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ahorbinskiBibliographic Data: Nimura Kazuo, The Ashio Riot of 1907: A Social History of Mining in Japan. Trans. Terry Boardman and Andrew Gordon, ed. Andrew Gordon. Chapel Hill: Duke University Press, 1997.
Main Argument: In this book--the amended and slightly revised translation of a book that was originally published as a compilation of papers Nimura had written at various points--Nimura takes issue with several orthodoxies of postwar Japanese social and labor history, particularly Maruyama Masao's [yes, him again] theory of "spontaneous resistance" and Ôkôchi Kazuo's theory of the "migrant labor pattern," using the riot at the Ashio copper mine in February 1907 to demonstrate that both theories were fundamentally flawed. By doing this, Nimura demonstrates that the premises of the "lecture school" (the kôza-ha) of Japanese Marxism, which held sway from the 1920s through at least the 1960s, were fundamentally flawed. He succeeds on all counts.
Historiographical Engagement: Nimura is mostly working within the Japanese language-scholarship on this issue, although Andrew Gordon, the editor and second-round translator, gets more than a few shoutouts. At several points I was also forcibly reminded of Tom Smith's Native Sources of Japanese Industrialization. And of course, Uncle Karl (Marx).
Introduction: Argument, Sources, Examples In the prologue, Nimura discusses his arguments and his methodology, and why he chose the Ashio mine riot at his source. In the 1950s while he was working on chapter 2, "the vast majority of labor history research focused on labor movement history" (4, emphasis original), and these works were actually just debates about Marxism. In chapter 1, written in the 1970s and 1980s, Nimura heeded his own call to examine labor disputes in the history of particular corporations and went back to the Ashio archives, now augmented by previously secret files: "To be sure, a study of a single dispute shows us just one tree, but I felt that conventional research at the time remained outside the forest entirely and could not teach us anything about its internal composition. We had to enter the forest and investigate representative trees and shrubs to comprehend the nature of the forest as a whole. Of course, one tree does not grow in isolation…" (10).
Prologue: Argument, Sources, Examples In this section Nimura lays out the background for Japanese mining, which had a long history (Japan supplied the bulk of the world's silver in the 16thC) that was reinvigorated by the introduction of new technologies in the mid-19thC, allowing for mine owners to take advantage of deposits that were known but had previously been inaccessible due to the pre-bakumatsu level of technology. By the end of the 20thC these mines were mostly mined out, but in 1907 Ashio copper mine was the biggest and most advanced mine in the country. The exploitative lodge ("hanna") labor system was still in force there, as were the mining brotherhoods, and miners, significantly, were paid by a piece-rate system.
Chapter 1: Argument, Sources, Examples This chapter goes through the origins, events, and consequences of the riot, arguing against Maruyama Masao's assertion that the riot was the result of "centripetal, dissociative, and other-directed" behavior, which leads to the conclusion that "workers are devoid of any subjective motivation or sense of independence" (45). This is essentially wholly incorrect; the riot was mostly likely a provocation instigated by the lodge bosses who felt themselves threatened by the petition for higher wages that had been organized by the mining brotherhoods and the brotherhoods' demand that the bosses, who were in a precarious position vis-a-vis both the company that employed them and the workers they supervised on its behalf, surrender the brotherhoods' treasury boxes. The workers were acting through these brotherhoods, a premodern social organization, urged on by a modern social organization that had resulted from the sheltering effect of the brotherhoods: the labor union, namely the Shiseikai organized by Nagaoka Tsuruzô and Minami Sukematsu. Moreover, careful examination of the evidence from other mine labor disputes in these years shows that the Ashio workers were anything but exceptional in their degree of organization. As Nimura concludes, "Maruyama holds that rioting is allied to "dissociative" and "centripetal" attitudes, but it is not only the attitude of the masses that determines whether or not they express their frustrations by the act of rioting: rather, the manner in which those in authority react to those frustrations is decisive" (144).
