ABSTRACT
DISCUSSIONS of Japanese labour problems are frequently disfigured by naïveté or by a complete lack of historical perspective. Western writers are apt to concentrate their attention upon the low level of Japanese wages, the long hours of work, the weakness of trade unionism, official oppression of incipient labour organizations, the ineffectiveness of the Factory Acts, and the absence of advanced forms of social insurance. They deplore the workers’ lack of liberty and they refer with contempt to the survival of “feudal” relationships in industry. Japanese apologists, on the other hand, assert that in their harmoniously constituted society the machinery for negotiation and for the protection of the workers that exists in the West has no function to perform. Militant trade unionism is an anachronism. The employer is said to regard his workers as a father regards his children, and conflicts of rival interests seldom arise. “The relationships between lord and vassal, master and servant, protector and protégé, are such as to make it impossible to conceive of one side resenting and the other abusing them.”1 Unemployment insurance is unnecessary in a community in which the family system provides effectively for the relief of persons in distress. Left-wing movements among workers are the result of delusions created by Western propaganda. In a word, conservative Japanese declare that industrial relations in their country have assumed a different form from those existing in the West, because of peculiarities in their social organization. Now these opposite judgments are clearly too extreme, and it is doubtful if the Western critic would be so ready to condemn or the Japanese “apologist” to affirm the nation’s peculiarity, if either were to reflect upon the social history of other countries.
