Our Unions, Our Selves: The Rise of Feminist Labor Unions in Japan by Anne Zacharias-Walsh (review)

Our Unions, Our Selves is an ethnographic account of U.S. and Japanese activists' collaborative work in the development and maintenance of women-only unions in Japan. Anne Zacharias-Walsh introduces us to the complex details of the tensions, frustrations, sympathies, and discoveries that have emerged between U.S. activists and Japanese activists in the building of these unions. Women's unions in Japan, which are grassroots workers' organizations, have represented largely part-time and temporary women workers who have mostly been excluded from the financial security of Japanese companies' lifelong employment as well as protection from firm-specific unions. The unions have worked with these women on major employment issues, including the wage gap, sexual harassment, lack of childcare, and forced retirement. In her grassroots exchange project, Zacharias-Walsh asks a question which is not only vital to the Japanese activists but is also of great interest to U.S. activists, scholars, and feminists: "[H]ow do we build effective workers' organizations that operate on feminist principles?" (p. 9). Adhering to the feminist belief in empowerment, Japanese women's unions "seek to empower women to recognize and claim their status as independent selves, with the same rights to self-determination, self-actualization, and full participation in society as their male counterparts" (p. 2). However, Zacharias-Walsh soon found that the Japanese women's exclusive focus on individual empowerment has hampered the major goal of attaining solidarity, which is necessary to make unions solid.

One of the strengths of Our Unions, Our Selves is the author's direct observation of the various types of obstacles facing the unions, regardless of whether they are simple management issues or cultural misunderstandings. Japanese women's unions have a hard time retaining members. Major organizational problems include a lack of human resources and understaffing. Women join the unions in order to seek immediate help, but they also soon leave them once their own grievances are resolved. Because of a chronic shortage of active members, the unions' abilities in the areas of fundraising, membership education, and community outreach have been constrained. With few educational materials, fostering consciousness and solidarity is difficult, which has also contributed to the members' high dropout rate.

Although Zacharias-Walsh writes that she, along with U.S. scholars and activists, wished to offer Japanese women a variety of organizational models, they encountered problems that often derived from fundamental differences in education, culture, and professional customs between Japan and the United States. When the differences were about something small, such as the question of how to start the daily meetings, the Americans showed an ability to respectfully learn the Japanese style, involving "self-introduction," which Zacharias-Walsh has found is important for the Japanese, as it enhances their sense of belonging and establishes harmony. Japanese women, on the other hand, often responded to the differences with negativity and passivity. There were a number of moments in which Japanese participants' frequent rejections and inaction, while not harming the U.S.-Japan collaboration in critical ways, nonetheless led to tension. According to Zacharias-Walsh, "nay saying does seem to be a favorite indoor sport for much of Japan" (p. 117), and "the Japanese women tended to fixate on what wouldn't work instead of asking themselves whether there was something in the underlying logic of the technique that they could use" (p. 123). Moreover, both groups had a hard time agreeing on how money should be spent because of differences that are sometimes embedded in their cultural customs and professional norms. Zacharias-Walsh thought they should spend a reasonable amount of money on the invited U.S. professionals, in order to express appreciation for their help and because this is what Americans would see as a middle-class, professional way of hosting guests. But Japanese women would view these expenditures with reluctance and a sense of...