PART TWO
UNIVERSAL SHOES

Chapter 5
Routinizing an Ideal
Democracy and Participation in Union Meetings

Early in June 1980, as Unikon was experiencing both the disorder of moving to their new company and the dissonance of their internal postvictory struggles, one of the Unikon leaders took me on my first visit to Universal Shoes, where I would begin working in July. We met at the train station nearest the company and walked from there. That walk, the area we passed through, and the physical structures and spaces of the Universal factory confirmed at every turn descriptions I had heard about them from Unikon workers. The images were very striking. Having come to Universal from Unikon my mind was sensitive to the differences. Whereas Unikon was located in three- and four-story, warehouselike factory buildings spread across a city block adjacent to the train tracks, the Universal buildings consisted of one one-story and one twostory wooden structures with pounded earth floors on about an acre of land. Surrounding Unikon was a cement wall. Around Universal was a wooden fence, just tall enough to prevent seeing inside. Bright red flags with the union name were placed at about eight-inch intervals atop the fence, giving the whole factory a somewhat festive appearance. The buildings themselves were open to the weather, with doors and windows open to breezes, whereas Unikon's had been closed up, many work areas without windows, and all with climate-control systems of some kind. People were not in uniforms at Universal as they had been at Unikon, they were in comfortable work clothes and aprons. Between Universal's two long rectangular buildings was a yard where the vans could pull in and load or unload shoes and where people could gather. Behind one of the buildings was an open field, part of which was being used by

workers to grow vegetables in their spare time, the rest of which was vacant and used for exercises and spontaneous ball games at lunchtime or for factory festival events. The walk from the train station to Unikon was short and crossed streets with a few shops and some apartments. The walk to Universal was long, about twenty minutes, and wound through tiny streets crammed with small houses, factories, and a few shops. The area was too far from train stations to be attractive to developers, so it was growing slowly and erratically into an area with both rebuilt homes and factories and older ones, all still on tiny plots of land with very modest resources. Unikon workers had referred to Universal as a "real shitamachi factory," referring to the old-fashioned neighborhood environment of the place.

What I found at this first meeting in June was a fascinating juxtaposition of images of tradition and traditional social values, on the one hand, discussed with pride by leaders and rank and file at Universal, with on the other, a commitment to ideals identified with socialism and democracy and a determination to protest, fight, and make personal sacrifices for an indefinite period of time to achieve union goals. This chapter is both an introduction to Universal and an account of one of its highest ideals, democracy, and the troublesome way in which, despite good intentions and significant efforts, that ideal evaded realization as routine organizational practice.

Introductions, Ideals, and Democracy

Nakahara-san, one of the Unikon leaders, and I met the president of the Universal union, Kishi-san, in the reception room of the factory. We spent only a few moments on the introduction of my project, about twenty minutes touring the small factory and meeting several workers, and then the three of us settled down for some tea and spent the next hour and a half chatting about a wide range of labor movement and union topics.

Kishi-san told me how hard he and other Japanese labor union leaders were struggling to realize democracy in their unions. He said that the most important aspect of socialism was workers being able to have "control ovcr their own lives." He smiled and referred to Universal as a "tiny socialism" (chiisa na shakaishugi ). It is very hard, he continued, to succeed in a capitalist economy as a "tiny socialism," but this was, for

him, the real inspiration for Universal's struggle. They were determined, he said, to win their dispute and reopen as a worker-owned and workermanaged firm. With this, the conversation roamed in the direction of Unikon's recent victory and its plans for the future. Nakahara-san looked somewhat uncomfortable as Kishi-san expressed the ideals and goals of the Universal movement, and when he started to talk about Unikon he shook his head and sighed and expressed his growing acceptance of the difficulties of achieving labor union goals in a capitalist country.

Kishi-san's age (forty-two), his status as union president, and his long experience in the labor movement gave him the status he needed to offer extensive advice to Nakahara-san about how hard Unikon should work to be a model for other struggling unions. They should, he said, strive for a smooth transition from the workers' control of production during their struggle to a successful new company. The conversation turned to the differences between Universal and Unikon, reiterating most of the characteristics which Unikon workers had been telling me about. Kishisan turned to me and said that one thing I would find at Universal which would make it very different from Unikon was that people here had trouble speaking up. Unikon is filled with younger workers, he said, and they are bold and understand better how to be democratic. "Here at Universal, however, there is a major problem of not speaking up [hatsugen mondai ] and that is probably the central problem which we have to solve in order to realize democracy or socialism." The sense of importance given to issues of organizational procedure at Universal was of keen interest to me, having just emerged from the internal struggles over these issues at Unikon.

While I had never heard the phrase hatsugen mondai at Unikon, recent events there made his characterization of their union as untroubled by the problems of realizing democracy seem ironic to me. The difference apparent to me from this initial meeting was the degree to which democracy and new and different ideals for organizing a workplace were placed explicitly as ideals and as goals by their president in his vision of the meaning of their struggle.

Meetings

The most routine aspect of union membership is attending meetings. Even before their dispute Universal workers had been

accustomed to convening several times a year for general meetings and more often for shop floor meetings. When I met them, Universal workers had been involved in their worker-control struggle for just over three years. It was the first major dispute in their twenty-five year history, and so far it had involved workers doing leafleting and attending arbitration sessions. The first demonstration in the history of their union was scheduled after I began working there, in an effort to speed up the resolution of their dispute.^[1] Their leaders participated in extensive union networks and had managed to gain widespread support, including the support of the labor union of the parent company, Custom, but the rank-and-file workers had had very limited contact with those wider networks of workers.

One of the most important differences between Unikon and Universal lay in the relative independence of Unikon and the relative dependence of Universal. Universal had been operating wholly as a subcontractor to Custom, so they had no sales department and no experience designing, marketing, or independently procuring materials. Their union members were relatively inexperienced in company operations because they had not been as independent as they had to become after their bankruptcy. Once the backing of Custom was pulled out, they had to create their own networks for supplies, sales, and design. Most of this they did themselves by relying on union networks for advice, financial support, and additional management and labor power in the form of visiting officials working at the factory on a daily basis. They bought vans and utilized national networks of federations to market their shoes throughout Japan on a strictly informal, union-to-union basis.^[2]

The Universal struggle was itself characterized most regularly by work routines and tenacious persistence. They put on factory festivals for neighborhood solidarity and threw occasional parties for their supporters. For the rank and file, the most frequently experienced form of explicit union action was the meetings. At the meeting described in this chapter, Universal leaders outline proposed changes in that strategy, changes meant to involve rank and file more directly in protest activities and more actively in the management of the company.

[1] That demonstration is described in chapter 6.

[2] Years later, when I was doing another project and dropped in on a union leader at a Toshiba factory near Tokyo, he asked me what other work I had done in Japan. When I mentioned Universal he beamed at me, pointed to the shoes he was wearing, and said, "They make great shoes! I bought these years ago and they are still in good shape!" He went on to praise their determination and success, particularly impressive considering how small they were.

Meetings held during their dispute were not altogether different from those held before, but they were substantially transformed, serving as a reminder of their struggle as an occasion for contact with supporting unions and federation people. For Universal workers, their struggle was evident in their daily lives as well, in that they had ongoing interactions both with workers sent from affiliated unions to help in production or management and with workers from their neighborhoods or their networks who bought their shoes. Representatives from these unions and from the Socialist Party came to all of their general meetings and to all of the special events.

Meetings had an additionally important purpose for Universal, in that their union ideology took an explicit stand in favor of workers controlling their own factory and making decisions in an egalitarian manner not only now, as part of their strategy, but as a long-term goal of company reconstruction as well. Democracy was an explicit ideal, as was the creation of a "tiny socialism." The first thing that Universal leaders asked me to do when I showed up for work my first day in July was to go to a meeting. It was clear that for them this was in many ways the heart of their union. I attended a Joint Struggle Committee meeting, the meeting of officials from regional and industrial federations gathered in support of the Universal dispute. Only Universal's officials were part of this committee; all other members were outsiders sent to direct and assist the struggle. Unikon also had such a committee, but I was never invited to its meeting. Universal leaders wanted me to attend these sessions, and I was more than happy to oblige.

I discovered the complexity of their small organization quickly, however, when on this first day I emerged from the meeting and went to the work station I had been assigned. I was working in the cutting and sewing section with six workers, all with long experience in shoemaking and at Universal. They broke the ice by telling me that I already knew more about their union strategy than they did, because they never got to find out what went on at those meetings. Only the erai hito or "big shots" got to attend those. I had only heard language like that used toward outsiders at Unikon. Here it was inclusive of their own officials and others on this committee as well. I was alerted already to the difficulties around decision making and democratic process within the union. The internal struggles which surfaced at the close of Unikon's settlement came to mind, as did the frustrations expressed by President Kishi about hatsugen mondai , the problem of people not speaking up, at Universal.

As the Universal union entered its struggle, the Custom union joined in supporting them. They were fighting their own struggle against further rationalization and loss of jobs at Custom, and they believed that the Universal bankruptcy was intended to frighten Custom workers into voluntary retirements to assist in the employee reduction management was attempting. The two unions had grown increasingly close over the past three and a half years, and Custom union officials were friendly, well-known faces around Universal. They often sent workers to help with production when deadlines were tight, and they always contributed financially when there was a need. While the Custom union was trying not to create an alternative form of workplace but rather to guarantee the jobs and benefits of their own rank and file in a successful company, they were also struggling with some of the same internal issues. Their union president raised the issue of democracy after one of the first general meetings I attended. "Unions," he said "are really the grass roots of Japan's democracy." It is the responsibility of union leaders, he said, to make it work in their own organizations, not just for the sake of the labor movement, but for the democratization of Japanese society as well.

At both Universal and Unikon, union leaders shared some of these feelings and accordingly made serious efforts to "educate" their workers, to "encourage" self-expression and participation in meetings, and to get rank and file involved politically at this most basic level. "Democracy is new to Japan," one leader told me, "and people have not had to fight for it. They don't rcally know what it is about. Our job is to educate our members." At Unikon workers had learned to speak up and say what they liked for much of their history. In the face of a major conflict they had not been able to find a voice or take oppositional actions, but in less polarized situations they had learned to engage in discussion. What that participation meant was, of course, seriously questioned and debated during their final weeks. At Universal things were quite different in this regard. Rank-and-file workers were inhibited in their expression not only of potentially discordant ideas but even in discussion of less problematic issues as well. Rank and file, however, did not feel it was so much an issue of education in democracy as one of leadership failing to lead "democratically." A Universal worker had this analysis: "Democracy doesn't work because our leaders act like samurai. As soon as they get any power, they start acting superior and stubborn. They don't even want to hear differing ideas, and they are scared that their own power might be weakened if differing opinions come out in

the open. Consequently they try to suppress any debate. You can't have democracy with that kind of attitude!"

At both Universal and Unikon, and among both leadership and rank and file, democracy was highly valued as an ideal. At Unikon democratic process was abandoned by leaders when circumstances seemed to them to make it impossible to pursue, but that in itself became a serious internal problem, thus attesting to the significance this ideal had attained and to the movement, albeit imperfect, toward making its practice routine. The word and related terms were used informally in conversation by workers and by leaders in both unions to express positive aspects not only of their unions but of modern Japanese society.

I attended meetings regularly at Universal and watched the fascinating counterpoint between discussion during these events and discussion before and after. The following is an account of one of the most important meetings, an annual meeting where a major shift in union policy was announced and left open for discussion. The thoughts, actions, and feelings which constitute the experience and consciousness of democracy emerge both through this event and in actions and conversations on related topics from daily life.

The Twenty-Fifth Annual Meeting

"There is a general meeting this coming Saturday," my coworkers reminded me on a Tuesday. "Are you going to come?" I said I'd love to, that I was looking forward to it, and that I found these events very interesting. This must have been the response they were waiting for, because it set into motion the by-now familiar round of smiling, laughing, and good-natured teasing of the American anthropologist which had come to characterize their treatment of my research activities. It was early November and I had been working with them since July, so we had come to know, enjoy, and relax with one another. "You're always finding the most boring things interesting. That is what is interesting!" More laughter followed as others in my work group joined in talking about the boring and repetitive nature of these events.

I asked how late the meeting was likely to go, and several spoke almost at once, "Seven-thirty." This took me back, because they didn't say "about seven-thirty" or "between seven-thirty and eight" or anything similarly flexible. I followed up on this asking how they could be so sure

of the exact time. "Because," they said, "we've been told to stay until seven-thirty, so for us it will end at seven-thirty sharp."

Suddenly I recalled the last large meeting I had attended, where I had been amazed to see virtually all the rank and file disappear simultaneously. At five minutes to eight they had all been there and at five after eight they were gone. I asked now if that was why they had all disappeared at the stroke of eight last time. They laughed and said, "Of course, didn't you know?" "For you," my group leader explained, "it may be different—something new and something to learn from. But for us it's just the same thing over and over and over again. We'd much rather be home."

If people didn't expect a fascinating experience or even an interesting one, they did, nonetheless, admit the importance of these events. When more than a couple of months elapsed between general meetings, people would complain that they were not being kept informed, that they didn't know what was going on. That they might have preferred a different format will be apparent later in this chapter as they discuss their feelings about democratic process in their union, but in the absence of anything better, they did expect these meetings to fulfill an important informative function.

They also expected a lot of work. In the Universal factory there was a large meeting room on the second floor, but it did not have any permanently set tables or chairs. Work tables had to be brought up the stairs for desks, chairs from work stations for seats, and various things like a podium, flags, and flowers had to be arranged. In addition, these meetings were always followed by one and sometimes two parties, for which food and drinks were served. All the work for these preparations was done by the rank and file, some during working hours but others after work. Cleanup, too, was done by them. Since outside guests were invited, these preparations were undertaken with additional care and thus effort. People anticipated the time and effort beforehand and talked about it afterward.

Preparations

On Saturday we quit early, about four o'clock, and started preparing the room upstairs for the meeting. All day long the women in charge of refreshments had been in and out of their work stations, working a while and then off shopping, cooking, cleaning. They were looking overworked and talked about being exhausted already. After we quit work, the men began moving benches upstairs and setting up the room. Two of the people I worked with told me to grab a seat cushion

and follow them. I did so, and they took me upstairs. "We want to get good seats, so the best thing is to come up and put your cushion down, then even if you get here a little late, you have your seat." The "good" seats? The back row near the door. I teased them about acting like school kids trying to get as far away from the teacher as possible. They said that last year they were "stuck sitting in front" and "it was awful because in front you can be seen so easily." In contrast, the back of the room is relaxed (raku ).

Conversation was not too different from that on other days at work. People did not talk much about the meeting and took the whole event in stride. When I did not bring it up, no one else did either. Meetings were, after all, the most routine events of their union and company lives. When I asked what to expect of today's meeting, I was told, not much; there would be speeches and greetings by leaders and visitors, and the Universal rank and file would just listen. "Wait and see, there won't be a peep from any of us. We'll just keep quiet. It's always like that."

The meeting room was very nicely decorated. The room itself was in a building which had survived World War II, in itself very unusual for Tokyo. The structure was wooden, with windows on two sides, and quite simple. Flowers were placed on a podium arranged as a stage near one end. There were red union flags, proclaiming the name of the Universal union and the "Unity" slogan. The sun was still coming through the windows, but it was cold. Since it was still November, heaters were not in use yet, and the inside temperature was in the high forties at four o'clock. It got colder later, and throughout the meeting this was a topic for mumbling to one another. Even in wool clothes, several layers of them, sitting still for a long time made us very cold.

To the right of the stage was a desk where the secretaries sat recording and keeping track of various papers. On each side of the room were chairs set up facing the rank and file. The chairs were to be occupied by outsiders, members of affiliated unions, Diet members, supporting union organizers, and other guests. Some of the Universal leadership also sat with these people. The rank and file were to be seated on benches and chairs, arranged facing the stage area with long tables in front so they could use them as desks, both to lean on and to write notes on.

The Meeting

Once the room was set up, we all waited until one of the leaders came and said everything was ready, and as we filed through the door we were each handed a long forty-six page agenda booklet which

included an overview of the past year, a short financial profile of the union, and a plan of action and discussion of union strategy for the coming year.

Welcoming Address . The meeting was opened by the chairman of the Kyotokaigi, the Joint Struggle Committee, the committee in charge of making policy suggestions and managing strategy. Made up of the most important members of Universal's executive committee and affiliated unions and federations, it was widely acknowledged that their word was usually taken and their suggestions inevitably followed.

The first speech was by the Universal union president, who began the meeting reminding people of the twenty-five-year history of the union. He continued to say that this year's meeting took on its own special character because of the fact that the union was in the midst of a labor dispute. Thus, this year's meeting would be different than "usual." In explaining this he linked the idea of a successful conclusion to the dispute to a successful protection of workers' livelihood, to a basic, grassroots style of democratic process. "We have to worry ourselves about how we can live. In this the most important thing is to get together and say what we think. If everyone says what he's thinking, we can use that as a starting point and make a good plan for our union and find a swift and desirable solution to the dispute." President Kishi emphasized the twin goals of building a democratic organization and settling the dispute—which would allow their union-designed, socialist-inspired organization to continue as a legitimate company. The purpose of this meeting, the president explained, was to talk about the goals and aims of the union members in their struggle, and that, he said, should not be left up to leadership and federation officials to decide. "So, today, let's make this a real meeting, let's exchange opinions [iken o dashiatte ] and find the best way possible to protect our way of life." He ended his welcoming address by raising his voice in encouragement, "Speak your minds at today's meeting!"

Reports . The general secretary gave the first report. It was a long one, and he asked people to refer to specific pages of the booklet we had been given as he went along. He summarized activities and accomplishments of the past year and made generalizations about their struggle and the meaning of worker control.

In his specific reports on the year he mentioned dates for court appearances both past and immediately future, spoke about sales

records over the year, and then singled out the absence of accidents and injuries on the job and the fact that no worker quit during the year as particular accomplishments. He linked the low accident rate to the introduction of daily calisthenics (rajio taiso ) during afternoon breaks. "Moving the body keeps us alert and increases our safety record."

He also tried to put the strategy for the coming year in the context of the past, reminding everyone of what, after three and a half years, they might have forgotten: that the purpose of engaging in a struggle is to find a solution as swiftly as possible. "After a while the fact that we are still fighting becomes second nature to us and we forget that we have to put great effort into a solution. We can't afford to settle into complacency or we will never get back to a normal state." Universal leaders had begun to worry that tenacity and negotiation might not be enough. Perhaps, they thought, they would have to put more pressure on their parent company or on the financial institutions which backed them. He suggested that a new tactic might be called for now and that such a shift in strategy could be a breakthrough. The Universal workers had been just waiting for it to end "somehow," but they must now try to bring it to an end more quickly, in particular because of the numerous elderly workers and part-timers. A large ratio of these workers was always felt to be a sign of weakness, and it was often said that those they fought against would not take them seriously because of it. These workers are seen to lack the commitment and tenacity to last very long in a difficult labor dispute.

The general secretary also emphasized the larger social significance of the Universal struggle, saying that the Joint Struggle Committee, with its members coming from so many different areas of the labor movement, is in itself representative of the broader political and economic battle which they were fighting. The point of departure for their dispute was "anger," but the meaning of the struggle over three and a half years had become much more than that. It had become "everyone's problem, all workers' problem." He also mentioned Unikon's successful conclusion and the situation in other companies struggling to solve their own labor disputes, trying to link these and to generalize the significance of Universal's efforts to national labor movement politics and the betterment of conditions for workers in Japan as a whole.

When he finished, he asked for opinions and comments. There were none. He called for applause to verify that there were no further comments, questions, or additions to his report.

The assistant general secretary reported on their financial situation, and one of the shop floor stewards reported on production and productivity for the year. There were two straightforward questions asking for clarification of points made in these reports. They were both very short. Following them the new officers of the union were introduced, and each said a few words asking for understanding and cooperation and promising to do their best. Several reiterated the importance of everyone speaking up and expressing their opinions. One made the same link the president had made earlier between serving the union, making good shoes, and the livelihoods and way of life of the workers at Universal. "First and most importantly I will work to put food on our tables [mazu meshi o kutte iku tame ] and to make good shoes. I am only one man, but as one individual I will do all I can to serve in this position." Others emphasized the importance of working together. "Alone we can do nothing, we must continue to work together as we have for three and a half years."

The Break . By now we had been sitting for nearly two hours and people were getting very tired. The leaders and various outside guests all headed downstairs and outside for the ten-minute break while the rest of us stayed inside. The benches were wooden and without backs, and the room was getting colder as the evening came, so the break was filled with activity and chatter, focused on warming up by moving about and releasing some tension by stretching and talking to each other. Several people paired off and gave each other shoulder massages, comparing techniques and talking about who did it best. Many commented with smiles about what "good talkers" these guys all were. There was no conversation whatsoever about the content of the meeting so far. Most of us were getting hungry and restless by now, and there was some longing expressed for the refreshments we had spent the day preparing and which were waiting downstairs. Some wondered how much more we had to listen to before we could get something to eat. Things did not settle down until the first of the leaders came back into the room, then we all took our seats again and the meeting reconvened.

Guest Speeches . The first speaker after the break was the Sohyo organizer who had come to Universal for the duration of their struggle, to help them and to act as an adviser as well as a link to the wider resources of the national federation. He had been wounded in World War II and was missing one arm. Both his daily presence working at

Universal and his attitude toward his handicap seem to have impressed people. He was probably the best liked and most respected of the outside organizers. His handicap gave him a certain credibility when he talked about struggle and overcoming odds. Through their union networks many groups of handicapped workers appeal to them for help and support, and the most sincere expressions of support that I witnessed were toward these groups of people, whose efforts to overcome adversity were favorite stories.

His remarks were very serious and focused on the wider significance of the Universal struggle both for Japanese workers in general and for the individual Universal worker's own life. In developing this theme, he delved into the meaning of life (ikigai ). "You have to think," he said, "of your own death. In thinking of your own death you will begin to ask yourself what you hope to accomplish in this life. That, after all, is all we really have, what we accomplish in this life. A struggle like the one Universal is involved in has that kind of greater importance." He turned next to a discussion of love (aijo ) and its role in holding people together for all this time. He mentioned a piece I had written in the November Universal newsletter. He said I had penetrated to the heart of Universal's strength when I said that love of family and friends combined with pride in craftsmanship were in many ways more important in maintaining people's spirits over the three and a half years than ideological commitment. "This," he said, "is the real heart of the struggle. The dispute may have started with anger, but it is the love and affection of parents for their children and children for their parents and between workers all over Japan which is the root of our strength. Without this, struggles like Universal's cannot persist or succeed." He concluded by asking people again to always think about the "real purpose of life."

The next two speeches, very short ones lasting only a couple of minutes, were by Socialist Party Diet members. These men were both noticeably better dressed than anyone else present, including the business representatives from the federations and other visiting guests. Their three-piece suits were expensive, fashionable, and looked all the more striking in this old wooden structure, surrounded by people dressed casually and inexpensively and sitting mostly on long wooden benches. Each was introduced as a Universal adviser (komon ) and with the explanation that he had a very busy schedule and regretted that he could not stay for the rest of the meeting. Their themes were the unfortunate success of the Conservative Party in the recent elections, the dangers of Conservative rule for the working class, and the backward (okureteru )

policies of Japan toward its workers. The Universal struggle "is of particular importance to Japanese workers," said one of them, "because it is an example of people standing up to these backward policies." As an example of the backward policies he mentioned excessive working hours. Each of the Diet members was sent off with applause—none of the other speakers had received this courtesy.

The President's Address . The President's presentation was lengthy, lasting about thirty minutes. He discussed the direction of the struggle, strategy for the upcoming year, and the meaning of what they were doing. He outlined a twofold goal: to bring the dispute to a close and to reopen under their own union management. To this end, they were going to begin a more aggressive strategy, the first concrete manifestation of which was to be participation in the Sokodo demonstrations that month. "Sokodo," he explained, "is an organization of unions amid disputes, affiliated for the purpose of mutual support. Through participation in this, member unions can amass hundreds of demonstrators rather than just the few in their own unions."

He then enumerated seven themes which he said Universal members needed to discuss and debate. He encouraged people to do so starting right then, at the meeting, and to continue through the year. Throughout his discussion of these he wove some of his favorite themes, namely, equality, democratic participation by all members, and the importance of raising their consciousness of themselves as workers in a capitalist society. His seven main themes were: (1) workers' consciousness, (2) everyday life and livelihood, (3) workplace issues, (4) education, (5) economic concerns, (6) sales issues, and (7) self-management.

He emphasized considering the wider meaning of their action, not getting too bound by the particularities of their situation and their own problems. "We must clarify our thinking, not get too wrapped up in just making shoes. We have to develop a consciousness of ourselves as workers. Together we must think about the meaning of our struggle and of self-management." He concluded this topic by encouraging people to think about what kind of consciousness is necessary for workers to control their own enterprise.

He focused here on daily life (seikatsu ) and its links to the necessity of earning a living. "We are wage workers," he said, "but that is not all. We also have a responsibility, to make ours a truly cooperative society. To this end we have to realize equality in our daily lives, starting in our union and our workplace." He emphasized that at Universal, equality

of wages was important, and that each employee, whether part-timer, elderly, female, or temporary, should be paid without inequality.

