Tenkō: Cultures of Political Conversion in Transwar Japan 9780367235796, 9780367770365, 9780429280559

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TENKŌ: CULTURES OF POLITICAL CONVERSION IN TRANSWAR JAPAN

This book approaches the concept of tenkō (political conversion) as a response to the global crisis of interwar modernity, as opposed to a distinctly Japanese experience in postwar debates. Tenkō connotes the expressions of ideological conversion performed by members of the Japanese Communist Party, starting in 1933, whereby they renounced Marxism and expressed support for Japan’s imperial expansion on the continent. Although tenkō has a significant presence in Japan’s postwar intellectual and literary histories, this contributed volume is one of the first in English language scholarship to approach the phenomenon. International perspectives from both established and early career scholars show tenkō as inseparable from the global politics of empire, deeply marked by an age of mechanical reproduction, mediatization and the manipulation of language. Chapters draw on a wide range of interdisciplinary methodologies, from political theory and intellectual history to literary studies. In this way, tenkō is explored through new conceptual and analytical frameworks, including questions of gender and the role of affect in politics, implications that render the phenomenon distinctly relevant to the contemporary moment. Tenkō: Cultures of Political Conversion in Transwar Japan will prove a valuable resource to students and scholars of Japanese and East Asian history, literature and politics. Irena Hayter is Associate Professor of Japanese Studies at the University of Leeds. Her research brings together domains normally kept apart: literature, visual studies, and consumer culture. The overarching concern is with the perceptual changes of the interwar years in Japan and their urban and technological contexts. Articles in positions: asia critique, Japanese Language and Literature and Japan Forum, amongst others, have explored the effects of these changes not only on cultural practices but also on the politico-ideological domain. Her current monograph project is

a media-historical investigation of urban spectacle, the technologies of image commodification and literary modernism in interwar Japan. George T. Sipos is Associate Professor at the West University of Timisoara, in Romania, where he teaches Japanese literature, language and culture. His research focuses on modern and contemporary Japanese society and literature from a transcultural perspective, in particular comparative perspectives on Japan’s modernity, modern nation state, activism, and resistance against state oppression. His recent publications include ‘Journeys of Political Self-Discovery: The Writings of Miyamoto Yuriko and Panait Istrati from Late 1920s Soviet Russia’ (Human and Social Studies, 2018), and book chapters on the works of Mishima Yukio (in Mishima Monogatari: Un samurai delle arti, 2020), Kawabata Yasunari and Akutagawa Ryūnosuke (in Critical Insights: Modern Japanese Literature, 2017). He is currently preparing his first single authored book on Japan’s tenkō and tenkō literature, due to be published in 2021 by Routledge. Mark Williams is Vice President for International Academic Exchange at International Christian University in Tokyo, Japan. Until 2017, he was Professor of Japanese Studies at the University of Leeds, UK. He received his PhD in Japanese literature from the University of California, Berkeley. He has published widely in both English and Japanese – on themes such as Christianity and Japan, the literature of Endō Shūsaku and literary representations of the Asia Pacific War.

The Nissan Institute/Routledge Japanese Studies Series Series Editors: Roger Goodman, Nissan Professor of Modern Japanese Studies, University of Oxford, Fellow, St Antony’s College J.A.A. Stockwin, formerly Nissan Professor of Modern Japanese Studies and former Director of the Nissan Institute of Japanese Studies, University of Oxford, Emeritus Fellow, St Antony’s College

Japan and the New Silk Road Diplomacy, Development and Connectivity Nikolay Murashkin The Liberal Democratic Party of Japan The Realities of ‘Power’ Nakakita Kōji Japan’s New Ruralities Coping with Decline in the Periphery Edited by Wolfram Manzenreiter, Ralph Lützeler and Sebastian Polak-Rottmann New Directions in Japan’s Security Non-U.S. Centric Evolution Edited by Paul Midford and Wilhelm Vosse Child Guidance Centres in Japan Alternative Care and the Family Michael Rivera King Gradual Institutional Change in Japan Kantei Leadership under the Abe Administration Karol Zakowski Tenkō: Cultures of Political Conversion in Transwar Japan Irena Hayter, George T. Sipos, Mark Williams For more information about this series, please visit: www.routledge.com/ Nissan-Institute-Routledge-Japanese-Studies/book-series/SE0022

