This book is useful as an introduction into the complex development of the Japanese trade union movement and for its debunking of the myth that the Japanese working class is an unorganized, powerless class.
MARXIST Review
Provides a comprehensive articulation of the liberal interpretation of postwar labor-management accommodation in Japan.
H-Net Reviews
... Read moreAn extremely interesting book.... Kume makes an important point about the ability of Japan's culture and political economy to incorporate and accommodate distinct interest groups to minimize and routinize conflict and achieve ongoing consensus.
Choice
Ikuo Kume's Disparaged Success offers a fresh view.... His revisionist argument sounds fascinating and encouraging. It is indeed refreshing to hear such applause for the Japanese model from today's standpoint. Yet the book is not obsolete even under the much changed economic conditions of today, and it stands as a benchmark in the study of Japanese labor politics.... The book promises to fuel a controversial debate on equality, fairness and the quality of Japanese lives. This classic issue has contemporary relevance, given rising unemployment rates and the problem of labor redundancy.
Social Science Japan Journal
Ikuo Kume presents a detailed and omplex analysis of why labor unions in Japan are an anomaly among industrialized economies. Japanese labor unions are enterprise-based and structurally highly decentralized. Yet unions in Japan have gained in importance and imfluence since the 1960's. Union leaders continue to influence corporate and national labor policy even though Japan, similar to other industralized societies, is undergoing a conservative swing as well as a decade-old economic crisis.... Kume uses a framework that is based on the concept of political opportunity as unions became incorporated into government-management coalitions through the development of social networks that seek cooperation rather than confrontation.... Thoughtful.... Analytic.
Jon P. Alston, Texas A&M University
Journal of Asian Business
Disparaged Success is one of the few English-written books that comprehensively examines the postwar development of labor politics and industrial relations, and this makes the book highly valuable. Kume's book is also important in that it is one of the first attempts to explain labor politics in Japan from an explicitly comparative perspective, putting the Japanese case in the context of analytic frameworks used by studies of labor politics in other industrialized countries.
Akira Suzuki, Hosei University
Journal of Asian Studies
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