The Rise and Fall of Japan's National Public Railway Labor Unions

A forgotten powerhouse which shaped Japan's present-day railways

Union members protesting against JNR privatization and division in October 1986 (Source)

The first three posts of my Japanese National Railways series spanned its lifetime between 1948 and 1987 and detailed its political birth and its political death. Created by American occupiers in the image of New Deal corporations, JNR met its end under the banner of neoliberalism promising a rejuvenated Japan through a Reaganite/Thatcherite revolution. Much of JNR’s trajectory in between occurred outside of its control, dictated heavily by politicians in the National Diet and the Liberal Democratic Party which controlled the government from 1955 onwards. But one force shaped JNR’s destiny from within: its labor unions. 

JNR’s unions were diverse and massive, with a membership of 432,000 in 1975 at the zenith of its powers.¹ As one of the largest public sector employers, JNR workers wielded some of the strongest unions in Japan. When labor unions were legalized by Douglas MacArthur in his first months as Supreme Commander of the Allied Powers in 1946, the unions gravitated toward radical left-wing politics heavily influenced by Communists released from prison by MacArthur. Its longstanding ideology and willingness to use illegal work strikes on a national scale granted JNR unions considerable powers – and many enemies. In the 1980s, with Prime Minister Yasuhiro Nakasone’s critical support, anti-labor businessmen, academics and bureaucrats united under JNR privatization to break labor’s back. JNR labor unions of the 1980s were thoroughly out-maneuvered in the political dissolution of JNR into a rebirthed JR and left crushed by the transformation.

Japan’s national rail unions are now a fraction of its former selves. The National Railways Labor Union, or Kokuro, was once the most populous, powerful and militant JNR union with a membership of 245,000 in 1982; in 2016, they reported 9,000 members.² JR Rengo is now the largest current railway union under the privatized JR companies at 74,600 members as of 2020, a fraction of Kokuro’s during JNR’s final years.³ While Kokuro’s successors have been reduced to a fraction in volume, its ferocity did not go extinct, as demonstrated by an exhaustingly long legal fight between terminated union employees and JR companies lasting from 1990 until 2010. The unions continue to make noise to this day. 

This post is an addendum to the larger chronology series of JNR and JR (the next post after this will cover JR’s first years post-privatization). Labor history is always a key piece of the rail history puzzle, and Japan’s is no different. Too often, observers and admirers of Japanese railways underplay its labor workforce as a reason for its success, falling back on infantilizing stereotypes as inordinately obedient or robot-like. The Japanese railway unions’ organization and militancy may surprise readers subscribed to the aforementioned underplaying.

Author’s Note

This is the fourth installment of a multi-part examination of JNR’s history. Popular in discussions of global railways, a detailed and granular history of both JNR and JR is much needed, especially in the English language.

To accomplish this work, I rely heavily on two English-language papers found online: University of Stirling academic Ian Smith’s 1996 study “The Privatisation of the JNR in Historical Perspective: An Evaluation of Government Policy on the Operation of National Railways in Japan” and Ohio State University academic Eunbong Choi’s 1991 study “The Break-up and Privatization Policy of the Japan National Railways, 1980-87: A Case Study of Japanese Public Policy-Making Structure and Process.”

In the two-years-plus timeline of research, reading and writing this project, I can sense there is much literature in Japanese on this topic that is unavailable to an English speaker in the United States. As such, I welcome all feedback, including corrections. Thanks to the excellent written works of Smith and Choi, I hope this will help serve a great deal of utility in furthering and elevating discourse on successful railways around the world.

Union workers tagging their own JNR trains (Source)

1946-1973: Labor and management draw their battle lines

The formation of JNR’s labor unions was an American-supported initiative within months of Japan’s unconditional surrender of World War II in August 1945. Under MacArthur’s rule, the Japanese Diet passed laws – inspired by the Rooseveltian New Deal laws of the 1930s – enabling the formation of unions, collective bargaining, and right to strike. MacArthur, in particular to the JNR, which would be birthed in 1948, envisioned the agency to be operated like the Tennessee Valley Authority, a public sector agency with its own finances and relative harmony with non-combative labor unions. 

