ABSTRACT
The aftermath of the Second World War marked a radical change in the history of unionism and of the labour movement in Japan, with the introduction by SCAP of the American model of the enterprise union (union shop/kigyō kumiai). Even though since the early 1990s it has been progressively weakened by falling rates of union membership, and put into question by new forms of union organisation such as community unions (based on networks of local associations), the enterprise union even now represents the basic unit of unionism in Japan. On this point, Japanese unionism still remains in the ‘postwar’. But if we think back to the ‘red purge’ of communist militants, 1 we may say that Japanese unionism was soon implicated in a new war of international scope, namely the Cold War. This was shown even more intensively when the union confederation Sōhyō, the principal support for the Japan Socialist Party (JSP), took up the torch of labour claims at the beginning of the 1950s. The failure of the Miike miners’ strike in 1960, which represented an irreversible setback for Sōhyō, was also part of the context of the movement opposing the Japan-United States Security Treaty, whose pacifist arguments referred directly to the Second World War.
