What is it about?
In the final years of World War II, the labor system in Japan's largest private Shipyard in Nagasaki exemplified a type of capitalist enterprise tht flourished under a militarized regime geared to iimperial conquest. Mitsubishi Shipbuilding owned and operated the Nagasaki and Hiroshima Shipyards, along with other yards in Japan. Companies like Mitsubishi operated a dual wage/forced labor system that characterized much of wartime industry in Japan, including construction, coal mining, and dock work. This system was very much like the even more extreme labor regime use in Nazi Germany, which contrasted with Allied economic production, particular in the United States, which only used wage labor and where union rights existed.
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Why is it important?
This history outlines a system under Japanese imperial fascism that still has not been acknowledged by the Japanese government and companies that operated during World War II. Litigations for compensation of unpaid wages by Koreans continue at present, despite opposition from the Japanese government and successor companies, such as Mitsubishi. This history therefore has great importance for current legal developments in workers' rights in East Asia, beyond the scholarly significance of this under-researched subject.
Perspectives
This book chapter originally was a paper (heavily revised for publication) presented at the ITH / International Labour History Conference held in Linz, Austria that concerned the history of coerced labor internationally, and contrasting theories based on that history. My interest was to connect the history of coerced labor in wartime Japan with the broader problem of the political economy of fascism, which I consider an extreme variant of capitalism, and the similarities of European fascist regimes to Japanese imperial fascism from the perspective of political economy - beyond the standard cultural and political analyses that often do not consider the linkages to economic institutions and big business.
Dr David Palmer
University of Melbourne
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Foreign Forced Labor at Mitsubishi’s Nagasaki and Hiroshima Shipyards: Big Business, Militarized Government, and theAbsence of Shipbuilding Workers’ Rights in World War II Japan, Brill,
DOI: 10.1163/9789004316386_009.
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