Reckoning

by David Halberstam

  Tetsuo Masuda, the leader of the union, seemed to welcome the challenge from Kawamata. This was the enemy he had longed to meet. He had been deeply alienated by the war and thoroughly radicalized by the poverty and desperation of postwar Japan. He talked constantly about democracy, and in his definition of democracy, workers made as much as the owners and, even more important, had political control of their workplace. Confident of his cause and even more certain of his tactical abilities, Masuda enjoyed nothing more than finding some unsuspecting member of management and embroiling him in debate, baiting him and then cutting him up, in front of as many workers as possible. In these impromptu little debates he never lost. The workers loved it. They would watch him as he walked through a plant, spotted a manager, and took him on. They immediately clustered around. No one had ever argued for them before, not here, not in school, not in the army; now, finally, someone was doing it, someone quicker and smarter than the bosses, someone who always won. This was a victory for their Japan over the old Japan.

  What distinguished Masuda, besides his intelligence, was his independence. He toadied to no one, not to the existing hierarchy nor, as many of the radical labor leaders did, to the Communist party. There was nothing tentative about him, no area in which he showed any doubt. Where the men in the ranks, in confrontation with their superiors, felt nervous and uncertain, Masuda brought his absolute confidence. “We had our fears of where we were going and what we were doing,” one of his friends said later, “and he always had answers, he was always so sure of himself.” Because Masuda spoke for the workers and because management was afraid of him, the friend said, “he seemed to make our lives bigger. And our lives had never been very big before.”

  To many of his contemporaries in management, some of whom had been at Tokyo University with him, he remained a puzzle, a man who had betrayed his origins. There were, after all, any number of men from Tokyo University—or Todai, as it is known—in the CP, good theoretical Marxists, but there were few sons of Todai in the unions. Once, during heated labor negotiations, one of these managers had complained about the union’s intractability, and Masuda had answered, “The problem is not the anger of workers who cannot get enough to eat. The problem is you. Why are you always on the wrong side of an issue—is it that you do not know better and are wrong in your mind, or that you know better and are wrong in your soul?” To the men around him, such moments were memorable. In America, on the Richter scale of union-management confrontation this would have seemed relatively mild, but in Japan an assault like that on existing authority was staggering. He was by far the most forceful man in the entire union, not just at Nissan, but throughout the entire auto industry. One of the things that terrified the nation’s industrialists was that he was spending more and more of his energy organizing not just Nissan but other auto companies. That constituted a true challenge to Japanese tradition; it meant that the workers would be allied on a class basis instead of a company basis—a Western rather than a Japanese concept of organization—and thus could potentially be very dangerous. The Americans had said that the Japanese could have unions; thus what the workers were doing was legal. But this was still Japan, and from the lowliest peasant to the Emperor himself it was a hierarchical society. There was a hierarchy in the home, a hierarchy in the school, a hierarchy in the village, and a hierarchy at work. The question of whether the union truly had the right, once established, to challenge those above it in the hierarchy might be established by American law, but it was not yet accepted by Japanese custom. Masuda was trying hard to make the new law as powerful as the old tradition.

  He was not from the working class himself. That did not seem to bother anybody. Most of the labor leaders of that era, like many of the Communists, came from the middle or upper middle class. Masuda was privileged by Japanese standards, certainly as much a product of the new ruling class as Kawamata. He had been born in 1914 on the island of Tokunoshima, off Kagoshima in the south. Later one of his critics, trying to understand why someone with so normal a background could be so completely alienated, blamed it on the region. Those island people, he said, because they had been so badly treated by the government in Kagoshima, were always difficult and rebellious, although they were not as bad as the Okinawans. Of the region, Masuda himself had said that it was so poor that even the most fortunate people there ate one meal a day instead of three. Only in that way could they save the money to send their children to the universities in Tokyo. His father had run a small shipping company. But the company had gone bankrupt when Masuda was young, and the family moved from the island to Kagoshima. His father died just as Masuda was about to enter high school. To start earning the money to go to a university, he began to tutor the son of a wealthy local doctor while attending high school himself. He lived in the doctor’s house, and eventually a marriage was arranged between him and his student’s younger sister. To an American his childhood might have seemed hard, but by Japanese standards of that era it was not particularly difficult. If anything he was luckier than most. He had, after all, gone to Todai, the greatest of Japan’s universities.

