The Asia-Pacific Journal | Japan Focus Volume 5 | Issue 7 | Article ID 2462 | Jul 12, 2007

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Japan's Red Purge: Lessons from a Saga of Suppression ofFree Speech and Thought

John W. Dower, Hirata Tetsuo

Japan’s Red Purge: Lessons from a Saga ofSuppression of Free Speech and Thought

Hirata Tetsuo and John W. Dower

Translation by Ben Middleton

Japan Focus Introduction. History often taps uson the shoulder unexpectedly. War andoccupation—and, more particularly, occupiedIraq vis-a-vis occupied Japan a half-centuryago— is a good example of this

In this case, the tap on the shoulder reallybegan in 2002 as a crude, hubristic shove. Inthe propaganda campaign that preceded theinvasion of Iraq in March 2003, officials in theBush administration frequently evoked theexample of Japan after World War Two, wherethe U.S.-led occupation proceeded smoothlyand ended happily in a democratic andprosperous nation staunchly loyal to the UnitedStates. President Bush, Secretary of State ColinPowell, NSC director Condoleezza Rice, andmany others repeatedly evoked this reassuringanalogy before the invasion, and before chaosconsumed Iraq. Astonishingly, the presidenthas continued to do so up to the presentday—using the fifth anniversary of V-J Day in2006 to resurrect all the by-now tattered andtorn analogies to World War Two and itsaftermath, and using the Washington visit ofPrime Minister Abe Shinzo in April 2007 tomurmur the same incantation.

The deceptiveness (and tragedy) of this falseanalogy is a subject in itself. Japan in 1945 wasa vastly different state and body politic thanIraq, and the America of today is likewise a

very different state and society than it was allthose many decades ago. Beyond this, the pointhas been made that even the relativelysuccessful “occupation of Japan” was ananomaly, for there were really three U.S.occupations in post-World-War-Two East Asia:in Japan proper, in the isolated and militarizedJapanese prefecture of Okinawa, and in theRepublic of Korea. Cold War strategy dictatedoccupation policies, and varied conspicuouslyfrom place to place, with Okinawa and Koreareceiving much harsher treatment.

The tap on the shoulder for Hirata Tetsuo,author of the essay that follows, came fromHollywood rather than the White House, but itfits this same picture. His treatment of “Japan’sRed Purge” reminds us that there were actuallymore than three occupations in Northeast Asiaafter 1945, for the occupation of Japan properwas itself a two-stage affair. The McCarthyistwitch-hunts that savaged the United States hada notorious counterpart in occupied Japan,where early ideals of demilitarization anddemocratization were soon subjected to a“reverse course” preoccupation withreconstruction and remilitarization. The so-called Red purges involved firing of thousandsof individuals in both the private and publicsectors—focusing not only on the ranks oforganized labor, but also progressive andleftwing critics of the Cold War and reversecourse in educational circles and the massmedia.

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Joseph McCarthy and Chief Counsel Roy Cohn

This graphic example of U.S.-style “democracy”in action has had a lasting legacy in Japan,albeit a somewhat ironic one. It fractured analready highly fact ional ized Left . I tstrengthened the foundations of what wouldturn out to be an enduring “one-and-one-half-party” democracy, dominated by slavishly pro-American conservatives. And it made amockery of rule of law (just as U.S.-endorsedremilitarization under the clearly anti-militaryConstitution would continue to do to thepresent day).

The irony? Even with all this, Japan—like muchof postwar and contemporary Europe—hasmaintained public support for political andideological discourse across a classic Right-Leftspectrum that accepts the seriousness andlegitimacy of social democratic, socialist, andeven communist perspectives. It is the UnitedStates where the purge of such “Red” heresieshas been most thoroughgoing. John W. Dower

I recently caught the film Good Night and GoodLuck, directed and co-written by GeorgeClooney. The protagonist is the newscaster,Edward Murrow, who in the early 1950s

enjoyed great popularity for bravely standingup to Senator Joseph McCarthy, the instigatorof the ‘Red witch-hunts.’

The ‘Red Scare’ in the US is often referred toas McCarthyism, after the name of itsinstigator, while the supposed ‘Reds’ wereconcentrated among ‘intellectuals’ such as film-industry people, writers and professors.‘Hollywood’, which exemplified the Americandream, was particularly targeted. Big-nameactors, screenwriters, playwrights, andmusicians were summoned to appear beforethe House Committee on Un-AmericanActivities where they were ruthlessly attacked.

