Literature among the Ruins, 1945–1955 : Postwar Japanese Literary Criticism 9780739180723, 9780739180747

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Literature among the Ruins, 1945–1955

NEW STUDIES IN MODERN JAPAN Series Editors: Doug Slaymaker and William M. Tsutsui New Studies in Modern Japan is a multidisciplinary series that consists primarily of original studies on a broad spectrum of topics dealing with Japan since the midnineteenth century. Additionally, the series aims to bring back into print classic works that shed new light on contemporary Japan. The series speaks to cultural studies (literature, translations, film), history, and social sciences audiences. We publish compelling works of scholarship, by both established and rising scholars in the field, on a broad arena of topics, in order to nuance our understandings of Japan and the Japanese. Advisory Board Michael K. Bourdaghs, University of Chicago Rebecca Copeland, Washington University in St. Louis Aaron Gerow, Yale University Yoshikuni Igarashi, Vanderbilt University Koichi Iwabuchi, Monash University T. J. Pempel, University of California, Berkeley Julia Adeney Thomas, University of Notre Dame Dennis Washburn, Dartmouth College Merry White, Boston University Recent Titles in the Series Japan Viewed from Interdisciplinary Perspectives: History and Prospects, edited by Yoneyuki Sugita Single Mothers in Contemporary Japan: Motherhood, Class, and Reproductive Practice, by Aya Ezawa Creating Japan’s Ground Self-Defense Force, 1945–2015: A Sword Well Made, by David Hunter-Chester Rethinking Japan: The Politics of Contested Nationalism, by Arthur Stockwin and Kweku Ampiah The Politics and Literature Debate in Postwar Japanese Criticism: 1945–52, edited by Atsuko Ueda, Michael K. Bourdaghs, Richi Sakakibara, and Hirokazu Toeda Yokohama and the Silk Trade: How Eastern Japan Became the Primary Economic Region of Japan, 1843–1893, by Yasuhiro Makimura The Unfinished Atomic Bomb: Shadows and Reflections, edited by David Lowe, Cassandra Atherton, and Alyson Miller Literature among the Ruins, 1945–1955: Postwar Japanese Literary Criticism, edited by Atsuko Ueda, Richi Sakakibara, Michael K. Bourdaghs, and Hirokazu Toeda

Literature among the Ruins, 1945–1955 Postwar Japanese Literary Criticism

Edited by Atsuko Ueda, Michael K. Bourdaghs, Richi Sakakibara, and Hirokazu Toeda

LEXINGTON BOOKS

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Published by Lexington Books An imprint of The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc. 4501 Forbes Boulevard, Suite 200, Lanham, Maryland 20706 www.rowman.com Unit A, Whitacre Mews, 26-34 Stannary Street, London SE11 4AB Copyright © 2018 by The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote passages in a review. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Available ISBN 978-0-7391-8072-3 (cloth : alk. paper) ISBN 978-0-7391-8074-7 (electronic) The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992. Printed in the United States of America

Contents

Acknowledgments   vii Introduction, Atsuko Ueda, Richi Sakakibara, Michael K. Bourdaghs, and Hirokazu Toeda   1 PART I:  FOREGROUNDING THE COLD WAR   15 1 Early Freeze Warning: The Politics and Literature Debate as Cold War Culture, Michael K. Bourdaghs   17 2 The Korean War and Disputed Memories: Kim Dal-su’s Nihon no fuyu and the 1955 System, Ko Youngran, translated by Michael K. Bourdaghs   43 3 Politics and Culture of Fascism, Ann Sherif   61 PART II:  STRUCTURES OF CONCEALMENT: CULTURAL ANXIETIES   89 4 Cultural Resentment and Valorization in Postwar Japanese Literary Criticism: Nakamura Mitsuo’s Literary History, Atsuko Ueda   91 5 Small Hopes and a Terror: Katō Shūichi’s and Mori Arimasa’s 1955 Return from France, Doug Slaymaker   105 6 Language and the People: The Amateur Writing Subject in Kindai bungaku, Shin Nihon bungaku, and Shisō no kagaku, Richi Sakakibara, translated by Atsuko Ueda   121 v

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PART III:  CONTINUITY AND DISCONTINUITY: SUBJECTIVE RUPTURE AND DISLOCATION   135 7 Temporalities of Ruin: Shiina Rinzō and the Subject of Tenkō, Seiji M. Lippit   137 8 Literature at War’s End: The Prosecution of Writers in Bungaku jihyō, James Dorsey   159 9 From the God of Literature to War Criminal: The Media and the Shifting Image of Yokomitsu Riichi from Prewar and Wartime to the Postwar Era, Hirokazu Toeda, translated by Atsuko Ueda   177 Index   191 About the Contributors   193

Acknowledgments

It gives us great pleasure to finally thank the many people who were involved in making this volume possible. In addition to the authors who have contributed to this volume, many people either informally or formally assisted in the making of the work through numerous dialogues that took place in the workshops we conducted, first at Princeton University, then at Waseda University, and finally at the University of Chicago: Heather BowenStruyk, Richard Calichman, Norma Field, Jonathan Glade, Justin Jesty, Victor Koschmann, Miho Matsugu, Munakata Kazushige, and Takiguchi Akihiro. The workshops and publication of this volume received generous support from many institutions. At Princeton, we thank the East Asian Studies Program and the East Asian Studies Department, the Council of the Humanities, and the University Committee on Research in the Humanities and Social Sciences. At Waseda, we are grateful for support from the Eibun gakujutsu shuppan josei (Fund for English-language publication support) and the JSPS KAKENHI Grant number 15K02274 (Grant-in-Aid for Scientific Research (C), Principal Investigator: Hirokazu Toeda). At Chicago, we thank the Japan Committee at the Center for East Asian Studies and the International House. Special thanks goes to David Boyd, who judiciously went through the manuscript multiple times and checked for consistency and format. We are also grateful to Michael Ashby for his excellent copyediting. We thank Doug Slaymaker for introducing us to Lexington Books. Our gratitude also goes to Brian Hill, Eric Kuntzman, and others at Lexington Books, who were all extremely patient with the various delays in the production of this manuscript.

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Introduction Atsuko Ueda, Richi Sakakibara, Michael K. Bourdaghs, and Hirokazu Toeda

In this volume, we take up the question of postwar literary criticism, with a basic focus on the “Seiji to bungaku ronsō” (hereafter referred to as the Politics and Literature Debate) that occurred soon after Japan’s defeat in World War II.1 The essays here do not limit themselves specifically to the writings traditionally seen as belonging to the Politics and Literature Debate but instead use the debates as foci by which to highlight various ideological forces that shaped the postwar literary scene in which Japanese intellectuals debated the course of a “new literature.” The commonality of the issues discussed in the essays is not simply the object of knowledge, in this case postwar literary discourse. The contributors share various critical perspectives, which we outline below. The immediate aftermath of World War II was disruptive in many areas of people’s lives. Defeat of course signified humiliation to an already povertystricken population. Yet it also signified liberation, not only for the rest of East Asia from Japan’s colonial rule but also for the many leftist intellectuals who sought to take the lead in the production of a new literature for postwar Japan. Many of these intellectuals were, after all, tortured and imprisoned, and some, even after committing tenkō (conversion), were kept under strict surveillance. It is important to keep in mind that, until the establishment of North Korea in 1948 and the People’s Republic of China in 1949, many leftists—perhaps ironically, in hindsight—considered the American Occupation forces as a liberation army. These intellectuals shared many things in common. Many took it as their responsibility to persecute the literary writers who drove Japan to such a self-destructive war. They sought to question the role that literary writers ought to play in the construction of a new Japan and how they failed to lead the people in the years prior to defeat. They began to reevaluate the 1

2 Introduction

relationship between intellectuals and “the people” (minshū) and how literary works could become a vehicle for such a relation.2 The end of the war in effect gave them the opportunity to set the direction of a new Japan, in the form of a new Japanese literature. We hasten to add here that, despite the dominance of leftist intellectuals on the literary scene in the immediate aftermath of defeat, there were of course many others who remained active in the postwar literary scene yet dissociated themselves from leftist projects, including such figures as Kobayashi Hideo, Nakamura Mitsuo, and Kawakami Tetsutarō. Many stayed on the periphery of the Politics and Literature Debate, which was primarily a debate between former and current Marxists. Yet, despite their varying political stances, they all anticipated a new direction, whatever that direction might be. One way or another, the creation of a new Japan in the postwar present signified an attempt to criticize and reevaluate the past. Their internal critique took aim at many objects: the failure of the proletarian literature movement in the 1930s, the failure of modern Japan and its literature to relinquish its feudalistic past, the failure of literary writers to prevent Japan from heading in a militarist, fascist direction, and so forth. It is thus not a coincidence that one of the main issues that participants argued in the Politics and Literature Debate was how to situate themselves vis-à-vis the proletarian literature of the 1920s and 1930s. The term “internal” needs qualification, however. First, the “past” was invariably a colonialist past, in which the boundaries of “Japan” expanded. This meant that the “internal” nature of wartime and postwar Japan could not legitimately be equated. Yet many, including intellectuals like Nakano Shigeharu, who was extremely active and conscientious with regard to the Korean cause, posited a seamless Japan that existed in the colonial past and the postwar present.3 Some of the essays in this volume examine such a disavowal. Additionally, as this negotiation with the past is inevitably intertwined with the transition from empire to nation (or semicolony), it cannot be separated from the emergence of the Cold War structure, which further complicates the drawing of boundaries.4 Of course, not all postwar intellectuals wrote specifically about these changes. In fact, as Michael K. Bourdaghs notes in his essay, “the term ‘Cold War’ was not yet in wide circulation. . . . The Japanese counterpart (reisen) seems to have entered the popular vocabulary around 1949.” Regardless of whether intellectuals were aware of the Cold War paradigm, however, they were very much implicated in its structure. The first set of essays in this volume tackles this Cold War dynamic and examines how postwar intellectuals negotiated with this emerging structure. The inquiry into this Cold War dynamic gets even more complicated when we consider our own discipline of Japan studies.5 Studying postwar Japan in North America must begin by calling attention to how the object of

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3

study became what it is and what we reify in this process. Needless to say, the object is never there—rather, it is the institution that discovers the object as knowledge. The need to call attention to such structures is especially pronounced given the fact that our institution of Japan studies emerged as a direct product of the time this volume examines. That this volume can exist as a scholarly work in our field, that postwar Japan can sustain itself as an object of knowledge, owes something to the structure of area studies that was produced within the Cold War scheme. We are certainly not so naive to claim that we can be free of such institutional constraints or that we can somehow be outside them. Precisely because of this, however, we must attempt, on the one hand, to constantly remind ourselves of this structure while, on the other, attempt to resist any uncritical complicity with the structure itself. The underlying assumption of our discipline is that this object of study, Japan, is one that has existed from time immemorial. That is to say, despite its changes and transformation, something called Japan can be identified across history. This means that there is always a tension between our urge to highlight the manner in which the interior of Japan shifted from empire to nation (one that is often concealed in postwar Japanese discourse) and the assumption that Japan is, as our discipline tells us, isolatable as an entity. This of course does not mean that there is no continuity or that there is only rupture. Any present contains a trace of the past that haunts it, just as the past is reconstructed through the present and the present projects itself into the future. Yet when we label that continuity as Japan, we fall into the trap of positing Japan as an entity that transcends time—that there is something called Japan that exists unaffected by time. In order to avoid uncritically reinforcing this notion of Japan, we call attention to how writers posit Japan at certain historical moments, examining what it expresses and suppresses while simultaneously highlighting how this Japan can never sustain itself. The impossibility of such a clear division appears in one of our common methodologies:  we reject the simple “influence” model, which presumes two distinct units such as France and Japan. That is to say, to adhere to the influence model always already posits internal and external boundaries, as it presupposes that an outside “enters” an inside, effecting a change. For example, when intellectuals are actively engaging with works of their European counterparts, can we simply draw a clear line between, say, Japan and France or Russia? When Japanese literature is itself conceptualized through Western novels—in its success or failure to emulate Western literature—can Japanese literature sustain itself as a self-same entity? All the essays in this volume thus feature a tension: a tension between our institutional force that defines Japan as an isolatable entity and the force that always already exceeds those entities.

4 Introduction

The problems of the influence model are even greater. Academic practices often tend to prioritize direct or causal influence, using empirical evidence to support an apparent link, such as writers’ biographical information (e.g., Ara Masahito read Sartre, or, conversely, Ara didn’t read Sartre). We do not wish to underestimate such direct or causal links, but to limit ourselves to connections such as these only makes us lose sight of the ways in which discourse operates. This brings us to another methodological commonality: all the essays approach postwar discourse with the understanding that presence is predicated on absence—which is to say, presence is always already contaminated by absence and vice versa. In simple terms, this means that even when postwar intellectuals themselves do not mention something directly, their discursive engagement extends well beyond their consciousness, their textual surface. Certain points are at times directly addressed, while at other times concealed, whether consciously or unconsciously, by these intellectuals themselves. In addition to calling attention to the fluid boundaries of Japan, we are also mindful of the fact that bungei hihyō, translated here as “literary criticism,” extends far beyond the realm of literature and what we might associate with this term in English.6 Bungei hihyō was a site where multifarious social and political issues such as human subjectivity and war responsibility were vigorously debated. In our inquiry, therefore, we by no means limit ourselves to what we institutionally define as literature. In effect, there is an invariable tension between calling our object of analysis literary criticism—and calling ourselves scholars of literature—and the endeavors that extend our object of analysis beyond the boundaries of literature. Postwar discourse is of course productive in its reorganization of the past and present, but we also pay attention to what such production inevitably conceals. Latent in the discussion of a new literature—which was always already a critique of the past—was the desire to reconstruct the past vis-à-vis the new present. As some essays highlight, a pattern emerges: Japan is occupied, and the United States looms large. Yet interestingly, the United States is often peripheralized in the effort to construct Japan. Whether consciously or otherwise, intellectuals looked toward Europe to conceptualize Japan, or, perhaps more accurately, what was lumped together as the West before defeat now came to be divided between the United States and Europe. The second set of essays specifically addresses the structures of concealment latent in the process through which postwar intellectuals posited the emerging cultural identity of the new Japan. The motif of subjective rupture and disjunction inevitably comes into play in postwar discourse. As with any rupture, however, traces of the past linger and haunt the present, marking a continuity. Yet the decisive change that marks the moment appears as radical discontinuity. This transition is rather

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disorienting, as many writers posit a liminal space between the past and the present where they lie suspended without escape. It is not a simple change from the past to the present; many seek to sever themselves from the past, but the past continues to haunt them. Ironically, too, what some believe to be the new ends up being a reappropriation of the past. The past also haunts in an unpredictable manner, as the moment in which that past is made manifest can never be controlled. The last set of essays explores the varying forms of continuity and discontinuity that shaped the postwar literary scene. FOREGROUNDING THE COLD WAR The volume begins with Michael K. Bourdaghs’s essay, which examines the dialogue between the participants of the Politics and Literature Debate and three intertexts that were prominent in the United States. These intertexts are Lionel Trilling’s Liberal Imagination, Ruth Benedict’s The Chrysanthemum and the Sword, and The God That Failed, edited by the British Labour MP Richard Crossman. Bourdaghs is careful to note that there are no direct links between these works and the participants of the Politics and Literature Debate, a gesture that, at one and the same time, implicitly criticizes the traditional model of influence and highlights the contemporaneity of Cold War discourse, before it was even named as such. He carefully delineates the many discursive resonances between the debate and Anglophone, anti-Communist liberalism while also noting the differences between them: Trilling and Hirano Ken share an “unlimited faith in ‘literature,’ ” and both reject the notion that the political should have primacy over the literary. Yet, while Trilling “quarantines proletarian literature,” excluding leftist writers from his literary history, Hirano embraces it as a negative reference point by which to write his literary history. In a bold move, Bourdaghs then couples Benedict and Nakano Shigeharu, who both posited literature as a means by which writers can “teach” the national people. This resonance is ironic, precisely because for Benedict culture—a product of antiracism and a key ideological tenet of Cold War liberalism—is linked to anti-Communism. Finally, with The God That Failed, Bourdaghs shows how the participants of the Politics and Literature Debate, unbeknownst to themselves, participated in the creation of key terms that would eventually become central to the ideas of anti-Communist intellectuals around the globe. Bourdaghs ends his essay on a very important topic: Japan studies in North America were and are a product of the Cold War ideological struggle. He notes that the founding figures of our field were trained in the three intertexts that he discusses in his essay. His conclusion suggests that our scholarly practices can only become complicit with the Cold War framework without

6 Introduction

concrete acts of intervention and analyses of the ideological ground upon which our practices are made possible. If Bourdaghs’s essay effectively criticizes the influence model in examining Cold War discourse, Ko Youngran inquires into the multiple ways in which Japan and Korea are mobilized and generated in Cold War discourse, highlighting the inevitable fluidity of national boundaries. She begins her essay with the “1950 problem” and its figuring as setting for Kim Dal-su’s novel Nihon no fuyu (Japan’s winter). The “1950 problem” refers to an internal split among members of the Japan Communist Party (JCP) (the “Commentary” faction versus the “International” faction) over JCP policy on whether to pursue peaceful revolution or armed struggle against American imperialism, which was inextricably linked to the question of the Korean War. Nihon no fuyu, Ko contends, complicates the prevalent historical narratives of the 1950 problem, which typically narrativize the events with discrete ethnic units, Japanese and Koreans. On the one hand, the Korean War was Korea’s “national war against American imperialism,” while, on the other, it signifies a war “among Korean comrades between the Commentary and International factions.” Through close textual analysis, Ko shows how the discourse on the Korean War reduces the problem as “something occurring now but over there.” This is linked, Ko argues, to the general discursive trend of the time: the rampant increase of newspaper reportage on the Korean War and the Korean boom in literature, which produces, as it were, a certain neutrality of the Japanese vis-à-vis the Korean War. Insightfully, she further links this with the Supreme Commander for the Allied Powers press codes, suggesting that the distance the Japanese media took in reporting the Korean War shows strong complicity with the Cold War scheme, positing Japan as something unrelated to violence. It was necessary, therefore, to make the Korean War a Korean problem, which coincides with the attempt by the United States to domesticate Japan’s wartime past. At the end of the essay, Ko turns to a fascinating discussion of how the notion of “Korean writers” in Japan (zainichi Koreans) was produced as a separate category—as neither Korean nor Japanese. Multiple forces are at work here, such as the urge to link Korean ethnicity with the Korean language and by extension Korean literature—an equation that was not at all self-evident at the time. As Ko argues, Japanese-language writing by ethnically Korean writers was, after all, included in Japan’s “national literature” prior to this time. JCP internal politics also contributed to this ghettoization of Koreans as separate from the Japanese, as Akahata reconstructed the 1950 problem from the side of the victor, the International faction, thereby erasing any memory of Korean JCP members. The engagement with the Cold War continues with Ann Sherif’s essay as she explores the ways in which Ara Masahito’s views of 1930s antifascism

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were reappropriated in the postwar present. Sherif contends that the legacy of pre-1945 resistance to fascism featured a significant part of the identity formation of postwar literary critics. The complexity of the essay lies in its discussion of how postwar intellectuals, not only in Japan but also globally, conceptualized the term “fascism.” While teasing out how references to fascism took on many different forms, this essay also draws attention to the instability of national boundaries. What Sherif’s essay suggests is the impossibility of specifically distinguishing Japanese fascism from, for example, German, Italian, or Spanish fascism. Sherif shows that the international network of resistance movements and popular fronts of the 1930s remained appealing to Ara in the postwar context because they can be construed as a force that gave rise to cultural productivity through interactions between writers and artists. What complicates Ara’s engagement is the shifting references to fascism in the global context, especially given the Cold War dynamic. First, fascism was the embodiment of the Axis powers, associated with the evils of World War II over which the Allied powers achieved moral victory. As subjects of imperial Japan, postwar intellectuals could not sever themselves from this association. Second, for many Marxists, fascism was a symptom of the ills of capitalist society, thereby calling for a peaceful revolution that would lead to an alternative social structure. The United States, however, dissociated fascism from capitalism, given its status as a primary advocate of free-market capitalist and liberal democracy, in direct opposition to the Soviet Union. As such, attempts were made to link Communism and fascism (i.e., “Red fascism”). Any resistance to fascism had to negotiate with this emerging dynamic. Ara attempts to carve out his position while, consciously or not, engaging with this shifting notion of fascism. It is here that Sherif locates Ara’s attempt to argue for subjective autonomy—one shared by the Kindai bungaku members as a crucial element in the production of a new Japanese literature. Sherif suggests that Ara’s use of antifascist discourse was a means to distance himself from all hegemonic regimes, whether those of imperial Japan, the Soviet Union, or the United States. By mobilizing 1930s antifascist discourse in the postwar era, Ara thus attempts to find a subversive subject position in the Cold War present. STRUCTURES OF CONCEALMENT:  CULTURAL ANXIETIES The focus on varying efforts to produce “Japan”—and the inevitable disavowal that Japan cannot sustain itself—is carried over to the next set of essays. Atsuko Ueda unravels a structure of concealment by focusing on

8 Introduction

Nakamura Mitsuo’s discourse on the shishōsetsu (I-novel) tradition. As with the proponents of the Politics and Literature Debate, Nakamura reconstructed Japan’s modern literary history, and he did so through his criticism of shishōsetsu, which, for Ueda, is the point of contention. She argues that this is a narrative of particularism and shows that Nakamura’s negative characterization of shishōsetsu features a dialectical reversal: shishōsetsu represents a failure—whether it be of imitating the Western novel or of what artistic shōsetsu ought to be—but precisely because of this, it is unique to Japan. In effect, shishōsetsu, in its failure, gains autonomy as specifically “Japanese” literature. What appears to be a simple internal critique turns out to involve a great deal more, as what constitutes the internal is being created at this very moment. Moreover, Ueda further contends that shishōsetsu is a site of continuity for Nakamura: all forms of literature that subsequently developed could not overcome the problems inherent in the genre of shishōsetsu. This continuity ultimately becomes a vehicle of concealment, specifically a latent resentment toward the United States. The shishōsetsu, empowered as the beginning of all literary failure since its production, structures subsequent development as “incidental” or “external” to (Japanese) literature. By focusing on the slight yet crucial redistribution of terms, which she analyzes through a comparison of Nakamura’s prewar and postwar writings on shishōsetsu, Ueda identifies a disavowal crucial at the moment of defeat: the desire to disavow the newly acquired position of the United States as imperial power by designating the origin of Japan’s literary endeavors in Europe. Insofar as he focuses on naturalism, the prototype of shishōsetsu, as the beginning point of failure, he can justify his silence and contempt toward American culture while simultaneously creating a narrative of particularism. This structure is shared by the Politics and Literature Debate, since those participants also emphasized failure in the name of internal critique. Doug Slaymaker’s piece delineates a similar structure of positing “Japan” by analyzing Katō Shūichi’s and Mori Arimasa’s essays that were written contemporaneously as they returned from France. As in Nakamura’s literary history, France becomes the reference point by which they define “Japanese culture,” which shows a prioritization of Europe in their effort to come to terms with postwar Japan. First, Slaymaker carefully reads Katō and highlights the manner in which he posits the zasshusei (hybridity) of Japanese culture, as opposed to the “purity” of France and England. “Pure” Japan, Slaymaker suggests, signifies its fascist past, but “hybrid” Japan—that is neither East nor West—represents Japan’s postwar state. According to Katō, it is through this hybridity that Japan can claim its uniqueness. If England and France represent a standard for “cultural purity,” then Japan can represent a

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standard for “cultural hybridity.” In this sense, Europe and Japan appear on equal terms—Japan can exist alongside the nations of Europe. Slaymaker reminds us that such positing of Japan is a mere essentialization and that, in this discussion of hybridity, Katō curiously (though perhaps inevitably) disregards any discussion of racial hybridity that was prevalent in the intellectual climate of France, especially as he left Paris in the second year of the Algerian War. Katō further disregards the Bandung Conference, where issues of race and culture were fervently discussed. At least three implications arise from this:  First, if racial hybridity were introduced, the “purity” of France by which he seeks to posit Japanese “hybridity” would have been called into question. Second, racializing culture would have undoubtedly introduced a hierarchy between France and Japan. And finally, the movement away from race resonates with Cold War culture and the liberal humanism of the United States, to which, whether consciously or otherwise, Katō became complicit. Slaymaker shows how Mori Arimasa took a very different route in thinking about postwar culture but participates in the same concealment as Katō. Mori, like Katō, disengages with contemporary events that shape the understanding of culture globally and does so by turning inward, narrativizing his experiences in France as a personal introspective journey. As Slaymaker suggests, this represents an avoidance of questioning Japan’s status in the world. Ultimately, what Slaymaker’s analysis of Katō and Mori suggests is a cultural valorization of Europe by which to define Japan. Not only do these intellectuals avoid the contemporary events that shook France; they also disregard the state of Japan and its occupation as if these, too, had no bearing on postwar Japanese culture. Richi Sakakibara’s essay offers a further example of concealment, but this time focusing on the issue of amateur writing, taken up by intellectuals involved in the Politics and Literature Debate. While exploring the ways in which Kindai bungaku and Shin Nihon bungaku engaged and disengaged with “the people,” Sakakibara introduces Shisō no kagaku as a reference point by which to highlight what the participants of the Politics and Literature Debate disavowed. Reading them against one another, Sakakibara unravels what their respective pursuits of a new literature expressed and in turn suppressed. She turns first to Shin Nihon bungaku, which designated the new subject of literature as “the people,” consistent with the group’s Marxist orthodoxy. Shin Nihon bungaku not only encouraged amateur writers to publish but also provided space in which to publish their works. Kindai bungaku, in contrast, showed no interest in producing new writers. Instead, its editors were invested in figuring out the relationship between the people and the petit bourgeois intelligentsia. Sakakibara then introduces Shisō no kagaku, an unexpected site for comparison. Shisō no kagaku was not a literary journal and featured many nonliterary writers, ranging from physicists and sociologists

10 Introduction

to philosophers and economists. Yet Sakakibara claims that it is noteworthy that the editors of this journal devoted a great deal of space to promoting a linguistic philosophy, imported as a “philosophy of democracy,” at least in the first phase of its publication. As with the journals that were involved in the Politics and Literature Debate, Shisō no kagaku was also interested in theorizing the relationship between language and the people. Similar especially to Shin Nihon bungaku, Shisō no kagaku attempted to create a space in which writers and readers could dialogue with one another on an equal footing. Yet Tsurumi Shunsuke, one of the founders of Shisō no kagaku, was never invited to contribute to either Kindai bungaku or Shin Nihon bungaku, a gesture that did not go unnoticed by Tsurumi himself. The question that arises, then, is why these two literary journals, inadvertently or otherwise, detached themselves from Shisō no kagaku. Sakakibara ends her essay by gesturing toward Tsurumi’s association with the United States, which suggests a latent desire on the part of the participants of the Politics and Literature Debate to marginalize the United States in their attempt to conceive of Japan and its new literature in the wake of defeat and the Occupation. CONTINUITY AND DISCONTINUITY: SUBJECTIVE RUPTURE AND DISLOCATION While Sakakibara’s essay addresses the new forms of subjectivity that the participants of the Politics and Literature Debate discussed vis-à-vis the people, Seiji Lippit identifies an alternative form of subjectivity by taking up the works of Shiina Rinzō. By focusing on the trope of ruin, Lippit highlights the manner in which Shiina’s texts intervene in the framework of individual versus people, one of the key issues in the debates over subjectivity carried out by the participants of the Politics and Literature Debate. The trope of ruin is inextricably linked to tenkō, which, for Shiina, is an ongoing process that subsumed both the postwar present and prewar past. Lippit closely analyzes Shiina’s Shin’ya no shuen (Midnight banquet, 1947) and Fukao Masaharu no shuki (The notebook of Fukao Masaharu, 1948) and demonstrates the textual in-betweenness straddling the present and the past. In Shin’ya no shuen, he shows how the protagonist’s “collapse” is not effected with defeat but rather dates back to his tenkō during the war. There is a constant layering of the postwar present and wartime past. For example, the apartment the protagonist resides in during the postwar era reminds him of the prison he was in, but he feels more confined now than he was before. Tenkō for Shiina is not a “turn” toward anything but rather a “fall.” Similarly, in Fukao Masaharu no shuki, Lippit highlights the manner in which Fukao is dissociated from the masses, which is for Fukao both an object of disgust and a part of himself. Fukao’s

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in-between state aligns with the view that tenkō is incomplete: it features a fall from one ideology but without the possibility of an alternative ideology to take its place. Both protagonists are arrested in time, suspended indefinitely. Lippit then identifies Shiina’s conception of subjectivity in this space of suspension, which is at one and the same time an absolute abjection and a new possibility of human agency, one that resists subjection. Shiina’s subjectivity, therefore, functions as a powerful intervention in the postwar debates vis-à-vis tenkō and the subject of revolution, a time when the position of nonconversion (hi-tenkō) was considered the most authentic form of agency. Moreover, debates on subjectivity, as played out in the Politics and Literature Debate, revolved around the opposition of the people to the individual. Lippit locates Shiina at the fractured edge of the two, as an embodiment of an incomplete turn that refuses integration into the new, a deferral of subjection. Whereas Lippit highlights a new possibility of subjectivity by examining Shiina’s trope of tenkō in its collapse of the prewar and postwar present, James Dorsey takes a different approach to tenkō discourse by showing the irony of continuity. Dorsey examines Bungaku jihyō, which was inaugurated by the younger members of the Kindai bungaku coterie—namely, Odagiri Hideo, Ara Masahito, and Sasaki Kiichi, otherwise known as the Setagaya trio. This was a modest journal whose most popular column, “Bungaku kensatsu” (Literary prosecution), is Dorsey’s point of focus. In this column, the coterie targeted approximately forty writers and discussed how they specifically “betrayed” literature. In effect, the identity of this journal was formed by its efforts to condemn the “war criminals” complicit with militarism. It was thus on a par with the dominant leftist discourse that took center stage in the immediate aftermath of defeat and was hence “new” to the postwar era. Dorsey, however, argues that precisely within this narrative condemning “war criminals” one can find the same paradigm of violence that shaped the wartime discourse. In order to substantiate this point, he specifically takes up Hayashi Fusao, whose tenkō from being a leftist intellectual to being a participant in the Overcoming Modernity (Kindai no chōkoku) symposium is well known. Identifying an uncanny resemblance between the narrative paradigm of Bungaku jihyō and Hayashi Fusao, Dorsey shows how Odagiri’s and Ara’s position vis-à-vis writers such as Hino Ashihei and Yoshikawa Eiji in fact resonates with the very discourse Hayashi employed, catering to such notions as “purity of literature,” “authenticity,” and “sincerity.” Dorsey points to the Setagaya trio’s generational gap as a possible cause for this irony, but the point is that just as the tenkō discourse of the 1930s catered to spiritual tropes by which to posit literature, so, too, did the Setagaya trio. They had been obsessed with tenkō discourse to the extent that they inadvertently replicated the very discourse they were arguing against.

12 Introduction

Dorsey suggests an element of self-righteousness that appears in the form of past discourse, which suspends the “new” in the state of the “old.” Hirokazu Toeda’s essay also captures the irony of continuity through the figure of Yokomitsu Riichi, tracing how the image of this writer changed and developed from the prewar past to the postwar present. Known and valorized as the god of literature from the 1930s through the war’s end, Yokomitsu’s reputation plummeted with the defeat, as a variety of media “punished” him as a “war criminal.” Yet interestingly, Toeda argues that Yokomitsu’s creative writings show no dramatic shift from wartime to the postwar. In fact, Yokomitsu was indeed conscious of the continuity of his work. Toeda has no intention to absolve Yokomitsu of war responsibility, since Yokomitsu was indeed involved in the Japanese Literature Patriotic Association and repeatedly offered public support for the state. Toeda’s interest is in the symbolic shift that manifests as rupture. Toeda examines the media spectacle surrounding Yokomitsu’s trip to Europe, when he was sent to report on the Berlin Olympics. He discusses how the extensive coverage of Yokomitsu’s trip, coupled with his own writings on the Olympic Games, reinforced the godlike image that had already been affixed to the writer prior to his visit to Europe. After defeat, however, his image dramatically shifts as he is targeted by the literary establishment, most specifically by Odagiri Hideo, and also by Nihon no higeki (Japan’s tragedy), a documentary film by Kamei Fumio. Toeda is quick to note that there were many other writers who had more political and social influence, so the reason behind Kamei’s choice of Yokomitsu as a representative cultural figure, chosen alongside politicians and military personnel who were purged or accused at the International Military Tribunal for the Far East, is not at all self-evident. However, he contends that this was a symbolic choice, insightfully describing the alignment the film makes between the emperor’s losing his divine status to become “human” and Yokomitsu’s fall from the status of god of literature to that of a war criminal. Despite the fact that Yokomitsu himself did not display any change, his image in the media embodied a symbolic rupture that shaped the postwar scene. NOTES 1. For discussions of the Politics and Literature Debate in English, see J. Victor Koschmann, Revolution and Subjectivity in Postwar Japan (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996) and Atsuko Ueda, Michael K. Bourdaghs, Richi Sakakibara, and Hirokazu Toeda, eds., The Politics and Literature Debate in Postwar Japanese Criticism, 1945–52 (Lanham, Md.: Lexington Books, 2017). In Japanese, see, for example, Nakamura Shin’ichirō, Sengo bungaku no kaisō (Memories of postwar

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literature) (Tokyo:  Chikuma shobō, 1963); Kamei Hideo, Nakano Shigeharu-ron (On Nakano Shigeharu) (Tokyo: San’ichi shobō, 1970); Nakajima Kenzō, Kaisō no sengo bungaku (Reminiscences of postwar literature) (Tokyo: Heibonsha, 1979); Nakayama Kazuko, Hirano Ken to “sengo” hihyō (Hirano Ken and postwar criticism) (Tokyo:  Kanrin shobō, 2005); Kasuya Kazuki, Sengo shichō—Chishikijin tachi no shōzō (Postwar currents: Portraits of intellectuals) (Tokyo: Fujiwara shoten, 2008); Oguma Eiji, “Minshu” to “aikoku”: Sengo Nihon no nashonarizumu to kōkyōsei (Democracy and patriotism: Nationalism and community in postwar Japan) (Tokyo: Shin’yōsha, 2002); Karatani Kōjin, ed., Kindai Nihon no hihyō II: Shōwa hen ge (Modern Japanese criticism II: The Shōwa period, volume two) (Tokyo: Kōdansha bungei bunko, 1997); Usui Yoshimi, ed., Sengo bungaku ronsō jō (Postwar literary debates:  Volume one) (Tokyo:  Banchō shobō, 1972); and Usui Yoshimi, Kindai bungaku ronsō ge (Modern literary debates: Volume two) (Tokyo: Chikuma shobō, 1975). There are also various memoirs and self-reflections of the debate. See, for example, Honda Shūgo, Monogatari sengo bungakushi (Postwar literary history: A narrative) (Tokyo: Shinchōsha, 1960); Hirano Ken, Waga sengo bungakushi (My postwar literary history) (Tokyo:  Kōdansha, 1969); Hirano Ken, Hirano Ken taiwashū: Seiji to bungaku hen (A collection of dialogues with Hirano Ken: Politics and literature) (Tokyo: Miraisha, 1971); and Ara Masahito et al., eds., “Kindai bungaku” sōkan no koro (At the founding of Kindai bungaku) (Tokyo: Shin’ya sōshosha, 1977). 2. See, for example, Nakaya Izumi, Sono “minshū” to wa dare nanoka:  Jendā, kaikyū, aidentitī (Who are “the people”? Gender, class, identity) (Tokyo: Seikyūsha, 2013), 141. 3. On Nakano’s views of Korea, see Ko Youngran, “Sengo” to iu ideorogī: Rekishi, kioku, bunka (Postwar as ideology: History, memory, culture) (Tokyo: Fujiwara shoten, 2010). Despite his criticism, Nakano strongly believed in the category of minzoku (ethnic nation) and was thus unable to question the ramifications of the shift in geopolitical boundaries. 4. Scholarship has recently begun to examine postwar culture through the lens of the Cold War. See, for example, Marukawa Tetsushi, Reisen bunkaron: Wasurerareta aimai na sensō no genzaisei (On Cold War culture: The contemporariness of the forgotten enigmatic war) (Tokyo:  Sōfūsha, 2005), and Ann Sherif, Japan’s Cold War: Media, Literature, and the Law (New York: Columbia University Press, 2009). 5. For recent scholarship on the inextricable relationship between Japan studies in North America and Cold War structure, see, for example, Ukai Satoshi, Sakai Naoki, Tessa Morris-Suzuki, and Ri Takanori, eds., Reishizumu sutadīzu josetsu (Introduction to racism studies) (Tokyo: Ibunsha, 2015). 6. As many scholars have remarked, the term hihyō is not easy to translate. Some say that it is more commensurate with what we refer to as criticism, but others choose to translate it as “theory.” See, for example, Richard F. Calichman, ed., introduction to Contemporary Japanese Thought (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005), and Shion Kono and Jonathan Abel, introduction to Otaku: Japan’s Database Animals, by Hiroki Azuma (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009).

Part I

FOREGROUNDING THE COLD WAR

Chapter 1

Early Freeze Warning The Politics and Literature Debate as Cold War Culture Michael K. Bourdaghs

The Politics and Literature Debate of 1946–1947 has long been taken as the starting point for postwar Japanese literary history. My purpose here, however, is to rethink it as an early skirmish in Cold War cultural politics. Instead of positioning the complicated disputes involving Hirano Ken, Nakano Shigeharu, and others in reference to the just-ended war of 1931–1945, what happens when we map them in relation to the global Cold War that was just getting under way? This is not an entirely new gesture. In rethinking Japan’s postwar culture through the lens of the Cold War, I follow in the wake of many others.1 Taking up the 1946–1947 debates as early Cold War culture helps reveal connections with subsequent developments in hihyō (criticism) in the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s—that is, during the latter stages of the Cold War. More important, this rethinking productively shifts the ground from which an American scholar approaches Japan. Whereas the postwar Japan studies approach has often proceeded from the implicit (and sometimes explicit) assumption of America as the benefactor that rescued Japan from fascism, a Cold War framework situates the United States in a less-comfortable position, one in which its own stance as a perpetrator in geopolitical violence has to be raised alongside the study of Japanese cultural production. I conclude my essay with a consideration of American Japan studies as yet another instance of Cold War culture. The rethinking I want to pursue requires us to transcend the boundaries of Japan and place the 1946–1947 debates in a more global context. In the wake of the horrors of World War II, intellectuals around the world engaged in lively debates over the meanings and interrelationships of such concepts as “literature,” “politics,” “subjectivity,” “culture,” “nation,” “Marxism,” and “humanism.” We need only to think of such classic works as Auerbach’s Mimesis (1946), Wellek and Warren’s Theory of Literature (1946), Adorno 17

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and Horkheimer’s Dialectic of Enlightenment (1947), or Sartre’s What Is Literature? (1947) to sense this context.2 We might add Orwell’s Animal Farm (1945) to this list—and note that Occupation authorities arranged the 1949 publication of a Japanese translation of the novel and sponsored performances of a kamishibai storyteller adaptation aimed at factory workers, government officials, and labor unions.3 Of course, the Politics and Literature Debate unfolded within its own specific historical situation, yet its participants were aware that their activities as critics paralleled similar developments around the world. The Politics and Literature Debate began with the April 1946 publication in the journal Ningen of a roundtable discussion on “The War Responsibility of Writers” (Bungakusha no sekimu). Skimming the table of contents of that journal from 1946 to 1947, we come across the following article titles: Fukuro Ippei, “Saikin no soveto bungaku o megutte” (On recent Soviet literature) (January 1946) Satō Saku, “Furansu bundan no shinchōryū” (Recent currents in French literary circles) (May 1946) Honda Kiyoji, “Amerikateki shii” (American-style thought) (June 1946) Takeda Taijun, “Chūgoku no sakkatachi” (China’s writers) (June 1946) Ramon Fernandez, “Thought and Revolution” (July 1946) Thomas Mann, Voyage with Don Quixote (serialized October–December 1946) André Gide, “André Malraux (The Human Adventure)” (November 1946) André Gide, “French-Style Dialogue” (January 1947) Takahashi Yoshitaka, “Hesse mondai” (The Hesse problem) (February 1947) André Malraux, Man’s Hope (March 1947) In February 1946, Ningen also published a special issue devoted to “American Thought,” while in 1947 it ran a two-part special issue (July and September) on contemporary French literary trends. In April 1949 it carried Nakahashi Kazuo’s piece on “The Problem of Literature and Politics in Contemporary English Literature” (Gendai Eibungaku ni okeru bungaku to seiji no mondai), while in January 1952 it published Katō Shūichi’s translation of Sartre’s What Is Literature? Clearly, readers of the Politics and Literature Debate as it unfolded across the pages of Ningen and kindred journals in late-1940s Japan had access to timely information about similar debates under way around the globe. Moreover, intellectuals outside Japan, particularly after the Chinese Revolution (1949) and the outbreak of the Korean War (1950), showed keen interest in how Japanese intellectuals understood the relationship between politics and literature.4 As I discuss in the following, the monthly Encounter regularly included translations from modern Japanese literature as well as



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reportage on the intellectual milieu of 1950s Japan. Moreover, if we browse such American intellectual journals as Partisan Review or Commentary from this period, we find a striking resemblance to Ningen and its peers in Japan. During the early Cold War, in both Japan and the West a shared canon was emerging—centered on such figures as Sartre, Dostoyevsky, Mann, and Gide—as the ground for ongoing debates over the proper relationship between literature and politics. Rereading the 1946–1947 Japanese debate in tandem with its counterparts abroad should open up a more global, dialogic understanding, as we come to see both what it shared with similar debates elsewhere and what was unique to it. My initial tactic here for tackling this enormous problem is to reread the Japanese debate alongside three intertexts. These three works were published in the United States at roughly the time of the debate and played important roles in Cold War culture. Each remains in print today, and each was translated and debated within Japan. Directly or indirectly, the Japanese critics who engaged in the Politics and Literature Debate did so in dialogue with these texts, and through this dialogue concepts that would become fixtures of Cold War culture began to take shape. As Ann Sherif has reminded us, “culture during the Cold War reveals itself as the primary front or battlefield, the desired site of transformation and conviction.”5 Whether or not they were aware of it at the time, Japanese intellectuals in 1946–1947 debating the proper meanings of “politics” and “literature” stood on the front lines of a battle for hearts and minds that would unfold across the globe in the coming decades. I must note, though, that at the time of the Politics and Literature Debate, the term “Cold War” was not yet in wide circulation. George Orwell had used it or its cognates in several essays published in 1945–1947,6 but the term did not win wide usage in English until around 1947; many point to the publication of Walter Lippman’s The Cold War that year as a turning point. The Japanese counterpart (reisen) seems to have entered the popular vocabulary around 1949. A keyword search through the online archive of the Asahi newspaper, for example, turns up an article of March 27, 1949, on East-West tensions (“Takaku kyōtei ni shippai: Uzumaku ‘tsumetai tatakai’ ” [Failure to reach multilateral accord: A spiraling “cold war”]) as the earliest usage of the kindred phrase tsumetai tatakai. Searches of other online databases of magazine articles also show the phrase reisen beginning to appear in 1949. In other words, the writers who engaged in the 1946–1947 debate could not have known at the time that they were early Cold Warriors. Nonetheless, I argue here that the positions and concepts they advanced contributed to the formation of what would become a global Cold War culture.

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The first of the three intertexts is Lionel Trilling’s The Liberal Imagination. Trilling, a professor of English literature and comparative literature at Columbia University, was a leading figure among the group known popularly as the New York Intellectuals, centered on the anti-Stalinist Partisan Review. The Liberal Imagination first appeared in 1950, but Trilling had published many of its essays previously in literary journals, precisely during the period of the Japanese Politics and Literature Debate. The book became a best seller and a popular sensation.7 It would have a decisive impact on 1950s American literary criticism: one critic described it as being akin to “Holy Writ.”8 Trilling’s impact on Japan seems less dramatic. His work was not widely introduced into Japan until after the end of the US Occupation (1952)— in other words, well after the Politics and Literature Debate had reached its inconclusive conclusion. As part of a campaign by the Congress for Cultural Freedom and other Cold War cultural institutions to present his work to readers outside the United States, a partial Japanese translation of Liberal Imagination appeared in 1959 under a revised title: Literature and Psychoanalysis.9 The previous year saw the publication of a translation of The Middle of the Journey, Trilling’s 1947 autobiographical novel depicting his own break with Communism (what would be termed in Japanese literary history a tenkō shōsetsu, a conversion novel).10 Prior to this, Trilling’s thought was introduced to Japanese readers through various journal articles.11 But as of 1946–1947, Trilling does not seem to have much of a presence in the minds of Japanese literary critics. For example, an article in the October 1950 issue of Ningen surveys the ongoing reevaluation of Henry James in American literary history without mentioning Trilling, despite the important role he played in that reevaluation.12 The Liberal Imagination represents a bold rewriting of American literary history (and, to a lesser extent, world literary history) from an anti-Communist perspective. As such, it became a classic text of 1950s American “Cold War liberalism.”13 The “liberalism” that Trilling analyzes remains somewhat amorphous, but this does not prevent him from vowing in the work’s preface that “in the United States at this time liberalism is not only the dominant but even the sole intellectual tradition.”14 As Trilling openly acknowledges, his literary criticism is driven by a political agenda: he wants to define the proper relationship between politics and literature. Whereas what Trilling calls the liberal imagination in American cultural life holds that mankind is perfectible, literature’s duty is to resist this optimistic belief. While Trilling does not use the same language as Ara Masahito employed in such Politics and Literature Debate essays as “Dai-ni no seishun” (Second youth, 1946), it is clear he has something similar in mind: for Trilling, literature is properly a kind of negativity.



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Trilling in defining his mission presumes what he calls “the inevitable intimate, if not always obvious, connection between literature and politics” (xviii). Echoing Hirano Ken’s assertion that the defining keyword of Japanese literature in the Shōwa era has been “politics,” Trilling writes that “the literature of the modern period, of the last century and a half, has been characteristically political” (xviii), with Trilling defining that last term in “the wide sense of the word” (xvii) to include “the politics of culture, the organization of human life toward some end or other, toward the modification of sentiments, which is to say the quality of human life” (xvii). Literature in particular served as a source of persistent resistance to liberalism’s rationalizing ideologies, as an insistence on the necessity of imagination and sentiment to any concept of human freedom. In the face of liberalism’s tendency to simplify problems in order to organize solutions to them, literature acquired a force of political resistance by being “the human activity that takes the fullest and most precise account of variousness, possibility, complexity, and difficulty” (xxi). Trilling is in particular fascinated by the relationship between literature and power. As in the Japanese Politics and Literature Debate, for Trilling this relationship could be understood in particular through an examination of the impact of the Communist Party on American letters. This thematic is developed in a chapter that was originally published in 1946 to commemorate the tenth anniversary of the Partisan Review—and one of the chapters omitted from the 1959 Japanese translation. This little magazine, Trilling notes, was at its inauguration in the early 1930s associated with the American Communist Party but quickly moved away from that position to become a new intellectual and literary voice for the non–Communist Party left. The essay begins with a meditation on the waning power of literature. “It is now more than twenty years since a literary movement in this country has had what I  have called power” (96). Trilling goes on to describe favorably the liberal worldview he believes is common to the educated classes in 1946 America, but he insists that it does not produce great literature. “Our liberal ideology has produced a large literature of social and political protest, but not, for several decades, a single writer who commands our real literary admiration” (98). It produces literature that is “earnest, sincere, solemn,” “a literature of piety” that “has neither imagination nor mind.” Trilling then lists what he takes to be the great writers of the twentieth century—Proust, Joyce, Lawrence, Eliot, Yeats—and argues that none respected the tenets of the liberal ideology. He concludes “that there is no connection between the political ideas of our educated class and the deep places of the imagination” (99). In this environment, Trilling insists, the most necessary task is “to organize a new union between our political ideas and our imagination.” This explicitly involves rejecting the sway of the Communist Party:

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The cultural program of the Communist Party in this country has, more than any other single intellectual factor, given the license to that divorce between politics and the imagination of which I have spoken. Basing itself on a great act of mind and on a great faith in mind, it has succeeded in rationalizing intellectual limitation and has, in twenty years, produced not a single work of distinction or even of high respectability. (100)

It is the fate of those who care about literature to remain political, he concludes, a hard fate of which “the only possibility of enduring it is to force into our definition of politics every human activity and every subtlety of every human activity” (100). The struggle to reunite the political with the imagination is ultimately, Trilling argues, a question of power. “The question of power has not always preoccupied literature. And ideally it is not the question which should first come to mind in thinking about literature. Quality is the first, and perhaps should be the only, consideration.” But because the very survival of “a particular quality” is at stake, “the question of power is forced upon us” (101). In such a moment, literature’s quality must be defended, and even if the writer of literature serves only his own muse, “the democracy that does not know that the daemon and the subject must be served is not, in any ideal sense of the word, a democracy at all” (102). I’ve already suggested points of similarity between Trilling’s arguments and those offered by participants in the Politics and Literature Debate in Japan. In particular, Trilling shares many positions with Hirano Ken. Both share a seemingly unlimited faith in “literature” and its possibilities. Both likewise reject the notion that the “political” should enjoy primacy over the “literary,” and for that reason both men cast a suspicious gaze at literature written under the influence of Communism. Trilling shares Hirano’s insistence on distinguishing literature from the political, yet he also openly acknowledges that his own literary criticism is operating (reluctantly, but necessarily) in the domain of politics. By contrast, as Victor Koschmann has noted, “Hirano’s extremely political essays about literary works contradicted his professed belief in the insularity of ‘literature’ from ‘politics.’ ”15 For Hirano, “politics” meant primarily the hegemony of the Japan Communist Party (JCP). As a result of this narrow definition, Hirano remains blind to the politicality of his own writings. The two critics also position themselves differently in relation to the prewar proletarian literature movement. Trilling essentially quarantines proletarian literature from the canon of liberal imagination: his book is very much concerned with explaining why, for example, Henry James belongs but Theodore Dreiser (who, Trilling notes, joined the Communist Party late in his life) does not. Upton Sinclair, Jack London, John Steinbeck, and other radical writers largely disappear from Trilling’s version of American literary history.



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As Christina Klein has argued, Trilling and the other New York Intellectuals were motivated above all by the perceived need “to protect the realm of culture from corruption by insisting on a clear separation between art and politics. They tended to view forms of culture that retained any explicit social or political content as veering dangerously toward Stalinism.” This led to a tendency to celebrate modernist, difficult art that tended toward abstraction and formal experimentation over populist works that relied on sentiment and realism.16 Hirano employs a different strategy. Rather than isolate works of Japanese proletarian literature, Hirano embraces them. But his mode of embrace is revisionist: he rewrites the historical narrative of the proletarian literature movement, providing it with new beginning and ending points, a switch that has the effect of redefining the whole character of the movement. In “ ‘Seiji no yūisei’ to wa nani ka” (What is “the primacy of politics”?, September 1946), Hirano tries to justify his controversial equation of Kobayashi Takiji with Hino Ashihei by composing a revisionist history of the Japanese proletarian literature movement.17 This new version situates Hirano rather than the JCP as the proper heir to the prewar proletarian literature movement. Hirano’s new narrative of that movement begins with Arishima Takeo’s “Sengen hitotsu” (One declaration, 1922).18 Arishima, a bourgeois novelist, wrote in response to Marxist critic Hirabayashi Hatsunosuke’s claim that literature was ultimately class based and that writers were unable to transcend their class origins. Arishima accepts Hirabayashi’s assertion, acknowledging that any attempt he as a bourgeois novelist made to speak for the proletariat would amount to arrogant self-deception. According to Hirano, Arishima was the first to “offer up a subjective version of the inevitability of the failure [haibokuron] of the intelligentsia” (217). In Hirano’s view, Arishima posed a fundamental challenge to proletarian literature, one that subsequent critics in the movement failed to confront. As a result of this original sin, the movement was characterized by an inability to define the proper relationship between the proletariat and literature, itself a product of bourgeoisie culture. Arishima’s fundamental challenge was forgotten, and what emerged ironically was a proletarian literature movement dominated by petit bourgeois intellectuals. The new endpoint Hirano assigns to his revisionist history of proletarian literature is located in the works of yet another bourgeois author, Shiga Naoya. Shiga’s three letters to Kobayashi Takiji, published after the latter’s death from a brutal police beating, resurrect the contradiction that the proletarian literature movement was unable to resolve: that literature was originally a bourgeois cultural form, one that required a measure of autonomy to exist. In particular, Hirano focuses on a phrase that Shiga used to criticize Kobayashi’s writings:  those works were a “literature with an [external]

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master” (shujin-mochi no bungaku) (216). Hirano concludes that the proletarian literature movement’s inability to address the criticisms of Arishima and Shiga spelled its inevitable doom, that it would have failed even absent the external state pressures that were conventionally narrated as causing its downfall. With his new beginning and conclusion in place, Hirano turns his attention to the meaning of the prewar proletarian literature movement for 1946 Japan. Here, it becomes clear that the direct target of Hirano’s revisionist history is Nakano Shigeharu. He notes that when Nakano discusses the relationship between the “democratic literature movement” of 1946 and earlier leftist culture, Nakano writes of the “so-called [iwayuru] proletarian literature movement” (220). Nakano does this, according to Hirano, because that earlier movement actually consisted of an alliance between working-class and petit bourgeoisie writers, with the latter being numerically dominant. Hence Nakano says it should properly have been called the revolutionary literature movement or the revolutionary petit bourgeoisie literature movement, but state repression prevented the use of the word “revolutionary.” Both the prewar and postwar movements aimed at a bourgeois democratic revolution, and as a result, according to Nakano, the 1946 democratic literature movement is the true heir to the proletarian literature movement. Hirano rejects this historical narrative as dishonest. He notes that the prewar proletarian literature movement defined itself in large measure by its fierce opposition to bourgeois literature. He quotes from Nakano’s response to Nakamura Mitsuo’s 1935 critique of Nakano’s tenkō story “Dai-isshō” (Chapter 1, 1935), in which Nakano clearly identified bourgeois literature as the enemy of proletarian literature and attacked Nakamura as a mouthpiece for capitalist ideology. Hirano chides Nakano for adopting in 1946 the very position he had a decade earlier denounced as being the voice of capitalism. He accuses Nakano of distorting the history of the proletarian literature movement, of effacing the way it was at its essence a movement that aimed to overthrow bourgeois culture, including bourgeois literature: It is an unmistakable fact that proletarian literature aimed above all at the liberation of the proletariat and that it desired a dictatorship of the proletariat. It was precisely for this reason that, from the start, it sought to link itself to a “purpose consciousness” of “world revolution,” and calling for the overthrow of bourgeois literature it necessarily took as its own name proletarian literature. (222)

To claim now, as Nakano does, that this was merely a “so-called” proletarian literature movement or that it was from the start a democratic revolutionary movement that welcomed bourgeois writers is, Hirano insists, to distort historical reality. So long as Nakano refuses to fundamentally question the



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reasons for the rise of the mistaken doctrine of the “primacy of the political,” Hirano maintains, he will be unable to achieve an effective self-criticism that would establish the proper relationship between politics and literature. He will only lead postwar literature into a repetition of the failure of the proletarian literature movement. What is needed in 1946, Hirano argues, is a clear understanding of the history of the proletarian literature movement. The insistence on the primacy of the political has to be reexamined as a misguided form of idealism, and the reasons for its appearance have to be understood. Hirano positions himself and his cohort as the ones who must undertake this rethinking of history. He proposes revisiting the works of largely forgotten proletarian movement writers such as Ikue Kenji and Tezuka Hidetaka to retrace the past of idealism that ultimately led to the notion of the primacy of the political. Clearly, Hirano places himself and like-minded writers as the true heirs to the proletarian literature movement, and a major purpose of the Politics and Literature Debate was to challenge the authority Nakano and others in the JCP were claiming as the present-day heirs to that movement. To borrow from Satō Izumi’s reading of the debate, Hirano charges Nakano and the JCP with misrepresenting the past in order to undermine their claims to represent the subject of the democratic revolution in 1946.19 In sum, both Trilling and Hirano attempt to formulate an anti-Communist, left-of-center position for literature. For each, this involves defining an autonomous space for literature, a holy ground from which it could comment on the political without being absorbed into it. Trilling’s strategy for achieving this was to expel proletarian literature from the canon of American literature. Hirano, by contrast, penned a revisionist history of the movement that allowed him to lay claim to its legacy, positioning himself as its legitimate heir in 1946. As I show in the following, this reflects the very different statuses of Marxism and its political advocates in early Cold War Japan and the United States. My second intertext is Ruth Benedict’s The Chrysanthemum and the Sword: Patterns of Japanese Culture (1946). Like Trilling, Benedict was a faculty member at Columbia University, and her reputation as a leading scholar in anthropology was already well established before the war.20 Benedict launched her study of Japan in 1944 at the behest of the Office of War Information as a wartime intelligence project, but by the time she published the book in 1946, it served as a kind of guide for how to occupy Japan. The book was widely and positively reviewed in American scholarly journals, though some commentators quibbled with Benedict’s methodology and her interpretation of Japanese culture.

