View source for Miike Coalminers' Strike (1960)

== 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]] 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]], 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
<nowiki> </nowiki>to resignation of Mitsui’s president and only resulted in only half the
<nowiki> </nowiki>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
<nowiki> </nowiki>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
<nowiki> </nowiki>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
<nowiki> </nowiki>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
<nowiki> </nowiki>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
<nowiki> </nowiki>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
<nowiki> </nowiki>now starting to turn on each other, which meant it was only a matter of
<nowiki> </nowiki>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
<nowiki> </nowiki>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
<nowiki> </nowiki>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
<nowiki> </nowiki>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:
<blockquote>
“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`”.</blockquote>
That really demonstrates I think the ferocity of feeling among the 
miners and their families who perceived their very livelihood’s as being
<nowiki> </nowiki>fundamentally under threat. That line about slitting throats Ku-bi-o-Ku
<nowiki> </nowiki>(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:
<blockquote>“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.”
</blockquote>
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
<nowiki> </nowiki>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
<nowiki> </nowiki>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,
<nowiki> </nowiki>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
<nowiki> </nowiki>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
<nowiki> </nowiki>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
<nowiki> </nowiki>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
<nowiki> </nowiki>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
<nowiki> </nowiki>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
<nowiki> </nowiki>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
<nowiki> </nowiki>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.
<nowiki> </nowiki>A new understanding had been reached that Unions would accept what they
<nowiki> </nowiki>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
<nowiki> </nowiki>this idea of harmony “Wa” of a society where conflict had been subsumed
<nowiki> </nowiki>by the greater interests of the whole. Look at Western writing on Japan
<nowiki> </nowiki>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
<nowiki> </nowiki>thinkers in Japan suggested Japanese ancestry itself? 

The explanation really is a lot simpler, that emphasis on harmony was
<nowiki> </nowiki>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
<nowiki> </nowiki>Hegel proposed a sort of process of intellectual evolution for humanity
<nowiki> </nowiki>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,
<nowiki> </nowiki>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
<nowiki> </nowiki>both sides and the process would begin again. 

The system that governed Japan to the 1960s until the 1990s, arguably
<nowiki> </nowiki>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
<nowiki> </nowiki>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
<nowiki> </nowiki>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. 

<nowiki>*</nowiki>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.