Chapter 16
Unrest and Violence on the Left

The tough budgetary and personnel programs of the Dodge Line in 1949 and 1950 led to tension and violence in the Tokyo area, the epicenter of political shocks in Japan. The government and the private sector discharged thousands of working personnel and, with SCAP approval, took a number of repressive measures against liberal and left-wing elements in politics, the media, and the labor movement. The summer of 1949 was a time of more trouble than any other in the postwar period, but the occupation's control and the government's stability were never endangered.

Reduction of government spending was a key element in the Dodge Line. Prime Minister Yoshida was only too happy to comply. In early 1949 the government employed about 1.63 million workers. Government offices were often heavily overstaffed as a means of holding down unemployment, with repatriates and demobilized military men receiving preferential treatment. General MacArthur expressed the view in March 1949 that both public and private employment rolls "had been padded quite unnecessarily to include twenty to forty percent more workers than required."^[1]

On April 19, 1949, the prime minister wrote a letter to the supreme commander stating his reduction plan would save the government about ¥7 billion (nearly $20 million) in annual wages.^[2] Because the national railways had incurred a ¥50 billion deficit (about $140 million) in FY 1949, particularly sharp reductions were to be made in the railway staff of 610,486 employees. A new ceiling was set by law at

506,734, thereby necessitating a cut of more than 100,000 workers. The national railway workers union was the largest in Japan in early 1949 and the most active politically. The leading force in the labor strife of 1949 and 1950, its central committee was almost evenly divided between moderates and leftists, some of whom later became communists.

Along with the government's "administrative retrenchment," private industry carried out a massive reduction program. Persons discharged in 1949 under the various administrative retrenchment programs totaled about 160,000 government workers and 330,000 private-sector workers. About 100,000 more were fired by the private sector in 1950.^[3] Although efficiency and rationalization of operations were usually the announced reasons for the cuts, many workers were discharged because they were considered left-wingers.

As soon as the government decided on its personnel retrenchment, a series of incidents occurred—work stoppages, worker takeovers of railway operations, demonstrations, and a strike threat (which SCAP's labor chief personally, and without specific authority, ordered canceled). In fact, SCAP officials interpreted MacArthur's statement of January 31, 1947, banning the threatened general strike as a legal prohibition against all strikes. Unrest increased as it became common knowledge that leftists and labor activists would be among the first to be fired in both government and the private sector. The largest number of railway sabotage incidents of the entire occupation took place in 1949, the worst month being July, with 1,574 reported cases.^[4]

The Communist Party, with Tokuda in the front line, decided to take the lead in opposing the government's plans. At a meeting of the party's central committee on June 18 and 19, Tokuda announced a "September revolution thesis" in which he called for the overthrow of the Yoshida cabinet by September. The communists had no specific battle plan. They knew that a strike would be banned, as had happened when they called a general strike in February 1947. But Tokuda wanted to rally all the forces on the left against reactionary capitalism. Although his appeal seemed to be empty theatrics at the time, it proved to be the first salvo in a series of terrorist actions that soon followed. The return to Japan on June 27, 1949, of 2,000 prisoners of war from the Soviet Union, waving red flags and singing communist songs, added to hopes and fears that the communist revolution might not be far off.

Three notorious incidents took place within six weeks during the summer of 1949.^[5] The first was the death on July 5 or 6 of the president of the national railways, Shimoyama Sadanori, whose name had fre-

quently appeared in the press when the plans for a huge personnel reduction began to receive attention. He had received threatening letters. On July 4 the first set of dismissal orders was sent out to 37,000 railway employees. Shimoyama was at work on the morning of July 5, but his whereabouts became a mystery after he went shopping at the Mitsukoshi department store in downtown Tokyo later in the morning. Shortly after midnight his body was found on the railway tracks near Kitasenju in the northern part of the Tokyo metropolitan district. Although the body had been run over by a train and was dismembered, it was quickly identified, but no one ever determined how the body got there or even whether Shimoyama had been dead before the train ran over him. Prime Minister Yoshida was so concerned at the time that he called in the head of the national police and asked why he did not "go to the scene of these incidents and assume direction of the operations, only to be told that the national police could not intervene unless the local police requested their aid."^[6]