President Kishi saw the most critical workplace issue to be participation and sharing in decision-making. All should be concerned with the organization of the work place and with working conditions. As an example, the president suggested people think about how to pay new employees when they want to hire additional workers. Should they be paid any less? What about seniority and job titles? "We have been working here through such difficult times and over such a long period. We have shared many things. How are we going to deal with new employees when the time comes?"

It is through the theme of education that so much of the orientation of Universal to society and issues of meaning are brought up. The president reiterated a familiar exhortation to try and get beyond the day-to-day routine and the particularistic way of envisioning the struggle. He spoke of the dangers of falling into a "capitalistic way of thinking. We have come all this way absorbed in what we are doing, not thinking clearly and precisely about our actions and their meaning. What we want is a socialist way of thinking, not a capitalist one, and we need to educate ourselves to achieve this." He emphasized the wide variety of issues related to this, saying that everything from the "meaning of our own actions" to "marketing" needs to be discussed and examined, to make sure they can achieve a "really socialist way of thinking."

As he moved on to talk about "economic issues" he continued to emphasize education and discussion, tying their importance to the "particular circumstances of each worker's life. Each of you has a particular standpoint [hitori hitori sono tachiba ni tatteru ], so keeping quiet, thinking 'Oh well, nothing can be done anyway,' just won't get us anywhere. That kind of consciousness must be changed. We need to hear from everyone, every individual, about each particular situation and set of circumstances." He went on to say that especially on issues that affect people's livelihood, "we [leaders] are only human, so we cannot have all the responsibility," and he concluded this topic with an exhortation to help make their workplace an "environment in which it is comfortable for everyone to express their feelings and thoughts."

He emphasized as well the importance of sales to their success. Once the labor dispute is over, how would Universal choose to sell their products? Up to now this has been done through union networks. The president asked people to look forward and, in light of their desire to have a socialist way of thinking and doing business, consider how they

might build their own "consciousness and work to sell to other workers as much as possible."

He concluded very briefly about the broad meaning of the term "self-management" (jishukanri ). Everyone should be thinking about the political, economic, and social meaning of the term. Returning to the notion of everyday life and livelihood, he reminded them that managing their own workplace has great implications for their own lives as well and that they must take responsibility, each and every individual, for this. To this end, everyone's thoughts and ideas are important and must be expressed and discussed.

Final Greetings by Guests . There were a series of greetings offered by other outsiders of rank. They were short, encouraging Universal workers to continue to struggle without losing hope, even though their dispute had dragged on already for three and a half years.

One of these was longer and more elaborate, offered by an official with the textile workers' union who had been so involved from the very beginning with Universal that workers tended to refer to him as sensei (teacher), a term of deep respect implying their debt to his advice all along. He chose this time to tell a story about a young woman in one of his unions who had committed suicide not long ago out of depression. Her problems were personal and she had nowhere to turn. "If," he said, "our unions had been doing their jobs, if we had been as good as we should be, she would still be alive. She would have had some place to turn, someone to talk to and understand her. Our unions have to be places where we care about and understand each other. That is the most important meaning of what we are about." He continued to talk about human relations in unions, concerned now with worker control of production.

We tend to forget that the mistakes of one are the mistakes of everyone. We tend to accept that what we make belongs to everyone and that our accomplishments are shared. But when it comes to a mistake or an error, suddenly it's the other guy's fault. If self-management is to work, we have to share but we also have to realize that each individual is the main character, the star of the production. We are each individually responsible.

He ended by cautioning everyone that economic life in Japan is a "harsh reality" and that they must not look on it too naively.

The final "greetings" and statements of encouragement came from telegrams read by the general secretary from other federations and

unions who had been unable to send representatives in person. This brought the formal session to a close.

Party Setup

Once the leaders and outside guests left the room to wait, all the rest of us broke into activity. Men began moving the furniture from rows facing forward to sets of tables with benches encircling them for eating and drinking. Women hurried to and from the kitchen putting finishing touches on the refreshments. Men started carrying cases of beer and soda in, and we all helped arrange things on tables. By now we were all freezing cold, so the activity was exaggerated somewhat in our efforts to warm up by moving around. It was already about eight o'clock, so the meeting had gone on for three and a half hours, lasting far longer than had been predicted.

Once we got set up, we all took seats around the three tables in the back of the room, leaving the three across the front to the "big shots." No one had had dinner, so we were all starving and consequently frustrated by the length of time it took to get the others back in after we finished setting up. We started laughing about ourselves sitting there shivering and starving, looking at all that food right in front of us and unable to eat it. It was miserable but suddenly appeared funny to us, and the whole room filled up with the comedy, joking, and laughter.

Finally, we heard them coming up the wooden stairs, people made a point of stifling their fun, and we all quieted down, but we continued throwing knowing glances at one another. The guests and leaders all filed in and sat at the front tables, where the general secretary stood, ready now to convene the party, formally called a koryukai , or literally a "social interchange meeting."

The Party

The party began with a toast and then everyone began eating and drinking. Food was similar to that served on other such occasions: deep fried cheese, some grilled chicken, sushi, potato chips, dried squid, lettuce and tomato salad, some fruit, rice crackers and small wieners. There was a generous quantity of beer, sake, and soda.

The general secretary, acting now as master of ceremonies, requested short addresses from several of us. This time I had to say a few words about my impressions of Universal thus far, then a young man who had

come from Unikon at the same time I did spoke for a few minutes. He said he was grateful for the chance to work here while fighting his own court battle. He had been laid off and was in the process of suing. He and I both emphasized the way in which the Universal people had made us feel welcome, their warm and casual way of interacting at work, and the enjoyment of being with them.

Between these greetings there was more space than in the formal meeting. These were just short addresses done while people continued to eat and drink. The tables in back were subdued and relatively quiet now. At the ones in front, leaders and guests were clearly enjoying themselves, the mood lively and talkative. This was clearly more their hour. Food disappeared quickly at our tables in back, and conversation continued to be subdued.

There was the familiar pouring of sake or beer for guests and leaders by rank and file. It is a gesture of gratitude and/or deference to pour for someone, and most of the women and many of the men made a point of doing this. In a gesture of reciprocation, the union president and one or two of the organizers came back and poured for a few of the rank and file.

There were continuing addresses by other guests, which continued to emphasize wider contextualization of Universal in the labor movement and in the international arena. Twice during this time Reagan's election and his politics were mentioned as a serious sign of worldwide danger, both as a military threat and a sign of the conservative trend in world politics.

About nine o'clock the majority of the rank and file left; they had already stayed beyond the time they had expected to and were tired and ready to go home. I waited until nine-thirty and walked back to the station with three men with whom I wanted to chat. One was a Universal leader, one from an affiliated union, and another was an official of the Custom union.

We stopped, as is customary after these meetings and parties, in a coffee shop for something to drink and a chance to relax and chat. By now we were even more miserable from the cold and wanted to warm up. Our conversation wandered from topic to topic, and they talked with me about my fieldwork, complimented my efforts to actually understand what people thought, and once again remarked that anthropology deserved great respect for the time taken to get involved in people's lives. "Most scholars don't bother." They complimented me further for the essay I had written for the union paper and said they wanted to help me in any way they could, because they felt I was without preconceptions

(yokubo ga nai ) and so might actually be able to understand. We also discussed the long hours they put in as leaders. They work full shifts and then take care of their union responsibilities. It is largely, for both leaders and rank and file, their own very demanding and often exhausting schedules that give them a respect for the efforts of a field-worker which they do not have for those who try to get as much information as quickly as possible in interviews. Effort and hard work are such dominant values in these contexts that I even found them complimenting me when I would occasionally miss a day just out of sheer exhaustion. "She works so hard," they would brag to outsiders, "that she forgets about herself and even gets ill sometimes."

We talked about their own work, how tired they get, their sense of achievement, the difficulties they face, and about the purposes and meanings of meetings like this one. This topic ended up focusing mostly on democracy in the Japanese labor movement. These men had between them experience in a variety of union contexts, and they lamented both the absence of "real participation" and "real self-expression" and the difficulty of getting rank and file to broaden their perspectives and identify with workers all over Japan or in the international arena. The Custom union official worried that it was his job as a leader to "give life to that democracy" which was more or less handed to the Japanese after the war. "Unions," he said, "are its foundation," and "it is not working in our unions. It should be, but it isn't. It's our job, as leaders, maybe our most important one, to make it work. If democracy cannot succeed in our labor unions, it can't succeed anywhere in Japanese society." Not only democracy, the others joined in, but even being workers (rodosha ) is new in Japan. "Our own parents were in most cases not workers. Those with two generations as workers are quite rare, and those with three generations even rarer. There are only a few." Our conversation ended on this historical note, a very common one in people's conversations. The sense of historical achievement, conceptualized inevitably in terms of personal, generational succession, seems to be an answer of sorts to some of the more frustrating or intractable problems faced within their unions and companies.

Discussion and Opinion

This four-hour meeting had transpired with only two questions from rank and file, both of which were straightforward requests for clarification of information about company sales and finances. The plethora of exhortations to speak up and have discussion was in stark

contrast to the silence of the members. The silence was context-bound, however, as the following days and weeks illustrated.

This meeting had seen discussion of several new strategies. The more aggressive efforts, centering around demonstrations, the filming of a movie to publicize and gain support for Universal's struggle, and the consequent need for putting in more hours to finance these and to actually participate in the demonstrations. The informal discussion of these at work and at after-work walks to the station or get-togethers in restaurants or coffee shops, indicated not only deep interest but considerably divergent opinions as well.^[3] When, however, these conversations were going on at work and a leader walked into the room, the discussion stopped and people waited until he left to resume. The president continued his efforts to hear what people thought, and would drop in on us from time to time during work just to ask, but no one would say anything. I asked people afterward why they would not say some of the things they were thinking to their leaders, who seemed very sincere in their desire to hear opinions and discuss issues. Rank and file would respond by lamenting the absence of discussion, even tying it to the length of time their struggle had been taking to reach resolution. One man explained, "The leaders here just aren't very capable. They can't seem to take decisive and unified action, and that's because no one knows what the bottom [soko ] of Universal is like.

"I asked what he meant by "the bottom."

"The people on the very bottom, the lower level of the union. No one knows them or what they're thinking . . . and the bottom won't talk."

The tension between leadership and the union organizers and affiliated officers on the one hand and the Universal rank and file on the other was a stubborn problem, and the silence of the rank and file remained unbroken in spite of widespread agreement on both sides about the importance of bridging that gap and of communicating with one another.

The Ideal

Rank and file shared with leadership a sense of the importance and value of democracy and of democratic process in their unions. Unikon had built strength from efforts to create such organizational practices and had faced severe internal problems when these were

[3] The content of these discussions is part of the following chapter.

suspended. At Universal leaders spoke of hatsugen mondai and wondered how to get rank and file to speak up, while rank-and-file workers were frustrated by the unwillingness of their leaders to listen to them. A sense of achievement historically mixed with a sense of inadequacies remaining in contemporary practice. While there was considerable disagreement about the source of the problems in its realization, there was widespread agreement about the nature of the ideal. The ideal itself had a number of references, and I came to realize that it was through its ability to represent so many other valued ideas and concepts as well that democracy had taken on so much importance. At Universal, efforts to work toward socialism meant most centrally a commitment to worker autonomy, equality, and control. Democracy embodied that. Their consciousness of themselves as "poor people" and as "commoners" allowed them to relate democracy to increased benefits in daily life for "ordinary folks." The following are some of the most frequently discussed clusters of meanings within which the notion of democracy was constituted in daily conversation and in meetings and other collective union events.

Democracy as the Absence of Tyranny

The word minshushugi (democracy) was used frequently with reference to history or historical change, primarily in memories of older workers as recounted to younger coworkers or to their own families. For the younger Japanese worker there are no memories of Japan as anything other than a constitutional democracy. For those in their fifties and above, however, the memories of prewar and wartime society not only color their own ideas about contemporary society, but also emerge forcefully and frequently in discussion at home and at work.

In addition to exposure to personal memories of older relatives and coworkers, younger people also have their own education, the popular press, and the entertainment media to elaborate on their image of Japan's past. As a result, for the common person, contemporary democracy is defined largely in contrast to the tyranny experienced by the common person in the past. Furthermore, since in the most recent past the ruling power was the military, it is also conceptualized in direct contrast to militarism. Consequently, workers frequently juxtaposed tyranny, the daily coercion experienced by workers, and militarism and placed them together in opposition to "democracy" and "freedom."

A seventy-five-year-old former textile worker responded to her daughter-in-law's complaints about the lack of democracy at Unikon, for instance, by saying how much worse things used to be.

Things used to be much worse. Thanks to having lost the war [maketa okage de ], things began to change. If it weren't for that, we'd still be living the same way.

I went to work when I was thirteen. My parents were paid a lump sum by the textile factory and for the first year I wasn't even allowed outside. There were huge fences all around the mill so we couldn't get out or escape. Girls died from the harsh conditions and were never allowed to see their families. We worked twelve-hour shifts, and it took me three years and three months to work off my debt so that I could leave.

The trouble is, once you left, you usually ended up doing the same kind of work in the same kind of place, because that's all there was.

And young men were being drafted into the army, and beaten to keep them in line. I have a friend who lost his teeth from so many beatings. And they would threaten your family.

After the war, democracy and freedom suddenly came into Japan, and had it not been for that, things would still be the same as before.

Democracy, when spoken of in this way, is described more by implication than by specific reference to institutions or democratic processes, whereas the tyranny it replaced is recounted in elaborate and personal detail. The resulting vagueness of the concept allows it to be used as a powerful symbol of what is to be hoped for in postwar Japanese society. Almost everything which people associate with increased freedom is apt to be labeled at one time or another "democratic." The Universal union president, for instance, associated it even with the basic freedoms of daily life. "We poor people have been greatly helped by the democratization and the Americanization of Japan. Now we can wear jeans and look casual [he pointed to his own apparel], and go anywhere. Before, we needed a new suit, a bath, and hair cream just to go to Ginza! All that cost money, so if you couldn't afford it, it showed. Sometimes you just had to stay home."

What constitutes this notion of democracy, which was not infrequently associated, as here, with Americanization, seems to be a basic idea of increased freedom and decreased susceptibility to arbitrary power for the average citizen. Democracy in this sense was often associated with other ideals like equality and freedom, but not with any particular system or institution. In this usage, it represents more the expectations and hopes that workers hold than concrete goals. It is illustrated more by

what it replaced than by what it ushered in, and contemporary problems are quickly attributed to a residual undemocratic tradition, even while institutions and procedures that constitute the structure of Japanese democracy are looked upon with some cynicism.

The Labor Movement as a "Struggle for Democracy"

In both the Universal and Unikon unions, their disputes were referred to as "struggles for democracy" (minshushugi no tatakai ), and in the frequent attempts to link their particular struggles to broader labor movement goals the ideals of democracy, equality, and freedom and the protection of constitutional and legal rights of workers were explicitly emphasized. The general secretary's speech in Universal's annual meeting spoke to this theme, asserting that the original anger over their situation was specific, but that now their struggle meant more than that, it was now "everyone's problem, all workers' problem." Similarly, President Kishi made a point of asking everyone to think about the meaning of their struggle to develop a habit of thinking of themselves as rodosha , workers.

After one of Universal's general meetings, in which the phrase "struggle for democracy" had been used, I told the people I worked with that I found that an inspiring thought. They laughed and gave me friendly reassurance that after a few more meetings I would "learn how meaningless all the words are." I pursued this, suggesting that in some sense they must feel that their lengthy dispute was serving the purpose of enhancing democracy and the welfare of workers in Japan. The five people there all tried to explain what to them was obvious, and with much shaking of heads and wavering, one spoke up, saying, "Not really . . . it's hard to explain, but things just aren't like that, not on the inside. They may look like that from the outside, but that's just show. No one really takes any of that kind of talk seriously."

This is not to say, however, that rank and file lacked appreciation for or sense of the importance of the laws and institutions of their society, the political apparatus and the operation of politics both in general and within their unions and union federations. These were more than adequately understood, and knowledge of contemporary political issues was extensive. The idea, however, that the maximization of democratic goals was to be achieved through these structures or the political process at this level did not inspire much faith.

Rank-and-file cynicism toward the political process and its institutions nevertheless was combined with their involvement in political action as union members. Even prior to the bankruptcy disputes which I observed, and during these disputes as well, they participated in actions aimed at furthering the interests of workers as a whole. Shunto (Spring Labor Offensive) demonstrations and May Day parades were only two examples. Not only in their meetings, but also in their celebrations and demonstrations, speeches and slogans emphasized the role of the labor movement in furthering democracy in Japanese society.

The threat of antilabor policies of the Conservative government and big business was also portrayed in such contexts as something against which workers must, through their unions, wage a stubborn struggle. For these Universal and Unikon workers, engaged in major labor disputes, their own specific problems and their efforts to fight against losing their jobs were represented as part of the greater labor movement, and of relevance to Japanese workers as a whole and, sometimes, to workers internationally.

Rank-and-file members did recognize the necessity of affiliation with union politics and national politics at this level. The collective weakness of the opposition parties was seen as related to the weak position of workers in Japanese society, and their relative strength or weakness at any given time was even thought to have some impact on the speed with which particular union disputes were settled. Affiliation with political parties and federations and the presence of Diet members at union functions received only equivocal support, however. Because participation was so indirect at this level, through representatives, it was hard for people to feel they had a clear sense of just how things were handled, and consequently they relied on evaluating the political process by its achieved benefits—of which they characteristically felt they did not get an adequate share. Because of their unions' small size and relative lack of resources and significance, they were skeptical about what they could gain from efforts of the labor movement at this level. Primarily such benefits went, it was felt, to workers in large firms whose unions were stronger and more financially sound and were taken more seriously by government and big business as industry leaders.

While leadership continued a concerted effort to arouse interest in and commitment toward the labor movement as a force for furthering the interests of workers and thus Japanese democracy, the rank and file persisted in a sort of well-informed apathy tinged with cynicism. This attitude contrasted sharply with the deeply felt commitment to the ideal

of "democracy" in general and to the goal of individual participation in decision making within their own unions.

Democracy as Participation in Decision Making

Democracy most often inspired conversation at Universal, as at Unikon, when linked to participation in decision making and involvement in discussion. Other forms of participation in union politics, like voting and attending or sending representatives to meetings, while taken advantage of, did not evoke high expectations for maximization of democracy in their unions. Attention was focused instead on discussion, debate, and consultation. And this made the inadequacy of procedures at meetings a topic of considerable complaint and comment. While the meeting discussed here is one of Universal's regular large ones, the level of discussion in smaller meetings was not considered by rank and file or leaders to be high enough either.

Smaller meetings were more informal, occurring as people sat in their work areas. In these people tended to ask more questions and make occasional comments indicating some frustration or disapproval, but there was still no discussion aimed at exploring ideas, opinions, and feelings that contradicted the suggested policies or strategies of leadership. Meetings at this level were convened, as were larger ones, at the initiative of leadership, with particular topics for discussion in mind. They were predominantly informative in nature, and as such their value as well as their inadequacies were recognized by rank-and-file workers.

Why then, in these forums, where ostensibly democratic process was possible, where leaders even encouraged and asked people to speak up, was there so much silence? This question plagued the Universal leaders as well as the membership. Leaders guessed that inexperience in democracy, political apathy, or passivity on the part of workers might be the cause. After all, one federation official joked, "The average Japanese worker doesn't have any consciousness." Consciousness in this context meant class-consciousness and union-consciousness. It was to the end of "raising" such consciousness that leaders at all levels of the movement worked.

The rank and file presented a different picture. Their interpretations of the problem centered around (1) powerlessness, (2) personal insecurity, (3) inequality, and (4) formal procedures. These four aspects of their situation combined, they felt, to create an "atmosphere" in which

people felt it to be unwise to speak up and sensible to remain silent. This was not an atmosphere of harmony and consensus, nor one of authoritarian subordination. It was rather a well-calculated acquiescence, a response which cultural orientations and political realities made sensible to these workers.

Powerlessness . Perception of themselves as politically weak, both as individuals and as an interest group, was one of the most pervasive elements within the social consciousness of the Universal workers, and one with a particularly strong impact on their understanding of their own potential to be active participants in a democratic political process. It was a widely used notion, providing explanations for why workers must organize on their own behalf and why they could not possibly do so, for why they must stand up for and defend their own interests and why it was most often futile to bother trying.

This sense of powerlessness or weakness was a relative one, conceptualized within the context of certain relationships, within each of which rank-and-file workers saw themselves as the weaker partner. The four most frequently mentioned were (1) rank and file to leadership, (2) union to management, (3) small union to federations and Sohyo, and (4) workers to government and big business (or capitalists). In each of these the possibility of participation of the weaker side in a democratic process of decision making, policy making, or collective bargaining was seen as ideally possible and desirable but in practice difficult to the point of being unlikely. The initiative and responsibility to create the specific mechanisms or procedures for such democratic process were seen most often to lie with the stronger side. Any perceived failures, therefore, in achieving democracy at these levels were usually considered to be the fault of the stronger partner. The weaker side, with which they inevitably identified, was not only free of blame or responsibility, it was also thought to have very limited possible responses. At an afternoon meeting at Universal following the annual meeting discussed here, rank-and-file workers had been silent in response to further planning for the new policies, which I had heard them criticizing ever since the annual meeting where they had been announced. I returned to my section to find people pantomiming and joking. An elderly man was bowing elaborately in the feudal style, uttering the humble sound "Haaaa" to the delight of his coworkers, who in turn joined in the mimicry.

He turned to me as I came in and said, "I bet you can't figure out what's going on around here, can you? But don't feel bad, most of us

can't figure it out either. You know, before the war, this was all we were allowed to do, just bow and say 'yes sir' this and 'no sir' that, and keep our mouths shut. If it weren't for the defeat, we would probably still be saluting."

I asked why, if things were so different now, people didn't speak up.

"What can we do? It's always the same around here—a one-way street [ippo tsuko ], with everything coming from top down."

I persisted, "If you spoke up, then by definition, things would no longer be a one-way street, would they?" People then started joking that that might work in America, but in Japan leaders are not skillful enough to know how to handle that, to behave democratically.

"We aren't given a chance to say anything. They just say what they want to say and all we can do is keep quiet and go along with it."

The idea that there is "no opportunity" to speak has to do with several things. In part it is the problem of seeing "democracy" as the absence of tyranny. The authoritarian structures of the past are seen in relatively clear ways. What is dreaded and recalled has specific and daily life form, what is aimed for does not. Power can and often is experienced to be exercised through procedures of a nominally democratic form, and thus these procedures—like voting and being represented by leaders at strategy sessions or more broadly represented at the national level by Diet members—are not convincing.

The idea that they have "no opportunity" to speak has also to do with two widely held commonsense assumptions: that their own behavior is a response to the action of leaders and therefore dependent on it, and that it is leadership that is responsible for consulting and encouraging discussion. Thus, when the Universal workers pantomimed their own behavior, the object of their sarcasm, while appearing paradoxically to be themselves, was in fact their leaders. Their own silence was, in their view, the inevitable response to the undemocratic behavior of the leadership. However, the notions that they could in any way alter the situation themselves or that their own acquiescence might itself be partly to blame were in no sense part of their interpretation. This will perhaps recall the efforts to evoke initiative at Unikon, when workers felt frustrated by leadership's failure to initiate democratic process, and the inability of workers either to imagine an effective course of action or to be satisfied without one.

What many Universal workers openly objected to was a set of circumstances over which their leaders had control and which represented to them both leadership's power and their insincerity concerning real

rank-and-file participation. They controlled information, the timing of its release to membership, and the meeting agendas. Because rank-and-file members had no say in any of these areas, they claimed that they never had the necessary information prior to a final decision and that they were always in a position of reacting to decisions which had in fact already been made. In short, they felt like subjects rather than participants. At Unikon it was only in the end that people started wondering if, in fact, the way meetings were orchestrated had harmonized their opinion even without their realizing it. At Universal workers were worrying about this even in the absence of specific crises, and it was of concern for both rank-and-file workers and for their leaders.

Rank-and-file thoughts on these experiences and on their own actions were filled with paradoxes: people recognized the need for the leaders to lead, to have first and greater access to information, to represent them to the outside world, and to make many decisions without daily consultation with the entire membership. Most workers wanted to delegate as much as possible to their leadership and content themselves with their daily work and home life. In the decisions that most directly affected their daily lives, however, most felt they should have, but rarely did have, a voice. Most felt a frustration about not being consulted on these matters, but they did not feel obligated or even able to insist upon it, and felt it more sensible to blame their leaders for being old-fashioned, undemocratic, and acting only in their own personal interests. These rank-and-file feelings of frustration, anger, or betrayal were, in turn, generally dealt with informally and without any consequent action.

Powerlessness was also raised in the context of the broader social structure, workers tending to divide people into two basic groups, "the strong" and "the weak." The specific identities of these changed depending on the context, but again they always identified themselves with "the weak." They also called themselves "the bottom" (teihen ), "the poor" (binbonin ), or "commoners" (shomin ) and identified with various historical tendencies referred to as "Japanese tradition." After seeing plays and movies about the Dickensian conditions of peasants or Meijiera female silk workers, for instance, people commented on how "our company is just like that."

