Lady Joker, Volume 1 Read online

  Of course, I know very well that unlike other companies, Hinode Beer has generally valued its employees since even before the war, and that not only the laboratory but also the manufacturing floor and employee cafeteria have always had a bright and liberated atmosphere. When my former professor Kenjiro Yonezawa at Tohoku Imperial University referred me to job opportunities at the navy fuel plant, the board of health at the home ministry, the army medical academy, Nippon Chisso nitrogen fertilizer company, Godo Spirits, and Hinode Beer, among others, the reason why I decided on Hinode without much hesitation is because I had a good first impression of the personnel department at the main office as well as the manufacturing department, I found the equipment in the fermentation laboratory impressive, and with flexible work hours, I thought it was a suitable place to spend my entire career. Of course, when I joined the company in 1937, beer brewing had already been designated as one of the country’s most valued industries, so I had some awareness of the responsibility that I would be taking on.

  I hardly need to explain that during the five years from the time I joined the company to when I was drafted and went off to the front, all industries in Japan were forced to carry on and work especially hard in the wartime effort. At the brewery, production hit its peak about two years after I joined the company, and then we shifted to cutting back production as per regulation. Yet even as the number of employees dwindled due to compulsory recruitment and conscription, the fact that, in addition to maintaining the working order on the home front, the company upheld its standard of producing the most delicious beer possible, was a source of great happiness to those of us who remained. Since raw materials were controlled, in reality we could not hope to produce the quality we wanted, but every time I saw people enjoying rationed Hinode beer in beer halls and restaurants around town, I felt glad that I had decided to work for Hinode Beer. Hinode was the kind of company that inspired employees to feel this way.

  I went to the front in 1942 so I have no knowledge of further hardships in Japan after that. I did not know that the Hinode trademark disappeared from our products once they became controlled goods, or about the air raid at the Kanagawa factory. Perhaps I was among the lucky ones, in that while stationed on an island in the South Seas, from time to time I was able to distract myself with daydreams of the boiling iron pot or the fermented beer storage tank at the Kanagawa factory, hoping only to return home even a day sooner.

  When I was discharged at Yokohama port in November of 1945, I could hardly believe my own eyes at the sight of the burnt-out city. The first thing I did was head straight for the factory. The fact was I had no other place to go, being a bachelor with no relatives in the Kantō region. I cannot aptly describe how I felt as the familiar factory upon the hilltop of Hodogaya came into view. I don’t know if in that moment my body finally accepted that the last three years at the front had been hell or if my mind could hardly keep up with the sensation of being alive, but more than relief, I think what I felt was a type of despondency, as if my body were breaking into pieces and I was on the verge of collapsing.

  Reading this, no doubt you would feel compelled to point out that I had only been an employee of Hinode for a mere five years, but it is no wonder that a young man returning from that war felt as though Hinode were his only refuge in this country. A family or hometown might provide that kind of sanctuary, but an adopted son like me had nothing. No, I can declare that—not only for myself but for every employee who left Hinode to go to war—our former factory was our only refuge in those days. That is the nature of a company. It would have been the same for Katsuichi Noguchi had he not quit working there. That would have been true even as a former employee who had only been at the factory for two years.

  Looking up at the hilltop of Hodogaya, I had tears in my eyes. As I got closer, I saw that the factory I had imagined remained standing was, in fact, not; the roof of the main building had burned and fallen down, most of the facilities had been destroyed, the warehouse and the laboratory building had been reduced to a mountain of rubble, there was no trace of the employee apartments at all, and only part of the cafeteria had been spared. Nevertheless, instead of despairing I could not help but put my hands together in a show of gratitude toward the factory. Please know that this is how happy I was. A notebook had been placed on a desk at the entrance of what remained of the cafeteria, along with a sign instructing demobilized soldiers to write down the date, their name, and contact information, and to wait for word. There were about a hundred names listed already, and among them I found a few colleagues I knew. I believe there was also information about temporary allowances for demobilized soldiers, distribution of socks, cotton cloth, light bulbs, and such for employees, free medical treatment and welfare counseling, and missing persons notices. In that moment, standing before that desk, I know I could not have been the only one whose legs trembled with the realization that I had been welcomed back by my family, and that I had finally returned home.

  For a while after that, a third of the factory site was transformed into farmland, and employees whose houses had burned down lived in barracks that they had built there. Even under such circumstances, the company swiftly announced plans to rebuild the factory and, while nothing was yet in production, they distributed a base salary despite repeated delays, so one hardly needs to make comparisons with other companies to say that the employees of Hinode were unmistakably blessed. Of course, considering the absurd inflation of recent years I would be lying if I said I never wondered how one could live on a mere two or three hundred yen, but if I take a moment to calmly consider how the beer industry was also responsible for the livelihood of distributors and general retail shops all over the country, I know I am being ungrateful for this extravagance.

