Historicizing Japanese Workers and Japanese Capitalism

This chapter begins with a brief historicization of salarymen from the late 1800s to the early 1990s. It focuses on the formation of the socioeconomic category of the New Middle Class and the cultural production of the new middle-class orientation within Japan's economic and industrial structure. It also traces the historical trajectory through which the modern configuration of welfare, work, and family emerged in prewar Japan and then took new shape in postwar Japan through the fractious struggle of workers and management. The chapter examines how the particular construction of the new middle class as a lived experience has been articulated through the socioeconomic category of the new middle class. It situates the contemporary discourse of neoliberal economic reforms within the historical development of Japanese corporate governance and Japanese capitalism.

Understanding the Trajectory of Japanese Capitalism

How can we understand the trajectory of Japanese capitalism? This Afterword situates Japan on a broad canvas stretching across both the region and the globe. East Asia’s regional dynamics figure prominently, shaping the trajectory of Japanese capitalism not only in the formative Age of Empire and postwar reconstruction, but also in the emergent Asian Century. An historical examination of geo-politics highlights imperial entanglements and both the routes and the roots of capitalist development in Japan. This discussion begins by setting the stage of post-World War II Japan, elaborating on the reproductive bargain that characterizes Japan’s political economy, investigating the importance of national identity as it informs who can participate in Japan’s economy, revealing the underbelly of contemporary Japan, discussing forces for change, and revisiting the methodological approach used to understand Japanese capitalism.

Introduction

This introductory chapter provides an overview of the rise of a nonregular workforce in Japan. Around the middle of the first decade of the 2000s, nonregular workers were identified as a key group whose members were suffering from low wages and insecure employment. As part of this growth in nonregular employment, Japan has also witnessed a growing number of workers' protests, which have both sought to highlight the plight of Japan's precarious workers and attempted to oppose and resist the new conditions that they were experiencing. Indeed, over the past twenty years, Japan has witnessed the emergence of a new form of labor activism. This book investigates the way in which Japanese capitalism has undergone a process of restructuring, with a particular focus on the workplace and how changing socioeconomic structures have affected workers. It explores how workers have responded and contributed to the construction of the Japanese political economy, as well as how the country's model of capitalism has been transformed as a result.

Democracy Against Labor Movement: Japan’s Anti-Labor Developmental State and Aftermaths

This paper investigates the labor-controlling orientation of the Japanese developmental state and its consequences today. Developmental state studies has given us a robust epistemological grid whereby we can make non-Western state formation intelligible. Yet, mainstream authors have tended to treat the working class as a mere appendage to state– business relations, relegating labor politics at the analysis of state– society relations. By using democratic Japan—a prime example of this sort of obfuscation—in combination with Marxian state theory, this paper outlines the difficulties, addresses them, and extends the scope of developmental state studies to labor. After identifying main tenets of the literature, the author constructs a theory of labor control as a stabilizer of relative state autonomy. The author applies this to Japanese labor movements since 1945 and interprets events and processes of labor oppression/regulation through which Japanese capitalism subsumed the working class under the aegis of the developmental state. Labor control, emerging out of an “exceptional state” (Poulantzas, 1974), evolved into a refined socio-relational system that insulated developmental goals from labor movements. This Japanese trajectory keenly mobilized big business and elite labor, which transformed labor control into a bilateral and then a tripartite league in defense of industrial policy and its deskilling/reskilling intervention. By the 1970s, this achieved the famous docility of Japanese labor. The historically constructed character of docile labor force was exploited once again when Japan made a neoliberal turn in its post-development phase.

Marxism and the Debate on the Transition to Capitalism in Prewar Japan

After the Meiji Restoration in 1868, Japan rapidly industrialized, greatly raising its level of economic productivity. However, the peasants were kept in a state of hunger under a semifeudal agricultural system. How should this semi-feudality be understood? About this question arose a debate among Japanese Marxists in prewar Japan: the Debate on Japanese Capitalism. This article examines the methodologies of three analysists of Japanese capitalism focusing on the level of abstraction of the analysis of capitalism, whose ideas were derived from Hegel’s Logic and Marx’s methodology of downward analysis and upward development: Moritarō Yamada of Kōzaha, Itsurō Sakisaka of Rōnōha, and Kōzō Uno, who distanced himself from both sides. Uno criticized Yamada and Sakisaka for directly analyzing a particular Japanese capitalism with a highly general theory such as Capital, and proposed the Three-Stage Theory: the Pure Theory, which is based on the assumption of a pure capitalism, such as Marx’s Capital; the Stage Theory, which clarifies the historical developmental stage of capitalism, such as Lenin’s Imperialism (1917); and the Empirical Analysis, which analyzes capitalism in each country at a given time. However, Uno’s main concern was to analyze Japanese capitalism in the Stage Theory, doing little to further advance it in the Empirical Analysis. Therefore, this article divided the Empirical Analysis into two levels of abstraction: the domain of theoretical construction of Japanese Capitalism, such as Lenin’s Development of Capitalism in Russia (1899), and of data analysis of specific conditions of Japanese capitalism, such as Engels’ The Condition of the Working Class in England (1844), and thus proposed the Four-Stage Theory. It is a hypothesis for complementing Uno’s Three-Stage Theory, which should be further developed by data. Finally, such methodological consideration for analyzing capitalism is applicable to non-Japanese capitalist societies.

The Thin Line between Economic Dynamism and Social Stability

Free competition in product markets is a common characteristic in capitalist economies. Meanwhile, regulations on the land, labour, and financial markets have changed over time in each capitalist economy and are distinct. We address this issue in the Japanese context. Medieval Japan under the second shogunate of Muromachi in the fourteenth century instituted a free competition regime for land, labour, and financial markets. An outcome was wealth inequality and social destabilization. The third shogunate of Edo vested peasants with property rights and regulated the land, labour, and financial market to maintain them as owner-farmers. The regime created an institutional arrangement where the stem farming family functioned as the centre of resource allocation. Deregulation after the Meiji Restoration of 1868 weakened the family-focused arrangement but did not entirely remove it. Traits of the family-focused arrangement form the specific characteristic of modern Japanese capitalism.