However impossible it is to believe that conditions can be as bad now as they were in feudal or prewar times, it is an important aspect of the historical consciousness of workers that they saw enough continuity of weakness and victimization at the hands of "the strong" to refer to the

past of the Japanese commoners, workers, or peasants when explaining their own inability to act or their own position of weakness or difficulty.

This perception of themselves as contemporary bearers of a tradition of powerless commoners, peasants, and workers, coupled with a concrete sense of their weakness within their unions, helped them explain their own political passivity. The consequence of these self-images was a feeling of political sovereignty in the abstract sense of belief in the ideals of democracy, but with a very low level of political efficacy in their daily encounters with the political processes within their own unions.

Personal Insecurity . The importance of their own families to Japanese workers is probably impossible to overestimate. In addition to natural ties of affection, the responsibility to provide them a bright and cheerful life (akarui seikatsu ), an omnipresent slogan at demonstrations and parades, is a basic motivation for much of their action. At both Universal and Unikon, workers talked about work itself and their participation in their unions and in the labor disputes as being "for the sake of my family." Yet when people discussed their participation in union politics, they also cited their families as the central reason for their silence or hesitation.

At an informal Universal shop floor meeting soon after the annual meeting, for instance, "the problem of people not speaking up" at general meetings was introduced by the foreman for discussion. "They [leaders] say they want to know why we aren't expressing our opinions and participating in discussions. I'm not sure what we can say about this, but it is a serious problem and I think we should really tell them what we are thinking." There were several brief comments followed by unanimous agreement, to the effect that "everyone has a family, so what can you do . . . ?" The other common response to the question was "raising children is a big responsibility." The link, which to everyone seemed self-evident, between keeping quiet and having a family was insecurity, a repeated theme throughout conversations about participation in their unions. "You don't want to end up in an insecure position—you don't want to be argued with," concluded one man.

Ultimately, the source of this feeling is the fear of losing their jobs. I asked one of the men I worked with one day why he thought people were so quiet even though they had so many opinions of their own and were willing to express them informally. "People just don't want to stick their necks out [medatsu ], especially the older men. They can't

afford to." While it seemed unlikely that speaking out would actually lead to losing your job, it was a very real and well-considered concern to these workers, one which they repeated in recalling examples of friends or coworkers who had faced such situations in the past. There was a story at Universal about a well-liked man who tried some years ago, before the bankruptcy dispute, to make his views known. He spoke out and expressed himself well at meetings even when he disagreed. The result, it was said, was that he was bullied and given such a hard time that eventually he was forced to quit. What people experienced as insecurity, of course, was in part due to their union being an enterprise union. For all their twenty to twenty-five years at the company, employment there had equaled union membership, so being out of favor with their own union also meant that there was at least the possibility of losing their jobs.

Yet another source of insecurity for these workers was the relatively limited social services in Japanese society. Workers often talked about having to rely solely on themselves and their own resources. Housing is expensive, old-age pensions are small, health insurance programs do not cover everything, and their children's education can be expensive. All of this adds up, they would say, to a heavy sense of responsibility. As one Unikon worker put it, "For those in large companies, their companies provide everything for them. For us, as soon as we leave at five o'clock, we are on our own. You are all by yourself and no one is there to help you." With all this responsibility, and a sense that there was nowhere to turn for help, workers felt they could not afford to risk losing their jobs.

To understand their feelings of insecurity, it is also necessary to understand their feeling that it is almost impossible for expressions of opinion to lead to discussion, compromise, and decision making in a peaceful democratic process. What people envisioned when they talked about speaking out was, essentially, a fight. In their responses to either an abuse of power or simply a policy or decision with which rank and file did not agree, a polarization of alternatives occurred. Workers felt that they must choose between either inactivity, accompanied by suppression of their own ideas and feelings, or extreme opposition. Extreme opposition, when conceived of as an individual effort or an unorganized effort of a small group, promised great risks in personal security for those involved. When such an opposition was thought of as an organized effort it was dismissed as too complex a task to undertake and, in a small union, just too impractical, in part because the only members skilled in political organization were already operating as leaders.

The consequence of this polarization of alternatives was severe constraint on any democratic participation that would include expression of divergent or opposing views. Universal workers pointed to the so-called "minority" unions or breakaway unions in large companies as the only form which internal differences of opinion could feasibly take. Unikon workers, seeing things in this light, felt constrained by the chaos they imagined if they spoke up about their disapproval of leaders' action. Thus the alternative available and seen as most sensible was a quiet, calculated acquiescence, albeit accompanied by persistent informal complaining and discussing.

Acquiescence was consistent both with their sense of being too weak to succeed anyway and with their sense of responsibility to their families and the necessity of avoiding insecure positions. But this had one, albeit weak, political effect as well. While it was not a strong statement of opposition, their silence was in fact accompanied by a withdrawal of sincere commitment and was recognized as such by leadership. This in itself provided some of the impetus behind the efforts by Universal's leaders to break the silence of their rank and file. Behind it, they knew, were divisions and uncertainties which were compromising their solidarity and their strength. The exhortations of President Kishi at the annual meeting were efforts to achieve a breakthrough, to learn what was at the heart of the rank-and-file feelings, and to forge a unity around common experiences and common goals.

The Distance between "Top" and "Bottom." The distance between "those on top" and "those on the bottom" was considered to be at once the source and the consequence of vast differences in goals, ways of thinking, and strategies between leadership and membership. In addition to what was considered a "natural" distance necessitated by their different roles within the organization, pursuit of personal power and status, available only through the union hierarchy, was also seen to give leadership a very different set of goals. "Without the labor movement there isn't any way for them [leaders] to become or to associate with big shots [erai hito ]. They don't want to do things simply, they want to show off their positions and act powerful to outsiders." At Universal "they" were seen by many to be "just going their own way," "taking detours," and "not really caring what we think." This us-and-them terminology (oretachi/watashitachi and muko ) was by far the most common way for Universal rank and file to refer to themselves and their leaders in conversation. Included in "them" as in "big shots" and the

"top" were members of the executive committees and all higher officers as well as the affiliated federation and Sohyo officers.

Basic to the perceived distance were the differences in "ways of thinking" and the "unwillingness" of their leaders to "really listen" to their ideas. Leaders announced things, requested cooperation, explained policies and strategies, and tried to convince rank and file that they were right. "Even when you do speak up, the discussion is still a one-way street going wherever the leaders have already decided it's to go."

Many union leaders at various local and national levels expressed to me their feelings that "the average Japanese worker" was egotistical, selfishly individualistic, and lacking in consciousness, concerned only with the most personally relevant social issues and with their own personal benefits. "All they care about," one Sohyo leader complained, "is what the union can offer them. They have no concern with the labor movement itself or with strengthening their own unions. American individualism is tempered with a sense of civic responsibility. That allows for a spirit of compromise and in turn democracy. Japanese individualism is untempered. The average worker has no sense of social responsibility whatsoever. He is interested exclusively in his own personal well-being, his own personal material benefits." Unikon and Universal leaders often expressed similar sentiments, although tempered with a sense of inevitability, given the low incomes and disadvantaged situations of their workers, but also with a sense of progress. The gap between themselves and the rank and file was both created and expressed in such perceptions. Because leaders widely believed this to be true, they felt that they must "manage discussion" and lead it in a "productive" direction. And because of their positions operating in the larger theater of regional and national labor movements, they were involved on a daily basis in issues of wider concern than were their rank-and-file members.

Union leaders were as concerned as members with this gap, and they tried in a variety of ways to overcome it, or at least lessen inhibitions about communicating across it. Paradoxically, their efforts often served instead to reaffirm the vertical distance even while denying it. A speech by an official at this annual meeting, for instance, urged "equality": "In our union we are all the same. We are all equal union members and equal as workers—all of us—from the president all the way down to the part-time women [shita no patosantachi made ]." Their efforts were further impeded by the polite and deferential attitude and language which common sense dictated in interactions between persons of un-

equal status. Workers said that they should not speak too much or disagree too openly with their "superiors" and that they must use "correct language." While appropriate discussion and even disagreement was a possibility, it was a linguistically and socially sophisticated one which most did not feel the confidence to attempt. Lacking that confidence, workers tended to avoid situations where it was necessary and, failing that, coped by speaking as sparingly as possible.

From both sides of the gap came the notion of great distance between them in terms of goals and strategies. From both came a feeling of near futility in closing that gap. Leaders made frequent efforts to achieve real participation, but in their very efforts they often demonstrated their own stubborn unwillingness to listen. Furthermore, the practices of Universal, unlike Unikon's, had segregated rank and file from leaders throughout their struggle. Leaders were operating outside and in the networks, and except for leafleting at their own parent company and attending—as spectators—their own arbitration, rank and file were always inside their own organization. Their primary contact with the larger networks of the labor movement came in entertaining them at meetings, special events, and visits to the Universal factory.

Formal Procedures . Like the inherent restrictions presented by their language, Universal workers talked about the inhibitions inherent in the formal procedures of their meetings. For them the meetings seemed to be performances demonstrating at once the hierarchy and unity of their organization and very inappropriate contexts for discussion, much less mention of anything oppositional. The formal procedures acted as an invitation to silence. People's common sense made it seem "natural" to be quiet. They experienced as contradictory the exhortations of President Kishi to speak up and discuss things in the context of a meeting structured around practices which highlighted hierarchy and made silence and consensus implicitly and even aesthetically appealing. His repeated requests at such events for discussion contributed to suspicions by rank and file that he was not sincere. Were he sincere, he and other leaders would ask for opinions in situations where it was possible to give them. For their part, the leaders at Universal talked about transforming their meetings into truly democratic meeting places, just as they wanted to transform their workplace into a "tiny socialism." The difficulties of doing so arose in the conflict between spoken ideologies and intentions and unspoken, implicit knowledge of appropriate practice.

It was to the carefully planned and absolutely predictable structure of their meetings that rank and file referred when they talked about it being "impossible" to speak out. The complete lack of any kind of spontaneity in these gatherings was itself a kind of mandate against membership participation. Even the time of their own departure—although not that of the leaders—was set, at once reinforcing the prearranged nature of the event and the differentiation of rank and file from leadership. The agenda, printed up and handed out as people entered the room, was followed and the meetings began and ended on a very orderly and predictable note. Since the officers and guests came with previous knowledge of the agenda, since they were the ones who made it up, and since they had prepared speeches, they were able to participate in a fashion congenial to its formal and orderly proceeding. Rank and file saw the agenda for the first time on entering the meeting room, and if they had something to say or ask they had to do so on the spot. They "haven't time," they complained, "to work out just what we want to say," and consequently they opted nearly always for remaining silent.

The order of speakers was a further inhibition. Greetings and addresses were given roughly in order of status. Proposals and opinions about them were offered first by officials of affiliated unions and their own executive committee members in the form of speeches to the membership. In addition, these proposals were printed up and handed out at the door in pamphlet form. It was only after thirty minutes to an hour of such addresses that rank and file were encouraged to express their opinions and ask questions. Following their almost inevitable silence, they were asked to approve policy proposals by voice vote or applause.

The fact that proposals were already approved by higher authorities according to accepted procedures, that they were offered already in print and supported by well-prepared speeches by high ranking officers, in lucid and correct language, all combined to create the "atmosphere" of which rank and file repeatedly spoke, in which it was "impossible to say anything." Later, in the party following the meeting, the status hierarchies were further rehearsed and dramatized by the pouring of sake by those of lower status for those they respect.

These meetings were, nonetheless, taken seriously by rank and file in one sense, as a necessary show of solidarity and unity in their struggle to win their dispute. They recall a performance more than a meeting, and it was here that harmony came most directly into conflict with democratic participation. Workers took a great pride in being able to bring off one of these affairs with success, and reflected on their own competence

in depicting harmony, unity, and solidarity with good-natured humor. Their motivation in this effort was to display strength, and since conceptually harmony is linked directly to strength, a show of dissension in this environment would defeat what for rank and file appeared to be one of the primary purposes of the gathering. The repeated experience of participating in such demonstrations of unity and strength may well have been an important factor in the difficulty Unikon workers felt in speaking out at their own final meeting or in disrupting the occasions which were available to them. Addresses all emphasized these themes of unity, solidarity, and strength as well as universally relevant themes like improvement of livelihood and protection of jobs. The utter impossibility of breaking the image being created by standing up and disagreeing with some issue was understood by everyone as a kind of unquestioned common sense. Clearly, to do so would be something like an actor in a play suddenly discarding his role and asserting his own personality.

When I began asking rank and file what situation would not make it "impossible" for them to speak, several suggested a "seminar" (zemi ). As they envisioned it, this would be an atmosphere devoid of formality where information would be made available and issues discussed prior to actual decision making. The proper timing for these sessions seemed critical, since one important complaint was that nothing was ever discussed until decisions had already been made. The agenda would also be flexible, with an opportunity for rank and file to introduce topics of concern. Results of these sessions should then be reported to union officers and their opinions integrated into policies at that level. This suggestion itself, while held very widely and with some enthusiasm, was never put formally to officials—because rank and file "have never been given a chance to do so."

Routinizing Democratic Ideals

Democratic ideals and values have had considerable success in penetrating the consciousness of rank-and-file workers. The ideals of democracy have been embraced so enthusiastically that the word itself sometimes has the awesome ability to represent almost anything that is good about postwar Japanese society. The democratic structures of the polity, however, have come to be taken for granted after nearly forty years. And while their constitutional and legal rights

and institutions are considered basic to the operation of their political process, they are not by and large considered sufficient to the realization of democracy.

The operation of politics itself is given the most cynical of interpretations, stemming largely from a certain perspective not on formal institutions but on power within their social world. As workers see it, relationships of power determine the uses made of democratic institutions and procedures, not the other way around, and these structures of democracy are not widely considered capable of checking the misuses of power which rank and file observe around them. While formal procedures may guarantee informative and expressive opportunities, these cannot guarantee real participation and involvement because they are not capable of altering or even substantially moderating the critical structuring relationships, "power relationships," or "the system."

To the Universal workers it looked as though the further realization of democracy in contemporary Japan was being threatened by traditional Japanese power relationships surviving relatively unchanged within the formal structures of capitalism and democracy. To their leaders the picture was rather similar. Both were working to make things better but doing so in a hesitant way, with their own commonsense notions of appropriate behavior frequently conflicting with the goals they hoped those actions might achieve. When leaders tried to emphasize equality but ended up saying things like "from the top all the way down to the bottom," they reinforced the inequality they spoke against. When Universal called more meetings to have more discussion but structured those meetings around procedures which made open debate seem impossible, the conflict between commonsense practice and intentional effort was obvious.

The task is a complicated one, to make routine what is an ideal, to facilitate in practice what is explicitly believed to be sensible. The consciousness of these workers, like their experience, was changing, forming, being challenged, feeling comfortable in one context and dissonant in another. The ambitious goals and ideals of Universal in trying to win their dispute, achieve a "tiny socialism," and organize their workplace democratically set the rank and file and the leaders on a troublesome path. They had, at every turn, to struggle to feel their own acts to be sensible in a field of widely varying interpretations of appropriate and inappropriate actions and of valued and rejected ideals.

In the interpretation of Japanese social life, it is often at junctures like this one that "traditions" of harmony and consensus are called upon to

explain how "tradition" is conflicting with "modernity." But it is not, I believe, that the "traditions" of harmony and consensus inhibited the voicing of opinion, thus stalling democracy, but that the important decisions were made behind the scenes without involvement or consultation by those in charge. Too often what was intended to be consultation was little more than an opportunity for expression designed to appear democratic, the substance being handled somewhere beyond their reach. At Unikon this was apparent in their final settlement and appears to have been used intentionally by leaders to control opposition. Rank-and-file workers made these generalizations about politics at all levels, from the national arena to their own shop floors. Within their unions, responsibility for initiating democratic participation, discussion, or debate, was seen to belong to leadership. On the national level, they relied on representation by federations and resigned themselves to their relatively disadvantaged and underrepresented position as small-firm workers within these organizations. Efforts to change this situation faced stubborn and unexamined habits on the one hand and well-examined fears of disorder or inefficiency on the other.

In my experience with workers at Unikon and Universal, the past, or "tradition," was as often recalled to help understand conflict, excessive use of power, or divisive acts as it was to imagine unity or harmonious relationships. Modern, and by implication "western," notions of democracy were no more evident than were modern and western notions of organizational procedures which, like agendas at meetings and hierarchically organized union leadership, make internal democracy difficult to achieve even within unions fighting for social democracy through the labor movement. This conflict is not new to other modern western societies, as the classic by Lipset, Trow, and Coleman, Union Democracy , attests. This struggle, like others engaged in by these workers, was about human agency in social change and the gradual evolution of consciousness over time and through experience.

The complexity of their situation as Japanese workers was noted, usually with some humor, by Unikon and Universal workers as they pondered the sometimes uncomfortable western origins of both the capitalism which they were challenging and the socialism with which they were challenging it, not to mention the democracy which they were routinely assuming to be appropriate to both. The World of these Japanese workers has no impermeable borders around either their geographical location or their temporal location in the flow of Japanese history. Their struggle to make sense of and to make a practice of

democracy continued while I was working with them and continues still, in this international and intergenerational context.

The consciousness of these workers is characterized more by a series of competing motivations and attitudes than by consistencies. Some of these are habits of the present rooted in the past. Others are ideas for the future being rehearsed and tested in the present. Habits are created, and their creation is a process which, at the level of human agency, is about both the past and the future, both what is imagined and what is assumed to be real. The "traditional" is as often what people are consciously avoiding as what they are unintentionally re-creating. And the "modern" is as likely to take the form of a hidden assumption as it is to be an explicit ideal.

In trying to make democratic procedures routine in their daily lives, Universal and Unikon workers acted out of a calculated acquiescence as often as out of a committed consensus, believed more in the ideals of political sovereignty than in their own political efficacy, and found themselves striving for political participation without demanding political equality. Harmony within their unions was more a strategy for showing strength and achieving certain goals than it was an end in itself, and their commitment to their union itself stemmed in large part from a sense of individual vulnerability.

Chapter 6
Arousing Thoughts, Persuasive Actions
Identity, Experience, and Consciousness in a Demonstration

At the Twenty-Fifth Annual Meeting described in the last chapter there were two major shifts in strategy: a movie project, and the decision by the Joint Struggle Committee that Universal should join the Tokyo Sogi Kodo demonstrations and thus take a more aggressive posture against both their parent company and the financial institution backing them. Rank and file had many reservations about these new projects, the movie project because it would cost too much and require a lot of extra hours of work to pay for it, and the demonstration because it would be uncomfortable to do.

Open conflict was not taken lightly by Universal workers, and while their labor dispute had already lasted three and a half years and their worker control of production was a public act of defiance and protest, this would be their first experience going into the streets in open and disruptive protest. It would take place outside their own neighborhoods and even outside their local area of Tokyo. As time drew closer to the event the contrast between rank-and-file and leadership attitudes toward participation grew more evident to me. While both were quite serious and determined, union leaders expressed genuine excitement in anticipation of this new form of collective action. They did what they could to alleviate reservations of the rank and file and to encourage enthusiasm from them. The leaders had explained their viewpoint that to win there was no choice but to get involved in demonstrations, and although rank and file had real apprehensions, they gradually became resigned. "This kind of thing," they would repeat to one another, "is probably inevitable." Because this was Universal's first demonstration, it was possible

to watch the impact participation had on consciousness and on other daily life activities. It was also possible to follow workers through preparation for, participation in, and reflection on this event.

I had already been through the Tokyo Sogi Kodo demonstrations with Unikon where, because of their particular history, the demonstration was already taken for granted by most workers. At Universal, in contrast, it had a distinctly transformative impact on the consciousness of most workers. The action itself drew people directly into a set of social relationships with other workers and unions which they were otherwise experiencing only through representatives or through words or supportive gestures. Participation also situated the Universal workers inside a collective protest, inspiring emotions and reflections about their own identity as workers, about the meaning of their struggle, and about the form it was taking. Explicitly stated ideas and the unspoken sensations of the actions themselves together constituted an experience which urged their consciousness to shift toward greater awareness of their identities as workers and toward increasing comfort with collective protest. This chapter is about this changing of minds and about Universal orkers "getting used to" these actions. It is a story not of certain, swift transformation, but of hesitant and uncertain shifts, feeling better about past habits than about present actions, and thinking unsure thoughts about the meaning of their own struggle and its new protest strategy.

Universal's Demonstration

Preparation

There were twelve days between the announcement at the annual meeting and the day of the Sokodo demonstration. There was not much reference to it until three or four days immediately preceding it, and for the most part this consisted of sighs accompanied by resigned comments anticipating the approaching date. The day before the demonstration, however, was filled with conversation both on the job and during lunch and break time and focused on misgivings about participation.

I had already been at Universal for several months by then, and it was the first time that I had witnessed people discussing an upcoming union event. I had never heard a comparable anticipatory conversation about

meetings or distributing leaflets, but on the day prior to the demonstration that was the only topic which kept people's attention for very long. Other topics, like the marriage that day of one of the most talked about young singing and acting stars, Yamaguchi Momoe, simply came and quickly went. Even the radio, which was on most of the time during working hours, did not inspire the usual chitchat about news items and star gossip. The most startling thing to me was that the conversation was entirely negative in tone. Having been introduced to such events at Unikon, I was prepared for some reservations but surprised by the degree and extent of them.

At break time, we talked about nothing else, and some talked or nodded in agreement while others expressed their apprehension. Heavy sighs accompanied comments like, "How I hate the thought of tomorrow! [Ashita wa iya! ]" or "Being seen at an event like that! [A iu tokoro de mirarete . . . ! ]." In this particular conversation, the majority of the talking was done by the three women present and the bulk of the agreeing by the three men. I told them that I was honestly surprised that they were not looking forward to it. This comment brought real amusement on all sides. "How could anyone look forward to something like this?" I asked if maybe they were at least pleased that it was a change of pace from their work. Everyone quickly agreed that they would far rather be working all day. They talked to me about the new emphasis by their union leaders on taking Universal's struggle out into the public eye and getting more attention from other parts of the labor movement and from the public at large. For this each and every Universal worker would have to participate in various demonstrations now and into the future. They seemed to agree that this might be unavoidable, but that no one was really anxious to get out and do that kind of thing. Into these conversations crept mention of the film and then memories of similar union events which cost money and consequently cost workers hours in extended work demands. Some thought the leadership was just too idealistic and trying to fight for too much when things might be speeded up by settling for less. Such activities were referred to sometimes as "detours," taking time and energy away from a simpler and swifter settlement.

Criticisms of this kind surfaced at times like this, as general concerns expressed in exasperation when workers were up against new or additional demands. While it was always clear to me that there were reservations about union goals and strategies in their lengthy dispute, it was not clear at the time whether or not these would become serious ob-

jections. Conversations with leaders were similarly fluid, with options and strategies juggled while decisions were being made about what to do and what to try next. I was catching Universal at a time when their struggle was still without hope for a rapid end and when workers were still debating the most effective ways to act, and for some even the sense of staying with the struggle into a very uncertain future. These debates took only informal forms for rank and file and both informal and formal forms for leaders. Reservations were expressed more frequently when facing changes or when tired, under pressure, or discouraged by lack of progress. The process of forming a strategy and getting most people, or ideally everyone, committed to it and enthusiastic enough about it to carry it out was a complex one. Leaders had to put constant effort into understanding what rank and file might think and feel and then into choosing a strategy that might succeed in demonstrating the strength and determination to bring the union into serious negotiation with Custom and the bank behind Custom. The demonstration was to be one element in a new strategy, an attempt to force financial backers of Custom to pressure the company to negotiate seriously and bring the struggle to an end. Having so decided, they had now to educate, encourage, and prepare their rank and file. For their part, rank and file were trying to work up some enthusiasm while harboring serious reservations about the potential usefulness of this strategy chosen by their leaders. Their position in the struggle and lack of experience with such action made it very hard for them to see or to appreciate the potential power of the demonstration.

The day before the demonstration, in addition to informal conversations, there were significant efforts by leadership to prepare for it and to create an enthusiastic atmosphere. Their efforts did not meet with easy success. Toward the end of the day a meeting after work was announced. People complained that it was not going to take place during working hours, but were reassured that it would only take a few minutes. The purpose was to prepare everyone for tomorrow's demonstration. After the union leader who had announced it left, people wondered out loud what could be left to discuss after the smaller shop floor meeting held earlier in the day. Kanto-san, the man in charge of the cutting and sewing sections, had called us all to his workbench area, given us the details for tomorrow's activities, and answered questions about time and place. It had been a brief and informative meeting. There was no discussion and no issues were brought up. People did not seem interested in discussing tomorrow's activities any more than was absolutely necessary. The ex-

citement of the union leader who came in to tell us all about the meeting after work provided a very striking contrast. He was clearly caught up in the preparations, of which there were many, and spoke with animation, not seeming to notice how quiet his fellow workers were in response to his conversational comments about how much work they had done already and how much was left to complete. He spoke with the air of one who was enjoying being busy and not entirely looking forward to the lengthy and exhausting task coming to a conclusion. He presented an attitude in stark contrast to ones I had been working around all day.

