Reckoning

by David Halberstam

  It was precisely at this time that one of the key figures in the drama, a man who was to be a most important figure in the history of Nissan, joined the company. His name was Ichiro Shioji, and he came to work at Nissan in the personnel department. He was twenty-six years old when he was hired, and in his own immodest way he decided he wanted to be president of the company and nothing less. He had almost not been hired. He had come highly recommended by his superiors at Nippon Oil and Soap, which was part of the Nissan group. He had helped fight a radical union there, and he had proved energetic and physically tough. But he had been to what Nissan officials judged a second-rate school, Meiji University, much of the time in night school, and he had not done well on the written examination administered by Nissan. However, the Nissan men who had overseen his interview, including Kawamata, had been impressed by his manner, his eagerness and confidence. That day they had looked at several other prospective employees, all of whom had been to better schools and who got better scores on the exam, but when the day was over, the man who stood out was Shioji. (The leaders of the Masuda union were convinced years later that the fix had been on, that the people at Nippon Oil had recommended him not so much as an energetic young worker, but rather as a strikebreaker.) Kawamata in particular had been impressed. “He is a tough one,” he had told the personnel director, “the kind we need.”

  About Ichiro Shioji, there was always controversy. He was prototypical of the men of the new Japan, the men partially released from the restraints of the past. The turmoil of the postwar years had allowed a certain number of men who under normal circumstances would never have reached a position of power in Japan to push above their normal hierarchical level, and Shioji was one of them. In a nation where men hid their egos, Shioji was openly egocentric; in a nation where men were willing to reach for power as long as no one realized that they were reaching, Shioji coveted it unabashedly. He was the rare classless man in the new allegedly classless society. As a labor leader, which he was to become at Nissan, he was attacked by the left for being too close to management, yet he was watched warily by management in his own and other companies, for the managers were worried by his hunger for power. Many of his heroes, like Walter Reuther, were American, and he often seemed in manner more American than Japanese. Watching him enjoy the perquisites of power, watching the cocky way he bustled about and gave orders, watching the phalanx of men who seemed to precede him everywhere he went, opening doors and running small errands, a visitor might think he was seeing a Japanese version of Mayor Richard Daley of Chicago, the last of the American political bosses. In a land of self-conscious modesty, much of it on the part of men who were hardly modest at all, there was something refreshing about Shioji’s fierce ego. Like Kawamata’s, his clothes conveyed a message. Somehow he had escaped from the requisite dark blue suit of the Japanese executive, which bespoke seriousness and caution and thus, in Japan, worthiness. As a senior labor official he dominated every meeting, and the men around him remained on all occasions silent. Later in his career, when one of Shioji’s deputies broke with him, analysts trying to estimate what the younger man was like had no idea. They had seen him at perhaps twenty meetings, but they had never heard him say a word.

  His impact was immediate. One day soon after he was hired, Kisaburo Tsubura, an official of Masuda’s union, went to one of the executive offices. It was just before the second union was formed, and there he saw Miyake, the man who was founding it. There was also a young man Tsubura had never met before. Tsubura had with him six demands which Masuda had told him to present to the company. Tsubura outlined the first demand.

  “This is stupid,” the young man next to Miyake said.

  Tsubura outlined another labor proposal, this one for larger bonuses.

  “That’s even more stupid,” the young man said.

  Tsubura started to outline a third.

  “You’re stupid too,” the young man said. “Why don’t you get out of here before we become as stupid as you?”

  Tsubura tried to finish the list. Then he left the personnel department as quickly as he could. “Who was that young man making all that noise?” he asked the first person who might know.

  “Someone named Shioji—Miyake’s new bag carrier,” he was told.

  Others in the new union were never entirely comfortable with their roles. Miyake, for example, had always longed for a position in management. But from the start Shioji was in his element. He was in effect Miyake’s bodyguard at first, and he loved best what the majority of the others feared most about those days—physical confrontation, muscle against muscle. He loved wheeling and dealing and marshaling his forces. He was a natural politician and a born street fighter, and he had apprenticed for that in the turmoil of postwar Tokyo.

