Masao Sugiura, Against the Storm: How Japanese Print Workers Resisted the Military Regime, 1935–1945
This review was first published in Interface: A Journal for and About Social Movements (Interventions 2019), vol. 12, no 1, pp. 657–60,<https://www.interfacejournal.net/wp-content/uploads/2020/07/Interface-12-1-reviews.pdf>.
Masao Sugiura, 2019, Against the Storm: How Japanese Printworkers Resisted the Military Regime, 1935–1945, edited by Kaye Broadbent, translated by Kaye Broadbent and Mana Sato. Melbourne: Interventions (164; AU$25)
From the commencement of Japan’s Fifteen Year War in 1931, when the Japanese Kwantung Army staged a bomb attack on the Manchurian Railway in order to justify the invasion of Manchuria, until Imperial Japan’s surrender to the Allies in 1945, labour organising and anti-war resistance in mainland Japan was subject to fierce repression by the military and civilian police. With some notable exceptions, most Marxists and labour organisations capitulated to expansionist Japanese nationalism, either recanting their views or joining in class-collaborationist projects such as the Patriotic Industrial Association (PIA), which compulsorily absorbed labour organisations and mobilised them for the war effort.
The new English translation of Against the Storm, Masao Sugiura’s account of labour organising in the Tokyo printing and publishing industry, demonstrates that in spite of widespread capitulation and ruthless repression, pockets of labour and anti-war resistance did continue throughout Japan’s darkest period. In doing so it also helps to explain how Japan’s labour and socialist movements bounced back so quickly in the wake of the defeat. The introduction of more favourable labour policies by the Occupation authorities was followed by an explosion in union membership and strike activity and the election of the first short-lived socialist-led coalition government in 1947, as has been documented in English by Joe Moore (2003).
This English edition of Against the Storm is a translation of Masao Sugiura’s insider’s account of the Shuppankō Kurabu (Print and Publishing Workers Club), whose precursors emerged in the Tokyo printing industry in 1934 and remained active until 1948, when it was disbanded following the establishment of a strong national printworkers union. The original text, Wakamono wa arashi ni makenai (Young People Will Not Give into the Storm) was published in Japan in 1982 based on an earlier 1964 version. Kaye Broadbent edited Against the Storm and translated the source text together with Mana Sato.
Broadbent also provides an introductory essay which summarises the development of the socialist and workers movements in Japan in the early twentieth century and describes the deepening economic and social crisis of Japanese society in the 1930s. Against the Storm is rounded out with a short interview Broadbent conducted with Sugiura at his home outside Tokyo in 2016, when he was 102 years old. A useful glossary contains definitions for the many terms which will be unfamiliar to non-specialist readers. The book is published in Australia by Interventions, a new not-for-profit socialist publishing initiative established in 2015 as a continuation of the earlier Jeff Goldhar Project. In Australia’s limited publishing marketplace, independent publishing ventures with an explicit political objective are a welcome intervention into the liberal mainstream.
In the preface, Broadbent describes how she came across the 1964 Japanese text in the library of the Ohara Institute for Social Research, Japan’s leading research institute for labour history, while conducting research for an essay on wartime labour activism (Broadbent & O’Lincoln 2015). Like Broadbent, I have had a longstanding interest in the untold stories of resistance to Japanese militarism during the war. However, the existing English sources on this history are limited. The publication of a primary-source document of this nature in English therefore significantly expands the information available to labour historians who seek to reclaim Japanese traditions of grassroots resistance in order to counter the continuing stereotypical portrayals of Japan as a nation of conformists who are incapable of standing up to their government.
Against the Storm takes us inside the lifeworld of working-class printworkers in 1930s Tokyo. Sugiura helps us to understand the poverty and harsh working conditions they endured, with long hours and often only two days off per month. The workforce was divided between an elite of full-time printworkers and an army of temporary workers who had no job security and even worse pay.
Sugiura shows us how the seeds of working-class culture took root in this environment. On his rare days off, he would attend performances at the Tsukiji Small Theatre, where the police would be in attendance to haul off members of the audience who broke out with the Internationale as the performers on stage acted out socialist realist plays about corrupt bosses and workers going on strike. As Sugiura notes, while mostly of working-class background and therefore unschooled in the elite Marxism popular among middle-class intellectuals of the day, the typesetters and printing workers needed an above-average level of education and literacy in order to do their jobs printing Japanese-language texts, which use thousands of Chinese kanji characters.
