Reckoning

by David Halberstam

  Miyake decided to have an open rally. He hoped that five hundred workers would come. All of Tokyo was watching. The meeting was broadcast on Tokyo radio and there were journalists everywhere. Some four hundred people showed up to listen to Miyake. That was a little disappointing, but not bad, he felt. Outside the hall were throngs of Masuda’s men, about two thousand of them, and they looked very tough and angry. Many of them had clubs. Miyake and Shioji had assigned their own young toughs to guard the doors, but Miyake was not sure they could hold the line. There were scuffles each time someone tried to enter the hall. Miyake wondered if the guards he had appointed were formidable enough. The night before they had looked strong. “Can anyone do judo?” he had asked, and then appointed those who had said yes to guard-the door. The police made the critical difference. The government wanted this meeting to take place. That decision, Miyake knew, had been made at a high level.

  Just before he walked out to talk to the crowd, he was hit with a terrible wave of fear. He knew that he could not allow himself to show it. The audience, he could tell, was already terrified. Most of them were sitting in their seats nervously, looking straight ahead. The hall was curiously silent. For the last two days Miyake had been receiving calls from friends who had once been filled with brave talk about the role they would play in the new union and who now, without explanation, were begging off coming to the meeting. Later he realized how scared the two thousand Masuda people outside must have been, and how frightened even the cops were, but he did not think about it at the time. Miyake had been so busy planning the meeting that he had not thought very much about what he was going to say. In the end he tried to make it simple: “If you break the law in this country you go to prison for that crime,” he said, “and you can never get out. But although this first union is like a prison, you have the chance to get out. You can determine it yourself. But you have to fight for it. You have to join us, and you have to bring a friend, just one friend to the next meeting. Then we will have a thousand members. Then they will bring a friend. But unless we fight back, we will all have to leave, because we will have no place in this company, we will not be able to control who we are and how we work and what hours we work. We will lose our livelihood. We are already close to it. Therefore we have to fight back.” When the meeting was over, a police captain came up to Miyake and said quietly, “You are supposed to come with me, sir,” and escorted him quickly out the back way. Otherwise, Miyake was sure, he never would have been able to escape from the building.

  Now the second union began to take over. It had been legitimized by that meeting. Almost immediately it took the struggle into the dorms. It had jobs to offer; it was paying workers who joined it roughly 60 percent of their salaries, while the other striking workers were getting nothing. It had carefully drawn lists of which workers were reportedly anti-Masuda, which were on the fence, which were moderately pro-union, and which were intensely pro-union. Miyake and Shioji and their men liked going into the dorms, in groups of five or six. They came armed with both carrot and stick. There might be a few workers sitting around in a room. “You’ve been good in this, Watanabe-san,” Miyake would say to one of them. “You are a loyal son of Nissan. Kawamata-san was told of you yesterday, and he was very pleased by the good things that were said. Kawamata-san said that men like you should be rewarded. We are going to promote you, and we are going to give you a raise tomorrow.” Then he might turn to Shioji, who, naming another man in the room, would say, “It is a shame about Ikeda-san. He listens to all the wrong people. What will he do when he leaves Nissan? I do not think we have a place for men like this, men who are against a strong Japan. But Ikeda-san seems to want to listen to foreigners instead of his fellow Japanese.”

  What pleased Miyake and Shioji about their meetings in the dorms was that the wives were often there. The country was poor, money for food was scarce, the company was hardly a success, and the wives were all too aware of the possible consequences of what was happening. They were uneasy with Masuda’s course, frightened by the confrontation and the rising level of violence, and, of course, the end of the paycheck. After Miyake and Shioji had left the dorms, the wives, they believed, would continue to press their arguments. What Masuda had been doing, Miyake and his men continually emphasized, was alien. It was anti-Japanese. It was as if some foreign force were at hand. Japanese people were not like this; Japanese people, they stressed, believed in work and in settling their differences peacefully. The one thing they had in common above all else was that they were Japanese. Who was behind this union? The answer, he said, was the Communists. That meant the Russians.

  Which way the workers went was critical now. Masuda was confident that they were his. The rallies had been bigger than ever. It never occurred to him, filled with passion as he was, that the workers were no longer with him as he was with them. Some of the men around him saw signs of slippage, signs of doubt among the workers; he did not. Some of his friends tried to tell him that this was a time to reconsider and to pull back, that he was overextended and playing into the hands of the company. But Masuda, challenged, seemed if anything more anxious for confrontation. He was confident of the workers and their commitment to the union. But certain advisers had the feeling that he did not know the workers as well as he thought he did. He might be their leader, they might in fact love him and believe they were loyal to him, but he was not of them. Their lives, unlike his, were not about speeches and ideas and polemics; their lives were about getting through one more day.

