Reckoning

by David Halberstam

But in a rare gesture of a teacher on behalf of a student, Takeda himself went to the house and pleaded with Hanshichi Tanaka to allow the boy to go on. Just two more years, he had argued. He is my best student. He loves to study, and he can be a fine teacher. He will certainly do well at the teachers college. There is a future for him beyond this village. That last argument did not enchant the elder Tanaka, for whom the village had been quite good enough, but in the end, Takeda prevailed—he was a teacher and a man of authority, and his authority held that day in the house. So the boy was allowed to continue with his schooling. The school fees in those days were 20 sen a month. It was not a great deal of money, just about enough for three packs of cigarettes, but for a very poor family it was difficult to raise. Tanaka, because he was the best student in the class, was assigned the task of collecting the school fees each month. Often he was unable to bring his own payment. Takeda would ask him at the end of the collection, “Do you have it all?” No, Tanaka would answer, we don’t have it all, but we’re close. Tanaka, of course, was the one person who had not brought the money, and he would manage to delay the payment until there was a little money at home. It was quite possible, he realized later, that Takeda had arranged it in this way, knowing how hard it was on him and wanting to give him a bit of grace.

  When Tanaka was finished with the eighth grade, Takeda began preparing to push Tanaka for the next level of education. There was a normal school he would be able to attend without paying anything; he would, however, be obligated to teach for many years afterward. Takeda wanted to come to the house to make the argument in favor of continuing, but it could not be done. Tanaka’s father was tired of this foolishness. The boy had to accept his fate. He had already, without consulting the boy, sold his services for five years. His father had broken the news to him without any emotion; Tanaka sensed that his father was very sad when he had to do it, but that he had learned long ago how to control his emotions in such scenes. After all, Tanaka reasoned, he had done it three times before.

  Tanaka was sharply disappointed. The idea of becoming a teacher was a powerful one, and, encouraged by his teacher, he had believed he would be able to do it. And then he found out he had been sold. In later generations, he thought, there might have been some recourse. At the very least he might have been able to run away. But in those days one accepted it. His father had indentured him to a family in a neighboring village. His father had done this because he was poor and needed the money; therefore, it was his obligation to serve his father. If he did not accept the terms he would bring shame to his family. If he had fled, he might have been able to find a job somewhere, but people would have laughed at his family, and the shame would have hung over them and him for the rest of his life. There was simply no alternative to accepting; a young boy from the country did not simply pack up and leave his village without parental permission. If he had violated the earliest level of authority, that of the family, then anyone thinking of hiring him would assume he would violate the next level of authority, that of commerce. The terms were simple: He would work for five years for this family. He would receive room and board—the plainest imaginable. The money he earned would be sent to his father. For the first year he was paid 50 yen; for the second, 70; for the third, 90; for the fourth, 110; and for the last year, 130.

  His job was to carry coal from the local coal merchant to the families in the village. The woman who ran the coal store was a widow, and part of his job was to tutor her ten-year-old son, who became almost like a brother to him. He never forgot for a day that he might have become a teacher. When his five years were up, his life was finally his own, and he left the village immediately and headed for Yokohama. The eldest son was supposed to stay and help the father work the land, and the younger sons were supposed to go to the city. Tanaka’s sister Taka, his favorite in all the family, was living in Yokohama with her family. She had been able to attend even less school than the boys, because at a very young age she had been sent off to work for wealthy families as a maid or a baby-sitter. Then an uncle had decided that a bachelor in his family should marry her. Tanaka’s sister did not want to marry him, but there was no choice. She subsequently had nine children; Tanaka did not think she was very happy in her marriage.

  He went to Yokohama when he was just twenty, and for a time he worked for a delivery service. Then he saw the ad for jobs at Nissan, applied, and was accepted. He proudly sent money home. He had made good, and he was a good son. He worked in the axle-assembly section for two years, then in the chassis section, and then was drafted. He spent a year in China and served in the South Pacific. In 1946 he returned to Nissan. He remembered those postwar years as the hardest period in his life. He had gotten married during the war, and in 1946 he and his wife had started having children. They had been luckier than most couples, because their little house in Yokohama had not been burned down by the American incendiary bombs. But it was a desperate time as far as food was concerned. One child had just been born and now another was on the way, and Tanaka thought himself a failure; he had a job, but he was unable to provide enough food for his wife and child. Whatever money he made at work he brought home, and it was used for food. He was paid only once a month, and prices went up almost daily. Every month there was only one thought on his mind: Will this paycheck last even close to the arrival of the next one?

  On Saturday when he was through work at the factory, he would go out into the country and forage for food. Only the black marketeers had rice, and they were hard men, they demanded cash; they would not take a poor man’s promise, or his barter. On Sunday, his day off, he hung around the area where the Americans were based, hoping to get work as a day laborer. At the very least, if he did not get work, he sometimes could bring home scraps of food. The American soldiers were very rich, and their army cooks would take the loaves of bread and cut off the end crusts, what the Japanese called the ears of the bread. This, if nothing else was available, became his family’s food. Somehow he always managed to find enough to eat.

