Aux sources de la politique des revenus japonaise : Savoirs, biopolitique et normes transnationales (1920-1960)

Under various, somewhat vague slogans such as ‘new Japanese capitalism’ (新しい資本主義), the Japanese government now appears to be acknowledging the failure of the current mechanisms for the social regulation of the economy. After several decades of reforms favouring supply-side policies, it now appears to want to revive an income policy, in order to stimulate a sluggish economy through demand. This economy is characterised by a decline in average wages for over thirty years, rising inequalities threatening the social contract, profound demographic imbalances and public health issues.

The Japanese Prime Minister’s announcement in 2024 to raise the average minimum wage by 40% by 2030 is a clear illustration of this shift. This overt return to an income policy implicitly references the 1960 ‘Income Doubling Plan’ (所得倍増計画), a policy that symbolised Japan’s rise to the status of a major economic power. Today, as the issue of wage regulation and economic inequality is increasingly at the heart of political debates, both in Japan and internationally, and in order to understand the scope and implications of such a shift in a globalised context, it is essential to look back to the pivotal period in Japan in the mid-20th century. The 1960 plan was not a starting point, but the culmination of a historical process that began in the 1920s, following in particular the country’s accession to the ILO in 1919, during which capitalist Japan gradually abandoned a development model based on an abundant, low-cost labour force in favour of a system that valued a better-paid, trained and protected workforce. Understanding the debates, tensions and contradictions that characterised this transition is fundamental to assessing the contemporary difficulties and challenges associated with a possible return to such a policy.

The factors determining wages and their relationship with the socio-economic system as a whole have been the subject of extensive research in economics, management studies and sociology. Within the field of history, which is our area of focus, the question of the transition in Japan’s economic and social development model has prompted numerous analyses. It has been examined by Marxist economists and historians through the prism of the underdevelopment of pre-war Japan—which was said to have remained semi-feudal—the weakness of the labour movement, and the nature of its social policy (Hattori, Kazahaya, Ôkouchi). Conversely, research linked to modernisation theory has presented post-war Japan as a model of economic and social development underpinned by liberal democracy (Reischauer, Jansen, Hall, Dore). A later body of culturalist literature, sometimes disconnected from historical processes of construction, has highlighted the superiority of Japanese labour relations as indicative of a transcendence of modernity (Umehara). More recently, a new generation of historians (Enoki, Garon, Gordon, Nimura, Taguchi) has sought to renew these perspectives by breaking with the teleological frameworks of Japanese Marxism and proposing an alternative interpretation of the modernisation process.

In particular, by analysing high growth as a process of the domestication of trade unionism, the transformation of the working class and the hegemony of consumerist values
beginning as early as the pre-war period. Other studies have linked it to the emergence of industrial policy (Johnson, Gao, Okazaki, Takeda), monetary policy (Metzler) and human resource allocation (Kase, Sugayama), or to the role of visionary entrepreneurs and organisational changes within firms (Fridenson, Kikkawa, Suzuki). Studies drawing on regulation theory (Lechevalier, Boyer) have examined the distinctiveness of Japanese capitalism in relation to Fordism. Other research has highlighted the coherence between labour institutions, social hierarchy, the gendered division of labour and the social protection system (Fujiwara, Oguma) or has emphasised the formation of inequalities (Moriguchi, Saez, Tachibanaki, Yasuba).

However, despite the existence of a few articles on wage reforms during the war years (Kaneko) or on the evolution of wage structures within companies (Hazama, Shimanishi), this extensive body of research has not fully shed light on the historical process by which income policy took shape between the 1930s and the 1960s, nor, above all, the specific conditions that enabled the state to intervene in private-sector wages and develop a minimum wage system, by mobilising new forms of knowledge and governance mechanisms, within the framework of a complex relationship with civil society and the international community. We therefore propose an approach that goes beyond the traditional frameworks for analysing Japanese development and emphasises the integration of scientific knowledge such as sociology, the economics of labour reproduction, and the physiology of work, in order to offer a new interpretation of the transition of the Japanese economic and social development model during a particularly critical period for Japan: the interwar period, the war, the American occupation and the early years of high economic growth.