  Shioji had been born in the Kanda section of Tokyo in 1927. His father and uncle ran a small milk-processing company. He was destined to become a good son of the middle class, but the war tore everything apart. He was just a little too young for it, not quite fifteen at the time of Pearl Harbor, and he hurried through his education and attended the naval academy, graduating just as Japan surrendered. He returned to a Tokyo obliterated by bombing. His father died at the end of the war, and he became responsible for taking care of the rest of his family. The death of his father was particularly painful. His father had been the most successful member of the family, the man who guaranteed loans for his inlaws and got them jobs, and while he was alive, young Ichiro had basked in the reflected glow of his father’s position. Whenever there had been family gatherings, certain uncles had flattered him and told him that he ought to go to the University of Kyoto, where they lived, and, of course, stay with them. At his father’s funeral the very same people turned from him coldly and told him that they would not be able to help him go to college. In fact, they said, it was quite presumptuous for him even to think of college. He had wanted to become an engineer, but now he had to quit school to feed his family.

  For him as for many others that was a desperate time. Tokyo was filled with men who had been perfectly good wage earners before the war and now, no longer able to provide for their families, were permanently crushed. Shioji decided instantly, not even consciously, that he would be a survivor, and that somehow he would end up on top.

  Food was rationed, and there was never enough. Bullies would go into a neighborhood, corner the market on what little food there was, buy it, go into the next neighborhood, and sell it for twice as much. Wealthy families were as desperate as poor ones, and Shioji remembered seeing an old woman from a good family sell several antique kimonos, which were priceless and must have been in the family for generations, for enough money to buy five kilos of rice. If black marketeering was what it took for survival, Shioji decided, then he would do it. Periodically he would go out into the countryside on what were called buying trains—the earliest trains leaving Tokyo each morning. The people of Tokyo crowded aboard them with sacks and bags and suitcases to prepare to do battle with the farmers. They would wander around the countryside, trying to pick up rumors about which farmers had food; they would buy whatever food there was, grab the last train back to Tokyo, and then sell the produce in the city. There was nothing pleasant about the buying trains; they were filled with terrified, selfish people, each suspicious of the other, each hoping to find some sort of deal and wary that someone else might cut him out of it. Only the farmers had food, which meant that only the farmers were wealthy. The farmers were bastards, Shioji thought. They could control the price of food, and they did, turning the screw as hard as they could. These were Japanese sticking it to other Japanese. It was a time that made people hard. No one could afford to be generous. That was a lesson for Shioji.

  Shioji had been a good engineering student at the naval academy, and he had always liked working with wireless sets. After the war it struck him that he had a talent for this, and he announced that he was an electrician whose specialty was repairing radios or making them from scratch. There was no such thing as t
elevision yet, and radio was a prime means of communication, but there were no radios for sale. So someone bright and hardworking who could repair a radio and had access to spare parts—which Shioji always managed to have—was a valuable man. There were Japanese who wanted radios and American soldiers who wanted them, and Shioji kept busy and managed to survive. He did it for a few years and managed to make it through the worst of the postwar period.

  The Nissan strike was like a small war. It began on May 25. The company wanted it. The union wanted it. Masuda was on a high. The crowds he was drawing were immense, five thousand and six thousand to each meeting. The workers were totally committed. Almost every Nissan worker was a member of the union, and almost everyone was at the meetings. For Masuda, it was as if the resolution of five years of struggle was finally at hand.