  In order to respond to the company’s endeavors, the employees spared no efforts themselves. Hoping to resume operations as soon as possible, the maintenance engineers conducted emergency repairs on broken equipment while the sales staff visited distributors every day, and I did my small part by borrowing some preserved yeast from the Sendai factory and working to cultivate it. Looking back, I think it was an extraordinary feat how we managed to restore part of the production line at the temporary factory as early as the spring of 1946. Doesn’t the fact that, even though it was only a year ago, I cannot remember the details of what I ate, wore, or thought about during those entire six months of rebuilding suggest that I worked so hard as if I had been bewitched? Naturally, had I not labored so hard, there would have been nothing to fill this gaping emptiness that I appeared to suffer from and, seized by a sense of lethargy and helplessness that made even walking appear tiresome, I would have probably gone insane or died.

  As fate would have it, soon after the resumption of production in May, all four factories of Kanagawa, Kyoto, Sendai, and Okayama joined together to form the Hinode Labor Union. The inaugural gathering of labor and management, with even the executives from company headquarters in attendance along with the managers of each factory, took place in a conciliatory mood from start to finish. Seen from the perspective of employees of other companies who could only declare a strike as a societal weapon of laborers against managers who executed one-sided layoffs—and though employee cutbacks at places like Japanese National Railways were excessive—one could argue that the brewery business, long considered an industry for national policy used to collect liquor taxes and operating more or less as an oligopoly or monopoly, had little to worry about. But I am not interested in having such a debate here.

  When it comes down to it, the question is: Even though unions were formed in other companies within the same industry at around the same time, why did none of them, Hinode included, incite an actual conflict until that fateful day of February 1st? As far as I can tell, it wasn’t so much that there was no need for conflict but that those unions were organized as a token effort by the company itself, in order to present the appearance of democratic management style as instructed by the Supreme Co
mmander of the Allied Powers at General Headquarters. And as for the employees, the mentality of “No Hinode, No Employees” had been fully ingrained into them as well. Perhaps this deserves to be called a new type of industrial patriotic association.

  Now, we are getting a little closer to the heart of the matter. While casting a sidelong glance at the deluge of labor disputes arising in the streets, the Kanawaga factory had been bustling with activity since the partial resumption of operations last spring. However, it only appeared this way to those working at the site, myself included. In reality, as long as beer remained under the Price Control Ordinance and with no prospect of a quick recovery of a demand in sales, even a child could figure out the quantity we could actually produce. Looking at the numbers for output that were released every month, it was clear that there would soon be a surplus of equipment and manpower. However, at the same time, all of us working on site had thought that everything would be fine as long as we could make it through the low-demand season of October through March of the following year, and we had heard that last September this sentiment had been echoed by the company and the union. However, as you very well know, once November arrived, the provisional solicitation for voluntary resignation began suddenly. It is laughable that rather than a firing or restructuring they chose to call it a “Recommendation for Resignation.”

  There is no use debating whether the only two valid choices for the company were either to allow excess labor costs to bankrupt the company, leaving all 270 members of the Kanagawa factory out in the cold, or to use cutbacks to save the remaining employees. As an employee, I can only trust that, given current management, the company and the union came to an agreement after undergoing serious discussions. That is to say further, this has always been the tradition of Hinode, a company that has been in business for fifty years. At Hinode, a labor dispute is unthinkable.

  Implementation of the “Recommendations for Resignation” was led by the union, and private interviews with each employee took place as needed. As is well-known, by the end of this past February, a total of forty members silently left the factory with money in hand, each of them citing a family issue, an illness, or a vague reason for not being able to stay. Some voiced anger or resentment but since there were rumors of a second and third round of cutbacks soon, I believe the majority of employees, if they were to meet a dead-end anyway, thought that it would be better to give up while conditions were still favorable. As for me, in addition to not having much strength after contracting malaria overseas, there was also the diagnosis of a nervous breakdown from my doctor, so I decided not to cause any nuisance. However, until this day I had no idea that while such reasonable discharges were taking place, there were a number of men who were released without receiving equal treatment, despite being Hinode employees.

  According to the self-proclaimed Communist member I mentioned above, last October three employees at the Kyoto factory, in the face of Hinode’s policy against labor unions, instigated a rally where they demanded participation with the unified dispute that was being led by the All Japan Congress of Industrial Unions, and called for the abolishment of the Price Control Ordinance on perishable food items. Citing a breach of their employee agreement, the company promptly fired the three men at the end of the year. I suspect the reason I do not remember hearing about any sort of dispute in Kyoto back then is because those three men’s actions were either too subtle to be noticed or because they ended in failure. Nevertheless, why did such firings take place, why did none of the other employees know about it, and why didn’t the labor union cause even a stir?

  Whenever I reflect on this, I look at my hands and wonder anew what exactly the pride and solidarity of the Hinode employees had meant. “No Hinode, No Employees”—when it comes down to it, did that mentality mean that we must enjoy spinning around as cogs in the company wheel, ignore minor differences of opinion to dream of prosperity under the aegis of the company, and forget about our individual poverty? This must be so because, indisputably, each and every Japanese is as poor as ever. Considering this, I cannot help but remember that man—Katsuichi Noguchi.

