AnarWiki/markdown/Miike_Coalminers'_Strike_(1960).md

## Background

The small island of Miike, halfway between Fukuoka and Kuamoto in
central Kyushu was the largest coal mine in Japan. Being one of Japan's
few deposits of natural resources, it was extremely important since
Japan did not have to rely on imports. Although developed in the 1700s
by a small Samurai clan into a mine for fuel, it was soon nationalised
after the [Meiji Restoration](Meiji_Restoration "wikilink") but was run
very inefficiently so it was sold of to Mitsui Zaibatsu and the mine
became a key part of Japan's industrialisation. However, working
conditions and safety standards were awful and unionisation efforts were
repressed due to fear of it being a socialist plot. However, during the
[Allied Occupation of Japan](Allied_Occupation_of_Japan "wikilink"),
workers were granted the right to form trade unions.

However, the mine soon came under threat of cheaper energy imports from
the US made from oil and natural gas. 32,900 workers were fired in 1959
as coal mines across Japan were closed, and around Miike, only 7% of the
children in the area to be in good health due to families being unable
to afford proper food and doctors visits. After it was announced that
100,000 workers would be fired over the next three years

This second round of layoffs also targeted a different population than
the previous ones. In particular the layoffs started targeting the mines
that were affiliated with the miners union called Tanro a wing of
Japan’s largest Union Sohyo, the one that called the general strike
against Kishi. Tanro dominated mines had previously enjoyed a lot of
autonomy in how they were run, with most of the major operational
decisions made by a sort of workers council. The first round of
implemented layoffs was not coincidentally designed to target the
leadership of these councils and the Union more generally. At first
Mitsui attempted to couch the move by sending letters to about 1,000
workers suggesting that they “voluntarily resign”. When the workers
burned those letters Mitsui pulled out the big guns and fired them. And
so in January 1960 Tanro called a strike. This was not the first time
this had happened, in 1953 Mitsui had attempted to rationalise the
workforce of Tanro dominated mines by forcing workers over 50 as well as
women and quote unquote “bad character” out of the mines. The resulting
Tanro strike cost Mitsui over 4 billion yen and led to resignation of
Mitsui’s president and only resulted in only half the proposed layoffs
ever going forward with the by the by a promise extracted from Mitsui
\`never to attempt unilateral dismissals of mine employee’s again\`.

So it was not unreasonable for Tanro to expect to win out. After all
they’ve done it before, so they can do it again right? That was
particularly true because even if Mitsui could get scabs -workers to
replace the strikers- into the mines, Tanro had one other card to play.
The miners could physically block the trains carrying the coal from
leaving their stations preventing Mitsui from fulfilling its coal
contracts. This time however Mitsui was confident in its ability to beat
its miners, it was prepared to take bigger losses than it had in 1953 in
order to break the power of the Union. And this time it had the backing
of other coal producers who agreed to service Mitsui’s contracts while
the Miike mines were shutdown. After all if Mitsui could break the
Union’s power, it would be good for all coal producing companies not
just Mitsui. In addition

Mitsui had two other cards to play, the first was the support of the
national government, which was prepared to deploy police to the area to
“keep order”. The second was the fact that the local Yakuza offered
their services to Mitsui, remember the Yakuza has a very long history of
anti-leftist activity, going back to Japan’s very first elections. Union
busting was a speciality of theirs. Thugs associated with the Yakuza
started attacking the miners in March of 1960. On March 29th Kubo
Kiyoshi one of the leading members of Tanro was stabbed to death by a
member of the Yakuza who managed to sneak through the picket lines.

This violence did succeed in intimidating some of the workers who broke
off from Tanro to form a new union that was prepared to accommodate some
of Mitsui’s demands. Partially from the economic pressure and partially
because some of the union members were afraid that militant workers
calling for an ongoing strike, were tied too tightly to the Japanese
Communist Party. It looked like the workers were now starting to turn on
each other, which meant it was only a matter of time before Mitsui won
out. Indeed some three thousand miners, about 20% of the mining
workforce -not the broader workforce of the town generally affiliated
with Mitsui- did go back into the mines and resume mining in the middle
of March despite violent attempts by the strikers to stop them. The coal
trains still couldn’t leave the station but the mines were technically
open for business once again.

At the same time Mitsui was very carefully containing the protest and
preventing it from spreading to its other holdings. Other Mitsui owned
coal mines such as the Bibai mine in Hokkaido were not subject to
mandatory layoffs. Instead Mitsui returned to the old canard of
voluntary retirement, essentially offering severance bonuses to ease
people out instead of forcing a confrontation. It really looked that
this was going to work, Union solidarity was breaking down, strikes in
other Mitsui mines hadn’t materialised.