We all went upstairs after work at 5:15 P.M. and began changing into street clothes. People hurried, trying to get assembled quickly so that the meeting could get started. There was some suppressed sighing upstairs and mumbled comments about being tired and not needing yet another meeting. The lockers where people dressed were at one end of a long, second-floor room used for meetings and other union work. Once people dressed they gathered there on benches set out for that purpose. Everyone clustered as near the door as possible. The room was strewn with half-finished banners and chest signs, paint and brushes, and other paraphernalia needed for demonstration preparation. There were halfa-dozen union leaders, all from Universal's own union, working there on these things, and four of them talked to us during the meeting. Tanabe-san, the general secretary of the union, began by saying that we had been called together to be given details about tomorrow, and that he would not keep us more than a few minutes.

The first thing we were told was to dress well, since it was necessary to make a good impression on passersby and on the press as well as on the bank personnel, not to mention on members of other unions. He explained that he did not mean we should be dressed up, but that we should come looking neat and respectable (kichin to shita kakko ). This was listened to quietly with no comment or question, but a couple of the other union officials started joking to the group as a whole about the sight of somebody coming looking sloppy and the funny things that might be said about Universal if that were to happen. The other leaders present, who were continuing to work on their projects, laughed and joined in. The rank and file just sat quietly making no response. Tanabesan began again, starting to tell us about the schedule.

One group is to start at 8:30, actually they will meet at 7:30 for leafleting at the Asakusa factory of Custom. They will be leafleting workers on their way into work. Another group begins at 11:30 and will go straight to the Toyo Bank to prepare for the demonstration there later in the afternoon on

Universal's behalf. This will include leafleting passersby and setting up signs and welcoming the Sokodo marchers when they arrive. Both of these groups are to continue through the evening, until 5:30 or later, but older people and less fit persons may quit whenever necessary.

The morning group was almost entirely men, mostly middle-aged and mostly within the leadership of the union. Older men and most women went in the afternoon and worked at the factory in the morning. These assignments followed the usual Universal pattern of grouping older men and women together, separate from the middle-aged men. Both gender and employment status overlapped largely but imperfectly with these categories. Most but not all women were part-time workers, and all older men were postretirement workers. Both part-time and postretirement workers received lower wages and fewer benefits. As at Unikon, the union included these categories of workers, whereas most Japanese company unions do not. Their shorter assignment at the demonstration was explicitly linked to a concern with their stamina (sutamina ) and implicitly associated with their status. This protective attitude toward women and the elderly was sometimes perceived as patronizing and as unwelcome. One elderly man asserted his status as "an equal union member" and insisted on being sent out to distribute pamphlets, although he had been told that it was exhausting work and he need not go. For the most part, though, this protective demeanor was accepted as reasonable and welcome when it concerned the elderly, but was much less appreciated when it concerned women.

Toward the end of this announcement people began getting impatient, and someone even reminded Tanabe-san that we had already heard all this in the earlier afternoon meeting. He said that there were just one or two more things, and continued. By now it was already nearly 6:00 P.M.

He continued to sketch out for us the general plan and shape of events for the demonstration and march as a whole and began to detail the activities scheduled for the Toyo Bank site.

The first thing to be done is the leafleting of passersby in front of Toyo Bank. This should begin about thirty minutes before the main body of the marchers reaches the bank, so our afternoon contingent of Universal workers will go there ahead of time to prepare everything, put out the signs and flags, and so on. Then they will wait for the marchers. Some leafleting for the All-Japan Leatherworkers Federation will also be done.

While the demonstration is going on there will be a few Universal people trying to get into the bank to talk. This may or may not succeed. Sometimes

banks cave in and allow the spokesmen for the union in to talk, but sometimes they do not. Since banks are soft on women, we are asking Miura-san to be one of those who tries to gain entrance [Ginko wa josei ni yowai kara, Miura-san ni haitte moraimasu ]. The others will be Kishi-san [the union president] and Nakahara-san [a federation officer working closely with the Universal dispute].

This last remark about banks being soft on women brought chuckles from a number of people and eased the mounting tension in the room somewhat. But there remained the overall atmosphere of some thirty people wanting to go home and half-a-dozen wanting less to quickly inform than to speculate about and enjoy anticipation of the next day's events. It was becoming a very uncomfortable situation. There was a lot of looking at watches and even easing toward the door. Some made rather a point of putting on their coats. Tanabe-san and the other officials didn't seem to notice. They were very much caught up in the excitement of the moment. It was 6:15 as Tanabe-san continued,

After the Toyo demonstration, Universal is going to continue marching, going to sites of other unions' demonstrations. We want to return the support given to us at our own demonstration. We will be staying all through to the end. Actually about ten of us will be there through evening, and we are having the rest of you go home earlier. But, please don't look too obvious about leaving. We don't want to give the impression that Universal is only there for its own interests, is only staying for its own demonstration, accepting the support of other unions and not returning the favor.

So anyway, don't make a spectacle of a whole bunch leaving en masse. Leave a few at a time [laughter and a short pause]. Just sort of sneak behind a tree, remove your headband and chest sign and walk away looking nonchalant.

Everyone started laughing at this caricature of themselves trying to get away with minimal participation. The laughter helped raise people to their feet, and the meeting seemed to disperse spontaneously.

Those of us who usually walked to the train station together assembled on our way out and waited around for Kanto-san until we realized that he would have to stay around, as a union steward, with the union officials to help out for a while. There was a great deal left to be done, and those remaining talked feverishly about it and were proudly showing their finished signs and banners to anyone they could get to stop long enough. As we went out the gate people were saying "Poor Kanto-san, he'll be there all night!"

On the way to the station about six of us talked about that day's meeting and the next day's events. The mood continued to be apprehensive and low-keyed. The meeting after work was said to have been too long and too repetitive. People complained that they should have been home by now and felt sorry for Kanto-san. I mentioned that it seemed that the movie people would be there shooting, and an older man from the section where soles are added to the shoes spoke up, saying, "I hate having pictures taken at things like that [a iu tokoro de shashin o torareru no wa iya da ]." A man not usually given to voicing his opinion too easily, he surprised us somewhat by elaborating, "They [leadership] are telling us it [the movie] will be something to help us look back on all this later, but . . . well . . . I don't know . . . if it were something good, I mean, if it were a good memory to look back on it would be different, but this! Who needs to look back on something like this?" He spoke in his characteristic quiet manner, but others joined in agreement, prompting me to ask if he meant that he would like to see this dispute just get over with as soon as possible and then forget about it. Immediately he and the others expressed total agreement with that assessment. Michiko-san, a forty-year-old woman from the sewing section, agreed that being photographed doing things like demonstrating was something she did not appreciate. She continued, "Doing what we've been doing up to now is one thing, but going out where everyone can see you . . . that is different. Who knows who might see us tomorrow!"

The embarrassment which constitutes much of the strength of the demonstration as a strategy is itself a double-edged sword. It can be embarrassing to the workers staging the demonstration as well, since the acts taken are designed to disrupt and in the disruption lies its embarrassment and its power. The bank, leaders explained, would be humiliated in front of their customers and surrounding banks by having thousands of demonstrators on the street in front of their main office. They would in turn pressure Custom to settle quickly to avoid further embarrassment. The disruption, however, must be created by the workers, who themselves may feel embarrassed to be involved in disruptive acts. Leadership efforts to "educate" were in part aimed at convincing workers that these acts were legal, reasonable, and appropriate. The interpretation which uncertain Universal workers were trying to embrace held that they were in the right by virtue of mistreatment and even illegal treatment as workers, and that it was not they who were disrupting the social order, but rather the bank and Custom Shoes who were disrupting

legal and customary practices. While it was not hard for apprehensive workers to understand and agree with the logic of this, it was very challenging for them to feel comfortable with the actions they were about to take on behalf of this sensible argument.

The Demonstration

Everyone going with the earliest contingent was gone the next morning when I came to work. Those of us scheduled to go with the 11:30 group were working as usual until then. It was a rather subdued mood around Universal on this morning. In the section where I worked there were only three of us left; the others all had been assigned to go early in the morning. At 11:00 we quit and went to the cafeteria, where a very special lunch was waiting for us. It had been called in from a local restaurant and included fish tempura and soup. The daily Universal lunches were not generally so elaborate nor did they usually contain so much protein. The concern with people's stamina had been a repeated theme, both in union leaders' addresses and in casual conversations, and lunch seemed to express again the concern with the health of the older workers and the women. It was delicious and everyone ate heartily, commenting to one another that it was going to be a long afternoon of walking and standing, so it was best to eat well.

Conversation at lunch was dominated by the man in charge of our contingent, Nakada-san. He was a steering committee member, a man of about forty-five. He had been very excited all the previous day and was still exuberant. When he realized that I was joining them he got caught up in the thought and talked without pause about how vulnerable banks are to foreign opinion and how surprised Toyo Bank would be to see that there were foreigners who knew about what was going on with Universal.

After lunch we all changed clothes and assembled to walk to the subway station. Nakada-san was leading us, carrying the banners which we would set up after we arrived at the demonstration site in front of the downtown offices of the bank. To me, his mood was contagious, but others were unmoved. There was a great deal of affection toward Nakada-san and people joked with him even now, but no one got caught up in his enthusiasm. He led us on a rather unique route to the subway station, one he was apparently famous for and continued to insist was a shortcut, although everyone else went by a more direct path. I had

never traveled this way before and others laughed and joked about whether or not we would ever really get to the station, much less to the demonstration site in downtown Tokyo, if we were to follow him on this crazy route. He kept assuring us that he knew just where he was going, and we kept following him and teasing him about taking the scenic route. Nakada-san himself did not initiate any conversation that was not related to the demonstration at hand, and about that he continued to talk in a loud voice full of anticipation. "That bank is going to get a big surprise today. They've probably forgotten all about Universal by now, but they're sure going to get a harsh reminder today! They have to deal with customers all the time, so they aren't going to like us showing up. Wait till all those people show up in front of their main office. How will that look to the public!"

Meanwhile, as we walked along listening to Nakada-san's enthusiasm, people were making softer comments to each other. "Toyo Bank has most certainly forgotten all about us. We are so small." "They may not even notice us today, we're so small." "What could little Universal really mean to such a big bank?" Clearly the rank-and-file workers with no experience of these demonstrations did not imagine them to be as Nakada-san and other union leaders described them. When Nakada-san occasionally heard one of these comments he would respond that there were to be thousands of people there that day, not just the forty-five or so Universal workers, and then he would go on repeating his prediction that they were going to be pretty surprised when everyone showed up at their main Tokyo office.

The mood was very much like that which pervaded most of Universal's activities and even the everyday work situations. People looked out for each other, tried to find little ways of reaching out to one another, and just generally expressed in innumerable quiet ways a certain warmth of feeling in each other's company. For instance, Moriyama-san, a man of seventy with a certain shy charm of manner, brought some hard butterscotch candy with him which he passed out silently to the women near him by simply slipping a piece in their pocket or hand. He was affectionately teased for flirting by all.

As we walked to the station, in the lunch period before, and in the leafleting activities after we arrived in downtown Tokyo, this mood prevailed, making people seem very much united in a common positive and caring attitude toward each other and toward their tasks. As is usually the case this general mood encompassed Nakada-san, but his excitement did not reach back and encompass the others.

When we got to Otemachi Station we all disembarked and reassembled on the platform, where we waited while Nakada-san tried to remember which of the many exits we should use. This is a huge station, and as often happened when I came to this area with the Unikon workers or the Universal workers, people did not seem very sure of themselves. The geographical gap between the station nearest Universal and this one is only about a fifteen-minute subway ride on one line, but the cultural gap is very wide, and people just do not come to this area with any regularity. As we had walked from Universal to the train station that morning, we had begun in the small, factory-filled area immediately surrounding Universal, had gradually walked into a residential area threaded with tiny winding streets and pathways, and then into the station area crowded with small drinking establishments. People on the streets in this area are housewives wearing casual clothes and aprons, men and women in work clothes from nearby factories, and a smattering of young people in school uniforms. When we emerged from the subway at Otemachi, we were standing on a beautiful eight-lane boulevard, lined with trees. This horizontal spaciousness was reinforced by a vertical spaciousness created by the tall buildings on both sides of every street in this area. Those buildings which are not chic new architectural triumphs are old, stately brick or stone structures. All are imposing, all are landscaped with beds of blooming seasonal flowers and hedges, and all the sidewalks in the area are wide and uncrowded. People passing by in this area are well-groomed, fashionable, and for the most part in business attire.

We arrived at the Toyo Bank intersection a few minutes before leafleting was scheduled to begin, about 12:30 P.M. The marchers were expected to arrive at 1:20. The Universal people were not wearing any identifying paraphernalia, so when we stopped in front of the bank and began unpacking all the chest signs, headbands, and banners we had been carrying, passersby did their share of staring. People quickly put on their headbands and chest signs in little groups of two or three, helping each other tie them securely. Leaving a few to put up the banners and signs around the outside of Toyo Bank, they took up their respective posts on each corner of the broad intersection. After a while someone moved into the center of the street as well, standing on the wide center divider and handing out leaflets to people in the crosswalk as they passed. While people carried on with this, I was moving around taking pictures, watching, blending into the crowd, and stopping frequently to talk to those who were for a few moments not busy. I was struck by how this

scene was visually reinforcing the comments made all the way here by Universal's workers about how small they were and how the bank was not likely to even notice them and their little company's problems. They certainly did look small, and it was not easy to notice them until you came right up to them. We were altogether a group of about fifteen, and that had seemed like a lot of people until now, but here on these wide boulevards surrounded by towering buildings and busy sophisticated people bustling by, we were hardly noticeable.

As people walked up to the crosswalks and waited for lights to change or passed by the bank, the leaflets were held out to them. Typically the Universal person would bow slightly as they held it out and the passersby would try to look past them, noticing nothing until that became impossible at which point they would receive the leaflet. A smaller proportion of the people would reach out themselves for one and begin to read it while walking. The task of getting strangers, especially in this area, to pay attention was neither an easy nor a very pleasant one. I could understand why people had said that this kind of thing would make them tense and fired afterwards. I began to have some understanding of why they were so reluctant to be photographed doing this kind of work, why they had said that this was not the fond kind of memory they were eager to look back on.

Despite the reservations they had been expressing, the Universal workers had risen to the task at hand and everything was being done conscientiously. Their attitude was of people doing their best at something they would rather not have to do. They were competent, unexcited, a little tense, and happy to have a diversion, like talking to me or to each other during a lull. Moriyama-san slipped over to me when the street emptied for a moment and slipped another piece of hard candy in my pocket, slipped back over to his place on the corner, and then looked over and smiled broadly at me. Others commented to me and to each other how beautiful the autumn leaves were in this area just now. Time was going by rather slowly and the marchers were late. After an hour of standing and walking we were all getting a little tired.

About half an hour after leafleting began, at 1:00 P.M., the movie crew, other union officials, and some federation leaders arrived. They gathered around the front of Toyo Bank and talked about arrangements for the demonstration soon to begin. The bank was beginning to take some notice, and the number of guards at the door had now increased from one when we arrived to four. Supporters from other unions began arriving a few at a time, scattering out around the area. The federation

people and the Sokodo officials were clearly in charge and had a very professional attitude toward their work. The Universal union leaders were obviously following their lead at this point. The general mood of excitement among Universal leaders prevalent the previous day was being replaced by a serious concentration on carrying through the planned action against the bank, and by an emotionally charged but controlled demeanor. Emotional involvement was not evident among the Sokodo and federation leaders. They remained throughout cool, professional strategists. They spoke to me before and after the demonstration about the potential effect of this on Universal's negotiations to end their dispute, and about how far it was wise to push the bank today, never displaying anything but intelligent, experienced, and concerned strategic thinking. I was even invited up for a tea break between demonstrations by one official who said that his office was on one of the top floors of a nearby skyscraper. He said it might be a chance to rest for a moment before continuing with the afternoon's schedule.

About 2:00 we began to hear the chants of the marchers approaching. By now they were about twenty minutes late. We could hear them for some time before they appeared. Universal people quickly left their leafleting posts and gathered by the steps in front of the bank. They lined up single file on both sides of the sidewalk facing each other, making a sort of reception line for the arriving demonstrators. A sudden flurry of color brought the demonstrators fight into their midst, filling the sidewalks all around the bank and flowing out into the streets. They continued to pour in by the hundreds, walking through the applauding Universal workers' lines, all marching behind their own union's flag, invariably bright red, and all wearing headbands and chest signs with their own union's particular dispute's slogans printed there. These too were mostly red on white, with a few in bright blue or orange. The overall effect was colorful and impressive.

The Universal contingent arrived with these marchers, about twenty strong, all having been marching and joining in other demonstrations since early morning. They looked different than I had expected. They were concentrating, involved, serious, and the excitement of this massive demonstration had found them. They barely said hello to me before starting to talk about how incredible this day had been, how many places they had been, and how many people they had been with. When the demonstration got called under way shortly afterward, Michiko-san and Yokota-san, with whom I had been talking, dropped their sentences midway and turned back to the crowd. These two women had been

among the most reluctant of the Universal workers. By now the members of the contingent with whom I had come were also getting involved. Their voices were raised along with their fists in the chants joined in by the hundreds crowded around the bank.

The demonstration activities began as a panel truck equipped with loudspeakers pulled up to the curb, and Universal's union president, the Sokodo organizers, and other union leaders spoke and led the crowd in chants. Meanwhile, other leaders and Universal's union members were crowded immediately in front of the doors of the bank pushing and asking to be let in to negotiate with the bank leaders. Kishi-san, the Universal president, spoke for some time. His address was strong and aggressive and spoken with an oratorical flair. While he was speaking a Sokodo negotiator, also with a microphone, was at the bank door trying to get them to let him in to talk. The movie crew was up at the door filming. The bank personnel were surrounded by guards by now, looking somewhat taken aback. After a few minutes a bank representative came forward, looking extremely expressionless. For perhaps ten minutes neither he nor anyone else from the bank said anything at all. They just stood there looking quite blank. Kishi-san, from atop the truck, was accusing them of standing in the shadows and being afraid to come out and meet people. He warned them that workers were going to combine their strength and fight wrongdoing on the part of the powerful institutions like Toyo Bank. "The aim of these workers is nothing more than protection of their livelihood and way of life." Interspersed through this speech were several "Protect our livelihood" chants (Seikatsu o mamore ) shouted with raised fists. The struggle at the door was continuing throughout all this, and there was enough pushing that those at the door were being forced back inward.

Attention turned to the negotiation attempt at the door. The Sokodo organizer and the appointed Universal people were continuing to ask permission to enter. Chants of "We won't give up" (Ganbaro ) set the rhythm of the crowd pushing on the bank doors and against the bank personnel. Finally the bank representative began saying, "Please restrain yourselves [Enryo shite kudasai ]," and "Please restrain yourselves just for today." He never varied from these two sentences. The union people and the camera crew were holding out microphones to the bank representative, who began to look more and more unsure of himself as this went on. To his continued "Please restrain yourselves" and "Please restrain yourselves just for today," those at the door of the bank replied in restrained and polite, yet loud and insistent language, "Why? [Naze ?]"

"Why should we? [Doshite so shinakute wa ikemasen ka ?]" and "When can we come back, then? [Ja, itsu mata kitara ii no desu ka ?]" The demonstrators, meanwhile, continued in high, tense, angry voices, voices I had certainly never heard these same people use before.

After ten minutes or so of this, a sit-in was staged on the steps of the bank. The Sokodo organizer continued talking to the bank representative, insisting either on talks that day or on a promise for a specific future date for negotiations. He continued to explain in a loud and determined voice that Universal's three-and-a-half-year struggle and the threat to the livelihood of the forty-five odd workers and their families was the responsibility of Universal's "parent company" and of Toyo Bank. He spoke of their social responsibility to these workers and accused them of neglecting it. The sit-in served its purpose, and the bank representative finally gave in, in a voice so soft that none of us on the street could hear it. With this the Sokodo organizer announced that for today the demonstration was finished and that they would be coming back soon for talks.

As the crowd dispersed and people lined up again to march to the next site, Universal workers were still very wound up. As we walked on, people talked to one another, with traces of excitement continuing to be evident for some time. "Whew! I really got worked up." "Everybody got pretty involved." "That was really something else!" Nakada-san was walking near me, his steps coming much higher and faster than usual. He was smiling, shaking his head, and saying, "These capitalists just don't care if a man dies or not. They don't care about anything but their own profits. Just look at these buildings. What do they care about a few little human beings?" We were walking at that moment through a narrower street, with the appearance of a sort of valley of sky-scraping bank and financial buildings.

The Universal contingent, combining now both the afternoon and the morning groups, continued to the next demonstration site and on through to the final demonstration of thousands in front of the Tokyo Metropolitan Government offices at about 5:00. The anticipated problem of people leaving en masse never materialized. The event had caught people up in its momentum and the great majority of Universal's workers were there until the end.

The Next Day

The next morning I went into work wondering how people would be feeling about the previous day's activities. Unlike the usual

absence of conversation following other union activities, the demonstration of the previous day came up over and over again, and a certain air of excitement remained for most of the day. Early on Kishi-san dropped in and greeted us with "Yesterday was something else, wasn't it?" His spirits were very high, and he was a good deal more outgoing than usual, smiling and walking with lighter steps. He spent a lot of time talking to us while we worked, not about the demonstration in particular, just making friendly conversation. This was not a common occurrence. I asked him when he came over by me if he thought that yesterday's demonstration had had the desired effect. He said that it certainly had, but that it was important not to drop the effort now. Universal would have to persist and keep up the pressure. Nakahara-san, the federation official working most closely with Universal, had told me very much the same thing yesterday between demonstrations. He said that Universal's contracting company, Custom, would get a call from the Toyo executives. Their company president would be scolded for creating a situation in which the bank became the target of this kind of action, and he would be pressured to bring the dispute to a swift end. Nakaharasan too had said that it was of vital importance not to let up now that they had begun to put the pressure on.

During work that morning people smiled, shaking their heads, and talked about how worked up everybody had gotten, how involved they had all felt. They were surprised at themselves, at how caught up they had all been. Since I was working near Michiko-san, I talked with her quite a lot, reminding her how reluctant she had been the day before the demonstration. She said, "Yeah, it was a first time for me, so putting on that thing [she motioned toward where the chest sign fits] was something I was dreading. But, you're not alone doing that, and even when something is unpleasant when you do it alone, if you do it with everyone together it is all right. There were so many people there yesterday! It was amazing. I didn't realize." I asked her if she would feel reluctant next time Universal was called to a demonstration, and she said no, she did not think so, she felt differently about it now.

Later on, while we were working, she began talking about the previous day's events again. "You know, workers alone just can't get anywhere. They're too weak. Workers have to get together and act with each other's support. Everyone has to combine their strength."

I asked her about the leafleting prior to yesterday's demonstrations. I said that it looked like hard work, giving leaflets to strangers some of whom will not even accept them.

She replied, "That is exactly right. It is tough work and sometimes very unpleasant. But you have to think about the necessity of doing it, and just go ahead and get it done."

Toward the end of the day a flier was passed around announcing a mass meeting in support of another labor union with its own labor dispute. Michiko-san remarked when she saw it, "Workers are, after all, very weak."

Not only was conversation uncharacteristically focused on labor movement topics, particularly yesterday's demonstration, but the mood too had perceptibly changed. It was lighter. People were working at a slightly faster pace, movements were sharper and the conversation exceptionally good-natured, tones of voice carrying something of satisfaction in them. They talked now and again all day long about how many people—thousands—had attended, about how long they had walked, and how far—several kilometers. They teased me about losing them once in the crowd and not being able to figure out which march their contingent belonged to. They talked repeatedly of the final stop in front of the Tokyo Metropolitan Government offices, where all the marches converged and literally tens of thousands of workers assembled. People had been very apprehensive about the previous day's demonstration, but something had been, in fact, accomplished, and they spoke about it with satisfaction and an appreciation of having reached a new understanding.

Persuasive Actions

This demonstration was a colorful, antagonistic, and vivid dramatization of open conflict and as such was very unusual in the lives of the Universal workers. Before they were convinced of the wisdom or necessity of participation, they were certain of its inevitability, and their response was to try to "get used to it." The forms which the actions took were themselves troublesome to get used to, being everything that they hoped their everyday lives were not. The demonstration aimed to create disturbances, its language was imperative, its colors bold and bright, its props large and flamboyant, and it was noisy. To create such an event was, for the Universal workers and all other participants, to behave in disturbing, imperative, bold, flamboyant, and noisy ways. The thoughts which were aroused during this event were embedded in the experience of these actions. People were sensing relationships, identities, and strug-

gles through the forms of their actions quite as much as they were analyzing them and thinking about how sensible they might be.

Dramatized Conflict

In dramatizing open conflict and antagonism, demonstrations are usually represented as a last resort, appropriate only because negotiation, accommodation, and similar cooperative methods of problem solving have failed. Speakers and signs reminded onlookers and participants that Toyo Bank and Custom Shoes, not Universal, were refusing to reach settlement through such channels. Unikon signs accused their owners of "running away" and "disappearing," placing blame for the chaos of the demonstration squarely on their shoulders—as a last resort. The style and form of the demonstration are determined by its goal—to force negotiation and ultimately concessions. The strategy is to draw attention to the union's unwavering determination, demonstrate the union's strength, and embarrass the opponent.

