When I was about 20, I worked at a major automobile plant as a seasonal worker. I performed the same duties as the company's regular employees, but I was treated quite differently.
When I was about 20, I worked at a major automobile plant as a seasonal worker. I performed the same duties as the company's regular employees, but I was treated quite differently.
One day, I noticed a regular employee who puzzled me. He was being completely ignored by his peers as if he were one of us lowly seasonal workers. I eventually learned that he used to belong to the company's old leftist trade union. After the union shed its distinctively leftist color and switched to a policy of "coexistence" with management, he became a pariah.
I got a chance to chat with him once after finishing our graveyard shift. It was shortly before dawn.
"The atmosphere is rather grim here, don't you think?" I said.
"The days of the labor movement are over," was his cryptic reply.
"What, exactly, is the labor movement?" I asked.
He answered after a few moments of silence, "I think the labor movement is what makes everyone lift their gaze and look to the future."
I worked at the plant for nine months. Throughout that period, not one regular employee ever spoke to him.
The Federation of Electric Power Related Industry Worker's Unions of Japan (Denryoku Soren) obviously has a direct interest in the accident at the Fukushima No. 1 nuclear power plant. But it has issued virtually no message concerning the accident. I wondered why.
As if to answer my question, Takeo Kinoshita wrote in POSSE labor issue magazine that one of the causes of the accident lay with the trade unions. He argued that collusive labor-management relations have completely destroyed the unions' "checking function."
Referring to the post-World War II history of labor movement, Kinoshita noted that labor-management disputes at major corporations in the 1950s led to the collapse of the labor movement based on industrial sector labor unions. As a result, Kinoshita went on, "laborers became divided horizontally by company, and then a vertical competition system was built into this closed environment."
This turned laborers ("rodosha") into "kaishain" or regular workers loyal to the management. This "company-oriented integration" eventually created a new divide within the ranks of workers. Regular company employees formed the corporate middle class and came to control subcontracting workers.
Kinoshita foresaw the ultimate outcome of this "company-oriented integration" in the attitude of a Tokyo Electric Power Co. (TEPCO) employee, who demanded that the company farm out the disposal of nuclear waste to subcontractors because the job posed a high risk of exposure to radiation.
Haruki Konno researched the nature of this subcontracted work in an article he contributed to POSSE magazine. The article's title was "Gendai Rodo Mondai no Shukuzu toshiteno Genpatsu" (Nuclear power industry epitomizes contemporary labor issues).
Nuclear power plants need workers for jobs that expose them to radiation. One of the most dangerous jobs is cleaning the plants during regular inspections. Subcontracting workers are "brought from rural areas and urban slums," according to Konno, and they are "invisible to Tokyo's power consumers."
While Konno and Kinoshita focused on labor issues related to nuclear power generation, Hiroshi Kainuma looked at relations between nuclear power plants and the communities that host them.
A native of Fukushima Prefecture, Kainuma is still in his 20s. His master's dissertation, titled "Fukushima Ron Genshiryoku Mura wa Naze Umaretanoka" (A study on Fukushima: Why the nuclear power village was born), has been published by Seidosha Inc. This young scholar's work has become quite a sensation because it tells us things we are most eager to know. In examining the reasons why a nuclear power plant came to Fukushima, Kainuma retraced Japan's postwar history--or modern Japanese history of the last 140 years, for that matter--with nuclear energy as the "mirror" that reflected those eras. Kainuma completed his lengthy research just before March 11. The work reveals his almost uncanny foresight.
By "the nuclear power village," Kainuma did not mean the closed community of central government bureaucrats, business leaders and academics who call the shots on Japan's nuclear energy policy. What he meant was any rural community that chose to rely on the nuclear industry for survival.
"The growth brought by the nuclear industry was meant to benefit Tokyo and other big cities, not the villages themselves," he noted. Yet, the locals mounted campaigns to bring nuclear plants to their communities. The project to build the Fukushima No. 1 plant was presented to the poverty-stricken people, who "self-deprecatingly called their home 'the Tibet of the Tohoku region,' as a means to realize their dream of developing their village," according to Kainuma. Granted, the plant did bring them temporary prosperity. But ultimately, all it did was to get them hooked on the nuclear industry. By the time they realized it, it was too late.
This is the reality of "the nuclear power village" that we didn't see before.
The June 18 issue of the business magazine "Shukan Toyo Keizai" (Weekly Toyo Keizai) ran a feature titled "Mi wo Mamoru Kagaku Chishiki" (Scientific knowledge for survival), while the June 1 issue of the advertising industry magazine "Senden Kaigi" raised questions about the competence of science and technology experts. It appears that many magazines today are going beyond their fields of specialty in search of the knowledge we need to have.
In the July issue of "Kagaku" (Science) magazine, Kiyokazu Washida pointed out that the Fukushima meltdown showed us that we are surrounded by what we cannot see. Many things remain invisible to us, according to Washida, such as what really goes on within the nuclear industry or inside the heads of nuclear engineers. But Washida also noted that there must be many more things we "could see but didn't bother to look at."
Kinoshita and Konno have made us see laborers we "didn't bother to look at" in broad daylight, and Kainuma turned our eyes to "the village" we didn't bother to look at. Experts can show us what we fail to see as individuals. But experts also need amateurs like us who are determined to see what experts have found.
Lastly, I would like to mention famed animator Hayao Miyazaki's message to Prime Minister Naoto Kan that was posted on YouTube, a speech delivered by Eiji Oguma, a historical sociologist, at an anti-nuclear power generation rally, and a tweet by novelist Toshihiko Yahagi who expressed his conditional but firm support for Kan.
The words of these three men do not come across as those of "specialists" at first, but they actually suggest their deep understanding of "expert knowledge." And I believe their common message is that we should all remind ourselves to lift our gaze and look to the future.
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Genichiro Takahashi is a novelist and professor at Meiji Gakuin University. His published works include "Yuga de Kanshoteki na Nihon Yakyu" (Elegant and sentimental Japanese baseball) and "Sayonara, Nippon" (Goodbye, Japan). Before his debut as a novelist, Takahashi worked as a laborer for 10 years in his 20s.