The Shimoyama incident became the most famous unsolved crime in postwar Japan. No credible evidence was ever unearthed regarding his activities immediately before the train ran over his body. No arrests were ever made. Suicide was never conclusively ruled out. Twenty years later a group of educators and intellectuals made a study of the incident, which had reached the proportions in Japan of the Sacco-Vanzetti case in the United States in the 1920s, but their investigation produced no new explanations. Rumors even sprang up, and were reinforced by a popular book, that American or Soviet agents had perpetrated the deed to cause political agitation and advance their own purposes.^[7]

The second major incident took place at Mitaka railway station in western Tokyo on the evening of July 15, two days after the second round of dismissal notices, affecting 63,000 employees of the national railways, had been posted. An empty electric train that had been parked for the night was somehow released from the car barn. It rolled down a hill for a half mile, hurtled over a guard rail, and smashed into the station area; six persons were killed, and twenty others injured. The police concluded that the incident was an act of sabotage because the train "could not have been moved without deliberate human action." Police arrested ten persons, nine of them Communist Party members. After a lengthy trial, one of them, the noncommunist, confessed and was convicted. His sentence of life imprisonment was confirmed on appeal, and he died in prison eighteen years after the incident. The nine communist defendants were acquitted, and this verdict was sustained on appeal.

The last of the three big cases—the Matsukawa incident—took place

early in the morning of August 17. A passenger train loaded with 630 persons was derailed at Matsukawa, in Fukushima Prefecture, 168 miles north of Tokyo. The engineer and his two assistants were trapped in the wreckage and killed, while many passengers were injured, three seriously. Someone had tampered with the tracks, removing the bolts and joining plates and throwing them into a nearby field along with the tools that had been used.

Twenty persons were arrested, most of them acknowledged communists, after one of them had confessed. At their trial, seven more defendants confessed. All of the defendants were found guilty by the Fukushima district court, but after ten years of litigation and appeals, including a retrial and a second hearing by the Supreme Court, all were acquitted on the ground that the retrial had turned up important new evidence. This was Japan's most publicized postwar court case, one that well illustrated the complexities of the judicial process in Japan.

Following the Shimoyama and Mitaka incidents, a struggle for control of the central committee of the national railway workers union took place. The communist members had a bare majority, but the national railways fired all seventeen of them, leaving in control the Democratic League (Mindo) faction, which some Japanese thought was a tool of the occupation. The impression was inescapable that the occupation and the Japanese government were taking quick and firm action, in contrast to their hesitant reaction in January 1947 to the strike threat. The leftists also seemed to be alienating public opinion, thereby making it easier for the Yoshida cabinet to isolate them from moderate elements in the labor movement.^[8]

Many companies had serious labor problems in those years. The Toyota Motor Company, for example, had managed to rebuild itself after the war. It developed a small car, having decided that the only hope for the Japanese auto industry lay in producing superior small vehicles, but found by 1949 that it could not sell all the cars it produced. As a consequence it could not meet its payroll. In April 1949, after Toyota started to make salary cuts and plans for dismissals, the company union founded at the end of the war went on strike. Red flags waved from the top of buildings, and workers demonstrated for an end to employee reduction proposals and delays in wage payments. The company was on the edge of bankruptcy when agreement was reached in June 1950. The union agreed to reduce the work force from 8,000 to 6,000, and the top management of the company including founder Toyoda Kiichiro resigned. This was the only strike in Toyota's history.^[9]

Americans and Japanese, including MacArthur and Ikeda, agreed

that the wages of government workers should be increased.^[10] As in the case of the National Public Service Law in 1948, MacArthur saw that a wage increase would assuage the workers' bitterness. But it was not until the beginning of 1951 that a supplemental budget raised the monthly base pay of government workers by 22 percent to the princely total of ¥9,000 ($22 a month plus about $3 a month in allowances). Workers in the private sector continued to receive substantially higher pay than those working for the government. One promising result of the 1949-1950 negotiations was the successful resort to the national personnel authority and to arbitration procedures to settle pay issues. These mechanisms contributed markedly to labor peace and stability in future years. The Labor Union Law was amended in late 1948 to strengthen the hand of managers in several ways, notably by prohibiting full-time union officials from taking salaries from the company.