Embarrassment as a strategy for gaining concessions is omnipresent. It determines the very scope of the action as well as the specific form it takes. The Sokodo demonstrations last for miles, winding through the financial district, and come into contact with a potential audience of thousands. The handbills printed up by each union discussing their specific grievances, however, are distributed only in front of and immediately surrounding the institution in question, not all along the route. Furthermore, all dialogue shouted or chanted at the demonstration site is carried out with people and loudspeakers facing the bank buildings, making every effort to address the bank and none whatever to address directly the onlookers. The strategy is to demonstrate in the most literal sense, to dramatize in as vivid a way as possible, the conflict between the institution and the union. That dramatized conflict itself, when exposed to the passersby, the neighboring institutions, and the customers both inside and out, is considered a potentially devastating embarrassment.

A demonstration like this could aim at educating the general public, drawing attention to itself and its plight, but it typically does not. Instead it is a dramatization of the fight per se, and as such aims primarily to demonstrate that there is a conflict and that that conflict was brought on not by the union but by the institution in question. The ensuing embarrassment, it is hoped, will force their opponents into negotiation and ultimately to a settlement.

What this drama requires from the participants is that they display their antagonistic feelings, even exaggerate them, and it puts them in danger of falling prey to an unwieldy emotional state of mind which they ordinarily control and handle with some restraint. Their demonstration asked Universal workers to act out, to show their most negative feelings, to express their frustrations and anger, and to disturb the usual peacefulness of daily routine. The means of expression were largely predetermined, and the sequence of actions was carefully orchestrated. Even the on-the-scene behavior was carefully watched and managed by an outside union organizer who himself remained calm and unemotional. For the rank and file, the emotional involvement was deep and the turning-on and turning-off of feelings quite difficult.

Under other circumstances, they were able to discuss and be calm about their struggle and their situation, and there was a great appreciation for not letting emotions out, for not expressing frustration too directly, for holding their tempers and getting on with everyday necessities. These are sensibilities common in Japanese society and become increasingly important with age, as they are commonly associated with maturity. They are also associated with gender, being even more important for women. One young man at Unikon talked of the initial reluctance of many of his coworkers to be involved in these actions, remarking on the importance of peacefulness, quiet, subtlety, and inconspicuousness for most workers. "Workers generally want to live without opposing or protesting things [sakarawazu ni ] because they know that they have to protect themselves. They want to sort of blend into the crowd and not to stand out in any way [medatanai yo ni ]." Although the original conflict may have been caused by the bank, the owners, or the parent companies, it is the demonstrating workers who initiate the disturbance and participate in what most Universal workers felt to be embarrassing (hazukashii ) and disreputable (mittomonai ) behavior.

Form and Style

Particular colors, sounds, and language characterize demonstrations and combine to suggest drama, conflict, strength, and determination. These, too, echo forms of activity more comfortable for younger workers and for men. The demonstration is bright red, blue, yellow, green. It is lively, even noisy, and it involves being lively and noisy in public. It is imperative in language. Red as a color for demonstration

headbands, chest signs, banners, and other paraphernalia, including individual union flags, is associated with left-wing political ideology. Everyone is aware of this association, and no one whom I asked failed to get to this eventually, if pressed. In daily conversations workers talked about their flags and other symbols as bright (akarui ), good-looking (kakko ii ), and beautiful (kirei ). Most assumed that these were the colors of labor unions everywhere and were surprised to hear that red was not in such widespread use in American unions. When the flags and banners decorate the shop and factory property, thus remaining within the boundaries of the workplace, people of all ages use these adjectives and seem happy with the colorful touch. When, however, they are taken into demonstrations, onto the street, older workers lamented the way red "sticks out" (medatsu ) and calls attention to them, and they talked of the embarrassment of marching in public wearing headbands and signs in bright red. As with feelings of hesitation in being dramatic about conflict in general, red is objectionable in this context largely because it "sticks out," and thus those wearing or carrying it "stick out" too. This is very uncomfortable for many.

Colors, especially for personal wear, are rather well-segregated by age among the Unikon and Universal workers, as they are in Japanese society as a whole. It is uncommon for middle-aged people to wear bright colors or even softer shades of red. Subtlety in the shades of color you wear is appreciated and associated with growing up and gaining poise. Colors worn at demonstrations are otherwise worn primarily by children and young people through perhaps their twenties. There are exceptions, but the exceptions are generally people who want to be noticed. There was one such woman at Universal, who occasionally dressed in brighter colors and was criticized for her flair and for "not dressing her age."

Red is also a color for festivals and celebrations of all kinds. It has a very positive connotation in that context; there, red and other bright colors are for everyone. Young Unikon workers often described their demonstrations to me as "festival-like" (omatsuri mitai ) and told me they went "half for the fun of it" (asobi hanbun ). Universal workers never used this kind of description and older Unikon workers just laughed when their "young people" made such comments.

The noisy and physically active forms of the demonstration similarly challenge older workers and women while being fun (tanoshii ) for some of the young men. Marching, fist raising, chanting, singing, and sitting in as protest are all physical activities performed in public and as

such are felt to be inappropriate and uncomfortable by many. Again, age and gender intersect with personality to determine the degree of discomfort and ease of adaptation. Vigorous physical exercise, including dancing, is widely considered "healthy" and "youthful." Noise, too, is the privilege of the young. As such, these kinds of activities are tolerated and even appreciated by older adults. When selecting coffee shops for after-work gatherings with Universal workers, for instance, those where "students" and "young people" gather are dismissed with a smile as noisy (urusai ).

Festivals and drinking parties, however, provide contexts in which all of these things are appropriate for all ages. Workers' parties are both noisy and involve a lot of moving around and dancing. They are not, however, held in public, where the noise could be considered a nuisance or where strangers could observe. When held in relatively public places, even parties are more subdued than when held in private, on the workplace premises, for instance. Festivals do not seem, for older workers, to be like demonstrations. The nature of the noise and the more structured form of the dancing are sanctioned by tradition and as such are suitable for public behavior. It is an interesting comment on the generational differences in the meaning of festivals and of demonstrations as contexts for behavior that while older people found the two so different, the young readily associated them.

Finally, the style of the demonstration is also constituted by its language, which emphasizes polarization and antagonism. While in fact the leaders are usually inside negotiating or at least talking about the need to negotiate, the speeches outside are inflammatory and uncompromising, serving to dramatize the conflict as extreme. While rank and file may find it reasonable to fight with the intention of discussion and cooperation, they find it difficult to participate in the stark and harsh discourse of the demonstration. Again, older workers find this more difficult, corresponding to the assumption that maturity develops with increasingly subtle and sensitive abilities and uses of language. Allowances are made for young people not appreciating subtlety and indirect forms of communication. It is easier to make sense, therefore, of youth participating in the harshly worded discourse of the demonstration.

Participation in these demonstrations was a challenge not only to ideas about protest or labor movement struggles, but to the sense of appropriate behavior and individual strength of character and maturity. The young men at Unikon frankly admitted that they enjoyed finding an outlet for their frustrations, an alternative to the daily necessity of

controlling it, and they claimed that afterwards there was a feeling of being refreshed (sukkiri suru ). Some even called it interesting and ex-citing (omoshiroi ) or a chance to vent anger (ikari o hassan suru ). In the cultural field of Japan, forms of activity characterized by color, noise, public physical action, and imperative language are associated for young people with being healthy, strong, vital, or simply appropriately childish or immature. For adults, and particularly adult women, they are more likely to be considered inappropriately lacking in poise (ochitsuki ga nai ), even disgraceful (mittomonai ).

Middle-aged and older workers at Universal prided themselves on being restrained and calm (ochitsuite iru ). Before and after the event, they spoke of hesitating to "put on that chest sign" and "march around in public," and immediately following their demonstration they spoke of getting all worked up (kofun shichatta ) with a sense of embarrassment. Workers got used to demonstrations at different paces, depending on their age, gender, and personality. Middle-aged women at Unikon spoke of "getting used to it" by "following our young men." Overall, union leaders and rank and file assumed that it was easier for younger workers and for male workers to do so for precisely these reasons. It was, consequently, no surprise to leaders or to rank-and-file workers that Universal, with its configuration of older men and middle-aged women, had a lot to "get used to."

Being Workers

The intensity of emotions aroused during the demonstration motivated Universal workers to reflect on and attempt to interpret their own role in this event and in the labor movement. Amid the discomfort, excitement, even confusion of their own participation in the action, workers were faced with the explicit arguments made in speeches, signs, and chants and with implicit messages about themselves and their relationships to other workers as participants in the same event. The emotions of the event inspired more intense reflection than usual in daily life, but at the same time threatened to be exceptional unless repeated.

One of the most moving and inspiring experiences of the demonstration for Universal workers was of the social relations between themselves as workers at Universal and other workers from all over Tokyo. In

previous union actions Universal workers had come into contact with small groups of workers from supporting unions, with federation officials coming to support them, or with the workers of Custom Shoes. This was the first time, however, they had encountered thousands of workers engaged in disputes as they were and committed not only to fighting similar struggles but also to helping Universal with theirs. Reports read in the news media or heard at union meetings were for the first time felt as personal experiences, and the impact was quite powerful.

Universal workers entered this demonstration, with all their apprehensions and lack of experience, knowing quite explicitly that they were workers. They used a variety of expressions to refer to this part of their identities, words like rodosha , with the connotation of worker versus capital, and hataraku hito , with a less political nuance of "working people." What this demonstration inspired was reassessment of their place in a broader set of relationships, experienced personally in these dimensions for the first time. Being in the Tokyo Sogi Kodo organization, being there with unions of varying power or prestige, with greater or lesser numbers of women and older workers, and being from factories on the outskirts of Tokyo, all placed them in a particular location in a network of workers with whom they could share this protest action and with whom they could to some degree identify.

The word rodosha itself was understood and used in union events and pamphlets, but had not been a common one in everyday conversation at Universal. Following the demonstration, however, people spoke of themselves and of their union and of the labor movement using rodosha with renewed meaning and a new frequency. This experience had a dramatic effect on their perception of themselves as workers and of their union's struggle. The inhibited and apprehensive spirit in which people walked to the train the morning of the demonstration, worrying about being laughed at because of their small numbers and weak position, recalled their dispute's history. Universal's rank and file had felt they had been fighting essentially alone, even after four years of continued struggle. The cooperation and support of affiliated unions had been known and representatives had visited Universal, but it had not been experienced in such a direct way before this demonstration. The following day, and even more noticeably in the evening after the demonstration, people were in high spirits, encouraged, and talking at length about how much they had learned, about how surprised they were at the numbers of people joining in the demonstration. The leaflets which came by on the day after were given a new perusal quite different from the more matter-

of-fact glance I had become accustomed to in previous months. They even encouraged some generalization and comment about the common weakness of workers and the importance of sticking together. One Universal participant remarked with a sense of newly gained under-standing, "Workers have to get together and act with each other's support. . . . Workers alone just can't get anywhere, we are too weak."

While on the one hand reinforcing their identification of themselves as workers, or rodosha ,^[1] the demonstration also reminded workers of their particular place in the broad spectrum of workers, workplaces, and circumstances. They came away with a renewed sense of the specific relationships tying their particular union to other particular unions and with additional appreciation of the differences and inequalities between theirs and the others.

For all the sharing of a common language in organizing the demonstration around brightly colored and directly worded statements and for all the similarities in attire and form, there are extensive and explicit differentiations just as obvious to the participants. Each union, of course, marches with its own flag and with its own banners. This, rather than, for example, marching with common slogans and common banners, sets unions apart from each other and effectively demarcates them. Attire is also differentiated by union. Some unions come wearing their company uniforms or a company product, as is the case for one jacket producer, for example. The effect of this union-by-union differentiation is to make it very easy to spot other unions, judge their size, their overall spirit, their age and gender composition, and read their particular grievances. The next step, comparing theirs with one's own, is hard to resist. Small unions like Universal and Unikon come away with even stronger feelings of weakness and inferiority after comparing their union to others. So it was that Universal people commented on the size, youth, and male composition, and Unikon people on the size and male composition, of so many of the other unions. There are very few smaller than Universal and not many smaller than Unikon. But those too were spotted and talked about later. The even tinier ones made people feel that "it could be worse" (Yunibasaru wa mada ii ho ), and the bigger ones and younger ones made them feel that just maybe they were wasting their time. "See, Universal is tiny! Did you see the number of people from that union? And they were so much younger. There's just no comparison. [Yappari ,

[1] For a discussion of the ways in which demonstrations reinforce universalistic notions of worker identity, see chapter 2.

Yunibasaru wa chiisai! Ano kumiai no ninzu o mita ka? Wakai shi . . . mo kanawan .]"

Being Part of Tokyo Sogi Kodo

The Tokyo Sogi Kodo organization, while a statement about shared conditions, is at the same time about the particularity of workers' consciousness. It is not an organization which brings workers from any and all sympathetic unions out to demonstrate on behalf of other troubled unions. It is an organization of unions involved in disputes, and they gradually fade out of the organization after their dispute is settled and they have "paid their debt" by participating after their own settlement as a gesture of gratitude. Of course, they never get involved in the first place unless their union is having a fairly serious problem in negotiating, and consequently it sets workers in disputes off from those in what they call normal companies (futsu no kaisha ) and develops in them a kind of reluctance to be around workers from these "ordinary unions." May Day demonstrations are an example of this kind of reluctance.

Universal workers expressed mixed emotions about the upcoming May Day, which has evolved now into a demonstration in the nature of a celebration, with marches but no political actions of any kind. Unikon people expressed relief that, at the first May Day after their settlement, they could go with a light-hearted feeling (akarui kimochi de ) because their chest signs would not proclaim them to be from a bankrupt company. A Universal worker expressed his reluctance this way:

I like the May Day demonstrations. They are even fun, with everyone getting together and marching under bright flags through those nice areas of the city, and starting from the beautiful Yoyogi Park. But it just isn't the same when you have to put on that dreadful chest sign so everyone can read it and tell that you are from a bankrupted company, from a union fighting a long and drawn out struggle. You don't want to advertise that fact, and it spoils the fun of going.

There you are with thousands of people from ordinary companies, and . . . I don't know, I just don't feel like going again this year.

While providing an important avenue for unity and strength, the Tokyo Sogi Kodo demonstrations also give solid expression to the differentiation between workers who are involved in the trials and tribulations of labor disputes and workers who are free of them. It adds fuel to the fire

of embarrassment and isolation felt by participants from unions which are fighting difficult and sometimes losing battles.

The Tokyo Sogi Kodo organization ties unions to one another by bonds of indebtedness. Each union is indebted to (osewa ni natteru or on o uketeru ) Tokyo Sogi Kodo as a whole, but they are also indebted to several other unions in particular. These particular debts are less emphasized than the general debt at the demonstrations, but they play a part even there. The general debt to Tokyo Sogi Kodo was responsible for Unikon's presence at the demonstration described in chapter 2, after their own settlement was all but concluded. They spoke and even joked about being indebted to Tokyo Sogi Kodo, bowing and laughing and in general caricaturing various Japanese ways of expressing humble gratitude. And to the Universal demonstration described above, Unikon sent four members, because these two unions had very close ties and Unikon was indebted to Universal for inspiring its own struggle and for lending support of various kinds.

There is in this act the expression of the on , or reciprocal indebtedness, felt to be a defining characteristic of the relationships between unions, both for Unikon and for Universal. This indebtedness, the exchange of services, financial help, advice, and sentiment that characterizes the relationship, creates a debt which cannot, for instance, be repaid by simply joining in a demonstration for yet another union, or even by participation in the Sokodo demonstrations as a whole. It is the nature of these relationships to be independent in this sense. So Unikon must show its gratitude and give its support to Universal in particular. This kind of orientation is of course responsible for creating a certain specific constellation of participants at every demonstration stop on the route of the Sokodo marches, and it works against the participating workers feeling an unambiguous universalistic identity as workers, and encourages instead a sense of oneself as both a worker (rodosha ) and at the same time as a worker of a certain company and of a union with specific characteristics, problems, and friends or allies.

Being Powerful or Weak as a Union

The demonstration highlights the struggle between capital and labor.^[2] It reminds workers of language otherwise uncommon in

[2] See chapter 2 for a discussion of ways in which capital and labor were conceptualized in the demonstration and by Unikon workers. The categories and their usage in conversation were the same for Universal workers.

daily speech. Universal workers spoke of "capitalists" during this event and commented, with discouraged emotions, about the relative weakness of their union compared with the strength of Toyo Bank. For instance, "What we're up against is capitalists! [Aite wa shihonka da yo! ]" The tone of voice used by Nakada-san when he said this was, "Can't you see how difficult this is going to be?" After the Universal demonstration, as we walked away from Toyo Bank and toward the next site, Michikosan commented, "They don't need us. What can it possibly matter to them if Universal ceases to exist? Custom doesn't need our production capacity, and Toyo Bank would be happy to be rid of us." The stark way in which demonstrations place labor against capital highlights the necessity of strength for the weaker side, the workers and their unions.

This does, on the one hand, emphasize the need for unity and solidarity, but it also impresses people with the differences between unions as well. Some unions have more political clout than others, they end their disputes more quickly and seem to have better leadership, better connections to powerful union federations, and better political strategies. The successful examples are repeatedly called to everyone's attention in demonstration speeches. Unikon was one such example. Unikon's struggle ended in a comparatively quick two and a half years, and it ended successfully. At several stops in the Sokodo demonstration which I attended with them right after their victory and again in one about six months later, Unikon was mentioned as an example to be studied and from which lessons could be drawn and which might serve as an inspiration. They were well respected by other unions, and the membership of Universal often spoke of them admiringly.

Because these two unions knew one another both through membership in their regional federation and in dispute-related organizations, and because they had been watching one another for lessons on strategies that might work, they had a special relationship to one another. There was nearly always a two-dimensional discussion when Unikon's name came up at Universal. On the one hand, workers felt a sense of encouragement in their victory in a situation very much like their own. On the other, the inevitable comparison of the two unions made Universal people wary. "Unikon has so much better leadership than we do." "They are so much younger and stronger." "They don't have so many old people." "Their federation is strong." "They didn't have the same kind of enemy as we do—they weren't a subcontracting company, so they only had to fight their previous owners, who had already gone bankrupt. We have to fight the strong Custom Shoe Company!"

Both the strengths and the weaknesses of other unions and of one's own become more obvious and more open to comparison in the context of the demonstration. More than other actions, this event dramatized the necessity and the purpose of strength. It did so by dramatizing the relationship between the unions and the financial institutions which back their companies. Were the unions and these institutions equals, the workers would be negotiating instead of demonstrating. And indeed it is negotiation which is the first aim of the demonstration. The Sokodo demonstrations, once negotiations are underway, are tamer by far than the initial Universal demonstration was. People commented afterwards that it was an exceptionally aggressive one and that Toyo Bank had been particularly stubborn. The speculation was that they just did not expect such a "weak" union to be able to make such a fuss, and as a matter of fact, neither did the Universal workers prior to their experience. Their perception of the political strength of the institutions was heightened. Their perception of their own individual union's political weakness was recalled, but at the same time transformed by a new experience of unity and strength deriving from a much larger collective action.

Being More Female and Other

The ratio of women and older men to young and middleaged men in a union is considered to be a measure of both political strength and determination. At Universal, it was an often-repeated refrain that they were not taken seriously because they were too heavily female and elderly. At the younger but over half female Unikon, comments took the form of, "You aren't going to believe this, but our women are really something else! Even the middle-aged women [parttimers] are really energetic and committed [isshokenmei ]."

Universal and Unikon looked at themselves very differently, but used essentially the same criteria for evaluating their own strength and prestige. Unikon was at an advantage because their only drawback was the number of women, and "even" the older women were complimented for being committed. Age was clearly considered a liability when entering a struggle. Where Unikon built its pride around achieving success in spite of the high proportion of women, or because older women (in their forties and early fifties) were "really young," Universal saw itself as somewhat "unpresentable" because of the predominance of the elderly and of women. The "unpresentable" feeling was overcome to a large degree in the course of participation, lessened by the overwhelming reception and support given their union by thousands of fellow workers

from a variety of other unions. People came away feeling visibly better about themselves. Nevertheless, for both Unikon and Universal the presence of a lot of women, part-timers, and/or elderly people was a liability to be overcome.

The dependent status of older people and of women is assumed as common sense, and the agenda of a labor dispute is aggressive fighting, requiring sacrifice, determination, and assertive acts. Women and older men are not considered suited for such action, so some kind of special care must be taken to form a collective action with such a work force. The proportion of women and older men at Universal was cited by some leaders as one of the reasons that demonstrations had been postponed for the first three and a half years of their struggle. Some had feared that their rank and file were not suited to such actions and might not be able to carry them out with the necessary commitment and strength.

These concerns reflect employment categories for women and older men as well. The logic motivating fears about adequate union commitment and action is quite similar to the logic motivating the employment categories for these people. The shorter assignments of participation in the demonstration reinforced both the separation of rank and file into these categories and the assumption that women and older men had less strength physically, less commitment, and a less significant role. This assumption of both physical weakness and lower levels of responsibility, dedication, and status on the part of women and older men was a sensitive issue within the union and at the same time contributed to its difficulties in creating an image of strength, solidarity, and determination externally in fighting its dispute.

Being Proud of the Union

Related to images of economic or political strength are feelings of pride, but pride—or its absence—was often expressed in other contexts as well. Workers talked about everything from the kinds of services rendered or products manufactured to the attractiveness and creativity of the demonstrations prepared.

Unikon workers, for instance, were very proud of the fact that they produced cameras. They sometimes used signs at demonstrations in the shape of cameras. They once put a huge cardboard camera on top of the Unikon car which accompanied them to demonstrations and marches. A closely affiliated union whose workers manufactured jackets similarly claimed a certain prestige because of the good-looking jackets they produced, and they made a point of wearing them—all in the same

color—to demonstrations, replacing chest signs with arm bands. For both cameras and jackets, status was derived in part from the product being modern and youth-oriented. In the case of cameras, additional pride was taken in the fact that they required a very high level of technology to produce. Universal, in contrast, never used shoes in this way. Shoemaking is an old industry and requires little technology. It is ironic that, in suggesting I go to Universal, Unikon workers had emphasized the greater skills and craftsmanship of the Universal workers. Where it takes only a few weeks to master most of the jobs at the camera factory, it is said to take eight to ten years to become a skilled shoemaker. The contemporary cultural field of Japan, however, inclines in the direction of "high-tech," youthful images. Their product is further removed from this ideal by being conservative leather shoes marketed primarily toward middle-aged men.

Pride also comes through in a good-natured competition concerning the attractiveness and originality of the paraphernalia and other signs of the effort of the membership in putting together a good demonstration contingent. Universal was recording their demonstration for their own movie. Unikon was very proud of their sometimes unconventional demonstration tactics and props, had them recorded on film, and had a lot of fun showing them off, recalling special signs, slogans, and actions which drew attention and were even copied by other unions. Before one of their demonstrations, one young man claimed proudly, "Unikon might be small, but we aren't going to be outdone by the bigger unions!" My participation in a demonstration with them was heralded with self-conscious enthusiasm: "Wait until they see our contingent this time! They're going to say, 'Unikon has done it again, a foreigner! You never know what they are going to come up with next.'"

Similar thoughts were expressed, but much less enthusiastically, at Universal, where the experience was dampened by the uncertainty of demonstrating for the first time. The concern with being dressed well, with "looking involved" even if you were not feeling enthusiastic, and with not making an obvious exit when leaving to go home all showed a concern with making a good impression. As one of the leaders put it at the evening meeting before the event, "Look at all these signs we're painting. And we have headbands and chest signs coming all printed up. It may take us the rest of the night finishing all the preparations, but we aren't going to be outdone [makenai zo ]! We're going to put on a good show."

Attractiveness and originality are related intimately to evaluation of effort. And it is really the effort (doryoku ) which is being evaluated implicitly as well as in the more explicit calls for at least the semblance of enthusiasm on the part of participants.

Being From Across the River

The demonstration brings people face to face with the unequal prestige of the different sections of Tokyo. Workers are so predominantly living and working "across the river" in the eastern sections of Tokyo that on demonstration days, both for Tokyo Sogi Kodo and for May Day, the trains coming in from the east to downtown Tokyo are actually packed in the rush-hour fashion, crowded with workers and the equipment needed for the demonstrations. These districts are relatively low in overall prestige, and the ward governments of Eastern Tokyo are forever trying to improve the images of their areas to attract residents of, as they put it, "better quality," like "white-collar workers" and "people of better educational background." And these people worry about their areas having too many tiny companies, not enough modern fast-food restaurants, and generally being "backward."

There is a shitamachi or "old Tokyo" image which counterbalances this "backward" image and gives it fair competition in the evaluation of the areas in which the Universal and Unikon people lived and worked. For some the shitamachi image meant warmth, fellowship, tradition, closely knit neighborhoods, and a colorful though modest life-style. But even so, that image could not be very well maintained by the majority of workers, especially younger workers at Unikon, because they were living in low-cost government housing projects which give them few of the positive aspects of the old-Tokyo-style neighborhoods. Even for those older workers who were born and raised in this area, there was a kind of complex about the "backward" nature of their life-styles and the often rundown look of the neighborhoods. So while perhaps even preferring to live in this area, they also recognized their life-style and their area as being of lower status. One Unikon worker raised her eyebrows and lowered her voice a bit to tell me that her sister lived in a certain more prestigious western suburb of Tokyo. This was followed by a discussion of how conceited people were "over there" and how much more fun it was to live in the older neighborhoods of eastern Tokyo. There was no doubt, however, that enjoying life here did not increase its status vis-à-vis the western suburbs.