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The book also attracted wide interest among intellectuals in Occupied Japan. A Japanese translation by Hasegawa Matsuji, a professor of linguistics at Tōhoku University, appeared in 1948 and became a hot topic, with such media as the front-page “Tensei jingo” (Vox populi, vox Dei) column in the Asahi newspaper introducing it to a wide readership.21 It also set off a debate among Japanese intellectuals, generating rebuttals by such prominent figures as sociologist Tsurumi Kazuko, philosopher Watsuji Tetsurō, and folklorist Yanagita Kunio.22 These Japanese debates were in turn reported back in the United States.23 When Benedict was writing Chrysanthemum and the Sword, the term “Cold War” did not exist. Nonetheless, she clearly grasped the idea. Near the book’s conclusion, Benedict speculates on possible outcomes for Japan’s postwar future, expressing concerns about the effect the global environment would have on the prospects for remaking Japan into a peaceful nation: The Japanese “hope to buy back their passage to a respected place among peaceful nations. It will have to be a peaceful world. If Russia and the United States spend the coming years in arming for attack, Japan will use her know-how to fight in that war.”24 In other words, Benedict saw Japan’s future as contingent on geopolitical relations between the United States and the Soviet Union. At least one early American reviewer of Benedict’s books explicitly shared this outlook.25 Keeping this in mind, it seems hardly coincidental that Benedict would labor to situate postwar Japan on the side of the capitalist liberal democracies. She repeatedly asserts that Japanese culture lacks the capacity to generate a “revolution.” Echoing E.  H. Norman and Japanese Marxist historians, she denies that the Meiji Restoration constituted a bourgeois revolution. “There was no French Revolution” (72–73), or again, “But Japan is not the Occident. She did not use that last strength of Occidental nations:  revolution” (132). Because of their social system, Japanese “can stage revolts against exploitation and injustice without even becoming revolutionists” (302). Those in the West who, looking to postwar Japan, “prophesied the triumph of radical policies at the polls have gravely misunderstood the situation” (302). She predicts Japan will follow a democratic course, albeit one distinct from the way the term “democracy” is understood in the United States. According to Benedict, postwar Japan may reform itself in a democratic direction, but it could not be the site of revolution. To consider Benedict’s work in relation to Cold War thought, we must first explore the concept of “culture” that is central to her work. The Japanese culture she depicts is characterized by a complex “pattern”: it includes two contradictory tendencies, expressed by the keywords that form her title. Benedict begins her account by describing the contradictions that she believes mark Japanese culture. She declares that “the Japanese are, to the highest



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degree, both aggressive and unaggressive, both militaristic and aesthetic, both insolent and polite” (2). Eventually, she pins this duality to child-rearing practices (286), and although she does not use this terminology, she describes a cultural identity that is suspended between a narcissistic imaginary stage (one she sees as grounded in the mirror stage, albeit in terms of Shinto religious practice [288–89]) and a more mature symbolic stage grounded in shame and fear of social ostracism. This split accounts for the contradictory impulses that she believes characterize Japanese culture. Benedict never cites Freud, but as with Trilling we see the influence of psychoanalytic thought in her work. Japan’s fundamental tendencies may be contradictory, but they nonetheless form a coherent, “singular” cultural system (18). As critics have noted, Benedict’s version of Japanese culture is ahistorical and essentialist: it seems to have no connection to, for example, class conflict, capitalism, or Japan’s recent imperial past.26 Moreover, it is a culture utterly foreign to America, so that to understand it Americans have “to keep ourselves as far as possible from leaping to the easy conclusion that what we would do in a given situation was what they would do” (5). Benedict stresses the cultural difference of Japan. On (恩) and other Japanese keywords that can be translated as “obligation,” for example, escape an American’s grasp; “their specific meanings have no literal translation into English because the ideas they express are alien to us” (99). Yet such radical “difference” is to the social scientist “an asset rather than a liability” (10). She dismisses calls for a single, homogeneous global culture as a kind of “neurosis” (a keyword she shares with Trilling) and calls instead for “a world made safe for differences” (15). Benedict maintains that such difference is acceptable and desirable precisely because it is cultural—which is to say not biological. She stresses “the anthropologist’s premise that human behavior in any primitive tribe or in any nation in the forefront of civilizations is learned in daily living” (11). In such assertions, Benedict’s characteristically liberal stance emerges. The Chrysanthemum and the Sword is a continuation of Benedict’s lifelong project (shared with her mentor, Franz Boas) seen in such earlier works as Race: Science and Politics (1940) and her pamphlet The Races of Mankind (1943) aimed at denying race as a meaningful scholarly category. Benedict labors to replace anthropology’s earlier stress on race with a view that insists instead on the importance of culture, a project that took on added urgency in the wake of wartime genocide. Benedict’s efforts to deny scientific validity to a biological conception of race was noted by at least one early Japanese reader. 27 In asserting the importance of cultural difference and rejecting racial prejudice, Benedict intends to provoke critical reflection not only among the Japanese but also among her American readers.28

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In this, Benedict lays down the prototype for a key ideological tenet of what would become Cold War liberalism. In the ideological competition with the Soviet Union, the persistence of violent racism in the United States was an obvious Achilles’ heel. As a result, as Christina Klein has noted, the “Cold War consensus” that governed American culture after 1945 was defined not only by “containment”—that is, by what it was against (Communism)—but also by what it was for: “integration” and multiculturalism. In contrast to nineteenth-century imperial powers, the captains of America’s postwar expansion explicitly denounced the idea of essential racial differences and hierarchies. They generated instead a wide-ranging discourse of racial tolerance and inclusion that served as the official ideology undergirding postwar expansion.29

In narrating a noncoercive mode for explicating American hegemony in Asia, cultural difference was now to be embraced, with cultural boundaries drawn only so that they could be crossed in the process of building the ties of a universal “family of man” based on sentiment, tolerance, and mutual respect. As a result of this stress on integration, domestic American racism became a crisis for Cold War foreign relations. It was a troubling legacy of the sort of imperialism from which the United States was at pains to distinguish itself. Benedict was a pioneering champion of this line: she identifies the Asian Exclusion Act of 1924, for example, and “our racial attitudes toward the non-white peoples of the world” as one of the causal factors behind World War II (308–9).30 As Naoko Shibusawa has argued, however, Benedict’s reifying of Japanese cultural difference often “ended up reconstructing racism through other categories,” primarily culture.31 In this, Benedict embodied one of the paradigmatic ambiguities of Cold War liberalism. American Cold War ideologues struggled with the propaganda nightmare of domestic racism. In Occupied Japan, this resulted in, among other things, a deliberate foregrounding of the Great Emancipator, Abraham Lincoln, as a symbol of American democracy. Annual Lincoln Day celebrations were sponsored by the America-Japan Cultural Society with the backing of Occupation authorities.32 In a celebratory message read at the 1951 ceremony, Illinois governor Adlai Stevenson declared Lincoln a “world statesman” whose “concept of freedom and brotherhood recognized no barriers of geography, race or nationality” and concluded that “in these days of anxiety concerning the peace of the world we do well to look at his example of firmness and faith that liberty and justice will prevail over tyranny.” Another congratulatory message, from David Sarnoff, chairman of the board of RCA, likewise stressed Lincoln’s ideals as a tool to “dissolve prejudiced opinion.”33 The organizer of the event, Jiuji Kasai, repeated this emphasis on Lincoln as a



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symbol for integration and drew the connection to the contemporary politics of containment. Since the Allied Occupation, the new Constitution was drafted and the democratic form of government was established in Japan. But, the bulk of our people do not yet understand the true meaning of democracy, as the Communists have been making sinister propaganda to confuse liberty with license. While the party politicians have been fighting for their own gain, the Soviet-directed Communists have organized their nation-wide cell systems with enormous funds. They are doing their utmost to destroy our old heritage as reactionary, and are attacking American democracy as capitalistic imperialism in order to create anti-American feeling among the Japanese people. . . . Against their relentless attack, the abstract theories of democracy had no positive and concrete force. At this moment, the life and character of Abraham Lincoln came to me in bold relief to illustrate to the Japanese people America’s true spirit of democracy in contrast with Soviet Communism. (11–12)

Returning to Benedict, in addition to her linkage of antiracism to antiCommunism, I’d like to zero in on another site of overlap with the Politics and Literature Debate: her use of two keywords, “culture” and “literature.” Benedict is seeking, as her subtitle tells us, “patterns in Japanese culture.” “Culture” here refers not to elite aesthetic products, such as novels or poems, but rather “the commonplace” (11) or what has become unconscious “habit” through repetition in childhood (281). Yet as an anthropologist studying an enemy culture during wartime, Benedict lacked direct access to daily life in Japan. In place of conventional fieldwork, she relied on interviews with Japanese-Americans, previously published secondary sources on Japan, and—of most interest for our purposes—Japanese literary works. (Benedict, in fact, began her scholarly career as a specialist not in anthropology but in literature.)34 For example, her explication of the untranslatable on from Japanese culture is grounded in a reading of Natsume Sōseki’s 1906 novel Botchan (107–9). Likewise, she cites literary texts as sources to demonstrate that romantic love is widespread in Japan (183), that the flesh and spirit are not at war in Japanese culture (189–90), and that Japanese moral expectations for justice differ from those of Westerners (198–207). Benedict even alludes to Kobayashi Takiji and Japan’s proletarian literature movement.35 For Benedict, literature does not function as an exceptional product grounded in the talent of individual genius but rather represents Japanese culture as a whole in its everyday habits and practices. Literature for her is inherently national literature. Here, she adopts a position contrary to that of Hirano Ken or Ara Masahito (or, for that matter, Lionel Trilling), for whom literature is a rarified product of unique authors and their existential encounters with radical negativity; it is national only in the sense that Japan

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has failed to produce a figure on a par with Romain Rolland or Thomas Mann. The crisis Hirano and Ara confront is Japan’s failure, due to its critical inability to distinguish politics from literature, to produce a true literature. Such a literature would not be representative of the Japanese nation but rather exceptional to it. Ironically, the liberal Benedict’s position here is closer to that of Communist Nakano Shigeharu. In “Bungakusha no kokumin toshite no tachiba” (The role of the writer as national citizen, February 1946), Nakano vows, “Japanese literature is the literature of the Japanese people. It is born in Japan; it finds its life first among the Japanese people. In the absence of Japan and the Japanese people, Japanese literature itself would not exist. The fate of Japan, and of the Japanese people, is itself the soil in which Japanese literature is rooted.”36 Nakano will subsequently condemn Hirano and Ara for mounting what he calls the literary reaction, bemoaning their advocacy of what he sees as an elitist notion of freedom.37 According to Nakano, in the democratic revolution of postwar Japan, reactionary forces have only literature and other forms of culture to rely on as weapons, because contemporary literature manifests the spiritual weakness of the people (minzoku) that is a result of the recent war.38 He stresses that the postwar democratic revolution must be grounded not in exceptional individuals but rather in communal effort. This means the participation of the investigators, the investigated, and the readers, all together, in the task of establishing the civic self-consciousness of the Japanese literati. The purpose of this is not to have a rare, fortuitous, and absolutely flawless conscience; rather, it is for ordinary writers in general to work together in paving a new road toward the achievement of civic self-consciousness. Here, too, artistic and theoretical literary creations form a broad foundation.39

Writers can at best serve as “teachers,” pointing out the proper course that the national people should follow in their daily lives.40 A few years later Takeuchi Yoshimi would develop a similar line of thought. In the national literature debate of the early 1950s, in many ways a continuation of the Politics and Literature Debate, Takeuchi explicitly rejected the widespread view of “the writer as an isolated individual, alone with his thoughts, which require unique artistic expression” and who must “pursue his craft alone, where he can all the more easily be true to himself and his individual genius.”41 For Takeuchi, the crucial question to explore about Japanese literature as national literature was, “Why didn’t Japan produce anyone like Lu Xun?”42 Japan’s proletarian literature movement represented the failure of Japanese cultural modernity as a whole: it was a characteristic instance of an external authority being reproduced slavishly by a slave that



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refused to recognize its own status as slave. Moreover, postwar critics on both sides of the Politics and Literature Debate continued to miss the point. From the perspective of Chinese literature, it is self-evident that writers act as the agents or spokesmen of national feeling. And it is on the basis of such national feeling that writers are judged, i.e., how and to what extent this feeling is represented. With Japanese literature, however, things are entirely different. The question of whether a writer represents national feeling is completely separated from the question of how this feeling is actually expressed, such that an additional operation is required in order to link the two together. Here lies the ground upon which the typical Japanese question of “politics and literature” is posed. Japanese critics see this separation as of a piece with the radical split in consciousness inherent in modern literature as such, but I would disagree. Rather I  would concur with [Chinese poet] Li Shou that it must be seen as symptomatic of the feudal nature of Japanese literature. In this respect, the journal New Japanese Literature [Shin Nihon bungaku] hardly represents an exception.43

Both Japan’s proletarian literature movement and the postwar critics fighting over its legacies ultimately became instances of the decadence and factionalism that Takeuchi saw as representative of Japanese culture in its incomplete modernity. Nakano and Takeuchi parallel Benedict in the way they take literature as representative of Japanese national culture in its everyday habits and practices. But there is an obvious difference between them as well. For Benedict, literature is national but not political. Japanese literature reflects a national culture that is impervious to revolution, even in the turbulent postwar era. Labor activism in postwar Japan was like premodern peasant revolts, she argues, explaining that they were “not class warfare in the Western sense, and they were not an attempt to change the system itself” (310). In contrast, for both Nakano and Takeuchi, because Japanese literature is inherently a national literature, it must also be political: it must become a crucial tool in a national awakening that will complete the revolution to realize modernity in Asia. This difference in positions would continue to reverberate throughout the Cold War as both a political and literary question. The third American intertext is the collection The God That Failed, published in 1950. Edited by the British Labour MP Richard Crossman, it consists of six autobiographical essays by prominent writers, each depicting his own youthful involvement and subsequent disillusionment with the Communist Party. In other words, it is an anthology of what Japanese literary scholars would call tenkō literature. Its roster of contributors constitutes a stellar collection of midcentury Western literati: novelists Arthur Koestler,

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Ignazio Silone, Richard Wright, and André Gide (recipient in 1947 of the Nobel Prize in Literature); journalist Louis Fischer; and poet Stephen Spender. The book created a sensation upon publication, with the Englishlanguage version selling more than 160,000 copies within four years. Not specifically an American product—among the authors only Wright and Fischer were US citizens—nonetheless the work became a cultural Bible of the American-centered anti-Communist bloc that emerged during the Cold War. The book’s wide promulgation abroad was due in large measure to direct and indirect CIA sponsorship. The CIA also bankrolled the Congress for Cultural Freedom (CCF), the organization responsible for the book’s publication. With this support, The God That Failed was quickly translated into sixteen languages.44 A Japanese edition translated by Murakami Yoshio and Yarita Ken’ichi appeared under the title Kami wa tsumazuku in 1950. The book attracted considerable attention in Japan. It was reviewed in the Asahi newspaper, and Takeuchi Yoshimi published a positive review in Ningen. He raises questions about the contributors’ level of understanding of East Asia but finds in The God That Failed an opportunity to again criticize the Japanese literary world by negative comparison: On reflection, I wonder who among Japanese literati can be said to have written this sort of confession. They know how to drown themselves in emotions and how to make sharp comebacks, but they never narrate their own experiences of failure for the sake of those around them, those who would come after (excepting only some fragments from Tanaka Hidemitsu and the unfinished confession of Takami Jun). They were simply playing at politics and were never authentic literati. Japan never had even a real tenkō literature.45

After publication of the Japanese translation of The God That Failed, its authors continued to appear before Japanese readers. Translations of essays on the problems of politics and literature by Spender, Silone, and Gide appeared in a number of Japanese intellectual journals around 1950. The CCF was particularly active in Japan, hosting international conferences in Tokyo in 1955 and 1960. Stephen Spender, the editor of its house organ, Encounter, would travel to Japan in 1957 and meet with a number of Japanese writers and critics.46 Arthur Koestler would follow in 1959.47 The God That Failed includes numerous references to Asia and Japan—in particular to the attempts by Western Communist parties to develop policies toward fascist Japan during the war years. Moreover, it also provides much evidence of the antiracist position characteristic of Cold War liberalism. Containment cannot be achieved without integration and respect for cultural difference, the various writers realize. As Crossman notes in his introduction,



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Richard Wright’s flirtation with Communism “is a reminder that, whatever its failures in the West, Communism still comes as a liberating force among the Colored peoples who make up the great majority of mankind.”48 Wright himself acknowledges that it was Stalin’s advocacy of respect for minority cultures that attracted him to the Communist Party: “I had read with awe how the Communists had sent phonetic experts into the vast regions of Russia to listen to the stammering dialects of peoples oppressed for centuries by the czars. . . . And I had exclaimed to myself how different this was from the way in which Negroes were sneered at in America” (130). In particular, when we read The God That Failed as an intertext of the Politics and Literature Debate, one feature is highlighted: Japanese literary critics in 1946 were already relying on keywords and concepts that in coming years would become central to the thought of anti-Communist intellectuals around the globe. The Italian novelist Silone’s description of the act of writing literature, for example, echoes the existentialist language of struggle and individuality that had a few years earlier appeared in Hirano’s and Ara’s essays in Japan: “For me writing has not been, and never could be, except in a few favored moments of grace, a serene aesthetic enjoyment, but rather the painful and lonely continuation of a struggle” (81). Silone also relates the appeal of Communism to youth in language remarkably similar to that used by Ara in his essay “Dai-ni no seishun.” Hirano’s explication of the problematic relationship of the bourgeois writer to proletarian literature likewise foreshadows language used by several God That Failed authors. Koestler writes sarcastically of the position of middleclass literati within the proletarian culture movement: A member of the intelligentsia could never become a real proletarian, but his duty was to become as nearly one as he could. Some tried to achieve this by forsaking neckties, by wearing polo sweaters and black fingernails. This, however, was discouraged: it was imposture and snobbery. The correct way was never to write, say, and above all never to think, anything which could not be understood by the dustman. (49)

Wright comments on the tension he felt among supposed comrades who looked down on him for being a bourgeois intellectual, a label that shocked him given that he had only a primary education and was sweeping streets for a living at the time. Spender writes of the “creative artist” whose “sensibility, which is decided for him in his childhood, is bourgeois. He can scarcely hope to acquire by an act of political will a working-class mentality” (236). The language that Hirano uses to define the difference between “politics” and “literature” would also be replicated in The God That Failed. According to Hirano, “the definitive characteristic of politics is that the end justifies

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the means.” By contrast, “in matters of literature and art, in particular, the very process of edging ever closer step-by-step toward the end is in itself the end. In their domain, not even the slightest separation of ‘means and end’ is permitted. In other words, it is from the means themselves that the end to be realized must be worked out.”49 Hirano condemns the JCP and proletarian activists for the ethical failing of believing the end (revolution) justifies whatever means are taken to achieve it. Literature for Hirano defines a humanistic ethical practice in which the means must be an end in itself. Nearly all The God That Failed authors invoke similar Kantian language: it clearly became a kind of cliché of anti-Communist writing. Koestler insists that “the end justifies the means only within very narrow limits” (68), while Fischer writes, My pro-Sovietism led me into the further error of thinking that a system founded on the principle of “the end justifies the means” could ever create a better world or a better human being. Immoral means produce immoral ends—and immoral persons—under Bolshevism and under capitalism. (225)

Likewise, Spender writes that to accept the Communist view meant that “one did not have to consider, except from the point of view of their effectiveness, the means which were used” (235). In sum, bringing in The God That Failed as an intertext allows us to see how the Politics and Literature Debate participated in the creation of a vocabulary of clichés that would be shared by anti-Communist intellectuals around the globe. Reading the two sets of texts side by side also allows us to see differences in the contemporary situations of the United States and Japan. In the Anglophone world, The God That Failed provided a rare public platform for former Communists, normally the target of silencing under Red Scare censorship. Reading its various autobiographical narratives, we find—especially when compared with the more one-dimensional writings of other contemporary anti-Communist thinkers—that the representation of Communism presented by The God That Failed writers is diverse and complex. Moreover, their accounts of the injustices generated by contemporary Western racism, imperialism, and capitalism are often sharply critical.50 In other words, The God That Failed provided an opportunity for a leftist social critique that found few other mainstream outlets under prevailing political conditions in the United States. It seems that leftist writers who foregrounded their anti-Communist credentials were permitted a wide degree of latitude in criticizing liberal capitalist society. On the other hand, as the informal censorship imposed on novelist Pearl S. Buck and journalist Helen Mears in the 1950s indicates, intellectuals who criticized American foreign policy—that is, openly opposed US Cold War policies toward the Communist bloc—risked



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losing access to public forums for commenting on America’s domestic social problems.51 This suggests one important difference between the Politics and Literature Debate and The God That Failed. The authors who published in The God That Failed and similar venues in the United States did not have to engage in direct debates with actual Communists. Their opponents were largely excluded from mainstream literary and political publications and were thus denied effective public venues from which to answer the criticisms launched at them. This situation was decisively different from that in 1946–1947 Japan. Hirano, Ara, and others who criticized the JCP from the standpoint of liberalism or humanism did so in a situation that required them to respond directly, and sometimes with obvious discomfit, to counterarguments launched against them by Nakano and other JCP intellectuals. This difference was a by-product of what Marukawa Tetsushi and Ann Sherif have called the air-pocket situation that characterized Cold War Japan. Unlike Germany, China, Korea, or Vietnam, postwar Japan was not partitioned into rigidly Communist and anti-Communist zones. And while Japan saw its share of Red purges, unlike the United States its Communist Party remained throughout the Cold War a viable political party. This air-pocket condition (perhaps most similar to that of France, Italy, and other undivided Western European countries) was one of the distinguishing conditions that shaped Japanese literary criticism in the period, and we see its impact on the Politics and Literature Debate as well. It does not mean, however, that Japan was somehow immune from the Cold War: this air-pocket situation was itself a product of the global Cold War. In conclusion, as an extension of the preceding discussion, I’d like to touch on the history of Japanese studies, especially Japanese literary studies, in North America. Like postwar Japanese literary criticism, Japan studies in the American academy was a product of Cold War ideological struggle, specifically the promotion of area studies as a new academic field that could contribute to the projects of containment and integration. The founding figures of Japanese literary studies in the United States were by and large trained within the world of the three intertexts discussed in the preceding. Benedict’s The Chrysanthemum and the Sword was itself, of course, a foundational text of postwar Japan studies. Trilling influenced a number of early scholars of modern Japanese literature, including Donald Keene, who studied with him at Columbia.52 Edwin McClellan, another seminal scholar of Japanese literature, trained in the 1950s at the University of Chicago under the direction of Friedrich Hayek, a key figure in Cold War conservative anti-Communism.53 Edward Seidensticker, future translator of The Tale of Genji, was in the late 1950s and early 1960s employed as Japan liaison by the CCF, the organization behind The God That Failed. Seidensticker was based in Tokyo

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and reported to, among others, undercover CIA agent Scott Charles at the organization’s headquarters in Paris. During the course of his employment Seidensticker traveled on CCF business around the world, including visits to London, Paris, Basel, Cairo, Karachi, Bombay, New Delhi, Seoul, and Manila. In his autobiography, he indicates that he was aware at the time of the CCF’s CIA connections.54 I began this essay by listing articles from Ningen as a way of capturing a snapshot of Japanese literary critical discourse circa 1946–1947. Let me conclude with a list of articles from another literary journal, Encounter, during the first five years of its existence: Dazai Osamu, “Two Stories,” trans. Edward Seidensticker (no.  1, October 1953) Melvin J. Lasky, “A Sentimental Traveller in Japan (I)” (no. 2, November 1953) Melvin J. Lasky, “A Sentimental Traveller in Japan (II)” (no. 3, December 1953) François Bondy, “ ‘Asia’: Does It Exist?” (no. 4, January 1954) Edmund Blunden, “Eight Japanese Poems” (no. 5, February 1954) (translations of haiku by Bashō, Buson, and others) William Barrett, “The Great Bow” (book review of Eugen Herrigel, Zen and the Art of Archery) (no. 7, April 1954) D. J. Enright, “Notes from a Japanese University” (no. 8, May 1954)  Raymond Aron, “Asia: Between Malthus and Marx” (no. 11, August 1954) Ken’ichi Yoshida, “The Literary Situation in Japan” (no. 18, March 1955) John Morris, “Reflections in a Japanese Mirror” (film reviews of Seven Samurai and Children of Hiroshima) (no. 21, June 1955) Christopher Sykes, “Hitler Leads to Hiroshima” (book review of Michihiko Hachiya, Hiroshima Diary) (no. 25, October 1955) Hilary Corke, “Opening Up” (book review of Jun’ichirō Tanizaki, Some Prefer Nettles) (no. 31, April 1956)  Ibuse Masuji, “Crazy Iris,” trans. Ivan Morris (no. 32, May 1956) Herbert Passin, “Letter from Tokyo: Headhunters, Watersprites, and Heroes” (no. 36, September 1956) Mishima Yukio, “Hanjo,” trans. Donald Keene (no. 40, January 1957) Herbert Passin, “A Nation of Readers” (no. 42, March 1957) Angus Wilson, “A Century of Japanese Writing” (book review of Donald Keene, ed., Modern Japanese Literature) (no. 42, April 1957) Herbert Passin, “The Mountain Hermitage: Pages from a Japanese Notebook” (no. 47, August 1957) Dwight MacDonald, “Fictioneers” (book review of Yasunari Kawabata, Snow Country) (no. 48, September 1957)  Bertrand de Jouvenel, “Asia Is Not Russia:  Or America Either” (no.  49, October 1957) 



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Edward Seidensticker, “The World’s Cities: Tokyo” (no. 50, November 1957) Stephen Spender and Angus Wilson, “Some Japanese Observations” (no. 51, December 1957) Nakashima Ton [Nakajima Atsushi], “The Expert,” trans. Ivan Morris (no. 56, May 1958) Edward Seidensticker, “On Trying to Translate Japanese” (no.  59, August 1958) D. J. Enright, “Empire of the English Tongue” (no. 63, December 1958)  The editorial staff of Encounter largely overlapped with the team that produced The God That Failed. A CCF publication secretly bankrolled by the CIA and British intelligence services, Encounter was aimed at a wide readership in Europe, Asia, South America, and Africa. Its propaganda targets were not Marxists or advocates of anti-Americanism but rather centrist or left-of-center intellectuals prone to advocate a stance of geopolitical neutralism—in Japan, those who would ally with the Japan Socialist Party and who might read, for example, Shiseidō’s monthly journal Jiyū, also bankrolled by the CCF.55 The journal’s editors knew that to be effective, they had to keep the journal free of the smell of obvious propaganda. When we page through issues of Encounter from the 1950s, we encounter the names of Trilling and several God That Failed authors. As the preceding list shows, we also encounter the names of the scholars who built the field of Japanese literary studies in North America: Keene, Seidensticker, Ivan Morris. Some of the earliest translations of giants of modern Japanese literature first appeared in the journal, and it regularly reported on the current state of literary criticism and intellectual discourse in Japan. For the first generation of scholars of Japanese literature in the United States during the 1950s, Encounter seems to have been an important venue. Through it, their early translations and criticism reached a broad audience of general readers. It is unclear how many of them (besides Seidensticker) knew of the journal’s ties to the CIA, or how they would have responded to such knowledge. But it does seem clear that the Cold War propaganda vehicle Encounter played an important role in establishing Japanese literary studies as a discipline and in presenting its scholarship to a global audience. I conclude with this detour to remind us that not only postwar Japanese literary criticism but also the framework through which we in the Englishspeaking world study Japanese literature are rooted in the global Cold War. The Cold War is generally said to have ended around 1990 with the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the Soviet empire in Eastern Europe, although continuing tensions in East Asia (Korea, Taiwan, Okinawa, China) make the Cold War seem more like, to paraphrase William Faulkner (whose

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1955 goodwill visit to Japan was another US Cold War propaganda effort), a past that isn’t even past yet. The Politics and Literature Debate can help us understand the position of Japanese literature in the Cold War—if we keep in mind that the lens through which we examine it is also a legacy of that ideological struggle. NOTES 1. See, for example, Marukawa Tetsushi, Reisen bunkaron: Wasurerareta aimai na sensō no genzaisei (On Cold War culture: The contemporariness of the forgotten enigmatic war) (Tokyo: Sōfūsha, 2005), and Ann Sherif, Japan’s Cold War: Media, Literature, and the Law (New York: Columbia University Press, 2009). 2. On Adorno, Horkheimer, and Auerbach as figures of Cold War culture, see Andrew Rubin, Archives of Authority: Empire, Culture, and the Cold War (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2012), 74–86, 90–108. On René Wellek and Austin Warren, see Mark Walhout, “The New Criticism and the Crisis of American Liberalism:  The Poetics of the Cold War,” College English, 49, no. 8 (December 1987): 861–71. 3. Rubin, Archives of Authority, 39–43. On US Cold War cultural policy in Japan and Okinawa, see Chizuru Saeki, U.S. Cultural Propaganda in Cold War Japan: Promoting Democracy 1948–1960 (Lewiston, N.Y.: Mellen Press, 2007), and Michael Schaller, The American Occupation of Japan: The Origins of the Cold War in Asia (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985). 4. See, for example, Nora Waln, “Is Japanese Youth Going Communist?” Saturday Evening Post, August 6, 1949, 36–37, 76–78; Joseph Yamagiwa, “Fiction in Post-War Japan,” Far Eastern Quarterly 13, no. 1 (November 1953): 3–22; Harry Emerson Wildes, “The War for the Mind of Japan,” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 294 (July 1954): 1–7; and Anthony West, “Letter from Tokyo,” New Yorker, June 22, 1957, 33–73. 5. Sherif, Japan’s Cold War, 14. 6. See, for example, George Orwell, “The Future of Socialism IV: Toward European Unity,” Partisan Review, July–August 1947, 346–51. 7. Louis Menand, introduction to The Liberal Imagination, by Lionel Trilling (New York: New York Review of Books, 2008), vii. 8. George Watson, “The Empire of Lionel Trilling,” Sewanee Review 115, no. 3 (2007): 484–90. The “Holy Writ” passage appears on 484. 9. Lionel Trilling, Bungaku to seishin bunseki, trans. Ōtake Masaru (Tokyo: Hyōronsha, 1959). On the efforts to transmit Trilling’s writings around the globe, see Rubin, Archives of Authority, 68–69. 10. Lionel Trilling, The Middle of the Journey, trans. Saitō Kazue and Ōtake Masaru as Tabiji no naka ni, in Gendai Amerika bungaku zenshū (Complete works of contemporary American literature) (Tokyo: Arechi shuppansha, 1958).



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11. See, for example, Nishikawa Masami, “Lionel Trilling-cho, ‘The Liberal Imagination,’ Morton Dauwen Zabel-cho, ‘Literary Opinion in America’ ” (Lionel Trilling’s The Liberal Imagination, Morton Dauwen Zabel’s Literary Opinion in America), Eibungaku kenkyū 28, no.  2 (1952):  254–57; Ōtake Masaru, “Futatabi Toriringu ni tsuite” (Another consideration of Trilling), Tōkyō keidaigaku gakkai 12 (1954):  67–95; and Ōnuki Saburō, “Lionel Trilling no shōsetsuron” (On Lionel Trilling’s novels), Kenkyū ronshū:  Shinshū daigaku kyōikugakubu jinbun shakai 3 (1953): 64–73. The last appears to be a Japanese translation of an essay by Trilling on fiction, but I have been unable to identify the original source. 12. Taniguchi Rikuo, “Amerika bunmei kara no tōsō:  Henrī Jeimuzu ni kansuru oboegaki” (Struggle from American civilization: A note on Henry James), Ningen 5, no. 10 (October 1950): 16–29. 13. Russell J. Reising, “Lionel Trilling, The Liberal Imagination, and the Emergence of the Cultural Discourse of Anti-Stalinism,” boundary 2 20, no. 1 (1993): 94–124. 14. Trilling, The Liberal Imagination, xv. Subsequent references to this work are given parenthetically. 15. J.  Victor Koschmann, Revolution and Subjectivity in Postwar Japan (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 75. 16. Christina Klein, Cold War Orientalism: Asia in the Middlebrow Imagination, 1945–1961 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003), 66. 17. Hirano Ken, “ ‘Seiji no yūisei’ to wa nani ka” (1946), reprinted in Hirano Ken zenshū (Collected works of Hirano Ken) (Tokyo:  Shinchōsha, 1974–1975), 1:216–25. For an English translation, see Atsuko Ueda, Michael K. Bourdaghs, Richi Sakakibara, and Hirokazu Toeda, eds., The Politics and Literature Debate in Postwar Japanese Criticism, 1945–52 (Lanham, Md.: Lexington Books, 2017): 115–25. Subsequent references to this essay are given parenthetically. 18. On Arishima’s notion of “representation” in politics and literature and its reappropriation in the postwar debate, see Satō Izumi, Sengo hihyō no metahisutorī: Kindai o kioku suru ba (The metahistory of postwar criticism: Modern sites of memory) (Tokyo: Iwanami shoten, 2005), 165–87. 19. Ibid., 178–79. 20. See, for example, Margaret Mead, “Ruth Fulton Benedict 1887–1948,” American Anthropologist, n.s., 51, no. 3 (July–September 1949): 457–68. 21. For “Tensei jingo” columns that touch on The Chrysanthemum and the Sword, see the Asahi newspapers of February 8, 1949, and May 4, 1950. 22. On the Japanese reception of Benedict’s work, see Sonia Ryang, “Chrysanthemum’s Strange Life:  Ruth Benedict in Postwar Japan,” Occasional Paper 32 (July 2004), Japan Policy Research Institute, University of San Francisco Center for the Pacific Rim. See also Minzokugaku kenkyū 14, no. 4 (May 1950), for a special issue devoted to Benedict, including essays by Yanagita and Watsuji; Tsurumi Kazuko, “Kiku to katana: Amerikajin no mita Nihonteki dōtoku-kan” (The Chrysanthemum and the Sword: An American view on the Japanese sense of morality) Shisō 276 (March 1947):  221–24; and Tsuda Sōkichi, “Kiku to katana no kuni: Gaikokujin no Nihon kenkyū ni tsuite” (The land of the chrysanthemum and the sword: Regarding research on Japan by foreigners) Tenbō 65 (May 1951): 6–25.

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23. John W. Bennett and Michio Nagai, “The Japanese Critique of the Methodology in Benedict’s ‘Chrysanthemum and the Sword,’ ” American Anthropologist, n.s., 55, no. 3 (August 1953), 404–11. 24. Ruth Benedict, The Chrysanthemum and the Sword: Patterns of Japanese Culture (1946; repr., New York: Meridian, 1974), 315. Subsequent references to this work are given parenthetically. 25. “What Mrs. Benedict has done by way of interpreting Japanese culture needs to be done by the same investigator, or by someone else equally competent, for the culture and life of the Russian people. In such interpretations lies the road to that world understanding which is needed in order that the United Nations may develop and become effective” (Emory S. Bogardus, review of The Chrysanthemum and the Sword, by Ruth Benedict, Social Forces 25, no. 4 [May 1947]: 454–55). 26. See, for example, Ryang, “Chrysanthemum’s Strange Life.” 27. “The author situates the cultural anthropologist on the front lines of the race problem as a scientist who resolves the anxieties and discord that are entangled in this problem” (Hayashi Sanpei, “Kokuminsei hihan no ichi shiten: Rūsu Benedikuto-cho Kiku to katana” [From the perspective of critique of nationality: Ruth Benedict’s The Chrysanthemum and the Sword], Amerika kenkyū 5, no. 5 [May 1950]: 69–74). 28. See Richard Handler, “Boasian Anthropology and the Critique of American Culture,” American Quarterly 42, no. 2 (June 1990): 252–73, and Clifford Geertz, Works and Lives: The Anthropologist as Author (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1988), 102–28. 29. Klein, Cold War Orientalism, 11. 30. See Lisa Yoneyama, “Habits of Knowing Cultural Differences: Chrysanthemum and the Sword in the U.S. Liberal Multiculturalism,” Topoi 18, no. 1 (1999): 71–80. 31. Naoko Shibusawa, America’s Geisha Ally: Reimagining the Japanese Enemy (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2006), 296. 32. On the Lincoln Day celebration, see Saeki, U.S. Cultural Propaganda, 118–24. See also the commemorative pamphlet The Lincoln Day Celebration (Tokyo: America-Japan Cultural Society, 1951). 33. Stevenson’s and Sarnoff’s messages are reproduced in Lincoln Day Celebration, 5, 8. Subsequent quotations from this work will be cited parenthetically. 34. On Benedict’s literary past, see C. Douglas Lummis, “Ruth Benedict’s Obituary for Japanese Culture,” Japan Focus 5, no. 7 (July 19, 2007), accessed August 10, 2012, http://japanfocus.org/-C__Douglas-Lummis/2474. 35. “Japan also has her proletarian novels protesting desperate economic conditions in the cities and terrible happenings on commercial fishing boats,” but Benedict identifies these as being outside the mainstream of what she calls character novels, presumably referring to the I-novel genre (166). 36. Nakano Shigeharu, “Bungakusha no kokumin toshite no tachiba” (1946), reprinted in Nakano Shigeharu zenshū (Complete works of Nakano Shigeharu) (Tokyo:  Chikuma shobō, 1979), 12:25. For an English translation, see Ueda et  al., Politics and Literature Debate, 159–69. 37. Nakano Shigeharu, “Hihyō no ningensei I: Hirano Ken Ara Masahito ni tsuite” (The humanity of criticism: Concerning Hirano Ken and Ara Masahito) (1946),



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reprinted in Nakano Shigeharu zenshū, 12:84. For an English translation, see Ueda et al., Politics and Literature Debate, 105–14. 38. Nakano Shigeharu, “Hihyō no ningensei II: Bungaku handō no mondai nado” (The humanity of criticism II: On the literary reaction et cetera) (1947), reprinted in Nakano Shigeharu zenshū, 12:96. For an English translation, see Ueda et al., Politics and Literature Debate, 137–49. 39. Ibid., 102. 40. Nakano, “Bungakusha no kokumin toshite,” 32. 41. Richard F. Calichman, ed. and trans., Introduction to What Is Modernity? Writings of Takeuchi Yoshimi, by Takeuchi Yoshimi (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005), 3. 42. Takeuchi Yoshimi, “Ways of Introducing Culture (Japanese Literature and Chinese Literature II)—Focusing upon Lu Xun,” trans. Richard F.  Calichman, in Takeuchi, What Is Modernity?, 46. 43. Takeuchi Yoshimi, “The Question of Politics and Literature (Japanese Literature and Chinese Literature I),” trans. Richard F.  Calichman, in Takeuchi, What Is Modernity?, 86–87. 44. David C. Engerman, foreword to The God That Failed, by Richard H. Crossman (New York: Columbia University Press, 2001), vii–xxxiv. See also Frances Stonor Saunders, The Cultural Cold War: The CIA and the World of Arts and Letters (New York: New Press, 2000). 45. Takeuchi Yoshimi, “Kurossuman hen Kami wa tsumazuku” (Crossman, editor, The God That Failed), Ningen 5, no. 12 (December 1950): 148–49. 46. Stephen Spender, “Some Japanese Observations,” Encounter 9, no. 6 (December 1957): 49–51. 47. On Koestler’s visit, see Edward Seidensticker, Tokyo Central: A Memoir (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2002), 87–91. 48. Crossman, The God That Failed, 9. Subsequent references to this text are given parenthetically. 49. Hirano Ken, “Hitotsu no hansotei” (An antithesis) (1946), reprinted in Hirano Ken zenshū (Collected works of Hirano Ken) (Tokyo:  Shinchōsha, 1974– 1975), 1: 183. For an English translation, see Ueda et al., Politics and Literature Debate, 87–92. 50. Engerman, foreword, xxiii. 51. On Buck, see Klein, Cold War Orientalism, 123–35. On Mears, see Shibusawa, America’s Geisha Ally, 61–63. 52. When Keene traveled to London in 1940, Trilling provided a letter of introduction to E. M. Forster. See Donald Keene, Chronicles of My Life: An American in the Heart of Japan (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008), 70. 53. See the expression of gratitude to McClellan for editorial assistance in Friedrich Hayek, The Constitution of Liberty (1960; repr., Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011), 42. McClellan’s pathbreaking translation of Natsume Sōseki’s Kokoro, published in 1957 by the conservative Henry Regnery Company, was produced to allow Hayek to read one of the works taken up in McClellan’s dissertation, “An Introduction to Natsume Soseki: A Japanese Novelist” (Committee on Social Thought,

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University of Chicago, 1957). Prior to his encounter with Hayek, McClellan had studied with another seminal figure of American conservatism, Russell Kirk, author of The Conservative Mind (1953). See Hirotsugu Aida, “The Soseki Connection: Edwin McClellan, Friedrich Hayek, and Jun Eto,” 2008, http://www.tokyofoundation.org/en/ articles/2008/the-soseki-connection-edwin-mcclellan-friedrich-hayek-and-jun-eto. 54. On Seidensticker’s work with the CCF, see his Tokyo Central, esp. 87–95. Seidensticker’s correspondence and receipts for salary and travel expenses with the CCF are archived in the papers of the International Association for Cultural Freedom, series IV, box 11, Special Collections Research Center, Regenstein Library, University of Chicago. Scott Charles, one of Seidensticker’s main correspondents at CCF, is identified as a CIA agent in Saunders, The Cultural Cold War, 243. 55. For a detailed account of the history of Encounter, see Saunders, The Cultural Cold War.

Chapter 2

The Korean War and Disputed Memories Kim Dal-su’s Nihon no fuyu and the 1955 System Ko Youngran Translated by Michael K. Bourdaghs

Kim Dal-su’s novel1 Nihon no fuyu (Japan’s winter) was serialized in Akahata, the official newspaper of the Japan Communist Party (JCP), from August 18 to December 31, 1956. It was subsequently published in book form by Chikuma shobō in April 1957. Nihon no fuyu was at the center of controversy from the time of its publication. According to an appendix included in the book version, soon after the beginning of its serialization a dozen or more letters were received by the Akahata editorial office, most “raising complaints. . . . Even within the Akahata editorial staff there were some (only some, not the entire staff) who were displeased with the serialization and for whom the letters were like a gift from heaven; under the pretext of ‘popular opinion’ they moved secretly to interfere with the author’s writing.” A response by Kim Dal-su (“From the Author”) is included in the same appendix. In it, he writes, “There were some who offered strong encouragement, but most expressed unhappiness with the passages that touched on the turmoil that arose in the party beginning in 1950.” Once this “From the Author” was published, some “thirty letters were sent from around the country to the author (and in addition others were sent to the Akahata editorial staff).”2 These letters manifest one layer of the controversy: Nihon no fuyu was widely read at the time as being JCP “propaganda.” For example, a letter from “a reader from Nagoya” goes so far as to declare that, while Nihon no fuyu may belong linguistically to the genre of the novel, “I wish it would acknowledge the painful past when there were ‘two parties,’ but it never carries out a thorough examination of this and ends up regrettably being simple 43

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propaganda for ‘the one party.’ ” Still other readers condemned Nihon no fuyu for being an “exposé of internal party matters” (a letter from “the Akahata Reading Circle at a certain unnamed high school in Kōchi Prefecture”) and urged that the newspaper serialization be suspended.3 This turmoil was in turn reported in Tōkyō shinbun and elsewhere, making known to the outside world this fierce debate involving readers, writers, and editorial staff that unfolded within the space of the JCP official organ, Akahata. Another layer of the controversy revolves around what this narrative conceals: Despite the fact that the narrative of Nihon no fuyu is set in small Korean “settlements” (buraku) in Tokyo, Hiroshima, and elsewhere at the time of the Korean War, and most of the characters who appear in it are ethnically Korean, the word “Korea” never emerged as a point of contention in the debates surrounding the work; the disputes focused rather on whether or not it consisted of JCP “propaganda.” Even the writer Kim Dal-su avoided the word “Korea” as he unfolded his attempt to historicize the JCP and the “1950 problem.” For our present purposes, as we reappraise memories of the Occupation and Korean War, these debates surrounding Nihon no fuyu provide a good opportunity for considering how memories surrounding literature and ethnic identity were reformulated during this period. Up until now, the period from 1945 to 1952 has been framed through the term “Occupation.” In particular, censorship has become an object of focus in tandem with research on the Occupation. Around these words, a number of fine studies have helped highlight the traces of the repression imposed on the “defeated” by the “victors.” Here, though, I want to focus not only on censorship as a repressive legal apparatus deployed through the language of the law but also on the self-censorship of language and how it operated in relation to the internalization of censorship codes within the most severely repressed organizations and their media:  those classified as relating to “Korea” and to the “Japan Communist Party.” Ultimately, I argue that this is precisely the moment that the position of a “zainichi Korean” subject was posited, one distinct from both “Japanese” and “Korean.” NIHON NO FUYU AND THE “KOREAN” WAR: NEITHER KANKOKU NOR CHŌSEN Nihon no fuyu is narrated through the perspectives of Sin Sam-sik, a Korean member of the JCP; Yamaki Keisuke, who is ordered by the Special Investigation Bureau of the Ministry of Justice to keep Sin under surveillance; and Shima Tomoko, who works for a leftist publishing house. The temporal span of the narrative begins immediately after the outbreak of the



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Korean War and ends right after the 1952  “Bloody May Day” incident. In other words, in Nihon no fuyu, the narrative apparatuses of time, space, and incident all serve to summon up the words “Korean War,” “May Day,” and “1950 problem.” In this context, Nihon no fuyu foregrounds the impossibility of a joint struggle between “Koreans” and “Japanese” over the “Korean War.” The beginnings of the 1950 problem—what was described in the debates surrounding Nihon no fuyu as the “painful past” when there were “two parties”—came on January 6, 1950, when a Cominform publication ran an article on “Conditions in Japan.” It severely criticized Nosaka Sanzō’s policy of pursuing a peaceful revolution, which was at the time the official policy of the JCP. This essay by Stalin (published anonymously) urged direct struggle against “American imperialists,” who were “colonial exploiters.” The JCP responded on January 12, issuing a “Commentary,” in which it explained that through the process of resisting changes in Occupation army policies, the flaws in Nosaka’s theory had been overcome through praxis. One week later, however, the JCP Expanded Central Committee retracted this “Commentary” and announced that it was completely accepting the Cominform criticism. In response, the JCP fell into a sharp internal split between two camps, the mainstream (or “Commentary”) faction, led by Tokuda Kyūichi, among others, and the nonmainstream (or “International”) faction, centering on Miyamoto Kenji. Eventually, the Commentary faction won out, and the peaceful revolution policy was abandoned, replaced by a policy of “armed struggle” against the United States aimed at socialist revolution. In response, the Supreme Commander for the Allied Powers (SCAP) and the Japanese government banned twenty-four members of the JCP Central Committee from public positions and later, after the outbreak of the Korean War, issued arrest warrants (on suspicion of violating the law regulating public organizations [Dantaitō kisei hō]) for Tokuda Kyūichi and others. Through this process, the conflict between the Commentary and International factions grew increasingly violent. The narrative of Kim Dal-su’s Nihon no fuyu derives from this series of events. In conventional historical studies, the appellations “Korean War,” “May Day,” and “1950 problem” inscribed in Nihon no fuyu are deeply etched with traces of debates revolving around the “joint” struggle of two ethnicities, “Japanese” and “Koreans.” For example, a contemporary historian Michiba Chikanobu emphasizes the collaborative effort between the two, quoting the testimony of Wakita Ken’ichi, who participated in the protest against the Korean War that is often referred to as the Suita-Hirakata Incident. “It was the Japan Communist Party and zainichi Chōsenjin [Korean residents of Japan] that took up a clear position of ‘opposition to this war,’ ” he writes, noting that “the struggles to ‘protect the fatherland’ and to engage in ‘a people’s war’ were movements launched independently by zainichi Chōsenjin and

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in no way subordinated to the Japan Communist Party.”4 Yet others such as Mun Kyoung-Su grasp the struggle very differently. Mun collects testimony from Koreans who participated in the same protest, including such critical comments as “we were manipulated by the party” and “we were simply used,” and cites the Suita-Hirakata Incident not as an example of joint effort but rather of how “the armed struggle policy of the JCP ended up hopelessly isolating the party and zainichi Chōsenjin from the rest of Japanese society.”5 Mun Kyoung-Su’s study suggests the complexity of the issues at stake here: the very meaning of the protest in question shifts depending on whose voice is chosen as the primary focus. Note, moreover, that Michiba situates and reexamines the struggle within the contexts of the 1950 problem and the Korean War. By contrast, Mun Kyoung-Su moves his historical time axis back one year, pointing out the absence of the kind of “joint” struggle seen during the Korean War at the time of the 1949 dissolution of Chōren (Zainichi Chōsenjin renmei), the organization for resident Koreans in Japan, and confiscation of its property—surely a life-or-death matter for Korean members of the JCP. Mung’s research undermines the myth of the joint struggle that shapes conventional historical studies of the Korean War. While this shows the differing standpoints of the two historians toward the relations between Koreans and the JCP, they in fact share a single paradigm: the Korean War was a war that involved discrete ethnic units, “Japanese” and “Koreans.” However, by analyzing the novel Nihon no fuyu, which takes as its setting this topos of joint struggle and foregrounds only the impossibility of joint struggle over the “Korean War,” I would like to present a far more complex mechanism for representing, creating, producing a voice that is purely “Korean” or “Japanese.” In Sin Sam-sik’s narration, we see exasperation at the outbreak of conflict between the Commentary and International factions even within the depicted cell of Koreans. Moreover, he is expelled from the party after being charged with distributing pamphlets opposing the Korean War in violation of JCP policies. The war in Korea was rapidly spreading. It was clearly no longer a “civil war” or “disturbance” but rather a war of national resistance against American imperialism. . . . The kind of refusal by laborers to participate in shipping weapons seen at the beginning no longer had much effect. Thinking about it now, Sam-sik realized that along the way that course of action had somehow been switched into a “struggle” for higher wages. . . . Surprisingly, this was the policy of the party’s Extraordinary Central Leadership Committee, which had promoted such slogans as “Hands off Korea!” and “Noninterference.” On top of that, it led to “Oppose American imperialism,” which was a classic instance of the so-called



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skewer thesis advocated up until now by certain party members. . . . He couldn’t help but recall what had happened at the time of the dissolution of Chōren.6

