Category Archives: labor

by | 29 June 2008 · 8:02 pm

Ethiopia, 1978: One More Equal Than Others

From The Fate of Africa: A History of Fifty Years of Independence, by Martin Meredith (PublicAffairs, 2005), pp. 245-248:

In September 1976 the Ethiopian People’s Revolutionary Party (EPRP), drawing support from the labour unions, teachers and students, all vehemently opposed to military rule, embarked on a campaign of urban terrorism against the Derg and its civilian ally, the All-Ethiopian Socialist Movement, usually known by its Amharic acronym, Meison. An assassination attempt was made on Mengistu in the centre of Addis Ababa in September, the first of nine such attempts. Scores of officials and supporters of the Derg were murdered. The Derg in turn sent out its own murder squads…. By mid-1977 the EPRP was effectively destroyed. In the final phase of the red terror, to establish his own supremacy, Mengistu turned on his Meison allies, destroying them too. The young generation of intellectual activists, who had so avidly supported the revolution were all but wiped out.

Mengistu’s hold over other parts of Ethiopia was nevertheless precarious. By mid-1977 the Ethiopian army in Eritrea had lost most major towns and controlled little more than Asmara and the ports of Massawa and Assab. In July 1977 Somalia, deciding the time was ripe to take advantage of the Derg’s preoccupation with Eritrea and other revolts, launched a full-scale invasion of the Ogaden. By August the Somalis controlled most of the Ogaden. In September they captured Jijiga, an Ethiopian tank base, and pressed on towards the town of Harar and the rail and industrial centre of Dire Dawa, the third largest city in Ethiopia.

What rescued Mengistu from military defeat was massive intervention by Soviet and Cuban forces, determined to prop up his Marxist regime. In November 1977 the Soviets mounted a huge airlift and sealift, ferrying tanks, fighter aircraft, artillery, armoured personnel carriers and hundreds of military advisers to Ethiopia. A Cuban combat force numbering 17,000 joined them. Led by Cuban armour, the Ethiopians launched their counter-offensive in the Ogaden in February 1978, inflicting a crushing defeat on the Somalis. The full force of the Ethiopian army, supported by the Soviet Union, was then turned on Eritrea.

At the fourth anniversary celebrations marking the overthrow of Haile Selassie in 1978, Mengistu sat alone in a gilded armchair covered with red velvet on a platform in Revolution Square in Addis Ababa watching a procession of army units and civilian groups pass before him. Then he returned to his headquarters at the Grand Palace. Having succeeded in holding the old empire together, he liked to portray himself as following a tradition of strong Ethiopian rulers. Indeed, Mengistu came to be compared with the Emperor Tewodros, a nineteenth-century ruler who started his career as a minor local chieftain, fought his way up to take the Crown and then strove to reunite the empire after a period of disintegration. At official functions at the Grand Palace, while members of the Derg stood respectfully to one side, Mengistu chose to preside from the same ornate chair that Haile Selassie had once favoured.

One of his ministers, Dawit Wolde Giorgis, once a fervent supporter of the revolution, recalled his growing sense of disillusionment.

At the beginning of the Revolution all of us had utterly rejected anything having to do with the past. We would no longer drive cars, or wear suits; neckties were considered criminal. Anything that made you look well-off or bourgeois, anything that smacked of affluence or sophistication, was scorned as part of the old order. Then, around 1978, all that began to change. Gradually materialism became accepted, then required. Designer clothes from the best European tailors were the uniform of all senior government officials and members of the Military Council. We had the best of everything: the best homes, the best cars, the best whisky, champagne, food. It was a compete reversal of the ideals of the Revolution.

He recalled, too, how Mengistu changed once he had gained complete control.