The labor unions, including the most popular Kokuro, had huge Communist contingencies in its membership, leading MacArthur to take a “reverse course” in his political liberalizations of Japan within two years. Under MacArthur’s direct orders, the Diet rolled back much of the labor rights given to public sector unions in 1948. In addition, on the day before JNR’s birth date, MacArthur’s SCAP staff and the Diet ordered JNR to fire nearly 100,000 grandfathered employees to reduce headcount and undermine Kokuro’s oversized influence.⁴ Amid mass layoffs in its first month of existence, JNR management rebuffed Kokuro’s demands for stronger labor arbitration processes and wage increases, setting in an “undercurrent of bitterness which had a lasting effect on labor relations” within the union, according to Smith.⁵ In 1950, more than 400 JNR employees were fired as part of a nationwide red purge to remove Communists and left-wing activists from public sector circles. Decisive government actions such as the purge, in contrast to slow progress for better labor negotiations, deepened labor’s resentment toward management.⁶ These actions fixed Kokuro’s longstanding antagonism and deep distrust toward JNR management, leading to a “profound effect on the latter performances” of JNR and “goes a long way to explain JNR’s lack of enterprise and its ultimate demise”, according to Smith.⁷

In the 1950s and 1960s, JNR workers began splintering and creating their own labor unions. In 1951, The National Railway Locomotive Power Union, or Doro, was created for highly skilled locomotive engineers, power vehicle crews and some train operators; despite a more specified “skilled” labor union, Doro would work in tandem with Kokuro through the JNR era in labor fights against management.⁸ But not all JNR workers were supportive of Kokuro and Doro’s methods. In 1957, an unannounced labor strike in Niigata was the catalyst for the creation of a splinter faction opposed and critical of the Kokuro-Doro orthodoxy. This splinter group found kindred spirits across Japan and soon united with recent defections from the Japanese Socialist Party, both searching for a political future where labor and management can more harmoniously work together. In 1968, this labor coalition inside JNR became the Japan Railways Workers Union, or Tetsuro.⁹ Tetsuro’s origins as anti-Kokuro and Doro defectors instilled their instincts to work first with management and resist participating in Kokuro-led illegal strikes. The continuous infighting between labor union and an inability to present an unified labor front to JNR and, more importantly, national politicians in the Diet would prove an Achilles heel for all three unions in the 1980s.

Beginning in the late 1960s, JNR began to report exponentially higher deficits every year. To stem the financial hemorrhage, JNR launched the Productivity Increase Movement (Marusei Undon) as a tourniquet to reduce employee headcounts and its related costs, such as pension obligations.¹⁰ In 1975, JNR employed a total of 430,051 employees – twice more than the figure cited by a pro-privatization committee in 1985 to staff JNR adequately for full national rail operations.¹¹ Employees at the time also averaged more than 20 years experience working for JNR; nearly half of JNR employees in 1976 were over the age of 45. Coupled with a freeze on spending for hires and reducing staffing levels, the Productivity Increase Movement sought to increase individual employee productivity and wrangle the unions under a more cooperative partnership to overcome JNR’s financial challenges. As one description goes, the Movement hoped to be a “spiritual movement to encourage a revolution in consciousness among employees.”¹²

If anything, the Movement sparked a streak of rebelliousness among Kokuro and Doro members. Both unions filed numerous lawsuits against JNR managers citing unfair labor practices, such as pressuring union employees to quit their membership for a promotion or salary increase.¹³ Union-loyal train operators expressed their anger by tagging their own trains with anti-Productivity Increase Movement slogans, such as “overthrow Marusei” or christening a train the “Marusei Crusher” (マル生粉砕).¹⁴ Doro, with a membership of 40,000, were especially involved — it harbored members in the forefront of the Japanese New Left movements of the 1970s and thus leaned more leftist than Kokuro’s general membership. Tetsuro, meanwhile, supported the Movement by wearing ribbons to express gratitude toward passengers. It stood in stark contrast to Kokuro’s own ribbons, commonly worn to support the union’s right to strike, an increasing demand among its ranks.¹⁵

On October 8, 1971, the Productivity Increase Movement ceased its operations after the Diet’s Labor Committee of Public Enterprises ruled JNR management did in fact engage in unfair labor practices.¹⁶ Three days later, JNR President Ei Isozaki publicly apologized at the Diet for the charges.¹⁷ It was a major victory for Kokuro and Doro, who demonstrated that sustained resistance against JNR mismanagement is not only possible but successful. Emboldened by this episode, the 1970s would crescendo into an all-out labor-management battle, dramatized in newspapers and on television by the broken glass, burning trains and violence at the stations — all of which would deeply wound JNR’s already hemorrhaging finances and its sterling reputation in the Japanese cultural consciousness.