Chapter 2: Argument, Sources, Examples Chapter Two looks at the lodge labor system in death to critique the "migrant labor theory," which holds that the "dominant labor pattern" is conditioned by "(1) the developmental stage of the capitalist economy, and (2) national and regional differences" (154). Ôkôchi held that the "migrant labor pattern" (dekasegi-gata) was the prewar Japanese labor pattern, which does not hold up under scrutiny not only because it is factually incorrect but also because it looks at the labor movement in isolation from management and ignores the subjectivity of those people who are in the labor movement. As Nimura says, "In general, we can say that however premodern in character a labor force may be when first recruited to industry, the technical and social training required by modern production processes turn this body of workers into a modern workforce. By ignoring this important fact, the migrant labor theory becomes all the more deterministic" (159). Looking at why the lodge system, a late 19thC evolution of premodern antecedents, was allowed to survive within one of Japan's most technologically advanced industries, Nimura concludes that "the premodern character of the labor force continued to exist within the capitalist structure as long as it enabled capitalist managers to exploit their workers effectively, and it was used by management only as long as it did not contradict that purpose" (174). At Ashio, as the company gradually modernized its mining practices at the face from essentially premodern 'raccoon digging' to modern overhand stoping, which was much more efficient and much less dependent on individual worker judgements and skill at the face. Bosses were able to exploit the conditions of raccoon digging to line their own pockets with bribes (since they were nominally paid less than the miners) in a way that the modern overhand stoping process did not allow them to do, thus weakening the bosses' position. Thus the "social foundation" of the Ashio riot and the mine labor disputes in 1907 was the exact opposite of what Ôkôchi argued: "the social foundation of the riot was the weakening of the lodge system, a process unfolding in major mines up and down the country at the turn of the century. The migrant labor theorists failed to perceive this fact because they limited their concern to characteristics of the labor supply and the labor market. … They overlooked the centrality to any consideration of labor issues of the workplace itself, the site where the productive process is controlled by capital. They forgot that 'the bourgeoisie cannot exist without constantly revolutionizing the instruments of production, and thereby the relations of production, and with them the whole relations of society'" (185).
Conclusion: Argument, Sources, Examples In the conclusion, Nimura argues that the miners--who were actually the highest paid class of workers at the mine--rioted precisely because their wages had shrunk in real terms relative to other workers due to inflation and the bosses' exploitation. Although the bosses' attempt to discredit the Shiseikai by precipitating the riot succeeded, it is not coincidental that the post-WWI mining labor unions that were most successful started at Ashio and Yûbari, where the Shiseikai activists had worked before and where many later union organizers had participated in the riot and in the organizing that preceded it. Even more profoundly, workers' consciousness played a key role in all of these disputes: "examination of the riots has made clear how profoundly the mine workers resented discriminatory treatment" (209), an attitude that prevailed throughout the 20thC among Japanese workers of all sorts. Unlike workers in other parts of the world, industrial workers agitated to be accepted as equal in social as well as in legal status after the Meiji Restoration, because "Japanese factory workers and miners were unwilling members of the working class who would have preferred not to be workers at all" (211). Furthermore, in the face of strong anti-union sentiment, workers who sought to organize did so by "buying in" to the premises of the Meiji state and its ideology, not because of a purportedly incomplete bourgeois revolution, but because of legacies from early modern Japanese society, which did not have the strong tradition of guilds--and their anti-modernization attitudes--of Euro-America and which thus embraced the ideal of meritocracy and competition among workers in a way that Euro-American workers and unions have not.
Epilogue: Argument, Sources, Examples This chapter attempts a little more comparative perspective on Japanese workers, identifying global similarities among mine workers after critiquing the Kerr/Siegel "isolated mass" thesis and evaluating G.V. Rimlinger's work on comparative strike behavior. Nimura also adumbrates differences, finding that the violence of U.S. strikes was distinctive and that in Japan the essential presumption is that the labor/management relationship is harmonious rather than adversarial, which is related to the lack of a strong "us and them" culture at all levels of Japanese workplaces, symbolized by the formation of joint white- and blue-collar unions in the postwar period. Again, according to Nimura, premodern craft unions or their absence make a key difference.
Critical assessment: This is an excellent, excellent book, a marvel of methodology and of evidence-based historical scholarship. Although the analysis and the prose is very straightforward, there is much to dig into here, and it is very worthwhile indeed to have this book in English.
Further reading: Andrew Gordon, The Evolution of Labor Relations in Japan; Sheldon Garon, The State and Labor in Modern Japan; Elyssa Faison, Managing Women; Tom Smith, Political Change and Industrial Development in Japan; Tessa Morris-Suzuki, The Technological Transformation of Japan
Meta notes: I do love it when scholars straight up quote Marx as an explanation.