On July 4, 1949, at the height of the labor violence, MacArthur made a statement referring to the Communist Party and asking "whether any organization that persistently and publicly advocated a program at variance with the aims of democracy and opposed established order should be permitted to function as a legal party." Paradoxically, on September 3, 1949, the fourth anniversary of Japan's surrender, he said that "the threat of communism ... is past." Then, on May 3, 1950, the third anniversary of the coming into force of the Japanese constitution, he issued a tough statement asserting that the Communist Party "has cast off the mantle of pretended legitimacy and assumed instead the role of an avowed satellite of an international predatory force and a Japanese pawn of an alien power policy, imperialistic purpose and subversive propaganda. That it has done so ... raises doubt whether it should be regarded as a constitutionally recognized political movement." For the first time MacArthur had attacked the Communist Party by name in one of his most ringing pronouncements. Communist strength in Japan in 1948, according to SCAP sources, was about 16,200 party members and 80,000 supporters.^[11]

By early 1950 Japanese leaders were talking about making the Communist Party illegal or setting up an un-Japanese activities committee on the model of a similar committee in the U.S. Congress. At the urging of SCAP the government enacted the Organization Control Law in April 1949, which prohibited "antidemocratic associations" and required all political organizations to register and submit their activities to public scrutiny. Riding the anticommunist wave, Yoshida appealed to MacArthur in June to release "small fry" from the purge orders to give them

hope and enable them to join the struggle against communism. On July 15, 1949, Yoshida also sent a public statement he had made on the "tense and explosive" situation caused by the violence of the labor movement. Both MacArthur and Yoshida seemed to be groping for ways to deal with what they considered a serious subversive threat.^[12]

Two events in the first half of 1950 intensified these fears. On January 6 the official journal of the Cominform, a propaganda arm of the Soviet Communist Party, carried an editorial in Moscow branding the "lovable Communist Party" line of Secretary General Nosaka Sanzo as "anti-democratic, anti-socialist, anti-patriotic and anti-Japanese." According to the editorial, the party in Japan should take a more militant and active line and abandon its policy of accommodation with the Allied occupation. Nosaka quickly admitted that mistakes had been made and that "the important mission assigned to the Communist Party of Japan as a link in the international revolutionary movement" must be fulfilled. Yet this assault by the citadel of communism did not seem to weaken Nosaka's position.^[13]

The second event was a demonstration on May 30 held on the imperial plaza in downtown Tokyo. In one of the very few incidents during the occupation when Americans were physically assaulted, five American soldiers taking pictures were roughed up by leftist demonstrators. Eight of the demonstrators were arrested, tried by a U.S. military court, and given sentences ranging from five to eight years at hard labor. Yoshida issued a strong statement castigating communists for this "shameful affair" and asserting his government might consider outlawing the Communist Party.^[14]

The campaign to rid the labor movement of leftists did not end with the retrenchment programs of 1949. In June 6 and 7, 1950, a few weeks before the Korean War started, the twenty-four members of the party's central committee and those responsible for the editorial policy of the party newspaper, Akahata , were barred from public service by virtue of letters from the supreme commander to the prime minister. On June 26 publication of Akahata was suspended indefinitely.^[15]

The Japanese government hastened to carry out the occupation's orders. Communist Party leaders were expelled from office. Nine of the twenty-four central committee members went underground, including Tokuda, who died in Beijing in 1953. Ito Ritsu, who also fled to China, returned to Japan in 1980. Nosaka remained in Japan and returned to public life after the occupation ended. Akahata continued under suspension for the duration of the occupation, but it, too, resumed activity

in 1952. In 1950, however, no one challenged the legality of MacArthur's orders. The 1946 purge orders had been put above the law of Japan, and the Supreme Court of Japan had been advised to reject any challenge in the Japanese courts to the purge.