But what kept the protests going was ANPO. In light of the growing
security treaty protests in Tokyo events in Miike took on a new aura. No
this was not just a labour dispute it was one wing of a broader struggle
against businesses and government bureaucrats who wanted to roll back
the reforms of the Occupation and return Japan to the bad old days.

National Unions started to take up the Miike cause. Calling a wave of
strikes in support of the Miike workers; the largest covered 300,000
workers across Japan. Activists also started flooding into the area
itself, many of them in fact the same activists who’d just been
protesting ANPO. They made their way south after the treaty passed and
Kishi resigned in June and July. Unions across the country also started
to send representatives to join the miners and their strikes and to
begin collections to support the miners.

The story grabbed national headlines right next to ANPO. My personal
favourite example is a letter from a Junior Highschool girl from Miike
named Tanabata Sumiko published in Sohyo run newspaper in April 1960,
the letter itself was from December. The letter reads in part:

Quote:

> “My father has done Union work for the Miike local Union since before
> I was born. He also works in the mines. Because my father is easy
> going every morning I get to talk with him a little bit about his
> work. My father spends every day organising or participating in Union
> demonstrations down at the mine, but I’m worried about him. My older
> sister said something the other day I think shows how things are here.
> \`Cut off the heads of those who would cut off ours\`”.

That really demonstrates I think the ferocity of feeling among the
miners and their families who perceived their very livelihood’s as being
fundamentally under threat. That line about slitting throats Ku-bi-o-Ku
(Phonetic approximation, trans ed) in Japanese, is a reference to a
Japanese colloquialism, Kubini Naru, which is a very euphemistic way of
saying someone is fired, literally that their head is rolling. The
letter closes by the way on a sadder and less violent note:

Quote:

> “soon it is going to be New Year’s and
>
> `there is nothing I really want for a gift. Because my father is being `
>
> laid off money is pretty tight. My family is going to be spending the
> New Year’s season by taking care of each other.”

The letter was likely selected by Sohyo of course to publish because of
its heart wrenching ending, but it also demonstrates the extent to which
this was a life and death battle for the miners. The protests continued
the whole summer and into the fall, it wasn’t until October that an
exhausted Miners Union caved in. Its strike funds were running out,
popular interest was drying up and so on November 1st 1960, the strike
ended.

The Union agreed to sit down with Mitsui and a team of outside mediators
to determine where things should go from here. In the end Mitsui had the
resources to wait out the protests. The mediators decided overwhelmingly
in Mitsui’s favour, the layoffs mostly went ahead, safety improvements
were never made and Tanro as a Union had its power broken. Mitsui had
proven they could be beaten.

In 1963 a mine explosion killed 450 people and injured over 800 more at
Miike, another explosion in 1984 claimed over 80 lives. The mine was
eventually shuttered all together in the 1990s. If as some protestors
claimed the Miike and ANPO struggles were linked attempts to defend the
New Japan against those who wanted to roll back the tide, those attempts
were it seemed failures. The miners lost, the protestors in Tokyo lost.

And yet as with ANPO a new consensus emerged from the ashes of Miike,
that would inform the future of Japanese society. The Miike protests you
see were messy, they looked bad and they undercut the new Ikeda
administrations focus on the consensus for economic growth. If the goal
was to paper over the difference of Japanese society by focussing
everyone’s attention on getting rich, fights over how to distribute
those riches were in essence counterproductive.

So government and business policy began to shift. Lifetime employment
guarantees were shored up in order to avoid the kind of direct
confrontation that Miike represented. Even as this was happening big
Japanese firms also worked to undercut the power of Unions like Tanro.
After all powerful Unions represented an organisational threat to the
ability of management to guide certain business decisions. Even if
management was committing to avoiding certain kinds of actions which
would upset the Unions.

Most Japanese Unions were and are what are called enterprise unions, in
other words Unions not organised across an entire sector like Teamsters
or Sanitation workers or what have you, but across a single business. A
Mitsui Union a Toyota Union and so forth. After Miike businesses began
pushing harder for unionisation along this model figuring not
incorrectly that if a worker’s energy could be channelled into these
narrower business specific unions it would be harder to organise mass
protests and easier to keep the unions under control.

In some cases, the president of a given company would even lead the
unionisation charge and become president of the Union as well. All of
this was pitched to workers as more responsive and not unreasonably,
after all a narrower union can respond to narrow issues as well. In my
mind the most interesting way this played out was in the 1990s during
the early days of the great Japanese recession. With the overt support
of the Japanese government many firms avoided outright firings to the
greatest degree possible even as Japan’s economy ran straight into a
brick wall. The economic cost of keeping workers whose jobs no longer
produced much if anything of economic value employed was considered less
than the social cost of breaking the lifetime employment contract and
inviting a new Miike on a greater scale.