Main Argument: In this book--the amended and slightly revised translation of a book that was originally published as a compilation of papers Nimura had written at various points--Nimura takes issue with several orthodoxies of postwar Japanese social and labor history, particularly Maruyama Masao's [yes, him again] theory of "spontaneous resistance" and Ôkôchi Kazuo's theory of the "migrant labor pattern," using the riot at the Ashio copper mine in February 1907 to demonstrate that both theories were fundamentally flawed. By doing this, Nimura demonstrates that the premises of the "lecture school" (the kôza-ha) of Japanese Marxism, which held sway from the 1920s through at least the 1960s, were fundamentally flawed. He succeeds on all counts.
Historiographical Engagement: Nimura is mostly working within the Japanese language-scholarship on this issue, although Andrew Gordon, the editor and second-round translator, gets more than a few shoutouts. At several points I was also forcibly reminded of Tom Smith's Native Sources of Japanese Industrialization. And of course, Uncle Karl (Marx).
Introduction: Argument, Sources, Examples In the prologue, Nimura discusses his arguments and his methodology, and why he chose the Ashio mine riot at his source. In the 1950s while he was working on chapter 2, "the vast majority of labor history research focused on labor movement history" (4, emphasis original), and these works were actually just debates about Marxism. In chapter 1, written in the 1970s and 1980s, Nimura heeded his own call to examine labor disputes in the history of particular corporations and went back to the Ashio archives, now augmented by previously secret files: "To be sure, a study of a single dispute shows us just one tree, but I felt that conventional research at the time remained outside the forest entirely and could not teach us anything about its internal composition. We had to enter the forest and investigate representative trees and shrubs to comprehend the nature of the forest as a whole. Of course, one tree does not grow in isolation…" (10).
Prologue: Argument, Sources, Examples In this section Nimura lays out the background for Japanese mining, which had a long history (Japan supplied the bulk of the world's silver in the 16thC) that was reinvigorated by the introduction of new technologies in the mid-19thC, allowing for mine owners to take advantage of deposits that were known but had previously been inaccessible due to the pre-bakumatsu level of technology. By the end of the 20thC these mines were mostly mined out, but in 1907 Ashio copper mine was the biggest and most advanced mine in the country. The exploitative lodge ("hanna") labor system was still in force there, as were the mining brotherhoods, and miners, significantly, were paid by a piece-rate system.
Chapter 1: Argument, Sources, Examples This chapter goes through the origins, events, and consequences of the riot, arguing against Maruyama Masao's assertion that the riot was the result of "centripetal, dissociative, and other-directed" behavior, which leads to the conclusion that "workers are devoid of any subjective motivation or sense of independence" (45). This is essentially wholly incorrect; the riot was mostly likely a provocation instigated by the lodge bosses who felt themselves threatened by the petition for higher wages that had been organized by the mining brotherhoods and the brotherhoods' demand that the bosses, who were in a precarious position vis-a-vis both the company that employed them and the workers they supervised on its behalf, surrender the brotherhoods' treasury boxes. The workers were acting through these brotherhoods, a premodern social organization, urged on by a modern social organization that had resulted from the sheltering effect of the brotherhoods: the labor union, namely the Shiseikai organized by Nagaoka Tsuruzô and Minami Sukematsu. Moreover, careful examination of the evidence from other mine labor disputes in these years shows that the Ashio workers were anything but exceptional in their degree of organization. As Nimura concludes, "Maruyama holds that rioting is allied to "dissociative" and "centripetal" attitudes, but it is not only the attitude of the masses that determines whether or not they express their frustrations by the act of rioting: rather, the manner in which those in authority react to those frustrations is decisive" (144).