General Willoughby had earlier recommended that the Communist Party be outlawed, but GS under General Whitney opposed this approach. MacArthur was also against outlawing the party, but he agreed that action had to be taken against the party because it was becoming openly defiant of the occupation. Using the purge device obviated the need for a massive campaign to suppress all communist activity and served to split the communist leaders from the rank and file of the party.^[16]

MacArthur based his purge of communist leaders on his orders of January 4, 1946, which had been directed against nationalist and militarist policies and leaders in the prewar era. It was not easy to stretch the reference in these orders to "ultra-nationalistic, terroristic or secret patriotic societies" far enough to apply to the Communist Party and its leaders. The general's letter of June 6, 1950, purging party leaders, dealt with this issue directly: "Their coercive methods bear striking parallel to those by which the militaristic leaders of the past deceived and misled the Japanese people, and their aims, if achieved, would surely lead Japan to an even worse disaster. To permit this incitation to lawlessness to continue unchecked, however embryonic it may appear, would be to risk ultimate suppression of Japan's democratic institutions in direct negation of the purpose and intent of Allied policy pronouncements, forfeiture of her chance for political independence, and destruction of the Japanese race."^[17] This was muscular MacArthurian prose, but its legal argumentation was anemic.

MacArthur's letters kicked off what has become known as the Red Purge—the discharge of left-wingers in government, industry, and the media and the purge of a number of leading Communist Party figures. The purge was carried out by the government and by private companies without any legal procedure or statement to justify it. Ultimately about 1,200 persons were discharged from government jobs, mostly teaching, railways, and communications, and about 11,000 persons from private-. sector jobs. According to Japanese sources, GS gave verbal orders for the purge of leftists in government and industry and advised the Supreme Court of Japan "not to touch" the discharges in court.^[18]

MacArthur's purge of communist leaders was probably welcomed by Yoshida and by many Japanese citizens, who had become increasing-

ly disturbed by the violence of communist actions and rhetoric. The success of the Communist Party at the polls in January 1949 had caused widespread dismay, and Mao Zedong's takeover of control in China and the Soviet test of an atomic weapon later that year seemed to foreshadow a huge jump in communist international power.

Yet for many Japanese the Red Purge was ironic. Few actions by the occupation upset conservative Japanese more than the release of communists from prison in October 1945. People like Yoshida always considered that action a grave error, even if their deep-rooted fear of communism eventually subsided. To see MacArthur make an about-face on the communist issue in 1950 seemed to them to justify their earlier apprehensions and to reflect an inconsistent U.S. policy. SCAP appeared to be taking a reverse course, but so had U.S. policy toward the Soviet Union. Liberal Japanese may well have felt the Red Purge was reminiscent of some of the attitudes that prevailed in their country before the war.

Yoshida wrote about this issue in his memoirs. As to whether fundamental human rights guaranteed by the constitution had been violated, he commented that "the men concerned were not deprived of their employment because they were communists, or because of their belief in certain ideas which the government and public opinion did not share, but because the behavior of the communists up to that time and during the purge period indicated that these men were potential menaces to the offices and industries employing them; so that in order to protect these from more trouble in the future, the government was justified in removing the men concerned." Yoshida, like MacArthur, did not worry about legal niceties.^[19]

MacArthur's appraisal of the communist movement in Japan had hardened noticeably since the general election of January 1949. He had put himself on record before the voting that the communist threat was not much more than "a nuisance factor" and that the communists had tried to capture the large labor unions in communications and transportation but failed because his preemptive action had stabilized the status of public service employees. In March 1949 he told the Australian representative that "there was no evidence of any connection between the Japanese Communist Party and Moscow. For three years his G-2 had been looking for it and it had not been found yet. In his view, the Japanese were essentially conservative and essentially individualist.... SCAP said that he was not worried by communism in Japan. There were more socialists than genuine communists in the JCP."^[20]