In the novel the “Korean War” is the motive force that drives the narrative, but what these words foreground is the fissure between Koreans belonging to the International faction and those allied with the Commentary faction. In other words, while “Korean War” signifies in Korea a “national war against American imperialism,” within Japan it is represented as a war among Korean comrades between the Commentary and International factions. For example, in Hiroshima, a stronghold of the Korean International faction, an “illegal” gathering to commemorate the first anniversary of the outbreak of the Korean War is held. There, what starts as a discussion of “A Report on Developments in the War in the Fatherland” devolves into a debate over the split within the party. While the conflict was labeled as the “Korean War,” the discourse on the war erases “Korea,” replacing it with Japan-specific issues. In Nihon no fuyu, Sin Sam-sik, a member of the International faction, participates in the 1952 May Day event but is injured in police violence before he can join the ranks of either the JCP or the Korean group. Contained in these descriptions is criticism toward the central faction of the JCP at the time (i.e., the Commentary faction), hence representing the perspective of the International faction. Since it was only after 1955 that the International faction became dominant within the party, it can be said that the novel retrospectively reproduced the scene from the perspective of the International faction. The May Day scene in Nihon no fuyu can be contrasted with one found in Jinmin hiroba: Chi no mei dei (People’s Square: Bloody May Day), issued by the editorial office of Akahata immediately after May Day 1952. It is an interesting point of comparison, as Jinmin hiroba presents the “official” account of the incident from the perspective of the Commentary faction in 1952: the ranks of the demonstrators whom Sin was not permitted to join consisted of “one squad of laborers carrying a portrait of JCP secretary Tokuda Kyūichi, followed by Korean laborers carrying the flag of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea and a portrait of General Kim Il-sung,” and they marched toward People’s Square. The Tokuda portrait was a symbol of “the struggle in Japan against war and to preserve peace,” while the Korean banners symbolized “worldwide” support for the Japanese struggle.7 What is important, however, is that in both cases, the Chōsen that forms part of the Japanese noun Chōsen sensō (Korean War) was erased—or more precisely, it was made to function as a sign that can be replaced by the word Nihon (“Japan,” as if it were a Japan War). This erasure serves to create a discursive topos in which the Korean War is discussed as a Japanese problem and is described as something occurring now but over there. Here, one may

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recall Hotta Yoshie’s Akutagawa Prize–winning novella Hiroba no kodoku (The solitude of the public square, 1951), which was praised for taking up the Korean War as an immediate problem for Japanese, Americans, and Chinese. Interestingly, however, Korean characters remain utterly absent from the story. The full implication of this absence is beyond the scope of this paper; suffice it to say, however, that such absence is symptomatic of this erasure of Korea from the “Korean War.” RECORDS, MEMORY, NARRATIVE At stake in the debates surrounding Nihon no fuyu was the question of how to grasp the period that its narrative spans, 1950 to 1952. During those years, the pages of such newspapers as the Asahi, Yomiuri, and Mainichi were usually filled with reports on the Korean War. Along with this, there was a “Korea boom” in the Japanese literary scene. In addition to such well-known writers as Kim Dal-su and the poet Heo Nam-gi, the period from around the time of the Korean War until 1954 also saw the publication of numerous essays and works of fiction by other “Korean” writers like Chang Hyŏkju (Japanese: Chō Kakuchū) and Kim Sa-ryang (Japanese: Kin Shiryō).8 This was also a time in which debates on the question of national literature (kokumin bungaku) were prevalent; within these debates, works written in Japanese by these “Korean” writers were considered to be part of “Japanese” national literature. I would like to argue that these two phenomena—the newspaper reportage on the Korean War and the “Korean” boom in literature—both worked to produce not only a neutral position for the Japanese vis-à-vis the Korean War but also the image of the Korean War as something taking place “over there.” This mechanism cannot be properly understood if we remain trapped in a conceptual framework constructed around such binary oppositions as ChōsenKankoku, people-state, colony-liberation, pro-Japanese–leftist, and Japanese language–Korean language. By introducing the works of Chang Hyŏkju and Kim Sa-ryang, I map out the mechanisms by which a position of Japanese “neutrality” was produced, all the while highlighting the manner in which the Korean War was distanced by the Japanese media. Ultimately, I also locate Kim Dal-su’s role within this. In inquiring into these issues, we need to keep in mind the influence of SCAP censorship. Censorship of magazines was launched in September 1946 by the Press, Pictorial, and Broadcasting Division (PPB), the arm of the Civil Censorship Detachment (CCD) that dealt with media. On October 31, 1949, the CCD was disbanded; with the simultaneous disappearance of the PPB, censorship was supposed to have ended.9 Already from around 1947, a relaxation of censorship policies could be seen with the gradual shift



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from prepublication to postpublication censorship. But daily newspapers like the Asahi decided that postpublication censorship called for greater self-responsibility than the era of prepublication censorship, and in order to avoid the economic damage that a sales ban or confiscation order would bring, as well as to avoid having those responsible for editorial decisions summoned before military courts, they spared no efforts to give SCAP the impression that they were in full accordance with the press code. The results of this are evident in the relative numbers of censorship actions taken during the period of transition to postpublication censorship (January 1 through May 31, 1948). Whereas Akahata suffered 633 and the Kyōdō tsūshin wire agency 545 incidents of censorship, the media that encountered relatively few incidents of censorship included the Mainichi (167), Yomiuri (154), and Asahi (113) newspapers.10 On the day after the outbreak of the Korean War Akahata was slapped with a thirty-day publishing ban for allegedly having published distorted reports about the war; then, on July 18 an open-ended ban was announced. It is usually said that media censorship by SCAP had ended by this time, but it is not hard to imagine that the drastic punishment handed out to Akahata immediately after the outbreak of hostilities influenced war reporting in other media. It was the media that faced relatively few instances of censorship that sent Chang Hyŏkju to cover the Korean War. Mainichi shinbun dispatched Chang to South Korea in July 1951, while the magazine Fujin kurabu did likewise in October 1952, supporting his reporting from the area covered by the advancing Allied forces, composed primarily of South Korean and American militaries. It is well known that Chang became a naturalized Japanese citizen, adopting the legal name Noguchi Minoru, just before his second reporting stint in Korea. But his first trip sponsored by the Mainichi Newspaper Company would likely have been impossible without exceptional measures and support: at the time, Korean writers who wanted to officially visit the Korean Peninsula as reporters faced numerous restrictions.11 Chang Hyŏkju was “Korean” and therefore a “foreigner” in Japan. Among the works he wrote after returning from his trip to cover the Korean War under the auspices of Mainichi shinbun, it was Aa Chōsen (Ah, Korea), published in May 1952 by Shinchōsha, that elicited the biggest response.12 What distinguished this text was the way it structures its depiction around a conflict between the South Korean Army and the (North Korean) People’s Army. This structure becomes apparent as the text narrates the process by which Park Seong-il, the focal character and a volunteer soldier in the People’s Army, is taken prisoner by the South Korean Army and then becomes a soldier in the South Korean National Defense Corps. To borrow language the critic Nakano Yoshio used to describe Chang Hyŏkju’s Aa Chōsen, the Japanese-language media sought writers of the

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Korean War that were “neither sympathizers with North Korea nor allies of South Korea.” Of course, alternating between depictions of scenes of massacres or atrocities committed by both the People’s Army and the South Korean military would achieve such an effect. In Nakano’s words, such descriptions highlight “the merciless reality that both sides descend into inhuman madness . . . blithely committing crimes, all in the name of freedom.”13 Nakano sought to portray this “reality” in order to argue his stance against Japanese rearmament. For Nakano, the narrative content of Aa Chōsen “is in one sense hardly new—if anything, it is precisely what I had imagined.” With regard to this déjà vu–like sensation, the contemporary critic Chang Yun-hyang aptly pointed out that the reports on the Korean War appearing at the time in the Yomiuri, Asahi, and Mainichi newspapers bore a remarkable resemblance to Chang’s Aa Chōsen.14 “Neutral” is the word Shirakawa Yutaka chooses to explain the reasons for Chang Hyŏkju’s positive reception during this period.15 “Neutral” in this case could be rephrased as “apolitical.” But of course “in the end an apolitical stance harbors the danger of serving a particular ideology, regardless of the intention of the person in question.”16 Moreover, for those holding political power such a “passive” stance is most desirable, since it never aims to criticize the authorities. The similarity between Chang Hyŏkju’s Aa Chōsen and the newspaper reports on the Korean War arose because they needed to comply with SCAP’s press codes. In particular, their shared perspective, situating themselves equally distant from the South and North, created a framework that situated the Korean War as something taking place “over there,” with no direct relation to the domain of the Japanese language. Where, then, can we locate Kim Dal-su in all of this? As I have argued elsewhere, it is important to note that Kim Dal-su is unable to assume a subject position as “Korean” precisely because he must engage himself with the fierce conflict between the Commentary and International factions. In order for him to speak as a “Korean” writer, divorced from this factional struggle, he needs to mobilize the image of Kim Sa-ryang. Aa Chōsen, Chang’s fictionalized account of the Korean War as experienced from the side of the South Korean and Allied forces, was at the time positioned as being the polar opposite from the war writings of Kim Sa-ryang, who died in combat while traveling as a war correspondent with the North Korean People’s Army. It was Kim Dal-su who translated Sa-ryang’s “Umi ga mieru” (The sea comes into view) in 1953, the year after the Occupation ended, in Chūō Kōron’s “Autumn Fiction” special issue; he did so with the clear intent of commemorating and valorizing the death in combat of Kim Sa-ryang. In fact, the special issue commemorating Kim Sa-ryang’s death was produced not by Jinmin bungaku, the Commentary faction publication that was home to many Korean activists, but rather by the International faction’s Shin Nihon



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bungaku in its December 1952 issue. At the time, Kim Dal-su was classified as a member of the International faction and found himself being “glared at” by even the Korean organization Bundanren.17 Literary critic Ishigami Minoru would criticize the posthumous work “Umi ga mieru,” arguing that “it may demonstrate the proper way to live one’s life, but it is far too clearly and obviously formulaic.”18 According to Kim Dal-su, similar criticisms appeared in Tōkyō shinbun and Shin Nihon bungaku. The work’s depiction from the perspective of the People’s Army clearly was one reason it became a target for criticism. Kim Dal-su acknowledges this criticism but points out that “up until now there have been no writings that adhered to the perspective of the North Korean side—the reverse side of what can be seen when looking from the perspective of today’s Japan,” so that “at present with regard to the North Korean People’s Army we are completely ignorant—or are made to be ignorant.”19 We cannot say that Kim Dal-su was successful in his attempt at resurrecting Kim Sa-ryang as a trope by which to speak from a “Korean” positionality. However, we see a glimpse here of his effort to intervene in the Japanese media’s ideological construction of the Korean War. APPROPRIATION OF “DIVISION” (BUNDAN) AND “SPLIT” (BUNRETSU) The motive force driving the narrative in Nihon no fuyu is the split that broke out in the Korean community between the International and Commentary factions between 1950 and May Day 1952. This fierce struggle is rendered invisible in Chang Hyŏkju’s short story “Kyōhaku” (Threat), which appeared in the March 1953 issue of Shinchō and is composed around the narrative voice of “I,” who has received a “threatening” letter from the collective Korean community (primarily Chōren).20 We see the same kind of narration in “Kyōhaku” as in Aa Chōsen. In Aa Chōsen the narrative is structured around the notion that the Korean War consists of “bloodshed between fellow countrymen,” as the focal character Park Seong-il switches allegiance between the People’s Army and the South Korean military, but the passages of narration that adhere to his perspective maintain an equal distance from both South and North. “Kyōhaku” likewise is composed around the perspective of an “I” who preserves a critical distance from both the organization for resident Koreans from South Korea (Mindan) and Chōren even as he moves between them. Interestingly, the pro-Japanese actions of “I” during the period of colonial rule and the violent “threats” made by the Korean community in criticism of his decision to naturalize as a Japanese citizen are made to parallel incidents in which Koreans “became embroiled in bloody tragedies and human lives

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suddenly disappeared” in the “violent clashes” between Mindan and Chōren as they established local branches across Japan.21 The affinity between Koreans and violence rendered structural in Chang’s text shares the same framework found in articles reporting clashes among Koreans belonging to the former Chōren and Mindan that appeared in those media outlets that encountered relatively few censorship incidents. Moreover, those articles appeared on the same newspaper pages as reporting on the Korean War, which represented it as the “mutual slaughter of fellow countrymen.” These together helped compose a narrative that linked clashes among fellow Koreans within Japan to violence (the mutual slaughter of fellow countrymen) and, ultimately, deportation from Japan.22 The “I” in “Kyōhaku” wonders, “Chōren, too, accepts that affiliation with the JCP is something that transcends nationalism, so why won’t they accept my becoming a Japanese citizen?” and seeks the reasons for this in “deeply rooted feelings of national identity.”23 But in this story, the depiction of the protagonist’s naturalization to Japanese citizenship generates an image of “Japan” and “Japanese” as something unrelated to “violence.” When memories from before August 15, 1945, are summoned up, Japan as a violent ruler can be narrated, but the period after 1945 is narrated as one in which the Japanese, beginning with “Japan’s police stations,” which “might as well have been renting space from the secretariat of Chōren,” only “curry the favor of the Occupation army and therefore hesitate to deal with organizations of persons belonging to a third country.”24 “I felt a sense of relief in my heart when Chōren was disbanded,” the protagonist declares. Moreover, with regard to the “armed struggle” policy described in the preceding, “I” says, “I wrote opinions denouncing the Molotov cocktail incident. Each time I did so, I received threats and was afraid that Molotov cocktails might be thrown into my bedroom. Whenever I made such statements, I felt a kind of patriotic affection, a desire not to cause trouble for my gentle fellow countrymen.”25 In this narrative of Koreans “causing trouble” for “gentle fellow countrymen” and of “I” feeling “afraid” of Koreans who had no qualms about engaging in the “mutual slaughter of fellow countrymen,”26 the violence of SCAP and the state authorities directed at Koreans—as seen, for example, in the dissolution of Chōren—is never depicted. On the occasion of the dissolution of Chōren on September 8, 1949, the Justice Bureau (Hōmufu), invoking Article 3 of the Cabinet Order for Management and Disposition of Property of Dissolved Organizations, confiscated all Chōren’s property, which the government at the time estimated to be worth some seventy million yen, and banned from public office some thirty-six former officers of the dissolved organization.27 According to clauses 1 and 7 of Article 2 of the Regulations on Organization, the law that was



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applied against Chōren, types of prohibited conduct included “(1) Resistance or opposition to the Occupation military, or to orders issued by the Japanese government under SCAP direction . . . (2) Any attempts to change the government through assassination or other violent measures, or any measures of support for or attempts to justify such violent measures.”28 The violent Koreans depicted in Chang Hyŏkju’s “Kyōhaku” thus functioned to reinforce a stereotype of Koreans generated by the contemporary media and state authority. As I’ve already noted, Kim Dal-su’s Nihon no fuyu, in its attempt to grasp critically the problems of violence and the pre-1955 Korean community, employed a narrative framework different from that in Chang Hyŏkju’s story “Kyōhaku.” During the period 1945–1952—the period, that is, that provided the backdrop for the narrative of Chang’s “Kyōhaku”—Kim Dal-su published the journal Minshu Chōsen. In fact, it is rather telling that as the publisher of Minshu Chōsen Kim was renting rooms in the very Chōren headquarters that the “I” in “Kyōhaku” would represent as the source of violence at the time of Chōren’s dissolution; as a result of the dissolution, all property belonging to the Minshu Chōsen Company was confiscated by SCAP.29 Needless to say, Minshu Chōsen was forced to suspend publication. When it began publication, Minshu Chōsen stressed not so much the creation of a “zainichi Chōsenjin” ethnic identity as the introduction of the history, literature, and culture of a Korea (Chōsen) now independent from the Japanese empire. But we can see a stance clearly different from this emerging around 1948 in articles that depict “ethnic schools” (minzoku gakkō) and the 1949 dissolution of Chōren. From around this time we see in Minshu Chōsen the formation of a historical narrative of zainichi Chōsenjin, one that depicts the establishment of a “Korean” society within Japan. As a result, if we rely only on censorship records, it may seem that the planning for a special issue on the “zainichi Chōsenjin problem” was simply a natural development. But at the time, conditions did not permit this to signify simply the creation of a zainichi Chōsenjin ethnic identity. We need to consider linguistic regulation in a broader sense if we want to grasp what remains invisible if we are conscious only of legal censorship in the narrow sense or of the violence of the law. THE FABRICATION OF MEMORIES OF KOREAN-LANGUAGE LITERATURE As I have discussed, in texts such as the Yomiuri, Asahi, and Mainichi newspapers or Chang Hyŏkju’s Aa Chōsen, representations of the Korean War structure it as “the mutual slaughter of fellow countrymen.” But in the

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texts of Kim Dal-su and Heo Nam-gi, both active participants in Japan’s democratic literature movement, it is represented as a war between America and Korea. It is important to note that for the Korean people, America was situated as the enemy that had appeared in the place of the Japanese empire.30 For that reason, in their texts from this period the subject of resistance, whether it be against the Japanese empire or America, was absorbed into discourses resisting the hegemonic power of the United States. In other words, the subject of resistance seen in their texts was appropriated without any hesitation into the discourse of opposition not to the Korean War but to the San Francisco Peace Treaty. In the process, as I mentioned earlier, the texts produced by these two ended up being situated as belonging to the “national literature” of Japan. This logic formed when the South Korean Army, which was unfolding its battle against the People’s Army, was buried from view under the phrase “our enemy America.” Kim Sa-ryang’s “Umi ga mieru” (and its translator, Kim Dal-su) was interpreted precisely in this framework: the image of the People’s Army fighting against Americans easily overlapped with that of the Japanese resisting American hegemonic power. Here, we need to pay attention not only to the fact that Nihon no fuyu, which set its narrative during the Korean War, was published in Akahata, the organ of the JCP, but also to the specific period in which it was published. This is because during this period it became increasingly difficult for Korean party members to speak from the standpoint of JCP members. On July 27, 1955, at the Sixth National Congress of the JCP, one year before the serialization of Nihon no fuyu, the end of the 1950 problem (split) was proclaimed, but the reality was that the International faction seized de facto control from the Commentary faction. Most Korean JCP members belonged to the latter, and their position was now redefined in accordance with this shift in power. Their new position was most clearly manifested in the statement issued by the national meeting of Mintai (the JCP’s Committee on Ethnic Matters) just before that Sixth National Congress, on July 24–25. The JCP debated “the conversion of the zainichi Chōsenjin movement,” deciding to disband Mintai and expel Korean party members from the JCP. Persons who hitherto had been Korean JCP members were now redefined as citizens of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, and their previous activities as JCP members were declared to have been in error. At the same time, they became affiliates of the newly formed Chōsen sōren (Zainichi Chōsenjin rengō). In this process, the armed struggles carried out by Korean JCP members belonging to the Commentary faction became the target of criticism. The events surrounding the poet Kim Si-jong and his magazine Chindare show the manner in which “Korean” writers in Japan emerged as a separate category. As I stated earlier, the writings of ethnically Korean writers were



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read as part of the Japanese national literature at the onset of the Korean War. Multiple forces, including the JCP’s decision to single them out as an ethnic category that existed outside the JCP itself, cohered to produce “Korean” writers as a category separate and distinct from “Japanese” writers. Under the direction of the JCP’s Mintai, in February 1953 Kim Si-jong founded the journal Chindare as the organ for an association of Korean poets in Osaka. Many of the members of the Chindare group had been in the vanguard of the Commentary faction’s anti-American armed struggles that had come under severe criticism at the Sixth National Congress. Beginning in 1955, after the group came under the leadership not of the JCP but of the Korean Workers’ Party, the Japanese-language writings that appeared in Chindare became a target for denunciation, which clearly shows that a new connection began between the Korean ethnic group and the Korean language and by extension Korean literature, a connection that had not previously been taken for granted. The debates surrounding Chindare proceeded in tandem with the movement toward the creation of a new linkage between Koreans, the Korean language, and Korean literature—that is, toward the formation of a new (zainichi) Korean people. The criticism from Chōsen sōren toward Korean members of the Commentary faction began in earnest just before the start of serialization of Nihon no fuyu.31 At the same time as there was an explosion of criticism against the Korean party member Kim Dal-su’s Nihon no fuyu in the pages of JCP publications, Chōsen sōren publications were making increasingly pronounced criticisms of Kim Si-jong’s magazine Chindare. These criticisms arising simultaneously in two different media should both be understood as incidents coming in the wake of the Sixth National Congress. I do not mean to argue these incidents were a matter of simple cause and effect. Yet it must be noted that it was at this historical moment that the subject position of “zainichi Korean” writer began to take form, one distinctly separate from Japanese—a subject position that did not yet exist at the beginning of the Korean War. While the debates surrounding Chindare proceeded in tandem with the movement toward the creation of a new linkage between Koreans and the Korean language, a different framework was at work in the debates surrounding Nihon no fuyu. First, we must recall here the obvious fact that Nihon no fuyu was written in Japanese, which was incongruous with the new position of Koreans as citizens of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea. Second, Nihon no fuyu could be seen as propaganda of the International faction. These two points lead us to a question: in a period in which it had been proclaimed that Koreans must not interfere (make utterances) in the internal politics of Japan and in which the history of the JCP from the period 1945–1955 was being critically reassessed, why was this novel—set among

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the Korean “settlements” of Tokyo and Hiroshima and in which the majority of the characters were Korean—read as being party propaganda for the JCP? In considering this question, we must first establish the mode of narration found in Nihon no fuyu. The narration seems to be situated in the period 1950–1952, but in fact in certain places, as in the following quoted passage, we see reflections that seem to come from the period after the 1955 Sixth National Congress. These seem, moreover, to grasp critically the dealings between the JCP and Koreans before 1955. In later years, it was made clear that having Koreans as members of the Japanese Communist Party was an error. Korea is now independent from Japanese control, and insofar as they have their own autonomous citizenship, this amounts to interference in the internal politics of another country. It would be a different matter if zainichi Chōsenjin were a minority people belonging to Japan, but insofar as this is not the case, this is a violation of the spirit of peaceful coexistence.32

The narration of this novel, which accepts and affirms the new policy proclaimed around the time of the Sixth National Congress, comprehends the 1950 problem and the Korean War while adhering to the perspective of characters who belong to the International faction that took over the party after the Sixth National Congress. The only actual historical figures who appear in the novel are Miyamoto Yuriko and Tokuda Kyūichi, two “celebrities,” one belonging to the rising International faction and the other the symbol of the declining Commentary faction. The death and funeral of the International faction’s Miyamoto are explained through the framework of the 1950 problem, a depiction that then develops into a criticism of Tokuda. The criticism of Tokuda presented in Nihon no fuyu was generally expressed through the phrase “patriarchal, individualist leadership” (kafuchōteki kojin chūshin shidō). It must be noted that this is a view that bears a very close resemblance to the framework of the statement “On the 1950 Problem” issued on November 5, 1957, by the Fifteenth JCP Expanded Central Committee. From around November 1956—that is, during the initial serialization of Nihon no fuyu—the JCP Central Committee established the Editorial Committee for Records of the 1950 Problem, and in December 1957 a fourvolume collection of relevant archival materials was published. Moreover, on the day after the serialization of Nihon no fuyu ended (January 1, 1957), Akahata launched an expanded version of its “Tōkatsudō” (Party activities) column, which featured reports on study circles and activities of “cells” located around the country, just like those depicted in the novel, while at the same time promoting a restructuring of the party organization. It is clear that



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these developments unfolded in tandem with the direction indicated by the four-month serialization of Nihon no fuyu. These connections were unmistakably evident at the time. That seems to be why the letters sent by readers to Akahata seemed to focus solely on differing interpretations of the 1950 problem. I criticize the pettiness of the author’s subjective judgments, his one-sided standpoint, and the official party organ that looks with contempt on the late party secretary as a sycophant (this seems to be the feeling of the author, though I won’t complain about that). An article noting the fourth anniversary of the death of that late secretary appears in that same party organ. Is the party willing to tolerate such a contradiction to make room for “evaluating the novel”? . . . Just as denunciations of the cult of the individual lead to the individual, do they not encourage impressionistic insults directed at the leaders who offer up their lives in order to serve the masses?33

But what is important to note here is not the debate over whether this novel was “propaganda.” Rather, we should note how the framework of conflict in the novel between Koreans of the Commentary faction and those of the International faction was transformed into the framework of a conflict among the Japanese people and of a “Japan War,” just as was the case with the Korean War, as discussed in the first section of this essay. As Akahata reconstructed the 1950 problem from the perspective of the victorious International faction, a tendency also seen in the “Tōkatsudō” column, any memory of Korean JCP members had been completely erased. What appeared in their place was the myth of a JCP that had fought as an ally of the Korean people as if these two were separate entities from the very beginning. For the readers whose reference in reading Nihon no fuyu was the “official” narrative of the International faction that was a later reconstruction, the myth embodied by the proper name of novelist Kim Dal-su was now a symbol of that alliance and hence read as propaganda. Grounded in this framework of forgetting, one that emerged in the form of the alliance between the JCP and Chōsen sōren, the “conflict” over why (zainichi) Korean writers didn’t or couldn’t write in Korean (Chōsengo or Kankokugo) was now historicized as an enduring theme of literary history, as if it had existed ever since liberation from colonization. NOTES 1. This chapter was originally published in in Kōno Kensuke, Ko Youngran, et al., Ken’etsu no teikoku:  Bunka no tōsei to saiseisan (The empire of censorship: Regulation and reproduction of culture) (Tokyo: Shinyōsha, 2014).

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2. The statements from the Akahata editorial staff and Kim Dal-su’s response are reprinted in “Kaidai” (Afterword), an appendix to Kin Tatsuju [Kim Dal-su], Kin Tatsuju shōsetsu zenshū (The complete novels of Kim Dal-su), 7 vols. (Tokyo: Chikuma shobō, 1980), 5:325–29. Note that Kim Dal-su’s name is sometimes transcribed as Kim Tal-su in English. 3. These letters are reprinted in “Kaidai,” ibid. 4. Michiba Chikanobu, Senryō to heiwa:  “Sengo” to iu keiken (Occupation and peace: The experience of the postwar) (Tokyo: Seidosha, 2005), 292. 5. Mun Kyoung-Su, “Sengo Nihon shakai to zainichi Chōsenjin 3:  Nihon kyōsantō to zainichi Chōsenjin” (Postwar Japanese society and zainichi Koreans 3: The Japan Communist Party and zainichi Koreans), in Mun Kyoung-Su, Zainichi Chōsenjin mondai no kigen (The origin of zainichi Korean problems) (Tokyo: Kurein, 2007), 144. 6. Nihon no fuyu is reprinted in Kin, Kin Tatsuju shōsetsu zenshū, 5:5–171; this passage appears on 62–63. 7. Akahata henshūkyoku, ed., Jinmin hiroba: Chi no mei dei (Tokyo: Yoyogi shobō, 1952), 11. 8. Shirakawa Yutaka, Chōsen kindai chinichi-ha sakka:  Kutō no kiseki (The faction of Korean writers familiar with Japan: Traces of struggle) (Tokyo: Bensei shuppan, 2008), 296–98. 9. On the PPB’s censorship activities, see Yamamoto Taketoshi, Senryōki media bunseki (Analysis of Occupation-period media) (Tokyo:  Hōsei daigaku shuppankyoku, 1996), and Okuizumi Eizaburō, ed., Senryōgun ken’etsu zasshi mokuroku kaidai:  Shōwa 20-nen–24-nen (Review of listing of magazines censored by the Occupation army: 1945–49) (Tokyo: Yūshōdō, 1982). 10. Yamamoto, Senryōki media bunseki, 320–21. 11. I discuss this in detail in ­ chapter 7 of “Sengo” to iu ideorogī:  Rekishi, kioku, bunka (Postwar as ideology: History, memory, culture) (Tokyo: Fujiwara shoten, 2010). 12. Chang Yun-hyang, “Chōsen sensō o meguru Nihon to Amerika senryōgun” (Japan and the American Occupation army on the Korean War), Shakai bungaku 32 (July 2010): 157–71; see in particular 159. 13. Nakano Yoshio, Watashi no heiwaron (My theory of peace) (Tokyo: Kaname shobō, 1952), 128. 14. Chang Yun-hyang, “Chōsen sensō o meguru,” 162–63. 15. Shirakawa, Chōsen kindai chinichi-ha sakka, 302. 16. Oka Mari, Kanojo no “tadashii” namae to wa nani ka: Dai-san sekai feminizumu no shisō (What is her “proper” name? The intellectual stance of Third World feminism) (Tokyo: Iwanami shoten, 2000), 72. 17. Kin Tatsuju [Kim Dal-su], “Gojū-nendai kara rokujū-nendai e” (From the ’50s to the ’60s), in Waga bungaku to seikatsu (My literature and life) (Tokyo:  Seikyū bunkasha, 1998), 189. 18. Ishigami Minoru, “Aa Kin Shiryō” in Bungei shuto 21, no. 11 (December 1953).



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19. Kin Tatsuju [Kim Dal-su], “Kin Saryō:  Hito to sakuhin” (Kim Sa-ryang: The person and his works), in Kin Saryō sakuhinshū (Collected works of Kim Sa-ryang), ed. Kin Tatsuju (Tokyo: Rironsha, 1954), 324–25. 20. Chang Hyŏkju [Chō Hakuchū], “Kyōhaku,” Shinchō 50, no. 3 (March 1953): 123–39. 21. Ibid., 133. 22. For example, see the following articles from the Asahi newspaper: “Futei senjin no sōkan” (Deportation of lawless Koreans), December 24, 1950; “Ichigatsu-chū ni sōkan: Sōran Chōsenjin yonjū-nin teido ka” (Deportation in January: Roughly forty Korean rioters), December 27, 1950; and “Akushitsusha o kyōsei sōkan” (Forced deportation for malignant elements), January 13, 1951. 23. Chang Hyŏkju, “Kyōhaku,” 138. 24. Ibid., 130. 25. Ibid., 137. 26. Ibid. 27. On the dissolution, see Pak Kyŏng-sik [Paku Kyonshiku], “Zainichi Chōsenjin renmei to Minsei no kyōsei kaisan” (The forced dissolution of Zainichi Chōsenjin renmei and Minsei), in Kaihōgo: Zainichi Chōsenjin undōshi (Postliberation: A history of the zainichi Korean movement) (Tokyo: San’ichi shobō, 1989), 315–50, and Kim T’ae-gi [Kin Taiki], Sengo Nihon seiji to zainichi Chōsenjin mondai:  SCAP no tai-zainichi Chōsenjin seisaku 1945–1952-nen (Postwar Japanese politics and the zainichi Korean question: SCAP policies on zainichi Koreans 1945–1952) (Tokyo: Keisō shobō, 1997). 28. Pak, Kaihōgo, 243. 29. Kin, Waga bungaku to seikatsu, 161. 30. I take up this issue in c­ hapter 7 of “Sengo” to iu ideorogī. 31. On Chindare, see Chindare kenkyūkai, ed., “Zainichi” to 50-nendai bunka undō:  Maboroshi no shishi “Chindare” “Karion” o yomu (Zainichi and the 1950s cultural movement: Reading the forgotten magazines Chindare and Karion) (Kyoto: Jinbun shoin, 2010). 32. Kin, Nihon no fuyu, 25. 33. From the previously mentioned letter from “a reader from Nagoya.”

Chapter 3

Politics and Culture of Fascism Ann Sherif

Beginning in 1945, Ara Masahito and other members of the Kindai bungaku group found themselves with the exhilarating task of contributing to new conceptions of literature, art, and cultural life in the postwar world. As Laura Hein has noted of this early postwar moment, “many Japanese wanted to reform society by taming the belligerence of the state and by carving out a respected space for dissent” and cultural autonomy, a task complicated tremendously by the fact that Japan’s defeat, occupation, and the shift toward a new Cold War world order rendered those years an “exceptionally politicized moment of renegotiation.”1 During the highly fluid and unpredictable decade after the war’s end, cultural figures found it hugely challenging to define the ethical, artistic, and political positions from which they could advocate for a new cultural life that would contribute to a democratic society. In their analyses of the social and political currents that influenced early postwar writers, scholars have emphasized institutional forces such as the Communist Party, international Communism (Cominform, Comintern), and the Allied Occupation apparatus. The significance of these institutional presences on literary and critical discourse is undeniable, as is the “considerable prestige of Marxism in the early postwar period . . . [with its] exemplary record of resistance against fascism and militarism that certain Communist Party leaders were justified in claiming,” as J. Victor Koschmann has noted.2 This chapter focuses new light on the legacy of pre-1945 resistance to fascism as a significant part of the outlook and identity formation of early postwar literary critics. The sacrifice, passion, and vigor of the French and Spanish popular fronts during the 1930s, and the wartime resistance in Europe, stood in stark contrast to the quickly defeated attempts by leftists, progressives, liberals, and Christians to form a popular front (jinmin sensen) in Japan. Nonetheless, those in Japan who would have joined a broad-based 61

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oppositional coalition kept abreast of the popular front abroad, as long as they had access to reading materials and contacts overseas. After the war, these writers articulated their participation in and identification with the pre-1945 global antifascist movement as a means of establishing credibility and autonomy in the context of the sharply fractured Cold War Marxist movement and of the “community of contrition” (kaikon kyōdōtai), as Maruyama Masao described the modernists’ wish to atone for “the excesses of an absolutized ideology of national community.”3 Engagement with the global antifascist popular front—even if that engagement took the form of reading or thinking about it—had constituted a powerful political and cultural experience for literary writers and critics in Japan during the 1930s and 1940s, one that did not easily fade from memory. The Communist Party as the primary influence on leftist literary critics frames our understanding of the famous debate about politics and literature carried out in the pages of the journals Kindai bungaku and Shin Nihon bungaku, in particular, but also of the directions of postwar literary critical production as a whole. The positions taken by two of the main participants in the debate, Ara Masahito (1913–1979) and Nakano Shigeharu (1902–1979), are said to pivot largely on merits and demerits of Communist Party directives concerning culture.4 Nakano, who in 1947 was elected as a Communist Party candidate to the Diet, tied his political identity strongly to the party. His approach to literary production, similarly, adhered closely to party analyses of the role of culture. In contrast, Ara advocated for the value of subjective autonomy in cultural production, and even the potential of the bourgeoisie (rather than only the proletariat) and the ego to play a central role in the democratic revolution. Ara’s catholic approach was encouraged by his long-standing interest in and admiration for antifascist movements that, by definition, had tolerated cooperation with people and groups that did not share their doctrinaire beliefs and party outlooks in order to achieve a greater goal. In the 1930s, the effort to start a popular front to fight the Japanese state’s negation of the values of humanism and social justice, and its valorization of militarism and violence, failed in the face of efficient repression of human rights, violence, and control of resources. However, an international network of resistance movements and popular fronts, spread by journals and personal contacts, cast even that failed effort as part of a larger and inspirational whole. The collaborative project of resisting fascism remained appealing in the cultural and political flux of the early Cold War. Ara’s writings reveal that the transnational antifascist popular front and wartime underground resistance of the 1930s and 1940s formed an important basis for his critical formulations in the early postwar years. This essay examines two aspects of the pre-1945 antifascist movement that contributed to Ara’s cultural outlook and cultural identity after the war: the



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belief in agency and resistance in the face of violent and repressive regimes, and the importance of a network of transnational connections that inspired and informed literary creativity and political and cultural identities of many Japanese writers. This essay does not pursue an analysis of all appearances of the term “fascism” in literary critical texts but discusses a small sample of essays by Ara Masahito with the goal of clarifying the complexity and weight of the notion of fascism in the cultural imagination and political discourse during the early postwar era. Ara Masahito’s use of the term “fascism” in his writing shifted over time in reaction to the changing political and cultural climate. Similar approaches can be found among his contemporaries, such as Aono Suekichi. The critical texts by Ara Masahito offered here as representative of important discursive and critical currents in post-1945, Occupation-era literary communities position its author in opposition to fascism and solidarity with leftist humanists in Japan and around the world. The Allies’ defeat of fascism in World War II abolished the authoritarian fascist states, but the meanings of fascism remained a subject of debate for decades after the war. The worldwide antifascist movement, moreover, inspired unlikely coalitions and cultural productivity, as the crusade to battle fascism attracted the passion of people from across the political spectrum. The formation of politically diverse popular front coalitions in Europe especially was spurred by the understanding that fascist governments sought to dismantle “modern civilization’s . . . central values—freedom, justice, and progress” through the exercise of violent authoritarian government. In the early twentieth century, the idea of a united front, or a revolutionary coalition of Communists, revolutionaries, and nonaligned workers, had its origins in the Russian Revolution. By the 1930s, the notion of a popular front was conceived in even broader and reformist (rather than revolutionary) terms, finding inspiration in internationalist groups and publications that arose in the aftermath of World War I and the Russian Revolution.5 The transnational connections made through struggle against fascism in particular gave rise to cultural productivity as networks of writers and artists came into contact with one another, sometimes face-to-face but more commonly through the global circulation of journals, translations, and images.6 In Japan, attempts to form an effective and coherent popular front by citizens (among them intellectuals and artists) were preempted by strong domestic repression, as the government sought to focus energy on militarist expansionism in Asia. Beginning in 1936–1937, the government actively eliminated antifascist social networks, groups, and publications by means of surveillance, arrest, violence, and restriction of resources (such as paper). Individuals like Ara, even in the face of such repression, continued to seek out reading materials and news about the popular front abroad. The Spanish

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Civil War became a focus of antifascist cultural production and political engagement worldwide.7 FASCISM, ANTIFASCISM, AND THE PEACEFUL REVOLUTION Ara famously emphasized the potential of bourgeois subjectivity as agent of the hoped-for democratic revolution (thus rejecting the Communist Party’s directives concerning culture), and his fiery exchanges with Nakano, along with his flamboyant and often polemic writing style, contributed to his stature in literary critical circles. He is also of interest because he framed his identity as a critic not primarily in terms of national defeat in the war but instead in relation to the heritage of the antifascist movement and its valorization of autonomy and tolerance. Like many literary writers and intellectuals who were politically engaged, Ara grappled with the rise of fascist discourses within Japan and with the rise of fascism globally. Historian Reto Hofmann has noted that for most people in Japan “who came of age from the 1920s to the 1940s, fascism conjured up a set of concrete associations. They discussed fascism for its nationalism, its leader, its economics of autarky and corporatism; and later for its drive toward empire and a new world order.”8 In response to the very real consequences of authoritarian ideologies, Ara felt a strong commitment to antifascist movements and ideas around the world. Even after the defeat of fascist states in 1945, fascism remained a concept with a broad range of meanings and contexts. How did literary writers and critics use the term? How did they conceive of their relationship to fascism? Those are the questions this essay seeks to address.9 As we read Ara’s early postwar literary critical and memoiristic essays, we need to ask how he understood concepts such as fascism in his own time. The term “fascism,” in the intervening decades, has accrued layers of casual negative meaning that tend to cloak the brutal, threatening edge that it retained in the months and years after the Allied powers defeated the fascist states of Germany and Italy, Axis partners of Japan. In 1946–1947, when Ara wrote many of the essays discussed here, fascism as an exercise of power, as an aestheticization of violence, as real violence, as a mobilization of the masses in the name of the state, and in line with state-defined agendas, remained a vivid part of recent memory. Defeat of fascism meant that the Allies could claim not only military but also moral victory in World War II. For Ara, and other writers, fascism also implied its several opposites (liberal democracy, Marxism), as well as the opposition: the worldwide antifascist movement. Historian Ueyama Shunpei criticized what he viewed as the “relativist political realist position” of many intellectuals and their “blind acceptance”



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of the “Allies’ partial perspective” on World War II during the decades after the war. Ueyama claimed that in this sudden reevaluation of the war, “ ‘Imperial Japan’ (Kōkoku Nihon) came to be replaced with ‘fascism.’ ”10 However, the writings of Ara and others make clear that there were people whose views of fascism were much more politically complex and ethically based than Ueyama suggests. In his earliest postwar writings, Ara made a point of expressing his feelings of solidarity with antifascist movements during the 1930s and early 1940s, even though there was not a fully realized movement in Japan.11 Ara’s conception of fascism was inseparable from the grassroots opposition to it. At a time when many writers (including Ara) made accusations of war responsibility (sensō sekinin) and complicity with the recently defeated Japanese empire, Ara emphasized his views of the worldwide partisan antifascist movement as a means of establishing his own political and ethical credibility. Ara served as the moderator for a roundtable discussion on the theme of peaceful revolution and intelligentsia, which appeared in the April 1947 issue of Kindai bungaku, a key literary journal of which he was a founding member. He was joined by a roster of the up-and-coming leftist male literary figures of the age, including Katō Shūichi, Hanada Kiyoteru, Sasaki Kiichi, Haniya Yutaka, and Hidaka Rokurō. These leftists hoped that the wartime goal of defeating fascism and authoritarianism that they, at least, shared with the United States and the Allies would result in an anticapitalist democratic revolution in Japan. What complicated Ara’s expressions of admiration for antifascist movements of the 1930s and 1940s was twofold: the postwar occupation of Japan by the Allies, who had fought against and triumphed over the fascist governments of Germany and Italy and the imperial government of Japan, and the ambiguous identity of imperial Japan among the Axis powers, lacking as it did a clearly labeled fascist party. Ara and many other writers in Japan abhorred fascism because it was a symptom of the ills of capitalist society; they rejected fascists’ claims that they aimed at “counteract[ing] the negative effects of capitalist modernity” and instead proposed a peaceful revolution that would lead to Marxist and socialist alternative social structures.12 The United States, on the other hand, opposed fascism because of its threat to liberal democracy and its godlessness, but not because of fascism’s foundations in capitalism. The emergence of the United States onto the world stage in 1945 as the primary advocate of free-market capitalist and liberal democracy in opposition to the Soviet Union and the Communist Eastern bloc meant that Japanese leftists had to adjust their expectations very quickly. As Koschmann has noted, the democratic revolution initiative would have appeared at the confluence of the democratic ideals of the occupiers and the goal of peaceful

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revolution of the Japan Communist Party. The Cold War context, however, rendered this intersection precarious.13 During the 1947 debate among Ara and his fellow literary critics, few participants mentioned that Japan was occupied, or the conflict between their Marxist approach and that of the Allied occupiers. The title of the roundtable itself—“peaceful revolution”— suggests their assumption of open discourse and shared goals. But could they, as former subjects of imperial Japan, be called fascists themselves? Many progressive writers and critics rejected the notion of a totalizing fascism and regarded fascism as external to Japan. Ara Masahito, among others in what he characterized as the “progressive culture movement” (shinpoteki bunka undō), regarded himself as existing in a separate space from the hegemonic state.14 They regarded fascism as more than brutality but instead as a current in global culture that had been countered not only by armies but also by means of antifascist thought and praxis. During the long wars of the 1930s and 1940s, Ara and his colleagues not only wrote and read about fascism but also were aware of, or engaged in (or aspired to take part in) antifascist networks of intellectuals and artists through internationalism, leftism, and Comintern. As 1930s journals such as Sekai bunka, Doyōbi, the Communist publication Inprokor (Inpurokōru), and publications like Jinmin bunko demonstrate, journalists and writers had available to them analyses of the rise of fascism and the antifascist struggle around the world from a variety of perspectives.15 Such serials also contained news about international antifascist partisans and groups. In retrospect, Ara Masahito vividly describes the 1930s as a time when the “black shadow of international fascism was spreading each year, with Ethiopia, with the Spanish Civil War.”16 Ara and the Kindai bungaku group used the term “fascism” first to reference their own past solidarity with antifascist movements around the world that fought against fascist regimes in Italy, Germany, and Spain. They emphasized these movements over anticolonial struggles. They were aware of fascist currents and discourses domestically, but they had good reason to regard fascism as external to the Japan they understood themselves as part of, the Japan they hoped for. In this sense, they shared with antifascists in many other parts of the world the belief that fascism, even if present domestically, was not part of the nation, and that fascists in their midst were outsiders.17 Even when Ara criticized the Japanese empire, it was not anti-imperialism but antifascism that made him feel connected to a global struggle with other humanists and leftists. In “Minshū wa doko ni iru” (Where are the people?), Ara names reactionary thought and militarism along with fascism as the several forces that oppressed not only “the people” but also the petit bourgeois intelligentsia (shōshimin interigenchia). Without uprooting all those



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negative influences, no one can be liberated (kaihō sareru), the people or intellectuals.18 CULTURAL AND ECONOMIC BASES OF FASCISM Many scholars view fascism from primarily a political or economic vantage point, but it is essential that we also consider the cultural field in relation to fascism. Some Marxist historians define fascism in mainly economic terms, emphasizing its capitalist foundations, and reject the cultural and ideological faces of fascism as ideological layers that merely disguise the economic and social injustices on which fascism depended. As historian Keith Hodgson has noted, That fascism should be understood primarily in economic terms was a belief retained by the left from its initial awareness of the movement in Italy in 1919 up to and beyond the outbreak of war in 1939. By using the simple expedient of enquiring into who actually ruled and who actually benefited, the left have bequeathed to us a model which we can use today to break through the still resonant and apparently still seductive assertions that fascism made in its own defence.19

Even as he denies the importance of culture as a category of analysis of fascism, Hodgson acknowledges the significance of fascist rhetoric by signaling his awareness of its provocation of desire and affect. The notion that “the actions of fascism,” rather than its rhetoric, “were the definitive guide to its true nature” does not preclude attention to the cultural discourses of fascism.20 For our purposes, however, we must give credence to the insistence of many scholars, such as George Mosse, Alice Kaplan, Alan Tansman, and Laura Hein, on the centrality of discourses of fascism, modes of representation and culture, and manipulation of the mass media. Historian Robert Paxton has offered several characteristics of fascist ideology in Europe, including the cult of leadership and race, the use of violence as a political tool, the aestheticization of violence, the aim of uniting the alienated individual with the state, and the subordination of reason to passion. Some scholars of Japan have situated 1930s–1940s Japanese culture squarely in the realm of fascist culture (and in particular utopian approaches to fascism), despite the absence of a fascist state that called itself that in Japan. Tansman applies the term “fascist” specifically to the Japanese case. Framing the cultures of the Asia-Pacific War era as fascist, Tansman highlights the influential thought of Marxist critic and philosopher Tosaka Jun (1900–1945) as representative of

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a criticism of fascism from within and then points to Maruyama Masao’s renowned analyses of fascism as characteristic of early postwar points of view on the recent cultural and political past.21 In order to consider the ways a literary critic and intellectual such as Ara regarded fascism in the postwar period, we need to consider historically the antifascist views held by literary writers during the 1930s when they were engaged in active struggle against increasingly repressive regimes. Even in the case of Japan, where the state did not center on a fascist party, many politically engaged citizens identified with antifascist movements because of the alarmingly rapid spread of fascism across Europe. The key points in this antifascist political and cultural solidarity include the coexistence of transnational networks of politically engaged people and nationally based antifascist fronts. Some antifascist popular fronts literally fought together (as the International Brigades in the Spanish Civil War, 1936–1939), while, for other antifascist advocates, the struggle took the form of social affiliation and gatherings or producing and reading publications such as journals. Popular fronts subsumed political party differences for the sake of fighting together for a higher ideal. In later memoirs, Ara confirms the centrality of the Spanish Civil War to Japanese writers’ imagination during the 1930s and 1940s: “[Socialist writer] Shimaki Kensaku [1903–1945] quite early on perceived the global and historical significance of the Spanish Civil War. He made sure that we all knew about it.”22 During wartime, antifascist groups around the world held a variety of views on the best means of opposing fascism, depending on their understanding of the reasons that fascists were able to acquire political power. Some in the movement advocated strengthening the ideas and institutions of democracy, because fascist parties in Germany and Spain had managed their rise to power in the context of weak parliamentary governments. In contrast, Communists pointed to the collaboration of politicians within Italian democracy as aiding the fascists’ ascendance. COLD WAR COMMUNISM AND RED FASCISM The powerful influence of Western bloc anti-Communism makes it difficult to distinguish the status of different political stances in Japan soon after the war. Like many writers and artists, Ara engaged seriously with Communism and with Marxist thought. He did not identify Communism with fascism, as did many writers in the Western bloc after World War II. According to Alan Wald, in the American case, the “essence of the political lives of most proCommunist writers in the United States was an honorable one of fighting against the injustices of US society and fascist dictatorships internationally.



