At the General Union’s Annual General Meeting on 17 May, Toshi Asari was re-elected as Chair. He wasn’t in the room. There was a lot of worry — it was very unlike him not to be there. That same night, we learned that he had died on the Thursday from a sudden fall. He was 77.

Toshi was born on 18 March 1949 in Kumamoto Prefecture, the son of farmers who were also teachers. We want to tell you who he was, because most of you didn’t get the chance to see it.

He came to the union late. By the time he walked through our doors in 2015 he had already lived a whole political life — deeply involved in left politics and the trade union movement for decades, schooled in the old, disciplined tradition of organising. He used to say that all his life he had been waiting for an opportunity like the General Union, and that his only regret was having to wait so long to begin this new chapter. He was in love with us. He said so plainly. We were the lucky ones.

His life before the union was its own story. As a young man he got into Tokyo University and walked away from it, unimpressed, deciding he could learn more from the people and the work around him; he spent his time volunteering with blind people instead. He worked for years as a machinist. Later he became a school crossing guard in Takatsuki, and it was there, of all places, that he found his way to us. He met a group of ALTs struggling with their housing, their workers’ compensation, their very status as workers — and he got involved, and he brought some of them to the union.

Yamahara, our founding chair, was the one who brought him in properly. Toshi used to say that he had known of Yamahara — Yamahara was something of a legend in the Kansai labour movement — but that Yamahara probably knew only his name and his face. We weren’t recruiting; Toshi was the one who was interested in us. We gave him a small job to start: research and write the union’s 25th anniversary book. He never finished it. As soon as he sat down to begin, we found him too useful for too many other things, and that book has never come out to this day.

He was in the office all the time. The more he was there, the more he did, and the more he became someone the union simply could not do without. He woke at four every morning — a farmer’s habit he never lost — and he was always the first into the office. People used to tease him about coming in to feed the chickens. He told us once that he had done his own quiet study of our opponents: the lights at the Liberal Democratic Party office burned from half past five in the morning, with people queuing to get in, while the Social Democrats drifted in around ten. “How can we beat them,” he asked, “if they work four hours a day longer than us?”

One of the pillars Toshi built at the General Union — a pillar that has held this union up for the last ten years — was his work on knowledge. He had a remarkable ability to find information, understand it, explain it, and get it from the right people. One day, early on, he asked a question that has not been forgotten. He said he was asking because he wanted a straight answer — not “do whatever you like.” He asked: what does the union need? Not what he wanted to do, not where he thought his talents lay. What the union needed. Most activists begin with themselves. Toshi began with the organisation. The answer he was given was the truth: the union needed knowledge. Members sometimes assumed he was a lawyer. He wasn’t. He was a militant who understood that the law can be turned to workers’ advantage if you take the trouble to learn it. He had no illusions about the courts — he knew as well as anyone whose interests they usually serve — but he refused to hide behind that knowledge. The fight is now, because that is when we live.

So much of what protects workers in this country is written in Japanese, locked away in offices and ministries, and you cannot get at the real thinking of the bureaucracy from documents alone. You need someone who can sit across from those officials and read them. That became Toshi’s work. There were ALT negotiations, set up in the old confrontational style, union against government, that he used to laugh at because they bore so little resemblance to real negotiation. He understood that we weren’t there to shout — we were there to get information for our members. And as everyone was leaving, Toshi would stand at the door and make sure every official accepted his business card, which meant they were obliged to hand over theirs — something they would never otherwise have done. That was him exactly. A minority union has few weapons. Information and relationships are two of them. He understood that before any of us. The Takatsuki Labour Commission case was carried all the way to the High Court on the back of his hard work.

Two things he said in his early days have stayed with us. The first, when he learned how we operated: that we were orthodox. He meant it as the highest compliment, and coming from him it was. Toshi belonged to that orthodox tradition — a real, militant tradition that believed in organisation, in the need to build and maintain a strong organisation. He understood that part of union work in his bones, and he recognised it in us. The second thing he said was about money. He came to his first executive meetings, saw our financial records laid open, heard us treat the union’s finances as a central pillar of building power, and thought, “Good God, what is this, a bank?” He had never seen a union do it. It impressed him to his core.

He shined brightest in the pandemic. He worked seven days a week for the better part of two years — long, punishing hours. He was in his seventies and he outworked all of us. He never let on how hard he worked, never performed his own exhaustion or his own virtue. He was a quiet powerhouse.

He was never prideful about being Chair. Even after he was elected to the position in 2020, he still used to call himself, with a chuckle, the union’s “caretaker.” It was a joke, but it was also how he carried the title. If you asked him to book a hall or carry placards to a demonstration, he was as glad to do that as to face an employer across the bargaining table or stand for us at the Labour Commission. No job was beneath him, because no one was beneath him.

He was kind. People often said he was too kind, and they were probably right. He could not say no to anyone. That is the man the General Union has lost. He waited his whole long life for us, and when he found us he gave us everything he had. We were the lucky ones.

In solidarity,
The General Union