Other than the Katayama cabinet of 1947 and 1948, Japanese leaders did not play a helpful role in labor relations during the occupation. Yoshida clearly felt the labor movement was communist dominated and beyond redemption. He was outraged by its frequent resort to violence. Two chapters in his memoirs were given to labor; he made the far-fetched point that its leaders were much like the militarists in prewar days, both being small minorities of extremists who forced the rank and file to go in directions it did not want to take. The labor experts in the government were more moderate than Yoshida: they were hostile to "left-wing political unionism" but supported Sodomei, the middle-course federation.^[21]

SCAP experts joined by Japanese conservatives decided in 1949 that the breakup of the principal international labor organization into two conflicting wings, the leftist World Federation of Trade Unions and the International Confederation of Free Trade Unions (ICFTU), could be the key to labor peace in Japan. In the words of Valery Burati, an Austrian-born American who played a valuable role in making labor policy during the latter period of the occupation, a new council should be formed of the most important labor leaders in Japan in the hope that "around the issue of affiliation with the ICFTU they will be able to unify the Japanese labor movement." In approving the sending of a delegation to the ICFTU meeting in London in 1949, MacArthur expressed the hope to the new joint council that the delegation would return to Japan as the core of a unified labor movement and "a bastion impervious to the scourge of totalitarian ideology."^[22]

The selection of a delegation had the paradoxical effect of splitting the right wing of the labor movement as well as the left. Even so, the new council, called Sohyo, was formally inaugurated on July 11, 1950, after approval by MacArthur. It consisted of unions with a total membership of 3,770,000, or about one-half of all organized labor. Sohyo was intended by its leaders to be "non-communist and middle of the road." Some called it "the bastard child of GHQ." But Takemae Eiji, an authority on the labor movement during the occupation, considered it a genuine initiative of Japanese labor.^[23]

Sohyo became the dominant force in the Japanese labor movement. But it was far from a tool of SCAP or U.S. policy. It soon became a liberal-left organization, taking many positions independent of U.S. and Japanese government views but not subservient to communist dogma. Sohyo attacked the economic stabilization program, called for the overthrow of the Yoshida cabinet, opposed rearmament, and advocated a

peace settlement that included the Soviet Union. From its inception, Sohyo's viewpoints were dose to those of the socialist left in Japan. Many Americans and Japanese were not happy about Sohyo, yet it offered an alternative to the dominant groups on the right-center of the Japanese political spectrum. After the occupation a moderately conservative labor federation, Domei, was set up as a counterbalance to Sohyo.

The tough and often arbitrary actions of SCAP and the Japanese government during the occupation decimated the influence of the far left in the Japanese labor movement and in politics. A number of Japanese in the labor movement and intellectual circles remain suspicious of U.S. motives even now, more than a generation later. Yet the labor movement remains alive and active. Workers have shared in the nation's affluence. Unions exert considerable influence on the policies of the two Socialist parties and have in recent years posed no threat to law and order. Management and labor are usually able to solve their problems effectively and amicably, with the government playing a helpful role. In late 1989 Sohyo and Domei joined with most of the centrist labor unions to form Shin Rengo, a new trade union federation with 8 million members, two-thirds of Japan's organized labor. The leftist unions, including the railway workers, have also reorganized. The new structure of the labor movement is expected to have an important impact on Japanese politics.^[24]

The labor movement was not the only source of unrest and tension in 1949. SCAP and the Japanese government became worried in the summer about the leftist threat in the education system. SCAP sent Walter C. Eells, an American professor of education at Stanford University who was a member of the headquarters education section, to visit universities around Japan and preach the evils of communist influence in higher education. Eells was greeted everywhere by crowds of jeering students and seemed to win few converts on the campuses, although he claimed that hundreds of communist teachers resigned as a result of the Red Purge campaign.^[25]

In 1950 Yoshida and his education minister, Amano Teiyu, made plans to issue a "national code of conduct" for educational use. The public reaction, as Yoshida ruefully noted, was "one of uniform disapproval," and the idea was abandoned. The Japanese people were more liberal than their prime minister. Yoshida steadily pressed for more action to get rid of leftist teachers, but it was two years after the occupation ended before the Diet passed legislation more to his liking.