Shinkansen trains tagged with pro-labor slogans on the demand for the right to strike in 1975 (Source)

1973-1975: Unions Go to War

In 1948, the Diet under MacArthur’s supervision revoked the public sector union’s right to go on strikes.¹⁸ Over the next 25 years, Kokuro and Doro repeatedly sought for the return of this right, initiating the first illegal nationwide strike in 1961. Matters were complicated further when Japan’s Diet ratified the Freedom of Association and Protection of the Right to Organise Convention written by the United Nations’ International Labour Organization in 1965.¹⁹ Kokuro and Doro felt that the Convention guaranteed their right to exercise their labor rights, including the right to strike. After the Productivity Increase Movement died in 1971, the unions focused their energies into regaining their right to legally strike.

In the spring of 1973, the unions launched their offensive via illegal work slowdowns and walk-outs — to spectacular collateral damages. Slowdowns paralyzed the massive commute traffic in Tokyo and its suburbs, leaving tens of thousands stranded in rush hour. On March 13, 1973, enraged commuters in the Ageo Station north of Tokyo attacked the few station staff manning the station despite minimal train service, threw stones at the station and train windows, and vandalized station and train equipment until riot police quelled the crowds. The unions called another slowdown on April 24th, inciting a far larger and more violent reaction from enraged, stranded commuters in Tokyo who vandalized 26 stations across the capital region. Two days after, JNR President Isozaki provided the following damages to the Diet: 760 million Yen in property damages; 1 out of every 15 ticket machines in Tokyo broken; 60 train sets (out of 400) inoperable without comprehensive repairs; and 14 injured employees. ²⁰

A video of the 1973 slowdowns and the chaos which soon followed.

Following a detente in 1974 thanks to a government-labor agreement to improve relations through a council, Kokuro and Doro reloaded its ammunitions for another offensive to restore the right to strike in 1975. In a June 1975 issue of the Japanese National Railways newspaper produced for Kokuro members, the union listed that “in the fall of ‘75 we must struggle to regain the right to strike” and declared that the regainment was “unlikely to be reached” through the council.²¹ Around this time, Kokuro especially saw themselves as a vanguard for the Japanese Left; in another June 1975 issue of the same paper, they listed their platform of working class revolution and raising worker consciousness. The platform states that “we will fight for the liberation of the working class” and “we will integrate them into a fight for the release of the Japanese government.”²²

Kokuro and Doro began agitating for a nationwide illegal strike to occur in the tail end of 1975. The unions believed that a full-fledged nationwide strike would paralyze Japan, and bring the new Prime Minister Takeo Miki and the Liberal Democratic Party to concede their long-sought right to strike.²³ Miki, however, willing to play hardball, pledging to “break the cycle of strike and punishment” of recent labor strife .²⁴ By October 1975, the unions and leadership were at an impasse, with the former reporting to its workers via the union newspaper that they will “fight for the fate” of JNR in a strike that will last 10 days or more.²⁵ The foreseen battle commenced on the morning of November 26, and JNR’s entire operations immediately froze up. Only 3 percent of its passenger trains ran the day of and nearly all freight trains were inoperable.²⁶ 

A Kokuro meeting on November 25, 1975 — the night before the eight-day strike (Source)

Three groups buffered the labor strike’s blows. First, the Miki government did not relent quietly into concession. To combat the impact of freight rail’s absence, and the possibility of food shortages in urban areas, the government encouraged then mandated truck companies and associations to transport foods in lieu of freight trains.²⁷ The strike’s impact on transporting goods was proven minimal, at least in the popular commerce spaces: one customer at the famous Tsukiji Fish Market in Tokyo told a TV interviewer that perhaps there was more inventory than usual during the strike than before.²⁸ The second group was private railway companies who were not involved and thus ran normal service. Whereas Tokyo — with a far more extensive JNR network in its capital region — were heavily impacted by the strike, the Keihanshin region of Osaka and Kyoto saw much less inconveniences due to a wider presence of private railway operators. On November 28, the third day of the strike, labor unions representing private railways went on a 24-hour solidarity strike – but the impact was minimal and inconsistent based on the railway.²⁹ There would be no more shows of solidarity from the private railway unions to supply more leverage toward Kokuro and Doro. The third group was Tetsuro, the lone JNR union who did not assent to the strike. According to a Tetsuro representative in a post-strike briefing at the Diet, the union instructed its members to go to work during the strike.³⁰ In response to crossing the picket line, Tetsuro workers were threatened, harassed and attacked by pro-strike union members and sympathizers. 