He grew more abrasive and arrogant. The real Mengistu emerged: vengeful, cruel and authoritarian. His conduct was not limited by any moral considerations. He began to openly mock God and religion. There was a frightening aura about him. Many of us who used to talk to him with our hands in our pockets, as if he were one of us, found ourselves standing stiffly at attention, cautiously respectful in his presence. In addressing him we had always used the familiar form of ‘you’, ante; now we found ourselves switching to the more formal ‘you’, ersiwo. He moved into a bigger, more lavish office in the Palace of Menelik. He got new, highly trained bodyguards – men who watched you nervously, ready to shoot at any time. We now were frisked whenever we entered his office. He began to use the Emperor’s cars and had new ones imported from abroad – bigger, fancier cars with special security provisions. Wherever he went he was escorted by these cars packed with guards, with more riding alongside on motorcycles.

He concluded: ‘We were supposed to have a revolution of equality; now he had become the new Emperor.’

You get the same result every single time a revolutionary thug promises equality—and begins to deliver it with the help of other revolutionary thugs. Every French Revolution yields a new Robespierre—and then a new Napoleon.

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Filed under Cuba, Eritrea, Ethiopia, labor, language, military, USSR, war

by | 27 May 2008 · 5:50 pm

The Gulag Economy’s Peace Dividend

From The Whisperers: Private Lives in Stalin’s Russia, by Orlando Figes (Metropolitan, 2007), pp. 467-468:

Forced labour played an increasingly important part in the post-war Soviet economy, according to a policy dictated by Stalin and his ‘kitchen cabinet’ of advisers. With the ending of the war the pool of unpaid labour available for exploitation by the state grew enormously. Apart from Gulag prisoners and labour army conscripts, there were 2 million German POWs, and about another million from other Axis nationalities, who were mostly used for timber-felling, mining and construction, although those with skills were employed occasionally in Soviet industry. In some factories German POWs were so integral to production that detention camps were built on the factory grounds and officials tried to block the prisoners’ repatriation to Germany. The Gulag population also grew, despite the release of many prisoners in the amnesty of 1945; the camps took in well over a million new prisoners between 1945 and 1950, largely as a result of the mass arrest of ‘nationalists’ (Ukrainians, Poles, Belorussians, Latvians, Lithuanians and Estonians) in territories captured or reoccupied by the Red Army but never really reconciled to Soviet power. The Gulag system expanded into a vast industrial empire, with 67 camp complexes, 10,000 individual camps and 1,700 colonies, employing a captive labour force of 2.4 million people by 1949 (compared with 1.7 million before the war). Overall, it is estimated that conscript labourers represented between 16 and 18 per cent of the Soviet industrial workforce between 1945 and 1948. They were especially important in the mining of precious metals in cold and remote regions where free labour was very expensive, if not impossible, to employ (hence their contribution to the Soviet economy was even more significant than the figures would suggest). Slave labour also made up the workforce in the big construction projects of the late 1940s which came to symbolize, officially at least, the post-war confidence and achievements of the Soviet system: the Volga–Don Canal; the Kuibyshev hydro-electric station; the Baikal-Amur and Arctic railways; the extensions to the Moscow Metro; and the Moscow University ensemble on the Lenin Hills, one of seven wedding-cake like structures (‘Stalin’s cathedrals’) in the ostentatious ‘Soviet Empire’ style which shot up around the capital in these years.

The post-war years saw a gradual merging between the Gulag and civilian economies. Every year about half a million Gulag labourers were contracted out to the civilian sector, mostly in construction, or wherever the civilian ministries complained of labour shortages; about the same number of free labourers, mostly specialists, were paid to work in Gulag industries. The Gulag system was increasingly compelled to resort to material incentives to motivate even its forced labourers. The population of the camps had become more unruly and difficult to control. With the amnesty of about a million prisoners in 1945, mainly criminals, who had their sentences either reduced or annulled, the camps were left with a high proportion of ‘politicals’ – not the intellectual types who filled the camps in the 1930s but strong young men who had fought as soldiers in the war, foreign POWs, Ukrainian and Baltic ‘nationalists’ – who were hostile to the Soviet regime and not afraid of violence. Without a system of rewards, these prisoners simply refused to meet the set targets. The cost of guarding the prisoners was also becoming astronomical. By 1953, the MVD was employing a quarter of a million guards within its camps, spending twice as much on the upkeep of the Gulag than it received in revenue from its output. Several senior MVD officials were seriously questioning the effectiveness of using forced labour at all. There were even mooted plans, supported by Beria and Malenkov, to dismantle sections of the Gulag and convert the prisoners into partially civilian workers, but since Stalin was a firm supporter of the Gulag system, none of these ideas was seriously proposed.