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This perspective frequently outlasted their Communist Party affiliations and in succeeding years was occasionally coupled with protests against injustices in the Soviet Union.”23 In contrast to the US case, the Japanese Communist Party became a vital force in national and local politics during the postwar period. As the debates with Nakano make clear, Ara challenged the orthodoxy of the Japan Communist Party of his day, and the Soviet regime as well, and especially the abuses of Stalin. However, he remained firmly grounded in Marxist thought. Like other leftists whose belief in the party and international Communism had been challenged by historical reality, however, Ara never “relinquished pride” in his “antifascist idealism.”24 In order to understand the political and cultural climate of the heated debates Ara was part of, it is essential to consider in more depth the complexity of discourses about Communism and fascism in the late 1940s Western bloc. During Allied Occupation and the ensuing decade, Japanese writers and intellectuals would have come into contact with Western bloc discourses of what has been referred to as Red fascism.25 The work of understanding fascism, in other words, was not merely retrospective in nature. The Allied goal in World War II had been the defeat of fascism and totalitarianism. However, as in Japan, fascism had its detractors and champions in the United States in the early 1930s: not a few Americans “saw Fascist Italy as an attractive political and social experiment.” But then American public opinion about fascism shifted profoundly beginning in the mid-1930s, when “the Italian attack on Ethiopia and the rise of” Hitler’s brutal and hateful regime rendered fascism “demonic.”26 American views of fascism as an ideology were further complicated after the war because of discourses that conflated all one-party regimes, whether fascist, like Germany or Italy, or Communist (the Soviet Union), which became commonplace in the US media and academia during the McCarthy era. American anti-Communist writers applied the term “totalitarian”—originally used in anti-Nazi propaganda—to Russia “as a means to emphasize certain similarities between fascist and Communist” states.27 Beginning in the early 1950s, the disillusionment with the myriad abuses of Stalinist Russia was genuine. What is notable for our purposes is that the prominence of anti-Communist discourses meant that many American analyses of fascism and totalitarianism tended to emphasize similarities between Soviet Russia and Nazi Germany and to blur any ideological dissimilarities. Rather than analyzing “both the differences and similarities between” the “political forms” of Nazi fascism and Russian Communism, American anti-Communist observers in the 1940s and 1950s “tended to believe that totalitarian methods overrode the role of ideology in shaping political form.” In short, dominant American discourses did not distinguish between “one system proclaiming a humanistic ideology and failing to live up to its ideal

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and the other living up to its antihumanistic and destructive ideology only too well.”28 In late 1940s and 1950s America, foreign “Commu-Nazis” were understood as identical not only because of brutal practices but also because they were “anticapitalistic, anti-Christian, and antidemocratic.”29 American anticommunist attitudes toward the Soviet Union were tempered between Pearl Harbor and the Allied victory in 1945 by the wartime need to ally with Russia, temporarily defined an “anti-imperialist” friend with a “revolutionary past” not dissimilar to that of the United States. Such proSoviet sentiment faded rapidly as World War II came to a close and the Cold War commenced. During the late 1940s and 1950s, Americans were warned in “influential anti-Communist publications” by the US Chamber of Commerce about the threat of foreign subversive agents, and that “what we say about Communists, applies with equal force to Fascist, Nazi or any other agents of foreign powers.” America’s Cold War superpower rivalry with the Soviet Union—and Japan’s centrality to US strategy—depended partly on this demonization of the new enemy, conceptually enabled by the equation of Soviet Communism with Nazi fascism. While acknowledging that there were some similarities between the Nazis and Stalin’s brutal regime, for our purposes it is significant that post-1945 discourse in America led to many Americans accepting the “unhistorical and illogical view that Russia in the 1940’s would behave as Germany had in the previous decade.”30 Rabid antiCommunism during the McCarthy era fueled American government policy and public attitudes that resulted in decidedly undemocratic and unfair treatment of countless Americans. In turn, the strong anti-Communism of this era shaped US foreign policy and the course of the Allied Occupation and US-Japan postwar relations (as is evident in the security treaties). In the mid-1950s, critic Matsushita Keiichi analyzed the skewed worldview engendered by the so-called reverse course and McCarthyism. He concluded that “if Nazism and McCarthyism taught anything, it was certainly that democracy in the name of the majority could easily spiral out of control, morphing into fascism,” according to historian Simon Avenell. Although Matsushita’s identification of McCarthyism with Nazism is overblown, his turn of phrase suggests the profound disappointment of intellectuals and artists, not to speak of ordinary citizens, over the stops clamped on public debate and the ostracization of the left in Japan’s postwar democracy. In the context of such an anti-Communist and antiprogressive atmosphere, Matsushita expressed these views nearly a decade after Ara’s advocacy of the importance of the shimin (petit bourgeois intelligentsia turned citizen), rather than a “unitary revolutionary subject,” as well as the “humanism of modern civil society.” In the anti-Communist context of the mid-1950s, Matsushita advocated stepping away from socialism and instead protecting “liberty and democracy” by means of creating a “consciousness of individual



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resistance.”31 Ara Masahito’s early postwar idealism based in Marxism and his goal of a peaceful revolution may seem naive, but his emphasis on political and cultural autonomy, and wariness of fascism, survived the discordant tensions of the Occupation. RESISTING FASCISM IN 1930S JAPAN When Ara wrote of fascism after the war, he also had in mind the antifascism of the 1930s, when humanists and leftists actively criticized fascism from their respective vantage points. Their utopian visions of a more equitable society and an end to class warfare were accompanied by a battle cry against fascism. However, such engaged citizens were not in a majority, nor did they have proximity to power. Like some writers, artists, and intellectuals in Europe and the United States, more than a few interwar Japanese authors considered fascism in overwhelmingly positive terms.32 Many of these affirmations of fascism, but not all, emerged before fascism came to power and the brutal implications of fascism for society and the individual, as practiced by the authoritarian regimes in Nazi Germany and Mussolini’s Italy, were revealed to the world. Leftist, liberal, and progressive writers in the 1930s, in contrast, were first wary of and then repulsed by fascist thought and aesthetics. Fascism’s rhetoric of revolution, they pointed out, was a mere covering over of its valorization of inequality; its invocation of the masses, furthermore, disguised its reliance on capitalist modes that did not assume equitable treatment of the working class. Even though progressive activists and writers were not able to realize their quest to form a popular front to fight against repression and abuses of human rights in Japan and abroad, their attempts and the intersection of their thought and writing with like-minded people overseas represent an important aspect of intellectual and political history. According to Richard Torrance, progressive literary writers of the 1930s literary journal Jinmin bunko identified as fascistic the aesthetic dimensions of neoromantic writer Yasuda Yojūrō, who held in highest regard the lyricism of Japanese traditional texts and married them philosophically to what he saw as the beauty of modern war. Takeda Rintarō and his Jinmin bunko colleagues resisted the sensual, reactionary bent of the neoromantics and countered it with a call to realist prose fiction and the very “spirit of prose literature” as antidote.33 Takeda Rintarō and other literary writers who founded Jinmin bunko knew about, and perhaps thought of participating in, “popular fronts of progressive forces against fascism” called for by Comintern in 1935. Japanese authorities responded to such activism by rounding up “people suspected of

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working to establish the popular front in Japan” in two waves of mass arrests of hundreds of writers, scholars, and activists in 1937–1938.34 The surviving editors at Jinmin bunko continued with their antifascist agenda, coming up with “creative ways to express political ideas: advancing the ‘spirit of prose,’ as opposed to neo-romanticism, presenting as history the views of socialists active from the Meiji period, and group discussions concerning the ‘lifestyles’ of male and female factory workers.”35 Other writers who were nonaligned were drawn to the popular front out of their antipathy for the antihumanist brutality of the Nazis and Franco. For example, scholars at Kyoto University worked to “provide a theoretical basis for a broad-based, unified antiwar movement” that was inspired by the antifascist popular front. Writer Shinmura Izuru actively provided readers with news about French antifascist coalitions in the journal.36 That leftists could not remain cohesive and effective in their opposition is not surprising when one takes into account that even the neoromantic Yasuda Yojūrō and his ilk were subject to the intrusive arm of the imperial state. Vigorous criticism of the philosophical, political, and aesthetic dimensions of texts forms the very basis of an open literary marketplace and a dynamic civic society. Richard Torrance reminds us of the authoritarian bent of an imperial government that actively shut down such frank exchange of ideas and analysis among people across the political spectrum. In the late 1930s the state demanded, through the apparatus of various literary societies, control over writers’ movements, ability to publish, and incomes—not to speak of violence and incarceration—that writers, and art itself, ought to be “subservient to the state” and “defend the nation through their art.” It is precisely this loss of a dynamic and open civil society that writers of good conscience feared. IDEALISM AND YOUTH It is certainly in reference to this process of criticism, resistance, and silence that Ara Masahito conceives of fascism in his essay “Jibun no rōsoku” (My own candle, 1946). In the essay, he describes the high interest in the idealism of antifascism. Along with other politically engaged literary youth, Ara eagerly read journals and books with information about antifascism (such as Sekai bunka and Jinmin bunko) and actively associated with like-minded people. In their eyes, fascism overlapped with, but was not identical to, the practices of domestic authoritarianism and militarism. Some antifascists refused to renounce their political beliefs and remained in prison for years, but still others, Ara is careful to point out, were “people of good conscience” who did “not cooperate with fascism or with the war. . . . People who were never jailed, who did not go into exile like Romain Rolland,



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Thomas Mann, or Marc Bloch, but who were forbidden to write, to read, and to speak.”37 In this way, Ara assumes a cultural and psychological space outside fascism. He described himself as an “internal exile” (kokunai bōmeisha). Constantly wondering when the “god of death” (shigami) might come for him, as it did for so many young people in Japan late in the war, he mourned his inability to “fight fascism at home and abroad” as the French Resistance did. He evokes his youthful desperation vividly: “The god of death’s beckoning hand drew closer and closer with each passing day. What good are my hopes to defeat fascism? My time here, my dreams, will be obliterated by that cursed invitation!”38 There were all stripes of leftists, radicals, humanists, moderates, and progressives in imperial Japan. Politically engaged people realized the huge challenge of bringing together such ideologically opposed groups for the goal of a united front to oppose domestic authoritarianism and militarism. Even in 1930s Europe, forming a coalition against fascism was an uphill battle. In Japan, for a variety of historical and social reasons, the front was never realized. Ara’s essays show that, in retrospect, he viewed antifascism as a goal that transcended other political rivalries and clashes. He clarifies that his criticisms of the thought of older leftists vis-à-vis the party is not a sign that he “looks down on those old warriors who battled fascism.”39 Ara’s use of “fascism” may seem to be merely metaphor for all the ills of the past, as a means of obscuring specific blame for the defeat (on the military, on the leaders, on the emperor, on the people). But if we take into account how compelling the antifascist crusade (to borrow Alan Wald’s phrase) was to people around the world, we can see that Ara wanted to express the affective and ethical weight of the transnational struggle to fight the evils of fascism and the compelling sense of connectedness among those alienated from the imperial discourse of Japaneseness. NETWORKS OF RESISTANCE In numerous essays, Ara refers to the Nobel Prize–winning French writer and pacifist Romain Rolland (1866–1944). Rolland’s essays and fiction were translated into Japanese, and he was well known especially among the left. In the midst of World War I, Rolland had refused to condemn all Germans as evil and expressed hope for the redemption of Germany: You are not the true Germany. There exists another Germany juster and more humane, whose ambition is not to dominate the world by force and guile, but to absorb in peace everything great in the thought of other races, and in return

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to reflect the harmony. With that Germany there is no dispute; we are not her enemies, we are the enemies of those who have almost succeeded in making the world forget that she still lives.40

Rolland suggests the potential for resistance even when the violent hand of the state silences speech and dissent. Rolland’s generosity of spirit and humanism were an attractive alternative to the hateful rhetoric that fuels violence against the enemy in wartime. He imagined the persistence of the humane aspects of German culture even during the brutality of the Great War and in turn the existence of individuals who cherished autonomy in silence. “Internal exile” could be realized in the mind:  some Italian citizens understood the act of reading works by Italian philosopher Benedetto Croce and other antifascists as one of resistance. Similarly, Ara Masahito was arrested because he was a member of a reading group late in the war. Rhetorically, Ara’s postwar essays evoke fascism as a faceless, nameless force, a nontotalizing discourse separate from some imperial subjects, external to the individual, and therefore able to be resisted as long as the apparatus of the state does not intervene. Ara describes himself as consciously choosing to study Japanese literary history through the lens of historical materialism as a means of resisting the war (sensō e no teikō toshite ishikiteki ni itonamarete ita).41 Ara thus interpreted fascist discourses and absolutism as external to his thought and existence. Yet Ara also narrates a historical process out of which a politically potent fascism evolved as a political system. Notably, the historical markers that he identifies in connection with the rise of fascism are mostly international sites and its movement global. He describes fascism’s progress in the first half of the twentieth century in relation to Marxism, as an alternative vision of (though not always alternative to) the fate of capitalism. In his 1946 writings, Ara begins his story of Japan’s path to the 1945 defeat and Occupation with the retreat of Marxist “ideas and worldview” in the aftermath of a domestic event, the 2-26 Incident (an attempted military coup by extreme rightists) of 1936, and the subsequent invasion of Manchuria. But the “dark shadow” of international fascism, according to Ara, was sparked on the international stage with Italy’s invasion of Ethiopia in 1935 and the Spanish Civil War beginning in 1936.42 In “Minshū to wa tare ka” (Who are the people?), Ara describes Japanese “fascism” as expansionist and militarist, like German Nazism: If Russia had lost the Great Patriotic War—leaving Russia and Europe at the mercy of fascist Germany—and if Japanese fascism had successfully toppled the Siberian occupation and Communist China, then perhaps the wall of despair the poet [Ishikawa Takuboku] faced would still loom over us today . . . [as] when



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the Russian forces beat a hasty retreat before the German blitzkrieg, we feared, in the worst-case scenario, that Soviet Russia might be wiped off the face of the earth entirely. There was an antifascist at the time who was always bragging about the impregnable “Stalin Line” and the invincible Soviet Union.43

Ara was not anti-Communist—indeed, he is said to have joined the Japan Communist Party in 1946 and soon became enmeshed in the famous heated debate between his fellow Kindai bungaku colleagues and Nakano Shigeharu and others in Shin Nihon bungakukai over the relation of the writer to the party. It was Ara and Kindai bungaku who championed the need for literary writers to develop subjective autonomy at a distance from the party’s dictates. Ara’s reflections just preceding clearly show his revulsion at the international abuses of power and violence by authoritarian states—whether imperial Japan or the Soviet Union. He tells the story about an antifascist who is enamored of the Soviet Union’s rhetoric of a triumphant, eternal Soviet Union not because he despises antifascists but rather to reveal the complexity of political sympathies. He is disappointed that someone who abhors fascism just as he does is not in the least suspicious of the propaganda of a government that boasts of its own perfection. In his essay “Shūmatsu no hi” (Final days, 1946), Ara describes his awareness of fascism as a threat when he was younger, recalling that in the early 1930s, young people held on most fiercely to their optimism that human history meant progress and development even as they heard clearly the ominous footsteps “of fascism and war.”44 In Ara’s eyes, then, fascism signifies places where there were both violent, autocratic regimes that proudly called themselves fascist and resistance to those regimes by progressive forces that, in common leftist parlance, identified the foe as “fascist.”45 Ara understood the pre-1945 world as a place where fascist and absolutist governments existed along with a transnational opposition, even in Japan, where, by all accounts, the popular front was crushed as if by advancing imperial tanks to make way for total war. The Axis alliance, Japan’s war in China, and geographical distance also blocked the fruition of a transnational front or active resistance from the late 1930s through 1945. After the war, therefore, Ara and like-minded people felt that they had been part of a popular front, even if it had been in the form of silent reading and thought and the memories of failed aspirations. In his essays of 1946–1947, Ara does not mention the Nazi regime or the Nazification of daily life in Germany, for example. Perhaps it is not surprising that Ara seeks to externalize, through rhetoric, the Axis alliance that aligned Japan with the fascism identified as Nazism and the concentration of Axis powers over which the Allies had triumphed only a year earlier. For what

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was Japan’s fascism without the Axis alliance in the months after the defeat of Hitler’s Germany in May 1945? Despite the vigor of the debate about war responsibility and culpability in the literary community after the war—and especially around the time of the International Military Tribunal for the Far East (1946–1948)—it is worth keeping in mind that the violence of war was not the only matter that this debate centered on.46 Ara Masahito, among others, also deliberated about the notion of the imperial system, prospects for democracy, and, more broadly, the pathologies of the recently ended political and cultural system. Ara expresses his admiration for fellow writers and intellectuals who fell silent, able “neither to speak nor to write” from the mid-1930s. Defining this cohort in generational and experiential terms, the critic claims that these are the very people who now, in 1946, stand “on the front lines of democratization.”47 The accusations of war responsibility and claims of innocence versus complicity relied on this definition of identifiable and external political currents of fascism and the domestic, as well as transnational, activist and intellectual countermovement. Again, we can perceive that Ara may have been inspired in his understanding of the role of writing by Romain Rolland, who wrote in 1914, “I speak but to solace my conscience . . . and I know that at the same time I shall solace the hearts of thousands of others who, in all countries, cannot or dare not speak themselves.”48 Ara returns again and again in his essays to the figure of the progressive individual whom he regards as engaging at cultural and political levels with the global network of fascist resistors. Even after humanism had virtually vanished “without a trace” from society, he and other kindred spirits were able to “[harbor those ideas] deep in the bottom of their hearts. . . . Keeping the spark alive among a small group of people . . . [they] look forward to that day when Japanese fascism must crumble.”49 He also writes of a fellowship of resistance: “I do not think that it was only on the battlefield, in that evil age of war and fascism, where blood was shed. It was also shed by those shut up in jails because of the Peace Preservation Law. The sacrifice demanded of us by that evil age was not only in prisons and on battlefields but also in every aspect of our lives.”50 The language of martyrdom here is significant and double edged. The sacrifice (gisei) can be read as sacrifice for the imperial cause or as the blood of the martyrs of the resistance, no matter how hidden or silent that resistance might be. Ara articulated this notion of the war years as the “dark valley.”51 Historian Kitagawa Kenzō has reminded us of the importance of acknowledging people who felt themselves alienated from the mobilization of total war and the imperial project and experienced as real the “dark valley” of the 1930s and 1940s. Social history, Kitagawa points out, has revealed the persistence of currents of cultural creativity and active criticism in those



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days. Ara and his cohorts’ experience of alienation from the mainstream, of dark despair at the state of the world, thus affirms the persistence of hidden discourses, as James Scott, Marcus Nornes, and others have described significant undercurrents of oppositional thought and praxis.52 To what extent “fascism within” figured in their early formulation of the recent past is a topic for debate. Ara’s postwar essays express his sincere belief that, during the 1930s and until the end of the war, there existed a space, or a vantage point, outside a hegemonic discourse created by fascist technocrats, politicians, military men—and fellow writers and artists, too—and in opposition to a mass society that thoroughly articulated the state’s aspirations. On one level, Ara describes his intellectual and political development in terms of the innocence and exuberance of youth (seishun), which he experienced in his young years during the 1920s, in an age fresh from revolution and the profound shock of grotesquely violent and senseless modern war. After the Asia-Pacific War, Ara wrote memoiristic pieces about his youthful hope for humanism, the masses, and the potential of proletarian literature. In “Dai-ni no seishun” (Second youth, 1946) and other controversial essays, Ara advocates that literary writers should abandon any attempt to write for “the people” (minshū) and refocus instead on the ego. Historian J. Victor Koschmann has pointed out that Ara and his fellow Kindai bungaku writers “argued that artists’ self-expression (rather than self-denial) should be encouraged: instead of attempting to portray reality objectively from the standpoint of the proletariat . . . writers should fearlessly express their own worldviews.” They believed that the bourgeoisie and “petit bourgeois intellectuals” should be the “main subject” of the democratic revolution.53 In the famous debate between Shin Nihon bungakukai and the members of Kindai bungaku, Nakano Shigeharu roundly criticized Ara’s advocacy of “petit bourgeois egoism” and the inner self as the starting points for literary writers, as well as what historian Yumiko Iida has called Ara’s “wholesale refutation of political agency” in literature.54 Was this confidence in his youth merely nostalgia or apology for what he and his generation had failed to achieve? Ara explains the foundations of his oppositional stance as intellectual in nature, as knowledge based (he read Marx; he participated in reading groups). Even though the thought police jailed Ara in 1944 because of his participation in the reading group with critics Sasaki Kiichi and Odagiri Hideo, he does not put forward his captivity in the essays.55 Instead, he focuses on his youthful moments of political awakening not only through books but also through feelings of solidarity with antifascist movements in other parts of the world. In “Minshū wa doko ni iru,” Ara contrasts his own attitudes about literary writers and the war with those who describe the past decade or so as “a record of the defeat of the literary writer in the ‘dark valley’ of fascism and war.” Ara asks whether he and

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like-minded writers “have something to be ashamed about in our attitudes toward the war of invasion [shinryaku sensō] before [great and moral men] like Tolstoy, Romain Rolland, and Thomas Mann or in the presence of Aragon, Marc Bloch, and Malraux?”56 THE DARK VALLEY OF WAR AND FASCISM Ara repeats the phrase “war and fascism” (or “dark valley of war and fascism”) to describe the social and cultural contexts of the long years of imperial control over the reading, writing, and production of knowledge during his youth.57 Notable is his linking of war (global, imperial) and fascism (also a global phenomenon). Ara, like other intellectuals, sometimes refers specifically to national fascism, such as German fascism, but in the majority of uses of “fascism and war” he employs the term globally.58 He mentions news of the Spanish Civil War as most significant, even though clearly there are other noteworthy events of the day. The Spanish Civil War was a current event featured widely in the media: Ara names Sekai bunka and “numerous other small magazines and newspapers” that covered antifascist struggles.59 The resistance also stood for the network of partisans who traveled from many points on the globe to fight the fascists alongside the Spanish. Ara’s imagination is sparked when reading the news of the Minsaengdan Incident, during which ethnic Korean partisan leaders were arrested and jailed in Kando (in Manchuria along the Korean-Russian border).60 He feels empathy for them, thinking that the jail cells where they spend their endless days must be even colder than the frigid classroom where he sits reading. By 1948, Ara has ceased referring to the “dark valley of war and fascism” and instead employs the name Pacific War.61 Honda Shūgo commented that, until the autumn of 1947, even literary critics deeply engaged in politics did not have the Occupation as the first thing in their minds about contemporary society. That did not happen until late 1947, when the Supreme Commander for the Allied Powers (SCAP) shifted policy firmly toward American goals, including producing an anti-Communist ally and citizenry.62 FASCIST WITHIN? Jean-Paul Sartre, in his famous early postwar essay “What Is a Collaborator?,” examines French intellectuals who were fascists (and thus separate from the “conservative elite” who were collaborators with the occupying Nazis, but not necessarily extremists who believed fervently in fascism). Alice Kaplan has pointed out that Sartre rejects these extremist intellectuals as outsiders,



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just as fascism itself invaded France with the Nazis. Sartre’s analysis of fascism as external “precluded inquiries into either a specifically French fascist lineage or a genuine attraction to the ideology of fascism on the part of intellectuals.”63 Fascism’s shift from the “ideology of a country” (Italy) to being a “political concept in its own right” confirmed fascism’s deep ties to the notion of nationalism. According to Reto Hofmann, the Japanese right that extolled Japanese uniqueness in the 1930s and 1940s “disavowed” fascism as a “foreign ideology.”64 Ara, in contrast, allowed for a range of expressions and studied the cultural and political inflections of writers across the spectrum. In the initial effort to sort out resistance from complicity and to articulate the possibility of resistance to a totalizing system, Ara offers a nuanced view of the status of certain fellow writers whom others might brand complicit with the age of evil. Kobayashi Hideo (1902–1983) and Hōjō Tamio (1914–1937), during the war responsibility debate, are two authors he singles out as “flowers blooming secretly in fascism and war’s dark valley of history, their colors not evident to the eyes around them.”65 Their literary insights allow both to see the world with “new ideas, new eyes.” Ara thus appears to absolve Kobayashi of war responsibility and regards both men as exempt from charges of complicity because they “abandoned ideas and sought will.” Rejecting the notion that entrance into the realm of aesthetics equals fascism, Ara points to Kobayashi’s evocation of the sensibilities of Japanese military men who took part in the attack on Pearl Harbor: “Doubtless, the light and air before them looked beautiful [to the pilots]. . . . The perspective of a person who has transcended life and death is likely similar to the heartless eyes of a camera.”66 In other words, he says, they have exterminated any useless thoughts as they abandoned “the regime of temporality altogether to secure a timeless aesthetic free from historical accountability.” Like Ara, Harry Harootunian and Tansman distinguish Kobayashi from the motley crew because of his daunting intellect and brilliant insights. Such flights of the imagination, outside history and into aesthetics, are thus not defined as part of a fascist sensibility.67 Yet Ara expressed admiration for aesthetic traits that could be called Japanese or could be branded as politically disengaged. He was aware that, at this early postwar moment, accusations of culpability might have high stakes. It was not clear who SCAP would hold responsible for the war, and writers deemed themselves as important producers of culture. To borrow Kaplan’s comment about Sartre, “it is important to keep in mind how many interpretive ‘errors’ . . . are grounded in pragmatic political reality.”68 Implicit in Ara’s examination of the ethical dimensions of his work as a writer is the tension between neo-Kantian notions of autonomy and historical materialism and its promise of a just social democracy through action and

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accountability. It was individual citizens who had to reflect on past behavior, redefine self and nation in the present, and move toward social democracy and away from the past. Ara and numerous others, including critics such as Nakano Shigeharu with whom the Kindai bungaku group would later argue, initially exhilarated at the opportunity to speak out, found themselves not the leaders of the new democracy but in many ways marginalized by the rapidly changing Occupation march toward American-style free-market democracy. These critics also wrote in an atmosphere plagued by doubts about how to conceive of culpability and responsibility in the context of mobilization for total war. CRITICIZING FASCISM In The Culture of Japanese Fascism, Tansman gives weight to Maruyama Masao as the most “influential postwar Japanese analyst of Japanese fascism.” Let us also keep in mind the resonances and emphases of other intellectuals as they wrote shoulder to shoulder with Maruyama and as they articulated their understandings of history. Maruyama’s analysis of fascism evolved in the context of not only looking at “a bad recent past,” as Tansman notes. It was at the same time Maruyama’s project of sounding a note of caution at a time, in the years leading up to the anti-Anpo (US-Japan Security Treaty renewal) demonstrations, when resurging LDP conservatism and burgeoning corporatized mass society suggested the possibility of a revival of the authoritarian, antidemocratic politics and practices of the past.69 During the Occupation era, Maruyama wrote about “the moral pathologies” that were part and parcel of tennōsei (emperor system) and “ultranationalism,” such as the “transfer of oppression” that involved the projection “outward and downward of the recurring sense of anger and violation that was inseparable from the regimentation and constant subordination of imperial Japanese society.”70 Like most intellectuals in his day, Maruyama recognized “Comintern’s position in the 1920s and 1930s” that identified the “support for fascism” exclusively with the “non-elite strata” of society, consequently resulting in an omission of the role of intellects and “fellow elites” in laying the foundations of fascism.71 Yet as Barshay has pointed out, this reticence is more understandable when seen in the “highly charged, polemic atmosphere” of the Occupation years when Maruyama was analyzing imperial society.72 During the 1950s and 1960s, intellectuals and artists continued to be concerned about the potential for a resurgence of fascism. The reverse course, the consolidation of a conservative hegemony, the bitter lessons of the Anpo protests during the Kishi regime—all pointed to the need for caution. Literary



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writers and critics debated the utility of Marxism and humanism, but many regarded the cultural creativity of the citizen-based circle movement, far from the literary establishment, as “a bulwark against fascism.” By 1960, fascism had gained broader and less historically specific meanings, so that sociologist Sasaki Ayao defined the term as “the manifestation of all ‘inhumane violence.’ ”73 Ara Masahito in particular understood his own past and present as a literary critic and writer as adherence to or rebellion against the Communist Party, but also in relation to antifascism, a hugely significant global social, cultural, and intellectual movement of the first half of the twentieth century. The military defeat of early twentieth-century manifestations of fascism did not preclude the rebirth of fascism after the war. Historian Laura Hein has explained that, after 1945, intellectuals and cultural leaders such as Wakimura Yoshitarō considered as fascism the “Japanese national cohesion” that had been “achieved through state-centered nationalism and mobilization for war.”74 While the influence of cultural articulations of fascism in Japan are evident, it is worth further interrogating the complex ways that literary writers conceived of fascism because it helps us understand the complexity of the historical moment during the decisive decade after the war and thus the enormousness of the task of refashioning culture and literature for a new age and society. This will also sharpen our critical understanding of other similarly critically and politically engaged literary critics and writers of the era. NOTES 1. Laura Hein, “Modern Art Patronage and Democratic Citizenship in Japan,” Journal of Asian Studies 69, no. 3 (August 2010): 821. 2. J. Victor Koschmann examines the status of Marxism and the “community of contrition” in “Intellectuals and Politics,” in Postwar Japan as History, ed. Andrew Gordon (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), 396–97. 3. Andrew E. Barshay, State and Intellectual in Imperial Japan: The Public Man in Crisis (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), 237–38, 241. See also Koschmann, “Intellectuals and Politics,” 396–97. Wesley Sasaki-Uemura discusses Maruyama’s notion of a “community of contrition” in Organizing the Spontaneous: Citizen Protest in Postwar Japan (Honolulu: University of Hawai`i Press, 2001), 57–58. 4. Koschmann discusses Ara Masahito and other founding members of Kindai bungaku and the various debates about art and politics and the role of the writer in J. Victor Koschmann, Revolution and Subjectivity in Postwar Japan (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 49–51, 54–57, 232. Koschmann analyzes in detail Ara’s well-known essay “Dai-ni no seishun,” highlighting the loss

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of innocence in the postwar world: “Even in the context of the postwar liberation could there be a return to simple humanism . . . Ara now recognized that true humanism could only emerge dialectically from utter negativity” (56). In addition, Ara became skeptical about the Communist Party’s authority and held up egotism as an alternative for humanists: “We once made the mistake of enshrining the party leaders as gods, but this kind of behavior is no less primitive than the emperor system’s slaves” (56). 5. David Berry, “ ‘Fascism or Revolution!’ Anarchism and Antifascism in France, 1933–39,” Contemporary European History 8, no. 1 (March 1999): 52–53. 6. The popular fronts in Europe indicated a willingness on the part of moderates, anarchists, labor unions, and nonaligned leftists to join forces with Communists and a shift in Communist Party policy from class struggle to coalitions across class lines. There was considerable resistance from many independent political groups, each with their own analyses of society, political participation, and revolution, to uniting until the alarming rise of fascism across Europe compelled the majority to join together with the aim of stopping fascism; ibid., 51–71. 7. By “Popular Front,” I  refer to the extraparliamentary movements in Europe, not the popular front governments formed by coalitions of political parties. See, for example, Martin S. Alexander and Helen Graham, eds., The French and Spanish Popular Fronts: Comparative Perspectives (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1989); Lewis H. Mates, The Spanish Civil War and the British Left: Political Activism and the Popular Front (London: Tauris, 2007); Michael Denning, The Cultural Front: The Laboring of American Culture in the Twentieth Century (London: Verso, 1996). For a harsh and anti-Communist criticism of the “gullibility” of the Popular Front, see Ichiro Takayoshi, “The Wages of War: Liberal Gullibility, Soviet Intervention, and the End of the Popular Front,” Representations 115, no. 1 (Summer 2011): 102–29. Takayoshi concludes that, because the Popular Front in Spain was heavily funded by the Soviet Union, people who joined it were making “peace with Stalin one way or another” during Stalin’s Great Purge, even if they, like Hemingway, regarded it as an “alliance of convenience, subject to renegotiation . . . once they won their common objective, the defeat of fascism” (102–3). 8. Reto Hofmann, The Fascist Effect: Japan and Italy, 1915–1952 (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2015), 2. Hofmann analyzes leftist intellectuals’ views of fascism on 9, 67–75. 9. At an anti–Vietnam War rally in June 1966, writer Shinmura Takeshi (1905– 1992) compared the fervor of the antiwar movement to that of antifascists who fought in the Spanish Civil War: “Simply yelling won’t help the Vietnamese people’s struggle. When the Spanish Civil War started in 1936, we felt compelled to become involved and bravely fight for the [antifascist cause]”; see Tsurumi Shunsuke, Oda Makoto, and Kaikō Takeshi, eds., Hansen no ronri: Nichibei hansen kōen kiroku (The logic of opposing war: A record of the US-Japan antiwar lectures) (Tokyo: Kawade shobō shinsha, 1967), 47. 10. Yumiko Iida, Rethinking Identity in Modern Japan: Nationalism as Aesthetics (New York: Routledge, 2013).



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11. Shinmura Izuru and the 1930s journal Sekai bunka are examples of antifascist elements in Japan. 12. Hofmann, The Fascist Effect, 2. 13. J. Victor Koschmann, “The Japanese Communist Party and the Debate over Literary Strategy under the Allied Occupation of Japan,” in Legacies and Ambiguities: Postwar Fiction and Culture in West Germany and Japan, ed. Ernestine Schlant and J. Thomas Rimer (Washington, D.C.: Woodrow Wilson Center Press, 1991), 164. 14. Ara Masahito, “Sengo” (The postwar) (1947), reprinted in Ara Masahito chosakushū (Collected works of Ara Masahito) (Tokyo:  San’ichi shobō, 1983–1984), 1:275. 15. Inpurokōru: Kokusai musansha tsūshin (Inprokor: International proletarian bulletin) (Tokyo: Inpurokōru-sha, 1929). 16. Ara Masahito, “Jibun no rōsoku” (1946) (My own candle), reprinted in Ara Masahito chosakushū, 1:219. 17. Jean-Paul Sartre was among French intellectuals who regarded French fascists as outsiders. Many British leftist groups and individuals similarly viewed fascists in England as not part of the nation. See Alice Kaplan, Reproductions of Banality: Fascism, Literature, and French Intellectual Life (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986), 14; Keith Hodgson, Fighting Fascism: The British Left and the Rise of Fascism, 1919–39 (Manchester, U.K.: Manchester University Press, 2010). 18. Ara Masahito, “Minshū wa doko ni iru” (Where are the people?) (1946), reprinted in Ara Masahito chosakushū, 1:106. 19. Hodgson, Fighting Fascism, 198–99. Hodgson defends this economically based analysis of fascism against the culturally based analyses, such as that of George Mosse, who urges us to look at fascism from the inside out: “In establishing the class bias of fascism, an examination of its rhetoric is more hindrance than help, whereas the validity of the left’s general approach towards fascism is that it clarifies just this point above and beyond any consideration of fascist apologia” (205). 20. Ibid., 66. On the wide range of analyses of fascism in academia, see Roger Griffin, “Studying Fascism in a Postfascist Age: From New Consensus to New Wave?” Fascism 1, no. 1 (2012): 1–17, and Ethan Mark’s introduction to Grassroots Fascism: The War Experience of the Japanese People, by Yoshimi Yoshiaki, trans. and ed. Ethan Mark (New York: Columbia University Press, 2015), 2–7, 17–21. 21. Alan Tansman, ed., The Culture of Japanese Fascism (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2009). 22. Ara focuses on the cluster of events (Spanish Civil War, 2-26 Incident) in 1936 as transformative. That same year, he participated in the Third Annual Japan-America Student Conference. Ara expands his mention of other social movements beyond the Spanish Civil War Brigades in these later writings and includes the people’s fronts and even the New Deal as significant contexts for his thinking and political stance. Domestically, Ara names the many antiwar and antimilitarist movements that were active in the mid-1930s even after the demise of the pre-1945 Japan Communist Party. Ara compares American Communists’ faith in the party as similar to their fervor for

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a church (much like Alan Wald’s notion of the antifascist “crusade” that involved many Communists in the United States); see Ara Masahito, “Kaisō: Shōwa bungaku yonjūnen” (Looking back on four decades of Shōwa literature) (1968), reprinted in Ara Masahito chosakushū, 2:64–69, 70–71. 23. Alan Wald, Trinity of Passion: The Literary Left and the Antifascist Crusade (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2011), xviii. Wald explains that he uses the term antifascist “crusade” because “crusade” was a common term in the era (1930s and 1940s) and because it “aptly captures the zealotry with which ideals were pursued at the price of blindness to complicating contingencies” (xiii). 24. Wald, Trinity of Passion, xiv. 25. Les K. Adler and Thomas G. Paterson, “Red Fascism: The Merger of Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia in the American Image of Totalitarianism, 1930’s–1950’s,” American Historical Review 75, no. 4 (1970): 1046–64. 26. John P. Diggins, quoted in Adler and Paterson, “Red Fascism,” 1047. 27. Ibid., 1048. 28. Ibid., 1049. 29. Ibid., 1050. 30. Ibid., 1054, 1061. 31. Simon Andrew Avenell, Making Japanese Citizens: Civil Society and the Mythology of the Shimin in Postwar Japan (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010), 73, 79. 32. Writing in the literary journal Mita bungaku in 1932, Hara Minoru favorably compared fascism to Marxism because fascism takes what he understood as a “rational, scientific approach” to achieve its aim of creating a “realm of freedom.” According to Michael Bourdaghs, Hara explains that, in contrast to Marxism, fascism mobilizes “irrational nationalistic” sentiments and visions of an essential “race” (minzoku) rather than depending on class; see Michael K. Bourdaghs, The Dawn That Never Comes:  Shimazaki Tōson and Japanese Nationalism (New York: Columbia University Press, 2003), 171–72. Reto Hofmann delves into the “circuits of exchange” between “Japanese thinkers and political figures and their Italian counterparts” in his fascinating book The Fascist Effect, 2. 33. Richard Torrance, “The People’s Library: The Spirit of Prose Literature versus Fascism,” in Tansman, Culture of Japanese Fascism, 64–66. 34. Ibid., 72–73. 35. Ibid., 73. The political engagement of literary writers and critics is thoroughly illustrated in the excellent anthology Heather Bowen-Struyk and Norma Field, eds., For Dignity, Justice, and Revolution: An Anthology of Japanese Proletarian Literature (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016). 36. Shinmura Izuru was a prominent antifascist during the 1930s. Scholars disagree whether Shinmura was a Communist. Ienaga Saburō states that Sekai bunka, the antifascist journal that Shinmura was involved in, “carried articles on antiwar and antifascist intellectual currents in Europe.” The staff was arrested and the journal was shut down by the government in 1937. Ienaga writes that Shinmura and the staff were not Communists; Saburō Ienaga, The Pacific War, 1931–1945 (New York: Random House, 2010), 118–19. However, Hirabayashi Hajime describes the connections of



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Sekai bunka to the Communist Party but also acknowledges Shinmura’s knowledge of the French Popular Front, in “ ‘Sekai bunka’ to ‘doyōbi,’ ” Kirisuto-kyō shakai mondai kenkyū 10 (1966): 14–38. 37. Ara, “Jibun no rōsoku,” 221. 38. Ara Masahito, “Sanjūdai no me” (The perspective of the thirty-somethings) (1946), reprinted in Ara Masahito chosakushū, 1:117. 39. Ara Masahito, “Hakuchōteki peshimizumu” (Hakuchō-style pessimism) (1946), reprinted in Ara Masahito chosakushū, 1:146. 40. Romain Rolland, Above the Battle, trans. C. K. Ogden (Chicago: Open Court, 1916), http://www.gutenberg.org/files/32779/32779-h/32779-h.htm. See also David James Fisher, Romain Rolland and the Politics of Intellectual Engagement (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988). 41. Ara Masahito, “Hihyō no henbō” (Changes in criticism) (1948), reprinted in Ara Masahito chosakushū, 1:317. 42. Ara, “Jibun no rōsoku,” 219. 43. Ara Masahito, “Minshū to wa tare ka” (Who are the people?) (1946), reprinted in Ara Masahito chosakushū, 1:37. For an English translation, see Atsuko Ueda, Michael K. Bourdaghs, Richi Sakakibara, and Hirokazu Toeda, eds., The Politics and Literature Debate in Postwar Japanese Criticism, 1945–52 (Lanham, Md.: Lexington Books, 2017), 41–64. 44. Ara Masahito, “Shūmatsu no hi,” reprinted in Ara Masahito chosakushū, 1:68. He uses the same phrase “tremble before the footsteps of fascism and war” in Ara Masahito, “Hareta jikan” (Clear time) (1946), reprinted in Ara Masahito chosakushū, 1:134. 45. Tansman discusses the applicability of the concept of fascism to Japan in national and experiential, rather than ideological, terms: “It seems that as insistently as American scholars have asserted that Japan should not be considered fascist, Japanese scholars have applied the term more freely—perhaps because, having lived through the 1930s, many of them knew in their bones how the regime differed from other regimes” (Tansman, Culture of Japanese Fascism, 2). 46. James Dorsey discusses in detail the war responsibility debates after the war (and an earlier one in the 1930s) in “The Art of War: Sakaguchi Ango’s ‘Pearls’ and the Nature of Literary Resistance,” in Literary Mischief: Sakaguchi Ango, Culture, and the War, ed. James Dorsey and Douglas Slaymaker (Lanham, Md.: Lexington Books, 2010), 97–135. 47. Ara, “Jibun no rōsoku,” 221. 48. Rolland, Above the Battle, September 15, 1914. 49. Ara Masahito, “Dai-ni no seishun” (Second youth) (1946), reprinted in Ara Masahito chosakushū 1:18. For an English translation, see Ueda et al., Politics and Literature Debate, 19–40. 50. Ara, “Sengo,” 279. On “war responsibility” and subjectivity, see Koschmann, Revolution and Subjectivity. 51. For a discussion of the “dark valley” (kurai tanima), see Thomas R. H. Havens, Valley of Darkness: The Japanese People and World War Two (Lanham, Md.: University Press of America, 1986).

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52. Kitagawa Kenzō, Sensō to chishikijin (War and intellectuals) (Tokyo: Yamakawa shuppansha, 2003), 4. 53. Koschmann, “Intellectuals and Politics,” 399. 54. Iida, Rethinking Identity in Modern Japan, 76. 55. Koschmann, Revolution and Subjectivity, 54; Honda Shūgo, “Kaisetsu” (Afterword), in Ara Masahito chosakushū, 1:350–52. 56. Ara, “Minshū wa doko ni iru,” 108–9. Ara comments on the works and thought of Louis Aragon, André Malraux, and other French intellectuals such as Henri Barbusse and Sartre in Ara, “Sengo,” 305–6. 57. Ara uses the phrase “dark valley of fascism and war” (fashizumu to sensō no kurai tanima) in multiple essays of 1946 and 1947 (Ara Masahito chosakushū, 1:98, 104, 108–9, 125, 134, 160, 197, 199, 221). The title of Thomas Havens’s book Valley of Darkness suggests that this metaphor of the “dark valley” was a ubiquitous phrase used to refer to wartime. Indeed, Havens writes that “for most Japanese the years from 1937 to 1945 are a ‘dark valley’ ” (6). 58. Ara, “Hareta jikan,” 132. 59. Ara, “Kaisō,” 69. In the 1968 version of “Kaisō,” Ara notes that the publication that contained even more accurate and frequent news of the Spanish Civil War was not Sekai bunka (shut down in 1937) but Serupan, in which Miki Kiyoshi and others published. Ara retrospectively calls the Spanish Civil War “the light of hope for the whole world” (Ara Masahito chosakushū, 2:71, 73). 60. During the 1930s, according to Charles Armstrong, “over one thousand Koreans were arrested and expelled from the Chinese Communist Party” because they were suspected to be members of Minsaengdan (People’s Livelihood), a pro-Japanese, group of Korean migrants to Manchuria. More than five hundred ethnic Koreans were killed. North Korean leader Kim Il-sung was among those arrested (The North Korean Revolution: 1945–1950 [Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2004], 30). 61. Ara, “Hihyō no henbō,” 317. 62. Honda cites the economist Tsuru Shigeto as his source for this chronology; “Kaisetsu,” 335–36. 63. Kaplan, Reproductions of Banality, 14–15; see also Russell Berman, foreword to Reproductions of Banality, xi. 64. Hofmann, The Fascist Effect, 86. 65. Ara, “Jibun no rōsoku,” 221. 66. Ibid., 220–21. 67. Harry Harootunian, “The Persistence of Modernism and Fascism in Japan’s Modern History,” in Tansman, Culture of Japanese Fascism, 85. Relevant, too, are the thriving and powerful currents of modernism, which prove resilient into the regime of total war. See Miriam Silverberg, Erotic Grotesque Nonsense: The Mass Culture of Japanese Modern Times (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006), William J. Tyler, ed., Modanizumu: Modernist Fiction from Japan, 1913–1938 (Honolulu: University of Hawai`i Press, 2008), Seiji M. Lippit, Topographies of Japanese Modernism (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002); William O. Gardner, Advertising Tower: Japanese Modernism and Modernity in the 1920s (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Asia Center, 2006); Leith Morton, Modernism



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in Practice: An Introduction to Postwar Japanese Poetry (Honolulu: University of Hawai`i Press, 2004). 68. Kaplan, Reproductions of Banality, 20. 69. Rikki Kersten, Democracy in Postwar Japan: Maruyama Masao and the Search for Autonomy (London: Routledge, 1996). In his review of Kersten’s book, Andrew E.  Barshay notes that “fascism” was then “operating under the guise of anticommunism” (Journal of Japanese Studies 23, no. 2 [Summer 1997], 449). See also Andrew E. Barshay, “Imagining Democracy in Postwar Japan: Reflections on Maruyama Masao and Modernism,” Journal of Japanese Studies 18, no. 2 (Summer 1992): 365–406. 70. Barshay, “Imagining Democracy,” 387. 71. Barshay and Kersten acknowledge Yoshimoto Takaaki’s criticism of Maruyama’s thought as bringing this blind spot to light. 72. Barshay, “Imagining Democracy,” 389. 73. Sasaki is quoted in Avenell, Making Japanese Citizens, 58. 74. Hein, “Modern Art Patronage,” 821.

Part II

STRUCTURES OF CONCEALMENT: CULTURAL ANXIETIES

Chapter 4

Cultural Resentment and Valorization in Postwar Japanese Literary Criticism Nakamura Mitsuo’s Literary History Atsuko Ueda Nakamura Mitsuo, one of the most influential postwar Japanese literary critics, wrote a great many essays in the genre of hihyō (criticism). He remained on the periphery of the famous Politics and Literature Debate, and perhaps precisely because of this he has garnered positive evaluation by present-day critics such as Karatani Kōjin and Hasumi Shigehiko. One of the reasons why they think highly of Nakamura is the consistency between his prewar and postwar criticism, focusing on what they call the critical spirit of literature (bungaku no hihyōsei). They feel that Nakamura understood that literature was not self-evident and that he had identified the role of literary criticism as one embodying a critical spirit against the “myth of literature.”1 Yet these critics have not paid much attention to what such bungaku no hihyōsei conceals, nor what it empowers. Furthermore, despite the similarity in the words Nakamura uses in his prewar and postwar essays in discussing literature—such as “society,” “spirit,” and “self”—one cannot ignore the slight dislocation in their distribution in his postwar essays, which is linked to a new linguistic terrain that emerged in the face of defeat and Japan’s subsequent occupation. What ultimately appear are new boundaries of literature and a newfound role for literary criticism. Analyzing the dynamic of this terrain reveals anxieties latent in Nakamura, which manifest in various textual manipulations and contradictions. It is not my intent to say that Nakamura was even remotely conscious of such linguistic operations; rather, I wish to reconstruct his position through his various essays. For Nakamura (as for many others), this anxiety appears most tellingly in his construction of modern Japanese literary history, especially in the manner in which he reconfigured the shishōsetsu (I-novel) tradition that grew out of Meiji naturalism vis-à-vis the postwar present. It goes without saying that a reconstruction of the history of modern Japanese literature in the postwar 91

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era is inextricably linked to the reconstruction of Japan’s national identity. The discussion of literature and its boundaries is therefore a form of cultural and national self-affirmation. Such a gesture was certainly not unique to Nakamura. In fact, the participants of the Politics and Literature Debate, in one form or another, all examined the Meiji period within a historical narrative in their effort to understand what “went wrong” in the development of Japanese modernity and the role literature played in that process.2 Perhaps it is instructive to first briefly situate Nakamura’s discourse in relation to that of the participants of the Politics and Literature Debate. The fact that Nakamura was not involved in this debate certainly does not mean that his writings failed to engage with their concerns. In fact, the overlap was considerable, especially with the works written by the members of Kindai bungaku. Nakamura himself thought very highly of Hirano Ken (one of the core members of Kindai bungaku) and quotes him extensively in “Fūzoku shōsetsuron” (On vulgar fiction, 1950), revealing his recognition of Hirano’s talents. The two men were similar in that both wished to consider what role literature ought to play in the reconstruction of postwar Japan as well as in their search for a new form of subjectivity, one that could sustain Japan’s national identity. Their target was Meiji- and Taishō-period literature, and the aim was to reevaluate the accomplishments and failures of literature and so empower the role of literary criticism. However, Kindai bungaku members were primarily Marxists who questioned the adequacy of Marxism in the 1920s and 1930s in their attempt to argue against the members of Shin Nihon bungakukai (founded in the postwar period and made up of primarily prewar Marxists who had been “liberated” with Japan’s defeat). Kindai bungaku members tried to define literature as an autonomous realm, one independent of politics. Yet precisely because they defined literature in opposition to politics, they were bound by politics itself. As we shall see in the following, Nakamura simply acted out this “autonomy” of literature by positing an arbitrary category of bungaku no shisō (“thought” or philosophy of literature), empowering literature and in turn literary criticism more successfully than did Kindai bungaku members. What interests me is the obsession of postwar Japanese literary critics with the shishōsetsu as a negative genre. Shishōsetsu in many ways embodied the failure of Japanese modernity, representing a form of “selfhood” that postwar Japan should reject at all cost. In effect, in addition to being a site of literary debate, shishōsetsu was no small part of the shutaisei ronsō (debates over subjectivity) that proliferated at the time.3 Of course, the criticism against shishōsetsu was not new in the postwar period; it began in the 1930s, and Nakamura himself participated in the discourse.4 Nakamura says in “Shishōsetsu no rongi ni tsuite” (On discussions of the I-novel, 1947),



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It has been a while since the problem of shishōsetsu was debated. Leaving aside the debates on ‘honkaku shōsetsu’ [true novel] and ‘shinkyō shōsetsu’ [stateof-mind novel] that were popular in literary circles of the Taishō period, this problem of shishōsetsu was often debated ten years ago. And it now seems to have come back again.5

In more ways than one, shishōsetsu is central to his most famous essay, “Fūzoku shōsetsuron.” This was a very influential piece in which he traces the development of realism in modern Japanese literary history since Japanese naturalism, explaining how its failure carried over to the postwar present. Precisely because of the reemergence of shishōsetsu criticism in the postwar era, the slight change in Nakamura’s discourse becomes more visible. The criticism of shishōsetsu is the most appropriate site for an inquiry into the reconstruction of national identity precisely because it represents a narrative of particularism.6 Despite its negativity, a “failure”—whether it be of imitating the Western novel or of what artistic shōsetsu ought to be— the narratives highlight this genre’s uniqueness. His criticism of shisōsetsu features a dialectical reversal, in which the shishōsetsu succeeds in its very failure, as the particularity of Japanese literature is gained precisely through its failure. That is to say, while Western novels appear to be privileged in their success, modern Japanese literature, in its failure, gains autonomy as specifically Japanese literature. According to Nakamura, all forms of literature that subsequently developed in modern Japan could not overcome the problem inherent in the genre of shishōsetsu. In effect, shishōsetsu is also a site of continuity: the “failure” (and its uniqueness) began with the shishōsetsu and carried over to the postwar present. This narrative of continuity is one of selfsameness in which the core of modern Japanese literary modernity represents the failure of shishōsetsu. I will come back to this point of continuity. It must also be noted that this particularity is always already threatened. Given that the particular can only remain part of a whole (i.e., the universal), its own self-sameness and autonomy can only be putative. In this dynamic, modern Japanese literature, despite its claims of uniqueness, owes its definition to Western novels and hence finds its origin outside Japan. Its internal integrity, in other words, cannot sustain itself. I am interested in how this narrative of particularity shifts from the prewar to the postwar era as Nakamura negotiates with various changes. It is in this shift that his anxieties are made manifest. Another point I wish to discuss before turning to Nakamura is the structure of modernization theory that gets replicated in the prewar-postwar discussions of shishōsetsu as failure. Modernization is narrativized specifically via Japan’s relationship to the West, focusing specifically on shishōsetsu’s inability to sufficiently adopt the features of Western novels.

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In the postwar era, the focus shifts slightly, as we shall see in the following, but this narrative that Japan could not modernize sufficiently (and hence drove the nation to war) gets repeated over and over. There is one crucial implication of such a narrative structure: postwar critics looked back at the Meiji and Taishō periods in their effort to understand “what went wrong” in Japan’s modernization process, which inevitably posits Japan’s particularism in relation to the West. Precisely because of this, Japan’s relation to Asia is suppressed, invariably concealing Japan’s colonial expansion into East Asia—or more precisely, such a discussion does not enter into their formulation of a new national identity. It is not a coincidence that these critics, when referring to the 1920s and 1930s, use periodization specific to Japan—Taishō 5, Shōwa 3—which rhetorically isolates Japan from global dynamics. Thus the discussion can only revolve around Japan’s “internal failure,” which is treated as a given. Invariably, such an approach precludes any consideration of the fact that the inside-outside boundary itself shifted with defeat. In other words, the very shift from empire to nation, crucial in considering war responsibility for colonial invasion, is simply unaccounted for in this postwar discourse of national identity. I turn now to a brief discussion of the essays Nakamura wrote in the 1930s to shed some light on his views of shishōsetsu in the prewar era and then proceed to his postwar essays. In the 1930s, Nakamura consistently highlights the manner in which the early Meiji reformers were unable to leave the backward confines of the Edo period, as could be seen in their inability to accurately grasp Western novels. This is almost always narrated along with their rush to modernize and hence is a result of what he calls bunka no yugami (cultural distortion). For example, in “Junsui shōsetsuron ni tsuite” (On pure novels, published originally in Bungakukai, 1935), Nakamura states, “The writers’ literary spirit, the site of the actual practice of production, never left the confines of the Edo literary tradition. Just like the Edo writers, they never left behind social common sense (shakai no ryōshiki). This hybrid of feudalistic literature and foreign literary techniques is our shishōsetsu, the unique literary form of our country.”7 He says something similar in “Shishōsetsu ni tsuite” (On the I-novel, published originally in Bungakukai, 1935), where he states, “As a result of the strength of the Edo tradition, while imitating the extremely socialized French naturalism, Japan produced shinpen shōsetsu [the personal affairs novel] and shinkyō shōsetsu [state-of-mind novel], a beastly child that had no resemblance to French naturalism.”8 Within this framework, Western novels (seiō shōsetsu) are posited as the regulative idea by which the shishōsetsu’s failure (and hence its uniqueness) is defined. The references are most commonly made to Flaubert, Zola, Tolstoy, and Dostoyevsky, as the focus of Nakamura’s literary history is primarily on naturalism. Yet it is important to note, as literary critic Satō Izumi



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has demonstrated, that Western novels in such contexts often represent a “void” (kūi) or function as a “symbolic absence” (fuzai no shōchō).9 That is to say, it is precisely through the criticism of shishōsetsu that the idealized form of Western novels—those that were emulated—was created. Thus, the rhetoric of “stillborn” (shizan) or “abortion” (ryūzan) is used multiple times.10 Regardless of such emptiness, however, it is important to note here that Nakamura posits Western novels as the regulative idea, which, as I show subsequently, is supplanted by something else in his postwar discourse. Shifting our attention to Nakamura’s postwar discourse, we begin to see dislocations in his discussions. This difference appears most tellingly in a very slight but crucial change in Nakamura’s discussion of early Meiji-period literature. In prewar discourse, Meiji (with the exception of Meiji literary greats such as Sōseki and Ōgai) was a site of contempt, where writers could not jettison the feudalistic elements within themselves. In postwar discourse, Nakamura begins to rewrite such literary history and claims that, despite not being sufficiently modernized, writers at least had shisō (“thought” or “philosophy”) or seishin (spirit). Take, for example, “Hihyō ni tsuite II” (On criticism II, published originally in Gunzō, 1947), where he discusses Meiji criticism such as Tsubouchi Shōyō’s Shōsetsu shinzui (The essence of the novel, 1885) and claims that “it documents the awareness of the first modern artist, who can be identified even now.” He continues, “Despite the fact that Meiji and Taishō criticism constituted premodern didacticism [keimō shisō], this does not mean that such criticism did not have the potential to become literature.”11 In “Kindai Nihon bungaku” (Modern Japanese literature, published originally as a lecture included in Bungaku kyōshitsu, 1948), moreover, Nakamura writes, “The majority of Japanese naturalist works are not interesting for us to read now, but the spirit [seishin] of the writers is not at all low. This spirit is much loftier than that of our present-day writers.”12 In comparison, Nakamura claims, postwar literature had lost all shisō and writerly spirit. Of course, it is not that Nakamura simply valorizes Meiji writers. It is perhaps more accurate to say that his main intent was to criticize postwar conditions, and to such effect he represents Meiji as an era with shisō. In “Fūzoku shōsetsuron” and elsewhere, Nakamura elaborates on why such shisō was lost. Discussing the manner in which Tayama Katai’s “Futon” (The quilt, 1907) distorted the potential success of Shimazaki Tōson’s Hakai (The broken commandment, 1906) and created the foundation for the development of shishōsetsu, Nakamura says the following: The effort to produce human characteristics from the writer’s inner self, which was nascently present in Hakai and Sono omokage, was aborted by the alltoo-easy success of “Futon.” Ever since, the naturalist writers of our country universalized their own inner selves and were liberated from the effort to

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materialize shisō [philosophy] . . . and this is precisely the foundation upon which shishōsetsu was produced. The reason behind this was that many writers were inhabitants of the traditional giri-ninjō world, against which they actually fought, and they could not truly sever themselves from it. . . . As a result, the flaws of their literature, if we take into account the time when they were writing, were inevitable and couldn’t be helped. But what is important is that when the writer’s attitude produced by the half-hearted mood of the time became solidified, techniques became linked to the concept of shōsetsu itself, which has become the core of literature to the present.13

Nakamura goes on to situate the New Sensationist (Shinkankakuha) writers and proletarian literature writers within this framework. He claims that the New Sensationist school and Marxist literature did not have a practical movement that would have allowed them to discover “new literary trends for themselves”; rather, they represented a movement that “embodied the historical era’s literary demands” (jidai no bungakuteki yōkyū o taigen shita mono).14 In other words, just as the naturalist and shishōsetsu writers could not understand and hence protect the shisō of literature given the time in which they lived, the New Sensationist and proletarian literature writers were absorbed by the era (jidai) and ultimately reproduced what Nakamura called bungaku no naiteki na kūhaku, or an “internal void of literature,” which for Nakamura led to “the vulgarization of literature.” This was carried over to the postwar present. As Nakamura writes in “Senryōka no bungaku” (Literature under the Occupation), published soon after the conditional end of the Occupation in 1952, Take, for example, the primary policies of the Occupation forces: agricultural land reform and women’s involvement in the political and social realms. Until now, these have produced almost no effect on literature. . . . I seem to have written only about vulgar and distasteful things above, but if there is a period we can call ‘the postwar’ in literature, it has generally been vulgar and distasteful. As I said before, this vulgarity is a result of favorable conditions external to literature. Perhaps it is here where we find that integrity of literature, its refusal to deceive itself.15

Whereas in the 1930s Nakamura’s discussions revolved around how writers had not modernized enough, which was the reason for their failure to imitate the Western novel, in the postwar era the discussion centered on the shisō of literature that shishōsetsu writers had failed to achieve. The cause is no longer Edo feudalism but rather the writers’ inability to understand the bungaku no shisō “internal” to literature (Nakamura uses such terms as naibu seimei or naiteki yōkyū). This is because they were absorbed by jidai, which is “external” to literature (gaibu or gaiteki na mono), whether this be



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the giri-ninjō world for the naturalist writers or the Soviet influence for proletarian writers. This curious dichotomy of the inside and outside of literature in relation to what he calls bungaku no shisō, which is not foregrounded in his prewar essays, is key to understanding his anxiety in the postwar era. What Nakamura posits as bungaku no shisō exists regardless of time and history. It refers to something inherently present in literature itself. Bungaku no shisō is posited as a pure site of self-relation in which all sociohistorical changes remain external to, and hence severed from, the core that is literature. The determination of what constitutes the inside and outside of literature is of course extremely arbitrary, and Nakamura in no way questions these boundaries. For Nakamura, it is precisely the failure to understand bungaku no shisō that began with the shishōsetsu that is at the core of Japanese literary modernity. Shishōsetsu therefore empowers itself as the origin of all subsequent literary developments. Everything that happened afterward is a manifestation of this failure. It further allows Nakamura to exclude all subsequent sociohistorical changes as that which do not affect this core of literature itself. This is precisely how he enacts the autonomy of literature, which sets him apart from those directly involved in the Politics and Literature Debate. In effect, bungaku no shisō represents a site through which the continuity between the prewar and the postwar present is produced. This criticism of shishōsetsu, as a site of continuity, conceals the tremendous asymmetry between prewar and postwar conditions, the very fact that Japan had to transform itself from a unified multiethnic empire to a colony within the US empire. Japan no longer owned Japan but was (and is) only a part of the US empire; in fact, Japan did not even have sovereignty over its own nation at the time “Fūzoku shōsetsuron” was written. Given the postwar reality of the Occupation, one could say that what Nakamura excluded as jidai is in fact the US presence and its impact on literature. The apparent “newness” of postwar literature in this narrative can thus be only a superficial change. This exclusion of the United States in part explains the postwar reemergence of the discussion of shishōsetsu as a negative genre. It allows Nakamura and others to situate Meiji literature as the origin of literary modernity and conceal or minimize the impact of the United States, as the narrative of “influence” limits them to European novels, most notably French literature. Here we can detect a hidden cultural resentment toward the United States and a cultural valorization of Europe. If there is going to be any origin of modern Japanese literature, it is in Europe and not the United States. As Nakamura states, “If today’s social situation in Tokyo were produced solely by the foreign military occupation, the issue would be rather simple. However, it is vital that we consider the seeds that had already been planted in our lives and culture to make Tokyo a ‘colony’ from the very moment Japan became ‘independent’ and a ‘first-tier nation.’ ”16 Just as Japanese literary modernity

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owes a great debt to European novels and not American culture, even the vulgarization of literature in the postwar period, often attributed to the so-called freedom granted by the Occupation forces, had been present in the prewar era, however nascent in form. What I am calling Nakamura’s resentment of the United States is not easy to tease out. It manifests most significantly in his erasure of the United States, especially in relation to the development of Japanese literary modernity. Of course Nakamura is not completely silent about the United States. He is the first to admit that American culture has impacted and seeped into Japanese popular consciousness, to the extent that much has been naturalized within Japanese culture. Nevertheless, this US presence curiously remains on the periphery of his discussion and construction of modern Japanese literary history. At least in his literary history, his only reference is the minor influence of the United States on modernism in the 1910s and 1920s, but such literature is already “tainted” by the production of shishōsetsu. As he writes, “The sociocultural phenomenon symbolized by the phrase ‘erotic grotesque nonsense’ in the early Shōwa period was the most vulgar—that is to say, mass-oriented— form of American culture that was imported, and its ‘colonial’ aspects were the perfect archetype of today’s occupied city.” At moments like this, one can see that vulgarization is linked to American culture. The United States is never portrayed as having the shisō that literature ought to have. That shisō is, if attributed at all, linked to European literature, and it is what the naturalists and subsequent shishōsetsu writers failed to adopt. Nakamura’s postwar criticism of shishōsetsu conceals the idea that what he calls vulgarization is at least partially linked to Americanism. Nakamura in “Senryōka no bungaku” is perhaps the most explicit in expressing his resentment toward the United States. The criticism is veiled as his criticism of postwar Japanese literature, but he claims that “so-called postwar literature grew out of the policies of the American Occupation, and it is probably correct to think of it as an embodiment of these policies.”17 He continues, The American military eliminated the tedious restrictions that had been hanging over writers on what they were skilled at portraying—namely, local mores and customs and relations between the sexes. We never enjoyed such freedom18 during the war. For many writers, therefore, it wasn’t a problem that this freedom was comparable to that of colonized natives burdened with indifferent rulers or to the situation of Edo-period merchants. Writers devoured this freedom with the innocent happiness of elementary schoolchildren freed from punishment and sought to benefit from it as much as possible. With great perseverance, they repeatedly treated lascivious materials. I of course recognize that romance, including the desires of the flesh, is an



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important part of literature, but it was rather peculiar to see so many writers taking up these “fleshly” deeds, which are fundamentally monotonous.19

It is toward the end of this essay where he claims, “If there is a period we can call ‘postwar’ in literature, it has generally been vulgar and distasteful. As I said before, this vulgarity is a result of favorable conditions external to literature. Perhaps it is here where we find that the integrity of literature cannot be fooled.” On the one hand, Nakamura recognizes that postwar literature embodies American Occupation policies, and he is more than aware that Japan has become a “colony,” equated with “an occupied city.” However, he claims that these are conditions “external to literature” and traces the origin of such vulgarization to shishōsetsu. It would be far more logical to say that the current postwar condition is produced by the American presence, and that there is a break given the war and defeat. But this significant break between the prewar and postwar—that is, the transition from empire to colony—is not registered in his literary history. He instead seeks an origin elsewhere—in shishōsetsu, a site of Japanese uniqueness. In effect, there is a clear tension between the continuity he posits in literary history, which is always an effort to reconstruct and reaffirm a national identity, and his awareness of the present. Had he attempted to logically work this out, he could only have run into a contradiction. Just as Nakamura disavowed the idea that the particularity of modern Japanese literature owes its definition to Western novels—in the failure of the former to imitate the latter—he disavows the US presence in the reconstruction of modern Japanese literary history. What he posited as bungaku no shisō therefore embodies a double disavowal; it is at one and the same time a site that disavows the very fact that the autonomy of Japanese literature is produced only through the West and a site that excludes the US presence. Another interesting manifestation of this postwar anxiety can be seen in the displacement of what he calls Western novels, which were, as I stated earlier, posited in prewar discourse as a regulative idea by which literature or its failure (i.e., shishōsetsu) was defined. In prewar discourse, in other words, Western novels represented literature. In postwar discourse, what we find instead is bungaku no shisō operating as the regulative idea, an ideal that shishōsetsu could not reach. What then happens to Western novels in this dynamic? Once bungaku no shisō is posited as something that exists regardless of time and history, Western novels become yet another historical and cultural manifestation of this literature. In effect, Western novels and modern Japanese literature are given equal epistemic positions. Even as an “inferior” form of literature, modern Japanese literature is, in this paradigm, given the same status as Western novels.