On the tenth day on December 3rd, Kokuro called off the strike. In their internal newspaper, the union leadership wrote it would be “wise to rebuild the struggle for the right to strike for next spring” and took pride that “the government and the Liberal Democratic Party were driven into a corner by this struggle.”³¹ But the 1975 strike would prove to be the apogee of Kokuro-Doro might. There would be no more strikes at the scale and length as November-December 1975. In 1976 and 1977, the unions laid low, striking for less than ten days each.³² Two months after the 1975 strike, JNR sued Kokuro and Doro for compensation of 20.2 billion Yen in damages for the 10-day rail stoppage.³³ Kokuro and Doro began to bleed members after the failed 1975 strike, and Tetsuro ascended as the most politically secure JNR labor union.

The failure of the 1975 strike shook JNR unions to the core, who finally realized they no longer commanded a monopoly of Japan’s transportation choices. The private automobile was king in Japan, and private railways in key urban areas fragmented a dwindled monopoly in rail. Earlier in 1975, an unrelated 50 percent fare increase – a new Diet policy to sharply make up lost finances due to a 20-year pause in fare increases nationwide – depressed JNR ridership further as users opted for driving a car or taking the now more relatively affordable private railways. The major fare increase and continuous labor disruptions marked JNR as a public agency not only financially unstable but culturally as well. This sentiment was keenly expressed by exasperated bureaucrats and politicians who sought to reconstruct Japan’s public finances in the new economic system gaining traction in the West: neoliberalism. Killing off Japan’s militant labor unionism would soon surface as a key desired effect in their neoliberal laboratory of the 1980s.

Shinagawa Station in Tokyo, plastered with union slogans in 1980 (Source)

1980-1985: Labor at the Face of Oblivion

In 1970, Kokuro outnumbered Tetsuro membership nearly four to one, with 270,000 compared to 70,000, respectively. By the end of the decade, Tetsuro more than doubled to 150,000 members, as Kokuro lost tens of thousands of members.³⁴ A major factor in the unions’ reversal of fortune was JNR management’s thinly veiled discrimination against Kokuro members, such as demanding members to withdraw from the union and promoting other union members over Kokuro members. Kokuro filed on behalf of its members 30 times of these alleged unjust labor practices to the Public Labor Relations Committee, but only two cases were accepted for hearing. Frustrated by the squeeze, many members voluntarily left Kokuro. This was only the beginning of the siege against JNR’s organized labor.³⁵

The anti-labor turn in the Japanese mainstream came from two fronts starting in 1981 and through 1982. First, the administrative reform movement was in full bloom in its efforts to privatize and split JNR. Led by pro-business figureheads like Toshio Doko and Hiroshi Kato, the prospect of JNR privatization became a real possibility in 1982 and became a main platform for new Prime Minister Yasuhiro Nakasone. Second, the mass media: long sympathetic to unions across the political spectrum, the nationally syndicated newspapers all turned harshly against JNR employees and their unions. Reporting on the alleged “collapse of JNR work discipline”, the media pointed out JNR employees as lazy or non-present at the job, unserious, scheming for overtime and holiday pay, and careless – and its unions as abetting such behavior. In some papers, JNR employee behavior became symbolic for a socioeconomic rot present in Japan, titling such hypotheses as “A Traitor Theory to the Country” or “If We Continue in this Manner, Japan Will be Bankrupt.”

Kokuro and Doro leadership were locked out of conversations happening deep within the Japanese bureaucracy incubating the nascent proposal of JNR privatization. When the original administrative reform commission (also known as Second Rincho) formed in 1980, pro-business representatives made the majority over labor delegates. Three years later, when the JNR Reform Commission was created to officially begin the task of privatization, three of the five members were the most pro-business voices on the Second Rincho. Kokuro’s Secretary-General in 1982 hinted his frustrations at the shadowy process, saying “there is the [Second Rincho], but there is no government; there is the government, but there is no Diet; and there is the Diet, but there are no people.”³⁶ The unions would remain cast out through the entire process inside JNR Reform Commission under Nakasone’s tight vigilance. And whatever intra-union solidarity there may have been was shattered for good in 1984, when Tetsuro backed privatization and the Reform Commission’s work.³⁷

1985 brought a series of bad news for Kokuro and Doro. First, former Prime Minister Kakuei Tanaka – the only man inside the Liberal Democratic Party who could dare oust Nakasone – suffered a massive stroke and was unavailable. Second, Nakasone fired all privatization-resistant JNR executives, including the President, in June. Third, the JNR Reform Commission finished its deliberations and presented full policies for privatization and division with the deadline of April 1, 1987. But the worst news of the year was to come in the early morning hours of November 28, 1985.