  His second child was born healthy, and then a third. Gradually things got better. He remembered precisely when it was he had realized the postwar period was truly over. Rice had begun to appear in the markets. The black marketeers no longer controlled the rice market. Soon they began to disappear. When the black marketeers no longer had power over him, no longer made him feel a failure, he knew that the war was finally over, and that the real peace had begun.

  He joined the union after the war, and he liked the idea of belonging to it; workers, he was told, were supposed to have rights and dignity, and the union would help them in this. He accepted the idea of that, although he also believed that work itself was dignity and that if you worked hard you did not have to assert any additional dignity. He became the union representative from an assembly section. But he was bothered by the growing turbulence at Nissan as the tensions mounted between management and the union. There were now so many authorized and unauthorized strikes and slowdowns that it was almost impossible to work. Work would start, and there would be a strike, and it would stop, and it would start again and stop again. That dismayed Tanaka more than anything else: He had a powerful belief that it was a shame not to work, that you were put on earth to work, not so much for yourself and your family, but because that was the right thing to do and because it improved the condition of everyone. The purpose of life, he believed, was work.

  The union began to make him nervous. He did not like the work stoppages, and he thought that the company, not the union, had the right to decide which worker held which job. He wanted to challenge the leadership of the union, but he was afraid to. Other men spoke up and there was quick retaliation against them, the suribachi trials. Sometimes he wanted to help the men who were on trial, but he was afraid to. Was he a coward? he wondered. He was a peasant, and peasants, he knew, were not supposed to speak up. They were supposed to be quiet and listen and do what they were told. So he was left each day with his thoughts; at night he would think of all the things
he had wanted to say, about how they had to work harder and save the company, and then in the daytime he would not say them. He was afraid all the time. He became suspicious of Masuda. Masuda was from Todai, he was from the elite—what did he really know about working men? Had his wife and children ever starved? Did Masuda forage for food? The people who got ahead in his union were the ones who were the most left-wing, not the ones who were the best workers. Was that right? “Masuda was the son of a rich man, and I was the son of a peasant,” Tanaka later said. “He was the moon and I was the turtle.”

  When the 1953 strike began he was very unhappy. He hated going to the factory every day when there was no work. Nothing in his life had ever seemed so wrong. Other men began to talk about splitting the union and forming a new one, but that seemed wrong to him too. However, when the second union was finally formed, on August 30, he joined almost immediately, on September 13. When the second union went back to work, Tanaka did too, with a great feeling of relief. Something treasured, his sense of purpose, had been taken away, and now it was being returned.

  Masuda stayed in jail about two weeks, and when he came back the second union was becoming stronger by the day. Oddly, Masuda seemed exhilarated. He had loved being in jail. He could not wait to tell his union colleagues about what it had been like. He had been with common criminals, and they had been amazed that a graduate of Todai, so well educated, had been in the same cell. He had given political instruction to them, he said, explaining to them why they were in prison and why they were victims of Japan’s class system. He seemed almost oblivious to the rise of the new union. It had no legitimacy with the workers, he said. Its leaders were agents of management. The workers would see that. When some of the men around him tried to argue that the struggle had changed, that the second union was picking up strength very quickly, Masuda stopped them short. “The men are loyal,” he would say. “All you have to do is walk across the floor or go to a rally.” His rallies were greater than ever, and far more emotional. That was so, the others replied, there was no doubt that he was winning the war of the rallies, and he would win a plebiscite, but the management and the second union were winning the war in the dormitories. Masuda, his friend Ochiai thought, had been too sure for too long of his own victory, and then when it became clear that the victory was slipping away, too proud to negotiate. He was, said Ochiai, like the Japanese commanders in the Pacific whom Masuda despised because they had held on too long after it was hopeless for them.

  Kawamata was slowly squeezing Masuda’s union. There were some loans to workers, and they were given with the understanding that they would not have to be paid back. Sometimes Miyake’s men would take a wavering worker to a bar, spend the evening filling him with drink and praise, and at the end of the evening some money might change hands, a bonus it was called. Sometimes a handful of them would visit a worker in the dorm, preferably in front of his wife, and talk to him about the job he might have. It was constant pressure now, and one side had the money and the jobs to offer, and the other did not. It could offer only dying hopes.

  Now the section chiefs, who had been beaten up so badly during the suribachi trials, were getting their revenge. They gave those workers who came back not just their regular salaries but bonuses. They warned those who remained with the Masuda union that there might never be another chance. There were going to be dismissals. For those who hesitated there would certainly never be any promotions. Promotions would go to those who had tried to save the company. The company would remember. The company already remembered. We have lists of those who caused all the trouble, Miyake’s people said. Right now your name is not on it. But we can add it to the list in a day or two. It is very easy to add a name to the list, and it is impossible to get it off once it has been added. Very quickly the tide turned. The second union concentrated on those workers, like Tanaka, who were the least political, and on those who seemed to be wavering. It simply ignored those who were committed to Masuda. The union, Miyake’s people kept repeating, is Communist. Look, they said, even its flag is red. If a worker spoke of loyalty to Masuda, the Miyake people would laugh: Masuda, they said, Masuda is from Todai, Masuda is not going to starve—and you, are you going to enter Todai when you lose your job?