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by | 9 February 2008 · 3:12 pm

Resistance, Collaboration, Passivity, Pétainism

From The Unfree French: Life Under the Occupation, by Richard Vinen (Yale U. Press, 2006), pp. 277-279:

What does [Service du Travail Obligatoire (the wartime labor draft)] tell us about the broader nature of the Vichy regime? Most obviously, it shows how resistance, collaboration, passivity and Pétainism always overlapped. Not everyone who evaded STO, or who helped others to do so, was a resistant. Some réfractaires specifically refused to recall their experience in terms of the Resistance or, like Yves Laurent, they distinguished between Resistance and resistance. Some people avoided STO in ways that involved serving the German war economy or even in ways, such as joining the Milice, that involved outright collaborationism. The very confusion of labour policy in France in 1943 and 1944 makes it hard to classify actions in simple categories. Vichy was divided, as some officials sabotaged policies that were pursued by others. The Germans, too, were divided. Different leaders in Berlin had different views about how best to exploit French labour and, especially in 1944, German agencies in France were desperate to secure their own labour supplies even if they did so at the expense of other German employers. The result of this was that many people ‘resisted’ STO by ‘collaborating’ with some German agency.

Response to STO was not, however, simply a matter of institutions and political structures. Such responses were also rooted in French society. In important respects, the orders of Vichy and the Germans were mediated through French society. The direct use of physical force was rarely effective. Such force could frighten the whole community but it could not track down particular individuals, and violence by outsiders broke down the subtle networks of cohabitation on which the occupation rested. Vichy and the Germans could only make STO work by securing the cooperation of powerful individuals—not just, perhaps particularly not, people who held formal positions. This inevitably meant that the social hierarchies counted for much in the implementation of STO. Some of these hierarchies dated back before 1940. A young man who entered a grande école in 1940 stood a good chance of avoiding STO; a young man who entered Santé prison in 1940 stood almost no chance of avoiding it: it was highly likely that such a person would have ‘volunteered’ in order to escape the high mortality rates of Vichy prisons before 1943 and, if not, he would have been taken in handcuffs to the Gare du Nord.

Pre-war hierarchies were, however, modified by the special circumstances of the occupation. Members of the grande bourgeoisie were protected from being sent to Germany but often had to endure considerable discomfort in order to achieve this. Members of the urban lower middle class were probably less privileged in the context of STO than almost any other social group, including those who would have stood below them before 1940. Agriculture, sometimes a poor relation before 1940, did well and young peasants were probably the only social group who sometimes managed to avoid STO without enduring any other serious inconvenience.

Rooting STO in its social context means recognizing the degree of complicity in its execution. This complicity did not just involve institutions and elites. The very people that requis de travail [labor draftees] trusted—local notables and, most of all, their own fathers—often encouraged them to go to Germany. Men in authority (and it was mainly men who encouraged departures to Germany) felt that STO was a lesser evil. The departure of a particular cohort of young men, who had thus far avoided military service, was seen as a price worth paying to protect their communities and families from reprisals. As time went on, this calculation changed. The Germans and their French allies had more and more difficulty in tracing particular réfractaires or those who helped them and were increasingly prone to respond with random acts of violence. STO’s legitimacy diminished as it became clear how harsh would be the fate of those who had gone to Germany, and the chances of avoiding it increased as the liberation approached and the Maquis expanded. By the summer of 1944, the circumstances that had made many feel that young men should obey orders to go to Germany in the summer of 1943 seemed remote. By the time the surviving requis de travail returned home in the summer of 1945, the logic that had seemed to require their departure no longer fitted into France’s vision of herself. Some requis now found that they were blamed for going by the very men who had refused them help when they had tried to find escape routes, or that they were encouraged to keep quiet about their experiences by their own families.

