist, Orientalist idea that all of Japanese culture at all times can be reduced to any set of essential characteristics, as well as against "market and Marxists perspectives", i.e. that they were universally perfect rational economic actors or that they were universally perfect workers out of Marxist dialectical central casting. Gordon's' second objective is to devise an interpretation of Japanese political history from 1905 to 1940 that takes labor into account, as well as moves beyond the framework of "Taishô democracy," which he calls "chronologically inaccurate and analytically empty" (5). The essential problem with "Taishô democracy" as a framework is that it discredits the popular desire for democracy and founders on the fact that democratic rule in Japan collapsed in the 1930s. Looking at the period from 1905-40 as "imperial democracy" allows us to see all these facts, not in opposition, but as internal contradictions, and also "indicates the dynamic links both backward and forward in time from the era of imperial democracy itself (1905-32)" (8). Finally, "the concept of imperial democracy distinguishes the movements of the bourgeoisie, focused on their political parties, and the movements of workers or poor farmers, focused on unions and 'proletarian parties,' more effectively than the construct of Taishô democracy" (8).
Part 1: Argument, Sources, Examples Chapters 1-4 These four chapters cover "The Crowd and Labor in the Movement for Imperial Democracy, 1905-18", Gordon covers the roots and rise of the imperial democracy movement and the rising prominence of the labor movement within it. It is important to recognize that the imperial democracy movement was very much an unintended consequence of modernization: "Put simply, by establishing an emperor-centered constitutional order, promoting a capitalist, industrializing economy, and leading Japan to imperial power in Asia, the imperial bureaucrats of Meiji unwittingly provoked the movement for imperial democracy" (15). Specifically, the efforts to create a kokumin, a national people sensible of its obligations as subjects under the emperor-centered constitution, brought mass education and mass literacy, and thus created a large readership for newspapers. (Remember what Thomas Jefferson had to say about newspapers.) At the same time, the expansion of industrial capitalism after the end of the Sino-Japanese War created a growing population of urban wage laborers, who were mostly male, as well as a concomitantly growing urban petite bourgeoisie. Imperialism played its part in that it cost a lot, and urban residents footed an increasing share of the tax bill. Imperialism also swelled the shipyards via government subsidies, and thus the population of workers within them, even as parades celebrating imperialism provided a precedent for urban gatherings for other purposes.
Chapter Two covers Japan's "era of popular violence," the years from 1905-18, when frequent and frequently massive riots, as well as the assemblies that spawned them, articulated a vision of government that did not conform to that of the imperial bureaucracy: namely, a structure that put into practice both the will of the emperor and of the people. This era of popular violence was distinctive both temporally (the last riots had been in 1860s Edo, and there were no more citywide riots after 1918), socially (in that from 1905-18 "the crowd had a uniquely heterogeneous social base and voiced a distinctive ideology of populist nationalism" (32)), politically (rioters in this period attacked both police boxes and government offices), and organizationally, in that they followed a distinctive pattern: political organizing, collective assembly, and violent action. The rioters composed a broad cross-section of lower- and some middle-class urbanites, while the professional classes were the leaders who gave speeches at the rallies they had organized. Trials of rioters in 1914 reveal that the bridge between these two groups was an ad hoc group of "sub leaders," people with connections to national leadership but also firmly of the populace, whose roles were thrust upon them as much as they were self-selected. When tried, all would deny their political consciousness, saying that they were swept up by the crowd and/or by sake, astutely choosing the most tenable line of defense. Rioters in general frequently denied any political consciousness, statements belied by their own interest in the events that brought them there. This interest was in part stimulated by the theatrical aspect of the assemblies and riots, which relied upon a coherent set of political symbols derived from the mythology of the imperial nation. Locations such as Hibiya Park were themselves largely predictable as well, in part because explicitly public spaces were a priori associated with the Meiji state. The crowd also shared a set of concerns: "(1) fairness and respect for the common good, (2) freedom of action, assembly, and expression, (3) respect for the 'will of the people,' and, embracing all these, (4) 'constitutional' political behavior" (53). These did not necessarily guarantee support for party government, and this disjuncture between elite leadership and lower- and middle-class crowd grew wider as the era of popular violence led to its close with the formation of the Hara Kei cabinet in September 1918.
