This ethnographic study of factory workers engaged in radical labour protest gives a voice to a segment of the Japanese population that has previously been marginalized. These bluecollar workers, involved in prolonged labour disputes, tell their own story, as they struggle to make sense of their lives and their culture during a time of conflict and instability. What emerges is a portrait of how workers grapple with a slowed economy and the contradictions of Japanese industry in the late post-war era. The ways that they think and feel about accommodation, resistance and protest raise essential questions about the transformation of labour practices and limits of worker co-operation and compliance.