TENKŌ: CULTURES OF POLITICAL CONVERSION IN TRANSWAR JAPAN

Edited by Irena Hayter, George T. Sipos and Mark Williams

First published 2021 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 605 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10158 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2021 selection and editorial matter, Irena Hayter, George T. Sipos and Mark Williams; individual chapters, the contributors The right of Irena Hayter, George T. Sipos and Mark Williams to be identified as the authors of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A catalog record for this book has been requested ISBN: 978-0-367-23579-6 (hbk) ISBN: 978-0-367-77036-5 (pbk) ISBN: 978-0-429-28055-9 (ebk) Typeset in Bembo by Apex CoVantage, LLC

CONTENTS

List of illustrations ix Acknowledgementsxi Contributor biographies xiii Forewordxvii Arthur Stockwin and Roger Goodman xix Introduction: Tenkō – modernity, empire, Japan Irena Hayter and Mark Williams PART I

Conceptual excursions

1

  1 Ideological conversion as historical catachresis: coming to terms with tenkō3 Max Ward   2 The historical origins of tenkō as an intellectual and social issue: Marxism – thought control – media Brice Fauconnier

23

 3 Tenkō in Korea: revealing the critical threshold of colonial empire Hong Jong-wook

47

  4 Takeuchi Yoshimi and the problem of tenkō65 Viren Murthy

viii  Contents

PART II

Literary possibilities

85

  5 Literature and affect: proletarian literature as discovery Nakagawa Shigemi Translated by George T. Sipos

87

  6 Common tropes and themes in Japan’s tenkō literature George T. Sipos

101

  7 ‘Doublethink’ in production literature theory Wada Takashi Translated by George T. Sipos

120

  8 The problem of literary truth: the tenkō of Nakano Shigeharu and Hayashi Fusao Naitō Yoshitada Translated by Toby Walters and Irena Hayter

137

  9 The disjointed narratives and fractured subjects of Takami Jun Irena Hayter

149

10 Crossing the void: Shimaki Kensaku’s search for meaning in ‘Leprosy’ and ‘Blindness’ Jeff E. Long

171

11 The tenkō of anarchist poets: agrarian and cinematic latencies185 Murata Hirokazu Translated by Irena Hayter and Toby Walters 12 A proletarian writer in the showcase window: the shifting representation of ‘the masses’ in Sata Ineko’s Kurenai198 Lee Juhee 13 Mythic reality, battlefield survival and psychosocial conversion in Yoshida Mitsuru’s The End of Battleship Yamato223 David Stahl Index241

ILLUSTRATIONS

Figures 2.1 Peace Preservation Law: number of arrests 29 2.2 Ideological crimes control process (1925–1945) 30 2.3 Tenkō in the Asahi and the Yomiuri: comparing non-ideological and ideological connotations 35 2.4 Sano and Nabeyama–related articles in the Asahi and Yomiuri newspapers38 12.1 ‘The couple are going their separate ways’: the article, published in Tokyo Nichinichi shinbun on September 1, 1935, which announced the dissolution of Sata and Kubokawa’s marriage 200 12.2 An advertisement for cosmetics on the pages of Crimson’s first episode in Fujin kōron204 12.3 An advertisement for a correspondence school for nurses on the pages of Crimson’s second episode in Fujin kōron205 12.4 An advertisement for a double eyelid machine on the pages of Crimson’s final episode in Fujin kōron206 12.5 Dairibu’s mail-order section in the January 1936 issue of Fujin kōron, in which Crimson first appeared 210 12.6 Akiko’s haircut scene, illustrated by Yoshimura Jirō, which appeared in the fourth installment in the April 1936 issue of Fujin kōron212

x  Illustrations

12.7 A photo essay, published in the March 1938 issue of Fujin kōron, in which Sata depicted working women enjoying their break time in various workplaces, from a public tobacco corporation to a textile factory and a hospital, and to Tokyo municipal bus company (Kubokawa 1938a). Interestingly, as seen on the left side of the double page spread, an advertisement for ‘Hechima cologne’, which features an image of two women smiling brightly, is placed seamlesly within the article, just next to the page that features telephone operators singing ‘Aikoku kōshinkyoku’ (March of Patriots) together during their break time