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by | 21 January 2007 · 3:49 pm

Another Profile of Japan’s Brazilian Workers

Associated Press reporter Joseph Coleman recently talked to a few people in Oizumi, home of Japan’s largest Braziltown, in international Ota City in Gunma Prefecture just north of Tokyo, and just across the river from the recent Outlier haunt of Ashikaga City in Tochigi Prefecture. It’s no surprise that the children of the immigrant workers seem to be having trouble fitting into either culture.

A labor shortage during the economic boom of the late 1980s produced a change in visa laws to let in descendants of Japanese emigrants. But if officials figured the immigrants would blend easily back into Japanese society, they were disappointed.

Today, Japan’s 302,000 Brazilians are its third-largest foreign minority after Koreans and Chinese. Watanabe and the other foreigners of Oizumi are the human legacy of that policy.

Instead of a chain of schools to absorb the newcomers into Japan, the reverse seems to be happening.

In 1999 the Brazilian education company Pitagoras opened a school in Ota, a town neighboring Oizumi, to improve the foreign children’s Portuguese and prepare them for a possible return to Brazil. Japan now has six Pitagoras outlets.

Maria Lucia Graciano Franca, a teacher at the Ota school, said many of the workers’ children speak neither Portuguese nor Japanese well and have trouble fully adjusting to life in Brazil or Japan.

“They go back to Brazil, they stay for a while, and they come back here,” she said as children practiced dance moves for a school concert. “And the ones who stay in Japan follow the same route as their parents – they work in the factories.”

The grown-ups are torn too.

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by | 6 January 2007 · 5:16 pm

Migrant Heroes from the Philippines

From Global Cinderellas: Migrant Domestics and Newly Rich Employers in Taiwan, by Pei-Chia Lan (Duke U. Press, 2006), pp. 44-47 (footnote and reference citations omitted; reviewed here):

Today the Philippines is the biggest labor-exporting country in Asia and is ranked second in the world after Mexico. As of December 2003, the number of Overseas Filipino Workers (OFWs) was estimated to be 7.7 million; the population of the Philippines is some eighty million. Forty-three percent of these emigrants were on temporary contracts, 68 percent of which were placed in Asia. The remittances sent by OFWs are the Philippines’ largest source of foreign exchange, contributing US$7 billion to the national economy in 2003….

The primary destinations of labor emigration in the Philippines have gradually switched from North America and Europe to West, East, and Southeast Asia. Among the land-based OFWs deployed from 2001 to 2004, 46 percent of them were located in the Middle East, 41 percent departed for East and Southeast Asia, and only a small number went to North America (1.7 percent) and Europe (6.7 percent). Taiwan has become a major host country for Filipino migrants since the mid-1990s. In 1998 it was the second-most-popular destination for newly hired migrants from the Philippines, next to Saudi Arabia, and in 2004 it was the fifth major destination, after Saudi Arabia, Hong Kong, Japan, and the United Arab Emirates.

Filipino workers have occupied a dominant position in the global labor market because of their proficiency in English and level of education. Both male and female OFWs are well-educated: over half have completed college or have at least taken some college subjects, and one-third complete secondary education. But the large outflow of experienced, skilled, and professional human resources constitutes a brain drain that poses a threat to development in the Philippines.

Annual changes in the numbers of overseas Filipino workers have pointed to a growing trend toward feminization. Women constituted only 18 percent in the 1980 outflow of OFWs, but that percentage rose to 36 in 1987 and 69 in 2002. Most women are employed in service occupations such as housemaid, caregiver, and entertainer. Domestic work accounted for one-third of overseas female deployment in 2002, despite the fact that most Filipina migrants were educated and skilled workers.

