Such fears did not afflict Kawamata. He was, ironically enough, the beneficiary of Masuda’s challenge. The more turbulent the company’s labor relations the more he became the company’s most powerful figure and chief decision-maker. If he had ever had a doubt that he had to move against the union, the suribachi technique ended it. The union, he later told friends, was abusing his people. So it was that he decided to support a second union, one much more sympathetic to the company, because, according to his wish, it would be formed not by labor but by middle management. The theory behind Kawamata’s plan was wonderfully simple. The Americans had decreed in the new constitution that workers had the right to organize and have collective bargaining. The Americans had promoted the idea of unions because they wanted a more egalitarian society, but they had not decreed what kind of unions they had to be, or to what aims and ideals the unions had to be true. Thus there was nothing to keep companies from creating their own more loyal, more compliant unions, unions sharing the objectives of the company itself. If there was competition between two unions within a company, one hostile and one friendly, then it would be the most natural thing to help the friendly one.
This strategy was not unique to Nissan; it was embraced by firms all over Japan in the early fifties. It was the policy of the Nikkeiren, and it became the critical device by which the traditional Japanese order reasserted itself against what business leadership felt was the anti-Japanese nature of some of MacArthur’s reforms. The Nikkeiren even sent out organizers to teach companies how to do it. It made sure that extra funds were available to shaky companies so they could, if necessary, outlast a union during a strike. Soon almost every major company troubled by unions began to create its own. At Nissan what made the conflict different was the level of bitterness. At many companies—Toyota, for example—the first union collapsed quite easily and very quickly became a company union. But at Nissan the Masuda union was very strong, and any union that sought to crush it had to be equally strong and tough.
Even as Kawamata was looking for a second union, one had been forming at Nissan under a man named Masaru Miyake. In a way Kawamata had been looking for Miyake, and Miyake had been looking for Kawamata. They found each other in the spring of 1953. Miyake was a young man who had served as a fighter pilot during the war, flying the famed Zero, which gave him added prestige with many of the workers. He had flirted briefly with the radical left after his return to Japan, and then, after joining Nissan, he had moved steadily to the right. He had begun to rise in the company up through the lower management levels in the accounting department, and in 1949, during the Dodge Line crisis, he began to emerge as a visible dissenter from the radical union. When the union had challenged the company’s right to fire the 1760 workers, Miyake had quite vocally backed the company’s right, indeed its need, to tighten its belt. Soon he became an outspoken critic of Masuda—and a target of the radicals.
In Japanese companies young aspiring management men were able to belong to the unions; it seemed perfectly natural that men running the unions had white-collar backgrounds. Among some of the other middle-level people, Miyake’s willingness to fight back against the union further enhanced his status; it had taken considerable courage in those days to challenge Masuda. Miyake began meeting regularly with other men like himself in the company, men in their late twenties and early thirties who were just edging up into middle management. There was a bar they went to almost every night near the Shimbashi station, and there they talked endlessly about reforming the union. Masuda, they agreed, had to be stopped. The union had to be less confrontational. It had to help support the company, they agreed, not destroy it. These young men were all college graduates, and they were all from the middle class. (Eventually some ten members from Miyake’s group served on the Nissan board of directors.) The more Miyake and his group spoke among themselves, the more concerned they became that the company might go bankrupt. Soon they began to talk about starting a new and loyal union.
Miyake and the others in his group regarded Kawamata as the only hope of the company. Kawamata was the only one in management, they agreed, who was strong enough to fight back. Asahara was too soft, in their view, a man afraid of Masuda and his own shadow. Miyake managed to talk to Kawamata. The subject of the second union came up. Kawamata seemed to encourage the idea of a second union. Something, he told Miyake, had to be done. That was just the way Miyake felt. Management and workers had to be friendly, Kawamata said; they had a common goal. Second unions were being formed at other companies, and they were proving successful in case after case. Kawamata would help all he could. Miyake and Kawamata soon discovered that they had a connection. They had gone to the same university, Hitotsubashi (almost but not quite as good as Todai as a means of entry into Japan’s elite). That nourished their friendship. Miyake even knew people in the International Bank of Japan.