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It is rather telling to see Nakamura’s discourse locating European novels, whether consciously or otherwise, as an entity that has lost the power it once had. This is on a par with a shift in his discourse by which he cannot but posit the United States separately from Europe. In his prewar discourse, Nakamura simply used the category of the “West,” and Europe and the United States were indistinguishable from each other. Or rather, perhaps more accurately, the United States never existed as an entity in and of itself in his prewar discourse. His contempt for the United States had been present in his prewar discourse in the form of such an erasure, but his resentment is obviously much stronger in the postwar present. Nakamura could have more effectively questioned literature if he had pursued some of these lines of inquiry. As he writes in “Senryōka no bungaku,” “In light of such fundamental issues, even when some writers superficially portrayed postwar social chaos or dwelled on an imported nihilism in the backdrop of a burned-down city, there is nothing more new in them than in Aguranabe [Around the beef pot] and Tōkyō shin hanjōki [New tales of Tokyo prosperity].” In this quote, he likens postwar literature to two early Meiji texts. This sets him apart from the participants of the Politics and Literature Debate, who reconfigured 1945 through their attack on the 1930s; that is to say, the reference point by which they reconstructed postwar Japanese literature was the 1930s. Instead, Nakamura chose as a point of comparison early Meiji literature. Perhaps here, too, one can detect his latent desire to erase the US influence on Japanese literature, as Nakamura himself admits the popularity of American culture on the New Sensationist school; in other words, focusing on the 1930s as the participants of the Politics and Literature debate had done would have signified acknowledging that influence on Japanese modernism. Regardless of the reason, his gesture had a very different result. Bringing in early Meiji as a reference point, Nakamura is, in effect, referring to a time in which the category of “literature” itself was yet to take form. That is, Nakamura could be seen to be questioning what constitutes literature, thus destabilizing the very bungaku no shisō he himself had posited. This bungaku no shisō that Nakamura promotes did not emerge in a historical vacuum. As Satō Izumi discusses succinctly in Sengo hihyō no metahisutorī, this bungaku no shisō engaged, however remotely, with what was happening in the educational realm, which was undergoing tremendous changes in accordance with newly implemented SCAP policies. The Fundamental Law of Education (Kyōiku kihon hō, 1947)  contains the following passage in its preface: “We shall esteem individual dignity and endeavor to bring up the people who love truth and peace, while education aimed at the creation of culture, general [fuhen] and rich in individuality, shall be spread far and wide.”20 In response to such calls for reform, high



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school textbooks of the time featured literary history, dubbed a vehicle for “the development of the human spirit.” Many textbooks defined literature as a site where “universal man” was to be discussed. The narrative tells us that “world literature,” regardless of “linguistic” differences, represents a site of “mutual understanding” given the universality of the realm of literature.21 Thus, at the time when Nakamura was positing bungaku no shisō to reaffirm Japan’s uniqueness and continuity, literature as a site of universality was being endorsed by Occupation policies. Nakamura’s bungaku no shisō may not coincide completely with the literature espoused by literary histories in textbooks, but it shares the apparent universality of literature—one that transcends historical time and place. It no doubt empowered the literary in the new postwar present. Ironically, therefore, Nakamura’s resentment of the United States, evident in his concealment of the US presence, was at least partially condoned by US policies. In “Shōsetsuka to hihyōka” (Novelists and critics, 1952), Nakamura writes, “The objective of criticism is, in a nutshell, to answer the question, ‘What is literature?’ ” The literary critic is thus endowed with a privileged position, as it is then the role of literary criticism to highlight this bungaku no shisō, or how a given work fails to achieve it. It marks, in other words, an empowerment of the genre of literary criticism. The role of literary criticism is thus to criticize anything that jeopardizes the inside-outside boundary. In more ways than one, Japanese literary criticism thus becomes a site of the double disavowal. We have seen that continuity, the site of Japan’s national identity, is posited through many rhetorical and ideological manipulations, consequently evading critical questions inherent in the historical shift from empire to nation (colony). At the core of this is the narrative of a failure of modernization, implying that had modernization been sufficient, failure would have been avoided. This model of modernization theory—which positions the West as the rightful leader of modernization and Japan as the inauthentic or immature follower of modernization—had a tremendous impact on the understanding of the postwar present. Given this racialized relationship to modernization, postwar intellectuals focused on insufficient modernization and the inadequate maturity of the Japanese people. However, such focus fails to take into account the structural limitations of modernity itself. And precisely because of this characterization, postwar Japanese intellectuals attempted to abolish what appeared to be feudalistic institutions, most notably the imperial system. They were convinced that it was the feudalistic institutional structure specific to Japan that disallowed a critical spirit to emerge. Regardless of the differences in political positions between Nakamura and the Marxistinfluenced critics of the Politics and Literature Debate, the failure of modernization narrative is affirmed in both.

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Two last brief notes about my objectives in this essay: First, my aim was to address the lack of attention paid to literary criticism as an object of inquiry in our field, despite the fact that we often quote such criticism as secondary sources. We are still in many ways fiction centered, often treating and reading secondary sources differently from primary sources. Second, I sought to reinscribe the United States into Nakamura’s postwar discourse. When we fail to pay attention to the concealment and disavowal that I have identified in this chapter, we become complicit in Nakamura’s narrative of uniqueness, thereby reifying the image of modern Japanese literature that continued from the prewar to the postwar present. These objectives mark my attempt to critically intervene in the structure of area studies within which we find ourselves, as this field posits Japan as an autonomous entity that has existed throughout history. NOTES 1. See, for example, Karatani Kōjin, ed., Kindai Nihon no hihyō II: Shōwa hen ge (Modern Japanese criticism II: The Shōwa period, volume two) (Tokyo:  Kōdansha bungei bunko, 1997), and Suga Hidemi, “Nakamura Mitsuo-ron” (On Nakamura Mitsuo), in Gunzō 35, no. 3 (1980): 220–44. There exists, of course, other scholarship on Nakamura Mitsuo: the monograph Nakamura Mitsuo-ron (On Nakamura Mitsuo) by Kawasoko Shōgo (Tokyo: Musashino shobō, 1998); Etō Jun, “Nakamura Mitsuo-ron” (On Nakamura Mitsuo), focusing on his youth; and Morikawa Tatsuya, Bungaku no hiteisei (On literary negativity), emphasizing the rift between Nakamura and Kobayashi Hideo. Satō Izumi has an incisive chapter on Nakmamura’s narrative of literary history, “Kindai bungakushi no kioku/bōkyaku” (Memory/oblivion in modern literary history), in Sengo hihyō no metahisutorī: Kindai o kioku suru ba (The metahistory of postwar criticism: Modern sites of memory) (Tokyo: Iwanami shoten, 2005). Despite the many references to Nakamura’s work, he has rarely been taken up as an object of study in English-language scholarship. 2. See, for example, “Zadankai:  Bungakusha no sekimu” (The responsibility of writers: A roundtable discussion), Ningen 1, no. 4 (1946): 150–66; For an English translation, see Atsuko Ueda, Michael K. Bourdaghs, Richi Sakakibara, and Hirokazu Toeda, eds., The Politics and Literature Debate in Postwar Japanese Criticism, 1945–52 (Lanham, Md.: Lexington Books, 2017): 65–86. Honda Shūgo, “Geijutsu, rekishi, ningen” (Art, history, humanity), Kindai bungaku 1, no. 1 (1946): 2–11; Ueda et al., Politics and Literature Debate, 3–18; Ara Masahito, “Dai-ni no seishun” (Second youth), Kindai bungaku 1, no. 2 (1946): 3–15; Ueda et al., Politics and Literature Debate, 19–40; Ara Masahito, “Minshū to wa tare ka” (Who are the people?), Kindai bungaku 1, no. 3 (1946): 3–19; Ueda et al., Politics and Literature Debate, 41–64; Hirano Ken, “Hitotsu no hansotei” (An antithesis), Shinseikatsu 2, no. 4 (1946): 48–9; Ueda et al., Politics and Literature Debate, 87–92; Hirano Ken, “Kijun no kakuritsu” (Establishing criteria), Shinseikatsu 2, no. 5 (1946): 50–1;



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Ueda et al., Politics and Literature Debate, 93–96; Hirano Ken, “Seiji to bungaku” (Politics and literature), Shinseikatsu 2, no. 6 (1946): 56–7; Ueda et al., Politics and Literature Debate, 97–103; Hirano Ken, “ ‘Seiji no yūisei’ to wa nani ka” (What is the “primacy of politics”?), Kindai bungaku 1, no. 6 (1946): 2–9; Ueda et al., Politics and Literature Debate, 115–25; Nakano Shigeharu, “Hihyō no ningensei” (The humanity of criticism), Shin Nihon bungaku 1, no. 4 (1946): 2–11; Ueda et al., Politics and Literature Debate, 105–14. 3. Satō, Sengo hihyō no metahisutorī, 195. See also J. Victor Koschmann, Revolution and Subjectivity in Postwar Japan (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), for an extensive discussion of the shutaisei ronsō. 4. The most famous criticism of shishōsetsu written before the war was Kobayashi Hideo’s “Shishōsetsuron” (On the I-novel) (1935). 5. Nakamura Mitsuo, “Shishōsetsu no rongi ni tsuite,” reprinted in Nakamura Mitsuo zenshū (Collected works of Nakamura Mitsuo) (Tokyo:  Chikuma shobō, 1972), 7:341. 6. See Tomi Suzuki, Narrating the Self: Fictions of Japanese Modernity (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1996). 7. Nakamura Mitsuo, “Junsui shōsetsuron ni tsuite,” reprinted in Nakamura Mitsuo zenshū, 7:86. 8. Nakamura Mitsuo, “Shishōsetsu ni tsuite,” reprinted in Nakamura Mitsuo zenshū, 7:118. 9. Satō, Sengo hihyō no metahistorī, 48. 10. It is important to note that Nakamura himself was not unaware of this, as he states that “the cultural distortion was one that resulted from the process of imitation . . . and does not refer to Western culture itself. The West has never emulated the West.” Nakamura Mitsuo, “Kaika no fūchō to shizenshugi,” reprinted in Nakamura Mitsuo zenshū, 7:294. 11. Nakamura Mitsuo, “Hihyō ni tsuite II,” reprinted in Nakamura Mitsuo zenshū, 7:352–53. 12. Nakamura Mitsuo, “Kindai Nihon bungaku,” reprinted in Nakamura Mitsuo zenshū, 7:425. 13. Nakamura Mitsuo, “Fūzoku shōsetsuron,” reprinted in Nakamura Mitsuo zenshū, 7:576–77. This essay grew out of a famous debate titled “Fūzoku shōsetsu ronsō” (Debate on vulgar fiction) with Niwa Fumio (1904–2005). I should also note that the term fūzoku literally signifies “customs” or “manners,” but the contempt with which Nakamura uses the term and his continuous equation of fūzoku and hizoku and tsūzoku lead me to translate the term as “vulgar.” 14. Nakamura, “Fūzoku shōsetsuron,” 589. 15. Nakamura Mitsuo, “Senryōka no bungaku,” reprinted in Nakamura Mitsuo zenshū, 8:111. For an English translation see Ueda et al., Politics and Literature Debate, 257–67. 16. Ibid., 107. 17. Ibid., 103. 18. Jiyū (freedom) was a term associated with the US Occupation forces, as the Japanese public was presumably “freed” from the military government that terroized

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them during the wartime years. There were many writers who questioned the description, and Nakamura was one of them. As he states elsewhere in the essay, “Of course, freedom under the occupation of a foreign military is a contradiction in terms” (ibid., 108). See also Kawakami Tetsutarō, “Haikyū sareta jiyū” (Rationed freedom), originally published in Tōkyō shinbun, October 26–27, 1945. For an English translation see Ueda et al., Politics and Literature Debate, 153–57. 19. Nakamura, “Senryōka no bungaku,” 108. SCAP’s Occupation policies allowed women’s bodies to appear onstage and onscreen, which brought about a sense of liberation in the immediate aftermath of defeat. In literature, the term nikutai (the flesh) became extremely popular, and works that thematized the lives of prostitutes were dubbed nikutai bungaku (literature of the flesh). For example, Tamura Taijirō’s Nikutai no mon (Gate of flesh, 1947) became a best seller and was made into a film the following year. See Douglas N. Slaymaker, The Body in Postwar Japanese Fiction (New York: Routledge, 2004). 20. This excerpt is from the “official” translation of the law, done under the supervision of the Occupation forces. I must note here that such reforms were also severely criticized by Japanese intellectuals at the time, especially those on the left. They claimed that the educational policies that promoted “individualism” were a “remnant of eighteenth-century Western thought.” See Oguma Eiji, “Minshū” to “aikoku”:  Sengo Nihon no nashonarizumu to kōkyōsei (Democracy and patriotism:  Nationalism and community in postwar Japan) (Tokyo:  Shin’yōsha, 2002), 354–68. 21. For an extensive discussion of such policies and how school textbooks reappropriated literary history to such a cause, see Satō, “Kindai bungakushi.”

Chapter 5

Small Hopes and a Terror Katō Shūichi’s and Mori Arimasa’s 1955 Return from France Doug Slaymaker

Among the important world events of 1955—the Bandung Conference in Indonesia, the tenth-year anniversary of the end of the Asia-Pacific War, the second year of the Algerian War—were two events important in the postwar intellectual landscape of Japan: the return to Japan, from study in France, of Mori Arimasa (1911–1976) and Katō Shuīchi (1919–2008). My focus here is, more than that return, the significant articles they each published in that year. They both articulate a vision of contemporary culture that drew energy, ideas, and formulations from their time in France while trying to redefine the terms. To summarize at the outset, Katō looks out expansively from the deck of the returning ship to consider Japan and culture and ruminates on culture, definitions, and rankings, while Mori, having returned to Japan after years in Paris, recalls how he embarked on a very personal, introspective journey to consider and explore his own self within culture. The choices offered by these two, however different, remain committed to a binary so basic to that era that, try as they might, they could not find a way to extricate themselves. Bert Winther-Tamaki has described this nexus of constrictions in his study of Japanese visual artists active in the 1950s, artists who are often seen as the most international and multicultural, yet they are prone to essentialist reiterations of their own identities (national, artistic, individual).1 The provocative writings of Mori and Katō reflect this historical moment and these constrained sets of choices. The two essays would seem to be in conversation. They appeared in Shisō within six months of each other:  Katō’s “Nihon bunka no zasshusei” (The hybridity of Japanese culture) was published in June; Mori’s “Bunka no ne to iu mono ni tsuite” (On the roots of culture) was published in December. The articles are entwined at a number of levels: written by two young intellectual elites, published in the same year, on a similar topic, in the same journal, 105

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following a similar travel trajectory. There is no evidence to suggest that these were set up as a contrived column where each was asked to argue for a position opposing the other; nonetheless, they both engage the same topics for the same reading audience. While this suggests a convergence of interests among the readers of Shisō, the difference in tone, approach, and conclusion is all the more striking. The essays represent a differing set of issues and responses to a similar topic. Mori Arimasa and Katō Shūichi were among the first scholars able to travel to France—or anywhere, for that matter—in the years after the AsiaPacific War. As members of this select group they spoke with a rare authority about culture, capitalizing on the access accorded them following their time in France. In the demoralized postwar years, when Japan was a pariah among nations, when Japanese culture still seemed suspect and in crisis, they articulated a renewed sense of energy and confidence. Themes of travel and return organize both. The essays record how Katō and Mori were both profoundly and unexpectedly moved by Japan at the moment of their return from France. Both chart a future for Japan in the charged postwar cultural and critical landscape. Both are considering the location of a self within culture. But one also notices, given how capacious are their concerns, that they assiduously avoid the major historical events of the time that I mention at the beginning of this essay: the Bandung Conference (the “Asia-Africa Conference,” as it is referred to in Japanese),2 decolonizing and independence movements (such as the Algerian War, in its second year in 1955), the tenth anniversary of the end of the war in Asia and Europe, the energy and revolutionary change-the-world excitement of decolonizing activities, or the criticism of privilege in a racialized world. They speak from extraordinary authority. Mori went to Paris on a French government scholarship in 1950 as a member of the first group of students— Endō Shūsaku (1923–1996) was also in this group—to study in France following the war. Mori intended to stay for one year but returned five years later, for reasons that have much to do with his interaction with culture and his self within it and with France. Katō first went to Paris in 1951, in the year before the end of the US Occupation, funded by a half scholarship from the French government in order to study blood pathology at the Pasteur Institute. He also returned to Japan in 1955. In both cases, the return prompts them to think in new ways about Japan and the place of the self within Japanese culture. The discussion of the national always takes them to the personal; that relationship is my concern here. Europe is central to these essays, as is, of course, Japan. Commenting on this more recently, critic Yano Masakuni wrote that the experience of Europe was necessary for Katō’s perspective on culture to exist, for it to even be possible, and that his vision of the West could not have existed without the travel there



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both in terms of what he saw and how he processed it; this comment points out something both obvious and insightful. Katō writes essays explaining France and French culture for Japanese readers at home, responding to the demands of the home audience, with the authority that the travel to Europe bestowed on him. Mori writes letters. Both register the totally unanticipated power that the experience of France had on them. Both were deeply changed by their time in France; and then again, both were profoundly changed upon their reentry to Japan. The surprise of France seems the more striking because they both went to France after a considerable period of scholarship and study. Mori was already established as a professor of French and a scholar of Pascal, for example. Katō was widely read in European literatures and culture; his erudition and deep knowledge of these traditions are on display in, for example, his essay “Atarashiki Seikinha ni tsuite” (On the new Stars and Violets school, 1946). They knew the France to which they traveled. The culture shock was then rendered the more painful by the discovery that their book learning was radically one dimensional. For example, Katō’s essay on Japanese culture develops from the near conversion experience he has as his ship pulls within sight of Japan after his lengthy sojourn in Europe.3 We do not read that he wept at the sight of the Japanese shore, yet while he avoids that melodramatic and clichéd response, the emotional charge seems only minimally modulated. He writes how the sight of Japan from the deck of the ship confirmed his conclusions. He concedes that even though it might be termed “nationalistic,” it was still appropriate and right to insist on this return to the study of Japanese culture. What one might call my first impression of Japan [from the ship] is as follows. In the mountains and the pine groves at the water’s edge as we approached from the sea, in the white walls of the fishing villages that were visible in the shadow of those pine groves, scenes portrayed in classic sansui-style ink landscape paintings, was that ancient, beautiful Japan. I had the distinct impression of how this was a completely different world from western Europe.4

He pairs this to another impression, one where the industrialized modern Japan of smokestacks and factories lining the shore gave him the impression of how this Japan was a completely different world from that of Southeast Asia. In these Japans are the distinct strains and strands that he will follow for his zasshu argument. The result of these experiences is that he is emotionally affected by, for example, the discovery upon his return of a Japanese culture that might compete with the “pure” cultures of Europe, and of the possibilities for reevaluating Japanese culture in ways that can counter the malaise and inferiority of the postwar years. He is energized by regenerative aspects he can now see in Japanese culture. The central power, and point, of this

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essay is the conclusion: that what distinguishes Japan in the world is not its “purity”—as one might expect at the time and that, he argues, England and France can claim—but its hybridity, its zasshusei. In his argument that quality of being hybrid is precisely the defining characteristic of Japanese culture and, as such, will allow it to compete with, to stand on equal footing with, the cultures of Europe that he takes as standards. Katō now finds a Japan—and this is the point of the title—that is zasshu:  hybrid, composite, amalgam, mongrel. “In short,” he asks, “if the cultures of England and France are taken as the exemplars of pure culture, then is not the culture of Japan the exemplar of a hybrid culture?”5 The logic of which, he goes on to explain, means that while England and France represent a standard in their purity, Japan can serve as a standard in its hybridity. This is the source of his excitement; this revelation of how Japanese culture works indicates that Japan is of an equal standing with these cultures—Japan can compete and hold its own against the cultures of Europe by virtue of this defining characteristic. In the reshuffled postwar world, this is a moment of emotional excitement; it is easy to understand this desire to place Japan on a par with the “major” nations; more surprising is that, in this revolutionary moment, he extends such energy in preserving France and England not only as “pure”—a still relatively untroubled category in the Japanese context— but as the standard and goal. Katō employs a complicated strategy to bring Japanese culture into this elevated system. In another step of the surprise, as I note later, this acceptance of standards remains unchanged throughout his life. Katō’s concept of zasshu—as in the mixture of races—is, precisely speaking, a biological metaphor, as in a “cross” or a “grafted” plant, because, following the metaphor, where the roots might be traditional, or Japanese, the trunk or the branches and leaves might be Western.6 Katō articulates a scenario wherein one cannot disentangle one element from the other, yet it remains clear which is root, and from what source, and which is trunk, from which source: “In short, I see clearly how one has to accept just how deeply the Westernization of Japan has penetrated. . . . The characteristic of Japanese culture is that those two components [Westernized Japan and traditional Japan] are entwined in a very deep place, and the fact is that neither could be easily extracted.”7 The cultures may be mixed—that is, inextricable one from the other and hybrid—but it also remains possible to point out which element came from which source, even if it is impossible to separate them. A mixture, yes, but with identifiable provenance for the pieces; it is clear which strand is Japanese and which is Western (to reproduce a lack of parallelism in Katō’s writing, i.e., a single country, Japan, on the one hand, and multiple countries of Europe on the other). Not so much alloy as admixture.



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Thus, in this admixture with still-identifiable components, Katō takes us not to a place of integration but to another place of purity. He is not pointing to a messy, anarchic state of amalgamation but to a royalist state of purity and invented traditions. Zasshu does not here signal a hybridity or mongrelization that associates with porous breakdowns and interstitial spaces, the fungible boundaries between cultures, as such vocabulary and postcolonial theorizing would now suggest. Rather, it is to offer a Japanese culture that is identifiably different from all the others, one that can stand on its own alongside the “pure” cultures of Europe, one that can compete, that is, on an equal footing with the “major” cultures, which he identifies as the French and British. “Hybrid” is not, then, a malleable and unstable category that breaks down the system that allows French and English categories to be not only “pure” but also a standard by which others are measured (and found wanting, of course) but is just the opposite, a clearly defined container, a cultural essentialism that is defined by, determined by, bounded by its hybridity. The traditional hierarchies and standards remain intact. Katō’s 1955 essay provided the title of the volume in which a number of essays were collected. This volume was subtitled “Japan’s Small Hope,” and as French literature scholar Miura Nobutaka has written, it can be taken as Katō’s attempt to navigate between the ultranationalism that supported the emperor-centered imperial Japan on one side and the blind religious faith in Westernism on the other.8 He intends a path between these two poles, leading the way through the binaries that frame this discussion and many of the era. “Hybrid” points to a middle ground. Miura further explains Katō’s stance by noting that “Katō’s intent, in this essay, was to explicate why Japan started the war and point toward an answer to, ‘How should Japan live after the war?’ ”9 Indeed, explaining Japan vis-à-vis the war would be one of Katō’s lifelong projects, as would an engagement with culture. Further, this essay (like Mori’s, as I subsequently discuss) is motivated by a desire to find a place for one’s self and one’s nation in the postwar world. Katō consistently offered antidotes to the domestic essentializing discourses of nationalists in Japan, he relentlessly addressed questions of how to live in the postwar era, he consistently and powerfully resisted movements that he saw as retrograde and that repeated or enabled earlier predilections to centralized militarism and fascism. For example, near the end of his life he was one of the founding members of the Article 9 Association (Kyūjō no kai), a group that also includes Ōe Kenzaburō, Tsurumi Shunsuke, and Inoue Hisashi. He consistently protested, and organized protests against, changes to Article 9 of the Japanese constitution. Almost all his oeuvre relates back to these themes. Katō’s argument and stance are, in important ways, a product of the time. Katō stakes a belief in hope, offers optimism, when there was precious little. His excitement for Japanese culture came when many felt demoralized and

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inferior as Japanese. Japanese culture had become a discredited culture—a culture identified as “belligerent,” “feudal,” “premodern,” “nonrational,” and “fanatical,” both domestically and in the world. It was a hard time to feel positive. Aoki Tamotsu, in his oft-cited because very useful schematic, describes the period from 1945 to 1954 as one in which domestic writing about Japanese culture was characterized by negativity. And while this broad-brush approach to comprehending the age carries its own essentializations, the heuristic is useful for elucidating the rational and affective issues at stake. Aoki carefully reads a number of essays that look forward to change—that look, specifically, to the advanced nations of the West for models of egalitarianism and democracy. Rereading essays by authors as diverse as Sakaguchi Ango and Kawashima Takeyoshi, Aoki points out that the energy pointing toward new ways of living and new constructions of society, while energized by change and possibility, were nonetheless predicated on a critical, negatively cast assumption of Japanese inferiority. Katō’s essay appears in the midst of this and marks a new direction. The energy and emotion, the optimism and possibility of Katō’s essays (the affective plane) may have overshadowed the rational. Katō’s enthusiastic response to seeing the Japanese shoreline matches this trajectory: an abrupt shift from being demoralized under the weight of a discredited Japanese culture, and returning from Europe to be surprised by how much positive is to be found in Japanese culture. Katō proclaims there is nothing to be ashamed of; we have a culture that can compete on an equal footing with those cultures we have long felt inferior to. Coming from someone just returned from France, his claim carried some authority and persuasiveness. The compelling nature of this positive reassessment makes it entirely of its time, both in the affective and the cognitive arguments. The consideration of rankings and positions was very much a part of the cultural moment. As Yoshikuni Igarashi has phrased it, “Tropes of in-betweenness and hybridity were deployed to confirm the unique position of Japanese culture and Japan in relation to other nations, with Japan conceptualized as a third term that defied the very premise of the binary opposition.”10 He goes on to reference Katō’s hybridity in this context, a hybridity that does not break down binaries but reinforces them by finding a position for Japanese culture between poles, where Japanese culture serves as a third term to mediate them, in a manner that reinforces Japan’s uniqueness. Katō’s commitment throughout his long critical career to denouncing the militarism and fascism of the war years is in evidence here; positing Japan as hybrid is, on one level, a means to present a Japan that is not pure, a Japan, that is, that runs counter to that of the militarist ideology. One can sense his glee at being able to offer a version of Japanese culture that tweaks the sensibilities of the militarist and nationalists who were invested in cultural purity. However, this criticism of dominant cultural forces that had insisted on a



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pure Japan leads him back to support those same categories. Katō’s argument for a Japan that is hybrid follows the same structure as the conceptualization of a Japan that is unique. Japan is neither East nor West but a third term all its own; as an amalgam of East and West it is in a position unlike any other nation. His argument that Japan has absorbed East and West means that it is therefore unique and particular. “In other words, during the 1950s, cultural discourse along these lines surreptitiously removed Japan from an association with the East and located it in a position between the East and the West.”11 A similar point was made by the writer Hattori Tatsu, in contemporary articles, charging that essays like Katō’s were nothing more than a new version of the “return to Japan” (Nihon kaiki) emblematic of a conservative turn in cultural theorizing. Hattori pointed out that while many were discussing a “hybrid culture” in the 1950s, they expressed a desire for a “pure-blooded” or “thoroughbred” (junketsu) culture, and that this discussion of hybridity fit with a new pragmatic by which the foreigners might actually be overthrown—a move, that is, to use Western ways to expel the foreigners.12 This is insightful for, as Katō’s reference to a small hope suggests, the invocation of a “hybrid” is indeed a desire to overturn the “purity” of wartime discourse, but as Hattori saw at the time, the result only posits a different sort of cultural purity. The biographical moment is important: Katō, the intellectual fiercely critical of his government and society, moves to France in a sort of self-imposed exile and returns not more critical but employing vocabulary that seems to reflect the rhetoric of the military past: Japan as “beautiful”; an admonition to study the classics of the past; to turn away from Europe.13 He was in Europe during the critical last year of the Occupation and missed the changes that had come to society. This absence left him conflicted, because being outside the country leaves him to wonder if he truly understands what was taking place in Japan yet knowing that this experience also gave him some perspective to better understand and appraise. Considered from another historical placement, scholar and translator of French Ebisaka Takeshi, in his long rumination on this essay, identifies Katō’s return from Europe as one of the notable events in postwar Japanese intellectual history, a moment of catalytic energy that generated activism in the 1950s and that overlapped with his own intellectual coming-of-age.14 Ebisaka also ties it to the world events I mentioned earlier and recounts how when Ebisaka first encountered the “proud strength” of thinkers such as Aimé Césaire (1913–2008) and Édouard Glissant (1928–2011) and the engagement with Créolité, it reminded him of Katō and the mixture of confidence and courage that would have been required to “raise one’s voice” and proclaim that Japan is hybrid in this way, given how strong were the discourses emphasizing Japan’s spiritual purity.

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All well and good, but Katō brings us, in the end, to an essentialized Japan, one with no reference to the themes of hybridity and Créolité that others have mobilized to such good effect in postcolonial thinking. Katō’s positing of Japanese culture as zasshu is a powerful idea that hints at an inclusive, rhizomatic, networked, fluid culture, but it proves to be something of a red herring. His strategy of positing a hybrid Japan, and his negotiation of the related issues, have given the ideas of this essay an important life, but it takes us to a different conclusion. In fact, Katō articulates a very conservative project of recuperating Japanese culture, not one that is based on a “poetics of relation” (to borrow Édouard Glissant’s phrase) but one that posits hybridity as giving Japan a unified and unique identity, not one of mixture and porousness. It is hard to imagine how a widely read intellectual leaving Paris in the second year of the Algerian War, for example, would not engage with hybridity and the racial and political revolutions of this context in the shadow of Jean-Paul Sartre’s writings. Katō knew better than most the intellectual ferment represented in, and by, Sartre’s writings. Katō had translated Sartre’s “What Is Literature?” in 1948, before he went to France,15 and he would later facilitate Sartre’s visit to Japan in 1966. Sartre’s ideas about negritude, for example, as articulated in “Black Orpheus” (1948), were also the foundation to many contemporary discussions of race and hybridity. As a further example, the disconnect seems the more noticeable given Katō’s unwavering commitment to being a Sartrian-styled and engaged public intellectual throughout his life. Closer to home, this is hard to square in the year of the Bandung Conference, in the tenth year after the end of the war and the dissolution of the Japanese empire, and in the ongoing concerns about race and culture and admixture—all the various ways that one could be “Japanese” under the Japanese imperium—against a background of “imperial hybridity.”16 This invocation of hybridity as uniqueness then seems retrograde in the shadow of Japanese empire, when, ostensibly, all different groups could be “Japanese” under the Japanese roof. Stated another way, it seems to represent a missed opportunity given Katō’s consistent and insistent criticism of wartime Japan; it seems that the strong tool hidden in this insistence on hybridity went unemployed. Admittedly, this is easier to undertake now given the sort of work that is being undertaken in Japan by scholars such as Imafuku Ryūta and Suga Keijirō, who ignore continents to focus on the islands of the world, for example.17 Likewise, the theorizing of “islands and archipelagos” found in the work of Françoise Lionnet and Shu-mei Shih18 provides tools to better see what Katō was theorizing. Perhaps more to the point, the writers closer in time to Katō’s writing and whom Ebisaka invokes—Aimé Césaire and Édouard Glissant—provide this critical foundation. Katō himself wrote, revisiting this essay after twenty



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years, that “it was my goal after the war, like many historians, in looking back over modern history, to come to know the origins and process of the growth of Japanese fascism.”19 He went on to explain that in the 1950s—that is, at the writing of this essay—his object of comparison was Europe, and that in the 1960s and 1970s he wanted to be more “multilateral” (he uses the English word).20 Maybe so, but to the end of his life the binary of comparison never changes, especially on the point of thinking about Japanese hybridity in its imperial project. He barely nuanced the conceptualization of zasshu even fifty years later, such that in an interview with Miura Nobutaka in 2003 he treats the idea as though it were as new as in 1955.21 In the afterword to the 1978 collected edition of his writings he commented this way: “This essay [‘Nihon bunka no zasshusei’] and ‘Zasshuteki Nihon bunka no kibō’ [The hope for a hybrid Japanese culture], which followed it, constitute a sort of confession of faith” (shinjō no kokuhaku; equally, “statement of belief”). In the original essay he also makes clear that the “various strains” identified in the metaphor of a hybrid graft are as much “influences”: “For sure, even the cultures of England and France, which I have taken as pure, are made up of the influences [eikyō] of Greco-Roman ancient civilization and Christianity laid atop various indigenous cultures”22 The “confession,” the “belief,” that he reiterates here is that these “influences” are creative elements in a culture. But in the case of England and France, he argues, this influence happened so long in the past that it is not worth considering for contemporary culture. They are no longer external graftings, no longer identifiable strains; they are now indigenous and the cultures are “pure.” Which suggests, for example, that the amalgam of styles and heritages that artists brought with them to create the artistic ferment of Paris in the 1920s and 1930s is of a different order. He goes on to offer, in the 1978 publication, that drawing from all that he had learned in the intervening decades, China may have been the best example of all of a culture that was, at least until the end of the nineteenth century, sui generis (he inserts the English term). These blind spots and the desire to categorize are telling: Germany is more heterogeneous and therefore not as “pure” as France or England, or Japan for that matter? This commitment to definable categories ultimately undermines the possibility of his argument. Mori Arimasa, in contrast, makes no grand claims for culture. Indeed, he seems to care little about such notions as “culture” or “Japan,” opting to focus on the personal and on place in finding one’s place in the flow and traditions of culture. This retreat into the personal may also be an avoidance of a wider criticism, such as the political aspects outlined earlier; it also reflects his reading, deep knowledge of, and intimate participation in the French tradition of writing, particularly of memoir. Here the foundation is culture and the focus is the individual. Where Katō looks down from a ship’s deck to survey the ground and conjecture the way forward, Mori begins with himself, on the

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ground, as he thinks through issues of history and culture, looking up and out into French culture and tradition. As I noted at the outset, the shared timing, cultural context, and venue for these two projects draw one to consider them together. We find in Mori that the goal is to become so fully immersed in the other that the cultural comparison becomes a sort of self-criticism. Or avoidance—Mori’s erudite and compelling essays are all about the project of getting immersed. He died relatively young, but the preparation for the project of understanding French culture became the project. Katō described Mori’s project as follows: The way that Mori chose was to go beyond a merely intellectual approach and to try to give a personal form to the entirety of his experience of French culture; not to explicate French concepts on the basis of his Japanese experience—which would merely be translation—but to comprehend French concepts through his experience of French culture. Or, as Mori himself said, to define concepts as they related to himself.23

In this cogent analysis of Mori’s work is articulated the difference of approach between them in the face of culture. Katō continues, This was a long process of acclimatization. . . . Mori described it as his “preparations for departure.” . . . However, “preparations for departure” are not in themselves “departure.” Although Mori lived in France for twenty-five years, he did not write on Descartes in French even once in this time; nor did he write in Japanese about Japanese culture.24

Katō slights Mori for a failure to write about culture—presumably a bounded, describable object—in Japanese for Japanese readers. He likewise chides him for failing a preliminary goal—to write about French authors in French. Mori’s finely wrought considerations of his experience of France are, indeed, writings about culture but a culture differently defined, less bounded, more amorphous and personal. Katō was always the explainer—Takeuchi Yoshimi famously labeled him “pedantic” (pedanchikku)25—whereas Mori did, in fact, approach the problem from inside, internalized the methodology of the French essayists he studied. Travel was traumatic: Mori describes being in a fright as the ship draws closer to France; he can hardly get off the boat; when he does disembark he wants to stay in the South of France, in Marseille, where the ship landed. Marseille was the long-awaited first step, the much-anticipated goal, of fulfillment of a dream of going to France. Marseille was the initial disembarkation point, before the overnight train to Paris; it marked the literal first step on French soil. It is also, then, the source of terror.26 All the aspects of French culture that Mori had known, along with all other Japanese, for generations,



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that had come from outside and, thereby, felt somehow safe, were now to be revealed as actual experiences of actual people. The reality was frightening and he wanted to get back on the boat—which appears as a small bean floating on the water from his vantage point high atop the peak in Marseille— even before going to Paris. He wanted to go back home. In Mori’s words, “When the ship first arrived in Marseille I found I couldn’t stand the idea of going to Paris, and I ended up spending a few days in this southern French harbor. . . . There was something in Paris that frightened me.”27 He would rewrite this scene many times; most of his readers will have encountered it in Babiron no nagare no hotori ni te (By the waters of Babylon). The scene is integral to this 1955 essay, for, as he goes on to relay to the reader (and I paraphrase), the essay developed, at least in part, from a desire to analyze, from the vantage point of his return to Japan five years after his first arrival in France, just what had occurred in that initial moment of terror in Marseille. Determining it will be difficult. It is indefinable. It relies on a “something” located “there” in Paris. He is convinced this does not arise from some “mere” neurotic breakdown (noirōze), by which he seems to mean that it is not psychosomatic, not made up, but the fear of something concrete and material. Paris is frightening, he writes, because of a physical something that is located there; it represents more than an abstraction that existed within him, in his imagination. To wit: “My fear, I know now, was that the depth and precision of the European scholarly tradition and philosophy which I knew only imaginatively, via books, actually existed there in Paris, which I could get on a train and arrive at in a single day.”28 The scene is developed in Babiron no nagare no hotori ni te as follows: “At the end of September a full three years ago,29 I entered a bar near the old quay of Marseille. I was talking with a friend. I had just arrived but already I wanted to go back to Japan. Going to Paris filled me with such fear I could hardly stand it. I had this sense that something was there that was too much to manage.”30 The only thing preventing him from turning around and returning home was the lack of boat fare; in retrospect he wonders if it might not have been better to return. Indeed, he felt this premonition, this “something,” even in Japan before leaving. In the tradition of Japanese writing about France this “something” is often imaged as the implacable stony substance of Paris—the imposing heaviness of weighty, stony, stolid buildings. Mori also feels keenly that he may need Paris, but Paris does not need him. He is immaterial, unimportant; Paris does not care about his existence. He will study Paris, but Paris will be uninterested in him. Worse, of course, is the fact that what he ostensibly needs from Paris—documents on Pascal—are all available in Tokyo. “What I can go to Paris and study for my own ends can, all of it, be studied in Tokyo.”31 Thus, he discovers that his “task” (shigoto; this is a key term in Mori’s lexicon as he works out his relationship with France and culture) in Paris is

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to discover a way of acting, a way of being in the world, that is responsive to French culture. This builds on two powerful realizations. The first is that, although he grew up, in a manner of speaking, within French culture—Frenchlanguage schools and Catholic training in Tokyo—he is, at best, an outsider, playing at the edges, mouthing the songs and phrases, but little more. He felt himself to be “inside” only to discover an entire world and universe he had not known. Second, this relationship with culture is like a romantic relationship in which France is the stony, haughty mistress while he is the suitor. Implacable Paris will not bend; if anyone is to change in this relationship, it will be he (jibun), he writes. This jibun is another key term in the Mori lexicon, for it is a focal point and it marks a space where there are fluctuations between “his, himself” and “a self,” the self that changes or is changed within culture. It points to the body and person navigating the flows. He pairs the two words in a terse apposition: bunmei to jibun, “culture, civilization” and “self” (and he has laid out in a few lines previous that when he thinks of French or Greek or Roman civilization [bunmei] he includes what is often referred to as culture [bunka]). The object of inquiry is the relationship between culture and self. Again, this Paris/culture is the mistress, the unapproachable lady: “I must keep in mind that possibility of a fate in which culture will not look over her shoulder in my direction, where I may be cast out from within that culture; without this understanding there will be no contact with [French] civilization. . . . This is one variety of a romantic relationship.”32 I (the self) makes culture one’s own and, simultaneously, becomes a possession of culture. It could not be otherwise.33 In this lover’s dance is the fear and frisson of a self being subsumed and lost, or the possibility of being mutually constituted. He—the self—is to become part of France (culture). With stakes as high as this it is no surprise that he is paralyzed in his fear, on the Marseille quay, in the face of the journey ahead. It (she) certainly doesn’t need him. Would he not be better off getting back on the boat and returning home? Which underscores, again, just how integrally the discourse on culture is altered by the personal experience of France. Katō and Mori have another point to make:  culture should not be a weapon. Katō is explicit on the ways that a fascist ideology of culture, wherein culture is coded as pure and spiritual and is a legacy of the militarist war years, motivates his essay. Katō is energized by the traditions and richness of culture; he rails against the instrumentalist uses of culture to club others into conformance. Mori’s essay makes a similar point: culture—in the form of traditions and patrimony—need not be oppressive and suffocating, can be organic and natural even if the distinctions between “ours” and “theirs” remain. There is an emphasis on commonalities to nourish this project of bridging, of crossing the divide between self and other, between the narrator and a lover, between a Japanese man and a French city. French culture as he grew up with it in



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Japan was something eternal and “out there”; his project in France was to discover how to make it internal, his own. Mori extrapolates in his essay to propose a similar goal for Japanese society, hoping that it will not look at other cultures as radically external or other but as an internalized aspect of identity, as “their own.” Using the example of his own objects of study, he phrases the relationships in ways that underscore how the trajectory parallels his personal interactions: how he anticipated going to France for a year to study the thought of Pascal and Descartes, from a distance, as something external, and then, after completing his academic research would return to his home and position. However, “I never thought that the philosophy/ideology of the stranger [tanin no shisō] could become my own ideology.”34 There is a collapse of distance, the sense that the outside traditions could be taken on as one’s own, not simply as foreign. His response is to burrow even deeper into that culture. It is worth noting that, for the difference in directions of both essays, there is an assumption as to the radical separation of cultural traditions. One gets a clear sense of each as discrete objects, a reminder of the fundamental assumption that French culture is set off from Japanese culture. All of which is more striking against the backdrop of truly hybrid mixings, of violent breakdowns and amalgams taking place in the world of 1955—the Bandung Conference, the decolonizing events that were changing the world, the Algerian War—that are not touched on by either writer, events it would have been nearly impossible to ignore in France. It is easy to make too much of nothing—neither writer set out with a goal to engage with contemporary events. But the disengagement is striking, and consistent with larger forces. For example, Mori’s insistence on the individual and the denial and disregard of the societal group conforms to a postwar distrust of mass society. His is hardly a postwar carnal celebration of individuality, but the focus on the individual reflects that impetus. It also is consistent with the individualistic, self-absorbed intellectual (French) tradition within which he is working. Katō’s engagement with macrolevel societal forces and explanations is not as solipsistic but is nonetheless surprisingly cut off from contemporary cultural currents and events. Given all that they share—cultural contexts of postwar Japan and France, personal trajectories across cultures, the impetus and burden to explain—and given how different they are in tone and temperament—Katō’s expansiveness in contrast to Mori’s inward focus—they both belie a common ground of inviolable categories of identity. They work in a different set of essentialisms. Katō seems to reproduce them while Mori is constrained by them. Katō is committed to thinking in essentialist categories in a way Mori does not evidence. In both cases, essentialist categories— whether they espouse them or not—constitute the boundaries of imagination and discourse. Katō’s effort to think through what hybrid might mean leaves him mired in the assumptions about categories and identifiable borders. This

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is clearest in the biological metaphor where leaves and branches, trunks and roots may be intertwined but are still identifiable. Messy mixing is not offered as a state of being. Mori would like to be cut loose, submerged in a milieu without categories, but the questions of identities and the borders of the self prevent that melding. Which takes me back to a point that I extrapolate from Winther-Tamaki—even if individuals can imagine a landscape without essentialist boundaries and borders, the external forces bring one back to inviable boundaries. In the mid-1950s they are caught, as if in amber, in the space between “either” and “or,” between categories, on one side, of “Japan,” “pure,” and “coherent” and, on the other, of “Europe” or “France,” “disassembled” or “dissolved,” “incoherent” or “unstable.” NOTES 1. Bert Winther-Tamaki, Art in the Encounter of Nations: Japanese and American Artists in the Early Postwar Years (Honolulu: University of Hawai`i Press, 2001). 2. I thank Michael Bourdaghs for the suggestion of the Bandung Conference and 1955 as a world watershed event to organize this inquiry. 3. Throughout his writings from this period he describes this sojourn as a seiyō kenbutsu, i.e., as “sightseeing in the West,” which seems to trivialize its importance. 4. Katō Shūichi, Zasshu bunka: Nihon no chiisana kibō (Hybrid culture: Japan’s small hope) (Tokyo: Kōdansha, 1974), 30. 5. Ibid., 31. 6. Suzuki Sadami, “Katō Shūichi, sandai” (Katō Shūichi, three topics), Gendai shisō 37, no. 9 (July 2009): 200. 7. Katō, Zasshu bunka, 31. 8. Miura Nobutaka, “Kureōru to zasshu bunkaron: Katō Shūichi–Gurissan taidan ni yosete” (La pensée créole et le caractère hybride de la civilisation japonaise: En marge de la recontre Shūichi Katō, Édouard Glissant), Nichifutsu bunka, no. 69 (November 2003): 42. 9. Miura, “Kureōru to zasshu bunkaron,” 42. 10. Yoshikuni Igarashi, Bodies of Memory: Narratives of War in Postwar Japanese Culture, 1945–1970 (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2000), 79. 11. Ibid., 82. 12. Quoted in Yano Masakuni, Katō Shūichi no shisō, josetsu:  Zasshu bunkaron, kagaku to bungaku, Seikinha ronsō (The thought of Katō Shūichi, an introduction: “On hybrid culture,” “Science and literature,” and “The Star and Violets school debates”) (Kyoto: Kamogawa shuppan, 2005), 32n3. 13. Komori Yōichi notes how the title of Katō’s 1951 work, Utsukushii Nihon (Beautiful Japan), which Katō wrote while in France, seems a surprising choice. At this point Katō is committed to recuperating the beauty and importance of Japanese traditional arts, without forgetting the context in which they had been mobilized for nationalistic ends and thus discounted. See Komori Yōichi and Narita Ryūichi,



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“Katō Shūichi o yomu tame ni” (On reading Katō Shūichi), Gendai shisō 37, no. 9 (2009): 76. 14. Ebisaka Takeshi, Sengo shisō no mosaku: Mori Arimasa, Katō Shūichi o yomu (Towards an explanation of postwar thought:  Reading Mori Arimasa and Katō Shūichi) (Tokyo: Misuzu shobō, 1981), 84. 15. Although Ebisaka refers to Katō as the “awful translator of Sartre” in reference to this translation; see ibid. 16. I borrow this phrase from Richard Calichman, who made this point in response to an earlier presentation of this paper at the Early Postwar Literary Criticism in Japan conference, University of Chicago, March 4, 2011. 17. See, for example, Imafuku Ryūta and Yoshimasu Gōzō, Ākiperago: Guntō toshite no sekai e (Archipelago: Towards the world as islands) (Tokyo: Iwanami shoten, 2006), or Suga Keijirō, Shasen no tabi (Transversal journeys) (Tokyo: Insukuriputo, 2009). 18. See, for example, Françoise Lionnet, “Continents and Archipelagoes: From E Pluribus Unum to Creolized Solidarities,” PMLA 123, no. 5 (2008): 1503–15; Françoise Lionnet and Shu-mei Shih, Minor Transnationalism (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2005); and Françoise Lionnet and Shu-mei Shih, eds., The Creolization of Theory (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2011). 19. “Atogaki” (Afterword), in Katō Shūichi chosakushū (Selected writings of Katō Shūichi) (Tokyo: Heibonsha, 1978), 7:469. 20. Hasegawa Izumi also pointed this out, for example, in 1974 by noting that India and China do not figure in this conception of the world. See “Kaisetsu” (Commentary), in Zasshu bunka: Nihon no chiisana kibō (Tokyo: Kodansha, 1974), 229. 21. Miura Nobutaka, “Katō Shūichi to Nichifutsu kaikan” (Katō Shūichi et le Maison Franco-Japonaise), Gendai shisō 37, no. 9 (2009): 98–105. 22. Katō Shūichi chosakushū, 7:29; italics added. 23. Shuichi Kato, A History of Japanese Literature:  From the “Man’yōshū” to Modern Times, trans. Don Sanderson (Richmond, Surrey, U.K.: Japan Library, 1997), 343. 24. Ibid., 343. 25. Takeuchi Yoshimi, “Katō Shūichi-cho Seiji to bungaku” (On Katō Shūichi’s Politics and Literature), Gendai shisō 37, no. 9 (2009): 50. 26. This terror at disembarkation is itself part of an established series of images in the Japanese tradition. Perhaps most famously is the scene in Yokomitsu Riichi’s unfinished novel of Japanese travelers in France, Ryoshū. The title of this long novel of trauma and loss and sorrow—Melancholy Journey—reflects the sense of fatigue, loss, and nostalgia of travel. The title character, who will go on to represent a commitment to a “pure” spiritual Japan, is likewise unable to get off the boat when it finally lands in Marseille, seriously tempted to stay in his stuffy cabin because, among other things, it is still “Japan.” 27. Mori Arimasa, “Bunka no ne to iu mono ni tsuite” (On the roots of culture) (1955), reprinted in Mori Arimasa zenshū (The collected works of Mori Arimasa) (Tokyo: Chikuma shobō, 1978), 4:146. 28. Ibid.; emphasis in original.