Some demographic characteristics of Filipina migrant workers deviate from the profiles of male migrants. The majority of migrant women are in their late twenties and early thirties, younger than their male counterparts, who are mostly in their thirties and forties. Official statistics provide no details about the marital status of OFWs. One survey showed that the majority of Filipina migrants were single (56 percent) while 37 percent were married. In contrast, a much larger proportion of male migrants were married (71 percent), and only 27 percent were single. The differences suggest that the decisions to migrate are embedded in the gender roles and ideologies in the Philippine family. Also, migrant women tend to face greater difficulties than their male counterparts in building or maintaining a family during their overseas journey.

Labor migration in the Philippines fluctuated in reaction to several crises in the 1990s. The Gulf War in 1991 resulted in the repatriation of 30,000 workers, mainly from Kuwait. Overseas deployment declined by 13 percent in 1995 after the hanging of Flor Contemplacion, a Filipina domestic worker found guilty of murdering a Filipina coworker in Singapore. To mitigate the public outcry over this case, the Ramos government banned deployment to Singapore for a short period. The Congress passed the Migrant Worker and Overseas Filipino Act (RA8042) in 1995 to announce its intention to ensure the welfare of migrants. But legal protection has proved to be nothing but a symbolic measure, and the halo of “national hero” only glows when politicking takes place.

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by | 5 January 2007 · 5:58 pm

Migrant Maids from Indonesia

From Global Cinderellas: Migrant Domestics and Newly Rich Employers in Taiwan, by Pei-Chia Lan (Duke U. Press, 2006), pp. 49-50 (footnote and reference citations omitted; reviewed here):

Religion has also played a significant part in migration links between Indonesia and Saudi Arabia. Muslim Javanese work abroad to make money as well as to make a pilgrimage to Mecca. Some work agreements even state that employers must fund their workers to go on the haj at the end of their work contracts. If Saudi Arabia can be seen as a destination for Muslim pilgrims, then newly rich Asian countries might be seen as a capitalist version of Mecca, hosting an increasing number of Indonesian migrants making a secular pilgrimage to modernity.

Taiwan has been a popular destination for Indonesian migrant workers except for the two-year period of government ban (from August 2002 to December 2004). The number of Indonesian migrant workers in Taiwan grew with amazing speed: in 1991 there were only 10,000 Indonesian workers, but the number reached over 90,000 in 2001. Most Indonesian migrants in Taiwan are women from East Java, and the majority of them are placed in private households. Parallel to the increase in Indonesian housemaids was a decline in Filipina migrant workers. A similar transition also occurred in Hong Kong and Singapore. The share of Filipinas among all foreign domestic workers in Hong Kong decreased from 85 percent in 1995 to 72 percent in 2000, while the number of Indonesian migrant domestic workers tripled. In Singapore, Indonesian migrants only amounted to 20 percent of foreign domestic workers in 1995, but one recruitment agency has estimated that about 70 percent of newly hired foreign domestic workers are now from Indonesia.

Indonesia has become a major source for housemaids across Asia. Women have dominated the official outflow of labor migrants in the last two decades. Domestic service accounted for 70 percent of overseas jobs between 1984 and 1989, and 60 percent between 1989 and 1994. Almost 95 percent of migrants engaged in domestic service were women. Surveys of Indonesian female migrants found that they tend to be in their twenties or early thirties and have relatively low levels of education. Migrant women tend to be single or divorced, with the exception that married women are predominant among housemaids in Saudi Arabia….

