Page:Sanzō Nosaka - A Brief Review of the Labour Movement in Japan (1921).pdf/28



Now, the time of trial of the strength of trade Unions came.

It is true that almost all Unions, except non-fighting ones, experienced a big drop in membership and more or less a crippling of their fighting capacity, owing to the incessant arrests of able leaders, and economically exhausted scanty funds. However, it is equally true that even an armed suppression can not root out the spirit of combination and revolt from the oppressed masses. On the contrary, the more bitter the attacks upon them, the stronger their solidarity and class-consciousness becomes. Instead of raising a white flag, they turned, under the shower of bullets, from the offensive to the defensive, and commenced to combine all their powers against the triumphant enemy,—to federate or amalgamate several Unions. At the same time, from the inside of their. camp rushed out a squadron of daring vanguards of the class war,—the „Left Wing“ section on which I shall narrate in the next chapter. That is to say, the Japanese labour moyement has, through the hardest experiments, gained spiritually or qualitatively, while it lost numerically or quantitatively.

The new movement for the amalgamation or federation of separate Unions can be traced back to September 1919 when a dozen Unions of different industries temporally combined in Tokyo against the Labour Delegation of the Washington International Labour Conference. Since that time onwards, the important Unions took a co-operative action; they worked shoulder to shoulder and helped each other in every emergency.

Then in January 1920, they acted jointly for their common claim—Universal suffrage and the repeal of the Police Law. Again in May, they carried on a May Day Demonstration in Tokyo which was the first May Day held in Japan. The time became ripe for uniting them in a concrete form. In the next month, the former Joint Committee of May Day, including leading Unions led by the Yuai-kai and the Shinyu-kai (see the Appendix), was decided to come into a permanent organisation, called the „Federation of Trade Unions“. This is not a Federation in a narrow sense, but a joint committee for common purposes, industrial and political, consisting of the most advanced section of Unions in several trades and industries (metal, printing, transport, mining, tailouring, teachers, etc.,) in and near Tokyo. At any rate, it is the first appea-