  9. THE CRUSHING OF MASUDA

  THE STRUGGLE WAS LARGELY beyond the workers. They were at once exhilarated and fearful. Wary by nature, they grew warier the longer the strike went on.

  That spring Sanosuke Tanaka, a worker at the Nissan plant at Yoshiwara, was thirty-eight years old. That made him one of the older workers in the company. He had worked for Nissan before the war; most of the men at the plant had been hired after the war as the company had slowly expanded. He had joined Nissan in 1937 after a series of lesser jobs. There had been a small ad in a newspaper saying that Nissan was going to hire a few people for its assembly plant. Nissan, to a peasant like Tanaka, had seemed a great company, and he had immediately wanted to go to work there. More than three hundred people had applied, and he had been one of twenty-four selected. He had considered himself very fortunate. He had been paid 40 yen a month, small by the standards of the Tokyo middle class in those days but princely by the standards that Tanaka had been accustomed to. Only a few years earlier he had been paid 50 yen for an entire year for working in a store. But it was more than just the paycheck, it was that he was now a man of Nissan. He belonged to an important company. Only very good people could work there. He was not just choosing a place to work and a means to earn a salary but, in a larger sense, he was joining a community. “In Japan work is a ceremony...” the Japanese writer Ichiro Kawasaki had written. “To the Western worker, the job is an instrument for the enrichment and satisfaction of the real part of his life, which exists outside the place of work. For the Japanese worker, life and job are so closely interwoven that it cannot be said where one ends and the other begins.” So it was with Tanaka. Nissan was a big company, perhaps not as big as the steel companies, but trucks were important. Nissan was his new family, and it defined him in the most positive sense. He gained prestige among the people he knew by the fact that he worked for Nissan. His family was proud of his success, and in the little village from which he had so recently come, it now was said of him by those who had once looked down on him that they had always known he would make good. Soon almost all his friends were fellow Nissan workers. This was his community now, almost his family. He intended to work there for the rest of his life.

  He was a country man, and he could barely believe that he had one of the best jobs in Japan. With his first paycheck he paid 10 yen to his sister in Yokohama, with whom he was living, and then he went to a movie theater and saw a movie. A few days later on his day off, still euphoric, he took some mo
ney and went with a friend to climb Mount Fuji. Then, summoning his courage, he went to a small store that sold Western-style clothing—there were more and more of them now in Yokohama—and bought himself a Western suit. The suit was gray, and it cost him 10 yen. All the rest of his life he would remember that moment, standing in the back of the store, wearing his new suit, and looking in the mirror and seeing a person he had never seen before. This is a real person, completely independent, he thought, this is a man of the city. When he walked out of that store he was prouder than he had ever been before, because for the first time in his life he truly felt released from his poverty. I am wearing a suit, he thought the rest of the day, I am wearing a suit just like anyone else.

  Tanaka and men like him had traded an old, severe rural life for a new, difficult but dramatically more bearable urban and industrialized life, a life that promised something better for their children. Tanaka was born on a tiny farm outside of Tokyo, in Kanagawa prefecture, in 1915. His memory was that Japan was poor, his village was poorer, and his family was poorer still. His father, Hanshichi Tanaka, was a tenant farmer working for a rich landlord on a tiny spit of land. His father, aided by the older boys in the family, could grow about 850 pounds of rice a year, and of this he was allowed to keep about 150 pounds for his own family. The rest went to the landowner. His father did not quarrel with this arrangement, though looking back later Tanaka himself was struck by the injustice of it. It was the way people were supposed to live, and the proof of that was that it was the way they had always lived. You were poor, you had always been poor, and you would remain poor. A tenant farmer might have enough to eat, but rarely would he have enough rice so that he might actually get ahead. The system was designed so that those who began the year poor ended it poor. His father, Tanaka said, never thought of rebelling because he could not conceive of a better situation. It was his responsibility to accept what he had.

  There were about five hundred people in the village. A tiny handful of them owned almost all the land. As a boy you could walk and walk and never seem to leave the property of these rich men, Tanaka remembered. A few people had small plots of land themselves, but most were like Tanaka’s father, tenant farmers. The majority of the children were those of tenant farmers; they lived in thatch-roofed huts like Tanaka and his family, all five or six sleeping, as his family of seven did, in one tiny room. In those days it was easy to tell the children of the landowners from the other children; they wore clean kimonos every day at school. Sometimes they wore oshimas, a classier form of kimono. All the others had raggedy old kimonos. Shoes were particularly precious; they were very expensive. Tanaka had no memory of new shoes, only of hand-me-downs from his brothers. Whenever it rained he would go around barefoot, because he did not want to get his shoes wet and ruin them. At graduation the landowners’ children would always have brand-new shoes, whereas the tenants’ children had worn shoes, meticulously cleaned for the occasion, and handed down inevitably through several siblings.