Chapter Three covers the rise of labor disputes and labor unions from 1897 to 1917, which was itself a vital part of the movement for imperial democracy. In the first generation, workers' attitudes were shaped by gender, nationalism, and pre capitalist attitudes and actions, but "workers gradually learned to carry out labor disputes of increasing sophistication" (64). Although workers in traditional trades had considerable leverage vis-a-vis employers even in the 1890s, it was the new tradition of protest that evolved in the worksites of industrial capital that eventually merged with the union movement. "Nonunion strikes and resistance to new management policy thus had roots in the changing nature of social relations in the workplace and the production process, as well as in preindustrial social values, traditions of protest, and concerns with social status" (79).
Chapter Four focuses on building a labor movement via the workers of Nankatsu, the heavily industrialized, polluted, and poor neighborhoods of the shitamachi across the river from Asakusa and Nihonbashi, and the Yûaikai, the first major labor organization in prewar Japan and, lasting from 1912-40 in various incarnations, its longest-lived. The Yûaikai benefitted from burgeoning mass literacy as well as Japanese imperialism, which greatly enlarged the number of Japanese industrial workers even as it shrank the proportion of female textile workers, who were legally barred from political activity. Even as managers sought to impose direct control, workers' consciousness of themselves qua workers and qua urban imperial political subjects grew. Drawing extensively on labor archives, Gordon shows that the union message was most successful at large factories, and that the message constituted "the simple promise of recognition, respect, and community" (98). Despite the energy of early worker organization and the lower-class elements of the crowd, their actions were not enough to win political rights that matched their political obligations, or government relief from what elites called "the social problem." Instead, the elite members of the movement for imperial democracy were able to harness fear of the crowd to officially enter government.
Part 2: Argument, Sources, Examples Chapters 5-8 - These chapters examine "Labor Under Imperial Democratic Rule." The advent of party government in 1918 "produced an amalgam: an increasingly and uneasily partisan bureaucracy, increasingly bureaucratic parties, and a less obstreperous military" (126). The two political parties that contested in the era of party government, the Seiyûkai and the Kenseikai/Minseitô, articulated two differing visions of the boundaries of legitimate political participation: the Seiyûkai a conservative vision that denied labor rights and advocated a gradualist approach to suffrage, and the Kenseikai a more liberal idea that had space for union organization as well as both male and female suffrage. The crucial point is that the Kenseikai, ascendant from 1925-32, failed to write its ideals into law despite popular support for them, and perhaps because of elite challenges to them.
Chapter Six uses labor archives to look at the "Nuclei of the Workers' Movement." After 1923, labor activity spread beyond the largest factories to "the small- and medium-scale segment of Nankatsu's denser, more diverse postwar industrial structure" (146). In this period the workers' movement encompassed three separate strands: radical intellectuals, Yûaikai moderate reformers, and workplace activists, and ideological and organizational tensions cross-cut each other. This period saw significant grown in the phenomenon of factory unions, which has been a significant feature of Japan's late-developing capitalism: worker consciousness developed in factories, and factories consequently became natural strategic organizing units. It was also marked by cohesive organizing and "diverse, creative activities" (170), but "emerging networks of formal institutions such as unions, aid societies, cooperatives and newspapers" (175) was only able to partially harness workers' desires for reform, even as unions became increasingly common and the "dispute culture" that supported them and dispute activities became more widespread.
Chapter Seven covers "The Labor Offensive in Nankatsu, 1924-29," looking at the years after the devastating 1923 Kantô earthquake, which, as natural disasters so often do in Japanese history, "marked a turning point in the history of the nation's labor movement and in labor's relation to the state" (177). Greater government tolerance enabled labor to broaden its support base and to experience concomitant greater success. Overcoming the officially sanctioned and planned murders of the Amakasu and Kameido incidents, in which police and higher officials used the opportunity of the earthquake "to purge society of men and women defined as outlaws" (181), labor unions grew and diversified, by 1927 forming three major camps: right, left, and center, and disputes became common parts of factory life. Crucially, however, these unions were still mostly tied to factories, and these organizations were highly volatile: unions existed to foment disputes, rather than disputes existing as an effect of unions. Disputes, in Gordon's telling, were the key working-class institution, not unions themselves.