  Todai is the Japanese equivalent of Harvard or Yale, with West Point’s sense of duty. The competition to get in is fierce. In a way that Harvard and Yale do not, Todai serves not so much the entering student as the nation. It is not concerned with brilliance and originality but rather with discipline and obligation. It is accepted in Japan that though a young man may not be from the governing class when he enters Todai, he is when he graduates. In that way it is more like Oxford or Cambridge than Harvard. Upon graduation he will do not so much what is good for himself as what is good for the nation. At that time, if he is outstanding, he will enter one of the most important parts of the bureaucracy, MITI, or the ministries of finance or foreign affairs, or he will go to work for one of the top companies. He will not challenge the existing order, because as a man of Todai he is now a part of that order. He will wait his turn, and in time the right to rule will be his. If he is patient and virtuous, the society will reward him. It is a formidable system, for the nation’s talent is always funneled into those key sectors where it is most needed.

  Masuda had gone to work for Nissan in 1938, in the days before Japan was fully embroiled in the Pacific war but when every Japanese knew that a major war was approaching. For a Todai graduate he was something of a hick. “You could take one look at him and know he wasn’t from Tokyo,” said Michio Hatada, then a young Nissan employee from the same department and his closest friend. “Everything about him said country boy—his face, his haircut, his clothes, the way he walked. I think he decided I should be his friend because I was from the country too and I felt just as alien in Tokyo. We both felt the snobbery of Tokyo around us all the time.”

  Masuda was smart, there was no doubt of that; he had done his college work at Todai in only three years and he had spent the last year doing nothing but playing baseball, which was his real passion in those days. It was a time, Hatada recalled of their early days at Nissan, when many of the young men of Japan were without dreams and ambitions; everyone in their age group knew that the war was coming and that they did not control their own destinies. There was an odd aimlessness to life. They did not sit around talking about their future in the company, their ambitions for high position, the women they might marry. Rather they talked of the war. Hatada and Masuda and a few others took a night course once a week in the Malay language, in the mistaken belief that the war would take them to Malaya. It was a small, almost pitiful attempt to have some control over their lives. “Other than that, we were all going to be good Japanese,” Hatada said. “We were going to go to war and many of us were going to die, and we did not argue with that fate. To argue would have been cowardly.”

  Essentially apolitical when he had gone off to war, Masuda had returned a different man, completely politicized. He himself had not had a particularly difficult time in the war. He had served as a medic with the Japanese forces in China and had contracted malaria there.
He had been sent home suffering from a high fever, had gone back to work for Nissan briefly, and then had gone back into the service. His mother and his sister had been killed when Kagoshima had been bombed. There was a new bitterness to his voice. Sometimes he would talk about the men who had run the country in the prewar days and had taken the country to war, and he would say, “They ruined us, they ruined our lives. They left us with nothing.” Back in Tokyo he found the results of the war all around him. Japan was not like America, said Hideya Nakamura, one of his friends in the union; veterans did not come back and tell war stories about what they had been through. In Japan there was no need to do that, for the destruction was a completely shared experience. No family had been spared. Those who had made it back from Okinawa or Iwo did not have to tell those from Hiroshima about the devastation, nor did anyone from Hiroshima have to tell anyone from Tokyo lucky enough to survive the fire-bombing what a terrible war it had been.