A small Doro splinter chapter in Chiba, a city east of Tokyo, declared a 24-hour strike, paralyzing JNR train service between Tokyo and Chiba. What was planned as a small wildcat strike turned into the biggest single-day shutdown in JNR history since 1968 (even more paralyzing than the 10-day national strike in 1975) due to the unsolicited sympathy participation of a far-left revolutionary group called Middle Core Faction, or Chukaku-ha. The Middle Core Faction participants vandalized 32 facilities around Tokyo and Osaka, and most importantly, severed coaxial and optical communications cables which powered the national train control computer systems.³⁸ As a result, 20 train lines in Tokyo and 2 lines in Osaka was completely inoperable for the morning commute, leaving four million commuters stranded in the morning and nearly 11 million riders impacted in total.³⁹ In addition, masked saboteurs in helmets threw gasoline bombs inside Asakusabashi station in central Tokyo, setting the station ablaze, along with 26 additional stations in the early morning hours.⁴⁰

Newsreel from the Middle Core Faction sabotage on November 28, 1985

Forty-eight participants were arrested for the attacks, but the damage was done reputationally against the unions. Both Kokuro and Doro condemned the “anti-social” attacks and apologized for the rider impacts.⁴¹ The minority Socialist Party canceled their solidarity press conference. Kokuro’s spokesperson worried this will trigger a “harsh response from the government” and this will impede on its signature-gathering effort to stop JNR privatization.⁴² The Nakasone government indeed responded strongly by dismissing 20 Doro-Chiba workers for the wildcat strike. (In comparison, only 15 were fired after the 1975 strike)⁴³

Helmeted Doro-Chiba members on a wildcat strike on November 28, 1985 (Source)

1986-1987: Labor surrenders, Kokuro pushed to extinction in new JR era

At the end of fiscal year 1986, JNR employed 276,000 workers, and that was a major issue for the JNR Reform Commission. The Commission determined that the new JR Group, by their creation date of April 1, 1987, should optimally employ 183,000 workers, 93,000 more than current staffing a year out.⁴⁴ The year prior, 48,000 JNR employees already retired voluntarily thanks to improved pension conditions offered to leave the railways. In 1986, the national Pension Fund sweetened the offer further to include a special allowance of additional ten months’ salary on top of the new pension conditions. As a result, 53,000 more employees took the offer and left the workforce.⁴⁵

Losing 100,000 workers within two years was a cataclysmic blow to Kokuro and Doro which were now struggling for self-preservation. Doro — long the more left-wing union of the two — caved in January 1986, voting to back JNR privatization and division. The union’s president Akira Matsuzaki recognized as far back as 1981 that privatization can mean destruction of his union and worked for five years to convince his membership to put their arms down for survival. In a deal with JNR, Doro gave up all further strike actions, agreed to cooperate on voluntary retirements and job transfers before privatization and drop all legal claims of JNR unfair labor practices. JNR, in return, dropped its lawsuits seeking damages from previous strikes.⁴⁶

Kokuro was now alone. Unlike Doro, they remain resolved in the struggle. For two years, they have long resisted the Socialist Party’s alternative JNR reform plan and rejected it once more in March 1986; the Socialist Party carried the reform plan in its General Election platform later that year without Kokuro’s blessings. In October, nine months after Doro’s concession, Kokuro’s leadership begged its membership to concede and allow negotiations with JNR before privatization. In a referendum, its membership overwhelmingly rejected negotiations, balking at the requirement that Kokuro will drop all outstanding unfair labor practice claims.⁴⁷ In response, the pro-leadership faction seceded in February 1987 to join Tetsuro and Doro in their pro-privatization stance.