Chapter Eight covers "Working-Class Political Culture under Imperial Democracy," using surviving union pamphlets and publications. In Gordon's telling, while we are accustomed to thinking of strikes being conducted over one of three things (wages, conditions, benefits), Japanese workers in this period were concerned with equality of treatment and respect from employers and transformation of the workplace community, i.e. greater unity among workers. Workers were normally regarded as social inferiors, and thus their demands for equality of treatment were not unradical. The flip side of this, as Gordon notes, was a persistent sense among workers of their own low status as well as antagonism towards management. At the same time, by the end of the decade, workers had begun to adopt formerly middle- and upper-class customs such as exchanging New Year's visits in a firm assertion of their equality of status. As this ideology spread among workers, more of them were more likely to join unions, to go on strike, and to win concessions from management. In this period radicals influenced by the works of Marx and Lenin also began to agitate for socialist revolution, which fit uneasily with the aspirations of most workers. This uneasy fit, however, was not unusual among workers of any country; taken together, recent historiography on Europe and the Americas shows that, as in Japan, "workers, while degraded and threatened by the process of capitalist industrialization, were never so atomized, alienated, or proletarianized as to lose connections with the past (older forms of crowd behavior) or one another (family, community). Rather, they resisted the tendency of the new engines of accumulation of the industrial revolution to make them rootless, dependent, or helpless" (209).
Part 3: Argument, Sources, Examples Chapters 9-11 These chapters cover "The Collapse of Imperial Democracy," a depressing story that has been told elsewhere, although not necessarily from this perspective. Chapter Nine covers "The Depression and the Workers' Movement," and Gordon begins by correctly calling the successor regime to the imperial democratic ideology and government structure "fascist," noting that "the regime shared with the two European cases [Germany and Italy] the objective of funneling the energies of a glorified national body (whether the Volk or the Yamato race) into a quest for military hegemony, autarchic economic empire, and an antidemocratic, hierarchic new political and economic order at home" (237). The political movements that produced these regimes differed, but the general historical contexts were fundamentally similar. In Japan, the depression sharply increased social conflict in Nankatsu and other industrialized areas of Japan's major cities, polarizing the local business elite against workers and giving elites the pervasive fear that the social order was in genuine crisis. Increasing violence in labor disputes, and the increasing participation of women, which was seen as wildly radical, led to the impressions among management that unions had begun to foment strikes for the sake of spreading chaos, that the class that was the "mainstay" of the nation (i.e. themselves) "was crumbing in the face of depression, disputes, and foolish liberal policies" (250), and causing them to lose "confidence in their ability to handle the labor problem unaided by the state" (251). Crucially, at the same time that management was long confidence in itself, right-wing grassroots political parties and "anti-union" unions enjoyed an upswing in working class support, eroding working-class confidence in the bourgeois parties that comprised the parliamentary system. The inability of the Minseitô party cabinet to control the army led to the Manchurian Incident of September 1931, and by May 1932, when the prime minister was assassinated, the military simply refused to let the Seiyûkai form a cabinet. The elite consensus and popular support for imperial democracy had crumbled, leading many to conclude that "the abandonment of democratic political rule was needed to preserve empire and social order" (269).
Chapter Ten covers "The Social Movement Transformed, 1932-35." Although sources are not extensive, it is clear that both unions and the proletarian parties were in retreat in these years due to the consequences of the end of imperial democracy: intensified surveillance and repression combined with popular nationalism to isolate these organizations, as well as the political left in general. Those unions and political parties that survived adopted their ideology such that, although class divisions remained, by 1936 the possibility of "any fundamental challenge to capitalism, the emperor, the empire, or the military" had been ruled out (292). Japan's rulers did not realize this, or the fact that they had gotten themselves into a ratcheting spiral: "each new step abroad intensified the perceived need for unity, order, and control at home" (ibid).
Chapter Eleven covers "Imperial Fascism, 1935-40." Ironically, both labor and the proletarian parties enjoyed renewed success in the mid-1930s; 1937 would have been an all-time high of labor disputes in Japan if not for the outbreak of war with China. At the same time, however, the fact that the bureaucratic-military state allowed the parties no role in government, and that it intervened both to shape political discourse and to shape the polity and elections at unprecedented levels. There was very little, and eventually no, criticism of the bureaucratic-military state because the state would not allow it, and also no "political" (i.e. non-state approved) discussion of the emperor. The state also got into the business of social organizations, and in particular it reorganized organized labor along the exact same lines as Nazi Germany, seeking a classless national community based on mythic traditional models--and indeed, Japan explicitly learned from Germany and Italy, because Japan saw itself as facing similar problems and in a similar position (especially vis-a-vis the Anglo-American-led international order) as those two powers. By 1940, political parties' acceptance of the New Order meant that they had "abandoned their role as representatives of popular interests for that of transmitters of state interests to the people" meant that the era of imperial democracy in Japan was truly finished. Instead, imperial bureaucrats in conjunction with the military sought to link people directly to the emperor and the state via state-created organizations.
