This first ethnographic study of factory workers engaged in radical labor protest gives a voice to a segment of the Japanese population that has been previously marginalized. These blue-collar workers, involved in prolonged labor disputes, tell their own story as they struggle to make sense of their lives and their culture during a time of conflict and instability. What emerges is a sensitive portrait of how workers grapple with a slowed economy and the contradictions of Japanese industry in the late postwar era. The ways that they think and feel about accommodation, resistance, and protest raise essential questions about the transformation of labor practices and limits of worker cooperation and compliance.

Christena L. Turner, an anthropologist, is Associate Professor of Sociology and Adjunct Associate Professor at the Graduate School of International Relations and Pacific Studies at the University of California, San Diego.

"A fascinating analysis of the consciousness and experience of industrial workers in Japan. . . . I recommend it to anyone interested in understanding how ordinary Japanese people make sense of the often difficult circumstances of their lives with determination and humor, with hope, cynicism, and resignation."—Andrew Gordon, Monumenta Nipponica

“Turner weaves a skillful and meticulous ethnography of the workers of two small enterprises in Tokyo. . . . In addition to its fine detailing of how workers experience protest, this book makes a significant contribution to a small but growing body of literature on the model Japanese worker, the one employed in the medium-to-small workshops. . . . Her central message on the formation of social consciousness in worker protest in japan is lucidly delivered. Her careful and compelling portrait of workers in protest should become a mainstay on the labor-relations literature on Japan.”—Contemporary Sociology

“[An] absorbing case study of two 1980s examples of employee takeovers of bankrupt companies. . . . Turner combines extensive interviewing with her experiences working on the assembly line at both companies’ plants and interacting with a broad range of employees and union officials. . . . Turner’s ethnographic approach is essential to any social science of industrial labor. By situating labor struggles in everyday experience, she is able to make comprehensible these worker demands for dignity, equity, livelihood, and control and their acts of solidarity and even militancy. . . . Turner’s subtle analysis is an inspired perspective on Japanese inflections of an uncommon but consequential occurrence in industrial societies everywhere.”—American Journal of Sociology

“In Turner’s work we are offered the rare opportunity to peek into the minds of factory workers . . . who with understandable anguish decide with different degrees of resistance as well as acceptance to learn the way of protest. . . . The book especially important because it revels what was going on in the mind of blue-collar employees in small Japanese companies before the ‘bubble economy’ years. Now in post-bubble, recessionary Japan with the shift of many union so the political right and their becoming more moderate in meeting the agendas of management, this book becomes an important historical marker.”—Journal of Japanese Studies

“An elaborate narrative of the workers’ thoughts, feelings, consciousness, dreams, hardships, and frustrations. . . . The book takes the reader on a rare journey into a relatively unknown realm of Japanese society. It is an elegant and moving tale of people struggling for simple justice, freedom, and a better livelihood.”—Journal of Asian Studies

“Turner’s intimate knowledge of Japanese culture combine with her position as both trusted participant and detached observer results in a sensitive, detailed and fine-grained study.”—Choice

"An elegant contribution to our understanding of Japanese society. . . . A model of clarity."—Robert J. Smith, Cornell University