Prior to privatization on April 1, 1987, the new JR companies were allowed to re-employ all JNR workers using new criteria set by its management. The companies used the clean slate to draft “requirements” in the re-hiring process to exclude workers previously opposed to privatization and allowed themselves to be extremely selective with their new organization.⁴⁸ By April 1987, JR companies had 40,000 surplus workers from JNR, and used creative solutions to re-employ nearly 24,000 of them. Thousands more voluntarily retired or took outside employment. The remaining 7,600 JNR surplus workers rejected by JR companies and who chose not to leave the railways were transferred to the newly created JNR Settlement Corporation, a new body to house JNR’s titanic long-term debt and liabilities away from the newborn JR companies. The vast majority of these 7,600 were Kokuro members, the direct result of a “policy of active discrimination against Kokuro members” by JR officials ushering in a new era.⁴⁹

The total re-shuffling of the JNR workforce created new labor unions suitable for the new era. Doro and Tetsuro fused into one union, the Japan Confederation of Railway Workers’ Union (Tetsudororen or JR Soren) totaling 133,000 members. Kokuro’s pro-leadership faction created its own union, Japan Railways Industry Workers Union (Tetsusanro) as well. Kokuro, once the largest and mightiest labor union of 270,000 strong, was by April 1987 down to 34,000 members with nearly 7,000 on the unceremonious chopping block. At the outset of the JR era, JR Soren agreed with management that the new unions will not strike or disrupt services as JR took shape.⁵⁰ The mass labor reductions and back-breaking of militant unions and JNR instilled unprecedented docility and anxiety among its workforce, an aimed achievement for JR management, according to one JR East executive:

Dividing Japanese National Railways and making a private management system was a huge trial for us…Certainly the Heisei property [of the 1980s] contributed to our satisfactory management, but the employees’ attitudes made them accept the facts. The sinking of the Japanese National Railways, which was a symbol of a ‘ship which could never be sunk’, and the employment anxiety that between 70,000 and 80,000 employees out of 280,000 had to be fired, helped their attitudes further.⁵¹

Another JR East executive echoed the same sentiment: “We’ve rid of ourselves of the gloomy atmosphere that plagued us in the days when you were going around telling the public that the national railways were a band of ‘National traitors.’”⁵²

The fight for the 1047 dismissed JNR workers continues in 2010 (Source)

Requiem for JNR labor: Final thoughts

On April 1, 1990, JR’s third birthday, 1,047 workers still left over from the JNR era and employed under the JNR Settlement Corporation were ultimately fired.⁵³ They were the remaining litter of the 7,600 surplus workers rejected from re-employment by JR, did not retire, did not take an outside job, or were not deemed hirable after a three-year re-employment program under the JNR Settlement Corporation. Of the 1,047 fired, 966 were Kokuro members. ⁵⁴

For the post-JNR labor union front in a new JNR-less world, the fight for the 1,047 dismissed workers became a rallying point for labor justice. The dismissed Kokuro members alleged their dismissal stemmed directly from their steadfast refusals to leave the union and filed complaints for unfair labor practices with regional Labor Commissions. The fight between the dismissed workers and JR companies escalated into the courts in 1994, and it would remain there for more than 16 years. Interventions and court decision could not stop the struggle; a collapsed deal in 2000 by the Liberal Democratic Party and other left-wing parties to re-hire the dismissed workers and a 2003 Supreme Court split decision ruling the JR companies bear no liabilities despite found unfair labor practices failed to end the legal conflict. In 2010, the Japanese government brokered a settlement deal: JR companies would pay 904 dismissed workers 20 billion Yen (roughly $225 million), or roughly 22 million Yen (or $250,000) per person, in exchange for dropping all existing lawsuits.⁵⁵ (The numerical difference between original 1047 and 904 plaintiffs is due to the Doro-Chiba splinter union refusing the offer and 60-plus plaintiffs dying during the 20-year struggle.)⁵⁶

Labor unionism in the JR era has remained in flux and fractional compared to what it once was under JNR. JR Soren, the Tetsuro-Doro fusion in 1987, were supplanted as the dominant JR union by JR Rengo in the early 1990s, formed over disagreements to JR Soren’s threats of a nationwide strike. As Soren leadership were dominated by ex-Doro members, JR Rengo assumed reins as the ideological heir to Tetsuro and its pro-management ideology. Allergy to mass strikes is now the standard for JR unions; in 2018, the JR East branch of JR Soren lost 70% of its membership in three months after its leadership announced its plans to strike. The union apologized for its plans and coaxed its dissidents to return to the membership.⁵⁷

With labor power diminished to the point mass strikes cannot be conceived, the 2010 settlement serves as the bookend of the era of JNR labor unionism. (Doro-Chiba, who is still fighting JR privatization, would disagree). For thirty-eight years, JNR labor unions and management clashed repeatedly only for both to perish from the modern Japanese socioeconomic fabric. The task to remove both took enormous political willpower — concentrated in a singular character in Prime Minister Yasuhiro Nakasone — fueled by a global economic movement of neoliberalism. Like so many powerful unions around the worldwide, Kokuro and Doro caved under the state’s anti-labor offensive in the 1980s after decades of power-sharing dance with the state.