Conclusion: Argument, Sources, Examples Gordon uses the conclusion to argue against the tired "Western impact, Japanese response" theory of Japanese historiography outside of Japan, as well as against the suspiciously hasty rush to explain away Japan from 1931-45 as somehow not fascist. It was fascist, and the fact that it was not exactly the same as Germany or Italy does not change the fact, or the implicit Eurocentrism and explicit nominalism of those who would try to argue otherwise. Such wrong-headed arguments have also relied on comparing Japanese outcomes to German and Italian intentions, which is just bizarre as well as highly questionable. Finally, proper attention to all of these societies reveals that, in the postwar experience of these countries, continuities with prewar experiences helped shape developments.
Critical assessment: Gordon is essentially telling a story of a tripod structure (workers and their parties, the elites and their parties, and the bureaucracy)--and we should remember from Dune the mentat's dictum that a tripod is the most unstable of political structures. Gordon's problem, though, is that in his telling the bureaucracy is MIA in the second part of the book, which profoundly unbalances the work as a whole and makes the bureaucracy's central role in the third part seem to come out of nowhere. Despite this structural weakness, I think Gordon's framework of "imperial democracy" and his criticisms of "Taishô democracy" are both essentially sound.
I've previously read Gordon's history of modern Japan and his book on postwar labor, and despite Gordon's self-deprecating comments in the latter about wanting to write a book that his family could read and understand, one of the things I appreciated most about the volume in question right off the bat is how very readable it is. Gordon writes astonishingly well, and he makes his arguments forcefully but not stridently. I should pay attention.
I'm less bothered than most by quibbles about why Gordon chose Nankatsu or his - sensible, I think - refusal to get bogged down in the nitpicky definitionism that has hobbled historiography of earlier eras. Indeed, I think the central strength of this book - and the reason it deservedly won the (ironically named in this case) Fairbank Prize - is Gordon's willingness to look beyond the narrow confines of his subject and see how the Tokyo mobility, workers in Tokyo and throughout Japan, and finally elites of all stripes interacted together in a complex cauldron of forces to produce first imperial democracy and then imperial fascism. The point of this book is not actually about labor or economic history per se; it's about how those two forces, and the vectors they produced in society as a whole, drove the political history of imperial Japan. Missing that aspect of the story is deeply problematic.
I appreciated too Gordon's willingness to justifiably castigate espousers of nominalism and impact-response theory, who would deny Japan its place among fascist countries of the 1930s and 1940s and think that only outside forces can get Japan to do anything. It occurred to me while reading that, in addition to being historiographically untenable and deeply biased, the refusal to call a spade a spade in the case of Japanese fascism actually blunts the analytical usefulness of that concept, since Japanese democracy was vitiated and the country turned fascist without a charismatic maniac, unlike Germany and Italy. If it's that easy, we should all be more attentive to how and why imperial fascism was produced, not less.
My sense is that the dial on this question has moved somewhat since Gordon wrote this book, and I would guess that Labor and Imperial Democracy in Prewar Japan is itself a large part of the reason why that is. The question of fascism remains, I think, one of the most vexed for the academy as a whole - witness the abandon with which some giants in the field of Japanese history threw the term around during the Bush years - and Gordon's approach offers a nice corrective to that sort of willy-nilly approach. All in all, this is an excellent book, and deservedly a classic.
Further reading: E.P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class
Meta notes: Thompson's Luddite workers are an anomaly, not a prototype.
Main Argument: Gordon argues that, rather than seeing a movement for "Taishô democracy" that began in 1905 and climaxed in 1918 (though mass male suffrage was not achieved until 1925), paying attention to "the history of workers, the urban poor, and the urban crowd" (2) shows that the movement for democratization in early 20thC Japan is better understood as what Gordon terms "imperial democracy," and that this movement "grew out of a profound transformation of society" (2-3) that was not limited to the urban bourgeoise.
