Few subjects have been so cursorily treated as the first Japanese unions. Yet their history contains much to intrigue the student of human events: The American Federation of Labor organizer who founded the Japanese labor movement; the Japanese Activists who spent years in AMerica studying unionism a major railway strike that won the hearts of the people of Japan; a major Japanese union newspaper with most of its copy in Japanese but always a few pages in English. These and other puzzling events can be understood only in the context of the development of Japan’s labor movement between 1868 and 1900. Stephen E. Marsland effectively brings together primary and secondary sources to demonstrate how social, political, economic, technological, and historical factors shaped the philosophical outlook and the organizational structure of the labor movement in Japan. He shows that Japanese workers and their leaders tended to choose the “shop” form of unionism rather than the prevalent forms in the industrialized Western nations. The shop from, the author contends, was the structural forerunner of the present-day “enterprise” unions that multiplied so typically in post World War II Japan. THe marriage of Western economic centres with Japanese social structure and philosophy forged a uniquely Japanese unionism that has remained strong and vibrant to this day, sustained by the traditions created by the early Japanese labor movements and its leaders. The Birth of the Japanese Labor Movement will be of interest to Japanese studies specialists, particularly in history and the social sciences, and scholars in the fields of industrial relations and labor history.

The century-long process by which a distinct pattern of Japanese labor relations evolved is traced through the often turbulent interactions of workers, managers, and, at times, government bureaucrats and politicians. Gordon argues that it was not until the 1940s and 1950s that something closely akin to the contemporary pattern emerged.

Labor and Imperial Democracy in Prewar Japan examines the political role played by working men and women in prewar Tokyo and offers a reinterpretation of the broader dynamics of Japan's prewar political history. Gordon argues that such phenomena as riots, labor disputes, and union organizing can best be understood as part of an early twentieth-century movement for "imperial democracy" shaped by the nineteenth-century drive to promote capitalism and build a modern nation and empire. When the propertied, educated leaders of this movement gained a share of power in the 1920s, they disagreed on how far to go toward incorporating working men and women into an expanded body politic. For their part, workers became ambivalent toward working within the imperial democratic system. In this context, the intense polarization of laborers and owners during the Depression helped ultimately to destroy the legitimacy of imperial democracy. Gordon suggests that the thought and behavior of Japanese workers both reflected and furthered the intense concern with popular participation and national power that has marked Japan's modern history. He points to a post-World War II legacy for imperial democracy in both the organization of the working class movement and the popular willingness to see GNP growth as an index of national glory. Importantly, Gordon shows how historians might reconsider the roles of tenant farmers, students, and female activists, for example, in the rise and transformation of imperial democracy.

In the middle decades of the twentieth century, Hawai'i changed rapidly from a conservative oligarchy firmly controlled by a Euro-American elite to arguably the most progressive part of the United States. Spearheading the shift were tens of thousands of sugar, pineapple, and dock workers who challenged their powerful employers by joining the left-led International Longshoremen and Warehousemen's Union. In this theoretically innovative study, Moon-Kie Jung explains how Filipinos, Japanese, Portuguese, and others overcame entrenched racial divisions and successfully mobilized a mass working-class movement. He overturns the unquestioned assumption that this interracial effort traded racial politics for class politics. Instead, the movement "reworked race" by incorporating and rearticulating racial meanings and practices into a new ideology of class. Through its groundbreaking historical analysis, Reworking Race radically rethinks interracial politics in theory and practice.

Between 1942 and 1945, the U.S. government wrongfully imprisoned thousands of Japanese American citizens and profited from their labor. Japanese American Incarceration recasts the forced removal and incarceration of approximately 120,000 Japanese Americans during World War II as a history of prison labor and exploitation. Following Franklin Roosevelt's 1942 Executive Order 9066, which called for the exclusion of potentially dangerous groups from military zones along the West Coast, the federal government placed Japanese Americans in makeshift prisons throughout the country. In addition to working on day-to-day operations of the camps, Japanese Americans were coerced into harvesting crops, digging irrigation ditches, paving roads, and building barracks for little to no compensation and often at the behest of privately run businesses—all in the name of national security. How did the U.S. government use incarceration to address labor demands during World War II, and how did imprisoned Japanese Americans respond to the stripping of not only their civil rights, but their labor rights as well? Using a variety of archives and collected oral histories, Japanese American Incarceration uncovers the startling answers to these questions. Stephanie Hinnershitz's timely study connects the government's exploitation of imprisoned Japanese Americans to the history of prison labor in the United States.

Shows how Japanese anxiety about overpopulation was used to justify expansion, blurring lines between migration and settler colonialism. This title is also available as Open Access.

This book examines the concept of 'community unionism', which argues that the future of the labour movement and industrial relations lies with the community and local labour markets. Providing a conceptual overview of the term, the book uses international case studies and draws on faith-based organizations to explore the issue.