Our hypothesis is that this process is inextricably linked to the development of a certain body of scientific knowledge and the establishment of a ‘knowledge-power’ regime, in the Foucauldian sense. The historian Sheldon Garon has shown that, as early as the Russo-Japanese War, the government sought to influence the domestic economy, notably through savings campaigns. But from the interwar period onwards, new fields of knowledge emerged: the economics of labour reproduction, sociology, the physiology of work, nutritional sciences, social hygiene and demography. These disciplines provided scientific legitimacy for state intervention in wages and enabled the integration of objectives relating to health, productivity, rationalisation and reproduction into the social regulation of the economy. It is on the basis of this shared knowledge that experts within the government, employers’ organisations, research centres and trade unions seek, debate and institutionalise new pay systems and new standards such as the minimum wage. These pay systems, alongside social insurance and tax measures, become central elements in the establishment of an income policy.

This development is also part of a transnational dynamic: Japan’s accession to the International Labour Organisation (ILO) in the interwar period, as well as the work of foundations – particularly American ones – helped to promote the spread of international social standards – sometimes accompanied by criticism of Japanese ‘social dumping’ – but also the emergence of a common language, which was more standardised at the supranational level but which influenced debates at the national level between governments, employers, trade unions and experts on the issue of living standards. Thus, income policy was not merely imposed ‘from above’, but was also negotiated on the basis of shared knowledge, against a backdrop of evolving forms of citizenship (civil, political, social) and a changing social and cultural context (urbanisation, the expansion of the middle class, the development of corporate cultures, the transformation of the family and the gender division of labour).

Building on this set of hypotheses, we propose to re-examine the shift in economic development models through an approach centred on the issue
of wages and income policies, considered in terms of their interplay with social policies, labour relations at the enterprise level and the domestic economy, and in their
academic, biopolitical and transnational dimensions.

The aim is not to return to a purely quantitative history of wages as practised during the golden age of Marxist historiography, but to propose a cross-disciplinary analysis,
drawing on the history of science, social policy, industrial relations and management practices.

This direction has emerged from our work, through the study of employment institutions within companies, gendered norms in male employment², the historical depth
of social policies, industrial hygiene and occupational health, transnational networks of social reform⁵, and the persistence of insecurity and precariousness
despite post-war social policies, and workers’ experiences of precariousness.

Building on the achievements of our past work, we aim to conduct our research along
five main lines of inquiry:

• The role of labour and nutritional sciences in framing the issue of income and their reappropriation by actors in labour relations.
• The development of social surveys and statistics: their use by government experts and industrialists to assess workers’ conditions, and by trade unions to build a case for their demands.
• The circulation of scientific knowledge related to industrial labour: its impact on rationalisation processes, Japanese research and debates on wage structures, the minimum wage, and Japanese responses to accusations of social dumping.
• The emergence of an administrative elite (senior civil servants in the Ministries of Health and Labour) specialising in wage policy and capable of institutionalising it.
• The role of large corporations (zaibatsu) in the reform of remuneration systems.

Our research will draw on unpublished or under-utilised archives:

• The Kaneko Archives (Waseda University), drawn from the collection of senior civil servant Yoshio Kaneko, who played a central role in the formulation of income policies, covering the wartime and post-war periods. These archives are of considerable importance to our project as they cover both the Second World War period – during which many documents were classified as confidential due to their connection with the war mobilisation policy – and the post-war period. Work on these archives began in the summer of 2025 thanks to a fellowship from the Japan Foundation.
• Archives of the National Institute of Population and Social Security Research (Tokyo), producing essential studies on living standards and workforce reproduction.
• Archives of the Research Institute for Labour Science, transferred to the Ohara Institute for Social Research (Hosei University), enabling analysis of research on the definition of necessary income for workers.
• Corporate archives (Mitsui, Mitsubishi, Sumitomo), some of which have recently been opened, on the remuneration policies of large companies.
• Trade union archives: the Ohara Institute for Social Research, Osaka Labour Archive (OLA), Kyushu University.