The fact that Indonesia is the only Islamic country in Asia that allows the recruitment of women as housemaids overseas has nevertheless made some Indonesians uncomfortable, particularly social elites. In 1997 the then Minister of Women’s Affairs urged the government to ban the export of housemaids because women, as the pillars of the nation, should be treated with respect. Twice, in 1980 and 1986, the government placed a ban on sending domestic servants to the Middle East in response to prevalent cases of rape and abuse, including one case in which an Indonesian household worker was sentenced to death for murdering her employer in Saudi Arabia. These bans were lifted only a few years or months after their imposition. Nana Oishi has pointed out that in Asia the emigration policies for female migrants are more value-laden—driven by social values and moral concerns—than policies for male migrants. Indonesia is no exception to this. Women must be at least twenty-two years old to work abroad, and they need to present letters of permission from their father or husband upon application. The state policy of emigration is torn between the moral discourse of “protecting” women and the economic interest of promoting them as better servants than migrant women from competing countries.

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by | 25 December 2006 · 12:12 pm

A Korean Worker’s Take on Korea, Japan, & China

Four or five years ago I was asked by one work site manager to make the “direct commute” (as we day laborers say) to a job that I had originally obtained through the Center. I did this for about ten days running. Two Koreans, one about fifty and the other in his mid twenties, were working there, and they would chat with me in their broken Japanese during rest periods and the noon break. I couldn’t figure out their relationship. That they were not parent and child was obvious I enough. I decided that they were two men of differing ages who just happened to be getting work, illegally (or so I surmised), with the same firm. That peculiar rule in Korean society of deference by the junior party to the senior (something I learned from my reading), which would have applied had they been acquaintances from the same village and come to work in Japan together, was not in effect between them. If the older man were indeed fifty, he would have been just a couple of years older than I, yet he had a commanding presence that made him seem for all the world like my father. When I got to talking with him, I realized that he was a fervent patriot. Somehow I was not surprised. He said his name was Shin.

“We go ahead of Japan. This I am sure. Less than ten years.” These are the kinds of things he liked to say. The younger Korean appeared to be uninterested in talk of this sort and simply wolfed down his boxed lunch. For ten days I teamed up with this Korean duo and took orders along with them from the site manager. The older Korean assumed the role of team leader and told us what to do. He was far more proficient at Japanese than his young compatriot, and it was possible to carry on an extensive conversation with him.

“I am not man who works like this. I was company president. Do you understand? My company closed. I was forced to come to Japan and earn money.” As he spoke, Kim, the younger Korean, would look on with an ironic smile without really listening. (He rarely spoke a word; indeed, it’s possible that he understood no Japanese.) Kim did not have the face of an educated person—that much was certain.

“I have three children,” Shin said. “Oldest one in college. ——— University. You know it?” When I shook my head, he continued, “Good school. He join elite. Give orders. We three here take orders. This is difficult thing.”

Shin may have had a problem with Japanese at the level of nuance, not being able to inflect his emotions correctly, but his very direct and open manner of expressing his desire to advance in the world definitely got my attention.

Shin asked me how old I was and learned that I was a bachelor and living alone. “You have no family at your age?” he proclaimed haughtily. “That shameful! You should not tell it to others. I feel sorry for you.”

Sometimes I would get into arguments with Shin.

“Japan not apologize for things they did to us. This no good. One day maybe we attack Japan. But we not do to you what you do to us. We are moral people. We are most moral and most superior people in Asia. This I am sure.” …

“Japan number one in Asia now, Korea number two. some day Korea number one.” The hierarchy featured in these pronouncements appeared to have nothing to do with morality, however, and everything to do with economic and political power in the global pecking order.

“That’s not true at all,” I countered. “China’s number one in Asia now, if you ask me.

Shin immediately shook his head. “No, very wrong—very wrong!” he snapped, curling his lips in contempt of China. “Look at Chinese. They fall behind. Long ago they were teacher. Now they are backward country. Their income less than one tenth of Koreans. That country is lowest country. It is dirty country.” …

And so I learned that not only was Shin a stalwart anticommunist, he also had no love, as I’d heard most Koreans had, for China, the country that Korea once recognized as its master.