  His strategy, a colleague said later, was win or die. There would be nothing in the middle. His oldest and closest associates continued to warn him that management had changed, that there was something new in the air, and that he’d better be more cautious. Yet the more they exhorted him, the more excited he became, and the more eager for conflict. “Look at my people,” he said after one of the meetings. “Have you ever seen such enthusiasm? Do you doubt who is going to win?” The men of management, he said, were old men from the past, who knew nothing of what was going to happen in the Japan now forming. They were the same men who had killed Japan. Men of death, he said. His people were the new Japan, and they were finally taking control. The new Japan was Masuda and his workers running the factories and insisting on their rights, and the old Japan was the zaibatsu, it was the bank sending Kawamata over to crush a union. Anyone who opposed him was the old Japan. He had never seemed so sure of himself. There was irony in that, his friend Nakamura realized years later. For in reality they knew nothing. They were children. None of them had ever been part of a labor union. None of them had ever been overseas or had ever observed a full-fledged union or talked with an international union leader. None had any real sense of the ebb and flow of a union’s relationship with management, or of the resources a company can summon that a union cannot. Above all, none of them knew how much pressure an average Japanese worker would take when confronted by conflicting definitions of authority. “We were all too innocent,” Nakamura said.

  Kawamata chose a hard-line policy. He decided to exhaust the union through its own strike. If the union struck, fine; there would be no pay. The company had secured its position for the near future. It might be able to last six months or a year in a strike, particularly if the work force was divided. It had special loans from the IBJ, which eased some of the financial pressure. It intended to lend some of that money to its key parts suppliers. Their financial position was even more precarious than that of the main company, and it was important that they survive the strike. The suppliers in turn would lend a considerable amount back to the second union, once it was formed. It would have been illegal for Nissan itself to lend to the second union, but this way the loan was permissible.

  The Nikkeiren was also ready to aid the company by helping its suppliers, arranging for them to get temporary work from other manufacturers. Because it feared the strong-arm tactics of the union, the company hired its own thugs, several hundred young men, many of whom were either unemployed longshoremen or yakuza—toughs who modeled themselves on what they perceived to be the style and manner of American gangsters. They flaunted their tattoo marks, and some were using drugs. Older Nissan executives were stunned to go to the men’s room and find their new allies, needles out, getting high for a day’s head-banging with the radical union. The thugs were there to protect the second union when it entered combat with the old one. After all, at the start the second union was going to be composed largely of kachos and buchos, men of the middle level. They would need protection, and they would have it.

  Management now sat back and played it cool. For the first time it began to cut the union off. When Masuda wanted to talk, management did not return his phone calls. When he wanted to hold meetings, there was always a reason why the meetings could not be held. Key management people who were supposed to deal with the union were told not to come to work. Many executives went fishing or simply hid out in rural inns. A skeleton managerial staff showed up at work, just enough to manage the office. When executives did meet among themselves, they chose a different site every time; they wanted complete secrecy. The union, increasingly frustrated, tried to find out where the executives were meeting, so it could gather, picket, and harass them. What was clear, some of the union people realized much later, was that management had a very carefully orchestrated plan, and it involved baiting and provoking the union.

  Inevitably the union moved closer to violence. Though a strike was going on, the union people felt free to enter the factory, and they held suribachi courts on the factory floor, more brutal than in the past. Masuda’s people carried their battle into the workers’ dormitories. The dorms became the center of the worst kind of civil war, conducted within the larger one. There the union people assaulted anyone they thought was against them. They harassed entire families, blocking some from using the toilets or the kitchens. Sometimes they set their wives upon the wife of a wavering worker; the wives would taunt the woman for several days, cutting her off, making fun of her, making it impossible for her to cook for her family. One worker years later could remember coming home and finding a huge sign outside the door of his room. It said, “The spy for the company lives here.” Inside were five men. He had seen only one of them before. “We know what you are up to,” one said. “Do not think you can fool us.” Then they remained silent. For four hours they just sat there, not saying anything. No one spoke to him. When his children tried to move around, they were told to be quiet, as if they were intruders in the house. The only noise was the occasional sound of weeping from one of the children. Finally one of the men turned to the others and said, “Do you think he gets the idea?” Then they got up and left. For days afterward the worker wondered what he had done to bring them to his apartment. He had been a member of the union, he had believed in Masuda. He had, it was true, been a little uneasy about the conduct of the union, and in his heart he believed that a man should be paid only if he worked. But he could not remember having revealed any of these seditious thoughts to anyone, not even his wife.

