Recession breeds rebellion in Japan PDF Print E-mail
Sunday, 19 July 2009 05:15

The global economic crisis is hurting Japanese workers, but it’s not as if their lives were easy to begin with.

The 1990s, sometimes called the ‘lost decade’ by commentators, saw economic growth virtually disappear and workers’ rights eroded.
Contrary to images of a country full of jobs-for-life and paternalistic corporations, the number of workers with non-permanent, casual or temporary contracts has increased 50 per cent in the last ten years. Add the world economic crisis to the mix, and it’s easy to see why so many people are worried for their future.
There are signs that Japan is entering a deep recession. There was an annualised 15.2 per cent contraction in the GDP in the first quarter of this year, a postwar record, following a 14.4 per cent drop in the last quarter of 2008. This led the Japan Times to editorialise that the “economy is rapidly deteriorating in the midst of the global recession.” As an export-based economy, Japan is particularly vulnerable to world trends. In another sign of the trouble the system faces, consumer electronic shipments fell last month by 14 per cent. This was the seventh straight month shipments have fallen. In the same month demand for services fell at the fastest pace since 1997. Unemployment, at just over four per cent, looks set to rise sharply.
While we haven’t - yet - seen an upsurge of workers’ militancy and struggle of the kind that is taking place in Europe, there are signs of discontent stirring amongst working people in Japan. The current LDP-led government, which has been in power for almost the whole post-war period, is extremely unpopular, and many workers and young people show revulsion towards all mainstream politics. After suffering years of attacks on their living standards and conditions from a confident right wing, it may be that Japan’s workers are preparing to resist.
One sign of this new discontent has been the growth of the Communist Party. The JCP long ago abandoned any commitment to revolutionary politics, and are closer to New Zealand’s Labour Party or Greens than they are to the ideas of Socialist Review, but they talk the language of workers’ rights and social solidarity, and this message is resonating with younger workers. The party is recruiting over one thousand new members each month, and the Akahata (Red Flag), its daily paper, has a circulation of over one million. There are more subterranean signs of discontent, too: The Crab Ship [published in English as the Factory Ship, see below], an obscure piece of left-wing ‘proletarian literature’ from the 1920s, sold over half a million copies last year (a film version is due later this year), and a manga comic version of Marx’s Capital is on the best-seller lists.
Some try to minimise the Communists’ growth.
“Young people don’t know anything about communism”, says academic Daisaburo Hashizume of the Tokyo Institute of Technology, “so it’s a kind of fashion.” This sort of sneering might reassure conservatives but doesn’t do much to explain why this fashion has appeared now. A new party activist, working in a part-time service jobs, better sums up the feelings of many young workers: “I hear many stories about people, especially temp workers, my age who make less and less money for longer working hours and can’t even pay their rent.”
The Communist Party may not have the answers to the crisis that young workers need, but their growth is a symptom of political problems that show no sign of going away. In February Panasonic announced that it would close over a dozen factories and slash more than 10,000 jobs. Workers, as always, are expected to pay for this crisis. But the Communists’ growth and the boom in left-wing literature are signs that many of them are sick of this sort of business as usual.
There will be confrontations to come. Watch this space.

Dougal M