Historiographical Engagement: Gordon is engaging with and arguing against the Japanese historiography of Taishô democracy. Although some Western scholars are cited in the footnotes, the fact that at the time most Western historians did not take the democracy movement in prewar 20thC Japan seriously means that Gordon does not have much to discuss with them.
Introduction: Argument, Sources, Examples After outlining his main argument, Gordon moves on to outlining his objectives: first, "to understand the political role that woking men and women have played in twentieth-century Japan" and "to reconstruct the intellectual world of factory laborers" (3). In this, Gordon argues against both what he calls "culturalism" but which I might simply call the racist, Orientalist idea that all of Japanese culture at all times can be reduced to any set of essential characteristics, as well as against "market and Marxists perspectives", i.e. that they were universally perfect rational economic actors or that they were universally perfect workers out of Marxist dialectical central casting. Gordon's' second objective is to devise an interpretation of Japanese political history from 1905 to 1940 that takes labor into account, as well as moves beyond the framework of "Taishô democracy," which he calls "chronologically inaccurate and analytically empty" (5). The essential problem with "Taishô democracy" as a framework is that it discredits the popular desire for democracy and founders on the fact that democratic rule in Japan collapsed in the 1930s. Looking at the period from 1905-40 as "imperial democracy" allows us to see all these facts, not in opposition, but as internal contradictions, and also "indicates the dynamic links both backward and forward in time from the era of imperial democracy itself (1905-32)" (8). Finally, "the concept of imperial democracy distinguishes the movements of the bourgeoisie, focused on their political parties, and the movements of workers or poor farmers, focused on unions and 'proletarian parties,' more effectively than the construct of Taishô democracy" (8).
Part 1: Argument, Sources, Examples Chapters 1-4 These four chapters cover "The Crowd and Labor in the Movement for Imperial Democracy, 1905-18", Gordon covers the roots and rise of the imperial democracy movement and the rising prominence of the labor movement within it. It is important to recognize that the imperial democracy movement was very much an unintended consequence of modernization: "Put simply, by establishing an emperor-centered constitutional order, promoting a capitalist, industrializing economy, and leading Japan to imperial power in Asia, the imperial bureaucrats of Meiji unwittingly provoked the movement for imperial democracy" (15). Specifically, the efforts to create a kokumin, a national people sensible of its obligations as subjects under the emperor-centered constitution, brought mass education and mass literacy, and thus created a large readership for newspapers. (Remember what Thomas Jefferson had to say about newspapers.) At the same time, the expansion of industrial capitalism after the end of the Sino-Japanese War created a growing population of urban wage laborers, who were mostly male, as well as a concomitantly growing urban petite bourgeoisie. Imperialism played its part in that it cost a lot, and urban residents footed an increasing share of the tax bill. Imperialism also swelled the shipyards via government subsidies, and thus the population of workers within them, even as parades celebrating imperialism provided a precedent for urban gatherings for other purposes.
Chapter Two covers Japan's "era of popular violence," the years from 1905-18, when frequent and frequently massive riots, as well as the assemblies that spawned them, articulated a vision of government that did not conform to that of the imperial bureaucracy: namely, a structure that put into practice both the will of the emperor and of the people. This era of popular violence was distinctive both temporally (the last riots had been in 1860s Edo, and there were no more citywide riots after 1918), socially (in that from 1905-18 "the crowd had a uniquely heterogeneous social base and voiced a distinctive ideology of populist nationalism" (32)), politically (rioters in this period attacked both police boxes and government offices), and organizationally, in that they followed a distinctive pattern: political organizing, collective assembly, and violent action. The rioters composed a broad cross-section of lower- and some middle-class urbanites, while the professional classes were the leaders who gave speeches at the rallies they had organized. Trials of rioters in 1914 reveal that the bridge between these two groups was an ad hoc group of "sub leaders," people with connections to national leadership but also firmly of the populace, whose roles were thrust upon them as much as they were self-selected. When tried, all would deny their political consciousness, saying that they were swept up by the crowd and/or by sake, astutely choosing the most tenable line of defense. Rioters in general frequently denied any political consciousness, statements belied by their own interest in the events that brought them there. This interest was in part stimulated by the theatrical aspect of the assemblies and riots, which relied upon a coherent set of political symbols derived from the mythology of the imperial nation. Locations such as Hibiya Park were themselves largely predictable as well, in part because explicitly public spaces were a priori associated with the Meiji state. The crowd also shared a set of concerns: "(1) fairness and respect for the common good, (2) freedom of action, assembly, and expression, (3) respect for the 'will of the people,' and, embracing all these, (4) 'constitutional' political behavior" (53). These did not necessarily guarantee support for party government, and this disjuncture between elite leadership and lower- and middle-class crowd grew wider as the era of popular violence led to its close with the formation of the Hara Kei cabinet in September 1918.