The areas where demonstrations and marches take place are without exception high-status areas, and demonstrations thus occasion a great deal of sighing and some wishful thinking. Some older women hoped for their children to be able to get jobs in the banks "around here," and people talked about cousins or friends' children who had jobs in a "building just like this one somewhere near here."

Opposition, Responsibility, and Human Life

The ideological and emotional power of the event prejudiced the conversations for the participants by placing them in an assertive role, arguing through their actions for a particular perspective and feeling through their participation a particular set of relationships between themselves and other workers on the one hand and between themselves and capitalist institutions on the other. Universal rank and file found themselves in an oppositional place of stark contrasts between capital and labor. Capital was represented in this action by imposing buildings, labor by thousands of supportive workers. Images of "small" and "large" stood out visually and verbally and began to take on power through their ability to stand for a variety of inequalities and implied injustices. The metaphor of size encompassed economic inequalities, as in such statements as, "Capitalists are so big, and workers are just little [Shihonka wa dekkai shi, rodosha wa chiisai ]" or "Capitalists are so big, what do they care about little human beings [Anna dekkai shihonka ni wa, oretachi mitai ni chippoke na ningen wa dodemo iin da ]." Comparisons were made between big companies and small companies and between big labor unions and small ones, and words like "small" (chiisai ) and "tiny" (reisai ) were used to express both despair about one's own status and feelings of powerlessness. The actual size of a person, union, or company was, of course, not the point. Rather, the status, social position, or perhaps reputation was at stake. The demonstration not only provided a very direct experience of this distinction but reinforced it in signs like "Big Capital! Stop destroying small and medium-sized companies! [Ote Shihon! Chusho tsubushi o yamero! ]" The setting for the demonstrations, putting people, however numerous, in front of enormous towering buildings of concrete, steel, and glass, gave rise to a great deal of big versus small commentary, all serving to reinforce the image.

If size was a primary way of conceptualizing inequalities, "responsibility" (sekinin ) was central to the representation of related incidents

of injustice that motivated the demonstrations and struggles. "Responsibility" was dramatized and recalled in the most emotionally arousing actions of the demonstration. The word's power stemmed at least in part from its ability to cross the boundaries of a number of different contexts, integrating valued forms of relating people to one another, ways of relating in "human" ways. People felt very deeply about taking, fulfilling, and shirking responsibility.

It was used on the one hand to mean a legal or contractual responsibility, a specific promise or obligation. Banks were told, for instance, to take responsibility for Universal's bankruptcy (Yunibasaru no tosan no sekinin o tore! ) and speeches elaborated on this, saying that the banks deliberately put these workers out of jobs for their own financial gain. Similarly, they and Custom were accused of planning bankruptcies to break the union, and speakers cited the Labor Standards laws giving workers a right to organize. In this way, workers used responsibility to demand compensation, assign blame for quasi-illegal acts, and insist on the "social responsibility" of financial institutions to uphold specific laws and practices and the spirit of the workers' "right to livelihood."

"Responsibility" also resonates across many contexts to symbolize the appropriate care for one's own work or task and for those with whom one works, as well as for one's own role in furthering the fortunes of the organization as a whole. Thus it evokes images of individual commitment, egalitarian, horizontal working relationships, and integration of individuals into a workplace community. It also recalls the appropriate caring attitude of those on top of an organizational hierarchy toward those below, or of the strong toward the weak, the large toward the small. It draws, therefore, on traditional concepts like obligation (giri ) and human feeling (ninjo ), as well as on contemporary notions of co-operation, equality, and democracy. It is in this sense that at demonstrations banks were told to "take responsibility for Universal's workers!" These echoed as well the daily use of the term, giving it more in common with a diffuse notion of expected good will within a relationship than with specific duties. In daily usage it has the sense of caring for or looking after an individual or a group of people. Used in union activities it lends a sense of an almost paternalistic expectation considered appropriate and desirable to these workers.^[3] The terminology of"parent company" further reinforces this sense in Universal's case.

[3] For an historical interpretation of paternalism and labor movement ideology and practice, see Smith 1988.

While the more specific legal or contractual sense of the word explains its wide use in slogans, it is the more implicit and diffuse one which lends much of its affective power to inspire participants. It was while shouting "take responsibility" to the seemingly "inhuman" and insensitive bank representative and seeing his continued intransigence before their pleas for understanding (oretachi no tachiba mo wakatte hoshii ), sincerity, and basic human treatment (ningen to shite tozen no yarikata ), that the protesters at the Universal demonstration got most keyed up. And it was following that, walking away, that their disgusted and by then edgy and tense voices complained to each other about the inability of capitalists to treat workers as human beings, about their insensitivity to the lives and needs of workers, and of the necessity for workers to fight together.

The power of this word to symbolize the problem with things as they are and at the same time a view of how things might otherwise be makes it a very important expression. It evokes both, on the one hand, the necessity of living up to negotiated promises, agreements, and laws that hold in check the tensions recognized as inherent in class relations, and on the other hand, the basic sense of appropriate norms of human relationships (including relationships of hierarchy), which people feel should be characterized by consideration, respect for individual circumstances, and compassion.

It manages to combine clear-cut obligations and general, affectively convincing notions of human feeling and caring. The most common use, in fact, is in expressions like, "Toyo Bank! Take responsibility!" This usage encourages a unity, or at least a coexistence, of these two very different dimensions, effectively making the notion of legal responsibility and obligation more familiar and convincing through its link with the commonsensical and affectively convincing idea of considerate, paternalistic care expected or at least desired by workers from their owners and others above them in hierarchical relationships.

Changing Minds and Getting Used to Actions

Throughout the next several months there were no more demonstrations for the Universal workers. When one was finally announced, workers voiced, to my surprise, hesitations and apprehensions similar to those expressed prior to the first one. When I reminded the

people I worked with that they had said they would not mind next time, that they had realized what an important and vital aspect of the labor movement and of their own struggle this was, they said, "Really, did I say that?" I laughed and offered to show them my notes. Then we discussed it, and they said that they had forgotten but, come to think of it, they were a little less reluctant this time. They still did not, however, like the idea of "parading around the financial district wearing those awful things [chest signs and headbands]."

After this second outing, the demonstrations continued at the rate of about one per month, and after half a year or so workers simply sighed about cold in winter and heat in summer and went. They were doing, they said by then, what was "necessary" and did not think much about it anymore. They were "used to it now."

In the course of the demonstration, participants learned to talk more explicitly about themselves as rodosha , or workers. They also began to learn to feel and to perceive themselves as part of the labor movement. Certain inequalities became increasingly visible, attention being drawn to them both explicitly and implicitly, and the inevitability of open conflict became more evident to them. At the same time, however, their conversation was filled with references to how distinct they were, how unique their plight, how peculiarly hopeless or difficult their struggle. They exchanged discouraged feelings about inequality and the futility of fighting. And they continued to get emotionally distressed about the lack of human feeling on the part of Custom, which was at the root of their commitment to their struggles. All these more-or-less new or reconsidered thoughts had their own patterns of use and neglect. Just as people forgot that they weren't going to mind demonstrating anymore, by the time of the second demonstration they had also forgotten some of the inspired ways of connecting themselves to other workers and to the labor movement. The power of these events is in the juxtaposition of participation, emotion, and reflection. The difficulty of making new insights and feelings lasting elements of consciousness lies in the exceptional nature of the action and the powerful inertia of the routines of daily life. As the demonstrations became more common the insights and feelings took hold more solidly, a process evidenced as well in the Unikon workers' experience in learning to protest.

Demonstrations were among the most intense events in which the Universal workers participated. They were moving, all-encompassing, clearly bounded events in which some of the most important aspects of their social lives and identities were involved. And they occasioned

lengthy reflection on identity, inequality, injustice, and open conflict. That the resolution was not complete, their world views neat and wholly integrated or their understandings of good social relations entirely consistent, was both the strength and the weakness of these events. Workers felt that conflict was "inevitable" between themselves and "capitalists," but at the same time they admitted strong "anger" and "betrayal" when treated badly by them. While common identities with other workers were emphasized, Universal workers sometimes felt hopelessly bounded by their own small company, union, and concerns.

I never heard people try to reconcile the often divergent and sometimes conflicting understandings of themselves and their struggle. Notions of almost paternalistic consideration lived with assumptions of conflictual labor relations, the inevitability of mistreatment by owners and "capital" hovered just beside the expectation of consideration. Furthermore, their sense of the advisability of demonstrating and their feelings about participating were, for most, left similarly "unresolved." What helped people change their minds about participating did not necessarily succeed in changing their feelings about it.

It provided a context in which issues of enduring importance were argued. As such it moved people; it nudged them toward change. It provided a coincidence of action and idea, of shared thoughts and shared feelings; it tried to argue for a politically active, well-organized, and class-conscious union response to injustice in the workplace. Through the participants, wittingly and unwittingly, themes of enduring importance to the ethos and affective climate of labor relations and of the workplace were also present. Most workers felt, at least at first, reluctance to make a spectacle of themselves, to stir up even temporary disorder. They preferred to persist resolutely in adversity rather than to demand change and clung to desires to work together, cooperatively, under the skillful, considerate, and protective guidance of good ownership and management. Most workers in these demonstrations wanted, in short, a more subtle dialogue. It was a task of labor union leaders to encourage and strategically incorporate these reluctant and hesitant workers into actions which might change their orientation. Others, however, found the demonstrations exhilarating, exciting, and even fun. Youth and male gender eased the process of learning to protest, but the education and experience of union activities was effective in helping most workers "get used to it," if not become enthusiastic and wholly convinced.

The consciousness of the Universal workers was as complex as their various responses to their own collective actions. If they could not have

the subtle dialogue most preferred, they did learn to engage in open conflict, of which the demonstration came to constitute the most dramatic and challenging form. They had ways of understanding and explaining adversity and antagonism, inequality and injustice, but these had not replaced completely their notions of how things might otherwise be. In the tenacity with which they held to such diverse and varying explanations and assumptions about their social world lay much of their ability to adapt to the rapidly changing circumstances of their workplaces.

Some thoughts, like the actions with which they were associated, were more "gotten used to" than realized in a successful argument or a sudden insight. People became workers through acting as workers; they became protesters through acting as protesters. Thoughts about their identity as workers, their relationships with other workers, the injustices inspiring their demonstration, and their own role in protesting grew on these Universal workers as they acted and reflected, the two processes being inseparably interwoven in their experience.

Chapter 7
Working as Protest
Dignity, Routine, and Daily Life

Over my desk hangs a poster made by Universal to paste on telephone poles, fences, and neighborhood kiosks and to mail out to affiliated unions all over Tokyo to advertise one of their "Factory Festivals" (Kojosai). Covering about three-fourths of it is a black-and-white photograph of Kanda-san, the head of the cutting and sewing section where I worked. Oblivious to the camera, he is concentrating over his sewing machine, running leather under the needle as he did six days a week all day long for most of the forty-plus years of his career. Over Kanda-san's image is a bold diagonal banner of words reading "Our sweat is glistening." A subtitle underneath announces the "Factory Festival of Working Friends" (Hataraku Nakama no Kojosai). Under it are cheerful, blue line drawings of four children, two men, a woman, some goldfish, a balloon, two carrots, four potatoes, three daikon radishes, and four musical notes singing over them all.

What happens between meetings, demonstrations, trips, and pamphleting has mostly to do with concentration on work, with the production of shoes, with families, balloons, and radishes, and—on good days—with music. This chapter is about daily life in its routine forms, its meaning for Universal's protest, and its celebration of the commonsense world of being human. It is about repetitious and routine ways in which objects, families, and dense networks of "working friends" were created and represented. In an unexamined and taken-for-granted way, the routines of daily life provided the counterpoint to the special events and collective actions of their ten-year struggle. It was cultural practice without the argument, the grounding for the occasional stirred-up emo-

tions, and an important source of assumptions about what was natural, desirable, inevitable, or real. Because it was what people did most of the time it had the pervasive power of common sense. Daily work routines were what people returned to following demonstrations. The shop floor was where disagreements and complaints were expressed and debated following meetings during which rank and file remained silent. In the sewing, cutting, gluing, polishing, and packaging of shoes, people practiced their crafts and felt their own skill. The repetition and continuity through time wove routines of familiarity, association, and consciousness which sustained this struggle through the union's fight with Custom and Toyo Bank and through the internal dissonance which periodically plagued their own struggle for a coherent solidarity.

Sharing Time and Space

Daily work routines were at once goal, strategy, and substance of daily life throughout the Universal dispute. The objective of their worker-control struggle was to secure their continued daily practice of coming to work at the Universal factory. To achieve that goal, union leaders saw the persistence of daily work routines as critical to their strategy. At the factory festival mentioned above, one of the lawyers representing Universal praised the "perseverance" of rank-and-file workers in their day-to-day maintenance of factory operations as the most important factor pushing them toward victory. A powerful and tenacious image was thought to be crucial to forcing their parent company and the financial institutions backing them to take the small Universal union seriously enough to negotiate a settlement. In addition, keeping these routines going—literally sharing time and space on a daily basis—was seen by union leaders to be the minimum condition necessary to mobilize commitment for struggle.

To make ends meet immediately following bankruptcy, Universal leaders organized rank-and-file workers to make coin purses, train-pass holders, and leather covers for whiskey bottles (these covers looked like vests and hats, transforming the bottles into little cowboys). One purpose was to make a modest amount of income to tide them over until shoe production and sales could be organized by the union. The other purpose was to keep people together. Workers came to the factory and maintained the usual schedule in the usual place, but without making the

usual objects. Leaders frankly claim that their struggle would never have gotten off the ground had they not convinced people to continue in this way. The story was the same at Unikon, where workers brought all their various types of piecework to the factory site at the same time and in their usual work places, to work on their disparate projects together. In their case they also pooled their accumulated money and divided it up according to original pay scales, maintaining the factory organization of labor time and approximate scales of wages. In discussion about decisions to stay and fight through their long struggle, rank-and-file workers consistently emphasized their feelings that they had been together all this time, so they couldn't quit while others stayed, or even that Universal was by now a "comfortable place to live."

The routine at Universal was a very usual one for small industry, with work beginning at 8:15 every morning and ending at 5:15 every evening. Overtime was not daily, but corresponded to special needs for money or production. In the morning everyone walked in through the open gates and punched in at a vintage time clock just outside the main office. The friendly morning greetings exchanged there turned into sex-segregated conversations as people split up to go change clothes at lockers upstairs behind the big meeting room. Unlike Unikon, Universal had no official uniforms, so everyone brought comfortable, older clothes and shoes to change into at work. In winter there were multiple layers of cotton underwear, nylon stockings, wool sweaters, and little hot-water bottles tied into scarves or sashes worn next to the body for warmth. Everyone wore much nicer, even slightly dressy clothes to commute to and from work, during which time they might stop at restaurants or shops. Not only was it nicer to be comfortable in clothes which could get soiled and were loose fitting for easy movement, but since buildings weren't heated or cooled, it was also important to adjust for weather. The buildings felt amazingly cold after working for a few hours sitting or standing still, and in winter people joked about how fat everyone looked all padded up to keep warm. This practice set a casual and relaxed tone to the workplace which clearly demarcated it from the outside world.

People tended to arrive at least fifteen or twenty minutes prior to their starting time. After changing clothes there were little gatherings around tea in each of the work areas where chatter about weather, families, and current events accompanied morning radio shows left on all through the day. By the time the bell rang at 8:15 everyone was ready to work. Work flowed smoothly and in patterns familiar to everyone. There were three breaks during the day. At 10:00 A.M. one of the women in each section

would make tea and people would congregate around a small table for a few minutes before getting back to work. It was not a scheduled break with a bell but an informal one left up to workers on their own shop floors.

At noon a bell marked the lunch hour. As part of its effort to contribute to health and help family budgets, the Universal union had decided to serve a complementary hot lunch every day for all the workers. The whole factory was housed in very old buildings dating to prewar times. They were all wooden with old windows and hard earth floors. The cafeteria was a small room with windows on three sides and a tatami mat floor with several low tables to sit around. A big TV sat in the corner and was tuned to the public station's noon news broadcast. It began at noon and ended at exactly 12:15, which was, to my initial amazement, exactly the time everyone cleared out of the lunch room. I practiced with considerable effort and never managed to eat that fast. The lunch period lasted an hour, and the remaining forty-five minutes were filled with enjoyable things to do. Several men were growing a garden on land behind one of the buildings, and they would spend the rest of the time there, weeding, watering, and admiring the progress of their plants. At least two or three games of Japanese chess (shogi ) were always in progress, gathering onlookers when the contest came to a critical phase. Many workers sat and talked to one another, read newspapers or books, and relaxed indoors in winter and outdoors in hotter months. A large open space behind one of the buildings was adequate for modest games of catch, and some of the part-time women who lived close by bicycled home and back. Informal friendships complemented the structured sharing of work spaces and nurtured dense networks of association and community.

People shared the ups and downs in their energy and exhaustion over the course of the day. Afternoons usually saw more conversation, more commentary on radio programs, and some complaints about cold, heat, being tired, or things people needed to do after work. Complaints about being sleepy or about backaches or shoulder aches later in the day were common. Workers would massage each other during breaks and tease one another about getting old. The Universal workers had known each other for some ten to twenty years or more, so they had also watched each other age and overcome various physical problems. In the cutting and sewing section where I worked one of the women was suffering from hot flashes due to menopause. When she would begin to experience that discomfort others, including men, would ask her if she was all right, and

someone would suggest she take a break and step outside if she needed to. One of the older men had high blood pressure, and in the winter when it was cold other workers would remind him to be careful and to come stand by the heater if he needed to warm up.

The third break of the day was for twenty minutes, beginning at 2:50 P.M. Everyone congregated in the largest open space where the head of the cutting section would place a portable radio-cassette player on the ground and put in a tape of calisthenics and music. Exercising was a great excuse for joking and playfulness, in that each person had their own style and level of enthusiasm, and fortunately no one seemed to mind getting teased about their imperfections of form as they tried to keep up with the voice on the tape. It was also the only time during the day that every worker, regardless of shop floor and section, did something together. In addition to the social aspect of this activity, people expressed appreciation for the physical relief from sitting or standing all day. Tea and sweets rewarded people back at their work areas following their exercise. This was the last break of the day, after which people worked through until 5:15. There were two bells at the end of the work day, one at 5:00 to signal the beginning of a fifteen-minute cleaning-up period and the last one at 5:15 at the end of quitting time. By the end of the day there were times when people would discover themselves all looking at the clock waiting for 5:00, and they would laugh and joke about their enthusiasm for working right up to the last possible moment. By the time the 5:15 bell rang, work areas were clean, and everyone was back into street clothes and—if their timing was just right—maybe even at the time clock ready to punch out. These little ups and downs formed the habits of working a very ordinary and accepted schedule.

This sharing of time and space doesn't take either much time or much space to write or read about. Its power lies in its repetition and in its association with ordinary, respectable human life. Nearly all Universal workers had worked this schedule for well over ten years, and had worked it together. It didn't change at the onset of their worker-control struggle. No one challenged it as the basis for efficient, productive work. Their protest actions interfered with it on occasion. Workers assigned to leaflet in mornings at Custom came to work a few minutes late. Demonstrations took from a half to a whole day away from work. Meetings and festivals required suspension of work routines for preparation. But for most days of most weeks of most months over several years the Universal workers had been sharing that factory space and the hours from 8:15 to 5:15 with one another. Routines like these were constitutive of fundamental ties

of association, familiarity, and consciousness for them as workers and as workers in protest.

It is not easy to record the effect of daily life on consciousness. Workers didn't talk much about routines they were used to, although they were likely to complain when something interfered with them. These routines didn't receive any explicit attention until I started talking about them and about my experiences of them. That in itself elicited interesting commentary from people around me as they tried to explain things to me and to help me adjust. The process of settling in was for the most part comfortable and smooth. I felt constraints, however, around my own energy and time. The combination of evening note taking and daytime factory work left little time for other activities, including rest. I got sick from this schedule after a few weeks, and that brought unforeseen benefits in popularity and unsolicited advice. My reputation was permanently improved. Universal workers began to brag to outsiders, when they introduced me, that I worked so hard I got sick, but that "even then she didn't quit." Without any particular intention of doing so, I was beginning to build relationships with people by virtue of daily life habits and routines.

The advice I received sketched a picture of maturity, adulthood, and the value intrinsic to a work schedule. The first problem with me, Michiko-san explained with enormous sympathy, was that I was not yet a mature adult member of society (shakaijin ) and consequently I was not used to the demands of the schedule. I still had too much looseness in my heart (kokoro no yurumi ). When I got a real job and started receiving a paycheck that a family depended on, "things will change." The association of this work schedule with a full adult life in society is one of the most important assumptions motivating the antibankruptcy struggles. One observer of the Unikon and Universal struggles saw in the rank-and-file motivation the "human desire to labor." In my experience, these workers shared the simple notion that human beings must work, that perseverance and diligence is appropriate to that work, and that it is all tied to the support of a family. In this way the daily lives of their families are created by and given meaning by the schedule and the daily life of the workplace, and the work schedule is in turn given meaning through its creation of family life.

While it is inevitable that a description of daily workplace routine appear discrete, it is not lived outside of personal life. Days don't begin at 8:15 or end at 5:15. The recognition of the interlacing of home life and work life was apparent at all Universal parties, trips, and celebrations,

through the direct involvement of family members. Meetings and collective actions recognized the links in speeches praising the patience, endurance, and support of families for the struggle and referring to the protection of family life as the underlying reason for workers to fight for their livelihood.

An important part of becoming a mature adult member of society was being "settled" into a schedule. That, people explained, came with getting used to the work and getting used to the people they were working with. Kanda-san reminded me often that it took at least ten years to learn this craft, and that nearly everyone at Universal had been making shoes for at least fifteen. Not being used to either the work or the people "uses more nerves" (shinkei o tsukau ), and I would become less fired as I "got used to" the work, the place, and its people. The routines of work and of being together had a strong association with familiarity, relaxation, and comfort.

Making Things

The original reason Unikon leaders suggested I work at Universal for a while was their belief that the craftsmen at Universal would have significantly different consciousness than the Unikon workers. The differences I observed were more subtle than obvious, and the differences in the work people did were always contextualized by the similarities in the structuring of the day, the organization, the production process, and the union activities.

The most explicitly discussed difference had to do with wholeness. At Unikon workers sometimes referred to themselves as "just one part in a big machine" or talked about being "interchangeable." These were comments which arose, as did the feelings they expressed, in times of trouble and doubt, when workers felt their leaders were not taking them seriously enough or caring for their needs. The Unikon workers also joked at other times about how no one in the factory could put the whole camera together, because they only knew their own little part of it. Even the men who inspected the camera didn't know how to do each step of its assembly. The workers in the parts department were even more at sea in understanding where the tiny pieces they made would fit. Only the men who ground the lenses were considered to be "craftsmen," but even they could not see the whole camera. This aspect of their jobs was at once

a subject for joking and for self-denigration. It also contributed to a hierarchy of prestige for the different sections of the company. The assembly workers were between the parts department "aunties," who were all part-time older women, and the lens department workers, who enjoyed the highest status.

At Universal I was assigned to the cutting and sewing section. Unlike Unikon where I could move about freely from one job to the next, learning in a couple of hours enough to do a respectable, though slow, job of assembly, at Universal there were very few places where I could work. The accepted wisdom was that it required ten years to become a shoemaker, and everyone at Universal, except for the six men who came from other unions to support the dispute, had worked at least that long, most at least twice that long. I was assigned to the sewing section because there I could glue leather together prior to its being sewn, a job which could be fixed should I make a mistake and which was extremely simple. Kanda-san, the head of this department, said that the definition of a craftsman was "someone who can make a whole thing." Kishi-san, the union president, went even farther, claiming that people who can make things start to finish have a very special feeling for objects. They care for things because they can see in them the efforts and skill of the workers who create them.

One difference in my own experiences at Unikon and Universal was in the things people wanted to teach me. At Unikon workers wanted to teach me their jobs, but very quickly they wanted to talk about other subjects. At Universal, throughout my participant observation work and later when I visited, I consistently had workers teaching me about shoes. There was a very strong pride and interest in the product they were making, and particularly in the process of making it. A very elderly worker bragged to me one day about his skill in inspecting the final shoes, showing me in great detail all the things he checked and explaining that since he knew how to make this shoe he knew how to make sure it was perfect. "I put myself in the place of the customer," he said, "and I wouldn't want a flaw in something I paid good money for." To demonstrate his particular care, he showed me as well how he wrapped the cleanly shined shoe in tissue so it wouldn't have a spot on it when the box was opened up. "This is the last time someone handles the shoes before they go to the customer," he teased, "so it's up to me to make everyone's work look good!" Kanda-san would talk to me for hours about how the leather should bend, how to sew along certain grains and not others, how to shape the cut and glued pieces just right while sewing.