SOURCE: A Man with No Talents: Memoirs of a Tokyo Day Laborer, by Ōyama Shirō, trans. by Edward Fowler (Cornell U. Press, 2005), pp. 92-95

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by | 23 December 2006 · 9:14 pm

Tobi, the Aristocrats among Day Laborers

Tobi [鳶 ‘kite (bird)’, or ‘steeplejack‘, the latter short for 鳶職 tobishoku ‘high-rise scaffolding work’] are the aristocrats of San’ya. In the same way that it is possible, in Europe, to distinguish the aristocracy from the common folk by how they look, so it is possible to distinguish tobi from common day laborers by their appearance (their faces more than their physique). The training required to nurture their skills to a level worthy of their calling and the confidence gained through having those skills recognized by their peers give them a commanding presence and bestow on their countenances a certain poise. All in all they cut a very dashing figure. There is a certain crispness about their movements and indeed about their entire demeanor. I would imagine that their individual abilities vary considerably, but the best have a truly unmistakable aura about them. One can tell at a glance: yes, this man, without question, is a tobi.

Carpenters and ironworkers are not employed as day laborers or as contract laborers, so there are none in San’ya. Here, the word shokunin—skilled worker—means only one thing, and that is tobi. Men like Saito (Mr. “One-Man Salvation Army”) and Ikeno (the former stockbroker) are exceptions; you could never surmise from their characters what the typical tobi is like. I have never actually met a tobi who treats laborers like slaves, barking at them and driving them into the ground; I have, however, run across several who were proud to the point of arrogance—so much so that they never paid us laborers any heed. (It was as if we never even entered their field of vision.) And I must say that I was not necessarily put off by their arrogant pride.

My hatred of working as a tobi’s assistant and being hounded on the job lives side by side with my admiration for the tobi “race.” Yet when all is said and done, it seems to me far preferable that the haughty arrogance of these men live on than that it wither away—these men who work closer to death’s door than any other group of skilled workers in Japan. There are among tobi some men (although admittedly few in number) who actually consider themselves works of art. I would much rather that such men never vanish from the scene. More and more of late I hear stories of this or that tobi doing the work of a common laborer. I fervently hope that these men—San’ya’s very own aristocrats—will be able to ride out this terrible recession. Speaking as a common laborer from San’ya’s “plebeian class,” I pray that San’ya’s spiritual patricians, defending their manly pride and honing their reputations in the face of great danger, manage to survive these hard times and live another day.

SOURCE: A Man with No Talents: Memoirs of a Tokyo Day Laborer, by Ōyama Shirō, trans. by Edward Fowler (Cornell U. Press, 2005), pp. 61-62

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by | 26 September 2005 · 11:19 am

A Visit to Japan’s "Little Brazil"

Recently, we set out from Ashikaga for 大泉 Ōizumi, Japan’s “Little Brazil” in neighboring Gunma Prefecture’s fanhandle to our southwest. At 太田 Ōta (‘Widefield’), we transferred to a 2-car, 2-stop, infrequent shuttle train running back toward the southeast to Higashi Koizumi (‘East Littlespring’). There we had to transfer to yet another 2-car, 2-stop, infrequent shuttle train running back southwest to the end of the track at Nishi Koizumi (‘West Littlespring’). The fare adjustment official at Ōta described Nishi Koizumi as the most bustling (にぎやか) of the three Littlesprings (East, Middle, and West) that make up Bigspring.

Well, wherever the bustle was, we didn’t see it. The tracks ended where the single platform ended at Nishi Koizumi. We walked straight south from the train station, crossed over a highway busy enough to warrant a pedestrian overpass, past a small fountain (maybe the ‘littlespring’ itself) that marked the beginning of a very long and pleasant walkway and bikepath (the Izumi 緑道 ‘Greenway’) shaded by a great variety of trees and bushes, most of them labeled, so that I repeatedly stopped to punch the katakana names into my little electronic dictionary to find the English equivalents.