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29. Babiron no nagare no hotori ni te, while dated in the correspondence as 1953, was not published until 1958. For readers in Japan, then, the 1955 essay was the first encounter with this attempt to reassess that moment of crisis in the face of France and the cultural tradition it represented. 30. Mori Arimasa, Mori Arimasa essē shūsei (Selected essays of Mori Arimasa) (Tokyo: Chikuma shobō, 1999), 1:19. 31. Mori, Babiron no nagare no hotori ni te, 20; emphasis in original. 32. Ibid., 27. 33. Ibid., 28. 34. Mori, “Bunka no ne,” 148.

Chapter 6

Language and the People The Amateur Writing Subject in Kindai bungaku, Shin Nihon bungaku, and Shisō no kagaku Richi Sakakibara Translated by Atsuko Ueda

Many historians have discussed the animated state of Japanese journalism at the beginning of the Occupation period: media grew in number as new magazines and journals were founded in various genres, older magazines and journals resumed publication after suspending circulation during the war, and there was also a tremendous growth in the publication of monographs and anthologies. Various writers began publishing. In addition to the established writers who wrote throughout the war, those who remained silent during the war resumed writing, while new writers also came on the scene. This was an age rightly dubbed a renaissance in literary circles; many debates, such as those on war responsibility and literature and politics, also added to the growing energy in journalism.1 One can refer to this field as an established discursive space, as it featured a system in which professional writers contributed to existing or prominent magazines. Needless to say, however, other writing practices also exist: writing by the common people, hence nonprofessionals or amateurs. Normally, these people occupy the reader’s role in the established discursive space. In the postwar literary scene, however, there were efforts to actively turn these readers into writers. By the late 1940s and early 1950s, we find a tremendous amount of amateurs beginning to write, publishing their writings in less-prominent media. With the help of professional writers, a few amateurs came to appear in the established discursive space using their particular amateur position to their advantage. Recent scholarship on amateur writing, especially on amateur writers of the 1950s, has developed considerably, examining the ways in which various 121

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people contributed to what might be called the nonestablished discursive space.2 However, what exactly is the relationship between journalism in the immediate postwar era and the popularity of amateur writing in the 1950s? How was the popularity of amateur writing received in the domain of literature, which is presumably the realm that is most sensitive to the act of writing? Did the literary debates of 1946–1948, occurring immediately after Japan’s defeat, reinforce or disparage the popularity of amateur writing? In what follows, I would first like to address these questions by focusing on two journals, Kindai bungaku and Shin Nihon bungaku, where the famous Politics and Literature Debate took place, examining how the established discursive space configured and theorized the amateur writing subject (kaku shutai). Subsequently, I wish to introduce Shisō no kagaku as another point of reference by which to explore these questions. As is well known, this journal was not a literary magazine, and its founders, including philosopher Tsurumi Shunsuke (1922–2015), consisted of many nonliterary writers: Tsuru Shigeto (economist, 1912–2006), Takeda Kiyoko (historian, b. 1917), Tsurumi Kazuko (Shunsuke’s sister and sociologist, 1918–2006), Maruyama Masao (political scientist, 1914–1996), Taketani Mitsuo (physicist, 1911–2000), and Watanabe Satoshi (theoretical physicist, 1910–1993). Nevertheless, it is worth pointing out that the early years of Shisō no kagaku focused a great deal on linguistic philosophy, imported as the “philosophy of democracy,” with particular focus on semiotics and pragmatism. In other words, Shisō no kagaku’s primary concern, not unlike the two journals that were involved in the Politics and Literature Debate, was the relationship between language and the people. At the same time, Shisō no kagaku theorized amateur writing differently from Kindai bungaku and Shin Nihon bungaku. By the early 1950s, both Tsurumi Shunsuke and Tsurumi Kazuko began to actively participate in the amateur composition known as the life-documentation movement (seikatsu kiroku undō).3 THE PURSUIT OF A “NEW LITERATURE” It is important to note that the raison d’être of amateur writers was not at all self-evident for professional writers in the immediate postwar period. Professional writers busied themselves with various questions: what is literature, what should literature do, what should literature not have done in the past, and what can literature do in the future? Only through these discussions did the meaning of amateur writing appear. It is commonly known that professional writers were concerned first and foremost with questioning war responsibility immediately after the defeat. This movement was led primarily by those leftist writers who were deprived of freedom during the war. Bungaku



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jihyō, one of the first journals to be founded after the war, by Odagiri Hideo and Ara Masahito, featured a column titled “Bungaku kensatsu” (Literary prosecution), which, listing actual names, discussed writers’ war responsibility. Odagiri was one of the leaders of this movement, having also published “Bungaku ni okeru sensō sekinin no tsuikyū” (An inquiry into war responsibility in literature) in Shin Nihon bungaku, naming twenty-five writers who, it was felt, ought to be prosecuted. Furthermore, in a roundtable discussion called “Bungakusha no sekimu” (The responsibility of writers) published in Ningen, seven participants who would later found Kindai bungaku questioned the qualifications of those who accused writers of war responsibility, focusing on two or three writers from Shin Nihon bungaku. They then discussed who should remain free of such accusations. The younger writers of Kindai bungaku and the central figures of Shin Nihon bungaku shared the goal of pursuing writers’ war responsibility. Given their ages, Kindai bungaku writers had not yet established themselves during the war, which naturally exempted them from any accusations of war responsibility. In addition, the Marxists of Shin Nihon bungaku were disallowed a public voice during the war. In effect, it was by condemning “war criminals” that these two groups claimed their right to participate in the production of a “new literature.” That is to say, the two groups performatively claimed this subject position. It must also be mentioned that those writers charged with war responsibility were not completely silenced. By referring to their past “crimes” and participating in the discussion of war responsibility, they, too, claimed new subject positions. However, discussions were limited to the writers’ crimes and did not extend to the readers of those writings. Without these readers, writers accused of war responsibility could not have garnered authority or power, so it would ultimately have been necessary to consider the readers’ war responsibility. Had they considered literature as a system of production and not only as an abstract totality of literary work or content, the production of a new literature would have entailed a cultivation of a new writer-reader relationship, as well as an examination of different methods of publication and circulation. Readers were, however, completely ignored, and, as we shall see, this decisively affected the way each journal treated the subject position of “amateurs” (readers). In reality, whether consciously or otherwise, professional writers had to negotiate with these issues in their pursuit of a new literature in their creation and management of new journals. In the following, I would like to analyze three journals so as to identify what they focused on as well as evaded, and ultimately what logic and rhetoric they mobilized vis-à-vis the subject position of amateur writers.

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SHIN NIHON BUNGAKU AS A MEDIUM FOR “THE PEOPLE” Shin Nihon bungaku was the primary journal of Shin Nihon bungakukai, a literary group that was founded with the slogan, “The establishment of democracy.” True to orthodox Marxism, this group defined the new subject of literature as “the people.” They not only defined the content of literature as such but also sought to provide a space for new writers to emerge. They began encouraging people to document their own lives. In Sono “minshū” to wa dare nanoka (Who are “the people”?), Nakaya Izumi states that Shin Nihon bungaku strongly welcomed “newcomers” around the time of the journal’s inception. Shin Nihon bungakukai committed itself to actively develop and cultivate new writers and sought to become the “best forum for their publication.”4 In its inaugural issue, Iwakami Jun’ichi (1907–1951) published an essay titled “Kiroku bungaku ni tsuite” (On documentary literature), in which he states the following: The people, by sharing with one another the reality of their lives, strive to understand the reasons behind today’s destruction of Japanese society so as to seek a path out of it. Voices that desire the establishment of democracy are searching for expression. They are doing so not only at the level of action or practice but also in the form of newspapers, magazines, pamphlets, leaflets, flyers, and posters. They want to publish their writing in the form of impressionistic narrative and scholarly writings as well as in tales, plays, poetry, songs, and novels. They hope to find someone to publish their writing. The people are seeking a poet who would express the emotions of the people. It can be said that they are impatient and ready to exclaim on their own. At no other time have democratic documentaries and reports been so coveted as today.5

Leaving aside the inebriated tone of the inaugural issue, Iwakami here offers practical advice on how amateurs should start writing. First, it is necessary to “share with one another the reality of their lives.” Newspapers and magazines are not the only medium for publication; there are also “pamphlets, leaflets, flyers, and posters.” No genre is prioritized: “tales, plays, poetry, songs, and novels” are equally effective. These all constitute “voices that covet the establishment of democracy.” In short, Iwakami attaches social, political, and literary meaning to writings by “the people,” encouraging writing as the most appropriate endeavor for the dawn of the new era. In this quoted passage, Iwakami discusses not only the writing subject but also the medium of publication. While “the people” themselves are “impatient and ready to exclaim” the “emotions of the people,” “they hope to find someone to publish their writing.” Responding to such desires is properly



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democratic. Iwakami ends the essay by quoting the phrase, “Today’s readers are tomorrow’s good writers.” The essay thus provides readers of Shin Nihon bungaku with motivation and a forum as well as practical advice. Shin Nihon bungaku thus represents itself as the most appropriate medium in which to express the voices of the people. It invites “life documentations” on the part of workers, publishing the best of these. In issue number 4, which contained Nakano Shigeharu’s “Hihyō no ningensei” (The humanity of criticism), a work with the title “Machi kōba” (A local factory) by an unknown “young worker”6 also appeared, together with Tokunaga Sunao’s article recommending this piece. It is not difficult to imagine how the prospect of publishing alongside works by Nakano Shigeharu and Kuroshima Denji (1898–1943) offered powerful inspiration to young workers. There is also a column called “Atarashiki bungaku no tame ni” (For a new literature), in which three professional writers encourage amateur writing. As Yazaki Dan (1906–1946) states in the issue, “Without being preoccupied with things like realism and romanticism, it is possible to begin the first stage of novel writing by simply recording thoughts on one’s daily life.”7 Moreover, Tokunaga Sunao (1899–1958) recommends that “for a group of four or five to twenty or thirty people, it is better to start up a small-circulation magazine, which is easy to do.”8 He also offers practical advice, suggesting that “highly regarded works and columns should be copied and sent immediately to the editorial office of Shin Nihon bungaku or Minshū no hata or Hataraku fujin.”9 What, then, is the relationship between amateurs and professionals in Shin Nihon bungaku? Amateur writers in no way threaten professional writers. On the contrary, professional writers place themselves in a position to “recommend” amateur writing by evaluating and at times criticizing it. In fact, one can identify a pattern: Tokunaga Sunao, in his evaluation of Ozawa Kiyoshi’s “Machi kōba,” states that, on the one hand, “it is not a great work, and it is not without clumsiness,” but, on the other, he claims that it features “a vision immersed in daily life” that was lacking in past writers.10 In “Bungei jihyō,” Ara Masahito remarks, “I read the second volume of Kinrō bungaku, which is a mimeographed edition published on coarse paper, managed by a man named Namiki Toshio. I am quite fond of Ōtani Yoshie’s ‘Shinbun haitatsu no musume’ [Daughter of a newspaper man], which is an inferior piece of work.”11 What we see here is a rhetoric positing a given work as inferior based on established standards of literary practice and yet simultaneously declaring something absolutely appealing about it. As such, professional literary techniques and standards of evaluation remain unquestioned, implicitly positioning amateur writing as secondary. Of course, Iwakami’s position was not shared by all those involved with Shin Nihon bungaku. In fact, Nakaya points out that debates took place between Odagiri Hideo and Tokunaga

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Sunao on the issue of valorizing “the people,” stating that the writers “oscillated on how to situate writings produced by nonprofessionals,” and this debate continued into the 1950s.12 Nevertheless, many of the journal’s professional writers maintained the superiority of their position. As alluded to earlier, Iwakami claimed that amateur “documentary writing” needed to be elevated to a literary movement on a par with “scientific democracy,” and that this was a mission for “writers equipped with literary technique.”13 In effect, amateurs existed to provide professional writers with material. Only then could their positions be endorsed. KINDAI BUNGAKU Though not without ambivalence in method, Shin Nihon bungaku sought to convert workers into writers while nevertheless drawing a clear boundary between amateurs and professionals, designating the latter as leaders of the movement. How, in comparison, did Kindai bungaku situate amateur writers? It must first be noted that Kindai bungaku as a journal showed no interest in producing new writers. For the inaugural issue, Kurahara Korehito was invited to a roundtable discussion, the second issue featured Kobayashi Hideo, and the third Nakano Shigeharu. Such a format, though sensational in having the younger generation engage in intense discussions with senior members of the literary establishment, was not amenable to the cultivation of new writers, nor for converting readers into writers. In this sense, Kindai bungaku was no different from more conservative journals such as Bungakukai. Even in its content, any discussion of amateur writing is extremely rare. Ara Masahito, a member of Kindai bungaku, refers to amateur writing in an essay he published in Shin Nihon bungaku but says nothing about it in those essays he wrote for Kindai bungaku. This fits with the fact that Kindai bungaku members focused on their own position as petit bourgeois intelligentsia, placing this status at the center of a “new literature.” Yet this view of themselves as petit bourgeois intelligentsia cannot be the only cause of their silence. The professional writers associated with Shisō no kagaku were equally conscious of their belonging to the petit bourgeois intelligentsia, but they sought to neutralize this by actively seeking amateur writings for their journal. In contrast, Kindai bungaku failed to participate in such a movement in either content or form. This does not mean, of course, that they ignored “the people.” However, their interest was in the relationship between the people and the petit bourgeois intelligentsia. Among Kindai bungaku contributors, Ara was perhaps the most interested in this issue. In a roundtable discussion reported on in the inaugural issue, he poses the following question to Kurahara:



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This concerns what you’ve written in Tōkyō shinbun. You use phrases like “live with the people” or “fight with the people.” You tend to emphasize the concept of “the people.” . . . I  think we need to address how literary writers relate to the people in ways that are different from politicians or scholars. . . . For example, do writers really “live with the people” by participating in an “organized movement” and working in settlement houses, following the old ways of doing things, or are there other, more fundamental ways of living with the people? These are some of the things I’d like to ask you.14

Ara did not receive a clear response from Kurahara, although he also stated that “this may not apply to writers who emerged from the people.” Yet writers like himself with the “background and emotions of the petit bourgeois intelligentsia” would certainly encounter complex problems when “going to the people.”15 He goes on to ask, “Do you have any thoughts about the particular ways in which to share happiness and sadness with the people in literary terms?”16 What Ara is concerned with here is not what it means for the people to write but rather what it means for the petit bourgeois intelligentsia to write. As we saw in Iwakami’s aforementioned remarks, many Shin Nihon bungaku theorists argued that professional writers needed to utilize their experiences with “the people.” In other words, they equated their act of writing with “going to the people.” In contrast, Ara’s questions suggest that he is seeking an alternative way of writing: he asks Kurahara whether there are ways for the petit bourgeois intelligentsia to write other than actually interacting with the people. Despite this difference, for Ara and Iwakami the background of the writer is prioritized over the actual content of writing. Or more precisely, “the petit bourgeois intelligentsia” and “the people” exist as predetermined, essentialized categories that precede writing. As such, “the people” is posited as a unit that exists entirely outside itself. The crucial difference is that while Iwakami attempted to compensate for his bourgeois background by “going to the people,” Ara sought other paths, which he called more literary. It is precisely the popularity of the rhetoric of “going to the people” that forces Ara to seek Kurahara’s endorsement for his endeavors, which can exist only outside the path of “going to the people.” A similar paradigm can be seen in Ara’s “Minshū to wa tare ka” (Who are the people?). Here, he criticizes the old-fashioned leftists who claim that they “represent” the people but only romanticize their existence. As he writes, “Every time some coddled bourgeois opens his mouth—‘laborers,’ ‘peasants,’ ‘the people.’ These are their mantras. Academia and arts for the people. They are teachers, organizers, activists for the people.”17 According to Ara, these leftists have not thought through the basic problem of how they, as part of

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the petit bourgeois intelligentsia, should relate to the people. Ara’s object of attack is the “the common and innumerable minor heroes and pseudoheroes who try to go to the people,” as if to imitate the Narodniks, “littérateurs who regard themselves as life’s teachers and enlighteners.”18 He thus asks the intelligentsia “who have appointed themselves ‘orthodox’ to confess” how they really feel about the people, which will allow them to recuperate their relations with the latter.19 Here, he uses the Japanese word jikkan (actual sensation), by which he means what the petit bourgeois intelligentsia, as subject, feel when confronting the people. Hence he calls for a self-reflective mechanism by which to examine “the inner self.” It is important for Ara to prioritize the intelligentsia’s pursuit of their “inner being.” Before “going to the people” he exhorts, “Go inward!” This “inner” exploration is precisely what replaces the act of “going to the people,” which is expressly political because it offers an alternative to Iwakami-like practice. However, this replacement has significant consequences for the discussion of the amateur writing subject. Since the self-reflective mode of thinking ultimately has no end, Ara in effect avoids theorizing the writings by the people, thus conveniently situating the topic itself outside the realm of his discussion. Ara and others associated with Kindai bungaku were not aware of the implications of their position. In the same issue in which Ara’s essay was published, a piece on a roundtable discussion with Nakano Shigeharu was included. It features one of the few occurrences in which Kindai bungaku raises the issue of amateur writings. This roundtable preceded the Politics and Literature Debate, but the tension between writers of Kindai bungaku and Nakano is already apparent. Let us compare the writers’ ambivalence toward amateur writing with Nakano’s position as revealed in the following exchange between Hirano Ken and Nakano: Hirano: I completely agree with what Mr. Nakano said earlier, that all of us need, in our own individual way, to blossom in literary endeavors. This, I believe, is the democratic way. But take the people who think, “I want to eat, and so I need to engage in the black market business,” or someone who possesses the earnest desire to find romantic fulfillment. Does it mean that they themselves should be the ones writing fiction? Nakano: It can be fiction, poetry, or drama, but it ought to be literature. It’s not that they should write about the need to deal in the black market to eat. Rather, they should address the intense need to eat regardless of the black market, or take up the poignant desire to find romantic fulfillment. Hirano: Do you mean that literary specialists shouldn’t overlook such poignant feelings? Or do you mean that those who feel these sentiments should express themselves in literary terms?



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Nakano: The latter. But this also means that professional writers should take up those issues as well.20

It is clear that Hirano is concerned with the writing subject. Although Nakano appears to be a bit slow in his response, we discover later that this is because Nakano deems it self-evident that nonprofessional writers should write. In effect, it is more likely that he was caught off guard by Hirano, who did not share this premise. The issue is raised again later by Sasaki Kiichi, but the focus of the discussion skirts the writing subject and proceeds with an abstract discussion on “democratic literature.” Even in the subsequent Politics and Literature Debate, this issue was never raised as a point of divergence between the two journals. As we have seen, this was because the Kindai bungaku writers marginalized “the people” and their writing. They never quite opposed Shin Nihon bungaku’s efforts to develop a literature of “the workers,” and remained silent on the issue of amateur writing. Ironically, perhaps, this avoidance led them to a certain complicity, a passive endorsement of Shin Nihon bungaku’s activities of promoting amateur writing and its conceptualization of “the people” as writing subject. THE UNIQUENESS OF SHISŌ NO KAGAKU Let us now turn to Shisō no kagaku. First, how did this group define itself with regard to amateur writing? Four important points are set out in the piece “Sōkan no shushi” (Our goals for founding the journal), all of which are insightful in giving us a general picture of the journal. What is of particular interest for our purposes is the fourth point: “We invite readers’ critiques of our essays and offer a column in which writers will respond to these critiques. We hope that our philosophy will gradually be expounded and developed through such active communication between writers and readers.” As part of the creation of Shisō no kagaku, its founders conceived of the journal as an interactive space in which both writers and readers stood on equal ground. A column was specifically designated as a space of dialogue. In the third issue, published in December 1946, there is indeed an essay contributed by an outsider named Kurata Ichirō, “Zendai seikatsu no ronri ni tsuite” (On the logic of life in the prior age). Kurata was not a complete amateur, however. Strongly influenced by Yanagita Kunio, he had become a folklorist and had initially pursued the path of a fiction writer. Given that he had already published, Kurata should perhaps be considered a semiprofessional. There are quite a few contributions by such semiprofessional writers, but in the early issues of Shisō no kagaku, there were no contributions by complete amateurs,

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nor did the journal offer any instructions for amateur writers, as did Shin Nihon bungaku. Shisō no kagaku subsequently changed direction by actively encouraging the publication of “life documentations,” but at least initially the journal did not actively seek to blur the boundary between amateurs and professionals. However, Shisō no kagaku contributed to amateur writing not as a media forum but in terms of linguistic style. In the early essays, we find attempts to simplify and destabilize academic writing by professional scholars. For example, in the inaugural issue economist Ueda Tatsunosuke (1892–1958) published “Shisō to hyōgen” (Thought and expression), where he discusses the “democratization of language.” As Ueda states, “In today’s world, where discussions of the democratization of language are rampant, it is almost anachronistic to see scholarly writings relying on highbrow, solemn-sounding classical language.” Ueda argues that scholarly writing should avoid jargon and communicate with the public.21 In order to demonstrate his position, he experiments orthographically, writing a review of Bertrand Russell’s A History of Western Philosophy without using kanji compounds. Perhaps the most important contribution on the part of Shisō no kagaku was its efforts to prepare the way for amateur writing by introducing semiotics.22 Tsurumi Shunsuke is well known for introducing to Japan American-born pragmatism, known as popular philosophy. Tsurumi’s philosophical training at Harvard, starting in 1939, was primarily in a branch of European semiotics, as he studied the analytical philosophy of such figures as Rudolf Carnap (1891–1970). Semiotics was then largely influenced by the classical pragmatist Charles Sanders Peirce (1839–1914), but it had further developed a more complex, sophisticated analytical system by which to examine language. Tsurumi, while studying classical pragmatism, sought to introduce the new forms of semiotics that had shaped the American philosophical establishment. Tsurumi’s essay “Kotoba no omamoriteki shiyōhō ni tsuite” (On the talismanic use of language) was included in the inaugural issue of Shisō no kagaku and marks the departure point of his postwar career. The essay deliberately avoids scholarly language while applying semiotics to the use of contemporary language. Tsurumi begins the essay by dividing language into two categories:  “assertive” or “constative” (shuchōteki) and “expressive” (hyōgenteki). The former refers to “a statement that can be determined as to whether it is true or false based on experimentation or logic,” while the latter is defined as “a statement that arises from a given condition of the speaker in which the statement affects the listener in some way.”23 Talismanic usage is a subcategory of this second type and is referred to as fake assertive statements (nise shuchōteki). The examples Tsurumi gives are wartime phrases such as “savage Americans and Brits” (kichiku Eibei) and “national polity” (kokutai), as well as such postwar words as “liberty,” “democracy,” and “peace.” Often



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used without a proper understanding of their meanings, their usage bestows a “talismanic” power and protection to users. The second half of the essay could easily be read as social critique in its contemplating the reasons so many of these words are used in Japanese society and ways in which to prevent such abuse. How does this semiotic analysis engage with our earlier discussions of Kindai bungaku and Shin Nihon bungaku? Tsurumi’s main contribution to amateur writing lies in the fact that he discovered everyday language as an object of analysis. Neither Kindai bungaku—which practically ignored amateur writing—nor Shin Nihon bungaku, despite its involvement with amateur writing, ever sought to analyze vocabulary or rhetoric. Shin Nihon bungaku focused on the background of the writer, an element that exists outside the text. In contrast, Tsurumi offered (if slightly pedantically) a way to analyze the text itself. Tsurumi did not take up amateur literary writing as an object of analysis, but if amateurs, who lacked literary language, sought to write in everyday language, it is easy to imagine that an analysis of everyday language itself offered a new analytical perspective for amateur writing. Moreover, Tsurumi’s essay did not simply capture everyday language as a static phenomenon. As the categories “assertive” and “expressive” show, semiotics was very much concerned with the speaking subject, a study that takes into account the context of utterance. It sought to analyze the manner in which utterances empower one, or the power dynamics that shape the context of utterances. Ultimately, such a perception of language precluded the predetermined division between “literary” and “everyday” language, allowing for a perspective in which “literary” or the “everyday” could be construed relative to the context in which the speaker or writer found him- or herself. Neither Kindai bungaku nor Shin Nihon bungaku was able to pursue this point. In a discursive space in which the “literary” is predominantly linked to the opposition between Kindai bungaku and Shin Nihon bungaku, Shisō no kagaku offers a fascinating reference point. Until now, very few literary scholars have paid much attention to Shisō no kagaku, perhaps because it was a social science or philosophy journal. Tsurumi was never invited to contribute to either Kindai bungaku or Shin Nihon bungaku. Much later, Tsurumi recalled that Kindai bungaku and Shin Nihon bungaku both ignored his work and his journal, despite their common agenda of “language” and “the people.”24 Situated far from the literary debates, Shisō no kagaku offered a paradigm by which to theorize the people as a writing subject, focusing ultimately on their potential as users of literary language. Shisō no kagaku thus foregrounds what the Politics and Literature Debate perhaps concealed or evaded. Two points are important here: First, one encounters a lack of theorization regarding “the people” as a speaking subject

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through which a “new literature” becomes possible. Second—and this point requires further reflection—Tsurumi, as a Harvard-educated philosopher of American pragmatism, represented the United States. A sustained inquiry into this important issue is beyond the scope of this essay, but it is not difficult to imagine a latent desire to marginalize the United States in conceiving of a “new literature.” NOTES 1. See, for example, J. Victor Koschmann, Revolution and Subjectivity in Postwar Japan (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996). Even before the opening of the Prange Collection at the University of Maryland, works such as Fukushima Jūrō’s Sengo zasshi hakkutsu—Shōdo jidai no seishin (Excavating postwar journals—The spirit of the scorched earth) (Tokyo:  Nihon editā sukūru shuppanbu, 1972)  and Kōno Toshirō et  al.’s Tenbō sengo zasshi (A perspective on postwar magazines) (Tokyo:  Kawade shobō shinsha, 1977)  discussed the tremendous growth in publication that shaped the immediate postwar period, but easy access to the Prange Collection has allowed scholars to view the broader picture. 2. See especially Gendai shisō 2007-nen 12-gatsu rinji sōkangō—Sōtokushū sengo minshū seishinshi (Contemporary thought, January 2007 special edition—A postwar history of the people); Toba Kōji, 1950-nendai—“Kiroku” no jidai (The 1950s—The age of documentation) (Tokyo: Kawade bukkusu, 2010); Nakaya Izumi, Sono “minshū” to wa dare nanoka—Jendā, kaikyū, aidentitī (Who are “the people”? Gender, class, identity) (Tokyo: Seikyūsha, 2013). 3. On the relationship between the Tsurumis and the life-documentation movement, see Nakaya, Sono “minshū” to wa; Nishikawa Yūko, ed., Kyōdō kenkyū sengo no seikatsu kiroku ni manabu—Tsurumi Kazuko bunko to no taiwa/mirai e no tsūshin (Learning from the postwar life-documentation movement—A conversation with the Tsurumi Kazuko Archive) (Tokyo: Nihon tosho sentā, 2009); Sawai Yoshirō, Garikiri no ki—Seikatsu kiroku undō to Yokkaichi kōgai (Mimeographing record—The air pollution issues in Yokkaichi and the life-documenting movement) (Tokyo: Kage shobō, 2012); Tsurumi Kazuko, “Seikatsu tsuzurikata ni manabu” (Learning from life documenting), Tosho, no. 126 (October 1952): 11–13; Tsurumi Shunsuke and Kuno Osamu, Gendai Nihon no shisō, sono itsutsu no uzu (Contemporary Japanese thought—Its five vortexes) (Tokyo: Iwanami shinsho, 1956); and Tsurumi Shunsuke, ed., Genryū kara mirai e—“Shisō no kagaku” gojū-nen (From the origin to the future—Fifty years of Shisō no kagaku) (Tokyo: Shisō no kagakusha, 2005). 4. Nakaya, Sono “minshū” to wa, 141. 5. Iwakami Jun’ichi, “Kiroku bungaku ni tsuite,” Shin Nihon bungaku 1, no. 1 (March 1946): 19. 6. From the “Henshū kōki” (Note from the editor), Shin Nihon bungaku 1, no. 4 (July 1947): 78. 7. Shin Nihon bungaku 1, no. 4 (July 1947): 42.



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8. Ibid., 44. 9. Ibid., 45. 10. Ibid., 78. 11. Ibid., 51. 12. Nakaya, Sono “minshū” to wa, 145. 13. Shin Nihon bungaku 1, no. 1 (March 1946): 21. 14. Kindai bungaku 1, no. 1 (January 1946): 24. 15. Ibid. 16. Ibid. 17. Kindai bungaku 1, no. 3 (April 1946): 8. For an English translation, see Atsuko Ueda, Michael K. Bourdaghs, Richi Sakakibara, and Hirokazu Toeda, eds., The Politics and Literature Debate in Postwar Japanese Criticism, 1945–52 (Lanham, Md.: Lexington Books, 2017), 48. 18. Kindai bungaku 1, no. 3 (April 1946): 11; Ueda et al., Politics and Literature Debate, 52. 19. Kindai bungaku 1, no. 3 (April 1946): 11; Ueda et al., Politics and Literature Debate, 51. 20. Kindai bungaku 1, no. 3 (April 1946): 36. 21. Ueda Tatsunosuke, “Shisō to hyōgen,” Shisō no kagaku 1, no. 1 (May 1946): 15. 22. In an interview titled “Shisō no kagaku no genten o megutte” (On the origin of Shisō no kagaku), Shisō, no. 1021 (May 2005): 7–41, Tsurumi remarks that he consulted Hatano Kanji (1905–2001) regarding a plan to found a journal centered on semiotics. 23. Shisō no kagaku 1, no. 1 (May, 1946): 15. 24. The roundtable included in Genryū kara mirai e is called “Senchū to sengo no hazama de—Kindai bungaku to no heisō” (Between wartime and postwar— Paralleling Kindai bungaku). Here, Tsurumi discusses the many commonalities between Shisō no kagaku and Kindai bungaku. He also remarks that his relationship with the Kindai bungaku members were “quite friendly,” despite the fact that Ara Masahito “saw foreign-educated scholars (ryūgakusei) as his enemy.”

Part III

CONTINUITY AND DISCONTINUITY: SUBJECTIVE RUPTURE AND DISLOCATION

Chapter 7

Temporalities of Ruin Shiina Rinzō and the Subject of Tenkō Seiji M. Lippit

Our past is filled to overflowing with unpleasant memories that cannot heal. Because of the war in particular, these unpleasant memories have blackened out all memories of the past, even happy ones. . . . We ourselves have collapsed because our every human relationship has collapsed. Even were we to discover meaning in our lives, we could never wholly recover from this sense of collapse. The more we struggle and attempt to escape from it, the more we are decisively dragged back into it. It is a ruin [haikyo], and nothing can be born from it. And we are left within that ruin, only to drift through each day without meaning. —Shiina Rinzō1

TROPES OF RUIN One of the central tasks of postwar literary discourse in Japan was an attempt to come to terms with the subjective rupture represented by the collapse of nation and empire in the wake of the defeat. In various critical and literary writings, the articulation of the experience of this moment of disjunction— situated between the collapse of the imperial state and the construction of the postwar nation—crystallized into several variations on the trope of ruin, which typically marked the sense of being thrown outside the confines of the state and national community into an abjected, corporeal existence. Thus, for example, Takeda Taijun (1912–1976) articulated the sense of rupture by way of the concept of metsubō (ruin or downfall), which he traced back to his experience of facing empire’s collapse on the streets of Shanghai in the wake of Japan’s defeat. For Takeda, the end of the war did not signify 137

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just one military defeat among others but rather pointed to a singular experience of “absolute ruin” that involved a descent into an existence of abject materiality, leaving behind only a lingering “residue” of the nation that he likened to a “grotesque, sinewy foodstuff that remains undigested.”2 For Takeda, metsubō was something on the order of a bodily affect, following the “physical” (butsuriteki) and “spatial” (kūkanteki) laws of the universe, whereby nations and races are chewed up and digested like so many plants and animals.3 A similar trajectory is at work in the concept of daraku (fallenness) of Sakaguchi Ango (1906–1955), which marked a descent from a state of sublime transcendence into an existence governed by the desires and drives of the body. Thus, the emblematic figures of fallenness, for Ango, were the newly humanized emperor, the kamikaze pilot turned black marketeer, and the war widow, for whom new desires displace the sense of fealty to the dead. For Ango, the act of falling into corporeality was also a moment of genuine possibility, the very beginning of human history: Could we not say that the Kamikaze hero was a mere illusion, and that human history begins from the point where he takes to black-marketeering? That the widow as devoted apostle is mere illusion, and that human history begins from the moment when the image of a new face enters her breast? And perhaps the emperor too is no more than illusion, and the emperor’s true history begins from the point where he becomes an ordinary human.4

In contrast, for Takeda metsubō was not the beginning of history but rather its violent interruption, a vertiginous, “primal precipice” from whose vantage point he could barely stand to “look back at the path of culture,” as if he were Walter Benjamin’s angel of history surveying the wreckage of history piled at his feet.5 One might say, however, that the key point of inflection in Takeda’s essay is his description of the gradual fading of ruin’s memory within an immersion in what he calls everyday preparations.6 Indeed, with the return of everyday routines and the reconstitution of the postwar national community, the sense of radical historical rupture was inevitably displaced, while reformulated narratives of national history attempted to suture the subjective disjunction between the imperial state and the postwar national community. A key issue for Takeda and other writers and critics, then, was the need to engage the lingering traces and memories of ruin amid the postwar reconstruction. Thus, for example, Naoki Sakai has argued that in postwar poetic practice, the attempt to maintain (or even create) a sense of disjunction, to block the reconstitution of a national collectivity founded on gestures of exclusionary violence, constituted an “ethical imperative”:  “Hence, on the part of the



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poets, what was needed in order to create a critical perspective was the maintenance of the sense of historical discontinuity. If such a historical discontinuity had not actually taken place, then they had to sustain the fiction that it had occurred and continue to write based on this fiction.”7 For Sakai, the irreducible gap between the speaking subject and the subject of enunciation underscored in the phrase “I am dead” (in which the two subjects could never coincide) marks both a subjective and historical fissure that the reconstruction of national collectivity attempts to subsume. A similar problematic, I argue, is at the heart of the immediate postwar writings of Shiina Rinzō (1911–1973), a key figure of postwar literature who claimed his own trope of disjunction in the physical ruins (haikyo) of postwar urban Japan, reduced to smoldering rubble at the hands of the Allied bombing campaign. The scene of ruin, what Haniya Yutaka (1909–1997) described as a “desolate landscape of burned-out ruins, with mountains of rubble spreading out as far as one could see,” was a prevalent image in postwar literature and criticism.8 It recurs in postwar fiction, from Tamura Taijirō’s (1911–1983) evocation of the “ruined capital” (haito) to Hayashi Fumiko’s (1903–1951) depiction of the collapse of a colonial fantasy amid the detritus of a defeated nation in Ukigumo (Drifting clouds, 1949–1951) and Ishikawa Jun’s (1899–1987) portrayal of the chaotic energy of the black markets dotting the “burned-out shell of a metropolis” in “Christ in the Ruins” (Yakeato no Kirisuto, 1946).9 Shiina in particular was a writer closely associated with the ruin; Haniya wrote that Shiina offered “an unimaginably profound, multilayered and, as it were, final and decisive meaning to the general state of ruin into which we were thrown.”10 Shiina’s fictional writings in the immediate postwar period depict the extreme conditions of life in a devastated city and nation; they are marked by representations of poverty, illness, despair, and the collapse of any familial or communal ties among its characters.11 The historical “meaning” that Shiina renders onto the ruin, however, is not limited to the postwar devastation, for it is also closely linked to his own personal history of tenkō (conversion) in the prewar period. As an activist in the Communist Party, he had gone through ideological conversion following his arrest and torture at the hands of the state, a formative experience in his emergence as a writer. In fact, as Fujita Shōzō (1927–2003) pointed out, Shiina’s tenkō was an ongoing process, one that never simply came to conclusion. One can say in this sense that for Shiina the ruin marks the site of a historical and personal collapse that spans the prewar and postwar periods. As Walter Benjamin emphasized, the ruin is an essentially temporal trope. Examining figurations of decay and disintegration in baroque drama, Benjamin equated the ruin with the structure of allegory, a temporal figure that maintains a certain doubleness of signification whereby “any person, any object, any relationship can mean absolutely anything else.”12 Allegory, like

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the ruin, is defined by an irreducible gap between sign and meaning (between the “object” and “anything else”) that is manifested as a fractured temporality, which Benjamin contrasted with the purported unity and simultaneity of form and meaning in the romantic symbol.13 For Benjamin, the ruin is a material emblem of the “irresistible decay” of history, marking the site of an irretrievably lost wholeness or origin. What Benjamin found in his reading of baroque drama—with its emphasis on “that which lies here in ruins, the highly significant fragment, the remnant”—were the “antinomies of the allegorical,” the gap between immanence and transcendence, between the material marker of decay and its attempted overcoming.14 The ruin, in this sense, is based on a double structure that both conjoins and separates at least two temporal moments (the past and the present, the present and the future). In postwar discourse, one can say that the trope of ruin was indeed enmeshed in multiple temporalities, relating the present moment to either the promise of a utopic future (much as Ango’s fallenness was the beginning of history) or, otherwise, to a past cultural wholeness that had been irretrievably lost. Yet, in contrast to these trajectories, Shiina’s ruin was firmly grounded in a continual present that resisted any gesture of transcendence, either nostalgia for the past or utopian hopes for the future. Instead, for Shiina both the past and the future collapse into the present state of decay, onto the ruin itself (as both figure and concept) as a material marker of a fractured subjectivity. Kamei Katsuichirō (1907–1966) linked Shiina’s description of the “human ruin” (ningen haikyo) to the experience of conversion, which he described as a double experience of being a fugitive from both the law and the party.15 In effect, the ruin—defined by a process of an incomplete, ongoing conversion—served as an emblem for a general sense of personal and social disintegration. At the same time, for Shiina this consciousness of ruin was not something to be readily abandoned in the process of postwar reconstruction, for, while it is characterized on the one hand by a sense of absolute despair and failure, it also, on the other, marks the site of resistance to the reconstitution of a collectivity governed by institutions of state power. THE LITERATURE OF CONVERSION Together with writers such as Haniya, Takeda, and Noma Hiroshi (1915– 1991), Shiina is typically counted as a core member of the so-called postwar school (sengoha), which was seen to institute a sharp break with prior literary practice. With a sensibility shaped by various involvements with Marxism and with the war, these writers engaged the social, ideological, and psychological collapse of the immediate postwar period.16 In an influential article published in the 1950s, critic Yoshimoto Takaaki (1924–2012) dismissed



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the writings of the initial postwar generation as nothing more than a type of tenkō literature. The key figures of this group—including the three just mentioned—had participated in leftist movements in the prewar period, and they had (in different ways) committed ideological conversion in the face of pressure applied by the state, including incarceration and torture, as well as more subtle forms of coercion. As will be discussed later, Yoshimoto himself considered tenkō to be as much an internal ideological problem as a response to external state pressure. Yoshimoto found it telling that the initial works of these writers published after the war—such as Noma’s “Kurai e” (Dark pictures, 1946)—tried to come to terms with this experience of conversion, rather than engaging the experience of the war itself. Yoshimoto compared these writers with Umezaki Haruo (1915–1965), Takeda Taijun, and Hotta Yoshie (1918–1998), whose careers began somewhat later than those of the other three and who started by “spitting out their wartime experience.”17 Yoshimoto writes that the initial postwar generation had “passed through the war years with the sentiments of apostates [tenkōsha], bystanders, and nihilists,” and he states that “even apostates, bystanders, and nihilists, whether they liked it or not, were dragged into the massive destruction and violent turmoil of the war, and, whether they liked it or not, they somehow should have had to confront the deaths of the millions of victims of the war on some internal level.” Yet for writers such as Noma, Shiina, and Haniya, Yoshimoto argues, the experience of conversion was more important than that of the war; if, conversely, they “had started from the point of excavating their internal landscapes from the wartime period . . . or rather, if they had been able to set any internal world worth excavating against the war to begin with, then postwar literature would have developed along a different path.”18 In this way, Yoshimoto claimed that the invocation of prewar experience in these early postwar works effectively elided the violence of the war itself, thus marking a major lacuna in the postwar generation. Yoshimoto’s essay offers valuable insight into the essence of postwar literature, for which the question of tenkō was indeed a core theme. At the same time, the stakes of conversion are not unrelated to the violence of the war, for, as Yoshimoto himself makes clear elsewhere, tenkō addresses precisely the relation of the individual to both the state and national or ethnic community, indispensable elements of the war apparatus. Furthermore, it is worth emphasizing that tenkō was not an issue that could simply be relegated to the prewar past, for it was also a means of articulating a positionality in the present, particularly in relation to the reconstruction of the state under the aegis of Allied Occupation. As mentioned earlier, Shiina’s tenkō was not a singular, bounded event but a process that had never simply come to an end; it subsumed both the postwar present and the prewar past into an ongoing process of fragmentation.

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In a recent essay, Mark Williams has analyzed the depiction of tenkō throughout Shiina’s career, arguing that conversion served as a central, organizing concept in his writings, that “the indirect and subdued references to tenkō in his literature are testimony to an author determined to work through an event that clearly registered as a traumatic moment in his life, but also that treatment of this issue is crucial to an appreciation of these texts—that it stands, in many ways, as a defining moment of Shiina’s art.”19 In the context of postwar literary history, Shiina may in fact be best remembered for another type of conversion—namely, his turn to Christianity in 1950.20 Yet, as Williams makes clear, it is his experience of apostasy from Marxism that he returns to time and again in his oeuvre. The route that led Shiina from revolutionary politics to literary practice distinguishes him from other writers of the postwar school, who were typically members of leftist student groups at elite universities. As Yoshimoto noted, “Shiina’s raison-d’être is that among the postwar writers, he was the only one who could depict the lower strata of Japanese society from within.”21 Shiina was raised in an impoverished, working-class household in western Japan, never attending college. His parents separated at an early age, and his mother, who attempted suicide several times, led an emotionally and financially troubled life. In an attempt to escape from this environment of domestic turmoil, Shiina left home in 1926 at the age of fifteen and dropped out of school, where he had been a star pupil. A difficult life on the streets of Osaka awaited him. After scraping by in various odd jobs, Shiina landed a position as conductor for the Ujigawa Electric Railway Company, where he became active in the labor movement, eventually joining the outlawed Japanese Communist Party in 1931. By then, membership in the party was not only illegal but also an offense that potentially carried a penalty of death, and Shiina lived under constant threat of arrest and torture. He later wrote that he had little interest at the time in proletarian literature, which seemed to him removed from the actual conditions of his life, failing, he claims, to capture the essentially nihilistic mood of the laborer’s existence.22 Shiina barely managed to escape the mass roundup of leftists in western Japan that took place on August 26, 1931, hiding out in an Osaka flophouse before fleeing to Tokyo, where his father was living at the time. He was arrested almost immediately, however, and sent back to Kobe, beginning a difficult period of incarceration that lasted nearly two years. Enduring months of torture while being moved from one detention cell to another, he maintained his defiance toward the authorities, refusing to renounce his beliefs or to divulge information about fellow activists or the party. Sentenced to four years in prison in February 1932, he was moved to Osaka Prison, where he was kept in solitary confinement. By this point, he would recall later, his will to resist was weakening, and after reading Nietzsche’s Ecce



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Homo, which had been given to him in prison, he claims to have realized that his activism did not reflect any love for the masses but was merely an attempt to fulfill his own “will to power.”23 He signed a proclamation of conversion and was released with a suspended sentence in June of 1933. Under the constant surveillance of the Special Higher Police, Shiina soon moved to Tokyo. He worked at various jobs throughout the war years while managing to obtain health exemptions from military conscription on two occasions; he abandoned his job at a factory that had begun manufacturing munitions for the war, he says, “not out of a clear sense of resistance, but because of a natural dislike of war.”24 In an attempt to overcome the sense of nihilism and despair that had tormented him since his imprisonment, he began reading the works of various existentialist thinkers, finding himself drawn to Kierkegaard in particular. In 1938, he encountered the “electric shock” of reading Dostoyevsky’s The Possessed and Notes from the Underground, an experience that opened Shiina’s eyes to the possibilities of literature and led him to try his own hand at writing fiction.25 Shiina began to read widely in European literature, and only afterward did he seriously begin reading Japanese literature. During the final years of the war, Shiina was involved in a relatively unknown literary journal and wrote a number of stories as well as one novel that remained unpublished; his true literary debut would come in February 1947, when his story “Shin’ya no shuen” (Midnight banquet) appeared in the journal Tenbō, one of the many literary journals newly founded after the war. Honda Shūgo recalls the powerful impact generated by Shiina’s story when it was published, describing Shiina’s writing as an unprecedented combination of a metaphysical questioning of existence and an authentic depiction of life at the lowest levels of society; Honda wrote that his impression at the time was that “a monster [kaibutsu] had appeared.”26 Indeed, Shiina quickly garnered the attention of critics and gained a broad readership. He was seen as a representative figure of postwar literature. The critic Nakamura Mitsuo (1911–1988) wrote of Shiina that “even going back to the prewar period, you would probably not find a writer whose emergence was so celebrated, and who became famous so quickly.” Nakamura noted that Shiina soon acquired a devoted group of admirers and imitators, adding that his existence symbolized “the diseased social phenomenon that is postwar literature.”27 The publication of “Shin’ya no shuen” (together with Noma’s “Kurai e”) has been cited as an inaugural moment of postwar literature. Critics have seen the work as representing a break with prior literary practice—it seemed to contain elements of the I-novel (namely, its concern with interiority) and proletarian literature (its social orientation) while being irreducible to either category. It was, in fact, at the fractured edge between the individual and the social that Shiina’s literature was situated, a border that had

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been opened up for him by the experience of conversion, which, he wrote, “created a deep wound in my heart.”28 “SHIN’YA NO SHUEN” “Shin’ya no shuen” is narrated in the first person and tells the story of a man living in a decrepit warehouse-turned-apartment-building amid the burned-out landscape of Tokyo soon after the end of the war. The work revolves around the depiction of the narrator’s life of destitution and his accompanying sense of absolute despair and melancholy. In Shiina’s work postwar Tokyo is marked by social, political, economic collapse—his characters are diseased, cynical, fearful, and desperately clinging to survival. The story opens with the narrator, a thirty-year-old man named Sumaki, stating that he awakens in the morning to a sound like rainfall, which surrounds his room in a deep air of melancholy. Yet he soon reveals that it is not actually rain but wastewater running off from the kitchen and splattering onto the stones as it flows into the canal. The narrator’s apartment is located in a converted warehouse, one of the few buildings left standing in the burned-out ruins of the Ryōgoku section of Tokyo, an area devastated in the firebombings. Compared with the flimsy construction of the numerous shanties that have sprung up in this desolate landscape, this warehouse is described as being “heavy as reality, black as an anarchist flag.”29 The narrator describes the room where he lives as follows: Being in my room is like being at the bottom of a well. The room is four mats in size, with neither closet nor shelves. The ceiling is as high as can be. The only light filters in from a small window set high beyond my reach, leaving the room in shadows even at midday. To my surprise, this small two-foot-square window is fitted with metal bars. Of course, they are simply left over from the building’s previous life as a warehouse. If only the wooden walls that separate this room from those on either side were new, that would offset the room’s dimness a bit, but in fact they’re made of scrap material left from the forced evacuations. The cold, moldy-smelling air is ever stagnant, penetrating my clothing, permeating my skin. The other day as I walked on the street I suddenly felt on my body the kind of smell that emanates from an open refrigerator door, which depressed me. Moreover, I cannot stand the dampness. As I fall into sleep, the quilt’s edge brushing against my neck gives me an unpleasant chill. At times, the stench of rotting food comes from somewhere, mixing with the dampness, assaulting me. It is unbearable.30

The passage indicates the extent to which the environment in which the narrator exists is closed off—in contrast to the “open landscape” of the



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destroyed city that Haniya described, Shiina’s landscape of ruin is marked by a sense of almost suffocating enclosure and confinement. “Shin’ya no shuen” describes Sumaki’s dismal existence in this apartment and his various interactions with his neighbors, a collection of desolate and desperate characters, poverty stricken and ill, clinging to life at the margins of society. The residents of the building remind the narrator of characters from a naturalist novel and evoke in him sensations of nausea, hopeless despair, and melancholy. Sumaki proclaims his disdain for all kinds of ideology (shisō). His daily life consists mostly of a continual search for enough food to survive. For Sumaki, there is no hope for the future, whether in the promise of democratic reform or communist revolution—he writes that he is “simply bearing the unbearable present.”31 By the end of the story he has begun to slip into a state of starvation and delirium. Shiina’s portrayal of existential despair in this work can be situated within a broader swath of postwar literature and thought that engaged with the loss of values and meaning following the collapse of the imperial state.32 Katō Shūichi (1919–2008) has noted that the disintegration of social order in the war had prepared the way for the large-scale reception of existentialist thought in Japan, predicated on a perspective in which “the individual is in a situation utterly removed from any social organization.”33 Usui Yoshimi (1905–1987), the editor of Tenbō, even felt it necessary to add an editor’s note to “Shin’ya no shuen” stating that it had been written prior to the large-scale dissemination of Sartre’s writings in Japan. If Shiina had yet to read Sartre, however, he was, as mentioned previously, heavily influenced by Dostoyevsky, Nietzsche, and Kierkegaard. As Shiina himself wrote, “Shin’ya no shuen” was an attempt to come to terms with a world that had been stripped of meaning. It is characterized by the absence of familial or social ties that would bind the members of the apartment building into any kind of a community. Yet it is important to note that for Sumaki, this process of collapse does not originate with the defeat but dates back to his experience of incarceration and conversion during the war. Sumaki had previously been a member of the Communist Party and had spent time in prison, where he had suffered a mental breakdown and ultimately renounced the party. The utter breakdown of social and familial ties in the narrative present can be seen as an extension of Sumaki’s tenkō experience, which involved (according to his uncle) a betrayal of Sumaki’s comrade Nakamura, who died in prison. The layering of past and present is established through Shiina’s detailed descriptions of physical space. Thus the narrator finds himself confined to his small, stifling room, whose barred windows recall the prison where he had been kept years before. If anything, his current quarters are even more confining: “Even in prison, I could feel the spray of raindrops through the window and watch

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intently as the rain turned the red brick of the outer wall into an ugly, muddy hue with just a trace of red in it. In spring, I could see camellias blooming along that wall, albeit beyond the iron bars and steel net. But here I just pace back and forth in my room. Nowhere can I see the outside!”34 His confinement at the hands of the state colors his experience of the present as well as his relationships with others. Because of the narrator’s prior membership in the Communist Party and his psychological breakdown in prison, the other residents regard him uneasily. These neighbors include Naka, a cargo handler, and his wife, who is suffering from ailments of the stomach, heart, and lungs, as well as Toda, who works as a platemaker and who remains mostly holed up in his room, afraid of meeting his neighbors. Shiina writes, “When I encounter Naka’s wife’s sharp, consecutive coughing from next door, or when I see Toda hurrying off to the bathroom with a tense expression like some thief, I fall into a melancholy as if I had come face-to-face with eternity.”35 The apartment building is owned by the narrator’s uncle, Senzō, a cynical, mean-spirited man who continually berates his nephew. One key element in the picture of social collapse that this work presents is the disintegration of familial ties. In this apartment-as-prison, Sumaki’s uncle fulfills the function of warden: “The structure of each of those rooms, the feeling of the dark lightbulbs dangling low from the ridgepoles in the high ceiling, the gloom permeating the entire building—all of these were identical to the rural prison where I had been jailed, so the fact that I had been calling Senzō ‘Warden!’ without noticing it for a while was not because of some mental problem of mine but is entirely the fault of this building.”36 The narrator notes that he often leans absentmindedly against a wall, a habit he had picked up in prison. At one point, Senzō tells him, “You think you can just do what you want here? You’re a criminal. This is your prison, and you are its inmate.”37 In this sense, what the figure of ruin represents for Shiina is a post-tenkō existence, in which the world has been reduced to material objects existing outside any framework of meaning. The exemplary figure for this state of being is Fukao Kayo, a twenty-year-old resident of the apartment building. Kayo is the daughter of his uncle’s former mistress who has come to the apartment for lack of anywhere else to go. Virtually by accident, she has become a prostitute: one day at the train station, she is mistaken for one, and she simply goes along with it. The narrator writes of Kayo that she is “absolutely unbearable” and that she evokes in him a sensation of “profound nausea”; to this extent for Sumaki she is simply an embodiment of the world at large.38 At first glance, it would appear that Kayo is depicted in opposite terms from the narrator. She is described as animal-like, marked by pure corporeality and linked to bodily functions of sexuality and eating—her room is described as being filled with men’s laughter and the smell of cooking beef. By contrast,



