Sydney Morning Herald 2006.7.8

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Lone vigil of man plucking heartstrings

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TWENTY-FIVE years ago Tetsuro Tanaka was fired from his job as an engineer for refusing to join in with compulsory morning callisthenics. Since then, every single working day, he has gone to the company gate at 8am to sing protest songs for half an hour. Once a month, on the day of his sacking, he sings all day.

Dressed in a black cowboy hat, wearing dark glasses and with a megaphone and battery pack, Mr Tanaka, 58, is a troubadour for the times.

Wielding his guitar, he sings of familiar themes: misused corporate power, union disintegration, the collapse of mateship and the loneliness of the sacked worker.

"Never once in 25 years has anyone asked me what I am doing," he said yesterday.

Sixteen hundred people who work for the company file past him daily on their way from the railway station, and all keep their eyes trained on the gate. In rain, snow and crackling summer heat, Mr Tanaka is there.

Passive resistance has become his substitute career. The manicured arcs of his fingernails plucking at the strings of his guitar are his tools. Heartfelt song lyrics, his message.

For an income he relies on music teaching and concert dates at union and folk gigs.

"No," he insists, "this is not my career. Is having breakfast your career? Is washing your face a career? For me this is one of the rituals of my life. I go to the gate and I sing - it is the same as having breakfast."

His routine is so reliable that children from the local school judge whether they are late for class by whether he is still singing.

The cataclysm over callisthenics was not the origin of Mr Tanaka's problems with his employer, Oki Electric, a telecommunications equipment manufacturer.

To his bosses Mr Tanaka was a troublemaker with big ideas about workers' rights.

Audaciously he belonged to a union, but that was only his first offence.

He also objected to forced redundancies and believed that managers were bullying his workmates.

Even so, if he had known his place, these grievances might have passed.

His mistake was that he spoke up in protest.

In 1978 the company where he had worked since university sacked 1300 people, close to 10 per cent of its workforce.

The redundancies upset the usual balance of expectations about lifetime employment, mutual responsibility and shared objectives.

Back then lay-offs were a betrayal, as was quitting.

"Young people have accepted this situation but they don't ask: what is justice?" he said. "What is their responsibility to society? They never think

about it."

The company went further and devised loyalty tests for remaining employees, Mr Tanaka said.

Loyalists were promoted while critics were demoted or ignored and left idle at their desks for months.

The slide into petty farce was sure and steady.

Oki Electric says a 1995 Supreme Court decision found that Mr Tanaka's dismissal had been fair and that it has no comment on his 25-year protest.

A Sydney documentary maker, Maree Delofski, has taped more than 30 hours of footage for a film about Mr Tanaka.

Last month, Delofski filmed him giving moral support to a protesting schoolteacher who had spent months suspended without pay for refusing to stand and sing the national anthem.

"Another type of loyalty test," Mr Tanaka says.

For Delofski, whose film is to be called Mr Tanaka Will Not Do Callisthenics, the spectre of psychologically whipped workers bending to a company exercise routine captures the struggle.

On the surface, the callisthenics classes were for fitness, but in fact they were more about fitting in.

At his showdown with his boss, Mr Tanaka was given two choices: stay and accept a transfer, or be fired.

He walked out, prepared to work as a truck driver if necessary but never dreaming he would one day own a guitar school, become a role model for other non-conformists and attract the interest of a filmmaker.

"The most important thing is not to think of yourself," he says. "Don't protest selfishly, don't think of yourself. The conclusion to a life of selfishness is unhappiness. Clever people profit by helping others. Recently I have felt very happy. Fired people have no retirement age."