To our right ran the kilometer-long fence punctuated by gated driveways enclosing a quiet but huge Sanyo electronics factory. To our left ran sleepy Hanamizuki-dori ‘Dogwood Avenue’, which hosted occasional trucks and vans making deliveries. Hardly anyone but a few stressed-out middle managers was making use of the jogging path. Across the road were a variety of smaller enterprises: a few stores, a few restaurants, and a preschool teacher-training school followed by Santa Clara (聖クララ) preschool.

The name of the school and the distant sounds of Portuguese rather than Japanese coming from its parking lot were among the few signs of the town’s large Brazilian population. Other clues were: a cardboard sign next the train ticket vending machine at the station that listed all the destinations in a Portuguese-friendly transcription; a small shop near the station that sold goods imported from Brazil, Peru, and Bolivia; and the Primavera Restaurant, which we noted for our return. It was nearing lunchtime.

Primavera was an interesting oasis, like a midwestern truck stop in many ways. The kitchen help spoke mostly Japanese, the customers spoke mostly Portuguese, and the menus and wait help were bilingual in Japanese and Portuguese. The music was mostly Country & Western in style, but with the lyrics in Portuguese. The featured buffet (バイキング [Viking] = smorgasbord) was discounted from ¥1600 to ¥1000 because it had run out of most of the grilled meats–and also the feijoada, I discovered after I ordered it. My wife went for just the salad bar portion. At the register, I asked the European-looking owner (in Japanese) how long he had been in Japan. He said 2 years this time, but 5 years in all. (Nikkei Brazilians can easily get work visas for 3-year stints.) His soft-spoken Japanese was even more limited than mine. He estimated the local population was at least 10% Brazilian, maybe 15%.

On our way back to the station, we stopped in at the small import shop, whose owner greeted all his customers with “Tudo bem?”–followed by “Konnichi wa!” if they looked Japanese. He looked to be Nikkei, and his Japanese was very fluent. He said he had been in Japan 7 years in all. He said the local population was 15% Latin American, with 10% from Brazil alone.

When we got back to the sleepy station, we found that we had a 45-minute wait until the next train, so we east headed down the line of shops beside the main highway (National Route 354), finding nothing at all. When we stopped to ask, we were directed to the Mos Burger, with its American southwestern decor, and sipped our tall ice coffees until it was time for the zigzag sequence of short train hops back home.

There are no doubt many North American equivalents of Nishi Koizumi, but it reminded me of the hidden charm and factory-sequestered bustle of an Austin, Minnesota–the Hormel company town that hosts the Spam Museum–especially if Austin had a little larger Hispanic population.

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by | 13 May 2004 · 2:31 pm

1932 Aso Coal Strike: Korean-Japanese Relations

The 20-day-long Korean strike against the Aso coal mines in 1932 was the only sustained strike by a large number of Korean miners in prewar Japan and the largest strike of the year in Chikuho, Japan’s most important coal field. The 400 strikers demonstrated courage and cohesion but won at best a partial victory that left most of them without jobs. This article draws on union documents and a contemporary report by the Kyochokai, a semiprivate organization devoted to labor-capital harmony, to explore the background of the strike, the tactics employed by the male strikers and their wives, and the many obstacles they faced in their fight for better wages and working conditions. The author argues that there was little the workers could do to overcome the harsh antiunion environment of prewar Japan or the surpluses in both coal and labor brought on by the Great Depression, but that the strike might have been more successful if rank-and-file Japanese miners had shown even a hint of solidarity. While a Japanese mining union provided organizational support, the failure of even one Japanese miner to join the strike suggests that Japanese working-class racism severely limited the potential for joint Korean-Japanese action.

SOURCE: W. Donald Smith, “The 1932 Aso Coal Strike: Korean-Japanese Solidarity and Conflict,” Korean Studies 20 (1996): 94-122

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