215

Tables 2.1 Overview of the Japanese Communist Party’s interwar evolution (1922–1936)27

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Editing a publication of this kind inevitably incurs a series of debts, and, as the editors of this volume, we are grateful for this opportunity to acknowledge our thanks to the following, without whom neither the 2017 tenkō workshop nor this volume would have been possible. This volume includes a number of the papers that were presented at the workshop that we organized on this topic at the University of Leeds in the summer of 2017. In order to invite the various participants to this event, we were indebted to the generous support we received, first from the School of Languages, Cultures and Societies (LCS) at the University. In addition to a small conference grant, the School also generously offered funding to pay for initial translations of the chapters by Naitō and Murata. More significantly, however, the School provided us with invaluable logistical support, most notably from the Research Support team. In this regard, we are also most grateful to James Garza, a PhD student in the School who devoted considerable time and effort to ensuring the smooth running of the event. At the same time, however, we acknowledge the generosity of a number of external foundations, including the Daiwa Anglo-Japanese Foundation, the Japan Foundation Endowment Committee, the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science, the GB Sasakawa Foundation and the Toshiba International Foundation. It was thanks to their backing that we were able to bring together the fifteen or so international participants for that memorable weekend in ‘sunny Leeds’. In preparing this volume for publication, it has been a pleasure to work with our editors at Routledge. Special thanks here are due to Emily Pickthall, Alexandra de Brauw and Sarahjayne Smith. And we appreciate that none of this would have come to fruition without the support that they and we have always received from their management team, headed up by Stephanie Rogers.

xii  Acknowledgements

Finally, our thanks must go to our long-suffering families who patiently endured those long interludes when we were ‘too busy working’. Special mention in this regard must go to our partners, Jason Hayter, Jessica Sipos and Ikuko Williams. Finally, in keeping with convention, we have kept to Japanese and Korean word order conventions for all names (i.e. family name first). Irena Hayter, George T. Sipos and Mark Williams

CONTRIBUTOR BIOGRAPHIES

Brice Fauconnier holds a PhD in Japanese modern intellectual history from Kyoto University and a doctorate in Japanese modern and contemporary history from INALCO University (Paris). He is currently an independent researcher. His field of studies addresses the definition of tenkō from the late nineteenth century to the late 1960s, including the reception of socialist and Marxist concepts, the stance of liberals vis-à-vis the War and new shifts in the postwar era. His publications include ‘The Red Purges’, in Japan’s Postwar and ‘The Continuity of the “Liberal” Elite in Japan from Pre- to Postwar: The Critics of Takeuchi Yoshimi and Tsurumi Shunsuke’, in Histoire du Japon et histoire au Japon (1853–2012) (in French). Irena Hayter is Associate Professor of Japanese Studies at the University of Leeds. Her research brings together domains normally kept apart: literature, visual studies, consumer culture. The overarching concern is with the perceptual changes of the interwar years in Japan and their urban and technological contexts. Articles in positions: asia critique, Japanese Language and Literature and Japan Forum, amongst others, have explored the effects of these changes not only on cultural practices but also on the politico-ideological domain. Her current monograph project is a mediahistorical investigation of urban spectacle, technologies of image commodification and literary modernism in interwar Japan. Hong Jong-wook is Associate Professor at the Institute of Humanities at Seoul National University. He was born in 1970, graduated from Seoul National University and received his PhD from the University of Tokyo. He is interested in the ideas and practices of twentieth-century Korean leftist intellectuals. His recent publications include Senjiki Chōsen no tenkōshatachi: Teikoku shokuminchi no tōgō to kiretsu (Korean Converts in Wartime Korea: Integration and Cracks in the Japanese Colonial Empire) and ‘Ban Sikminji Yeoksahak eseo Ban Yeoksahak euro: Dong