  If you’ll allow me to explain a little, it is not as if Noguchi and I were very close while we worked at the factory. What I do remember is that Noguchi, on the day he started working as a mechanic in the Kanagawa factory’s vehicle division in the spring of 1940, had a slightly mischievous sparkle in his eyes, as if he had a dagger concealed in his pocket. But when I remarked to an acquaintance in his division, “That’s quite a guy there,” he replied in a hushed voice, “Better watch what you say. You’ll be accused of discrimination.” Being born and raised in northeast Japan, this was the first time I had ever met someone from a buraku village, one of the segregated areas where members of feudal outcast communities still lived.

  Since the garage of the vehicle division was located in the rear of the laboratory building where I worked, I saw Noguchi quite often. Noguchi would always cook potatoes in the ashes of the incinerator that was in the back there, and when I told him it was dangerous because there were chemicals mixed in, he just laughed softly and said, “It’ll disinfect my stomach and do me some good.” He wouldn’t listen to anything I said—he was quite stubborn and hard to deal with—but he was a kind man.

  Although Noguchi did not talk much about himself, I heard from other people that he was born on the outskirts of Saitama prefecture and he was the only one in his village to graduate from secondary school. He then moved to Tokyo where, while working as an apprentice at an ironworks in the Arakawa district, he met the former factory manager Yukio Sasahara, who asked him if he would join Hinode. But I also heard that behind this arrangement was Hinode’s plan to acquire a site for construction of their new factory near the village where Noguchi was born, and his employment was a ploy to smooth over their relationship with local tenant farmers who would soon lose their farmland. Hinode had also promised that once the factory was completed on the new site they would hire a few men from the same village, and Noguchi and three other men were sent off to each Hinode factory in advance of this negotiation.

  Incidentally, I know that the plan to purchase said site was postponed around 1941, but according to the same self-proclaimed Communist member I mentioned, Hinode withdrew the plan altogether in 1943, and have now already decided on the purchase of a different parcel of land. Moreover, the three men who started working at the company in 1940 with Noguchi were the same three men who were fired from the Kyoto factory for instigating a conflict.

  Then, in the spring of 1942, the former factory manager Sasahara suddenly left the factory for personal reasons, but in the afternoon of the day his departure was announced, the usually reticent Noguchi had a word or two to say about it. “My employment has become a problem for the company,” he implied. Five days later, he wandered into my laboratory building and told me that he had submitted a letter of resignation because he was returning home, and that he had already sent his belongings by train. His expression was as obstinate as ever, but just when I thought I saw a hint of torment in his eyes, he said, “What I wouldn’t give for a glass of Hinode beer. Who knows when I’ll have a chance to drink it again,” and laughed softly again.

  I took him to the factory, poured some from the storage tank and gave it to him. He drank it down happily and thanked me, and then he left. It was quite a few days later that I learned that he had received his draft papers the day before.

  Why did Noguchi submit his resignation before going off to war? I’m sure there are circumstances that I don’t know about, but I can only imagine Noguchi had reached the decision for his own reasons and after much agonizing, and that despite everything, his strong attachment to Hinode made him crave one last glass of Hinode beer. For the briefest of moments, Noguchi—like me and many others—had dreamt of prosperity in a company called Hinode. Ah, the taste of Hinode beer that we were treated to at our farewell party is coming back to me now.

  Now, let me
address the issue of “last December 15th.” That day, I was visiting a hospital in Tokyo. When I got off the train at Hamamatsucho Station, I had just thought to myself, I’ve seen that man’s face somewhere before, and the man called out my name. It was Katsuichi Noguchi. I asked him what he was doing here, and he responded that he had hurried to Tokyo because there were important meetings taking place in the city, starting that day.

  It had been four and a half years since I had last seen Noguchi, and though he was in perfectly good health, he looked quite pale. When the times change as drastically as they have, even the demeanor and expression of the people also change, and it seems as if our voice as the Japanese people has grown louder, but Noguchi was much the same as before. He sat on the bench, quiet and still like a rock. No, perhaps it would be more accurate to say that he appeared a little lost or behind the times—like a soldier who had just returned from war—with his cheeks faintly flushed, he was half excited and half stunned.

  He told me he had indeed returned to Japan in February and was now working in the mining industry in Hokkaido for Mitsubishi Bibai after answering a call for workers in his prefecture.

  “Tokyo’s pretty cold too, isn’t it? These days in the coal mines they give you plenty to eat, if nothing else, so I ought to have energy, but I’m afraid my mind’s not all there. There is a national convention so my friends put up the money and took care of the travel expenses and whatnot so I was able to make it here as a branch representative.”

  He laughed a little. It goes without saying that the national convention he spoke of was the second convention of the National Committee for Buraku Liberation, but what I wish to tell you here is not the story of the convention but that of Noguchi. It is not about basic human rights or democracy or anything like that—this is the story of what it means to be alive.

  On that bench on the platform, with the collar of his overcoat turned up and his shoulders hunched up like a child, Noguchi began to speak slowly in a soft voice, a faint smile on his lips.