One day he confessed that he couldn't tell me much about "consciousness" but he was confident that he could teach me anything I wanted to know about making shoes. Universal, on a daily and hourly basis, was permeated by this sense of skill, confidence, and pride in the quality of the products they were working on. The atmosphere at Unikon had, indeed, been different. People there worked quickly, and in evaluating their own skill they thought in terms more of quality and speed than of an expressed love for the process of making the cameras.

To convey what a day's routine was like is quite difficult. In describing the daily work schedule, the breaks, lunches, and starting and quitting times stand out because they are transition points and are thus relatively easy to describe. What constitutes most of the day's routine, however, is work, and work done standing and/or sitting in one spot. From 8:15 to 10:00 Universal workers were making shoes. From 10:10 to 12:00 they were making shoes. From 1:00 to 2:50 and from 3:10 to 5:00 they were making shoes. Making shoes is what they did most of the time every day. Most chapters in this book focus on particular incidents or special events and as such are much easier to write and, I would guess, to read as well. Events like demonstrations and meetings have clear structures of beginning, middle, end. The daily practice of work, on the other hand, has a structure which can be summed up in a few sentences, and a substance which would require pages of repetitive description.

Work doesn't happen for a couple of hours like a meeting, or once a month like a demonstration, or once every three months for two or three days like a trip. Work is the most continuous and repetitive practice in the daily lives of these workers. Minute after minute, hour after hour, day after day, week after week, month after month, year after year, the men and women doing these jobs follow their routines. And yet their working is never exactly the same. Kanda-san has been taking up bits of glued leather, molding them to form a three-dimensional shoe form, and running them under a sewing machine needle to stitch them together for nearly thirty years. At Unikon, the placement of the tiny black aperture part into the lens opening with long tweezers was unvarying for Suzuki-san, and had been for the twelve years she had worked on that assembly line. Their experiences of their work, however, were not the same on Saturday just before quitting time, facing a weekend off, as they were on Monday morning facing a full week of work ahead. Nor were they the same when there was a good conversation of gossip as when there was silence, or when there was an interesting game of chess waiting from the previous day's lunch as when there were no particular plans to

look forward to. It wasn't the same when the production targets had just been raised as when one had just been met.

To convey what actions constitute daily routines of work at Unikon, I might simply write something like this:

First she picks up the long tweezer, then with that she carefully takes a 1/4" × 1/8" black aperture part from a small box filled with hundreds of these, places it over a tiny silver peg and tips it at just the right angle so that it overlaps the one before it just right. Then she picks up another 1/4" × 1/8" black aperture part from a small box filled with hundreds of these, places it over a tiny silver peg and tips it at just the right angle so that it overlaps the one before it just right. Then she picks up another 1/4" × 1/8" black aperture part from a small box filled with hundreds of these, places it over a tiny silver peg and tips it at just the right angle so that it overlaps the one before it just right. Then she picks up another 1/4" × 1/8" black aperture part from a small box filled with hundreds of these, places it over a tiny silver peg and tips it at just the right angle so that it overlaps the one before it just right.

For each lens aperture, Suzuki-san put in fifty of these pieces. I have just written about four of them. It would require about eight pages for me to repeat that description fifty times. Suzuki-san does about five cameras an hour, and that would take me forty pages to describe. An eight-hour day would yield three hundred and twenty pages. A six-day week would be nineteen hundred twenty pages. Suzuki-san has worked at this job for about twelve years.

To convey in such a form what a Universal worker does is a little more difficult because it is relatively less repetitive in the details. Kanda-san always takes glued leather pieces, shapes them properly, and slides them under the needle of a sewing machine to stitch them. But depending on the particular leather and its cut and the "feel" of the form, he bends it this way or that, fiddles with it, and adjusts the machine and his task accordingly. He sews about seven pairs of shoes an hour, about fifty or sixty a day, around three hundred a week. At Universal there were several people doing each task. And each task led from one to another until the whole shoe was finished. At any given moment parallel jobs were being done, which created the flow of a single product throughout the factory and from one person to another.

This daily flow of work, experienced together, was clearly facilitating a sense of sharing skills, organization, fortunes, and lives. No shoes were made without each section touching them, and in a company this small that also meant that each worker knew the others who were working on the same product very well. They knew the idiosyncrasies of their work,

their style, and their enthusiasm or lack thereof. The daily routine act of making shoes rehearsed the commonsense assumption that the Universal workers were sharing their lives and their livelihoods.

Managing and Being Managed

One of the frequently acknowledged problems with unions operating their own factories is the conflict between their egalitarian ideologies and organizational hierarchy. President Kishi spoke of the "soft" (amai ) characteristic of union relationships and how they don't always mix with the "harsh" (kibishii ) nature of factory management. Equality as union members conflicts both with the union's own internal hierarchy of officers and, in cases like Universal's, with the factory management hierarchy set up by the union as well.^[1] Prior to bankruptcy and worker control of production, all union members were working together, sharing time and space and making the same product in the routine ways discussed above. Once the union began to manage production, however, union leaders all took on different jobs, jobs with different schedules, a different workplace, and none of them involving hands-on production of shoes.

On a daily basis, decisions about what to produce, in what quantity, and at what pace were all made in committees of union officials. Rank-and-file workers saw their union officers around the factory, but they were in the front office doing management work with one or two visiting federation officers. The work the leaders did was no longer the work of the shop floor, and there was a daily experience of separation and distance which enhanced whatever differences in opinion, strategy, or status workers might otherwise feel.

Decisions about what to produce, the quantity, the prices, and sales strategies were all made in committees which included Universal officers and outside labor federation officers. Rank-and-file members were told the results of these decisions, but for the most part they were working under the management and instructions of their leaders. Leaders were also doing the work of the union and as such were associating with outsiders, going around Tokyo meeting with federation officials, lawyers, and others involved with their struggle. Their worlds were bigger and clearly of higher status than the world of the factory. The union

[1] For a discussion of this dilemma in similar companies, see Inoue 1981a.

leaders also joined different activities and followed different schedules. They did not eat lunch at a particular time and they rarely joined rank-and-file workers in the dining area. Their hours were longer and less clearly structured. The daily habits of work were themselves both expressive of and responsible for a gap in practice and a sense of inequality which contributed substantially to the problems of the union with internal democracy and equality.

The habits of management became, through daily practice, part of life for union leaders. In turn, their frustrations around trying to get rank and file to speak up, take part in discussion, and take responsibility for making decisions revealed rank-and-file habits of being managed.^[2] The daily patterns of association between leaders and rank and file strained former relationships of equality and rehearsed in ongoing practice this confusion of status. The very leaders most sincerely concerned about egalitarian principles were trapped in habits of management within hierarchy that undermined the achievement of their goals for internal equality, democracy, and rapport between workers.

In December, when the end-of-the-year rush demanded higher output and longer hours, one of the workers in the cutting section missed work for a couple of days. Things were so busy that President Kishi decided to work in her place for a couple of days. Working the cutting machine had been his job prior to self-management and he would be a big help. When Kanda-san, the foreman, came back from a meeting to say that President Kishi would join us the next day there was silence. By now I knew that silence for Universal workers was itself a statement. Later, while we were walking to the station, I asked about that silence. They reminded me that President Kishi didn't treat me the same way he treated them, and that he was very "harsh" with them. Having him there would mean a very serious atmosphere. Furthermore, it would not be easy to talk because when you talk to "superiors" (ue no hito ) you have to "be careful not to use the wrong words or something." Once again, as in reluctance to speak at meetings, the complexity of deferential Japanese language usage was cited as a reason for not bothering to speak.

The next day, President Kishi did come to the cutting section. It was indeed one of the quietest days I had ever witnessed. More interesting to me, however, was the way in which he worked, choosing not to follow the same schedule as everyone else. At the afternoon break when the

[2] This is still a problem at Universal in its new cooperative company form. See chapter 8 for a discussion.

buzzer sounded, he did not stop working, and others were very slow to stop themselves. Gradually we all did, however, and walked out to the open space to exercise. He continued working. When we went back ten minutes later he was still working, and by now even I was feeling uncomfortable taking a break while someone else was working. It is quite usual at Universal, and at Unikon too, for people to break only when everyone else does and to leave only when their whole section is finished with a task. If anyone had to leave ahead of the rest, he or she went to each other coworker and apologized for leaving first. Once we had made tea, the woman pouring said under her breath to the others, "I suppose I should make one for Kishi-san too, shouldn't I?" They nodded that she probably should. It was becoming quite an awkward situation. Finally one of the workers called to him that tea was ready and he stopped work to come and join us. While one person was pouring tea another was finding him a good chair. As we began to eat our usual sweets, Kishi-san's secretary came in with sweets he had asked her to buy and bring to us. This generous gesture was also a little surprising, because it is the sort of thing which guests do when visiting, and once more reinforced a sense of distance. The difficulty many workers felt in speaking up at meetings or in feeling equal as union members or equally enthused about particular events seemed to be continuously strengthened by the simple practices of working in the factory. Attempts to argue for a new form for their organization, while convincing as an ideal, often seemed distant from the reality constituted by their ongoing experiences.

While continuing the daily routine of work was itself a powerful symbol of solidarity and strength critical to Universal strategy, once reestablished, union leaders considered that very routine to be problematic as well. They explicitly argued against settling into a complacent routine so ordinary that rank-and-file workers might lose the vigilance and determination necessary for their protest actions. The repetitive and familiar routines of daily life which occupied most hours of most days could fill up time, use up energy, and make days and weeks predictable in ways which provided calm patterns of activities. Workers were nurtured by them, and productivity was enhanced by such stability, but it often did become an escape from formative debates and unfamiliar actions necessary to their struggle.

Rank-and-file workers frequently expressed their desire to just do their work and let the lawyers and their leaders negotiate a settlement, and shortly after I began working there I started hearing people refer to their struggle as "calm" (ochitsuiteru ). Clearly, the goal of the dis-

pute—to continue their daily work lives at Universal—and the means to achieve it were to a great extent merged for many of the workers. Lawyers working for Universal claimed that this perseverance was Universal's most powerful weapon. On the other hand, the attendant habits of quiet daily life were obstacles to forging a strong, conflictual protest needed, for instance, in demonstrations. Leaders also worried that it might hamper their ability to represent themselves to the outside world as powerful enough to be taken seriously.

There were very few changes in daily work routines when the Universal union took over management of production. The daily work schedule didn't change, nor did the length of breaks and lunch hours. Information, on the other hand, was much more broadly dispersed once the union began managing the factory. Rank and file were more informed than ever before about day-to-day operations but experienced little difference in their own role in decision making. They didn't make decisions about production before and they didn't make them after their union began managing. Union leaders made a much bigger transition in their daily activities and associations. This dissonance was clear when leaders spoke about creating a "tiny socialism," about "equality" and worker control over their own livelihood. While most rank-and-file workers held these principles and ideals to be valuable goals, they were not experiencing them as directly as were their leaders. For them the picture was complicated by habits of management and of being managed which sustained hierarchies of organization and mediated against equality or the experience of direct control of their work. The political frustrations of incomplete forms of equal process were unwittingly aggravated by complacency about management of production. Rank-and-file workers were engaged in political struggle over the control of their livelihood more than over the right to manage their own workplace. Universal leaders were more idealistic, striving for control over both, but it was a control that they themselves were exercising and of which they had a daily understanding and experience.

When I asked people what had changed for them at work, there were two common kinds of responses. Some talked about the more casual atmosphere of work. Others talked about the insecurity of their livelihood due to the absence of professional management. Everyone said that things weren't that different on a day-to-day basis. The real differences were in the security and outlook for their futures. One worker put it this way: "Before the bankruptcy we didn't have to worry about where work was coming from, where it would be sold, and so on. Those were tasks

for the managers. . . . The union had to take all that on and professional managers and sales people know more about what they are doing." For most workers this lack of security about their futures was more dominant than their experience of their present working conditions as "tiny socialism" or even as a significant break with organizational hierarchy. While the ideas expressed by their union about a future company owned, operated, and designed by their own hands was attractive, these ideas, even after several years of union management, were not yet experienced as real, and their feasibility was sometimes seriously doubted.

Seikatsu for "Working People"

For workers in antibankruptcy disputes, coming to work was in and of itself an act of defiance. The internal arguments about the form of the workplace shaped the conceptual meaning of their goals and strategies. The daily routines of making shoes or cameras, following a regular "ordinary" schedule, and making a modest but livable wage were familiar acts of fundamental significance in the context of their struggles. They embodied a fundamental association of human dignity with daily work lives on the one hand and daily home lives on the other. They defied the authority of capitalists to control whether or not a "working person" could work. These were not initially struggles over distribution of resources or increased participation in management of factory operation, although these issues became important internally during worker control of production. These were struggles over control, not over management. Workers were ambivalent throughout about how much they wanted to get involved in managing production and how well they thought their own leaders could even handle that job. No one was ambivalent about their fundamental right to work, and about the "inhumanity" and "irresponsibility" of capitalists who would deny them that without consultation or appropriate consideration.^[3]

The motivation to fight over such long periods of time was sustained in union activities and arguments and nurtured in daily life associations of work, home, and human dignity. Hataraku hito (working people) was an expression which echoed through labor movement events, community

[3] Dore 1986 presents an appendix with accounts of two cases of labor unions arguing for something beyond the contractual employment relationship. In both cases bankruptcy does eventually occur, but the unions insist upon "responsibility" and consultation in the process.

events, and daily life. It softly grounded the more ideologically motivated rodosha and labor-capital relations in the people and activities most real and most loved. The identities of Universal and Unikon workers as workers layered these terms, and solidarity played on their overlap as well as their distinctions. Rodosha was powerful and could be used in analyses, speeches, or shouted at banks. It could signify opposition and organization. The more richly grounded hataraku hitobito could be used in the same speeches, on banners, or chest signs to refer to the common plight of ordinary people working for a living. A bridge was frequently built between these two by using nakama (friend or colleague) to evoke strong horizontal ties of association, at once friendly and close but placed in daily routines of workplaces. These terms helped people imagine identities and solidarity extending from personal, daily work life through ties to coworkers with whom you share your organizational life and finally to all who share the relationship of labor to capital.

Seikatsu , like sekinin , or responsibility, was a versatile word and a powerful symbol in these struggles. Its meaning encompasses earning a material livelihood, daily life, and home life, and it served to unify all three in a deeply felt struggle for the dignity of work and "working people." It was the most frequent word to appear in slogans, and its "protection" was angrily fought over. The protests of the Unikon and Universal unions grounded their motivation and commitment in the protection of livelihood. Debate ensued about the degree to which livelihood was to be controlled by workers themselves in the long run, but there was no debate about the legitimacy of the demand. The language, however, was important in understanding felt commitments and determination strong enough to motivate these long struggles and their financial and personal sacrifices. Seikatsu did not have to be explicitly linked to family or to daily life because it was already, by definition and common, unexamined usage, fundamental to the imagining of what it is to be a human being in society. It includes within it the relationships to family, to work, and to daily association which constitute "ordinary life." It was an important touchstone, where ideological motivation to fight for the interests of Japanese labor was grounded in those immediate experiences of association that made workers feel that they "just couldn't quit" while their coworkers continued.

In the early twentieth century, Japanese unions struggled over "respect for the humanity of labor," a goal often translated by rank-and-file workers into the struggle for a "normal life" (Gordon 1991: 231). Gordon quotes one young worker describing her personal goals as just

wanting "to do what human beings do" (1991: 228). At Universal's second factory festival, the schedule of events handed out to guests had a statement of purpose. "We have decided to begin our daily lives, our work, and our struggle again this year." The radishes, the children, and the glistening sweat were juxtaposed, just as were home lives, work lives, and protest. The festival itself was an impressive collage of activities attended by nearly two thousand people. Other unions under worker control of production were selling their own products at reduced prices. Universal set up a small "shoe bazaar" where they sold their Solidarity (Soridarichi ) brand shoes. The Japan Philharmonic Orchestra, the musicians' union of which was just settling a lengthy dispute, gave two performances. The first was a "parent-child concert," and the second was an evening concert of baroque music emphasizing Mozart, where people were invited to "wear a nice jacket and some Solidarity-brand shoes and enjoy an evening of wonderful music." Food booths sold ice cream, barbecued chicken, kabobs of ground octopus, and drinks. Cotton candy was given away to children, and a large area of games and activities was set up especially for them, where they could fish for goldfish, pop balloons with darts, or buy masks of favorite cartoon heroes. A small railway ran around the perimeter of the empty lot where exercises were done during the workday. Tickets for kids and parents to ride on it were printed up as souvenirs. Over a red line drawing of an old-fashioned steam locomotive were the words "Solidarity Rail. Destination: Reconstruction of a Worker-Controlled Universal." Vegetables were brought in from local retailer cooperatives and laid out for sale. A singing contest awarded prizes for those with the most talent, and a portable shrine was borrowed from the neighborhood for children to carry around the factory yard to the accompaniment of auspicious drums and chants.

In presenting themselves, their factory, and their struggle, Universal workers created a collage of the most ordinary elements of an ordinary human life. The more mundane and familiar the object or event, the more powerful it was in creating their own images of themselves as ordinary working people and of their struggle as a strong one with unshakable determination to defy attempts to take their ordinary seikatsu away. The weaving together of families, craftsmanship, hard work, and an orderly routine gave people affectively convincing substance to the arguments and goals of their collective action. Their long struggle, and that of Unikon as well, endured in large part because they had the humor, simple pleasures, and affection of the seikatsu these "working people" were fighting to maintain.

Chapter 8
Endings

The Unikon and Universal unions waged struggles remarkable for their length, for their success, and for their timing. In an era of economic slowdown, decreasing labor activism, and political conservatism, workers at Unikon and Universal, aligned with the Communist and Socialist parties, defied legal orders to disband, operated companies under their own control, and won resources and the right to reopen under their own ownership. Interpretations of the consciousness of the rank-and-file workers in these struggles ranged from "the most advanced class consciousness in Japan" to "they don't have any." Researchers looking at the movements' strategies and prospects tended to overestimate the ideological consensus and class consciousness of the union members. Union leaders engaged in mobilization of rank and file joked in frustration about the utter absence of these same characteristics. In this book I have explored the conceptual world of Japanese workers engaged in protest and have tried to show the significance of practice in the analysis and construction of consciousness. Direct experience and discursive argument both played decisive roles in forming the ideas and feelings which guided action. Decisive and successful social action can be taken, and I would suggest inevitably is taken, while consciousness is in the process of being formed. Unspoken assumptions and nonverbal actions are as critical to such analysis as are direct discussion, debate, reading, or intellectual pondering. Furthermore, all social experiences matter, from daily life routines like those of a usual workday or casual chatting over tea or sake, to periodic events like union meetings or

company outings, to exceptional occasions like demonstrations, formal parties, or internal union conflicts.

It is tempting to look for a single coherent belief system or for a particular content to consciousness, but what is clear from this account is that neither experience nor consciousness is truly at rest. As E. P. Thompson elegantly writes of class and class consciousness, "Like any relationship, it is a fluency which evades analysis if we attempt to stop it dead at any given moment and anatomize its structure" (1963: 9). Looking at social life as lived makes strategy and decision making central and the uncertainty of outcomes ubiquitous. To see how action engenders thought and how ideas and feelings inspire decisions is to see how people perform their cultural calculations and negotiate their actions during intervals when outcomes are unknown and strategies necessary. In short, it assumes their active role in creating their own lives and histories.

This kind of processual analysis is particularly important to the study of Japan, where stereotypes of tradition-bound, docile, and submissive workers continue to encumber our understanding. It becomes possible to see industrial workers as active participants in the ongoing evolution of their own labor relations, of their own social organizations, and of their own conceptual world. While their histories, their remembered pasts, and their embedded sense of what is natural or commonsensical shape their social and cultural worlds, they arc themselves the agents of their constitution. Andrew Gordon calls industrial workers "assertive participants" in the evolution of prewar labor relations in Japan, arguing against the scholarship on Japan which relegates workers to positions of docility and dependence (1988). I would suggest that this is an even broader problem plaguing studies of Japan in that it is usually generalized to include all who are placed low in hierarchies of authority and power. In looking at the intellectual issues and cultural contestation in present-day labor protest, I have tried to bring the concerns of cultural conceptualization and assertive agency into an historicized present. I have also tried to show how life at the bottom of hierarchies is nonetheless life lived amid critical thought, careful consideration, and strategics for action within institutions. Industrial workers in Japan are engaged with their past, with the international community, with commonsense assumptions and ideological arguments from the political right and the political left, and their lives are shaped by their own efforts to change things for the better and to accommodate the inevitable.

Settlement and Reconstruction

Both Unikon and Universal continue as viable small companies. Unikon is still making cameras and Universal is still making shoes, but each has had to adapt to the competitive markets which conspired to drive their companies into bankruptcy in the past. They each continue to be active in the labor movement networks which supported their struggles. Although Unikon modeled its struggle on Universal's, and their settlements were similar in many ways, the decisions about how to reorganize and operate the new enterprises were dramatically different. Those initial decisions and the forms which their new companies took continue to lead these small companies down very different paths.

Unikon Camera

Unikon's settlement was signed on June 27, 1980, and they began as a new company at the smaller Saitama prefecture site on July 21. About forty of the Unikon workers stayed to work there. The structure of the reopened Unikon was designed by the Unikon union leaders, and replicated the organization of "ordinary companies." From the point of view of most leaders, the primary purpose of their dispute had been the restoration of both the management and the labor-management relationships usual in capitalism. Management was separated from the union, which continues to exist and to be affiliated with the same federations. The Unikon union president became the new company president and the secretary of the union became the new union president.

There were explicit efforts on the part of union leadership to design a new company which would not be encumbered by its history of union management. Unikon leaders had worried, as had many at Universal and elsewhere, that when unions run companies the principles of equality and democracy which characterize the union interfere with the administrative hierarchy necessary to a successful capitalist enterprise.^[1] In a conversation in 1989, the former union president explained to me that you cannot run a company without a "clear distinction between superiors and subordinates," and that on the other hand you can't run a union

[1] For a discussion of this issue, see Inoue 1981b.

without equality. Their own history of commitment to the labor movement and to the communist and socialist ideals of the parties which supported them were instead expressed in the nature of the products which they would try to manufacture. The new management at Unikon talked about forming a "socially significant corporation" by manufacturing cameras which were "user-friendly" and would take good pictures at a reasonable price (Inoue 1981a: 81).

The most pressing problem for the new company was to try and reenter the camera market and be competitive in it. They introduced a new 35 mm, lightweight camera, which they announced to be "the lightest camera in the world containing a flash." Within a year they found it necessary to diversify their products to remain solvent. They began renting cameras at sight-seeing spots, started looking for subcontracting business producing lenses, and tried to develop cameras for other uses, such as in home security systems.

To date Unikon has manufactured single-lens reflex cameras, car cigarette lighters, printed circuit boards, pocket cameras, underwater cameras, binoculars, opera glasses, minicameras, and video camera conversion lenses. They have contracted with Pentax, Canon, and Hoya for binoculars, Polaroid and Hitachi for video lenses, and Keystone for minicameras. They now have eighty employees, six of whom continue as full-time workers from before reorganization. The other seventy-four are all part-time workers. The new Unikon union does not permit part-time workers to be members, so the number of union members at present is six. To cut labor costs they have opened two small "offshore" factories, one in Taiwan making camera bodies and the other in southern China doing assembly work.

My most recent correspondence with the people from Unikon came from the former union president, Sasaki-san. He wants to talk with me during my next trip to Japan because, "since the breakup of Eastern Europe and the dissolution of the Communist parties," he has been reflecting on his union's struggles and on the internal dynamics of the organization. He says he feels freer now to talk with me about the political dilemmas he experienced.

Universal Workers' Cooperative Company

On November 18, 1986, Universal signed an agreement with Custom Shoes which ended their dispute and won for themselves

the means to open Universal Shoes as their own worker-owned cooperative company. In the agreement, Custom Shoes gave the Universal union lease fights to one-fourth of the land upon which the factory stood, allowing them to reopen in the same spot, though with reduced space. They also gave the union all Universal's machines and ninety million yen (about $750,000) toward construction expenses. All buildings on the property were torn down, and on their 726 square meters, the Universal union erected new, two-story buildings to house their factory operations. Custom also agreed to pay back wages, social security, and severance pay to each worker and to pay the union eighty-seven million yen as a dispute settlement fee. This settlement was reached through arbitrated negotiation, and following its conclusion all court cases were withdrawn.

In March 1987 Universal reopened as Universal Workers' Cooperative Company and continues today to manufacture and sell shoes under this name. The workers at Universal were given the option of joining the new cooperative and continuing to work there, in which case they would buy shares of the company. Just under half did so, and the others quit either to retire or to seek other jobs.

The end of this struggle was not eventful, as Unikon's had been. Toward the end of it, however, there developed stronger disagreements about the wisdom of holding out for full reconstruction, a very ambitious goal. At the conclusion of the dispute came the reconstitution of the company as a workers' cooperative, and at this point individuals took different paths. All the older men retired. When the struggle began there had been men in their early sixties, but by the time they settled these men ranged in age from sixty-nine to seventy-nine. Universal's oldest worker at the time died at the age of seventy-nine, five years before settlement. One of their youngest, Nakada-san, the man who had led my contingent to the demonstration, died at the age of forty-eight just after settlement. Two of seven part-time women quit, one to take a different job as a kitchen helper in a downtown Ginza restaurant and the other to find a job closer to her home, which had moved during the struggle. The Universal struggle had, over its course, been constituted both by defiant political acts and by a very ordinary progression of lives through time.