McCarthyism in Hollywood has often been inthe news in Japan. However, for some reason,there has been little talk here of the furyunleashed by a ‘Red Purge’ that occurred on aneven greater scale than McCarthyism—onemore systematic, authoritarian and insidious,

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and based on an even more heinous anti-communism. I refer to the ‘Red Purge’ thatswept through Japan during that same era.

Following the practice of calling McCarthyisma ‘blot’ on American democracy, we can speakof the Japanese Red Purge as a ‘headwind’(gyakufu) or backlash against postwar Japanesedemocracy. Even at the smallest of the range ofestimates of its victims, they number no fewerthan 27,000. Perhaps it is the sheer magnitudeof the events that weighs heavily on people’sminds.

The Red Purge provides many lessons when itcomes to observing the current situation ofJapanese capitalism, which is characterized bycorporate restructuring or downsizing(euphemisms for mass layoffs of workers), andthe logic of market economics sweepinghaughtily through the land and wreaking havocwith people’s lives. What we can learn from theRed Purge speaks to the hopes for Japan’sfuture.

First tarred, then purged from theworkplace

We first address the question of just what the‘Red Purge’ was.

The Red Purge was a series of arbitrary layoffsby government agencies and corporationsaimed at heavy-handedly eliminating from theworkplace those workers who had beenunilaterally branded ‘Red’. Because the targetwent well beyond communists and thesuppression of the Japanese Communist Partyto include democrats and labour-unionactivists, the event directly called into questionthe foundations of the freedom and democracyguaranteed by the Japanese constitution. Thepurge occurred during the US occupation ofJapan from 1949 to 1951.

Table 1 indicates the number of victims of thisRed Purge by stage and target. Of course,

these are just ballpark figures. The heaviesttolls were among national civil servants andofficials of regional public organizations underthe pretext of ‘administrative adjustment’during the first phase, and among workers atprivate corporations during the third phase. Atotal of over 20,000 workers from bothcategories were stigmatized as being ‘Red’ andpurged from their workplaces, after which theywere branded as social failures.

Table 1 The Number of the Purged, 1948-1950

On what grounds were such large numbersof workers fired, and by what means?

The strongest weapon in the arsenal usedagainst them was an executive order enacted inApril 1949 called the Associations ControlOrdinance (Dantaito kisei seirei). Thisordinance, drawn up according to a SCAP‘directive’, stipulated that communism was‘undemocratic’, that members of organizationshad to file notification of their membership. Itfurther stipulated the disbandment of someorganizations. Needless to say, the ordinanceitself was extremely undemocratic. Moreover,the registration of ‘communists’ required bythis ordinance became an extremely powerfultool in identifying ‘Reds’.

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MacArthur’s 6 June 1950 letter to Yoshida Shigerudemanding the purge of members of the CentralCommittee of the Japanese Communist Party from publicservice.

However, because not all Communist Partymembers who had registered were actuallypurged, and because a considerable number ofnon-Communist Party members were purged,we can conclude that in practice the basis forthe identification of ‘Reds’ lay elsewhere. Let’slook at some specific cases.

In the ‘corporate restructuring’ at Toshiba inJuly 1949, some 4,581 workers, including 202Communist Party members, were laid off. The‘Personnel Adjustment Criteria’ that Toshibaused consisted of nine articles. They providedfor the ‘readjustment’ of those in the followingcategories: (1) workers with low skill levels; (2)workers who fail to perform their duties; (3)workers in breach of administrat ive

regulations; (4) workers who do not cooperatewith company operations; (5) workers who failto report for work; (6) workers frequentlyabsent from work due to accidents; (7) workerson lengthy leaves from work due to illness; (8)workers difficult to redeploy or transfer; (9)workers for whom there is a lack of appropriateposition due to operational downsizing.

The breadth of these ‘criteria’ indicates themassive scale of the dismissals. Criteria (5)~(7)are general performance evaluation criteria; (8)and (9) relate to the slogan of downsizing. (1)and (2) take the position of improving labourefficiency, while (3) and (4) imply a rejection ofanti-corporate activities. In other words, article(4) was intended to ‘readjust’ influential labouractivists and labour union officials.