  For nine weeks Kawamata waited. He was in absolutely uncharted waters. It was the hardest period of his life. All the other businessmen in the Nikkeiren were pushing him and encouraging him, and his own instincts told him this was the right way. Moreover, knowing he faced a protracted strike, he had received a critical bit of additional support from the Nikkeiren people; they had arranged with his two top competitors, Toyota and Isuzu, not to exploit the long strike by taking some of Nissan’s market share. It was a reflection of a far more controlled society than America’s, and one in which antitrust laws were quite different. It freed Kawamata from the kind of fear that had long plagued and divided the American companies and that the United Auto Workers, the UAW, had so skillfully exploited—the fear of loss, perhaps permanent, of market share to a competitor during a strike. (When International Harvester took on the UAW in a long, complicated, bitterly fought strike in 1979, Arch McCardell, the head of Harvester, who had once been a Ford finance man, was at a business council meeting, where he ran into Philip Caldwell, the head of Ford. Caldwell praised his heroism in standing up to the UAW. “Somebody has to stand up and do this, Archie,” Caldwell said, as quoted by Barbara Marsh in her excellent book on Harvester, A Corporate Tragedy. “You just stick in there.” McCardell’s pleasure was somewhat diminished by the knowledge that Ford sales people were already quite systematically going after Harvester’s truck customers.) That alone strengthened Kawamata’s hand considerably. It meant that he was fighting on only one front, not two, and it meant that time was on his side and working against the union. His strategy now was to use time to wear the workers down with the absence of paychecks. He wanted their wives
to start working on them. He did not want his countermoves to come too quickly. The strikers’ ideological passion must be tempered by hunger and fear. In June and July the union and the company struggled with each other. Then, on August 5, Kawamata finally made his move. He locked out the Masuda union. On August 7 the second union surfaced at a mass meeting, and on August 10 came the crucial confrontation.

  For Kawamata the lockout was the most difficult move imaginable. It was, he said later, the act of a desperate man. It caught the union completely by surprise. The management put up barricades, and the union, perplexed, responded with force. Its people crashed through the barricades and, led by Masuda, poured onto the factory floor. There were fist fights everywhere between Masuda’s people and the yakuza, and the police were called. The struggle went on day after day. The first barricade had been flimsy; the next barricade was stronger, and again Masuda’s people charged it. Masuda was arrested.

  Now the initiative passed to management. For the first time Kawamata was setting the rules. He was well financed as the union was not, with an estimated $1.5 million in special loans from the IBJ and the Fuji Bank to support him as he took on this radical force. That was a sum nearly equal to what the company made in a year. He had blocked the union out, worn down its people by cutting off salaries, and now was creating an alternative outlet for most of the workers. Once the second union was formed, its people were allowed to come to work, and they were paid immediately, even though the company was barely able to function. Most of those in the second union were white-collar people who had been appalled by the suribachi trials and the hostile tactics of the union. Some were there on the direct orders of management to strengthen the handful of loyalists in the new group. Some were former members of the Masuda union who had been thrown out for opposing the strike. In the beginning there were almost no working men in it. “Those who love the company love the union,” went one of Miyake’s slogans. Miyake thought it a frightening time. He knew he was backed by Kawamata, but some of the Asahara people were warning him that he had chosen a risky course. At the time the second union was formed there were about seven thousand workers, and they were all in the Masuda union. In the first meetings of the new union there had been perhaps forty members at the most. They knew they had to form a new core out of the white-collar class. Each person was told to bring in ten recruits.