The last thing that Miyake had wanted to do when he first went to work at Nissan was become a union leader. He thought of himself as a son of the middle class; his father had been a small businessman. Miyake had wanted to go into a large company and be a part of management. It would have been nice to end up on the board. As a pilot during the war he had loved flying, and when the war was over he had wanted more than anything to work in the aircraft industry. But nations that lose wars, he learned somewhat ruefully, are not allowed to keep their aircraft industries. So he had gone to work in autos, at Nissan, which he judged the next best thing. He considered himself lucky anyway, simply in that he was alive. He had been in a squadron stationed in the South Pacific, and most of the pilots he had flown with, once so bright and eager and proud, were dead.
At first the Japanese pilots had been better than the Americans, and the Zeroes had been faster and more maneuverable than the American planes. Then, all too quickly for the Japanese, the American pilots had gotten better and their planes were swifter, reached higher altitudes, and dove faster. There were also a great many more of them. The Zero of which they had once been so proud suddenly seemed quite backward. It did not even have a self-starter; it had to be started by flipping the propeller. The pilots also, in contrast to the Americans, had very little protection inside the plane. Zero lighters, some of the pilots called them, because they would simply burst into flame. Men in squadrons like Miyake’s knew far ahead of most Japanese that the tide had turned in the war. By 1943 there was a sad new ritual at his air base; at the mess table each day there were fewer and fewer seats needed for the pilots, because fewer and fewer were returning from the air battles, so from time to time the mess officer would simply remove an entire mess table.
He was based in Borneo. One day in 1944 the Americans came in full force—the day of the Americans, he later called it. On that particular day he did not fly, because since they had lost even more planes than pilots, there were now more pilots than planes, and so they took turns; this was Miyake’s day without a plane. That, he always realized, was why he had lived. There had been heavy raids before, but Miyake had never seen anything like this one. They came and came and came—about four hundred B-24s and P-38s, all based on Guadalcanal (where his brother, a naval doctor, had already died). The Japanese had about 120 aircraft, and they managed to get most of them up, and there were dogfights all over the sky. The Americans left, but soon they were back. All afternoon the battle continued. For the second raid the Japanese had managed to get up about sixty aircraft, and then to everyone’s horror the Americans returned again, as if untouched and undamaged by all that action, with as many planes as on the first raid. Possibly thirty Japanese went up to meet them. It was not that the Americans were winning the individual dogfights; if anything, thought Miyake, standing and watching the terrifying action in the sky, the human circus above him, they were probably evenly matched in terms of individual skill and bravery. It was simply the numbers. If one American was shot down, there were always more of them. By the end of the day the Japanese had been reduced to five operative planes. Almost everyone on the ground knew then that
the war was over, but still there were naval-academy traditionalists who wanted to kill every American they could, even though it was hopeless. To Miyake, it was a great lesson in the power of technology and the strength of a truly industrialized nation.
The war left Miyake with a certain melancholia. Years later he visited the Philippines and placed some flowers on a monument there to kamikaze pilots who had given their lives. The Filipinos had been very impressed by the spirit of the kamikazes. Men of suicide, they called them. Many of the Filipinos wanted to talk to Miyake about how wonderful his comrades had been. Miyake had thought it stupid and wasteful and was immensely saddened by the day. But the one thing that the war had done, he realized later, was to make him outspoken. He had never been outspoken before—that was not his way or the Japanese way—but he had fought in the war and seen so much death that when he returned to Japan he believed he had the right to speak out, that this above all he had earned. There was going to be a new Japan, and in the new Japan, which was going to be much like America, people would be encouraged to say what they thought. He belonged to a generation that had sacrificed their lives and were now entitled to some measure of freedom. No one was going to push him around.