  Masuda’s friend Nakamura had not been in the army but had worked instead at an office that Nissan had set up outside of Yokohama. The main Nissan plant was in Yokohama itself, but the American bombings had become so intense that company officials decided to keep much of the clerical staff—and the company’s papers—at a small primary school in the countryside. The factories would be vulnerable, they thought, but the paperwork would not be. It was very Japanese of them, Nakamura later decided, to think at a moment like that of preserving all that paperwork for the future. One terrible day in April 1945, Nakamura arrived at work to see that the bombers had preceded him. The school was destroyed and the bodies of little schoolchildren were mixed among the rubble. He had worked alongside the mothers sifting through the debris, trying to find the bodies and not knowing which was worse, finding them or not finding them, for they were like mangled little dolls when found. It was something he never forgot, the violence visited upon the innocent. He changed politically in that moment, from an accepting, law-abiding man to an alienated one who did not accept authority. He was not angry at the Americans for having done what they did; he was angry at the Japanese, who had decided to start the war and who now had to suffer the consequences.

  On rare occasions Nakamura and Masuda would speak about the war; Nakamura would say a few words and Masuda would add something, both talking in a kind of shorthand, communicating things without having to say them because most of it was unsayable. Once, however, after they had talked, Masuda had said: “We must never be at war again. None of this must happen again. Ever!” His anger was tangible. Nakamura felt that Masuda was not so much politicized as almost completely alienated from the Japan of the past. The war had done that to many. It had torn apart one generation of Japanese, those who had been young men when it started and had believed in all the accepted values of the nation and who, when it ended, had lost not just everything they owned but, more important, everything they believed in.

  Working in Nissan’s Yoshiwara factory, Masuda got involved with the union. His talents were soon evident: a powerful intellect, absolute fearlessness, an unwavering sense of purpose, and exceptional skill as a speaker. Soon Nakamura, who headed the union in those days, arranged for Masuda’s transfer to Yokohama, where he was much needed. Nakamura had grown worried about Nissan’s opposition to the union, and worried that he himself might not be strong enough to stand up to management. He thought that Masuda would be a more courageous leader. Later, as the struggle between the union and the company escalated, Nakamura had a premonition about Masuda’s vulnerability, of Masuda’s standing alone against an increasingly powerful business class once again determined to exert its will.

  “They are going to get you,” he told Masuda.

  “Don’t worry, Nakamura-san,” Masuda said. “You will always be around to pick up my bones.”

  Nakamura believed that for Masuda the union was a means of checking the power of the old zaibatsu and thus of preventing any resurgence of Japanese militarism. Nissan, after all, had been a part of a zaibatsu, and it had been a major beneficiary of the Japanese invasion of Manchuria. The animosity he felt for management was in reality his rage against the war and the war-makers. They had done it once, he told Nakamura, and they could do it again.

  For some of Masuda’s old prewar friends his increasing radicalization was disturbing. Here after all was a young man with a good chance of becoming a senior officer of the company, and instead of helping his career he was risking it by challenging the very order to which he by right belonged. “You, a man of Todai, you should be ashamed of what you’re doing,” a member of management who had known him at college had said during one battle over salaries. “Look at who your friends and supporters are.”

  “Todai,” Masuda replied, “should be ashamed of itself for having so few like me, and so many like you. You went there and learned nothing.”

  Most Japanese accepted the hierarchy; Masuda was contemptuous of it. The order, he said, should be revised. “Good is bad,” he would say. “Up should be down, and down should be up.” At first some of his people were confused when he talked like this, but gradually they understood. His adversaries in management thought him a Communist, but none of the men who worked closely with him believed that. What made him distinctive was his independence; he belonged to no one except his own workers. Most of the real Communists had been weeded out of the union during the Red Purge. Certainly he was left-wing, and surely some of his views often coincided with those of the far-left Socialists or the Communists. “He wanted the union to be strong, to be on the left,” said Tokuichi Kumagai, a good friend, “but he did not want it to be Communist.” That would have meant that it was answerable to someone other than the workers themselves. The orders might have come from Moscow.