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Sumaki is represented as cerebral and ethereal, almost disembodied. In one scene, a homeless man tells the narrator that he is like a ghost, and Sumaki accepts this as an essential critique of his being: “A ghost—it’s true I am an existence without substance. I am the concept of melancholy.”39 As the story progresses, he begins to slide toward starvation, sometimes going for days without any food. He visits a local black market to pick through the pile of rotting refuse left at the day’s end, in search of any remaining edible scraps. By now, his body has become completely emptied out and hollow, and he is wracked by continual nausea. At the same time, however, it becomes clear that Sumaki sees in Kayo a materialization of his own post-tenkō existence. In one scene, Kayo notes that a customer had claimed that Kayo and Sumaki were alike in some essential way. This observation comes as a shock to the narrator, who yells out, “What does this man do? This man who found out my secret!”40 Ultimately, Kayo and Sumaki represent the two sides of Shiina’s representation of the fractured subjectivity of tenkō, marked by a radical disjunction between mind and body. Speaking of his own experience of conversion, Shiina at one point denied that his course of action constituted a tenkō, calling it instead a datsuraku, a “falling out”—a movement away from something (from Marxism or from thinking in general) but not a movement toward anything.41 At one point in “Shin’ya no shuen,” Toda asks the narrator, “When you converted from Communism, what did you convert to?”42 In many ways, this unanswerable question is the key to interpreting the meaning of conversion in Shiina’s work. For Sumaki as well, his own prison experience and tenkō constituted a falling away from ideology, but not a turn toward anything. Sumaki tells his neighbor Toda that he rejects all thinking, “which, to the extent that it is a system of thought, inevitably presages confrontation and struggle . . . [and] systems of thought are nothing more than scraps of toilet paper.”43 Sumaki’s tenkō is presented as a falling out of “systems of thought”: subsequently, he finds himself amid a horrific corporeal existence, where all human relationships lie in tatters, within a shattered community that lacks any unifying concept or affect. It is this depiction of a continually enfolding tenkō—here a fall rather than a turn—that defines Shiina’s image of the ruin. For Shiina’s narrator, time has in some sense stopped at the moment of tenkō. In his next story, “Omoki nagare no naka ni” (In a heavy current, 1947), Shiina wrote, “I have no future. And the past has vanished in ruin. I myself am a ruin.”44 Shiina’s narrator is trapped in an “unendurable” present, which collapses both the past and the future; he exists outside the process of memory, change, and history. At one point, as he walks through the landscape of burned-out ruins and barracks, Sumaki feels himself slipping out of historical time: “At that moment, suddenly I had lost the concept of time. I was assaulted with the feeling that I had

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been continually walking like this since I was born. And I felt that my future, too, would be exactly like this.”45 In another passage, the narrator says that “I have no memories. Nor bright hopes. Only the unbearable present.”46 FUKAO MASAHARU NO SHUKI The significance of conversion is taken up once more in Shiina’s novella Fukao Masaharu no shuki (The notebook of Fukao Masaharu), a work that some commentators, including Haniya and Honda, consider Shiina’s most important from this period.47 Shiina noted that he considered the story to be the third installment of a trilogy that began with “Shin’ya no shuen” and “Omoki nagare no naka ni,” and in some ways it provides a culmination to the theme of conversion in these early works. Published in the January 1948 issue of the journal Kosei, the work takes the form of a journal fragment, written by Communist Party member Fukao, who, the epigraph states, died in prison sometime in the second decade of the Shōwa period. The journal entries describe the days leading up to Fukao’s arrest, as he lies in wait in a dismal flophouse in an unspecified small town, hiding from the police yet also resigned to his inevitable discovery and capture. Shiina claimed that the story was based on his own experience—adding that it was meant to counter the four ideologies currently in vogue (although, as Hirano Ken noted, the identity of these four ideologies, as well as which characters might represent them, remains obscure).48 In the context of Shiina’s own biography, then, one can say that the story is set prior to the moment of arrest, torture, and conversion in prison. In some sense, however, the conversion has already been set in motion internally—the conversion cannot be explained, in other words, only as a result of external pressure. Rather, Fukao’s tenkō begins as a bodily sensation that leads to a growing awareness of an irreducible disjunction between his body and his consciousness. Thus, while suffering from severe stomach cramps, Fukao comes to a realization that historical materialism is of no use to his corporeal existence: “The fact that I cannot remember a single word of Marx or Lenin cannot be considered a crime of my spirit. What is decisive is that my body is weakened to an absolute point. This, too, must be the reason why I cannot remember even the faces of my comrades or colleagues, as though my memory had been completely extinguished.”49 Fukao becomes aware of his body as pure material excess, unassimilable to memory and consciousness; as such, it begins to appear to him as an object of disgust and hatred. At this point new questions arise in Fukao’s mind—namely, whether he genuinely loves the masses (taishū) and whether he is truly prepared to sacrifice his life for them. He writes, “How wonderful it would be if I could



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love the masses as a philosophical system, in other words, to love them academically! Then I would be able to die as a philosophical system.”50 Fukao feels a growing alienation from those around him and experiences a descent into utter solitude. For Fukao, the abstract concept of the masses finds an embodied form in the other residents of the flophouse (kichinyado). Situated at the margins of society, the topos of the flophouse typically serves as a container for social outcasts and refugees. The other residents are a group of social misfits that include Ikeda, a crooked peddler who has fallen out with fellow gangsters and who dreams of entrepreneurial fortune; Koyama, a beggar who goes from house to house in search of handouts, wearing a worn-out student’s uniform; and Yamazaki Jūjirō, known as the fly swatter, who lives by himself in the only single room at the inn, a five-mat room on the first floor. A former policeman, he is always lost in sullen silence, spending his days killing flies, which swarm the town. Later, a woman named Miyo, who is dying of tuberculosis and has run away from home, arrives at the inn. Fukao feels nothing but animosity and disgust toward these other residents of the flophouse. He has chosen this town for his hideaway because it is the home of his former party comrade Sugimoto, a worker at the same railway company. Yet Fukao makes no effort to contact him. Fukao’s questioning of his attachment to the masses prefigures one of the core arguments presented by Yoshimoto Takaaki in his well-known essay “Tenkōron” (On conversion), published in 1958. In this essay, part of a series of works on wartime and postwar literary and intellectual discourse that turned on questions of war responsibility, Yoshimoto rejected the idea that conversion was a result only of external pressure applied by the state, arguing that internal factors—namely, a deep-rooted sense of disconnection from popular nationalist sentiment—played a decisive role. As Michael Bourdaghs has noted, “In Yoshimoto’s version, tenkō signifies the intellectual elite’s estrangement from the masses, so that the most egregious tenkōsha were those who had refused to renounce their beliefs and spent the war in prison. . . . This estrangement from the masses prevented 1930s leftists from acquiring a clear understanding of nationalism and its relation to class struggle—it prevented them, that is, from being able to distinguish ‘good’ nationalism from ‘bad’ ultranationalism.”51 As Bourdaghs indicates, Yoshimoto’s perspective on tenkō involved an attempt to critique the privileged position claimed by nontenkōsha in the postwar cultural and political scene. Yoshimoto’s essay includes a close reading of the “conversion proclamation” of Communist Party leaders Sano Manabu (1892–1953) and Nabeyama Sadachika (1901–1979), which was written while the two were in prison and published in the July 1933 issue of the journal Kaizō. Their statement’s publication played an important role in the collapse of organized

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leftist activity in the 1930s, including the fall of the proletarian literature movement. As various critics have noted, the rationale for conversion set forth by Sano and Nabeyama established the basic framework for subsequent articulations of conversion, which appeared in quick succession thereafter. Fujita Shōzō, for example, has written that these “pioneers” of tenkō played “a decisive, leading role in universalizing the concept of tenkō.”52 He notes that whereas earlier conversions had been perceived to exist on the level of a personal, individual defeat, Sano and Nabeyama established tenkō on the level of a generalizable thinking. Fujita writes that the distinguishing characteristic of their tenkō statement is the acceptance of nationalist ideology (including support for the emperor system) “from the perspective of the vanguard party”;53 in this sense their conversions are distinguished from others (such as Yasuda Yojūrō’s [1910–1981] conversion), which wholly repudiated Marxist thought. Thus Sano and Nabeyama never relinquished their “pride of being the proletarian vanguard,” even as they wrote, “The social feeling that senses the imperial family to be the center of ethnic unity exists within the hearts of the working masses. There is a need for us to grasp this actual feeling as it is.”54 In other words, Fujita notes, their statement was an articulation of the proper path for the vanguard party, rather than simply a repudiation of socialism in general. For Yoshimoto, it is the acknowledged distance from “the working masses” that is the decisive element of their conversion proclamation. He argues that Sano and Nabeyama established (by way of their criticism of the Comintern) an opposition between the categories of class and ethnicity (minzoku), which, he writes, corresponds to the opposition between modern and premodern elements in Japanese society. Their conversion is played out through their choice of minzoku over class, which Yoshimoto reads as a submission to the popular nationalistic tide following the Manchurian Incident of 1931. “To restate it in terms of the internal motifs of Sano and Nabeyama’s conversion, what is important is that beyond their submission to the oppression of emperor-system power, they were unable to bear their isolation from the masses.”55 For Yoshimoto, the opposition between class and ethnicity is a false one that leads to an ideological dead end for Sano and Nabeyama; at the same time, Yoshimoto notes that the two party leaders at least evince some awareness of the intellectuals’ alienation from the people. As mentioned earlier, a sense of dissociation from the masses is in fact the point of departure for Fukao Masaharu no shuki. This can no doubt be taken as a reference to Shiina’s own experience of tenkō, which he claimed was driven by an awakening in prison to his own lack of love for the masses. Looking back on his own tenkō, Shiina writes,



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At the time, I had been sentenced to three years of hard labor because I had not committed tenkō at the first trial. I remained in detention during my appeal. However, one day, out of the blue, I was assaulted by the question of whether I truly loved the masses. This was a question that I had never even considered. (Ever since then I acquired the practice of questioning myself.) And I was completely struck down by this question. Until then, my love for the masses had been self-evident. Furthermore, wasn’t I myself one of the wretched masses? Yet after reflection, I realized that I didn’t love the masses after all. My imprisonment lost its meaning of being for the masses. I was no different from a criminal such as a thief or robber who had failed in his self-centered aim. The exaltation and pride of being a martyr that had until then sustained me through the days of suffering were annihilated in an instant. My world had been transformed into an unbearable meaninglessness.56

In Fukao Masaharu no shuki, in contrast to the case of Sano and Nabeyama, Fukao’s awareness of his alienation from the people is not marked by a desire to be a part of the masses. Quite the contrary, Fukao’s desire for the masses had been mediated through his relation to an abstract system of thought; when his belief in this abstract system crumbles, what remains is only “the masses” themselves, which then appear to Fukao as objects of disgust. Yet, just as Shiina stated about himself, Fukao, too, is one of the “wretched masses” himself. When he goes underground, submerging himself among the residents of the flophouse, there is no sense of community there, only revulsion. At the same time, for Fukao, there is no possibility of existence outside this world, as indicated by his refusal to try to leave Japan. Like the residents of the apartment building in “Shin’ya no shuen,” the denizens of the flophouse represent a collectivity into which the protagonist can never be fully integrated. In the words of Haniya Yutaka, the other residents represent an “everydayness” that is unbearable to Fukao, yet he must bear them—that is the unavoidable contradiction that he faces.57 This in-between state ultimately reflects the experience of a tenkō that is incomplete and partial. That is, while the falling away from ideology has already been set in motion, there is no possibility of reintegration into society or submission to an alternative system of thought. In his remarks on Shiina, Fujita identifies this incompleteness as the distinguishing characteristic of the tenkō experience for both Shiina and Haniya Yutaka. Fujita argues that in contrast to those apostates who turned to external institutions such as the family in order to resolve the guilt arising from their apostasy, Shiina and Haniya turned inward, extending and developing their tenkō experience internally. Fujita writes that Shiina and Haniya “came to a standstill at the point of tenkō”; instead of engaging in external social action, they moved in the direction of what Fujita terms “internal social action,” exploring the limits of the “autonomous energy of interiority.”58

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Indeed, Fukao Masaharu no shuki focuses on a transitional moment in the process of tenkō, when Fukao has already begun to harbor doubts concerning his absolute commitment to the Communist Party and cause, but before his actual subjection to state authority. And it is precisely the representation of this transitional state that links this story to Shiina’s earlier works “Shin’ya no shuen” and “Omoki nagare no naka ni.” In Fukao Masaharu no shuki, Shiina writes that “I feel that tomorrow will be the darkest thing for me. And that today is what is eternal for me.”59 The statement is analogous to the depiction of the postwar experience found in his other works, an experience situated between the collapse of one ideological system and the anticipated construction of another. Fukao Masaharu no shuki ends with the narrator remaining on the second floor of the boardinghouse, caught in a perpetual state of waiting. “Yet how long will I wait here? And what am I waiting for? For the police? Or death? Or—do you actually think that something is going to happen that would instantly transform the light of the world?”60 I argue that this moment of waiting, suspended indefinitely between past and future, indicates Shiina’s conception of subjectivity, which is characterized by absolute abjection and degradation, on the one hand, but which also offers the possibility of resistance against subjection to institutions of power on the other. THE RUINED SUBJECT OF TENKŌ One might say that for Shiina, tenkō does not indicate simply an experience of ideological reorientation but instead a more fundamental possibility of human agency that is not routed through a subjection to power. In Louis Althusser’s well-known formulation of interpellation and subject formation, ideology is the unconscious link between the individual and the apparatus of power. In his narrative of the scene of interpellation, the individual is hailed by the law and compelled to respond to its call. This “turn” marks the moment at which the subject is formed—the individual is given an identity that is, however, defined only by its subjection to the law. Althusser considers a concrete scenario in which this interpellation is performed: “Assuming that the theoretical scene I have imagined takes place in the street, the hailed individual will turn round. By this mere one-hundred-and-eighty-degree physical conversion, he becomes a subject.”61 For Althusser, it is a call that is always already answered—as he notes, ideology, like the unconscious, is “eternal;” It has no history. In her analysis of this process of subjection, Judith Butler points out the contradiction that underlies this formulation—the subject that turns back to answer the call is produced as an effect of this turning back, or what Althusser refers to as a conversion. Thus Butler writes, “The narrative that seeks to



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account for how the subject comes into being presumes the grammatical ‘subject’ prior to the account of its genesis. Yet the founding submission that has not yet resolved in the subject would be precisely the non-narrativizable prehistory of the subject, a paradox which calls the very narrative of subject formation into question.”62 Althusser’s narrative of subject formation, in other words, is founded on an impossible temporality. Butler asks the question of whether it is possible to recover, given this seemingly closed structure, any moment of agency prior to the turn toward the law, this gesture of submission and subjection. She writes, “Is there a possibility of being elsewhere or otherwise, without denying our complicity in the law that we oppose? Such possibility would require a different kind of turn, one that, enabled by the law, turns away from the law, resisting its lure of identity, an agency that outruns and counters the conditions of emergence.”63 In effect, this is precisely the question posed by Shiina’s postwar works, in their depiction of an incomplete tenkō, a partial turn away from and toward subjection to power. In Fukao Masaharu no shuki, for example, the act of tenkō is presented not so much as a submission to the law as a turning back on oneself, the performance of an act of self-reflexivity. Toward the end of the narrative, Fukao receives a visitor at the inn, his former coworker Sugimoto. Sugimoto has by this time left the Communist Party and he is clearly disturbed at Fukao’s presence in the town. He tells Fukao, “Your government will be formed. Then you will be one of the powerful. But me . . . I’m still a wretched worker. Is this justice?”64 Sugimoto denounces Fukao and yet returns repeatedly to visit him at the inn to continue this one-sided polemic (Fukao himself has no interest in arguing with him). The fourth time Sugimoto returns, he promises that it will be the last—he has just informed the police of Fukao’s whereabouts, having dropped the letter in the postbox on the way over. He attempts to justify his actions: I had no other choice. I can’t bring myself to love the masses. Yet my conscience won’t allow me to become a person of power. And I can’t abide the fact that the proletariat are exploited. So what should I do? I had no choice but to turn you in. To become a traitor to my class. I’m a traitor, and by all rights I should be lynched. No matter how much I work for our class, I will always be branded a traitor. There’s no chance such a traitor would ever become a leader of the party. So no matter how much I throw myself into the movement to atone for my crime, you will understand that I have no intention of attaining a position of power. . . . But I have one request. When the revolution comes to pass, if you are still alive and I am dragged before the disciplinary committee to be sentenced, I want you to testify for me. This man is no doubt a traitor of the class who turned me in. But since he devoted himself to the movement, why don’t we let him live as a laborer in some remote corner of this new society. Then I . . .65

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Fukao cuts him off, annoyed:  “Okay, I  understand.” Sugimoto attempts to give Fukao two hundred yen to escape to Shanghai, but Fukao says he has no intention of escaping and refuses the money. Once out on the street, Sugimoto calls Fukao to the window and yells at the top of his lungs, “Kyōsantō banzai!” (Hurray for the Communist Party!).66 As in the case of Kayo and Sumaki in “Shin’ya no shuen,” it is possible to consider Sugimoto and Fukao to represent two different aspects of the same consciousness, defining the parameters of Shiina’s fragmented depiction of subjectivity. On the one hand, Sugimoto is depicted as a debased character—a traitor—and he no doubt reflects a certain consciousness of guilt held by Shiina at his betrayal of the party and fellow activists. On the other hand, by a certain twist of logic, his betrayal is presented as a rejection of power—a tenkō that is not a tenkō but is, rather, a turning back on oneself. Sugimoto is the prototype for one of the characters in Shiina’s novel Eien naru joshō (Eternal preface, 1948), who is described as a “communist who is not a Communist”; this conception is developed further in Shiina’s novel Akai kodokusha (The lonely Communist, 1951), which features a “revolutionary party that is not the revolutionary party.” Shiina’s early postwar writings can be seen essentially as an attempt to represent the moment—extended out indefinitely—when this turn or interpellation takes place. It is a transitional state situated between the failure to “become a philosophical system” and the explicit subjection to the authority of the state. Shiina’s writings are thus organized around the description of an incomplete, partial conversion, a falling away rather than a turning toward something. In Fukao Masaharu no shuki this eternal moment of conversion is situated after Fukao’s identification with the Communist Party has started to falter yet before he can be subjected to the state apparatus, while in “Shin’ya no shuen” the transition is located between the collapse of the state and the imposition of a new political order. Shiina’s writings can, in this sense, be considered an intervention into postwar debates on both tenkō and subjectivity, which began with a questioning of the proper subject (shutai) of revolution and ultimately moved toward the attempted recovery of a national subjectivity that had been destroyed by war, defeat, and occupation. Against assertions of “nonconversion” (hi-tenkō) as the guarantor of an authentic agency in postwar cultural and political practice, Shiina attempts to recover, precisely within the ruinous degradation and despair of an ongoing conversion, the possibility of a human agency based on the refusal of subjection. In the context of postwar debates on subjectivity that, in literary discourse, were typically framed as an opposition between the individual and the social (or, alternatively, between literature and politics), Shiina’s ruin stands at the fractured edge between the two, as a fragmented subject of a conversion or turn that does not achieve



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completion or integration into national community—it is marked both by an absolute dejection and debasement but also by the continual refusal of power, the deferral of subjection. NOTES 1. Shiina Rinzō, “Muimi yori no kaiyu” (Recovery from meaninglessness) (1948), reprinted in Shiina Rinzō zenshū (Complete works of Shiina Rinzō) (Tokyo: Tōjusha, 1970–1979), 14:71. 2. Takeda Taijun, “Metsubō ni tsuite” (On ruin) (1948), reprinted in Takeda Taijun zenshū (Complete works of Takeda Taijun) (Tokyo: Chikuma shobō, 1972), 12:94. 3. Ibid., 93. 4. Sakaguchi Ango, “Discourse on Decadence,” trans. Seiji M. Lippit, Review of Japanese Culture and Society 1, no. 1 (October, 1986): 5. 5. Takeda, “Metsubō ni tsuite,” 96. 6. Ibid. 7. Naoki Sakai, Translation and Subjectivity: On “Japan” and Cultural Nationalism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 183. 8. Haniya Yutaka, “Kaisetsu” (Afterword), in Shiina Rinzō zenshū, 1:601. 9. Ishikawa Jun, “The Jesus of the Ruins,” in The Legend of Gold and Other Stories, trans. William J. Tyler (Honolulu: University of Hawai`i Press, 1998), 73. 10. Haniya, “Kaisetsu,” 602–3. 11. See Mark Williams, “Shiina Rinzō: Imaging Hope and Despair in Occupation Japan,” Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies 66, no. 3 (2003): 442– 55. Williams, citing the critic Takadō Kaname, has noted that Shiina is a “writer ‘born out of the ruins’—not only the physical ruins of Occupation Japan, but also the ruins that pervaded his inner being” (445). 12. Walter Benjamin, The Origins of German Tragic Drama, trans. John Osborne (London: Verso, 1977), 175. Benjamin wrote that “allegories are, in the realm of thoughts, what ruins are in the realm of things” (178). 13. Benjamin identifies the key difference between symbol and allegory as one of temporality; he writes that “the decisive category of time, the introduction of which into this field of semiotics was the great romantic achievement of these thinkers, permits the incisive, formal definition of the relationship between symbol and allegory” (ibid., 166). As Susan Buck-Morss explains, in allegory “the temporal mode is one of retrospective contemplation,” whereas “time enters the symbol as an instantaneous present” (The Dialectics of Seeing: Walter Benjamin and the Arcades Project [Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1991], 168). The temporal difference between symbol and allegory is further developed by Paul de Man in his seminal article “The Temporality of Rhetoric.” De Man writes that in the symbol, the object and its representation can coincide since “their relationship is one of simultaneity, which, in truth, is spatial in kind, and in which the intervention of time is merely a matter of contingency, whereas, in the world of allegory, time is the originary constitutive category. . . . This relationship between signs necessarily contains a constitutive temporal element;

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it remains necessary, if there is to be allegory, that the allegorical sign refer to another sign that precedes it. The meaning constituted by the allegorical sign can then consist only in the repetition (in the Kierkegaardian sense of the term) of a previous sign with which it can never coincide, since it is of the essence of this previous sign to be pure anteriority” (“The Rhetoric of Temporality,” in Blindness and Insight: Essays in the Rhetoric of Contemporary Criticism [Minneapolis:  University of Minnesota Press, 1983], 207). 14. Benjamin, Origins of German Tragic Drama, 174. 15. Kamei Katsuichirō, “Shiina Rinzō sakuhin-shū kaisetsu” (Afterword to Collected Works of Shiina Rinzō) (1958), reprinted in Shiina Rinzō zenshū, Suppl. Vol., 320–21. 16. See, for example, Ishizaki Hitoshi, “Jitsuzon to hōkai kankaku” (Existence and the sensation of collapse), in Kōza Shōwa bungakushi (Lectures on Shōwa literary history), ed. Yūseidō Henshūbu (Tokyo: Yūseidō, 1988), 3:113–23. 17. Yoshimoto Takaaki, “Sengo bungaku wa doko e itta ka” (Where has postwar literature gone?) (1957), reprinted in Machiu-sho shiron/Tenkōron (Essay on the Book of Matthew/On conversion) (Tokyo: Kōdansha bungei bunko, 1990), 317. 18. Ibid. 19. Mark Williams, “Writing the Traumatized Self: Tenkō in the Literature of Shiina Rinzō,” in Imag(in)ing the War in Japan: Representing and Responding to Trauma in Postwar Literature and Film, ed. David Stahl and Mark Williams (Leiden: Brill, 2010), 107. 20. As Van Gessel has written, Shiina’s later writings secured him a pivotal role in the history of Christian fiction in Japan: “Shiina Rinzō was Japan’s first true Christian novelist. Although like a flash of lightning he may have given only brief illumination to the problems of being a Christian writer in Japan, he asked enough of the important questions to deserve recognition for the uniqueness of his vision. No one since his time has been able to claim to be a Christian writer without first pondering the questions that he posed” (Van C.  Gessel, “Voices in the Wilderness:  Japanese Christian Authors,” Monumenta Nipponica 37, no. 4 [Winter 1982]: 444). 21. Yoshimoto, “Sengo bungaku,” 319. 22. Shiina Rinzō, “Kumo no seishin” (The spider’s spirit) (1948), reprinted in Shiina Rinzō zenshū, 14:68. 23. Ibid. 24. Shiina Rinzō, “Naze sakka ni natta ka” (Why I  became a writer) (1954), reprinted in Shiina Rinzō zenshū, 15:20. 25. Shiina Rinzō, “Waga yume o kataru” (Speaking of my dreams) (1954), reprinted in Shiina Rinzō zenshū, 15:469. 26. Honda Shūgo, Monogatari sengo bungakushi (Postwar literary history: A narrative) (Tokyo: Shinchōsha, 1966), 158. 27. Nakamura Mitsuo, “Shiina Rinzō” (1948), reprinted in Shiina Rinzō zenshū, Suppl. Vol., 60. 28. Shiina Rinzō, “Jiko ni mezameru koro” (Awakening to the self) (1958), reprinted in Shiina Rinzō zenshū, 17:291. 29. Shiina Rinzō, “Shin’ya no shuen” (Midnight banquet) (1947), reprinted in Shiina Rinzō zenshū, 1:4. For an English translation of the work, see Shiina Rinzō,



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“Midnight Banquet,” in The Go-Between and Other Stories, trans. Noah S. Brannen (Valley Forge, Pa.: Judson Press, 1970). 30. Shiina, “Shin’ya no shuen,” 4. 31. Ibid., 11. 32. In his analysis of the discourse on shutaisei in postwar Japan, J. Victor Koschmann has analyzed the negative humanism of writers associated with the journal Kindai bungaku. Koschmann notes, for example, that Ara Masahito articulated a prominent theme of postwar literature, that of “a sublime experience of negativity— death, pain, degradation—that leads to heightened subjective awareness and vitality.” As Koschmann notes, however, this negativity was conceived of as an essential form of humanism—by exploring the extremes of human existence, the aim was to delineate and recover the proper boundaries of what it means to be human, a borderline, it was felt, that had been thoroughly obliterated during the war. Koschmann writes, “This loss of faith in values, philosophies, and ideologies often correlated with new concern about defining and differentiating humanity from other forms of life. For many writers, it was only in the lowest common denominator of human existence that some glimmer of hope for the future could be perceived, and this often meant emphasizing the flesh rather than the spirit” (J. Victor Koschmann, Revolution and Subjectivity in Postwar Japan [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996], 57). 33. Katō Shūichi remarked as follows on the importance of existentialism during this period: “The war broke up the traditional group consciousness of Japanese society by forcing each individual to face the question of death. Existentialism is a philosophy of the individual in a particular situation that transcends the social order and social relationships. In the existentialist perspective the individual is in a situation utterly removed from any social organization; existentialism removes one from any social milieu and leaves the individual radically alone” (Katō Shūichi, “Thinking beyond Parallel Traditions: Literature and Thought in Postwar Japan and France,” in Confluences: Postwar Japan and France, ed. Doug Slaymaker [Ann Arbor: Center for Japanese Studies, University of Michigan, 2002], 57). 34. Shiina, “Shin’ya no shuen,” 4. 35. Ibid., 9. 36. Ibid., 13–14. 37. Ibid., 41. 38. Ibid., 9. 39. Ibid., 23. 40. Ibid., 44. 41. Quoted in Kobayashi Takayoshi, Shiina Rinzō-ron:  Kaishin no shunkan (On Shiina Rinzō: The moment of conversion) (Tokyo: Seishidō, 1992), 13. 42. Shiina, “Shin’ya no shuen,” 27. 43. Ibid. 44. Shiina Rinzō, “Omoki nagare no naka ni” (In a heavy current) (1947), reprinted in Shiina Rinzō zenshū, 1:98. 45. Shiina, “Shin’ya no shuen,” 34. 46. Ibid., 11.

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47. See Honda Shūgo, “Shiina Rinzō no tenki” (Shiina Rinzō’s turning point) (1949), reprinted in Shiina Rinzō zenshū, Suppl. Vol., 106. 48. Hirano Ken, “Bungei jihyō” (Literary review) (1948), reprinted in Shiina Rinzō zenshū, Suppl. Vol., 30. 49. Shiina Rinzō, “Fukao Masaharu no shuki” (The notebook of Fukao Masaharu) (1948), reprinted in Shiina Rinzō zenshū, 1:194. 50. Ibid. 51. Michael Bourdaghs, The Dawn That Never Comes:  Shimazaki Tōson and Japanese Nationalism (New York: Columbia University Press, 2003), 40. 52. Fujita Shōzō, “Shōwa 8-nen o chūshin to suru tenkō no jōkyō” (The conditions of conversion around 1933), in Kyōdō kenkyū: Tenkō (Collective research: Conversion), ed. Shisō no kagaku kenkyūkai (Tokyo: Heibonsha, 1959), 3:53. 53. Ibid., 54. Emphasis in original. 54. Ibid. 55. Yoshimoto Takaaki, “Tenkōron” (On conversion) (1958), reprinted in Machiusho shiron, 29 56. Shiina, “Kumo no seishin,” 67. 57. Haniya writes, “Shiina Rinzō is unable to abandon all the things of his everyday life. Shiina’s position, of being unable to leave behind the everyday life about which he can feel only despair, is a certain desperate [zetsubōteki na] contradiction.” Haniya Yutaka, “ ‘Shiina Rinzō’ kaisetsu” (Shiina Rinzō commentary) (1959), reprinted in Shiina Rinzō zenshū, Suppl. Vol., 362. 58. Fujita, “Shōwa 8-nen,” 62. See also Brett de Bary’s study of Haniya Yutaka’s tenkō; of particular relevance is her discussion of Tsurumi Shunsuke’s argument that Haniya’s continual engagement with tenkō represented an attempt to produce an autonomous subject independent of both party and state; de Bary writes that for Tsurumi “the productive nature of Haniya’s thought lies in the fact that ‘Haniya did not try to distance himself quickly from tenkō but sat rooted to the site of the tenkō process’ and from this position developed a sustained critique of prewar Japanese communism. To Tsurumi, Haniya’s critique was ‘revolutionary’ and has remained revolutionary throughout the postwar period” (Brett de Bary, “ ‘Credo Quia Absurdum’:  Tenkō and the Prisonhouse of Language,” in Culture and Identity: Japanese Intellectuals during the Interwar Years, ed. J. Thomas Rimer [Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1990], 166). 59. Shiina, “Fukao Masaharu no shuki,” 196. 60. Ibid., 260. 61. Louis Althusser, “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses,” in Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays, trans. Ben Brewster (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1971), 174. Emphasis in original. 62. Judith Butler, The Psychic Life of Power: Theories in Subjection (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1997), 111–12. 63. Ibid., 130. 64. Shiina, “Fukao Masaharu no shuki,” 233. 65. Ibid., 258. 66. Ibid., 259.

Chapter 8

Literature at War’s End The Prosecution of Writers in Bungaku jihyō James Dorsey

WARTIME CRITICISM IN THE POSTWAR PERIOD Although the phrase “postwar criticism” (sengo hihyō) implies a sharp break in literary and cultural analyses written before and after Japan’s surrender in 1945, the relationship is in fact more complex. Understanding what had transpired in the realms of politics, literature, and culture in Japan between September 18, 1931 (the year of the so-called Manchurian Incident), and August 15, 1945 (the “jeweled voice broadcast” [gyokuon hōsō] announcing Japan’s surrender) seemed to many who lived through that period a crucial task, one that haunted—and continues to haunt—critics of all stripes. The experience of the war weighed so heavily on the mind that, especially in the very early years, the term “postwar criticism” is almost misleading; it often refers to nothing more than the point in history at which an essay or article was penned. In terms of contents and paradigms, however, much of that very early criticism was actually firmly rooted in the war years. Nowhere was the specter of wartime literature and criticism more evident than in the pages of the modest, short-lived postwar publication Bungaku jihyō, published by Odagiri Hideo, Sasaki Kiichi, and Ara Masahito. While other authors and critics were appraising the state of literature at war’s end by examining it in the context of post–Meiji Restoration (1868) literary history, the Bungaku jihyō critics narrowed the scope, focusing tightly on the record of particular writers during the war years. In targeting their criticism at that more specific period, they were filling the gap that censorship had left in wartime criticism. They were also “wartime” critics in the sense that they (probably unintentionally) revived a vision of literature as a record of an individual’s spiritual, or religious, quest. This paradigm for literature was, ironically, very 159

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similar to that held by many writers who underwent tenkō (conversion) in the 1930s as part of their acquiescence to state ideology and policy. This essay introduces the coterie of critics that inhabited that liminal literary space between wartime and postwar as it is revealed in the pages of Bungaku jihyō. Their denunciation of particular writers in that publication represents a type of criticism pursued only briefly, and nowhere else; attention shifted quickly from that narrow focus on individual writers in wartime to a broader concern with the full range of modern Japanese literary history. This analysis of Bungaku jihyō also reveals striking resemblances to the tenkō discourse, an indication of the continued influence of wartime literary visions into the postwar world. ALMOST FOREVER YOUNG: BUNGAKU JIHYŌ AND A GENERATIONAL DIVIDE The contours of this gray area of transition between the wartime conceptions of culture and the paradigm that eventually took root in the postwar period can be traced in work done by the critics Odagiri Hideo (1916–2000), Sasaki Kiichi (1914–1993), and Ara Masahito (1913–1979). The group is sometimes referred to as the Setagaya trio, a reference to the area of Tokyo in which all three made their homes. While the three are most closely associated with the journal Kindai bungaku, they also coordinated very closely together on the smaller-scale publication Bungaku jihyō, where they supplemented the work they were doing for the more prestigious journal. Odagiri would also publish a famous essay in Shin Nihon bungaku, another pillar of the literary world of the time. The very titles of these publications suggest something of the different attitudes toward the war years adopted by the literary community as it groped for a new vision for literature. The title Kindai bungaku (Modern literature) might at first glance appear to present its mission as progressive or “modern” in a sense that the literature that came before was not. The title is better understood, however, as referencing a specific period in the history of Japanese letters: the years between the Meiji Restoration and the opening of hostilities with China in the early 1930s. Understanding the journal title in this manner reveals that Kindai bungaku was revisiting an earlier period of literary history in the hope of uncovering and correcting elements that allowed for, or perhaps even promoted, the cooperation of writers with the wartime state. Indeed, many of the writers associated with the journal had participated in the proletarian literary movement of the prewar years and had experienced the repression and collapse of that movement. It is therefore no surprise that they were keen to revisit it. While sharing some of the concerns of Kindai



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bungaku, Shin Nihon bungaku (New Japanese literature) placed more emphasis on nurturing a new generation of writers from within the working and agrarian classes. As such, it had its eyes on what lay ahead. The title Bungaku jihyō, however, has an utterly different ring to it. It is not the standard jihyō (時評), the word designating reviews of recently published works of fiction, but the homophonous jihyō (時標), an obscure word that, parsed, refers to something that stands as a marker or signpost indicating a particular moment in time. Indeed, that is what this publication did: while it emerged after the end of hostilities, it was very much concerned with documenting, “marking,” the contours of the moment, particularly the elements of the recent past that cast a shadow on their postwar moment. A key concern for the publication in its attempt to “mark its place in time” was the matter of wartime complicity on the part of literary figures. Odagiri Hideo described the mission of the journal as follows: The most left-leaning three of us (Ara, Sasaki, and I), working as what you might call a small-scale vanguard of the journal Kindai bungaku, published the inaugural issue of Bungaku jihyō. I say “vanguard,” but we were actually a humble publication whose aim was to address literary issues of the moment through a meticulous examination of literary phenomena, authors, and texts from the prewar, wartime, and post-surrender period. The issues had an import that extended beyond the immediate moment, however, and we intended to mercilessly examine them for what they might reveal about the essence and internal nature of literature, the endeavors and standards of writers, the ethical issues for humanity, and the responsibilities toward society.1

This description documents some of the agenda that differentiated the Bungaku jihyō critics from the others. Most notable is the dogged determination to explore the contours of the immediate postwar moment (rather than reach back to the prewar legacy or train one’s eyes on the future); this narrower focus on the contemporary moment, reflected in the journal’s title, seems to have been limited to the generation of Odagiri and his colleagues. Interestingly, and for reasons noted in the following, they pursued it vigorously for only a short time. One reason that the Bungaku jihyō group could envision themselves as a “vanguard” further to the left, ideologically, than the rest was a perceived generational divide. Odagiri, Ara, and Sasaki were all born between 1913 and 1916. The four other writers working with them on Kindai bungaku were slightly older; Yamamuro Shizuka, Honda Shūgo, Hirano Ken, and Haniya Yutaka were all born between 1906 and 1909. Although this means they were separated by at most a decade and in some cases a mere four years, a number of the figures involved have indicated that the difference was significant.

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Reflecting back on his experience with Bungaku jihyō forty years later, Sasaki Kiichi, for example, described the divide as follows: Among the founders of Kindai bungaku, Yamamuro Shizuka, Hirano Ken, Honda Shūgo, and Haniya Yutaka were all born during the Meiji period. After participating in both the proletarian literary movement and the outlawed Communist Party, they distanced themselves from the movement. The other three founders—Ara Masahito, Odagiri Hideo, and Sasaki Kiichi—were all born in the Taishō period. As such, they had contact with only fragments of the movement at just the time that the proletarian literature movement and Communist Party were collapsing. Thinking about it now, what strikes me is the fact that the left-wing faction of the Kindai bungaku group was made up of the three born in Taishō and with a rather weak connection to the movement. Perhaps they continued to hold on to the unrealized dreams for the movement because their affiliation with it had not left them scarred and their conversion experiences had been mild. In contrast, the Kindai bungaku members who had been born in Meiji felt a strong desire to do the work that was important to them, and they were dominated by the feeling that it did not matter if they were therefore left on the sidelines. This feeling did not hold for the three born in Taishō, and particularly Ara; they were driven by a belief that being the generation that was in their thirties at the time, it was incumbent upon them to be the central spiritual pillar [seishinteki shujiku] of the postwar age. . . . In the end, Ara Masahito, driven by a belief that as a man in his thirties he had a mission, squared off against the literary figures in their forties and fifties who had once been part of the proletarian literature movement (often as Communist Party members) and were now associated with Shin Nihon bungaku. This stance is what led to Ara Masahito and Hirano Ken engaging in a debate [ronsō] with Nakano Shigeharu on matters such as Kobayashi Takiji’s outdated view of women and the issue of tenkō. With the lines drawn in this manner, Odagiri was caught between the Shin Nihon bungaku and Kindai bungaku camps, prompting him to end his affiliation with Kindai bungaku. This moment also marked the end of Bungaku jihyō.2

It is conceivable that the generational divide identified in these comments was exaggerated in those early postwar days as a strategy to aid the younger, lesser-known Bungaku jihyō critics in staking a claim for themselves vis-à-vis their elders. Still, whether rooted in a historical reality or a rhetorical strategy, the stance adopted by these critics did differ from those just a few years their senior. This interpretation of the generational difference is more easily accepted when considered in the context of a pivotal moment in prewar cultural history. If we take the tenkō of Communist Party officials Sano Manabu (1892–1953) and Nabeyama Sadachika (1901–1979) in 1933 as a crucial turning point in the history of the left in Japan, the otherwise seemingly



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insignificant differences in age take on greater importance. The Meiji-born writers who founded Kindai bungaku were between approximately twentyfour and twenty-seven years old in 1933; the Taishō-born Setagaya trio were between seventeen and twenty. This distinction makes clear how the level and duration of participation in “the movement” could differ so greatly between the two generations. The elders had been old enough to experience firsthand the messy conflicts between ideological and artistic ideals and the realities of living in a country at war. The Bungaku jihyō three, on the other hand, because of their youth at that crucial historical moment, had been forcefully deprived of the opportunity to fully taste the thrill and, consequently, to fully endure the disappointment. Perhaps this difference in lived experience accounts for the idealism (or, perhaps, rhetoric of idealism) running through their work with Bungaku jihyō, an idealism that comes as a surprise in writers around the age of thirty, the approximate age of the Setagaya trio at the end of the war. It is as if their youthful idealism, never fully deployed and never harshly crushed, had existed in suspended animation through the hard war years. When that idealism was reanimated after the surrender, it fueled an attack on literary predecessors who in the eyes of the Bungaku jihyō critics had succumbed to government and social pressures and had forsaken certain literary values as they lent their pens to the war effort. The idealism that for this generation had not been fully tested or challenged may also be what generated the hubris that allowed the young critics to imagine themselves as the vanguard and spiritual pillars for the new age. BUNGAKU JIHYŌ: “LITERARY PROSECUTION” AND THE PARADIGM BEHIND IT As the generational divide made it difficult for the younger, more idealistic members of Kindai bungaku to fully pursue their vision for literature within the pages of that journal, they decided to supplement their work there with the publication of the smaller-scale Bungaku jihyō. The first edition was issued on January 1, 1946, and between this moment and its demise in November of the same year, thirteen issues were published. It was a most modest publication, really more of a pamphlet than a journal or magazine. Odagiri Hideo referred to it as a koshinbun, a “little newspaper,” and his brother Susumu described it, in katakana, with the English word “tabloid.”3 The first nine issues were but four pages long; the remaining four were twice that—eight pages. When the length doubled, the price rose from twenty-five to thirty sen to one yen.4 Even with the price increase, a copy of Bungaku jihyō was still selling for approximately one-sixth the price of a bottle of beer in 1946. Though production values were rather low—or perhaps because they were low—the publication

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opened with a print run of ten thousand copies.5 Although the most consistent contributors to Bungaku jihyō were the three founders (Odagiri, Ara, and Sasaki), there were also articles by a broad range of well- and lesser-known writers. Some of the old-guard left-wing writers such as Miyamoto Yuriko, Nakano Shigeharu, Miyamoto Kenji, and Kurahara Korehito contributed. Other familiar names were Tokunaga Sunao, Katō Shūichi, Hanada Kiyoteru, and Sakaguchi Ango. The publication featured a number of regular columns, including “Bungaku to seiji” (Literature and politics), “Bungaku tsūshin” (Literary communiqué), “Bungaku jihyō” (Literary reviews), “Sakka annai” (Introduction to authors), “Kokubungaku jihyō” (Critique of research on national literature), and “Shuchō” (Assertions). Still, by far the most popular column was “Bungaku kensatsu” (Literary prosecution), a section in which a variety of critics “interrogated” literary figures on the subject of their wartime legacies.6 Approximately forty writers were examined in this column; the list included names such as Takamura Kōtarō, Hino Ashihei, Yoshikawa Eiji, Kamei Katsuichirō, Yasuda Yojūrō, Saitō Mokichi, Yokomitsu Riichi, Ishikawa Tatsuzō, Shimaki Kensaku, Satō Haruo, Hayashi Fusao, Mushanokōji Saneatsu, Kikuchi Kan, Aono Suekichi, Kume Masao, Iwata Toyoo (aka Shishi Bunroku), Seikanji Ken, Watsuji Tetsurō, and Kishida Kunio. Ultimately it would be only within the pages of Bungaku jihyō that specific authors would be taken to task in a sustained campaign to reveal where and how writers had “betrayed” literature and served instead the wartime state. It was the stance adopted by the journal’s editors that made this possible, their unique place in history prompting them to ignore many of the structural elements that pushed writers into the service of the state and to see literature as a sacred realm that might have been immune to coercion. The writers “prosecuted” in Bungaku jihyō represent a variety of stances in relation to the state ideology. Three examples will provide a sense of the range of those stances. The denunciation of a writer that is easiest to understand is that of sculptor and poet Takamura Kōtarō (1883–1956). Known and loved by many, particularly for his moving poetic tribute to his wife, Chieko (Chieko-shō [Collection for Chieko], 1941), Takamura proceeded to compose reams of nationalistic verse following the attack on Pearl Harbor. “December 8,” included in the poetry collection Ōi naru hi ni (Days of greatness, 1942), was the following: Remember December 8th! On this day the history of the world was changed. The Anglo-Saxon powers On this day were repulsed on Asian land and sea. It was their Japan which repulsed them,



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A tiny country in the Eastern Sea, Nippon, the Land of the Gods Ruled over by a living god.7

Odagiri Hideo, in the inaugural issue of Bungaku jihyō, “prosecuted” Takamura for this nationalistic turn in his career. After describing the respect bordering on awe that his generation felt toward Takamura, Odagiri goes on to address works such as that just cited: As if he were tumbling off the edge of a cliff, with a speed that would make one’s head spin, this poet was reduced to a megaphone serving the invasion authorities. His poetry collection Ōi naru hi ni is a record of this disgrace [ojoku]. The beautiful language offered by the invasion authorities was supported directly by state power, which foisted it on the lives and spirit of the people in an attempt to control them. With a bloodthirsty intensity, Takamura Kōtarō embraced that language.

Odagiri continues with the assertion that Takamura was so respected that he influenced many other poets to follow him in becoming “megaphones” for the imperialist agenda. These transgressions lead Odagiri to close the essay with these lines: “He is the figure who must take the greatest responsibility for the degradation [daraku] of all poets. That is why he is a ‘class A’ war criminal.”8 Odagiri’s conviction of Takamura is based on the poet’s shift in tenor, a shift so sudden and radical that there is no reasonable literary explanation for it. Thus Odagiri concludes that the change represents an acritical adoption of the language of state propaganda. Odagiri’s anger is rather easy to understand. Other cases “tried” in the court of Bungaku jihyō, however, are somewhat harder to accept; so often the issues are far more complex than was the case for Takamura. An equally harsh criticism that denounces a writer with a more ambiguous relationship to wartime ideology is that directed at historical novelist Yoshikawa Eiji (1892–1962). This attack was published in the “Literary Prosecution” section of the second issue of Bungaku jihyō (January 15, 1946). The author was Ohara Gen (1919–1975), a contemporary of Odagiri’s and, like Odagiri, a graduate of Hōsei University. Ohara’s rhetoric is fully in keeping with that seen in most of the publication, and he denounces Yoshikawa for three of his wartime works: Miyamoto Musashi (1935–1939), Taikō-ki (Chronicle of the regent Toyotomi Hideyoshi, 1941–1945), and “Tani Tateki fujin” (The wife of Tani Tateki), a chapter in Nihon meifuden (Legends of famous Japanese women, 1942). The most trenchant of the readings is that for Miyamoto Musashi, Yoshikawa’s telling of the myth of Japan’s famous seventeenth-century swordsman. Ohara accuses Yoshikawa

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of being part of a coterie of writers serving as a “behind-the-lines command force fabricating feudalistic myths that, in the name of literature, turned the nation’s people into animals.” Ohara elaborates on this charge: Miyamoto Musashi is posited as the essence of the Japanese spirit—Miyamoto Musashi, who slaughtered innocent children and crushed the pure aspirations of virtuous maidens in pursuit of his desire to achieve a religious enlightenment through utter mastery of swordsmanship. This regression to the Middle Ages, possible only through a rejection of everything that makes us human, was the symbol of a true “Japanese spirit”! . . . Sustained by the ethics of selflessness, the people of the nation hid their tears and went off to do “honorable battle” for “the sake of the sovereign.” It is truly no surprise that this novel received fanatical praise from all military men.9

This denunciation of Yoshikawa is similar in tone to that directed at Takamura. It also suggests that, like Takamura, this author embraced the language of the state. It does so by quoting the stock phrases “honorable battle” (mi-ikusa) and “for the sake of the sovereign” (ōkimi no tame ni), both of which were regularly used in state propaganda tracts and evoke the air of bygone samurai warriors. While the contributors to Bungaku jihyō find Yoshikawa as “guilty” as Takamura for fueling Japan’s imperialistic war of aggression through his literature, the issues are more complex in Yoshikawa’s case. Whereas Takamura careened far from the trajectory of his prewar career and promoted the contemporary military campaign explicitly in his wartime poetry, Yoshikawa’s wartime novels can be seen as very much an extension of the historical novels he had published previously. Furthermore, while Ohara seems justified in suggesting that Yoshikawa’s conflation of spiritual development and martial arts accomplishments in the novel prompted similar attitudes in the wartime populace, this association requires an interpretive move on the part of readers, a move that is not required by readers of Takamura’s poetry, which explicitly reference Japan’s military campaigns. My point is not that Yoshikawa’s novel was immune to the tenor of the times or that the inspiration it gave the wartime population was based on a misreading. Rather, the comparison with Takamura’s poetry is intended to highlight the fact that the Bungaku jihyō critics were less than subtle and far from forgiving in their evaluations of wartime writers. Little consideration was given to the mechanics of literature as a system inclusive of readers, publishers, and censors; any meaning or significance that could be assigned to a text was posited as utterly the responsibility of the author.



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A writer very different from Yoshikawa but in a perhaps equally ambiguous relationship to the wartime state is Hino Ashihei (1907–1960). Hino was the author of the famous Heitai (Soldiers) series: Mugi to heitai (Wheat and soldiers, 1938), Tsuchi to heitai (Soil and soldiers, 1939), and Hana to heitai (Flowers and soldiers, 1939), three novels depicting the life of Japanese soldiers on the Asian continent. Understated in terms of military valor, the portraits of soldiers quietly going about their mundane duties are tender, even sentimental. As such the novels are a sort of paean to the nameless infantrymen serving their country. Hino was a target for the “Literary Prosecution” column in Bungaku jihyō. Ara Masahito wrote of Hino: Seeking beauty in simplistic sentimentality, Hino abandoned thought and proceeded into a realm in which “that which is most straightforward and most innocent will lead one directly to that which is most exalted.” This mode of thinking, which we find in Tsuchi to heitai, is the dissolution of reason, it is a retreat from modernity to the Middle Ages. This author is an intellectual whose story Funnyō tan (Of excreta) won him the Akutagawa Prize, and yet he managed to make tens of thousands of his readers believe that this conclusion would be reached by anyone who personally experienced fighting so intense it left them speechless. That is an accomplishment that will be hard to beat!10

Ara is here leveling a charge at Hino that echoes the criticism of the poet Takamura. Just as the war years prompted a radical turn in Takamura’s poetry, so, too, did they prompt a significant shift in Hino’s prose, at least as Ara reads it. Ara explicitly mentions Funnyō tan, where Hino explores discrimination and class consciousness through the tale of a man whose turn to cesspool cleaning alienates him from many. Ara seems to interpret Hino’s subsequent choice to narrate from personal experience in the voice of an average soldier as a turnaround too radical to be anything but a surrender to propaganda, and hence unforgivable. As with the Bungaku jihyō criticism of Yoshikawa Eiji, the reading is not unreasonable; still, again as with the Yoshikawa criticism, it is a reductive mode of analysis that refuses to consider other elements of the literary system within which an author works. More important, Ara’s criticism fails to acknowledge that Hino’s soldier trilogy may actually represent a literary innovation on his part. The narrative voice (positioned by paratext such that it is read as also the author’s voice) is a compelling rhetorical device eliciting empathy from readers, and it represents a literary accomplishment on Hino’s part.11 Furthermore, Hino’s championing of the “average man” could conceivably also be understood as fully in keeping with his earlier Communist inclinations. In short, the relationship between this author and the wartime state is much more complex than Ara’s reading would suggest.