  The Tanaka family knew nothing but hardship. There was always enough food but never any luxury. The basis of the diet when the harvest was good was rice. More often than not, however, things were hard, and the rice was mixed with millet. Tanaka loved rice but he hated millet, and when he would look at his plate and see that his dinner was mostly millet, he would carefully, as little boys do, separate the rice he loved from the millet he hated. Once in a while, when they were very lucky, there were some vegetables. On still rarer occasions there was fish. There was never meat. As a boy Tanaka helped his parents with every chore and worked in the fields. Sometimes he had one of the easier chores, like working in the mulberry fields, picking cocoons to sell to the silk dealers. Years later a friend asked him what he had done for leisure as a boy, and he had looked puzzled; he simply did not understand the question, for there had never been any leisure.

  Tanaka often wondered, when he was a grown man, who had had the harder life, his father or mother. They were both people who had suffered without even knowing they were suffering. His father would get up in the morning and work the harsh paddy all day long. It was backbreaking labor. If he had any pleasure in life, it was his sake. Sometimes, Tanaka knew, he drank too much sake and beat his wife. Even as a little boy Tanaka had known that there were terrible fights between his parents. He remembered that when his older brother was in the army and he had once written asking for a little money; his mother had gotten the letter and tried to hide it from the father, for fear of the anger it would create. It was very easy for his father to go from exhaustion into rage. As a boy he had understood in some elemental way that the drinking and the anger were always connected, but he had never decided whether the anger caused the drinking or the drinking caused the anger. Some of those nights were hard on everyone in the little hut.

  Tanaka thought his mother had an even harder life than his father. She got up earlier than anyone else and prepared the simple peasant breakfast for the entire family—bean-paste soup, boiled barley, and pickles. That finished, she would pack a lunch for her husband and join him in the field, working side by side, until she came home a little before him to fix dinner. That was her day. She had borne five children and had worked in the field until an hour or so before she delivered them. Her life, he realized later, had been merciless; she died when he was eight, of jaundice, he thought. When she died, he, the youngest, became responsible for most of the housework. His kimonos—it was a mild source of shame—were always a little more ragged than those of his schoolmates because there was no one at home to repair them.

  The village was self-contained, almost completely cut off from the outside world. There was no television or radio to keep the peasants informed of news from Tokyo, nor were there cars hurtling down the highway, bringing people in contact with one another. When he was eight years old Tanaka saw his first gas-driven vehicle; the date was September 1, 1923 (he remembered it because it was the day of the great Tokyo earthquake, and he later realized that his own tiny home had survived the earthquake only because it was so small that it shifted with the earth and thus was not destroyed). He had been walking along the road when a huge metal contraption rolled by. It was, he later realized, a bus. It seemed the grandest thing he had ever seen in his life. He stood there transfixed, and then he noticed that it seemed to be leaking something. He knelt down after it had passed, touched the spot on the road, and for the first time in his life smelled the scent of gasoline. He thought the smell was wonderful, and he stayed there for a long time, a little boy by the roadside sniffing this wondrous odor left behind by the bus, hypnotized by the smell and the idea of such a powerful machine. The idea of movement by machine was nearly unthinkable. Tanaka himself walked to and from every place he visited. There was a rich landowning family nearby, and the daughters of the family rode bicycles to school. Tanaka would watch them come and go, and sixty years later he could still remember the intensity of his envy, how much he wanted what they had, how much freer they were than he was.

  The principal pleasure in Tanaka’s life was school. He loved school, and he was good at it. Sixty years later a reporter could walk through the tiny village, now a distant suburban extension of Tokyo, and talk with the assistant principal of the elementary school, who had been a classmate of Tanaka’s, and hear him explain how everyone in the entire village had always known that Tanaka was the brightest boy in the village and would succeed. For in this meager society, school was the only equalizer. Tanaka might not be able to buy books at the little bookstore in the village, which he passed every day and longed to enter, but school was different. Poor and rich children were treated the same by the teachers. Studying for him was everything. He took his pleasure from those moments when he alone was able to answer a question from the teacher.

  His teacher was named Rennosuke Takeda, and he had from an early time encouraged Tanaka to continue his studies. Tanaka was clearly the best student in the class, and Takeda told the young boy that he could, by dint of hard work, become a teache
r himself. He was that gifted. That seemed a dream almost beyond Tanaka’s comprehension; teachers were men of learning and power. Hearing his teacher talk like that, he thought that teaching would lead him to the most wonderful of worlds. Japanese compulsory education ended, however, with the sixth grade, and poor children like Tanaka usually dropped out then and went to work in the fields. His three older brothers had finished their education with the sixth grade. At that point if a child still wanted education, his parents had to pay. Tanaka’s father did not want his fourth son to continue with his education. A sixth-grade education had been good enough for all the other children; it would be good enough for this son.