Comparing the ‘Personnel ReorganizationCriteria’ with Hitachi’s 14-article ‘standard’, itis clear that it was neither unique nor peculiarto Toshiba. Hitachi’s standard applied to thefollowing categories:

(1) workers with low occupational efficiencywhose performance fails to improve; (2)workers whose l ength o f serv ice i scomparatively short—excluding workersnecessary for operations or whose performanceis exceptionally good; (3) workers requiringredeployment for whom it is difficult to findappropriate redeployment; (4) workersuncooperative with company operations; (5)workers who are not required for companyoperations; (6) workers frequently absent fromwork, late, or who leave work early; (7)workers who disrupt workplace order ordiscipline; (8) workers who are dissolute andcompromise their reputation as employees; (9)workers who do not follow their superiors’operational instructions; (10) workers whohinder other workers’ willingness to produce;(11) workers with a low degree of integrationand collabouration with their superiors and co-workers; (12) workers whose livelihood wouldbe comparatively little affected were they to

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leave employment; (13) workers with delicateconstitutions, with the exception of thoserequired for operations; (14) workers with lowlevel contributions to business efficiency forreasons other than those mentioned above.

The number of clauses used by Hitachiincreased and the criteria are more specific,yet qualitatively the regulations are the sameas Toshiba’s. In effect, this proves that the‘personnel reorganization’ regimes did not somuch reflect the will of individual corporations,but were based on the disposition of SCAP.

The Supreme Court was Subservient toCorrespondence from M

From the start of 1950, the Red Purge byprivate corporations moved forward apace withthe backing of GHQ. Macarthur’s letter of July18 to Prime Minister Yoshida Shigeru led theway. The letter directly orders suspendedpublication of the central organ of the JapaneseCommunist Party, Akahata (Red Flag), alongwith publication of any successor newspaper.This letter became the sole legal basis for thered purge in the media. The GHQ authoritiesinsisted that the letter took precedence over allother laws and that its instructions constituteda ‘directive’ (shiji) rather than an ‘order’(shirei).

Tokyo University students mobilize to oppose the purge

In later years, this letter would play animportant role in a lawsuit seeking legalredress, but the interpretation of the SupremeCourt at the time was as follows: (1) the letterconstituted an extra-constitutional regulation;(2) the exclusion of communists and communistsympathizers from the news media constituteda ‘directive’; (3) the letter was binding on allprivate-sector firms; (4) the statement by[Robert T.] Amis, head of SCAP’s LabourDivision, projecting the Red Purge as anexpression of the free-will of management andlabour unions, had ‘final authority’; (5) the term‘communists and communist sympathizers’ wasto be understood simply as such, and being acommunist or sympathizer was sufficient for aperson to be subject to dismissal.

However, examined in light of the verdict ofhistory, it is clear today that this interpretationby the Supreme Court was a political judgmentsupportive of the GHQ line. At the same time,the judiciary abandoned the banner of [legal]redress.

Upon receiving Macarthur’s letter, the LabourDiv is ion at GHQ held meet ings wi thmanagement and labour union representativesfrom various industrial sectors, pressed forcomplicity in the Red Purge, emphasized that‘red’ did not mean all members of theCommunist Party, urged a ‘prudent response’,and from first to last followed a course ofpolitical opportunism.

The government, while on the one hand seekingto introduce measures to proscribe theCommunist Party, proceeded to ‘excludecommunists and others from public office’ onthe basis of agreements and understandingsreached by the cabinet. At the same time, theLabour Ministry urged all firms to ‘expeldestructive communist elements’.

The Japan Federat ion of Employers 'Associations (Nihon Keieisha Dantai Renmei, orNikkeiren) [1] led the ‘red purge’ among

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private-sector firms. ‘On Policies towards theElimination of Red Elements’, a long report byNikkeiren, became the basis for the corporatered purge. Its main points were: (1) lumpingtogether declared and secret members of theCommunist Party and communist sympathizers,blatantly labeling them as ‘red elements,’ andspecifying a policy of elimination; (2) justifyingthe elimination in terms of the social ideals of‘the protection of firms and, by extension, thewelfare of society’, while emphasizing that theactual reason was the anti-social, self-interested agenda of ‘corporate convenience’;(3) urging that a list of Communist Partymembers be made, to be verified throughinvestigations. In the case of ‘secret partymembers,’ it demanded rigorous investigations,while for sympathizers, it laid out threecategories of activities—(i) joint actions withCommunist Party members, (ii) labour unionactivities and activities obstructing companyoperations, (iii) destructive actions—givingmore than a dozen examples of such activities.

