Twenty years of resistance to the state’s postal parcel monopoly (1981)

Fighting regulation as a durable management style

At the centre of this decision was a management style in itself: the continuous accumulation of proof that a private carrier was inferior to the national postal monopoly on neither price nor service. The advantage that in 1981 was described as eating into the state’s business was not a one-off price war; it stood on the same line as the acquisition of route licences and the shop-floor-led “everyone manages” structure, which suggests that resistance to regulation had taken root as the company’s management culture. That it was not confined to the pronouncements of one executive, Ogura Masao, but carried on by Aritomi Keiji as president under the same logic, is where the continuity of this style shows.

The outcome of some twenty years of confrontation, however, does not look like a simple victory. Neither the complaint to the Fair Trade Commission nor the resistance to the correspondence-delivery bill managed to break the basis of the monopoly itself in Article 5 of the Postal Act, and the interpretation of what constitutes a letter was left, in the end, to administrative discretion. Even so, the continuous stirring of public opinion can be seen as groundwork for the later debate on postal privatisation. Competing against a state business as a way of managing has gone on defining the shape of this company even as the regulatory environment has changed.