Schools promoted obedience and readiness for military service. Workplace controls reduced workers' freedom to organise and put wartime production first.
Schools had long taught loyalty to the emperor. During the 1930s, physical training, discipline and approved lessons increasingly linked that loyalty to readiness for military service. In 1937, the Ministry of Education issued an official text called Kokutai no hongi. It presented obedience to the emperor as a moral duty and criticised individualism, or emphasis on individuals' own choices and interests, as a threat to national harmony. These were the government's arguments for loyalty, not proof that every pupil accepted them.
A trade union is an organisation through which workers act together to negotiate pay and working conditions. Such negotiation is called bargaining. Unions and left-wing activists faced repression, while official workplace groups promoted cooperation between managers and workers. Industrial patriotic associations expanded in 1938 to organise support for wartime production.
Cooperation could be presented as managers and workers serving one national purpose. But when workers were discouraged or prevented from organising independently, they had less power to challenge pay, conditions or production demands. This was part of mobilisation: organising people and resources for war. The removal of independent union structures continued into 1940; it was not completed at the start of the 1930s.
Worked example: A workplace is called a family
Imagine an official message asking managers and workers to avoid disputes and put national production first.
- The message aims to secure cooperation so production can continue without interruption.
- Ask whether workers can still negotiate pay, refuse demands or organise a union independently.
- If those choices are restricted, the language of harmony hides an unequal relationship. The message tells us the behaviour officials want, not whether workers freely agree.
Watch out for this
The official school text proves that students believed obedience was more important than their own interests.
It shows what the Ministry wanted people to believe. To judge actual acceptance, we would need evidence of how students responded.
Check your understanding
What common aim linked the 1937 school text and patriotic workplace organisations?
- They encouraged people to put state-defined national duties ahead of individual or group interests.
- They made individual choice the basis of loyalty, allowing pupils and workers to set national priorities.
- They treated cooperation as something that required workers to keep independent unions free from state direction.