xiv  Contributor biographies

Asia eui Jeonhu Yeoksahak gwa Bukhan eui Yeoksa Seosul’ (From Anti-colonialism Historiography to Anti-historiography: Postwar Historiography in East Asia and Historiography of North Korea). Lee Juhee is an independent scholar. Having finished the doctoral course at University of Tsukuba in 2020, she is currently working on her Ph.D. dissertation on tenkō literature, focusing on works written in the form of the ‘I-novel’ genre. Jeff E. Long is Professor of History at Bloomsburg University of Pennsylvania, and his research focuses on the role of tenkō in the writings of Hayashi Fusao and Shimaki Kensaku. Recent publications include Stories from the Samurai Fringe: Hayashi Fusao’s Proletarian Short Stories and the Turn to Ultranationalism in Early Shōwa Japan (2018) and a translation of Hayashi Fusao’s short story ‘Ringo’ (Apples), in  For Dignity, Justice, and Revolution: An Anthology of Japanese Proletarian Literature (2016). Murata Hirokazu is Associate Professor of Modern Japanese Literature at Hokkaido University of Education in Asahikawa. His publications include ‘Kindai shisōsha to Taisho-ki nashonarizumu no jidai’ (The Modern Thought Association and Nationalism in the Taisho Era, 2011), ‘Ichi no heiwa: Dazai Osamu “Hashire Merosu” ni okeru “fusai” to “shinyō” ’ (Peace of the Market: Debt and Credit in Osamu Dazai’s ‘Run Melos’, 2018), and Shigemi Nakagawa and Hirokazu Murata (eds.), Kakumei geijutsu puroretaria bunka undō (The Revolutionary Arts and Proletarian Cultural Movement, 2019). Viren Murthy teaches transnational Asian History at the University of Wisconsin–Madison and researches Chinese and Japanese intellectual history. He is the author of The Political Philosophy of Zhang Taiyan: The Resistance of Consciousness (2011) and co-editor with Axel Schneider of The Challenge of Linear Time: Nationhood and the Politics of History in East Asia (2013), co-editor with Prasenjit Duara and Andrew Sartori of A Companion to Global Historical Thought (2014), co-editor with Joyce Liu of East Asian Marxisms and Their Trajectories (2017) and co-editor with Max Ward and Fabian Schäfer of Confronting Capital and Empire: Rethinking Kyoto School Philosophy (2017). He has published articles in Modern Intellectual History, Modern China, Frontiers of History in China and positions: asia critique, Jewish Social Studies, Critical Historical Studies, and Journal of Labor and Society and is currently working on a project tentatively entitled Pan-Asianism and the Legacy of the Chinese Revolution. Naitō Yoshitada is Professor of the College of Letters at Ritsumeikan University, Kyoto. His research and publications focus on modern Japanese literature, particularly wartime and postwar fiction and criticism. His books and papers include The Strategy of National Literature (Kokumin Bungaku): Reason and Its Impasses in the Criticism of the Proletarian Literature Movement (2014), ‘The Heart of the Debate on Natsume Sōseki’s Kokoro: The Other Side of the Issue of the “Author” ’ (What Is