The Print and Publishing Workers Club’s first incarnation was as a literary circle called Ayumi. By publishing and distributing a magazine of the same name, organisers were able to make contact with workers in different factories and talk about labour issues. This formed the basis of their later organising. Following a 1935 strike at Tokyo Printing, Ayumi formed the kernel of a labour organisation and helped to raise strike funds and support striking workers. While the strike was ultimately defeated, the strike committee and literary circle continued to organise, forming a society which was formally established as the Print and Publishing Workers Club in 1937. The Club tried to help the newly unemployed printworkers find jobs, an activity which forced them to confront corrupt labour hire practices in the industry. Organisers of the Club had a background in the union and communist movements, but they argued that the workers needed a different type of organisation that would nurture a culture of solidarity among the workers that would in turn help build class-consciousness and open up avenues for further organising.
The Club’s focus on grassroots networking and developing the cultural life of its members helps to explain why their resistance remains relatively unknown. Rather than focusing on explicit union demands and risking almost certain arrest and repression, the club focused on building solidarity among the workers in different factories and the publishing industry more broadly. This kind of activity is less likely to leave a trace in the historical record than strikes and other more visible forms of labour activism.
The Print and Publishing Workers Club built connections between workers which enabled them to survive the hardships of their daily lives by organizing as a social club. Their activities included publishing a haiku journal, organizing sporting competitions and organising hiking expeditions to the mountains. During the summer months, the club rented a house at the beachside to provide rest and recreation opportunities for the members. The group also operated a lending library including both novels and popular literature alongside Marxist and other socialist texts. These social activities gave them a veneer of legitimacy and helped to minimize police surveillance and repression.
As the Japanese state increased its repression of labour organizing following the intensification of the conflict in China after 1937, labour organisations and the still-legal proletarian parties began to take the increasingly class collaborationist line of supporting the nation in a time of crisis. Unions were forced to disband and joined the Patriotic Industrial Association (PIA), a body established by the government and conservative union leadership to support the war effort. Due to its unique organizational structure, the Club continued to organize at the grassroots, avoiding open confrontation with bosses. They prepared to go underground by dividing their activities into separate organisations, such as haiku circles, sporting clubs and women’s groups.
The Club was formally dissolved in the presence of Special Police witnesses in line with the directive for all labour unions. While this enabled the organisation to operate covertly, its networks began to fray as conditions worsened and members were sent to the front or transferred to munitions factories. In 1942 the author, Sugiura and leading organiser Shibata Ryūichi were both imprisoned under the repressive Peace Preservation Law and brutally tortured by the police before being sent to prison, where they remained for the remainder of the war. Shibata died in prison in 1945, just months before Japan’s surrender, but Sugiura survived and was released in October 1945, along with other political prisoners. He immediately joined the now-legal Japan Communist Party and began organising in the print industry, helping to found the All Japan Printing and Publishing Trade Union in 1946.
In making Against the Storm available for an Anglophone audience, Broadbent and Sato have given us new insight into the world of cultural activism and underground organizing during the darkest period for the labour and socialist movement in Japan’s history. Today, far-right forces within the ruling Liberal Democratic Party are gaining confidence in their quest to rewrite the history of the Fifteen Year War, denying Japanese atrocities and minimizing the repressive nature of the wartime regime as they seek to rearm Japan so that it can play a greater role in foreign military conflicts.
Today, Prime Minister Shinzō Abe openly seeks to revise Article 9 of the Japanese Constitution, the so-called peace clause which outlaws war as a means of solving international disputes. In their defence of the constitution, the democratic forces in Japan often point to the terrible violence committed by the Japanese military overseas and the repression carried out against the labour movement at home. However, this pamphlet reminds us that as well as remembering the crimes of the militarist part, it is also important to remember Japan’s own traditions of resistance. The model of grassroots organizing, cultural resistance and industrial militancy the Club provides can give us confidence that even as fascism gains strength, it is possible to resist and in doing so to build the foundations of a democratic, peaceful culture.
References
Brodbent, Kaye and Tom O’Lincoln 2006. “Japan: Against the Regime.” Pp. 655–702 in Fighting on All Fronts: Popular Resistance in the Second World War. London: Bookmarks.
Moore, Joe 1983. Japanese Workers and the Struggle for Power, 1945–1947. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press.