Chapter Three covers the rise of labor disputes and labor unions from 1897 to 1917, which was itself a vital part of the movement for imperial democracy. In the first generation, workers' attitudes were shaped by gender, nationalism, and pre capitalist attitudes and actions, but "workers gradually learned to carry out labor disputes of increasing sophistication" (64). Although workers in traditional trades had considerable leverage vis-a-vis employers even in the 1890s, it was the new tradition of protest that evolved in the worksites of industrial capital that eventually merged with the union movement. "Nonunion strikes and resistance to new management policy thus had roots in the changing nature of social relations in the workplace and the production process, as well as in preindustrial social values, traditions of protest, and concerns with social status" (79).
Chapter Four focuses on building a labor movement via the workers of Nankatsu, the heavily industrialized, polluted, and poor neighborhoods of the shitamachi across the river from Asakusa and Nihonbashi, and the Yûaikai, the first major labor organization in prewar Japan and, lasting from 1912-40 in various incarnations, its longest-lived. The Yûaikai benefitted from burgeoning mass literacy as well as Japanese imperialism, which greatly enlarged the number of Japanese industrial workers even as it shrank the proportion of female textile workers, who were legally barred from political activity. Even as managers sought to impose direct control, workers' consciousness of themselves qua workers and qua urban imperial political subjects grew. Drawing extensively on labor archives, Gordon shows that the union message was most successful at large factories, and that the message constituted "the simple promise of recognition, respect, and community" (98). Despite the energy of early worker organization and the lower-class elements of the crowd, their actions were not enough to win political rights that matched their political obligations, or government relief from what elites called "the social problem." Instead, the elite members of the movement for imperial democracy were able to harness fear of the crowd to officially enter government.
Part 2: Argument, Sources, Examples Chapters 5-8 - These chapters examine "Labor Under Imperial Democratic Rule." The advent of party government in 1918 "produced an amalgam: an increasingly and uneasily partisan bureaucracy, increasingly bureaucratic parties, and a less obstreperous military" (126). The two political parties that contested in the era of party government, the Seiyûkai and the Kenseikai/Minseitô, articulated two differing visions of the boundaries of legitimate political participation: the Seiyûkai a conservative vision that denied labor rights and advocated a gradualist approach to suffrage, and the Kenseikai a more liberal idea that had space for union organization as well as both male and female suffrage. The crucial point is that the Kenseikai, ascendant from 1925-32, failed to write its ideals into law despite popular support for them, and perhaps because of elite challenges to them.
Chapter Six uses labor archives to look at the "Nuclei of the Workers' Movement." After 1923, labor activity spread beyond the largest factories to "the small- and medium-scale segment of Nankatsu's denser, more diverse postwar industrial structure" (146). In this period the workers' movement encompassed three separate strands: radical intellectuals, Yûaikai moderate reformers, and workplace activists, and ideological and organizational tensions cross-cut each other. This period saw significant grown in the phenomenon of factory unions, which has been a significant feature of Japan's late-developing capitalism: worker consciousness developed in factories, and factories consequently became natural strategic organizing units. It was also marked by cohesive organizing and "diverse, creative activities" (170), but "emerging networks of formal institutions such as unions, aid societies, cooperatives and newspapers" (175) was only able to partially harness workers' desires for reform, even as unions became increasingly common and the "dispute culture" that supported them and dispute activities became more widespread.
Chapter Seven covers "The Labor Offensive in Nankatsu, 1924-29," looking at the years after the devastating 1923 Kantô earthquake, which, as natural disasters so often do in Japanese history, "marked a turning point in the history of the nation's labor movement and in labor's relation to the state" (177). Greater government tolerance enabled labor to broaden its support base and to experience concomitant greater success. Overcoming the officially sanctioned and planned murders of the Amakasu and Kameido incidents, in which police and higher officials used the opportunity of the earthquake "to purge society of men and women defined as outlaws" (181), labor unions grew and diversified, by 1927 forming three major camps: right, left, and center, and disputes became common parts of factory life. Crucially, however, these unions were still mostly tied to factories, and these organizations were highly volatile: unions existed to foment disputes, rather than disputes existing as an effect of unions. Disputes, in Gordon's telling, were the key working-class institution, not unions themselves.