  Once Kyuichi Tokuda, the secretary of the Communist party, had debated with Masuda over the role of unions and the left. Masuda’s friends had been surprised not just that Masuda had turned out to be a better debater than Tokuda, who was a legendary speaker, but by the vehemence with which he challenged Tokuda’s position. The Communists, he said, wanted to use the workers and the union for their own purposes, which were first and foremost political. He wanted to keep the union the way it was, serving the workers. On occasion their purposes might intersect, but the union was for the workers, not for some larger political cause, he said. “Masuda wanted to be the first Japanese man of the French Revolution,” said Kumagaya, “of the new liberty and equality and fraternity—all that was supposed to happen here and, of course, never did.”

  Masuda became furious with friends when they were active in politics outside the union; he wanted no mixing of their interests. He could see no purpose save his own. When Nissan officials argued that wage increases would hurt the company, that it was not yet strong enough for them, that it desperately needed what limited resources it had for capital reinvestment, he scoffed. It was not possible, he believed, for something to be good for the union and bad for the company. The company did not really matter. The union did.

  Up until the Dodge Line, Masuda won almost every battle with the company. There was no doubt that he had intimidated the management, and no doubt that he had enjoyed this. He deliberately sought confrontation. In retrospect, some of his colleagues thought that the early years had spoiled him and made him arrogant. He alone exerted power within the union, and while he seemed to listen to others, it became clear that his idea of a democratic union was one where people spoke when he let them. When they were finished, he did exactly what he had intended to do in the first place. He talked of democracy and was authoritarian. “This is a democratic dictatorship, Tanaka-san,” he often told his deputy, Akinori Tanaka, after there had been a meeting in which he had stifled dissent, “and as long as they understand that, we’ll be all right.” No one was supposed to challenge him. Once during a general union meeting, when Masuda was out drinking with delegates from other companies, a Toyota union man had turned to him and said, “You’ve gone rather quickly from Keynes to Marx.” Masuda, enraged, picked up his
plate and started hitting the Toyota man. The Emperor Masuda, some of the people in middle management called him.

  In 1951 it became time to choose a new president of Nissan auto. There were those who thought that Katsuji Kawamata, the banker, wanted the job. But he was simply too new. The purge of tainted executives had just ended, which meant that both Genshichi Asahara and Shoji Yamamoto were candidates. Both had been purged, and both were anxious to get back to the company. Now Kawamata gave the first evidence of how skilled an infighter he was. He saw that the ambitions of the gentle, diffident Asahara were quite modulated—he was interested only in cars. Yamamoto, by contrast, he saw as quite capable of running the company, eager to do it, and not very eager to share power with anyone else, particularly a man of finance. Kawamata realized that under Asahara there would be plenty of room for him to continue to deal with the labor people to whom Asahara had been so deferential and to keep control over the company bureaucracy, whereas under Yamamoto, there would be very little room to maneuver. So Kawamata threw his and the IBJ’s support to Asahara. Ironically, so did Masuda and his union. Asahara got the job.

  Because of his early victories, Masuda was becoming confident to the point of arrogance, some of his friends thought, and that was dangerous. Management had changed: Asahara was the head of the company, but Kawamata was clearly the more dominant figure, and anyone who watched Kawamata sensed for the first time that the union had a true adversary. Kawamata was ruthless and determined. Masuda did not perceive the threat, nor did he realize that Kawamata was readying himself for a showdown. For Kawamata’s own career was now on the line. His ambition did not extend merely to limiting the power of the union; he might have come over to Nissan on temporary loan, but he liked it there, and he intended to stay on and make it his own company. From the time he arrived, Kawamata let everyone know that he was the bank and the bank had power over the company. What was gradually taking place, an Asahara associate realized, was nothing less than a takeover. “Why,” Kawamata asked an executive who worked in Asahara’s office, “did you take that matter to Asahara instead of to me? Didn’t you want a decision made?” Soon Kawamata was reaching out to recruit his own people. Young management men had the distinct impression that very quietly a Kawamata team was being formed. Furthermore, he started going around the factory giving out small sums of money to workers who might be working exceptionally late. Here, he would tell them, go to a bar and have a few drinks. This was an executive letting the workers know that he was the main man. It had never been done that way before.