It is clear that, if fully implemented, theN i k k e i r e n g u i d e l i n e s w o u l d h a v ecomprehensively eliminated communists andfel low travelers from private-sectoremployment. However, as may be expected,both the Labour Division of GHQ and theLabour Ministry raised objections. The GHQLabour Division’s instructed labour andmanagement representatives to (1) bring theperspective of ‘corporate defence’ to the fore,and (2) define ‘destructive elements’ ascommunists and communist sympathizers whohad been ‘active trouble-makers’.

While this slightly revised the Nikkeirencriteria, the fact that private corporationssystematically pushed through with a large-scale red purge had epoch-making significancein defining the fundamental character of thepostwar Japanese state. That is, it establishedthat the state would explicitly embark onconstructing an anti-communist politysubservient to the US.

The Forced ‘Dismemberment’ of LabourUnions

Let us pose the question anew: what was thereality of the Red Purge?

In the broadcast and newspaper industries, 119workers at NHK (the Japan BroadcastingCorporation, then the state-run radiocorporation), 104 workers at the Asahi shimbunnewspaper, and 98 workers at the Mainichishimbun newspaper were purged, according tothe Ministry of Labour’s Documentary LabourHistory (Shiryo Rodo-shi, 1950). As well, therewere cases such as the Kyoto shimbun eveningnewspaper in which 11 employees were purgedout of a total of 85. The lay-offs wereuncompromising: workers were arbitrarilygiven dismissal notices informing them thatthey were to remove themselves from companypremises by a certain time, and were bannedfrom ever setting foot on company premisesagain.

Two years earlier, GHQ had restricted freedebate and criticism in the print media bydeclaring that newspaper editorial rights be‘restricted to administrative managers andeditorial managers commissioned by them’.This restriction was tightened by the purge, ineffect suppressing freedom of expression.

In the face of this pro-corporate assault, labourunions, for the most part, fell to their knees,becoming yellow unions (company-controlledunions), so that it was quite natural for them toadd insult to injury to the purged workers byhastening to strip them of union membership.For the so-called ‘company unions’ thatmanaged to escape the purge, this became anintense source of psychological stress, suchthat they were eventually wracked withmisgivings, resulting in a collapse of solidarityfrom within those unions. The purge of the‘reds’ pushed the labour unions themselvestowards dissolution.

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The seriousness of the red purge lies in the factthat a situation arose in which these kinds ofprocesses and tendencies regularly penetratedalmost every industry and individual firm. Oneorganizat ion that I have spent t imeresearching, the Samukawa branch of theJapan In terna l Combust ion Eng ineManufacturing Workers Union, has proven tohave considerable significance in that is was anexception to this pattern. Four elementscharacterized the anti-purge struggle of theSamukawa branch:

(1) The number of purged workers rose from 13to 19, all of whom participated in the struggle.(2) The struggle was taken up systematicallyunder the banner of the union.(3) A committee was established as theorganizational locus of the opposition struggle,and it subsequently played a prominent role.(4) Ultimately, a memorandum of agreementwas concluded with the firms that the unionhad struggled against.

The Red Purge was aggressively pursued aspart of the anti-communist policy of theOccupation, but the reality was that it was aconfrontation between labour and capital.Whether we can move on to overcome thisconfrontation from the standpoint of the workerhas now become a touchstone.

[1] Translator’s note: Nikkeiren (Nihon

Keieisha Dantai Renmei), the Japan Federationof Employers' Associations, amalgamated withKeidanren (Keizai Dantai Rengokai) or JapanFederation of Economic Organizations in May2002 to form the Nippon Keidanren (NipponKeizai Dantai Rengokai), or Japan BusinessFederation. The new organization’s home pageis here (http://www.keidanren.or.jp/index.html).

This article appeared in Shukan Kinyobi, no.616, July 28, 2006. Hirata Tetsuo (1939~) is ahistorian who focuses on modern Japanesepolitical history. He is the author of the bookReddo Paji no shiteki kyumei (HistoricalInvestigation of the Red Purge). This articlewas published at Japan Focus on July 7, 2007.

John W. Dower, professor of history at theMassachusetts Institute of Technology, is theauthor of Embracing Defeat: Japan in the Wakeof World War II, which won both the PulitzerPrize and the National Book Award fornonfiction. He is a Japan Focus associate.

Ben Middleton, Associate Professor ofSociology, Ferris University, Yokohama, is aJapan Focus associate.. His chapter on lootingby the Japanese Imperial Army in north Chinaduring the 1901 Boxer War is forthcoming inRobert Bickers and R.G. Tiedemann (eds.), TheBoxers, China, and the World. He is currentlyworking on 20th century Japanese sociology,especially the sociology of Takata Yasuma.