And one that would hit places a lot close to the centre of Japan than
some coal mine in rural Kyushu. That’s the extent to which fear of a new
confrontation with labour became a major factor in policymaking. In the
end that’s what’s interesting about the summer of 1960. It wasn’t
despite what some protestors might have envisioned a great uprising
against the forces that wanted to turn Japan’s clock back. In the end
the establishment won both cases, a new age of progressive Japanese
politics was not on the horizon.

Indeed probably the most powerful visual moment of the summer of 1960,
really underscored the degree to which the progressive dream had bloomed
in the 1940s had died. On October 12th 1960 the Socialist representative
of Tokyo’s first District, Asanuma Inejiro was taking part in a debate
with an electoral opponent that was being broadcast live on the local
NHK affiliate. Asanuma had a long history as a Socialist firebrand, most
recently for having gone on a state visit to Beijing and praised
Chairman Mao, while denigrating the United States, at a time when Japan
still refused to recognise the People’s Republic of China as a
legitimate government. In the middle of the debate a right-wing
ultranationalist all of 17 years old stormed the stage with a Katana and
stabbed Asanuma to death.

Asanuma’s death became a stand in for the death of the old Socialist
Party, for a vision that the JSP could take control of Japan from the
LDP and direct the future of the country. Asanuma Inejiro was mourned
nationally and in his wake peace protests broke out across Japan. But
that was really it, the JSP and left-wing movements that had led ANPO
and Miike had become generalised peace movements content to throw out
the occasional protest while the LDP governed the country.

This shift from a left-wing that was vying for power to a left that was
content to defend what it had, a peace constitution, labour laws,
lifetime employment was not a direct result of the death of Asanuma.
Instead his murder took on a symbolic value, the death of Asanuma became
a stand in for of the old Socialist Party. And in more concrete terms it
served as a threat to future socialist politicians, \`stay in your lane,
don’t push to far, or else\!\`

In addition to a weakened left, one that had gambled on two big
victories and lost both what emerged from 1960 was a renewed
Conservative movement. Kishi’s wing of the LDP the pro rearmament crowd
was now gone from power. It would not return seriously in any meaningful
sense to the political discourse until the mid to late 2000s. When Kishi
Nobususke’s grandson Abe Shinzo got his first term -but not his last- as
Japan’s Prime Minister.

Meanwhile, while Mitsui had defeated Tanro in a labour showdown the
result was not the end of Union power altogether. Unions remained and
were still capable of shows of force, but that kind of direct
confrontation between management and labour became less and less common.
A new understanding had been reached that Unions would accept what they
were being given in exchange would restrict themselves to pro forma
protests, often scheduled in advance every year with a short walk out
followed by some speeches and low-key marching followed by a return to
work. A far cry from the old days of Yakuza backed unionbusting.

In the end that transformation is what I think is really interesting
about the events of 1960. So often commenters on post war Japan focus on
this idea of harmony “Wa” of a society where conflict had been subsumed
by the greater interests of the whole. Look at Western writing on Japan
or even Japanese writing on Japan in some cases, from the 1970s and
1980s you’ll see this brought up over and over again. Where did it come
form? The commenters wondered, something unique to Japanese
institutional history, Japanese culture too, or as some more racialistic
thinkers in Japan suggested Japanese ancestry itself?

The explanation really is a lot simpler, that emphasis on harmony was
born out of conflict. The summer of 1960 was a compressed version of a
sort of Hegelian synthesis. If that means nothing to you very simply put
Hegel proposed a sort of process of intellectual evolution for humanity
in three steps. First a new vision a thesis would be put forward, say
the progressive vision of the Japanese left who embraced Union activism,
article 9 and the image of Japan as a disarmed and neutral friend to
all. Then an antithesis would come forward, an opposed agenda energised
by disdain for the original thesis, men like Kishi or the Mitsui board
of directors would step forward and oppose it. Finally their conflict
would result not in ultimate victory for one side or the other, but in
compromise, in synthesis a new path forward would be found incorporating
both sides and the process would begin again.

The system that governed Japan to the 1960s until the 1990s, arguably
still today was just such a synthesis. Born out of a desire to prevent
further confrontation and instead to refocus Japan’s energies on the one
area of agreement, on the power and importance of economic growth. It
became the guiding principle of the New Japan. And hey it worked, today
that’s how ANPO and Miike tend to get remembered. As bloody violent
depressing footnotes on the way to that synthesis. And yet I do think
they deserve a little more than that, these were events that rocked
Japan, that captured headlines, that were instrumental in driving the
new Japanese order forward. The Japan of today, the worlds third largest
economy, rich, stable, it’s the product of ANPO, the product Miike, even
the product of the death of Asanuma. And everything that grew from those
moments in 1960.

That’s all for this week, thank you very much for listening.

\*I believe this is a mistake as Isaac Meyer says Kōtoku Shūsui, but
seems to be talking about Kanno Sugako who was his lover and grew up
around mining companies.