At risk of contemplating alternative history, Kokuro and Doro may have encountered a different fate if the 1975 strike went differently or responded quicker to the emerging neoliberal movement for privatization. But its slowness to respond to Nakasone’s push for privatization and inflexibility to deal with the oncoming blows resulted in their downfall. JNR management, once its eternal foe, met its end in a similar fashion — the inability to react to a changing political time. Here, Smith provides a potential epithet for both labor and management, who perished in tandem:

If the left wing labor unions and the mainstream JNR Board had anything in common in the early 1980s, it was an inability to see the changing political climate in which the national railways’s dissolution was carried through.⁵⁸

1. Choi, Eunbong. “The Break-up and Privatization Policy of the Japan National Railways, 1980-87: A Case Study of Japanese Public Policy-making Structure and Process.” Ohio State University, 1991, p. 1

2. Smith, Ian. “The Privatisation of the JNR in Historical Perspective: An Evaluation of Government Policy on the Operation of National Railways in Japan.” The University of Stirling, 1996, p. 361

3. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japan_Railway_Trade_Unions_Confederation

4. Smith, p. 152

5. Smith, p. 144

6. Smith, p. 152

7. Smith, p. 180

8. https://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/国鉄動力車労働組合

9. https://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/鉄道労働組合

10. Smith, p. 233

11. Smith, p. 232-233

12. https://coqtez.blog/jnr_history_21

13. https://dic.nicovideo.jp/a/マル生運動

14. Ibid.

15. https://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/鉄道労働組合

16. https://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/マル生運動

17. https://kokkai.ndl.go.jp/%23/detail?minId%3D106604410X00619711011%26spkNum%3D5%26single

18. Smith, p. 152

19. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freedom_of_Association_and_Protection_of_the_Right_to_Organise_Convention

20. https://kokkai.ndl.go.jp/#/detail?minId=107103830X02119730426

21. Nagasawa, Toshio. “The Strike of 1975 for the Right of Strike in ‘Kokutetsu-shinbun’”, Chiba University, 2012, p. 69

22. Nagasawa, p. 67

23. Smith, p. 251

24. Nagasawa, p. 71

25. Nagasawa, p. 75

26. https://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/スト権スト

27. http://ktymtskz.my.coocan.jp/denki/suto.htm

28. Ibid.

29. https://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/スト権スト

30. https://kokkai.ndl.go.jp/#/detail?minId=107613830X00519751211

31. Nagasawa, p. 82

32. https://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/スト権スト

33. Smith, p. 416

34. Choi, p. 244

35. Ibid.

36. Choi. p. 365

37. Smith, p. 417-418

38. https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1985-11-29-mn-4958-story.html

39. https://www.csmonitor.com/1985/1202/otrain.html

40. https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1985-11-29-mn-4958-story.html

41. https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1985-11-29-mn-4958-story.html

42. https://www.csmonitor.com/1985/1202/otrain.html

43. https://www.doro-chiba.org/english/nakano/works/on-rail/ch04.html#Ch4_IV

44. Smith, p. 473

45. Smith, p. 475

46. Smith, p. 414-415

47. Smith, p. 482

48. Smith, p. 478-479

49. Smith, p. 482

50. Smith, p. 483-484

51. Smith, p. 484

52. Smith, p. 502-503

53. Smith, p. 480

54. https://web.archive.org/web/20160927202026/https://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2003/12/23/national/top-court-rules-against-ex-jnr-workers/#.V-rUmS_gqfA

55. https://www.zenroren.gr.jp/jp/english/2010/07/english100706_02.html

56. https://www.doro-chiba.org/english/dc_en_10/dc_en_10_03.htm

57. https://mainichi.jp/english/articles/20180607/p2a/00m/0na/019000c

58. Smith, p. 616-617