Annual No.26 (2013)

巻頭言「「寄せ場」のもつ良い面をもっと強調したい」水野阿修羅
フォト「東京・堅川河川敷公園から」向井宏一郎

特集：「流動する下層労働者」再考
「流動と貧困　「流動する下層労働者」再考」西澤晃彦
「除染労働における重層下請構造と搾取の実態　いくつかの労働相談・争議事例の報告」なすび
「現代における流動する若年派遣労働者の労働・生活」山口恵子
「集団就職と韓国人研修生　高度経済成長期における「開国」」山口覚
〔編集の過程で付図等に誤りが生じてしまいました。
　執筆者山口覚氏及び読者には大変失礼をおかけしました。
　お詫びして、訂正します。正誤表はこちらです〕
「一九六〇年代の韓国における「浮浪者」に対する政策と社会的まなざし　「国土建設団」を事例として」イム・ドクヨン（林徳栄）
「敗戦前後における日本社会の変容と持続」松沢哲成

時論
「未来から吹く風　台東区隅田公園山谷堀広場顛末記」濱村篤
「オーストリア・ロマの文化活動　文学・詩作・絵画・映像を中心に」金子マーティン

ヨセバ・クリティーク
「土木建設業の〈熟練技〉って何だろう？　建築知識編集部『建設業者』を読む」松沢哲成
「闘いとしての研究活動の原点　上畑恵宣『失業と貧困の原点　釡ヶ崎五〇年からみえるもの』を読む」原口剛
「遠くで生きるロマたちを近い現実とするために
　ミショ・ニコリッチ著／金子マーティン訳『あるロマ家族の遍歴生まれながらのさすらい人』を読む」池田浩士
「「消されゆく大阪」を旅して　趙博『パギやんの大阪案内ぐるっと一周[環状線]の旅』を読む」金子マーティン
「石炭の物語を広く深く掘る記念碑的な労作　池田浩士『石炭の文学史』を読む」中西昭雄
「怒りのロックが、いのちを歌う詩が、グローバルに響き渡る　竹内光浩編『反原発の詩』を読む」松沢哲成

学会日録

ISBN：978-4-8462-0408-2
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Yoseba Annual #26 (2013) Contents and abstracts

Special feature : Mobile proletarian workers reconsidered

NISHIZAWA Akihiko, ‘Mobility and Poverty:Mobile proletarian workers reconsidered’

The process of deregulation over the last quarter of a century has seen a rapid, policy-driven increase in the number of irregularly employed workers. That process has seen a succession of new categories added to the existing domain of ‘the poor.’ Foreign migrant workers were an early case. Then going into the 1990s, the poor were put to work across every industrial sector under a succession of revisions to the labor dispatch law. They included young workers, released into the ranks of the proletariat due to the breakdown of the family’s role as socioeconomic sanctuary. In the end, the social space prepared for these newcomers was similar to, or contiguous with, the ‘outsider’ status of the traditional proletariat. Nor was that the only similarity. The great folklorist Yanagita Kunio observed nearly a hundred years ago that poverty in modern times is characterized by economic want and social isolation. Those words ring truer that ever today as we survey the new poverty classes in contemporary Japan.

NASUBI, ‘The truth about complex sub-contracting systems and exploitation in radiation decontamination labour: some case studies of labour consultations and struggles’

Starting last year, the Network to Consider Radiation Exposure Labor got together with labour unions in the Fukushima area to commence full-scale support for workers exposed to radiation in the workplace. Our consultations with decontamination workers, and campaigns in their support, have revealed a wide variety of abuses: siphoning off of wages, fake sub-contracting contracts, illegal use of dispatch agency labour, forged contracts, forged wage records, inappropriate dismissal and so on. Workplaces free of abuse are the exception, and it has become abundantly clear that decontamination workers face appalling conditions. The state and local authorities are the customers placing orders for decontamination, but the work itself has been entrusted lock, stock and barrel to the construction and civil engineering industry, headed by the giant general contractors. They in turn have applied the system of farming out work through long chains of sub-contractors and sub-sub-contractors, with all the attendant problems of collusive public-private profiteering and domination of labour for which this industry is notorious. In this paper I will introduce some of the cases we have been involved with, which show all too clearly the grim reality of vicious exploitation of "disposable labour" in the decontamination projects. This struggle has important new implications for the parallel struggle of workers in nuclear power plants, as well continuing the age-old battle c one that we in the day labour movement have fought for so long without success c to reform Japan’s fundamentally exploitative employment structure.

YAMAGUCHI Keiko, ‘The work and life of young temporary dispatch workers in the present age’

With the advance of flexible working practices, one third of all young people in Japan find themselves engaged in irregular labour. Amid the great structural changes affecting employment practices in Japan as a whole, what is the meaning of the shift in labour power from the provinces to the big city? In this paper, I analyse the case of young people from Aomori who have had the experience of working outside the prefecture, in an attempt to clarify the nature of labor migration in the present age and investigate the special features of mobile labour and the role of local connections as resources. My research entailed in-depth interviews with four men from Aomori, in their late twenties, who had experienced working for personnel dispatch agencies outside the prefecture. Their working arrangements and lifestyles were extremely mobile and increasingly unstable. Local connections proved to play a major role. The result is the creation of a local labor pool in the context of structural regional imbalances, and the reproduction of marginal regions as disposable labour pools.