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These examples from the spectrum of writers taken to task in the “Literary Prosecution” column of Bungaku jihyō are representative of the tone and approach taken in virtually all the column’s contributions. While there is much of interest in their details, what is perhaps most significant is the fact that the “prosecutions” focus almost entirely on the authors in isolation from their systems of cultural production, assigning very little significance to the influence the state exercised on writers, journals, and publishers. It is as if the Bungaku jihyō critics envisioned literary pursuits as transcendent of political and ideological concerns and, by definition, somehow immune to attempts to assimilate them into the nationalistic discourse of the time. The idealism surrounding the Bungaku jihyō writers in their criticisms seems explicable only by recourse to the experience of their generation (narrowly defined) as outlined earlier. Too young to have directly experienced persecution at the hands of the state, their idealism remained intact to emerge in the immediate postwar period. This fervent, uncompromising ideal for literature was most fully expounded in the manifesto that opens the inaugural issue of Bungaku jihyō. Here literature is portrayed as an autonomous, sacred realm antithetical to reactionary politics and imperialism. As if to emphasize the spiritual nature of literature, the metaphors employed are largely religious (and, more specifically, Christian) in nature: the governmental censorship and oppression of writers during the war years is labeled a “religious inquisition” (shūkyō saiban), and the writers who succumbed are also denounced in terms religious and misogynistic: We are unable to forget that there were writers and critics who, some secretly and some openly, joined forces with the fascists. The vilest of these were the manufacturers and supporters of the literature of the “Holy War.” Like Judas betraying Christ for thirty pieces of silver, these literary figures pursued petty ambitions and material gain in exchange for which they sullied with their own hands the purity of literature, treating it as a common whore.12

The religious tone is echoed in repeated references to the “purity” of (true) literature and in the repetition of a biblical phrase: “The very stones would cry out.” The line is found in Luke, verse 19, in which the Pharisees ask Jesus to silence his disciples in their praise of him. Jesus replies, “I tell you, if these were silent, the very stones would cry out.”13 Presumably the point is that voices ringing out in defense of literature cannot be silenced. The same religious imagery is present in the vow made by Odagiri and his coauthors to dedicate their publication to fully chastising the offenders: “Bungaku jihyō will, in the name of pure literature [junsui bungaku], pursue every last one of these impudent and shameless men



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responsible for the war, these blasphemers [bōtokusha] of literature. We shall denounce them and, together with our readers, we shall bury their literary lives.”14 This course of action, it is implied, will allow the authors to restore the purity of the literary endeavor. At the close of the essay they outline how they will “purify” literature and what that will mean for politics: “We shall be freed from each and every political ideology, each and every literary movement; we will boldly and sincerely place our faith in art for art’s sake, we will trust in the nobility of literature. Henceforth we shall lead our lives based on these principles. It is only through this path that literature will lead to a proper politics.”15 Read in the context of the manifesto as a whole, the closing line of this passage is best interpreted as indicating a belief that a vibrant, multivoiced literary community unbeholden to any narrow ideological agendas would best serve the body politic, presumably by bringing diverse perspectives into the public discourse. The foregoing discussion of the journal Bungaku jihyō documents how this literary enterprise was intensely occupied with the wartime legacy in a most narrow, focused sense. The war had ended but its specter lived on. Importantly, the literary paradigms at work in Bungaku jihyō were also tightly tied to wartime literature: in its portrayal of the literary enterprise as a spiritual undertaking in which “purity” is a key element, and in its paradoxical conception of literature as somehow prompting a proper politics through its apoliticality, it is drawing (almost certainly unconsciously) on literary paradigms and rhetoric that figure prominently in the discourse of the tenkō that took place in the 1930s, the early years of the war. PRECEDENTS AND PARALLELS IN TENKŌ DISCOURSE In the 1930s many progressive writers associated with the Communist Party, Marxist criticism, and proletarian literature had renounced these associations.16 While persecution, or its implicit threat, at the hands of government authorities was certainly a primary motivation, these conversions were also fueled by a growing artistic aversion to the ideological agendas that were deemed stifling of literary experimentation. Like Odagiri and his generation, many figures who had undergone tenkō a little more than a decade earlier had sought to be liberated “from all political ideologies and all literary schools.”17 In the end, if only by default, many of these writers from the 1930s had ended up, at least implicitly, furthering the imperial cause. Indeed, the sentiments and rhetoric found in Bungaku jihyō share a great deal with those in tenkō writing. Renowned tenkō writer Hayashi Fusao (1903–1974), for example, began his break from the Communist Party by stating his allegiance to literature above all things. In September 1932, he

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wrote, “I have made up my mind. I will stake my life on literature. The task of literature is noble and great.”18 Note that this is part of his break from the Communist Party; it is a justification for a severance of a political affiliation. And yet he does it not to commit himself to any other political ideology, or at least anything readily recognizable as such. In this sense, Hayashi’s conversion is somewhat incongruous: he moves between seemingly incompatible poles, from Communism to literature. Note also that he does not specify a particular literary affiliation—not social realism, not surrealism, not shishōsetsu (the I-novel). The belief seems to be that a purely literary life is possible, and that it represents a sort of alternative world untouched by petty politics. The breadth of Hayashi’s vision for literary practice is immense. Like the Bungaku jihyō critics, he hopes to transcend all “isms” in the pursuit of a dynamic creativity. This breadth is evident in the following lines from Hayashi’s essay “Sakka no tame” (For the sake of writers, 1932): It is really quite amazing how stupid novels by stupid authors—and this does not apply only to proletarian literature—do not move beyond the category of popularized introductions to issues in biology, psychology, sociology, or history. . . . This is not the fault of literature; it is the fault of writers. . . . On the Origin of Species is an interesting book. Still, Maupassant, though in a different way, is interesting, too. Das Kapital is fabulous. But to Marx himself there was no reading more fabulous than Shakespeare and Balzac. Now here is the point: do not be carried away by Das Kapital; instead write something that would impress its author.19

Hayashi’s call is for a dynamic literary praxis that constantly re-creates itself. By lumping together writers as divergent as Darwin, Maupassant, Marx, Shakespeare, and Balzac, Hayashi is hoping not only to break with the Marxist and proletarian literature paradigms that reigned supreme in the late 1920s but also to ensure that nothing rises to replace those related movements. He wants a widely free-flowing literary conversation—precisely what the Bungaku jihyō manifesto called for in January 1946. Bungaku jihyō’s perception of literature as a religious or spiritual pursuit engaged in by a largely autonomous individual also has precedents in the tenkō discourse of the 1930s and 1940s. Again, Hayashi Fusao provides a concrete example. In his essay “Tenkō ni tsuite” (On conversion, 1941)  he describes his tenkō in spiritual, almost ascetic, terms. Remember that the conversion he is undergoing is one enacted largely if not exclusively through literary pursuits, and yet Hayashi describes it with the following language: Tenkō is not a mere change in direction. It is a regeneration of a human being. It is not enough for the subject merely to strip himself naked. It is not enough for him merely to scrub himself in cold water. He must cleanse himself to the marrow



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of his bones before he makes his fresh start. This is not a matter of external form but of one’s inmost heart. It is a great spiritual discipline, and one that cannot be successfully completed in two years or three. If a man could be regenerated the instant he proclaimed his tenkō there would be no problem. . . . The truth of the matter is that even after one has made the decision to commit tenkō and has started one’s efforts to achieve self-regeneration, it takes at least ten years before one understands the proper direction.20

This portrait of tenkō as an ascetic exercise aimed at purifying the body is echoed throughout the essay, particularly in a phrase borrowed from a work by Kamei Katsuichirō (1907–1966), himself executing a conversion:  tenkō is to be “an utter dissolution of, and complete escape from, all worldly attachments and desires [issai gedatsu].” I offer one final quote from this essay by Hayashi, a quote that underscores the religious overtones of a tenkō to literature: What are the bad habits of the [superficial] converts? First of all, they are lacking in faith, they do not know the gods. The toxins of positivism and empiricism [kagaku shugi] have seeped into the marrow of our bones. . . . Today we suffer the consequences: when we set out to undertake something new, we immediately look to figures and formulas and are prone to forget the existence of both man’s pure inner heart [magokoro] and the gods who speak to it. Consequently, [superficial] converts tend to be lacking in authenticity [seishin] and sincerity [sei]. They tend to rely on talent rather than sincerity; they tend to favor the quick results of “strategies and schemes” rather than the superiority [tōtosa] of selflessness [mushi].21

These sentiments share a great deal with those of Odagiri Hideo and the early postwar Bungaku jihyō editorial staff. Just as Hayashi called on his peers to rid themselves of “the toxins of positivism and empiricism,” the Setagaya trio were pushing for a denunciation of any and all “isms” in the practice of literature. Just as Hayashi writes of man’s pure inner heart, authenticity, sincerity, and the superiority of selflessness, the postwar group wrote passionately of the need to purify literature once again, for writers to be true to their inner artistic calling. Although the tenkō discourse draws metaphors and vocabulary from Buddhism while the Bungaku jihyō writers borrow more from Christianity, both discourses are focused on the importance of spiritual purity in the pursuit of literature. It is likely that choosing metaphors from religious discourse prompted the writers and critics from both historical junctures to conceive of literary production as the act of autonomous individuals somehow transcendent of worldly pressures. It is hard to otherwise explain the apotheosis of an autonomous subject (the writer) in what were historical moments where

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political concerns were paramount and state interference in cultural matters was so intense. A final commonality of the tenkō and Bungaku jihyō discourses was the positioning of literature in relation to politics. As previously quoted, the Bungaku jihyō manifesto declared a “faith in art for art’s sake” and insisted that such a path alone would “lead to a proper politics.” This sentiment, too, can be traced back to the late 1930s and the height of tenkō discourse. Though he himself was not, strictly speaking, a tenkō writer, Kobayashi Hideo gathered around him many writers who were. Kobayashi articulated a vision for literature that appealed to these writers who felt trapped by the narrow range of political agendas deemed appropriate by Marxist theorists and the promoters of proletarian literature. Beginning with the essay that launched his critical career, “Samazama naru ishō” (Multiple designs, 1929), Kobayashi had been promoting precisely the sort of dynamic literary praxis that Hayashi later came to embrace. The passage from Hayashi quoted earlier, the one in which he groups Darwin, Maupassant, Marx, Shakespeare, and Balzac under the broad umbrella of “literature,” for example, owes a great deal to that debut essay by Kobayashi. Kobayashi practiced what he preached: much of his “literary criticism” is far more “literary” than it is “critical,” if we take criticism to be a genre distinguished by a sustained analysis based on a consistent theoretical agenda. Kobayashi’s criticism is less the elucidation of a text and more the erudite performance of the critic’s subjectivity as it takes a text, writer, or movement as grist for its mill. Kobayashi had, in fact, been roundly criticized for this propensity by the Marxist critic Tosaka Jun (1900–1945), and the attack prompted a lively debate between the two in the early 1930s. Tosaka labeled Kobayashi’s performative approach to the genre of criticism bungaku shugi, a neologism meaning literally “literature-ism” but perhaps better translated as “literary aestheticism.” In Tosaka’s eyes, this critical perspective inverts the proper hierarchy of objective reality over literary representation and dangerously subjugates material realities to the fictional whims of literature. In the writing of Kobayashi, warns Tosaka, real-world issues are being “hijacked” for mere literary performance. Quite surprisingly, Kobayashi embraces the label, turning it around to reveal Tosaka’s blind spots. In “Bungei hihyō no yukue” (The future of literary criticism, 1937), an essay that is part of this debate, Kobayashi provides his most succinct statement concerning the relationship of literature and politics as he, and surely many tenkō writers, conceived it. He insists that he will not subsume literature into a political framework, and he goes on to claim that such resistance makes it possible for literature to be even more politically volatile:



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The reason literary practice is made easy by adding a political perspective is, in principle, quite simple: it is because in so doing writers would be limiting the conceptual range of literature to its political nature, never questioning this. If this were the case, political criticism through the vehicle of literature would, of course, gain in vigor. But this is at most a superficial vigor. In other words, literature of this sort would be nothing but one political perspective being critiqued by another political perspective that has borrowed the label of literature. . . . However, literature cannot stop at the concrete standpoint of issuing a critique from a political standpoint. Literature presses further; it cannot abandon the ideal of criticizing politicality itself. It is this ideal more than any other that forms the essence of literary thought; it is what feeds the internal creativity of the writer’s thinking.22

This statement clearly shares a great deal with the vision for literature and politics expressed by the Bungaku jihyō group. Both position a dynamic, freefloating literary praxis in a position insulated from politics and yet because of that very fact possessed of the potential for prompting a “proper politics.” The Bungaku jihyō critics, and particularly Ara Masahito and Odagiri Hideo, occupied a liminal space between wartime and postwar literary culture; though living in the postwar, the focus of their interests and the paradigms with which they operated were firmly grounded in wartime Japan. This perspective was likely a product of the unique experience of their generation. Too young to have fully staked their careers on the Marxist criticism and proletarian literature movements that were so harshly persecuted by Japan’s wartime state, the men were somehow able to sustain the utopian, idealistic literary vision of their youth through the dark years of the war in ways that their elders had been unable to. Partly a by-product of their position in history and surely partly a rhetorical strategy to distinguish themselves from the older generation, this worldview allowed them to identify themselves as the left-wing vanguard and the “central spiritual pillar” of the postwar literary world. It was from this standpoint that they felt justified in “prosecuting” authors whose wartime production seemed complicit with the state’s imperialist agenda. Their modest journal, Bungaku jihyō, was, just as the title implies, a “marker in time” (時標) for literary history. Particularly in its focused assault on writers perceived to have been complicit in the war effort, it represents an attempt to complete the critical record of the war years, a record scarred by lacunae imposed by the system of censorship. The paradigms for that critical revision, too, were inherited from the wartime, particularly the tenkō, discourse. Time marched on, however, leaving Bungaku jihyō a marker not of contemporary experience but rather another piece of the historical record. Whereas for a brief moment it seemed that the campaign to bring complicit writers to justice would continue in the pages of Shin Nihon bungaku, with

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Odagiri publishing the famous “Bungaku ni okeru sensō sekinin no tsuikyū” (An inquiry into war responsibility in literature, 1946) there, the follow-up investigations promised in that essay never materialized. With the demise of Bungaku jihyō in November 1946, the denunciations of specific writers for perceived transgressions against the sacred realm of the literary also ceased. Increasingly, it seems, Odagiri and his collaborators on Bungaku jihyō began to lose their idealism, recognizing that literature would always have political and ideological implications. Odagiri, in fact, had begun moving in that direction as early as March of 1946. At that time he published the essay “Shin bungaku sōzō no shutai: Atarashii dankai no tame ni” (Subjectivity in the creation of a new literature: Thoughts for a new stage), in which Odagiri continues to call for literature as a heartfelt, spiritual pursuit while simultaneously insisting that such endeavors would, if pursued sincerely, inevitably lead to a worldview based on dialectical materialism and social realism as the optimal mode of literary representation. As that perspective takes hold in even Odagiri’s generation, we see the dissolution of the identity that had distinguished it. The Bungaku jihyō critics subsequently move closer to the literary agenda held by those a few years older than them, and a more genuinely postwar perspective takes hold. This postwar perspective, however, ironically, is one in which the prewar Marxist worldview is rehabilitated in an effort to undo the failures of that earlier time. NOTES 1. Odagiri Hideo, “40-nen mae no jōnetsu: Bungaku jihyō no tashō no sonzai riyū ni kanren shite” (The passion of forty years ago: On some of the reasons for the existence of Bungaku jihyō), in Fukkokuban “Bungaku jihyō” (Tokyo: Fuji shuppan, 1986), 1. Note that this book has idiosyncratic page numbering; both the section reproducing the original Bungaku jihyō and the section of accompanying essays on it begin with page 1. 2. Sasaki Kiichi, “Bungaku jihyō no kaisō” (Reminiscences on Bungaku jihyō), in Fukkokuban “Bungaku jihyō,” 5. 3. See, for example, Odagiri Hideo, “40-nen mae no jōnetsu,” 2, and Odagiri Susumu, “Sono koro no koto: Bungaku jihyō to watashi” (About those days: Bungaku jihyō and I), in Fukkokuban “Bungaku jihyō,” 6. 4. Odagiri Susumu, “Sono koro no koto,” 6. 5. Ibid. 6. On the fact that Bungaku jihyō was most well known for this column, see Odagiri Hideo, “40-nen mae no jōnetsu,” 1, and Odagiri Susumu, “Sono koro no koto,” 6. 7. Translation by Donald Keene; quoted in Donald Keene, “Japanese Writers and the Greater East Asia War,” Journal of Asian Studies 23, no. 2 (February 1964): 213.



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8. Odagiri Hideo, “Bungaku kensatsu:  Takamura Kōtarō” (Literary prosecution:  Takamura Kōtarō), Bungaku jihyō, no. 1 (January 1, 1946); reprinted in Fukkokuban “Bungaku jihyō,” 3. 9. Ohara Gen, “Bungaku kensatsu (2):  Miyamoto Musashi” (Literary prosecution [2]‌: Miyamoto Musashi), Bungaku jihyō, no. 2 (January 15, 1946); reprinted in Fukkokuban “Bungaku jihyō,” 7. 10. Ara Masahito, “Bungaku kensatsu: Hino Ashihei” (Literary prosecution: Hino Ashihei), Bungaku jihyō, no. 1 (January 1, 1946); reprinted in Fukkokuban “Bungaku jihyō,” 3. 11. For an in-depth, nuanced reading of Hino’s legacy vis-à-vis the wartime state, see David M. Rosenfeld, Unhappy Soldier: Hino Ashihei and Japanese World War II Literature (Lanham, Md.: Lexington Books, 2002). 12. Ara Masahito, Odagiri Hideo, and Sasaki Kiichi, “Hakkan no kotoba” (Founding words: A manifesto), Bungaku jihyō, no. 1 (January 1, 1946); reprinted in Fukkokuban “Bungaku jihyō,” 1. For an English translation, see Atsuko Ueda, Michael K. Bourdaghs, Richi Sakakibara, and Hirokazu Toeda, eds., The Politics and Literature Debate in Postwar Japanese Criticism, 1945–52 (Lanham, Md.: Lexington Books, 2017): 197–99. 13. The Navarre Bible: New Testament in the Revised Standard Version (New York: Scepter, 2008), 33. 14. Ara, Odagiri, and Sasaki, “Hakkan no kotoba,” 1. 15. Ibid. 16. Honda Shūgo claims that over 95 percent of the proletarian writers committed tenkō. See Honda Shūgo, “Tenkō bungaku to shishōsetsu” (Conversion literature and the I-novel), in Tenkō bungakuron (A theory of conversion literature) (Tokyo: Miraisha, 1974), 180. 17. For one scholar who sees the tenkō phenomenon in these terms, see Maruyama Masao, Nihon no shisō (Japanese intellectual history) (Tokyo: Iwanami shoten, 1961), 15. I treat the tenkō phenomenon more fully in “From Ideological Literature to a Literary Ideology: Conversion in Wartime Japan,” in Converting Cultures: Religion, Ideology and Transformations of Modernity, ed. Dennis Washburn and A. Kevin Reinhart (Leiden: Brill, 2007), 465–83. 18. Hayashi Fusao, “Sakka toshite” (As a writer), quoted in Donald Keene, “Japanese Literature and Politics in the 1930s,” in Journal of Japanese Studies 2, no. 2 (Summer 1976): 238. 19. Hayashi Fusao, “Sakka no tame,” in Shōwa hihyō taikei, ed. Muramatsu Takeshi (Tokyo: Banchō shobō, 1968), 1:199. 20. Hayashi Fusao, “Tenkō ni tsuite,” in Shōwa hihyō taikei, 2:239. I build on the translated excerpt provided in Keene, “Japanese Literature and Politics,” 240–41. 21. Ibid., 260. 22. Kobayashi Hideo, “Bungei hihyō no yukue,” in Kobayashi Hideo zenshū (Tokyo: Shinchōsha, 1978), 3:179; emphasis added.

Chapter 9

From the God of Literature to War Criminal The Media and the Shifting Image of Yokomitsu Riichi from Prewar and Wartime to the Postwar Era Hirokazu Toeda Translated by Atsuko Ueda

Yokomitsu Riichi (1898–1947) began to be called bungaku no kamisama (the god of literature) in Japan before World War II, and there are some who still refer to him this way. The label parallels shōsetsu no kamisama (god of fiction), a title given to Shiga Naoya (1883–1971). These titles represent the writers’ distinct characteristics: Shiga was a skilled writer of fiction and the author of “Kozō no kamisama” (The shopboy’s god, 1920),1 hence the moniker “god of fiction,” while Yokomitsu, in addition to fiction, wrote essays such as “Shinkankakuron” (On new sensationism, 1924)2 and “Junsui shōsetsuron” (On the pure novel, 1935)3 that were greatly influential in literary circles, and thus his title includes the term “literature,” which encompasses both fiction and criticism.4 There was a time when “god of literature” and “god of fiction” were used interchangeably, but as literary history began to take orderly form, the usage gradually stabilized, and Yokomitsu has been deemed god of literature and Shiga god of fiction until the present day. It was not any institution that granted Yokomitsu this title; rather, it was the prewar literary world and media. As we shall see in what follows, it was around 1935 that Yokomitsu was given this title, which was further reinforced when he was dispatched as a reporter to the Berlin Olympics in an era when traveling to the West was still not easy. However, after World War II, especially during the Occupation period, Yokomitsu was criticized in various media, such as literary criticism and film, prompting questions about his war responsibility. How did the prewar god 177

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of literature come to be treated this way? This essay examines the manner in which Yokomitsu Riichi became the god of literature before World War II and how that changed in the aftermath of the war by exploring contemporary literary criticism and mass media. ORIGIN OF THE “GOD” TITLE When did the title “god of literature” begin to appear and how did it stabilize? I would like to begin by discussing when Yokomitsu began to be referred to by this title. By examining the newspapers and journals that focused on Yokomitsu, it becomes clear that he began to be referred to as god of literature in the first few years of the 1930s.5 For example, Sokuratetsu’s “Bundan uwasabanashi” (Gossip in the literary world, 1934) includes the following passage, titled “Kamisama no kōgi” (The god’s lecture): Literary youths of our time refer to Yokomitsu Riichi as something of a “god of literature.” Yokomitsu has been invited to Meiji University as a lecturer in the School of Humanities, whose chairman is Yamamoto Yūzō; he lectures only once a week but is extremely popular—a packed audience with much pushing and shoving going on! It is rather amusing to see how they listen humbly to the divine message of this god.6

Beginning in 1934, Yokomitsu taught creative writing as a lecturer at Meiji University, where Yamamoto Yūzō (1887–1974) was chairman of the School of Humanities. This passage describes the popularity of Yokomitsu’s lectures and delineates the tendency among students to valorize Yokomitsu as the god of literature. It is true that Yokomitsu produced a diverse array of works around this time, deserving of the title. In 1935, Yokomitsu won the first Bungei Konwakai Prize for his experimental fictional work Monshō (Emblem), published as a monograph following its serialization the previous year.7 He also published “Junsui shōsetsuron,” which garnered great excitement among members of the literary establishment. Moreover, in January 1936, prior to his departure for Europe, the first Yokomitsu Riichi zenshū (Complete works of Yokomitsu Riichi) was released by the publisher Hibonkaku. These events prompted the media to focus extensively on Yokomitsu’s trip abroad. Advertisements for the Hibonkaku edition of Yokomitsu’s complete works were printed amid reports of his travels, as if to link them together. The advertisements included in Tōkyō nichinichi shinbun in February 1936, the month that Yokomitsu left on his trip, reveal that Hibonkaku had already



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gone through three printings in a single month. After the publication of his complete works in January, the morning edition of February 7 stated that it had “rapidly begun its third printing,” and already in the morning edition of February 15, an advertisement was claiming, “The third printing is now sold out, and the fourth printing is currently under way.” The February 25 edition further stated that the fifth printing had been completed. Hibonkaku’s advertising for the complete works clearly shows that its sales increased dramatically as a result of Yokomitsu’s European trip. Moreover, the advertisement in the February 15 edition was full of praise for Yokomitsu: “Pagoda of pure literature,” “divine product of art,” “a literary giant’s comprehensive works,” “the sublime literature of national stature.” From our perspective today, it seems rather exaggerated to refer to his works as a “literature of national stature,” but such claims accorded with his literary achievements at the time. At the very moment of such praise, the god of literature Yokomitsu departed for Europe. YOKOMITSU’S TRIP TO EUROPE Yokomitsu, who had already garnered high praise as a writer, traveled to Europe as a special reporter on the Berlin Olympics. This rare opportunity was granted to him precisely because he was a popular writer designated as the god of literature. Moreover, he was the focus of much attention in being given the unique role of reporting to the Japanese people on the Berlin Olympics. On February 20, 1936, as a special reporter for the Ōsaka Mainichi shinbun, Yokomitsu departed from the port of Kobe for Europe on the ship Hakkōmaru, belonging to the Nihon Yūsen Company. His objective was to report on the Berlin Olympics, including also accounts of his various experiences overseas.8 Traveling by way of Shanghai, Hong Kong, Singapore, Benin, and Colombo and crossing the Mediterranean from Egypt, Yokomitsu arrived in Paris at the end of March after a brief stop in Marseille. Basing himself in Paris, he traveled around England, Germany, Switzerland, Hungary, and Italy; in August, he attended the Berlin Olympics, and on August 25 he embarked on his return trip to Japan via Moscow and Siberia. For approximately six months, he devoted himself to reportage and personal accounts for newspapers and magazines. In April 1937, Yokomitsu published Ōshū kikō (European travels) with Sōgensha. For this book he included, in addition to the reportage that had already been published, a variety of essays, reviews, and letters to his family. For Yokomitsu, travel marked an attempt to find a new direction for his fictional projects, but this was not his only motivation. Because he was such a

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popular writer, there were also hopes his friends and the Japanese literary establishment had attached to him. One can gain a sense of this in the following passage from Ōshū kikō: “I did not come to Paris because I wanted to. My friends urged me, ‘Go, go . . .,’ and pushed me to it.”9 It is clear that they had high expectations of Yokomitsu. The media had equally high hopes, as is evident in the newspapers and magazines examined in the following. Many newspapers and journals covered Yokomitsu’s trip to Europe, the reports of which centered on his attendance at the Berlin Olympics. The Japanese literary establishment recognized the significance of this trip, as is clear from Yokomitsu’s farewell party, sponsored by the Japan PEN club. With the role he had as special reporter at the Olympics relaying news back to Japan, Yokomitsu was the object of people’s considerable hopes. There was much media coverage of Yokomitsu’s travel, and some journals even created special issues devoted to it. Bungei tsūshin (vol. 4, no. 3, March 1936)  was one such example. Bearing the title “Toō ni saishi Yokomitsu Riichi shi e” (To Mr. Yokomitsu Riichi for his trip to Europe), this special issue included a “Kōkaijō” (Public statement) by Kawakami Tetsutarō (1902–1980); “Tsurezure naru negai” (Idle wishes) by Yazaki Dan (1906– 1946); “Nigatsu hatsu no tegami” (First letter of February) by Nakayama Gishū (1900–1969); and “Sōbetsukai” (A farewell party) by Terazaki Hiroshi (1904–1980). These writers and critics outlined their expectations for Yokomitsu. Yūben (vol. 27, no. 5, May 1936) also published an article, “Bungaku no kamisama Yokomitsu Riichi” (Yokomitsu Riichi, god of literature), along with his photo, declaring that his travels throughout Asia and Europe would lead to further creativity in his works. These reports reveal the high expectations the Japanese literary establishment and media had for Yokomitsu. Coupled with the fact that travel abroad was rare at the time, the firsthand reports by the god of literature were a topic of great interest for the domestic media. The Berlin Olympics was a subject of national interest, garnering extensive media coverage. FEATURES OF YOKOMITSU’S REPORTAGE AND OLYMPIC COVERAGE Yokomitsu’s reportage had been published at a steady pace during his trip, but its volume increased dramatically around August, at the beginning of the Berlin Olympics. With the Olympic coverage, Yokomitsu’s name began to appear frequently in Tōkyō nichinichi shinbun. What special features can we discern here? In the morning edition of July 29, a piece headlined “Berurin dai-isshin nijūshichinichi hatsu” (First transmission from Berlin, July 27) with the title



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“Orinpikku mura o miru” (Exploring the Olympic Village) appeared alongside Yokomitsu’s photograph. This extensively advertised first transmission was accompanied by the following caption: “How will the literary genius capture and represent the sacred festival of sports?” Clearly, the newspaper was curious to see how Yokomitsu, with his particular literary techniques, would relay the sporting event. Yokomitsu describes his impression of the Olympic city of Berlin as follows: Branches of lime trees hang low on the sides of clean, straight streets, while window after window is decorated with blooming red hollyhocks. This landscape, where swastika flags flutter in the wind, recalls the Warring States era of our past, when a group of warriors came in to attack. What war are these people preparing for?10

Yokomitsu lyrically portrays a foreign land while aligning Japan’s Warring States period with the landscape where the swastika, the symbol of Nazi Germany, figures large, foreshadowing the coming of war. What Yokomitsu is describing here is not a real war but nothing other than the Berlin Olympics. Here we see his efforts to describe the Olympics with the rhetoric of war, and this can also be seen in his subtitle to this section: “Hana akaku hata hirugaeru ‘Berurin-sai’: Rakuen wa senzen no shizukesa” (Red flowers and flags flutter at the Berlin Festival: The silence of paradise before battle). This tendency to use war rhetoric to describe the Olympics was common to other reports in Tōkyō nichinichi, where Yokomitsu published his accounts. In this newspaper, one finds a strong tendency to narrativize the Berlin Olympics in terms of national or ethnic war. The following few examples are among many: “Bōtakatobi kessen no kangeki” (The excitement of blood battles in the pole vault) (August 7, evening edition); “Nihongun masumasu katsuyaku” (The continuing success of the Japanese troops); “Gyokusai kisu sōteijin” (Honorable defeat by the rowboat squad) (August 12, evening edition); “Happyaku keiei dōdō no shingun” (The eight-hundred-meter relay nobly charges forward) (August 12, special edition). These characteristically militaristic expressions are common in Olympic reporting in Japan at the time; the Olympics evoked not only nationalism but also outright belligerence. In these pages, the use of war rhetoric obscured the expected line between the Olympics and actual war. Such rhetoric encouraged readers to view two otherwise disparate undertakings with the same enthusiasm. This war rhetoric created a sense of enthusiasm for the Games while softening the reality of the war in East Asia, which was just beginning at the time. For readers who received war news primarily from the newspaper, the repetition of such expressions fostered a sensibility in which the Olympics and the war were conflated.

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Even after the closing ceremony on August 1, Yokomitsu’s accounts continued to appear. In the special edition of August 2, he wrote a piece headed “Orinpikku nyūjōshiki o miru ‘kokusai kankei’ eiji tsutsu:  Karei kaigyaku no keirei moyō ‘shōchi’ kōfun no waga senshu” (Observing the opening ceremony of the Olympics:  Reflecting “international relations”; Magnificent yet humorous salutes—our athletes excited by the invitation). Another piece appeared in the evening edition of August 5: “Nihon senshu e no kimon semaki sora ni kumoribi minzoku tairyoku no sa o miru” (Ominous atmosphere for Japanese athletes: Clouds hover in the narrow sky; A gap in physical prowess among races). In the evening edition of August 7, we find “Rekkoku no kanshū kozotte Nihon ōen no shūchūka gekiteki no kono issen o miru” (Ignited cheers for the Japanese from an audience of all countries: Watching the dramatic games). Here, too, we see more examples of the widespread use of war rhetoric in the media. Paralleling these Olympic reports, Yokomitsu published four installments of his Ōshū no tabi (Traveling through Europe) in the morning editions of August 7, 8, 9, and 11.11 The distinction between the Olympics and war was thus obscured in characterizing both as national competitions. Although war rhetoric was made frequent use of in such reports, it does not appear that Yokomitsu wrote with much critical distance in his reporting. Writing of the “state of war” at the Berlin Olympics, he seemed oblivious to the distinction between war and the Olympics and also to foresee how such expressions would be read by the public. REINFORCEMENT OF THE “GOD” IMAGE UPON YOKOMITSU’S RETURN The observations by this god of literature were published primarily in the Tōkyō nichinichi and Ōsaka Mainichi newspapers, both of which were owned by Mainichi, the sponsor of Yokomitsu’s trip. His return was covered extensively in many newspapers. Yokomitsu’s personal account was published immediately after his return to Japan at the end of August 1936. During the months prior, his writings about his European travels reached Japanese readers through his reportage and personal accounts. But Yokomitsu most directly and honestly relates his sixmonth experience in the account he wrote immediately upon his return. The evening edition of August 26 announced, “Kichō shita Yokomitsu Riichi-shi no dan” (Mr. Yokomitsu Riichi’s account upon returning to Japan), featuring his piece “Orinpikku o ki ni Nihon no bunka wa jūnen hiyaku shiyō: Ima ni shite omou Nihon josei no bi” (Thanks to the Olympics, Japanese culture will leap forward by ten years: Now affirming Japanese women’s beauty)



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along with a photo of him resting at a hotel in Moji. His account consisted of roughly three themes: political conditions in Europe, the meeting with the French writer André Gide, and the Berlin Olympics. Written from the perspective of a writer of national stature who has experienced firsthand an event of international prominence, the account details his thoughts and opinions of the Olympics as well as European politics and literature. Many translations of Gide were available in Japan, and he had tremendous influence in literary circles. These three topics, in other words, were the main concerns not only of Yokomitsu but also of the Japanese literary establishment and general public. The evening edition of September 1 featured yet another account by Yokomitsu, “Yokomitsu-san kikyō” (Mr. Yokomitsu returns to Tokyo), accompanied by a photo of him resting at home. Here he claims, London and Paris are fine, but Japan is the best. Even in literature, although stylistically different, Japan is not far behind its foreign counterparts. The Olympics were of course magnificent. . . . Japanese goods have done marvelously well. Take toys, for example: wherever you go, Japanese products can be found everywhere.

Whereas the previous account focused on the new conditions of Europe, here Yokomitsu employs a comparative perspective and denies the backwardness of Japan either as a nation or in literature and industry. Of course this is a newspaper report and invariably reflects the newspaper’s own stance, but it is clear that Yokomitsu’s logic clearly affirms and valorizes Japan. I would like to call attention to the comparative cultural perspective Yokomitsu employs regarding Japan and Europe. He later developed this perspective in his novel Ryoshū (Melancholy journey) and in relation to the next Olympics. On July 31, the day before the opening ceremony in Berlin, it was announced that Tokyo would host the Olympics in 1940. Many Japanese newspapers issued a special edition to report this. Yokomitsu stated, “When we host the Twelfth Olympics in Tokyo, I think Japan will leap forward by ten years materially and spiritually.” The subtitle of this account was “Japanese Culture Will Leap Forward by Ten Years.” There is thus a specific focus on the “leaping forward” of “Japanese culture.” In light of the decision to select Tokyo as host of the Olympics, as well as in response to media demands, a comparative cultural perspective began to gain more significance for Yokomitsu. This tendency appears in the structure of his discussion: after mentioning the Tokyo Olympics, he proceeds to focus on Japan’s culturalism through comparison with Europe. There are other interesting reports devoted to Yokomitsu’s return. One such appeared in Bungei tsūshin under the title “ ‘Bungaku no kamisama’ kaeru” (The god of literature returns, 1936). The article describes the many people

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who went to greet Yokomitsu at Tokyo Station: “Sano Shigejirō and his wife, Kobayashi Shigeru of Sōgensha, Saitō Ryūtarō, Suga Tadao, and dozens of others from Bungei shunjū as well as the Tōkyō nichinichi and Miyako newspapers followed.”12 It’s possible to glimpse here the success Yokomitsu enjoyed and the motivation for referring to him as the god of literature. As mentioned, Yokomitsu was already being referred to in this way before traveling to Europe; thanks to his trip to Europe, however, these references only increased. There was wide coverage of Yokomitsu’s travel that continued for a period of six months, and this coverage was highly regarded in literary circles. Yokomitsu’s image as the god of literature thus came to be reinforced by the extensive media reports during and subsequent to his return. DETERMINATION AS WAR CRIMINAL IN THE OCCUPATION PERIOD In tracing Yokomitsu’s image in the media, we discover that it changes after World War II. With the dramatic shift in the postwar era, the valorization of Yokomitsu is silenced. The postwar Yokomitsu was no longer considered a god of literature; albeit only temporarily, he began to be treated as a war criminal. The reasons behind this shift can be found in the fact that he was targeted by one literary critic as having war responsibility while also being made the subject of a documentary film. The critic was Odagiri Hideo, who wrote “Bungaku ni okeru sensō sekinin no tsuikyū” (An inquiry into war responsibility in literature, 1946), published in Shin Nihon bungaku; the documentary was Nihon no higeki (Japan’s tragedy, 1946), directed by Kamei Fumio (1908–1987), which was prohibited from screening by the Supreme Commander for the Allied Powers (SCAP). Let us first examine Odagiri’s essay. Based on the following criteria, Odagiri lists the “first group” of twentyfive people, which includes Yokomitsu: We have focused here on two types of literary figures: (1) those directly responsible for the reactionary systematization of both literature and writers and (2) those without official affiliations but whose standing in the literary world was so great that their shameless transformation into megaphones praising the invasions exerted a grave and powerful influence on a broad range of literary figures as well as on the general public.13

Odagiri’s piece was quite influential in its effort to assign war responsibility, and it is easy to imagine the damage it caused for the writers it listed. This



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is because Odagiri was a leftist intellectual and Shin Nihon bungaku was a literary journal that attracted much attention at the time. Shin Nihon bungaku was listed among the twelve journals in the “Survey of Selected Japanese Newspapers and Magazines” (January 1948), a survey that was conducted by Civil Information and Education. Even SCAP was forced to take notice of this influential journal. The survey states that Shin Nihon bungaku had a circulation of twenty thousand, which is remarkably high for an Occupation-era literary journal. The survey lists the circulation figures for other literary journals as well: Ningen was at thirty-four thousand and Kindai bungaku ten thousand, while the general-interest magazines Bungei shunjū, Chūō kōron, Kaizō, and Sekai were all at fifty thousand. Odagiri does not specify why he lists Yokomitsu in “Bungaku ni okeru sensō sekinin no tsuikyū.” However, we can speculate that Yokomitsu’s participation in Misogi, the first meeting of the Imperial Rule Assistance Association (Taisei yokusankai) in 1941, his reading of a declaration at the Greater East Asia Writers’ Conference (Daitōa bungakusha taikai) in 1942, and his involvement in the Japanese Literature Patriotic Association (Nihon bungaku hōkokukai) were crucial. Kamei Fumio’s film Nihon no higeki, which I turn to in the following section, features a scene where Yokomitsu reads a declaration at the Greater East Asia Writers’ Conference. It is likely that he was considered a writer of great stature in literary circles, someone who, despite his prewar and wartime influence as the god of literature, did not actively try to stop the war. In December 1941, around the time Japan went to war with the United States, Yokomitsu also wrote essays and reports referring to the war, which were published in newspapers and general magazines—media that had many readers. This, too, affected his status. The essays that discussed such contemporary issues were often published in Tōkyō nichinichi, which had sent Yokomitsu to the Olympics. The Tokyo Olympics, which were scheduled to take place in the summer of 1940, were ultimately called off with the onset of the Sino-Japanese War and the beginning of the Pacific War the following year. The mass media that had solicited Olympic reports from Yokomitsu now sought war reports from this same god of literature. Despite both the expanding war and strict military censorship, which limited the reports and essays that could be published, Yokomitsu continued to answer to the demands of the media, publishing such essays as “Misogi-sai” (Misogi festival, August 13–14, 1941)  and “Kamigami ni inoru:  Kashiwabara jingū ni sanpai shite” (Praying to the gods: Worshipping at Kashiwabara Shrine, December 30, 1942).14 Although these essays do not entirely valorize the war, we cannot deny the impact that they must have had. It is clear, therefore, that the reason Yokomitsu was criticized following Japan’s defeat was related to both the great prominence he enjoyed in

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literary circles and the fact that he wrote many essays to fulfill contemporary demands. As we shall see in the following analysis, Yokomitsu’s reading of a declaration at the Greater East Asia Writers’ Conference was also crucial in the creation of his image in postwar Japan. PORTRAYAL IN NIHON NO HIGEKI Kamei Fumio’s Nihon no higeki was made with the objective of assigning war responsibility, capturing Japan’s wartime actions beginning with the Manchurian Incident, and characterizing the war as one of invasion led by the ruling class. The film consists of edited news footage and photo clippings from the prewar to postwar years. Its opening in theaters was permitted by SCAP, but subsequent censorship prompted it to confiscate the film and prohibit its screening.15 Nihon no higeki was screened at selected theaters prior to the prohibition, and it is not hard to imagine that it even further damaged Yokomitsu’s reputation. How, then, was Yokomitsu represented in this film? In the middle of this forty-minute work, one sees footage of Yokomitsu reading his declaration at the 1942 Greater East Asia Writers’ Conference. This scene appears as the film attacks intellectuals as war criminals. The film deals mostly with military personnel and politicians, and very few writers appear. Those who do include Yokomitsu and Kobayashi Takiji (1903–1933). One also sees Tokutomi Sohō (Tokutomi Iichirō, 1863–1957), who was influential as a Meiji-period social critic, but he was no longer especially regarded as a writer by this time. Kobayashi Takiji was depicted as a victim of the ruling class’s war of invasion, whereas Yokomitsu was portrayed as an active proponent. The literary world at this time included many other writers with considerable political and social influence, and so it is not clear why Yokomitsu (together with Tokutomi Sohō) was singled out as a representative cultural figure and introduced along with politicians and military personnel who were either purged or accused at the International Military Tribunal for the Far East. We might assume, however, that this was due to his status as representative of the literary establishment, as is evident from his title god of literature and the fact that he wielded tremendous influence with the masses. If Yokomitsu’s place as god of literature during the prewar and wartime years motivated his inclusion in Nihon no higeki, then this is linked to the manner in which the Shōwa emperor, who was a prewar “god,” began to be treated as human under the democratic policies of the Occupation. At the end of this film, there is a striking image of the emperor’s transformation from god to human as represented by his change from military garments to Western clothes. This shift corresponds to Yokomitsu’s transition in the film from



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literary god to war criminal. By treating this god as a war criminal, the film attempts to reject the ideology of wartime Japan. Yokomitsu was chosen as a symbolic object in order to accomplish this goal. As we have seen, following World War II, Yokomitsu was criticized in both literary criticism and film, and the Japanese media, if only temporarily, treated the god of literature as a war criminal. There were demands to purge those of high rank for their war responsibility. Kikuchi Kan (1888–1948), who had served as president of Daiei, was one such example. Although Yokomitsu was never purged, his high literary and social status resulted in attacks by the aforementioned journals and film. Given his treatment in the media as the god of literature, the impact was significant. In the literary criticism and film that appeared in 1946, the image of Yokomitsu shifted dramatically, especially during the Occupation. Of course it is not possible to deny Yokomitsu’s war responsibility, particularly given his involvement in the Japanese Literature Patriotic Association. As I have stated, he also wrote essays for newspapers and other media in which he declared his support of the state. Yokomitsu was not purged, unlike many writers and journalists, but was instead “punished” in the media and film. It was solely for the social responsibility he embodied through his actions. These criticisms must have done great damage to a writer who tried to resuscitate his writing career in the postwar period. In truth, the beginning of the Occupation era signified his eclipse as a writer. With no chance to defend himself, Yokomitsu grew ill and died in despair in December 1947. There seems to be no dramatic shift in Yokomitsu’s creative writings from the wartime to the postwar years. Nor does he appear to have undergone any significant philosophical transformation. Based on the few essays and works of fiction that he produced after the war, it is clear that he was conscious of his work’s continuity from the prewar years.16 The reactionary trend of being treated first as a god and then as a war criminal has reinforced the many contradictory images of Yokomitsu. NOTES 1. “Kozō no kamisama” was initially published in the literary journal Shirakaba 11, no. 1 (January 1920), and was later included in Araginu (Tokyo: Shun’yōdō, 1921). 2. “Shinkankakuron” was initially published under the title “Kankaku katsudō— Kankaku katsudō to kankakuteki sakubutsu ni taisuru hinan e no gyakusetsu” (Movement of perception—The paradox of criticism of the movement and objects of perception) in Bungei jidai 2, no. 2 (February 1925), but was later altered to “Shinkankakuron—Kankaku katsudō to kankakuteki sakubutsu ni taisuru hinan e

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no gyakusetsu” (New Sensationism—The paradox of criticism of the movement and objects of perception) and included in Yokomitsu Riichi, Kakikata zōshi (On methods of writing) (Tokyo: Hakusuisha, 1931). 3. “Junsui shōsetsuron” was published in Kaizō 17, no. 4 (April 1935) and later included in Yokomitsu Riichi, Oboegaki (A memo) (Tokyo: Sara shoten, 1935). 4. I have also examined the process through which Yokomitsu Riichi came to be known as the god of literature in “Bungakusha no shinwa keisei o meguru nōto” (Notes on the creation of writers’ myths), Shōwa bungaku kenkyū, no. 51 (September 2005): 75–79, and in “Media ni utsushidasareru ‘bungaku no kamisama’ no Ōshū kikō—1936-nen Yokomitsu Riichi no gaiyū to sono hōdō o megutte” (The god of literature’s Ōshū kikō reflected in the media—On reports of Yokomitsu Riichi’s 1936 foreign travels), in Yokomitsu Riichi Ōshū to no deai—“Ōshū kikō” kara “Ryoshū” e (Yokomitsu Riichi’s encounter with Europe—From Ōshū kikō to Ryoshū), ed. Inoue Ken, Kakeno Tsuyoshi, and Inoue Akiyoshi (Tokyo: Ōfū, 2009), 154–66. 5. Kobayashi Hideo (1902–1983), a contemporary of Yokomitsu’s, was often referred to as hihyō no kamisama (the god of criticism). It seems clear that the media of the 1920s created “gods” of fiction, literature, and criticism. 6. Sokuratetsu, “Bundan uwasabanashi,” in Yūben 25, no. 9 (September 1934), 346. 7. Monshō was serialized in Kaizō 16, nos. 1–10 (January–September 1934), and was published as a monograph by Kaizōsha in September 1934. 8. Yokomitsu’s letter (May 9, 1936) to Abe Shin’nosuke, who was in charge of the literature and art section at Tōkyō nichinichi at the time, can be found in Kawamura Minato and Moriya Takatsugu, eds., Bundan ochiba-shū (Collection of fallen leaves of the literary world) (Tokyo: Mainichi shinbunsha, 2005). Here Yokomitsu states that his travel was made possible with the support of both the Tōkyō nichinichi and Ōsaka Mainichi newspapers. Kawamura’s “Bundan no yabanjin” (Barbarian of the literary world) and Moriya’s “Bundan ochiba-shū kaisetsu” (Collection of Fallen Leaves of the Literary World: A commentary) also mention this fact. 9. Yokomitsu Riichi, Teihon Yokomitsu Riichi zenshū (Complete works of Yokomitsu Riichi, standard version) (Tokyo: Kawade shobō, 1982), 13:330. Initially published as “Dōbā o koete—Pari tsūshin” (Crossing the Dover: An account from Paris) under “April 28” in Bungei shunjū 6, no. 7 (July 1936). 10. Tōkyō nichinichi shinbun, July 29, 1936 (morning edition). 11. These installments were later included in Ōshū kikō. 12. “ ‘Bungaku no kamisama’ kaeru,” in Bungei tsūshin 4, no. 10 (October 1936), 25. 13. Odagiri Hideo, “Bungaku ni okeru sensōsekinin no tsuikyū,” Shin Nihon bungaku 1, no. 3 (July 1946): 65. For an English translation, see Atsuko Ueda, Michael K. Bourdaghs, Richi Sakakibara, and Hirokazu Toeda, eds., The Politics and Literature Debate in Postwar Japanese Criticism, 1945–52 (Lanham, Md.: Lexington Books, 2017): 179–182. 14. Yokomitsu also published in the Mainichi newspaper “Ōi naru isshun— Yamamoto Teitoku no eirei o mukaete” (The great moment—Receiving the spirit of Captain Yamamoto; May 24, 1943), “Chōsen no koto” (On Korea) (July 30–31, 1943), “Daitōa bungakusha kai ni nozomu—Fukyū no ganbō o tsuranuku” (Preparing



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for the Greater East Asia Writers’ Conference—Being true to my unhurried wish) (September 16, 1944). On January 1, 1943, the Tōkyō nichinichi and Ōsaka Mainichi newspapers merged to become the Mainichi. 15. Hirano Kyōko examines the censorship of Japanese film during the Occupation era in Tennō to seppun—Amerika senryōka no Nihon eiga ken’etsu (The emperor and kissing—Japanese cinema under American Occupation censorship) (Tokyo: Sōshisha, 1998). 16. If we were to view Yokomitsu’s creative texts in terms of what Andrew Gordon has called the transwar system, it would be possible to see a certain continuity between his literature and the social structure and individual lives that supported it; see Andrew Gordon, A Modern History of Japan: From Tokugawa Times to the Present (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003).

Index

American Occupation, 1, 98–99 Aono Suekichi, 63, 164 Ara Masahito, 4, 6–7, 11, 20, 29–30, 33, 35, 61–66, 68–81, 81n4, 83n22, 85n37, 86n55, 86n56, 86n57, 86n59, 123, 125–128, 133n24, 157n32, 159–162, 164, 167, 173 Arishima Takeo, 23–24 Benedict, Ruth, 5, 25–31, 35, 39n25, 40n35 Chang Hyŏkju, 48–53 China, 1, 18, 35, 38, 74–75, 113, 119n20, 160 Cold War, 2–3, 5–7, 9, 17, 19–20, 25–26, 28, 31–32, 35, 37–38, 61–62, 66, 68, 70 Communism, 5, 7, 20, 22, 28–29, 33– 35, 61, 68–70, 147, 170 Crossman, Richard, 5, 31, 33 fascism, 7, 17, 61–81, 82n6, 82n7, 83n19, 84n32, 85n45, 87n69, 109–110, 113 Hanada Kiyoteru, 65, 164 Haniya Yutaka, 65, 139–141, 145, 148, 151, 158n57, 158n58, 161–162

Hasumi Shigehiko, 91 Hayashi Fumiko, 139 Hayashi Fusao, 11, 164, 169–172 Hidaka Rokurō, 65 Hino Ashihei, 11, 23, 164, 167 Hirabayashi Hatsunosuke, 23 Hirano Ken, 5, 13n1, 17, 21–25, 29–30, 33–35, 92, 128–129, 148, 161–162 Honda Shūgo, 13n1, 78, 86n55, 86n62, 102n2, 143, 148, 156n26, 158n47, 161–162, 175n16 Hotta Yoshie, 48, 141 Inoue Hisashi, 109 Ishikawa Jun, 139 Iwakami Jun’ichi, 124–128 Japan studies, 2–3, 5, 13n5, 17, 35 Kamei Fumio, 12, 184–186 Kamei Katsuichirō, 140, 164, 171 Karatani Kōjin, 91, 102n1 Katō Shūichi, 8–9, 18, 65, 105–114, 116–117, 118n13, 119n15, 145, 157n33, 164 Kawakami Tetsutarō, 2, 180 Kikuchi Kan, 164, 187 Kim Dal-su, 6, 43–45, 48, 50–51, 53–55, 57 191

192 Index

Kim Sa-ryang, 48, 50–51, 54 Kobayashi Hideo, 2, 79, 103n4, 126, 172 Kobayashi Takiji, 23, 29, 162, 186 Korea, 2, 6, 13, 18, 35, 38, 43–57, 78 Kurahara Korehito, 126–127, 164 Maruyama Masao, 62, 68, 80, 122 Marxism, 17, 25, 61, 64, 71, 74, 81, 92, 124, 140, 142, 147 Miyamoto Kenji, 164 Miyamoto Yuriko, 56, 164 Mori Arimasa, 8–9, 105–107, 109, 113–118 Nakamura Mitsuo, 2, 8, 24, 91–102, 103n10, 104n18, 143, 145 Nakano Shigeharu, 2, 5, 13n3, 17, 24– 25, 30–31, 35, 62, 64, 69, 75, 77, 80, 125–126, 128–129, 162, 164 Noma Hiroshi, 140–141, 143 Norman, E. H., 26 Odagiri Hideo, 11–12, 77, 123, 125, 159–165, 168–169, 171, 173–174, 175n14, 184–185 Ōe Kenzaburō, 109

Shiina Rinzō, 10–11, 137, 139–148, 150–154, 155n11, 156n20 Shimazaki Tōson, 95, 158n51 shishōsetsu (I-novel), 8, 91–99, 170 subjectivity, 4, 10–11, 17, 64, 85n50, 92, 140, 147, 152, 154, 172, 174 Supreme Commander for the Allied Powers (SCAP), 6, 45, 48–50, 52–53, 78–79, 100, 184–186 Takamura Kōtarō, 164–167 Takeda Rintarō, 71 Takeda Taijun, 18, 137–138, 140–141 Takeuchi Yoshimi, 30–32, 114 Tamura Taijirō, 104n19, 139 Tayama Katai, 95 tenkō (conversion), 1, 10–11, 20, 24, 31–32, 137, 139, 141–142, 145–154, 158n58, 160, 162, 169–173, 175n16 Tokunaga Sunao, 125, 164 Tosaka Jun, 67, 172 Trilling, Lionel, 5, 20–23, 25, 27, 29, 35, 37 Tsubouchi Shōyō, 95 Tsurumi Kazuko, 26, 122 Tsurumi Shunsuke, 10, 82n9, 109, 122, 130–132, 133n22, 133n24, 158n58

proletarian literature, 2, 5, 22–25, 29–31, 33–34, 40n35, 77, 96–97, 142–143, 150, 160, 162, 169–170, 172–173, 175n16

Umezaki Haruo, 141 Usui Yoshimi, 145

Sakaguchi Ango, 85n46, 110, 138, 155n4, 164 Sartre, Jean-Paul, 4, 18–19, 78–79, 83n17, 112, 119, 145 Sasaki Kiichi, 11, 65, 77, 129, 159–162, 164 Shiga Naoya, 23–24, 177

Yamamuro Shizuka, 161–162 Yanagita Kunio, 26, 129 Yasuda Yojūrō, 71–72, 150, 164 Yokomitsu Riichi, 12, 164, 177–187, 188n5, 188n8 Yoshikawa Eiji, 11, 164–167 Yoshimoto Takaaki, 87n71, 140–142, 149–150

Watsuji Tetsurō, 26, 164

About the Contributors

Michael K. Bourdaghs is Robert S. Ingersoll Professor in East Asian Languages and Civilizations and the College at the University of Chicago. He is the author of Sayonara Amerika, Sayonara Nippon: A Geopolitical Prehistory of J-Pop (2012) and The Dawn That Never Comes: Shimazaki Tōson and Japanese Nationalism (2003). James Dorsey is an associate professor of Japanese at Dartmouth College. He is the author of Critical Aesthetics: Kobayashi Hideo, Modernity, and Wartime Japan (2009). He is also coeditor of Literary Mischief: Sakaguchi Ango, Culture, and the War (Lexington Books, 2010). His current research includes both wartime representations of the attack on Pearl Harbor and the youth culture of Japan in the 1960s. Ko Youngran is a professor of modern Japanese literature at Nihon University, Tokyo. She is the author of “Sengo” to iu ideorogī:  Rekishi, kioku, bunka (Postwar as ideology: History, memory, and culture, Fujiwara shoten, 2010) and coeditor of Ken’etsu no teikoku:  Bunka no tōsei to saiseisan (The empire of censorship: Regulating and reproducing culture, Shin’yōsha, 2014). Seiji M. Lippit is a professor of modern Japanese literature at the University of California, Los Angeles. He is the author of Topographies of Japanese Modernism (2002) and editor of The Essential Akutagawa (1999) and Kojin Karatani, History and Repetition (2011). Richi Sakakibara is a professor of modern Japanese literature at Waseda University, Tokyo. She is the author of “Idō to hon’yaku: Senryōki shōsetsu no shosō” (Migration and translation:  Aspects of Japanese fiction under the Occupation), in Ken’etsu no teikoku:  Bunka no tōsei to saiseisan (The 193

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About the Contributors

empire of censorship:  Regulating and reproducing culture, Shin’yōsha, 2014); “Kigōron kara seikatsu kiroku undō e: Shisō no kagaku no chōyaku” (From semiotics to the life-document movement: The postwar transformation of Shisō no kagaku), in Kuadorante (March 2014); and “ ‘Hikakumeisha’ shiron: Takeda Taijun Shanghai mono ni okeru kokka to jendā” (A reading of “nonrevolutionalist”: Nation and gender in Takeda Taijun’s Shanghai series), in Shōwa bungaku (September 2009). Ann Sherif is a professor of modern Japanese literature at Oberlin College. She is the author of Mirror: The Fiction and Essays of Kōda Aya (1999) and Japan’s Cold War: Media, Literature, and the Law (2009). Doug Slaymaker is a professor of Japanese at the University of Kentucky. He is currently at work on a book examining narratives of animals in fiction following the March 11, 2011, earthquake and tsunami. He is the translator of Furukawa Hideo, Horses, Horses, in the End the Light Remains Pure (2015) and author of The Body in Postwar Fiction: Japanese Fiction after the War (2004), coeditor of Literary Mischief: Sakaguchi Ango, Culture, and the War (Lexington Books, 2010), and editor of Yōko Tawada: Voices from Everywhere (Lexington Books, 2007). Hirokazu Toeda is a professor of modern Japanese literature at Waseda University, Tokyo. He is the author of Iwanami Shigeo: Hikuku kurashi, takaku omou (Iwanami Shigeo: Plain living and high thinking, Minerva shobō, 2013), editor of Ōdan suru eiga to bungaku (Traversing literature and film, Shinwasha, 2011), and coeditor of Ken’etsu, media, bungaku—Edo kara sengo made (Censorship, media, and literature: From Edo to postwar, Shin’yōsha, 2012). Atsuko Ueda is an associate professor of modern Japanese literature at Princeton University. She is the author of Concealment of Politics, Politics of Concealment: The Production of “Literature” in Meiji Japan (2007) and coeditor of Natsume Sōseki, Theory of Literature and Other Critical Writings (2009).