  There were constant scuffles and fights as marauding groups encountered each other, the ugliness of it intensifying because it was a family feud and both sides knew each other so well. Shioji was in charge of the youth group from the second union. His assignment was to keep an eye on the first union and to match its force with his own. He loved it; he was always on the move, the head of Action Central, checking out trouble spots, sending his own people in. He seemed almost joyous, his friends thought, the one person who seemed to revel in the confrontation and who was always able to rise to it. Miyake was the head of the second union, but a great deal of the energy and strategy was coming from Shioji. He was already a power. By the end of September the new union had more than three thousand workers among its members. Finally Masuda understood what had happened. “They have us now,” he told his friends. “The only thing to do is save as many of our people as we can.” He never spoke to others about any miscalculations he had made: As far as he was concerned, he had done everything right until one day it had suddenly all gone wrong. Since the confrontation in August, when his union was locked out, his people had become broken and tired. He was fighting against a well-organized and well-financed foe—indeed, against the full force of postwar Japanese capitalism. He had underestimated his opponent. Having no alternative, he accepted the company offer, ended the strike, and sent his people back to work.

  They went back, of course, at the mercy of the company. Those who had been strong Masuda people were given the worst jobs, and some of those were eventually pressured into leaving the company. Masuda himself and about seven of his leaders soon received letters saying that they were fired. A few weeks later the second tier of his leadership was fired as well. The letters were very simple: They said that the recipient had broken the rules of the company and would no longer be needed. Some, like Masuda, decided to challenge the firing in the courts, but most did not. For them, they knew, it was over. By the end of 1953 the new union had complete control of the factory floor.

  Masuda was finished. His first mistake had been underestimating his opponents, and his second and perhaps even greater mistake had been overestimating his own men, thinking that they believed everything he believed and that they would stay the course. He had thought that Japan had truly changed after the war, and that a new order, of which he was an important part, had taken power. Instead, there had been a change not so much in the society but within the old order. Newer men had been allowed to come to the fore, and some of the older men had been forced into retirement because of their association with the old war-making machine. The old order had been democratized, modernized, slimmed down, and energized; the banking system was simplified, the companies made less cumbersome. But the old order had not changed. The strike at Nissan was the final proof. Limits on political and economic freedom were subtly being imposed.

  Nissan promptly expelled its old enemies and put loyalists in key jobs. Over the next few years nearly two thousand workers were fired. Now, the radical union broken and a new one sympathetic to management installed, Nissan stabilized itself. Basic wages for workers were cut 16 percent in the first year. Production schedules were tightened. Workers no longer challenged their superiors; instead, foremen watched their workers carefully for any murmur of dissent.

  Most significant was the death of Masuda’s dream—of an industry-wide union strong enough to stand up not just to one company but to the entire industry and indeed the state. From now on, each company would have its own union, which would be totally loyal to its parent company and dependent upon the marketplace success of the company for its own success. Management had won; it could not go back to the pre-MacArthur days, when there were no unions at all, but it had defined labor on its own terms, incorporated labor into the
company itself, and ended any possibility of labor as an adversarial force within. Years later, when Japan finally challenged Western industries, it was clear that one of the most critical factors in its success was the creation of the second unions and the elimination of radical ones.

  Masuda’s world had collapsed. Nearly all his old union associates reestablished themselves. Some made lateral moves to jobs in supplier companies or joined left-wing groups. But Masuda just drifted. His friends always thought his plight was proof that he had never been a member of the Communist party, because the party, which normally took care of its own, did nothing for him. The other members of his union felt themselves bound to each other and stayed in touch; they went to the same bars to drink and reminisce and try to understand what had happened. Indeed, in the true style of Japan, where there is a group for almost everything—be it the company group or the fifth-grade group or a group for the wounded in an army hospital—they formed an association of those who had been forced out of Nissan. They even had a name for themselves, the Association of the Bad Guys, and they got together for annual reunions. But Masuda never showed up. He avoided his old friends. When an auto journalist named Hideo Numasaki tried to interview him, Masuda answered. “All of that is past. All of it is done.”

  He had a difficult time supporting himself. For a long time he did not work, and then, using money borrowed from his mother-in-law, he set himself up as a small supplier, running an autobody-stamping shop. Before long he had serious labor troubles. He struggled with his workers, there were dismissals, and the workers, who did not have a union, thought of bringing charges against him in the labor council. Friends intervened, and the charges were not brought, but the company, which had never been very strong, went bankrupt. When friends tried to help him find other jobs, he pulled back; he was a proud man, and he did not want to be helped. By the early sixties he was unemployed and living as a single man, his life disorderly and lonely.