Chapter Eight covers "Working-Class Political Culture under Imperial Democracy," using surviving union pamphlets and publications. In Gordon's telling, while we are accustomed to thinking of strikes being conducted over one of three things (wages, conditions, benefits), Japanese workers in this period were concerned with equality of treatment and respect from employers and transformation of the workplace community, i.e. greater unity among workers. Workers were normally regarded as social inferiors, and thus their demands for equality of treatment were not unradical. The flip side of this, as Gordon notes, was a persistent sense among workers of their own low status as well as antagonism towards management. At the same time, by the end of the decade, workers had begun to adopt formerly middle- and upper-class customs such as exchanging New Year's visits in a firm assertion of their equality of status. As this ideology spread among workers, more of them were more likely to join unions, to go on strike, and to win concessions from management. In this period radicals influenced by the works of Marx and Lenin also began to agitate for socialist revolution, which fit uneasily with the aspirations of most workers. This uneasy fit, however, was not unusual among workers of any country; taken together, recent historiography on Europe and the Americas shows that, as in Japan, "workers, while degraded and threatened by the process of capitalist industrialization, were never so atomized, alienated, or proletarianized as to lose connections with the past (older forms of crowd behavior) or one another (family, community). Rather, they resisted the tendency of the new engines of accumulation of the industrial revolution to make them rootless, dependent, or helpless" (209).
Part 3: Argument, Sources, Examples Chapters 9-11 These chapters cover "The Collapse of Imperial Democracy," a depressing story that has been told elsewhere, although not necessarily from this perspective. Chapter Nine covers "The Depression and the Workers' Movement," and Gordon begins by correctly calling the successor regime to the imperial democratic ideology and government structure "fascist," noting that "the regime shared with the two European cases [Germany and Italy] the objective of funneling the energies of a glorified national body (whether the Volk or the Yamato race) into a quest for military hegemony, autarchic economic empire, and an antidemocratic, hierarchic new political and economic order at home" (237). The political movements that produced these regimes differed, but the general historical contexts were fundamentally similar. In Japan, the depression sharply increased social conflict in Nankatsu and other industrialized areas of Japan's major cities, polarizing the local business elite against workers and giving elites the pervasive fear that the social order was in genuine crisis. Increasing violence in labor disputes, and the increasing participation of women, which was seen as wildly radical, led to the impressions among management that unions had begun to foment strikes for the sake of spreading chaos, that the class that was the "mainstay" of the nation (i.e. themselves) "was crumbing in the face of depression, disputes, and foolish liberal policies" (250), and causing them to lose "confidence in their ability to handle the labor problem unaided by the state" (251). Crucially, at the same time that management was long confidence in itself, right-wing grassroots political parties and "anti-union" unions enjoyed an upswing in working class support, eroding working-class confidence in the bourgeois parties that comprised the parliamentary system. The inability of the Minseitô party cabinet to control the army led to the Manchurian Incident of September 1931, and by May 1932, when the prime minister was assassinated, the military simply refused to let the Seiyûkai form a cabinet. The elite consensus and popular support for imperial democracy had crumbled, leading many to conclude that "the abandonment of democratic political rule was needed to preserve empire and social order" (269).
Chapter Ten covers "The Social Movement Transformed, 1932-35." Although sources are not extensive, it is clear that both unions and the proletarian parties were in retreat in these years due to the consequences of the end of imperial democracy: intensified surveillance and repression combined with popular nationalism to isolate these organizations, as well as the political left in general. Those unions and political parties that survived adopted their ideology such that, although class divisions remained, by 1936 the possibility of "any fundamental challenge to capitalism, the emperor, the empire, or the military" had been ruled out (292). Japan's rulers did not realize this, or the fact that they had gotten themselves into a ratcheting spiral: "each new step abroad intensified the perceived need for unity, order, and control at home" (ibid).
