Obituary for comrade
A Shigeru Comrade Kato Shigeru died on 23 September 1995, at the age of 52. He was an active member of the National Council of Internationalist Workers, a Japanese organisation in solidarity with the Fourth International. Kato was born in February 1943 in Miyagi prefecture, north-east Japan. Soon after graduating from high school, he became a telecommunications worker, and immediately committed himself to the workers' movement. In the mid-60s he fought against the US war in Vietnam, and the construction of the international airport in Narita. In 1980 he and his colleagues organised an independent trade union to defend workers arrested after a struggle in Narita. Towards the end of the 1980s, he joined a movement to organise the new National Organisation of Workers (Zenrokyo). In 1991 he became the secretary general of the Miyagi branch of Zenrokyo. Sendai city, where he worked, is known as a place where Trotskyists entered the Socialist Party, and succeeded in wining young workers to their movement. Shortly before his death, Kato attended a plenary meeting of the National Council of Internationalist Workers, to listen to a report on the 14th World Congress of the Fourth International. He also visited a newly-constructed nuclear dust processing plant, with the aim of organising a movement of resistance against the plant. His sudden death is thought to have been caused by his overwork for the workers' movement. Japanese workers will remember comrade Kato, and how he fought as a worker militant. *