Like Unikon, they have had to contend with the economic pressures which have threatened their company all along, but unlike Unikon, they continue to use unconventional distribution and sales networks, linking themselves to cooperatives throughout Japan. Universal

faces severe competition from larger shoe manufacturers and from foreign products, which are increasingly common in Japan since the opening of that market at the time of their bankruptcy. To meet that challenge they have tried creative new ideas for products. They have made backpacks for children and have expanded to produce women's shoes as well as men's. Their most successful innovation and the one they are most proud of is their made-to-order shoe business. They began slowly, but have gradually expanded their reputation for quality and service. Customers come, have a mold made of their foot, and after that they can order whatever style they like and Universal will custommake it. "In this day and age," says Kishi-san, "it is important to think about what customers want and to try and meet individual needs and tastes. The increasing demand for individual style or fit may be something a small company can take advantage of even better than a large one."

Organizationally, they have a committee to make management decisions. It is headed by Kishi-san, former union president, but his title is "representative," not "president." Decisions are made by the committee and in consultation with workers at regular meetings. The primary struggle, not unlike prior to reorganization, is to get people to speak up and take an active role in their own management. The habits of leaving management decisions to management continue to impede implementation of procedures for broadened worker control. The equality of the union relationships does not permit the usual hierarchy of a company. The Universal leaders, in designing their cooperative, decided that they would try to build a company on "partnership, independence, and confidence." They are self-consciously trying to "educate" themselves and to create a "tiny socialism" where workers can be independent of capitalists and where people can have confidence in their own abilities. It is a slow process, and Representative Kishi reports that he still has to work hard to get workers to call him "Kishi-san" or "Representative Kishi" instead of "President."

At present there arc twenty-eight people working at Universal, fourteen from before reorganization. All are union members and own a small share of the company. They continue to be supported by a wide network of unions, cooperatives, and "friends" of the company. There are over five hundred members in their Solidarity Group (Soridarichi Kai), who continue to make small donations, gather for special events, and offer support to what many idealistically and hopefully still think of as a "tiny socialism."

"Tiny Socialism"

There was a precipitous drop in worker-control actions in the mid-eighties. Companies became more cautious in their efforts to carry out rationalization, plant closure, or bankruptcies in part because of these struggles. On the other hand, while their success was certainly noticed, their numbers and sizes were probably limiting factors.^[2] The overall drop in labor disputes reflects the tightening of the economy, the fear of job loss, and the more conservative political environment of the time. The dissolution of Sohyo, the most radical labor federation and the primary supporter of these struggles, is another obvious factor. In 1989 Sohyo joined other federations in forming Rengo, the largest labor federation in Japanese history, ushering in an era Andrew Gordon refers to as "friendly opposition" (1993b: 451). The Universal and Unikon unions joined this federation, complaining of its inevitable shift toward the political right but seeing no feasible alternative. They acknowledge that disputes will be harder to fight, particularly for smaller unions. It was already hard for smaller unions to get the support they needed to carry on viable dispute actions, and in their estimation it will continue to become more difficult over time. Rengo has an important stake in working with government and industry on behalf of labor, thus tacitly accepting labor as a "partner" in the capitalist system. Rengo is learning to work effectively as sole national negotiator for labor, and its power as representative of nearly 70 percent of all unions gives it the ability to work in national networks of government, bureaucracy, and industry in ways that "both stabilize the economic system and enhance Rengo's influence in it" (Tsujinaka 1993: 213). In this organization many see the hope of a more powerful labor advocate on the national stage, one able to move beyond the enterprise-specific union actions and concerns and negotiate for labor as a whole. Others fear that there will no longer be any source of national support for struggles which challenge the basic structures of capitalism.^[3] The more particular fear of those in small unions like Unikon and Universal is that this even larger federation will be an even larger sea in which concerns specific to their firms get diluted by the concerns of the industry giants.

[2] For an assessment of the importance of these disputes on the labor movement, see Inoue 1981b.

[3] Taira 1988 gives an extensive analysis of Rengo's development and the prospects for labor.

The significance of the Unikon and Universal struggles is still being discussed in Japan by academic researchers, observers, and those in the labor movement. Some think they were significant challenges to capitalism, specifically, that they represented a challenge to capitalist control of labor. The workers and union organizers themselves captured both the strength and the weakness of these struggles in their favorite term for them, "tiny socialism." Totsuka points out that the control of labor by workers during these disputes challenged important principles of capitalism with an innovative protest strategy (1980). Unikon and Universal workers did not merely demand the right to control their own livelihoods, they created factories which did in fact operate under their own control, in open defiance of orders to disband and liquidate assets. Their victories and subsequent patterns of settlement, however, paint a more mixed picture.

The Universal outcome continued the "tiny socialism" model and even expanded it by becoming a wholly legal workers' cooperative. These are still uncommon in Japan. There are about three hundred, with a total of just twenty thousand workers. Producers' cooperatives are building on a retailers' cooperative movement which also challenges usual capitalist forms of ownership. Universal leaders, while optimistic, idealistic, and proud, continue to look with a realistic pleasure on their accomplishment. They are, after all, tiny. Their product is sold very locally, and they struggle continually for survival. The meaning of this effort is most certainly an open oppositional act meant to challenge some basic structuring principles of capitalism. It is, however, also a very small-scale operation, one which the Japanese state and its capitalist economy can easily survive. The workers at Universal continue, as before settlement, to be slightly more cynical than their leaders, smiling at their small size, and reiterating the impossibility of creating socialism in a factory which operates in a capitalist economy.

At Unikon, while the struggle itself challenged assumptions about who has rights to control labor, the new company does not. Having returned to the form of an "ordinary company," leaders there are engaged in the same struggles for survival that Universal's are, but they do not share the idealism or sense of oppositional purpose to their enterprise. They talk instead of becoming "realistic" and doing what was necessary to survive in the "harsh" economic climate of contemporary capitalism.

Inoue, citing the work of Tadashi Hanami, claims that these worker-control struggles are the outcome of the Japanese labor unions' refusal

to relinquish to managers and owners all rights of management. These struggles, says Inoue, represent a challenge to the control of labor by capitalists. Hanami has previously pointed out the radical nature of Japanese labor union tactics like work slowdowns, refusing to do certain tasks but coming to work anyway, and generally taking control of services to protest against management (Hanami 1979 and 1984). Such tactics, rather than strikes where workers refuse to work altogether, are themselves a refusal to abandon the workplace and a refusal to abandon certain entitlements to take part in running it. Inoue sees the worker-control movements as the most radical extension of this strain in Japanese labor relations (Inoue 1991).

Whether these struggles were for full worker participation in a capitalist enterprise or for worker control of labor in opposition to capitalism was a contested issue within both unions. The indignation and anger which motivated rank-and-file workers at the outset of their struggles stemmed less from the fact of economic collapse than from their exclusion from negotiations and consultations about it. Unikon leaders spoke openly about their indebtedness to the insensitivity of their owners in mobilizing rank and file. They felt that had the union been consulted and included in working out provisions for workers following bankruptcy, they probably would have been unable to convince people to fight. This issue, the right to be included in the administration of their companies, was one which returned in the end to confront Unikon workers with ironic frustration. When leaders took steps to settle on plans for a postsettlement company without consulting rank-and-file workers, the result was the indignation and anger which sparked the internal crisis discussed in chapter 4.

This points to one of the great dilemmas of the Unikon union and one area of difference between Unikon and Universal, namely, the ongoing negotiation of the meaning of worker control. The Unikon leaders used worker control to achieve the goal of company reconstruction, without striving for a new company controlled by workers. Unikon leaders told me that although there were debates about it within their own leadership ranks, most of them knew all along that their goal was to create a new "ordinary company," and they pride themselves on having managed alignments with both socialist and communist political parties during their struggle. For them, the form of opposition for labor had to be one which opposed and threatened to disrupt the control of labor by company owners and financial institutions. That was a tactic, however, not a final goal. It was, rather, their judgment that it is not

feasible for labor to challenge capitalism and succeed or even survive, except for a short-term strife. In other words, worker control of production is possible only because a vast network of unions supports it on a daily basis, and only in extreme and unusual circumstances like their bankruptcy struggle. It is a powerful enough threat to owners and financial institutions to force negotiation. The negotiation, however, was about compensation, equal participation, and the right to employment within the existing economic order. Totsuka has suggested that the Unikon struggles were in fact a much more powerful threat than the union intended: That is to say, the workers and leaders began their struggles as protest against exclusion from negotiation over potential bankruptcy, against loss of jobs without proper compensation, and for financial settlement allowing them to restructure their enterprises. The form of their struggles, however, posed bolder and more critical threats to capitalist enterprise than anyone had imagined. In addition, it became clear rather early on that at Unikon the rank and file developed more radical demands and expectations than did their leaders.

Through most of the dispute, rank-and-file workers assumed that their participation in management decisions would continue and that the form of their company during the dispute would carry over into the newly opened Unikon should they succeed. To assure themselves that this would be true, the part-time women in the union actually raised the issue shortly after the struggle began and received assurances that this would be the case. After the struggle ended I interviewed the former union president and asked him about the motivation of leaders and about their reassurances to workers about the goal of the struggle. His response was thoughtful, somewhat troubled, and clear. "They would never have fought had we told them that we couldn't continue running the company the same way after settlement as during the dispute." Following this, he talked about how impossible it would have been to maintain solidarity without the goal of full participation in decision making for workers and about how hard it is to survive in a capitalist world without an "ordinary" structure to the company. As may be clear from my account in chapter 4, this judgment on the part of the Unikon leaders may have been flawed. Rank-and-file workers expressed a willingness to cope with the necessities of becoming an "ordinary company." That might well have been accepted as "inevitable." What was not accepted as inevitable, and what they were unwilling to accept, was the loss of their jobs following such a long struggle to secure them.

At Universal, workers and leaders alike knew that their union's goal was to achieve a "tiny socialism" both during their dispute and in the company they hoped to open after settlement. Theirs was conceptualized as an oppositional act, as an idealistic one, and as an effort to escape from the structures of power which threatened their jobs. There was a sense both of political opposition and of a yearning for a small enterprise on the model of the machi koba which dot the shitamachi area, the old-fashioned small companies of their "old Tokyo" neighborhoods. The yearning for the independence from industry, bureaucracy, and state echoes many of the themes of the labor movement in the early twentieth century, when capital, bureaucracy, and government had to work so hard to manage rebellious and independent workers (Garon 1987; Gordon 1988 and 1991; Moore 1983). Universal was affiliated solely with the Socialist Party and was ideologically committed to realizing a new form of work organization, even if on a small scale. There were some rank-and-file workers in the union, however, who felt weary of the length of the fight and pessimistic about its outcome. In that context they would argue that a financial settlement with their parent company might be wise, that holding out for reconstruction could make them lose everything.

This is probably the single most common debate within worker-control struggles in the seventies and eighties (Totsuka 1984) and one which characterized the worker-control struggles of the immediate postwar period as well (Moore 1983). It is a fundamental question about control of labor and about the nature of opposition. Within Unikon and Universal, there was no question raised about the preference for worker control of production. The questions were about feasibility, and the answers to those questions governed goals and strategies. Moore points out that in 1945 and 1946, the outcome of many such struggles was the organization of management councils that institutionalized worker input into administration of the firm. In Japanese firms today, nine of ten companies with labor unions also have joint consultation bodies, and in six often companies labor negotiations and joint consultations are mixed (Tsujinaka 1993). It is part of the current debate over the power of Rengo to ask whether or not more consolidated power within the established capitalist order is really more power for labor, or whether labor is more powerful when it can protest against that system itself (Mochizuki 1993; Taira 1993; Tsujinaka 1993). Rank-and-file workers at Unikon and Universal lived these contradictions, worrying about their viability as companies on the one hand and enjoying their increased sense

of ownership, control, and independence under their own management on the other.

The Formation of Consciousness

Unikon and Universal workers created decisive collective actions with some decidedly uncollected thoughts. Class consciousness was neither present nor absent. Commitment to their struggles was felt "naturally" at some points and became weak and plagued with doubts at others. Thoughts and feelings about equality, solidarity, and protest shifted through time. Straightforward questions aimed at understanding consciousness led to argument. With very few exceptions, responses to questions like "Do you think of yourself as belonging to the working class?" were "Sometimes" or "No, not really, but it depends on what you mean by class." The discussions which followed such questions were much more revealing, not of a simple, yes-or-no answer to the question of consciousness, but of the terrain of the conceptual world where social consciousness was being shaped, challenged, and reshaped through time. My questions, for instance, about reasons for such a long-term commitment to a radical struggle were met with lengthy discussions, many of which I have reported here. One common response, given with irony and humor, was "First let me tell you what we always tell people who come asking that question." Following a comment like this were remarks about working for the improvement of life for Japanese workers, fighting for respect and dignity for workers, and taking a stand so that capitalists wouldn't be able to eliminate jobs like this in the future. Then people would start discussing what they claimed to be the "real" answer to the question, an answer which almost always had two parts. The first was about doubt. Nearly everyone admitted thinking of quitting many times over the course of these three- and ten-year struggles, so the decision was made not once but several times. The second part of the answer was longer and sketched what was felt to be most responsible for their perseverance. They had been together with their coworkers for many years, had been through very hard times together, had struggled together, had all faced orders to leave their jobs together, and just couldn't quit when others were still fighting. Some said that they couldn't let down those who were so determined to fight, that they themselves weren't so convinced they could win but were inspired by the strength of purpose of particular individuals.

The relationship of "No, not really" as a response to questions of class identity to "We've been together for so long that I couldn't quit" as a motivation to fight a radical labor dispute lasting several years is intriguing. This apparent discrepancy suggests the embeddedness of consciousness in practice, raises the question of the formation of discursive consciousness from the experience of practical consciousness, and points to the importance methodologically of the qualitative analysis of social process. The formation of consciousness, at the very least, involves three things: argument, usually between articulated viewpoints; implicit social knowledge, sometimes assumed absolutely and at other times explained or doubted through example or metaphor; and action, itself a performance and experience of social relatedness. In each case, there is a degree of involvement or of experience that is critical not only to some clearly differentiated world of "feeling" but to knowledge and consciousness as well. Making sense of social relations and of action involves sensation as well as reason.

The workers at both Unikon and Universal referred repeatedly to shared experiences within their own unions, simple daily experiences like working together for years, staying up all night together to meet deadlines, or suffering the fear and anxiety of job losses. Demonstrations and other protest actions made workers "see" that they were not alone, that other workers were also fighting, suffering similar problems, and supporting one another. The experiences of acting in concert with these other workers had powerful impact on consciousness of class identity. Social relationships themselves have a sensory dimension, a dimension of consciousness and knowledge such that in social action knowledge is rehearsed, argued, understood, or possibly doubted and challenged. As Michael Taussig suggests, "The sense data of raw experience [includes] not merely sensory impressions of light and sound and so forth, but also sensory impressions of social relations in all their moody ambiguity of trust and doubt and in all the multiplicity of their becoming and decaying" (1987:463). The daily acts of working the same time schedule, working together to produce objects, sharing the vulnerability to owners' decisions to rationalize production and eliminate jobs, and later sharing the streets in protest and exchanging members with other unions for meetings, work, or celebrations created a practical consciousness of class.

That consciousness was itself, however, vulnerable to changing events and circumstances, one of the most obvious and significant of which was the involvement of Unikon and Universal workers in protest. Their consciousness of class during the time covered in this book cannot be

separated from their involvement in labor struggles and worker control of production. During times of protest, however, building union solidarity out of individual commitment is a central task for leadership, and Unikon and Universal leaders believed it to be the most critical element deciding the fate of their disputes. One of the federation officials working with Universal saw the development of class consciousness as the evolution of a kind of "wisdom," and believed that through workers' "wisdom" solidarity grows and that, conversely, through collective activities workers' "wisdom" grows. After more than six years of their ten-year struggle, he wrote that in his experience it is not the success of the Universal strife per se that is most meaningful, nor is it the way it might be viewed by others in the future. "The greatest joy," he writes, "comes from knowing that workers can see, however vaguely, what they previously could not."^[4] He expresses, in the language of his own experience, the emergence of solidarity in protest and of the visibility of relationships of class and class consciousness that Universal workers gained through their meetings, demonstrations, and other solidary activities. The dialectic of consciousness evolving in practice, of class consciousness evolving through solidary activities, echoes the perspective of E. P. Thompson (1963) on the formation of class, of Raymond Williams (1977) on the emergence of consciousness through structures of feeling, and of anthropologists and sociologists on the formation of consciousness in the complex and mundane activities of daily life (Comaroff and Comaroff 1991; Fantasia 1988; Giddens 1979; Myerhoff 1992; M. Rosaldo 1980; R. Rosaldo 1989; Taussig 1987; Turner 1967, 1969).

Unikon and Universal workers answered the question of why they decided to stay by saying that they had struggled together. Leaders in both these struggles claim that they didn't really give people a choice about beginning the worker-control struggles; they just announced that the union was going to fight and asked everyone to stay and join them. Their faith was in the ability of solidary activities to create the solidarity needed for more solidary activities. At the same time, as is evident in the discussion of Unikon's history, there were intensive efforts at education through meetings, discussions, and newsletters, and it was the interaction of discursive activities and practical experience which formed consciousness.

Class struggle and the power and importance of worker protest, workers' interests, and their right to be employed in particular compa-

[4] From a Universal union publication.

nies were keenly debated, as was the form of an egalitarian and democratic workplace. The conceptual life of the Unikon and Universal workers reveals the conflictual and formative engagement of argument with common sense. Workers at Unikon and Universal were at times more discursively persuaded by democratic notions of participation than by paternalistic or, in their words, "feudalistic" notions of perseverance and silence. For many workers, that battle was one waged openly, explicitly, and discursively. Reading that text over their shoulders, however, took me only so far in understanding eventual silences or decisions to "make trouble" or to "speak up" in internal disputes. The struggle was sometimes a nondiscursive one about the power of forms of knowledge as well. The confusing and unsettling response of Unikon workers to the crisis discussed in chapter 4 suggests that collective memories, habits of moral significance, and daily life routines of relating to one another can be more powerful, if not necessarily more convincing, and can carry people into actions or away from them even while they continue to wonder why. Silence is often an eloquent form of communication and has particular meanings in Japan (Miyoshi 1974). Jokes play on the obvious. Tones of voice, gestures, and certain looks exchanged speak to that which needs no words while all the time people are talking, thinking, and wondering what to do. Points of contention between assumptions and argument arise as the discursive touches the world of the obvious and assumed.

Class relationships were more visible to workers when collective actions involved wider networks or when owners of their companies used legal and economic powers to rationalize production, bankrupt their companies, and eliminate their jobs. This is not to suggest that class relationships were utterly invisible within the routines of daily life, but to point to the greater ease of recognizing these relationships when they actively restructured experiences. It is also to suggest that the visibility gained in demonstrations or through experiences of bankruptcy carried over into the more habitual experiences of daily work routines and were there made more convincing and certain if reinforced by routines of daily life. This interplay of special, unusual experience and familiar daily routine shaped arguments, discussions, and considerations throughout these protests.

Former Unikon and Universal workers now employed in a wide variety of companies, most without unions, much less collective action, continue to see themselves as workers, to use the language of their disputes, and to speak critically of class politics both in their new work-

places and in Japanese society. They still wonder about the ultimate meaning of these disputes, and they all speak of a personal sense of accomplishment, many referring to their participation as jinsei keiken , or life experience. Their lives now, however, don't motivate the kind of reflection that demands for collective action did or the kind of crisis consciousness that bankruptcy evoked, and they need not make sense of ongoing involvement in labor actions. The distance from struggle and protest has not eliminated the meaning of that experience, but it has removed the intensity of daily confrontation with questions of action and of meaning and has left them instead with a critical and often cynical vision of relationships of class and power. What is seen to be "inevitable" for workers, unions, and small industry now is more extensive than in the late seventies and eighties, when these struggles occurred. Union leaders and rank and file alike see the drop in numbers of labor disputes as a sign of decreased resources to support disputes.

Ethnography, Argument, and Everyday Life

Situated as it is in extended labor disputes, this ethnography has looked at transformations on several levels, and both practice and consciousness were complex and shifting. I have considered the living and imagining of daily life within social relationships of unequal power and cultural relationships of contested meaning. For several years Unikon and Universal workers lived daily lives constituted by mundane routine, vigorous protest, ideological debate, emotional struggles, the certainty of common sense, and the confusion of change. Rather than search for a single, coherent, "Japanese" way of thought, I have tried to examine the pathways to conviction, common sense, and social transformation within the wholeness of lived experience, with all its contradictions and dilemmas. At Unikon workers who participated in openly harassing the homes of owners felt compelled to use the most indirect forms of communicating their opposition when their union leaders took unpopular actions. People who cared deeply about labor and about transforming capitalism into even a small socialist experiment worried about efficiency and productivity in such an alternative organization. Consciousness of class was grounded in a feeling of "being one," a feeling exemplified by working through the night to meet production deadlines, suffering job loss together, and sharing years of daily work

routines. The intellectual life which filled conversations and motivated opinions and decisions thrived in the complex and contradictory experiences of institutional life. Bankruptcy presented workers with a legal order to disband, while bankruptcy administrators allowed that until all related issues were resolved and settlement reached, workers could operate their own companies. Their unions faced rank-and-file workers with a centralized leadership that was able to manage production and fight successful disputes over their very livelihood while at the same time maintaining hierarchies of authority and power within the organizations that mediated against the very egalitarian and democratic workplace practices they aimed to achieve.

The tensions over defining control and participation and over forms of egalitarian, democratic, and productive organizations structured the debates, experimental practices, and protests constituting these lengthy struggles. Many of these have been chronicled in the chapters of this book. They provide pictures of idealism, opposition, and emergence. Ideals were shared more widely than were ideas about their implementation or evaluations of their feasibility. Notions of democracy and equality were grounded firmly in notions of daily life processes of institutional and social life. People were talking about and trying to create a community of equals built on aijo (love), on giri (mutual obligation), and on ninjo (human feeling) without breaking down the hierarchy which seemed necessary for organizational efficiency in capitalist enterprises. They questioned whether or not a company that feels like a "comfortable place to live" could survive. Rank-and-file workers tried to decide whether they could trust their union leaders to work toward realization of their own interests or whether they themselves needed to protect them.

Attempts have been made to find an interpretation which can set these concerns to rest, settle the debates, and resolve the contradictions. Unfortunately, they have sealed off from view the efforts of ordinary people to understand and to create social relations within daily life. Contradiction has long been a theme in writing on Japan, the most common being those between harmony and conflict, horizontal and hierarchical relationships, democratic institutions and authoritarian practices. In social science literature, the management of context has been used as an explanation for the persistence and lack of resolution of such contradictions. Equality and hierarchy have been seen to coexist within workplaces, and context has been relied upon to explain the harmony which reigns in spite of it. In office groups or work teams,

hierarchy governs company operations, while equality characterizes the social circle of after-work partying. Chaotic abandon characterizes informal gatherings and deferential, reserved behavior the workplace. Successful leadership in organizations becomes a matter of skillful management of context and appropriate meaning. The contribution of such analyses is to isolate some of the more critical elements in social thought and practice and to point to their resilience. The picture of social relations, however, is static and the people—all but the managers, owners, and others on top of their respective hierarchies—are invisible, voiceless, and without conceptualization, reason, or decisive action.

At Unikon and Universal, people were spared neither confusion nor the responsibility to act. They were confronted with everything most of the time, and they usually knew it. That is, contradictions and dissonance were not problems of management of context for a handful of leaders or managers; they shaped the cultural reality of social life for everyone. People were not faced with equality at after-work parties and hierarchy at work, nor were they unabashedly enthusiastic at demonstrations and mild and reserved in daily routine. They were not wrapped up in harmony on their trips and conflict in their meetings, or feeling "oneness" at the demonstration and then losing it in crisis. Workers were coping with all of these most of the time. Situations of equality evoked the problems of hierarchy, feelings of community recalled feelings of individual self-interest, and harmony was inevitably linked to images of conflict. Contradictions and dilemmas did not arise between contexts so much as out of social life, and social life was formed not of a static structure but of fluid relations of power and action.

The intellectual issues and practical problems of conceptualizing and acting in protest and in daily life were not about great clashes or careful contextualizations. They were about small, daily clashes and about efforts to make connections between contexts which embody unresolved contradictions, or to "find a sensible frame for the interpretation of daily practice" (M. Rosaldo 1980: 223). The strain between hierarchy and equality appears frequently throughout this book in explicit argument, in comfortable assumptions, and in uneasy confusion. Efforts to create and maintain democratic processes of decision making were similarly idealistic and troubled. Ties of solidarity for collective action and ties of loyalty and affection for coworkers overlapped in sometimes contradictory and at other times complementary ways. The Unikon and Universal efforts to sustain lengthy labor protest and to create their own firms sustained complex debates for the workers involved, debates central to

the social relations, organization, and control of industrial work in Japan. Their concerted efforts as ordinary people involved in extraordinary actions were cultural and social struggles for power and dignity deeply grounded in concerns for making feasible changes toward a more livable, "human" society.