Chapter 2: Argument, Sources, Examples Chapter Two looks at the lodge labor system in death to critique the "migrant labor theory," which holds that the "dominant labor pattern" is conditioned by "(1) the developmental stage of the capitalist economy, and (2) national and regional differences" (154). Ôkôchi held that the "migrant labor pattern" (dekasegi-gata) was the prewar Japanese labor pattern, which does not hold up under scrutiny not only because it is factually incorrect but also because it looks at the labor movement in isolation from management and ignores the subjectivity of those people who are in the labor movement. As Nimura says, "In general, we can say that however premodern in character a labor force may be when first recruited to industry, the technical and social training required by modern production processes turn this body of workers into a modern workforce. By ignoring this important fact, the migrant labor theory becomes all the more deterministic" (159). Looking at why the lodge system, a late 19thC evolution of premodern antecedents, was allowed to survive within one of Japan's most technologically advanced industries, Nimura concludes that "the premodern character of the labor force continued to exist within the capitalist structure as long as it enabled capitalist managers to exploit their workers effectively, and it was used by management only as long as it did not contradict that purpose" (174). At Ashio, as the company gradually modernized its mining practices at the face from essentially premodern 'raccoon digging' to modern overhand stoping, which was much more efficient and much less dependent on individual worker judgements and skill at the face. Bosses were able to exploit the conditions of raccoon digging to line their own pockets with bribes (since they were nominally paid less than the miners) in a way that the modern overhand stoping process did not allow them to do, thus weakening the bosses' position. Thus the "social foundation" of the Ashio riot and the mine labor disputes in 1907 was the exact opposite of what Ôkôchi argued: "the social foundation of the riot was the weakening of the lodge system, a process unfolding in major mines up and down the country at the turn of the century. The migrant labor theorists failed to perceive this fact because they limited their concern to characteristics of the labor supply and the labor market. … They overlooked the centrality to any consideration of labor issues of the workplace itself, the site where the productive process is controlled by capital. They forgot that 'the bourgeoisie cannot exist without constantly revolutionizing the instruments of production, and thereby the relations of production, and with them the whole relations of society'" (185).
Conclusion: Argument, Sources, Examples In the conclusion, Nimura argues that the miners--who were actually the highest paid class of workers at the mine--rioted precisely because their wages had shrunk in real terms relative to other workers due to inflation and the bosses' exploitation. Although the bosses' attempt to discredit the Shiseikai by precipitating the riot succeeded, it is not coincidental that the post-WWI mining labor unions that were most successful started at Ashio and Yûbari, where the Shiseikai activists had worked before and where many later union organizers had participated in the riot and in the organizing that preceded it. Even more profoundly, workers' consciousness played a key role in all of these disputes: "examination of the riots has made clear how profoundly the mine workers resented discriminatory treatment" (209), an attitude that prevailed throughout the 20thC among Japanese workers of all sorts. Unlike workers in other parts of the world, industrial workers agitated to be accepted as equal in social as well as in legal status after the Meiji Restoration, because "Japanese factory workers and miners were unwilling members of the working class who would have preferred not to be workers at all" (211). Furthermore, in the face of strong anti-union sentiment, workers who sought to organize did so by "buying in" to the premises of the Meiji state and its ideology, not because of a purportedly incomplete bourgeois revolution, but because of legacies from early modern Japanese society, which did not have the strong tradition of guilds--and their anti-modernization attitudes--of Euro-America and which thus embraced the ideal of meritocracy and competition among workers in a way that Euro-American workers and unions have not.
Epilogue: Argument, Sources, Examples This chapter attempts a little more comparative perspective on Japanese workers, identifying global similarities among mine workers after critiquing the Kerr/Siegel "isolated mass" thesis and evaluating G.V. Rimlinger's work on comparative strike behavior. Nimura also adumbrates differences, finding that the violence of U.S. strikes was distinctive and that in Japan the essential presumption is that the labor/management relationship is harmonious rather than adversarial, which is related to the lack of a strong "us and them" culture at all levels of Japanese workplaces, symbolized by the formation of joint white- and blue-collar unions in the postwar period. Again, according to Nimura, premodern craft unions or their absence make a key difference.
Critical assessment: This is an excellent, excellent book, a marvel of methodology and of evidence-based historical scholarship. Although the analysis and the prose is very straightforward, there is much to dig into here, and it is very worthwhile indeed to have this book in English.
Further reading: Andrew Gordon, The Evolution of Labor Relations in Japan; Sheldon Garon, The State and Labor in Modern Japan; Elyssa Faison, Managing Women; Tom Smith, Political Change and Industrial Development in Japan; Tessa Morris-Suzuki, The Technological Transformation of Japan
Meta notes: I do love it when scholars straight up quote Marx as an explanation.