Yoshida and Amano also endeavored to win more respect and popularity for the national anthem and the flag. They did not make much progress in this regard, but their successors kept trying. Early in 1989 the Education Ministry decided that state-supported elementary and high schools should fly the Hi no maru and play the Kimi ga yo at entrance and graduation ceremonies. An opinion poll supported this decision, but considerable opposition remains both in the teachers union and in Okinawan schools.^[26]

The Korean community in Japan was watched carefully by SCAP and suspiciously by the Japanese throughout the occupation. The 600,000 Koreans who remained in Japan after the end of the war were initially treated as "liberated people," meaning that they would not be treated as Japanese; would have certain privileges, such as separate schools; and would be repatriated if they wished.

A year after the occupation began, SCAP announced in a press statement that Koreans voluntarily residing in Japan would be treated as Japanese nationals but that they would not be obliged to obtain Japanese citizenship and could remain in Japan until a duly established Korean government recognized them as Korean nationals. SCAP continued to facilitate their return to Korea, but not many wanted to go.

In time the Japanese sought to eliminate privileged treatment for the Koreans. In the eyes of the Japanese, who had historically looked down on many other Asians as inferior peoples, the Koreans were a disruptive and unassimilable element. After a few years in Japan, many Americans tended to sympathize with Japanese attitudes. On at least one occasion U.S. troops had to come out in force to support the Japanese police in their efforts to compel Koreans in Kobe who were not entitled to attend Korean schools to attend Japanese schools.^[27]

The political polarization of the Korean peninsula came to be reflected among the Koreans in Japan. At least one-half of them were under leftist influence by 1948, when the Republic of Korea (ROK) was set up and established a liaison office with SCAP in Tokyo. Both SCAP and the Japanese government hoped that a Korean liaison office would be able to mitigate the obstreperous and left-wing tendencies of the Korean residents. The unrest and turbulence Japan experienced in 1949 and 1950 made this a vain hope.

A SCAP staff study in 1948 concluded that the Korean liaison office in Japan should be allowed to register Koreans as Korean nationals if they executed a document with the Japanese government relinquishing Japanese nationality; these persons would then be treated as foreign

nationals, and their repatriation to Korea would continue to be encouraged but not compelled. Those who did not register as Korean nationals would remain Japanese nationals but without full rights of citizenship. MacArthur decided not to go along with even this small step "since a partial solution will cause more trouble to arise than if we leave this matter alone."^[28]

Yoshida stirred up the issue in 1949 by giving MacArthur an unsigned and undated letter—a technique he used to indicate an unofficial and informal approach—proposing that all Koreans in Japan be repatriated at Japan's expense but that those who desired to stay be permitted to do so if they could "contribute to reconstruction." Yoshida said later that MacArthur had opposed forced repatriation of the Koreans, partly because they were mostly North Koreans and "would have had their heads cut off" by the ROK. The Japanese government would have liked nothing better than a forced exodus of most of the Koreans in Japan, with the occupation taking the onus for the action, but Yoshida's heavy-handed ploy did not succeed.^[29]

In 1950. Japan passed a nationality act providing that only persons born of a Japanese father could be registered as Japanese nationals; this in effect barred Koreans. In 1952 the government issued an alien registration order disenfranchising the Koreans and Taiwanese in Japan as of April 28, the effective date of the San Francisco peace treaty.^[30]

Most of the Koreans in Japan now live in a kind of legal limbo. Many are permanent resident aliens under Japanese law, but a large number of second- or third-generation residents have not been accorded this status. A small number of Koreans have been naturalized as Japanese nationals after meeting a strict test of "assimilation." Intermarriage with Japanese is widespread. The Japanese have continued to discriminate against Koreans, making it very difficult for them to get government jobs or receive benefits such as social security and subjecting them to close police scrutiny. The ROK has sought to intervene diplomatically on behalf of Koreans in Japan but so far without much success.

Along with the burakumin or eta , long relegated to the bottom of the social ladder, Koreans in Japan continue to fight for better conditions, but they are still a long way from receiving equal social and economic treatment. Feelings of ethnic pride and superiority run strong among the Japanese. Japan may be compelled to make more concessions in the future if it wishes to maintain good relations with the ROK.