When he took the job at Nissan, he soon came to hate the union. Workers were being paid for twelve months of work, but what with all the stoppages and wildcat strikes they actually worked more like nine months. He came to think that Masuda was a bully. Furthermore, Masuda was a leftist. Miyake thought that America was a very strange occupying power: It was a capitalist country, and yet it was allowing labor unions as radical as this to form. General MacArthur, he thought, was a particularly strange American. All the Americans, including the general himself, said he was politically very conservative. But he went around Japan creating left-wing labor unions. Just what did he want from the Japanese?
What finally turned Miyake around was a congress of labor officials at a resort near the town of Ito in the middle of 1952. Miyake was hardly an important figure at the conference, simply a minor delegate from the Nissan accounting department. Masuda got up and started an assault on management, and finally Miyake challenged him and asked him who would pay for all the raises he wanted, and the two started to argue. The argument went on long into the night. Masuda brought in his support troops, officials from the Isuzu and Toyota unions, and they started browbeating Miyake. It seemed to go on forever. The assault was designed to prove to him not just that he was wrong, but even more important, that he was alone. During that evening he felt very much alone. It was very personal: Why was he with the capitalists? Why was he against the working men? What was his real relationship with Kawamata? Which side was he on? It was, he thought, just short of physical intimidation, but there was no doubt that every word carried some kind of warning with it. Those who go against us will pay a price, Masuda had said; we will remember our enemies. Miyake had no reason to doubt him, none at all. When he returned, he decided that something had to be done, that it was not just jobs the workers were in danger of losing but freedoms as well. These union men were not interested in making cars, he realized; the cars were a means to an end.
Back at Nissan, Miyake began to meet more often with his Shimbashi station colleagues about the problem of the union. Later they became known to some as the Secret Group, not only because they met secretly but also because what they were planning was in effect a coup d’état, an attempt to wrest power from the union with covert management support. They were able to keep in close touch with Kawamata because one of their members was Kuniyuki Tanabe, a bright young engineer who was also a cousin of Kawamata’s—all angles had been covered. What Kawamata allegedly communicated to the Secret Group was that if it came to a strike, then the company would be ready; it would borrow the money from the banks to fund the people who were on its side. Thus the new union was financially solid. It had powerful friends who wanted the radical union crushed. With commitments from the banks, the company was better prepared to last out a long strike than the Masuda union. A strike might not be such a bad thing this time. Perhaps the company needed it.
There was about Katsuji Kawamata a quality of self-importance and brusqueness that other Japanese, those below him and even those above him, disliked. He did not, they felt, pay nearly enough attention to the time-honored amenities of the society. He was arrogant, and while other bankers and heads of companies were also arrogant, they put more effort into concealing it. Kawamata did not mind their disapproval. That he could be arrogant and get away with it was a sign of his strength.
One of the things Kawamata liked to recall about his childhood was that it was so much harder than that of modern youth. In his later years, looking at Japan’s young, he was astonished by how many presents Japanese children received, how filled the stores were with toys. They got toys at ten o’clock in the morning and an hour later they were bored with them, he once told a reporter. They expected that pleasure could be bought in a store and handed to them. His generation had been different, he recalled. “We were poor without knowing that we were poor. We did not have toys, and so we went outside and played all day, climbing trees and playing ball and fishing. We had a simpler life, and we were connected to each other through the way we played, not through toys.” Today’s Japanese children, he added, beneficiaries of so much better a diet, were tall, “like electric light poles,” whereas his generation had been shorter and stockier but “stronger and more muscled.”
