Divisions of Labor: Globality, Ideology, and War in the Shaping of the Japanese Labor Movement (review)

There is little reason to debate the desirability of comparative research on Japan, since there is really no such thing as noncomparative research. Until someone discovers a way to write books without adjectives, comparative judgments are inevitable. It is impossible to characterize Japan as democratic or authoritarian, traditional or modern, open or closed, individualistic or collectivist without bringing comparative standards into play. Just as a person can only be tall in relation to others who are short or of average height, a society can only be democratic, traditional, and so forth in relation to other societies. The scholar's real choice, then, is not between comparative and noncomparative research, but between systematic comparative research, in which the author examines carefully the comparative reference points, and implicit comparative research, in which the comparative reference points are left unidentified or unstudied and thus often lead to faulty conclusions.

Casual, implicit comparisons have long dominated scholarship on Japan, but Lonny Carlile's work on the Japanese labor movement is one of many signs of late that things are looking up. His research examines the historical divisions within the labor movements of Germany, Italy, France, and Japan, especially as these evolved in the period immediately following World War II. Roughly a third of the book covers the European cases, while the rest constitutes an in-depth treatment of Japan. The author's decision to do a comparative study was based upon "the sense of déjà vu I experienced when reading works on Western European labor-movement history after having gained a general familiarity with Japan's labor history. It was not simply that familiar characters and plot devices kept reappearing . . . there were also astonishing simultaneities in the timing of key developments" (pp. 1–2).

The story begins with a concise review of the five major strains of organized labor that dominated the early twentieth century: anarcho-syndicalism, Christianity, social democracy, left socialism, and communism. Anarcho-syndicalism lost steam after World War I, but the other four divisions remained salient. In Japan, despite the role of Christian humanists in inspiring the first labor organizations, the Christian variant of the labor movement was ultimately less significant than it would be in the other three countries, for obvious reasons. Left socialism stood midway between the more moderate and economistic social democracy and the more radical, internationally driven communism. The left socialists rejected direction from Moscow and shun-ned violent revolution, but embraced more sweeping goals of socialist transformation than did the social democrats. As of the mid- to late 1920s, these divisions of the labor movement were evident in all four countries.

Efforts to forge a popular front against fascism in the 1930s were thwarted by the changing policies of the Comintern and the severity of repression, yet the impulse to unify the labor movement resurfaced at the war's end. It produced different outcomes in the four countries, however. The communist movements of France and Italy derived a certain legitimacy from their participation in the wartime resistance, and they managed to join early postwar coalition governments. These coalition governments did not last, but the experience helped to give communist organizations the wherewithal to survive as major players in a divided labor movement. In Germany, the anticommunist policies of the Western occupiers and the infamy of the Soviet occupation limited communist influence to the Eastern sector and paved the way for a more durable unification of the labor movement in the West. The effort to unify the labor movement in postwar Japan shared features of both these patterns. As in France and Italy, prewar divisions in Japan's labor movement resurfaced after the war. As in Germany, Japan's communists failed to consolidate their influence in the postwar period. They lacked the legitimacy of participating in a wartime resistance; they suffered from the...