This Day in Labor History: January 25, 1960
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On January 25, 1960 Mitsui Miike coal mine lockout in Japan began, the single biggest labor dispute in the history of Japan. This was also a core battle to see if the left could play a major role in postwar Japan. The forces of order crushed the strike and effectively eliminated the left wing of the Japanese labor movement.
The Miike Mine was Japan’s most important coal mine. While there was a limited amount of coal mined there going back centuries, the Meiji government nationalized it in 1872 and developed it to fuel that nation’s industrial revolution. That continued through World War II (where it was used as a POW work camp) and in its aftermath. Every government had an interest in producing coal there. But the 1950s was a tough decade for the coal industry. The development of Middle Eastern oil reserves led to a flood of cheap energy and the closing of coal mines not only in Japan, but in the United States and around much of the world. In 1960, the Income Doubling Plan intended to sunset old industries such as coal mining and invest in new industry such as electronics that would double national income within a decade.
There was something of an active Japanese left after World War II and it had some influence in country’s nascent postwar labor movement. But the U.S. occupation government reflected both the American military leadership’s and Japanese industrialists’ hostility to the left. But this was also the era where supposedly “respectable” unions had established themselves in the United States. Respectable meant anti-communist and working under contracts that disciplined workers as much as they gave them better wages and conditions. So that type of union could be adopted in the rebuilding of Japan, albeit with Japanese characteristics. But the purges of left unions in the early 1950s did not lead to the elimination of people who believed in them.
In 1961, the Mitsui company decided to lay off 1,500 miners. This wasn’t the first time. In 1959, Mitsui had announced it was going to lay off 14,000 workers around the country, about 10 percent of which would take place in the Miike mine. But the miners struck and struck hard. 30,000 walked off the job. For them, this was also about fear of automation, rightfully believing that Matsui was investing in new technology to reduce the workforce. Now, the Miike workers were at the core of the Sohyo union confederation. This was the Japanese left. This is not what American planners had wanted to see. These were socialists, by and large, and they believed in worker militancy. Sohyo was how the Japanese left labor activists had revived themselves. Through the 50s, Sohyo activists had led a variety of actions. A lot of them were strikes, including a quite large one at Miike in 1953. Others were opposing the continued domination of their nation by the United States, the establishment of American military bases, and anything to do with promoting the rise of the nuclear bomb. This strike took place at the same time that Sohyo was engaging in the huge Anpo protests in 1959-60 against the U.S.-Japan Security Treaty that allowed military bases to remain in Japan. Later in 1960, Sohyo would organize upwards of 6 million Japanese workers against the treaty, the biggest moment of resistance to American occupation to that time.
Mitsui wanted these radicals eliminated from its operations entirely. Basically, everyone–left and right–decided that the Miike mine was going to be the big stand over the future of Japan. This strike soon came to mean a lot more than the jobs themselves. It was the future of Japan. The right employed yakuza and other thugs to beat up workers and the left. A yakuza stabbed and killed a leading worker named Kiyoshi Kubo on March 17. The Japanese labor movement–and here we should not that included a lot more moderate unions–poured money into the struggle to support Sohyo and the workers. Mitsui tried to form a more moderate union–basically a company union. As the strike went on, some workers began to join it, really just wanting to get back to work. The mine was right on the coast and battles over landing scab workers became part of the daily struggle, with the so called “first union” miners seeking to keep them out and the company bringing so called “second union” miners in.
The strike was probably lost by May, but it got a second wind win Prime Minister Nobusuke Kishi pushed through the U.S.-Japan Security Treaty through force, ordering the police to drag opposition lawmakers out of the Diet so it could have a majority. This rejection of democracy reenergized the left. People now linked the fate of the miners to the government that pushed forward the treaty. Supporters poured into the area and so did money. Right-wingers poured in the area too. That meant lots of streetfights and violence. Business urged Kishi to send in the military to bust the strike. He probably would have, but then he was forced to his resign due to pressure over the treaty.
Hayato Ikeda became Prime Minister and he wanted a peaceful solution to the Miike strike and everything that had risen up around it. He chose Hirohide Ishida as Labor Minister. That was unprecedented in postwar Japan because Ishida was from a rival faction in the party. But the unions respected him and he was dispatched to negotiate an end. It was a complete farce. Ishida got both sides to agree to mandatory arbitration. The workers figured they could win some things, declare victory, and then go on strike again later. But the arbitration board found entirely for Mitsui, including the loss of all the jobs, which were not classified as “voluntary retirement” instead of layoffs, as if that fed a child. The wrokers wanted to strike again, but Sohyo was absolutely tapped out of funds and energy and refused to support the workers either. The union struck anyway, but with little effect. They gave up on December 1.
The mine’s terrible conditions came back to haunt the workers two years later, when a build up of carbon monoxide led to an explosion that killed 438 miners and caused injury to another 839. Meanwhile, the left was utterly defeated and has never really come back in Japan.
Nick Kapur’s Japan at the Crossroads: Conflict and Compromise after Anpo, covers these issues in depth.
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