Chapter Eleven covers "Imperial Fascism, 1935-40." Ironically, both labor and the proletarian parties enjoyed renewed success in the mid-1930s; 1937 would have been an all-time high of labor disputes in Japan if not for the outbreak of war with China. At the same time, however, the fact that the bureaucratic-military state allowed the parties no role in government, and that it intervened both to shape political discourse and to shape the polity and elections at unprecedented levels. There was very little, and eventually no, criticism of the bureaucratic-military state because the state would not allow it, and also no "political" (i.e. non-state approved) discussion of the emperor. The state also got into the business of social organizations, and in particular it reorganized organized labor along the exact same lines as Nazi Germany, seeking a classless national community based on mythic traditional models--and indeed, Japan explicitly learned from Germany and Italy, because Japan saw itself as facing similar problems and in a similar position (especially vis-a-vis the Anglo-American-led international order) as those two powers. By 1940, political parties' acceptance of the New Order meant that they had "abandoned their role as representatives of popular interests for that of transmitters of state interests to the people" meant that the era of imperial democracy in Japan was truly finished. Instead, imperial bureaucrats in conjunction with the military sought to link people directly to the emperor and the state via state-created organizations.
Conclusion: Argument, Sources, Examples Gordon uses the conclusion to argue against the tired "Western impact, Japanese response" theory of Japanese historiography outside of Japan, as well as against the suspiciously hasty rush to explain away Japan from 1931-45 as somehow not fascist. It was fascist, and the fact that it was not exactly the same as Germany or Italy does not change the fact, or the implicit Eurocentrism and explicit nominalism of those who would try to argue otherwise. Such wrong-headed arguments have also relied on comparing Japanese outcomes to German and Italian intentions, which is just bizarre as well as highly questionable. Finally, proper attention to all of these societies reveals that, in the postwar experience of these countries, continuities with prewar experiences helped shape developments.
Critical assessment: Gordon is essentially telling a story of a tripod structure (workers and their parties, the elites and their parties, and the bureaucracy)--and we should remember from Dune the mentat's dictum that a tripod is the most unstable of political structures. Gordon's problem, though, is that in his telling the bureaucracy is MIA in the second part of the book, which profoundly unbalances the work as a whole and makes the bureaucracy's central role in the third part seem to come out of nowhere. Despite this structural weakness, I think Gordon's framework of "imperial democracy" and his criticisms of "Taishô democracy" are both essentially sound.
I've previously read Gordon's history of modern Japan and his book on postwar labor, and despite Gordon's self-deprecating comments in the latter about wanting to write a book that his family could read and understand, one of the things I appreciated most about the volume in question right off the bat is how very readable it is. Gordon writes astonishingly well, and he makes his arguments forcefully but not stridently. I should pay attention.
I'm less bothered than most by quibbles about why Gordon chose Nankatsu or his - sensible, I think - refusal to get bogged down in the nitpicky definitionism that has hobbled historiography of earlier eras. Indeed, I think the central strength of this book - and the reason it deservedly won the (ironically named in this case) Fairbank Prize - is Gordon's willingness to look beyond the narrow confines of his subject and see how the Tokyo mobility, workers in Tokyo and throughout Japan, and finally elites of all stripes interacted together in a complex cauldron of forces to produce first imperial democracy and then imperial fascism. The point of this book is not actually about labor or economic history per se; it's about how those two forces, and the vectors they produced in society as a whole, drove the political history of imperial Japan. Missing that aspect of the story is deeply problematic.
I appreciated too Gordon's willingness to justifiably castigate espousers of nominalism and impact-response theory, who would deny Japan its place among fascist countries of the 1930s and 1940s and think that only outside forces can get Japan to do anything. It occurred to me while reading that, in addition to being historiographically untenable and deeply biased, the refusal to call a spade a spade in the case of Japanese fascism actually blunts the analytical usefulness of that concept, since Japanese democracy was vitiated and the country turned fascist without a charismatic maniac, unlike Germany and Italy. If it's that easy, we should all be more attentive to how and why imperial fascism was produced, not less.
My sense is that the dial on this question has moved somewhat since Gordon wrote this book, and I would guess that Labor and Imperial Democracy in Prewar Japan is itself a large part of the reason why that is. The question of fascism remains, I think, one of the most vexed for the academy as a whole - witness the abandon with which some giants in the field of Japanese history threw the term around during the Bush years - and Gordon's approach offers a nice corrective to that sort of willy-nilly approach. All in all, this is an excellent book, and deservedly a classic.
Further reading: E.P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class
Meta notes: Thompson's Luddite workers are an anomaly, not a prototype.