>Although I found the article generally agreeable, the last passage
>referred to did catch my eye as basically wrong. It ignores the
>facts of AMPO and the "Income Doubling" regime that immediately
>followed it as a concession to the Japanese working class from
>Washington after 1960. It is this regime that has been coming
>undone since the Bubble. Here is Patrick Smiths'
>account:...("Reinterpreting Japan", pgs. 25-29)
Dennis replied:
>Sure, GDP doesn't equal happiness, but a rising GDP doesn't have to
>mean unhappiness, either, if powerful unions and socialist movements
>share the wealth.
The rapidly rising GDP was predicated upon _neutralizing unions and socialist movements_. Aside from the anti-AMPO movement that Brad, drawing upon Patrick Smith, mentioned, what shaped Japan's "social contract" in the era of high growth was the labor struggle at Mitsui's Miike Coal Mine in 1959-60.
***** ...[T]he Central Labor Relations Commission mediated, and the dispute ended in September. The commission upheld the company's reductions in personnel, yet Mitsui was compelled to retract the discriminatory dismissals of militant unionists, to raise wages, and to guarantee adequate welfare for the workers....
Although Japanese labor historians generally view the outcome of the Miike dispute as marking the death of a truly autonomous labor movement in the postwar era, the lessons of Miike prompted the government to play a much more active role in maintaining employment. The state assisted in retraining the laid-off miners, and in the words of Koji Taira and Solomon Levine, "The experience of Miike, although never repeated, remained a vivid reminder of the likelihood of forceful labor protest if significant changes were introduced without joint planning and consultation well in advance."...On the legislative front the Labor Ministry and the LDP cooperated to win the enactment of a number of laws designed to assist workers in moving into rapidly expanding sectors of the economy. The 1963 revision of the Unemployment Insurance Law granted financial support for training technical workers, subsidized housing to encourage workers to move to new jobs, and expanded employment programs for workers aged forty-five years or older....
(footnotes omitted, Sheldon Garon & Mike Mochizuki, "Negotiating Social Contracts," _Postwar Japan as History_, ed. Andrew Gordon, Berkeley: U of California P, 1993, p. 160) *****
Other reforms through tripartite consultation followed, with labor incorporated into the policy-making process from the subordinate position. In other words, the state mediated between capital and labor, upholding capital's right to rationalize production, at the same time as softening the negative impact of unemployment, etc. that inevitably would follow rationalization. In this process, it was not socialist movements that grew in political power; it was the LDP & its "creative conservatism" that emerged as a political winner, ably absorbing pressures from below (from labor, farmers, small businesses, etc.).
That is why the end of the era of fast growth became a problem & a cause of political disarray _for the LDP_, which had come to combine within the party the roles elsewhere played separately by the CDPs (& the like) & the Socialist-International Parties.
As long as high growth was maintained, the state could successfully mediate between capital and labor. The end of high growth, the resulting creation of a speculative bubble, and the post-bubble deflation mean that something in the old social contract must give. The reason why deflation has persisted so far is that neither the ruling class nor the working class has the power to impose its political will -- a new social contract -- on the rest of the society, so the old social contract lives a life of the terminal patient, slowly decaying in the process, with no one to perform radical surgery on it.
Slow decay, of course, is preferable to a radical shock therapy prescribed by neoliberals. On the other hand, the weaknesses of organized labor, social movements, & socialist movements in Japan suggest that no anti-capitalist solution to the present predicament -- a left alternative to the neoliberal solution -- is likely to emerge in the near future either.
Yoshie