He often felt nostalgic about his boyhood in the town of Mito, and, like many Japanese of his generation, he believed in his heart that the Japan of the early twentieth century was a much healthier place than the modern country. It was a more austere life, but that austerity was good. When he was a boy, there were no expensive pastries to eat every day, he remarked, and no fruit. A bunch of sweet potatoes was considered a great delicacy. He could remember pounding rice cakes, something he had not enjoyed at the time but regarded with pleasure in retrospect. His boyhood had been lived without central heating and without air conditioning, and he was not sure that those who would someday inherit a great nation should be raised with either. The family’s house was cold, but because everyone shared the same hardship, Kawamata had not thought he was cold; that was the way people lived, that was the temperature that the whole world lived at. “Who knows what is cold until you are warm?” he once told a reporter.
As a boy he wore a kimono; not until he was in high school did he wear Western-style clothes. There was no radio in the town of Mito, and the main means of transportation was a small trolley, which ran back and forth through the town. There was a little fire engine that had been built in the United States and was pulled by four horses. He did not see his first car until he was eighteen. It was right after the great earthquake of 1923. The car was a huge black box that seemed to move on its own, and he was fascinated by it. Some thirty years later, when he was almost fifty and just about to take over one of the leading auto companies in Japan, he came to own his first car.
Mito is about sixty miles from Tokyo, a four-hour train ride then, a suburban commute today. Neither of his parents had come from particularly well-off families, and neither had been a Kawamata. The Kawamatas were a relatively successful family in Mito, but they had no children. As is still the custom in Japan, a moneyed but childless family might adopt the child of poorer neighbors who had extra children. So it was that Kawamata’s father, who was a Tange, and his mother, who was a Tanabe, both were adopted into the Kawamata family. That way the name lived on: The successful had access to children, and the less successful had access to the resources and connections of the wealthy. Kawamata’s new father had been a minor official in the state tobacco monopoly (“a very ordinary, salaried man, nothing unusual about him,” Kawamata would describe him later). When Kawamata was about eight years old, the family moved to Tokyo so that the children could go to good high schools and thus have a chance at college education. Kawamata became the first member of his family to go to a real university. H
e had thought of becoming an engineer, but he had terrible handwriting, and he was not capable, he decided, of making good drafts. Many of the young men in school with him were going into the bureaucracy, but Kawamata was not enthusiastic about that idea. He had watched his father’s life, and it had seemed a rather limited one. Instead he wanted to work for a trading company, because it meant he could travel. In 1929, when he graduated, he applied to one of the leading trading companies, Mitsubishi, and was turned down. Times were hard and it was not easy to get jobs. But Kawamata’s father had a friend at the Industrial Bank, and he made a call, and a job was offered. Kawamata rather reluctantly accepted it, largely because it was the only one available. He led a fairly typical, insular Japanese life. When he was twenty-eight his mother told him it was time to marry the daughter of a friend of hers in Mito. Kawamata himself would have much preferred to marry a Tokyo girl, for Tokyo women were more sophisticated, but he bowed to his mother’s wishes (just as earlier, wanting to take dancing lessons, he had asked for his mother’s approval, not wanting to upset her). His mother had been rather insistent about his marrying a small-town girl. It was, she had pointed out, much harder to check the bloodline of a Tokyo person. (That meant that there could be a secret “buraku”—an untouchable—in there somewhere.) A “miai,” or match, was arranged and Kawamata thought she was all right, and so they got married.
He went into the army in 1941 and spent the war on the home front, a relatively easy war. When it was over, he went back to the IBJ; other men in his age group seemed to be ahead of him. While the posting to Nissan came as a shock and he resented it at first, it was not long before he understood the challenge in it and even more the possibilities of it. This was a troubled small company, but it might become both untroubled and large. There was talk of mounting a major highway program in Japan and rumors that MITI, once steel and shipping were secured as powerful competitive industries, might move to the auto industry, encouraging it as an obvious adjunct of the steel industry. There might be more future than others realized. It was at this moment that Kawamata suddenly became very ambitious. If Nissan became a powerful company, it would be, in the most personal way imaginable, his success. By 1953 his only real impediment was Tetsuo Masuda.
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