YAMAGUCHI Satoshi, ‘Group labour recruitment and Korean apprentices :the ‘‘Opening of Japan’’ during the high economic growth period’

The expression ‘group labour recruitment’ (shKdan shKshoku) refers to the systematic deployment to workplaces around the country of young people newly graduated from junior high school. It is usually discussed chronologically in terms of the high growth period (especially the Shōwa 30s, or 1955-1965) and spatially in terms of the domestic Japanese labour market. In the decade that followed, the number of junior high school graduates available to do manual labour gradually declined, as more young people stayed in education to senior high school level. This resulted in a shortage of low-wage unskilled labour, and official and unofficial attempts to recruit such labour from abroad. In 1957 group recruitment from Okinawa (then still under US occupation) began. From the late 1960s, young workers started to be brought in from South Korea under a government-run apprentice system, although the numbers were small. These apprentices may be seen as the missing link between the domestic group labour recruitment of the 1950s and 1960s, and the opening of Japan to international migrant labour starting in the 1990s. This paper analyses the increasing difficulties in domestic group recruitment and the inauguration of the South Korean apprentice system.

LIM Deok Young, ‘Public policy and social attitudes towards vagrants in South Korea during the 1960s: the case of the National Land Construction Corps’

This paper seeks to analyze public policy and social attitudes towards vagrants in South Korea during the 1960s, using the short history of the National Land Construction Corps (u토건설단(kuktogeonseoldan)) as a case in point. The paper is based on published research and mass media reports of the time. Among the features of the NLCC, it was the Republic of Korea’s first attempt at planned economic development; and it entailed forcibly mobilizing ‘vagrants’ as part of the labor force. When the military junta emerged from the social unrest caused by the Korean War, poverty and political strife, it viewed ‘vagrants’ (Js. Furōsha; Kn. 부ｨ(burangja)) as one of the causes of the trouble. By pressing them into the labour force, it sought to control social unrest and also promote economic growth. The media initially supported these moves, but switched to opposition once the NLCC’s remit was expanded beyond ‘vagrants’ to embrace the whole of society. The junta’s authority still rested on shaky foundations, and it was forced to abandon the project after just one year. Nonetheless, it was significant as the first attempt to impose military-style control on ‘vagrants’, which until then had not been drafted into the capitalist system. In the following years forced labour by ‘vagrants’ would be an important element in the rapid development of South Korean capitalism.

MATSUZAWA Tessei, ‘Change and continuity in Japanese society immediately before and after defeat in World War Two’

Seeking the roots of the mass consciousness of contemporary Japan, this paper looks at the crucial historical period around the end of World War Two, first through a study of novelist Fukazawa Shichiro (1914-1987); novelist Nosaka Akiyuki (1930-); and yakuza boss Ozu Kinosuke, and tries to establish a very rough typology based on these elements and a fourth type derived from a combination of the three. I further look at the workers who were mobilized to tackle the severe post-war coal shortage, comparing those (often called homeless or vagrants) living in the station buildings at Ueno etc., in air-raid shelters, and in cheap boarding houses, with the permanently employed steel workers temporarily sent to work in the coal fields to help supply the steel industry’s massive need for coal. The latter resemble the second of my types, showing the same kind of loyalty to the state associated with zero pilots, while the former showed more of the philosophical detachment one associates with Fukazawa. But they were all pressed into service, and the former type also learned to behave as if they shared the intense loyalty of the latter c albeit with the occasional outburst of violence in the form of riots, which would briefly expose the charade.

Frontline Reports

Martin KANEKO, ‘Cultural activities by the Roma in Austria: focusing on literature, poetry, art and film’

There are quite a few Roma authors, lyricists (poets?), artists and film directors dotted around the world. In 2002, some of them came together to form the International Romani Writers Association. This paper introduces the work of ten Austrian-Romani writers and artists, including memoirs and collections of artworks by four Roma who managed to survive the Nazi concentration camps; memoirs of children and grandchildren born after the War to parents who suffered Nazi persecution; a novel written by a man whose son was killed in the 2005 terrorist bombing of a Roma settlement (in Austria?); memoirs and poetry by two Roma born in Serbia but now assimilated into Austrian society; and visual images created by a Romani film director of post-war birth whose grandmother was killed by the Nazis and who spent his childhood being passed around among various foster-parents and orphanages.

HAMAMURA Atsushi, ‘The Wind that Blows from the Future’

On the Sumida River in Tokyo, not far from the famous day-labouring district of San'ya, is the San’yabori square, a symbolic site where past, present and future mingle together. From January to March 2013, Yasen’notsuki Haibizi conducted a series of negotiations with the Parks Department of Taito ward office, the authority in charge of the square, in an attempt to get permission for her tent theatre performance “Monuke Tendenko” to perform there. The negative outcome of the negotiations shows that although officially the park is supposed to be a public space, in fact the local bureaucracy has been preserving it solely for the use of vested interests, just as has always been the case. The roots of Japanese exclusionism can clearly be seen in this mundane yet important issue of who gets to use a public square. If the closed nature of society is ever to be reformed, it has to start from the everyday, by opening up this square to truly public use.