Contributor biographies  xv

the Writer/Author: Text, Classroom, Subculture, 2015), and ‘Abe Kōbō’s “Intruder” in the Globalization Era’ (Fenceless, 2016). Nakagawa Shigemi is Emeritus Professor of Japanese Literature at Ritsumeikan University in Kyoto, Japan. He has also taught as a visiting professor at universities around the world, such as Stanford, Paris-Diderot and Ho Chi Minh National University. His current research focuses on modern Japanese literature and culture, comparative literature, gender studies, affect theory, theories of world literature and postcolonial theory. Nakagawa has authored and edited several volumes on Japanese literature and culture, his most recent publications being Sensō o yomu: Nanajūsatsu no shōsetsu annai (Reading the War: A Guide to Seventy Novels, 2017); Modaniti no sōzōryoku: Bungaku to shikakusei (The Imagination of Modernity: Literature and Visuality, 2009), and the co-edited volume Kakumei geijutsu puroretaria bunka undō (The Revolutionary Arts and Proletarian Cultural Movement, 2019). George T. Sipos is Associate Professor at the West University of Timisoara, in Romania, where he teaches Japanese literature, language and culture. His research focuses on modern and contemporary Japanese society and literature from a transcultural perspective, in particular on comparative perspectives on Japan’s modernity, modern nation state, activism and resistance against state oppression. His recent publications include ‘Journeys of Political Self-Discovery: The Writings of Miyamoto Yuriko and Panait Istrati from Late 1920s Soviet Russia’ (Human and Social Studies, 2018), and book chapters on the works of Mishima Yukio (in Mishima Monogatari: Un samurai delle arti, 2020), Kawabata Yasunari and Akutagawa Ryūnosuke (in Critical Insights: Modern Japanese Literature, 2017). He has published four books of translations from the works of Mishima, Kawabata and Akutagawa into Romanian and is working on an anthology of Dazai Osamu’s prose. He is currently preparing his first single-authored book on Japan’s tenkō and tenkō literature, due to be published in 2021 by Routledge. David Stahl is Professor of Japanese Literature and Cinema at Binghamton University (State University of New York). His major publications include The Burdens of Survival: Ōoka Shōhei’s Writings on the Pacific War (2003), Imag(in)ing the War in Japan: Representing and Responding to Trauma in Postwar Literature and Film (2010, co-edited with Mark Williams), Trauma, Dissociation and Reenactment in Japanese Literature and Film (2018) and Social Trauma, Narrative Memory and Recovery in Japanese Literature and Film (2019). Wada Takashi (PhD) is Associate Professor at Mie University, Japan. His publications include ‘Proletarian Cultural Movement in the Regions: Focusing on Kansai’ (in The Revolutionary Arts and Proletarian Cultural Movement, Shinwasha, 2019); ‘Behind the Theory of the Pure Novel: A Study of Synchronicity with the Theory of Fact-Based Literature’ (in Yokomitsu Riichi Studies, Vol. 16, 2018); and Die Strasse

xvi  Contributor biographies

ohne Sonne, a German Translation of Tokunaga Sunao’s Taiyō no nai machi (in Modern Japanese Literary Studies, vol. 100, 2013). Max Ward is Associate Professor of Japanese History at Middlebury College, author of Thought Crime: Ideology and State Power in Interwar Japan (2019) and coeditor of Confronting Capital and Empire: Rethinking Kyoto School Philosophy (2017). He is currently working on a second book project tentatively entitled Police Power in Modern Japan. Mark Williams is Vice President for International Academic Exchange at International Christian University in Tokyo, Japan. Until 2017, he was Professor of Japanese Studies at the University of Leeds, UK. He received his PhD in Japanese literature from the University of California, Berkeley. He has published widely in both English and Japanese – on themes such as Christianity and Japan, the literature of Endō Shūsaku and literary representations of the Asia Pacific War.

FOREWORD

One of the most important but at the same time most complex and puzzling phenomena in the understanding of the politics of Japan in the 1920s and 1930s (and also in the postwar period) is tenkō, translated variously as ‘conversion’ or ‘changing course’, though the meaning itself of the term is controversial. In 1922, some five years after the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia, the Japan Communist Party (JCP) was formed, in the first of its iterations. The new party was wholly illegal according to the judicial code of the time, and its history up to 1945 was one of persistent harassment by the authorities and arrest of its known members. Even though the history of the party after its foundation was not entirely continuous, we may say that the present JCP – a minor but significant legal political party at the present time – is the party having the longest history in Japan. A major round-up and imprisonment of known Communists took place around 1928, leaving the JCP eviscerated. Five years later, in 1933 two prominent Communists (both former labourers), Sano Manabu and Nabeyama Sadachika, issued a joint statement from prison renouncing their Marxist beliefs and declaring their adherence to the emperor system and to the ‘special spiritual identity’ of the Japanese people. These two became vocal and to an extent influential anti-Communist propagandists after the Japanese defeat in 1945. Curiously enough, however, even though in popular discourse the Sano–Nabeyama declaration is widely regarded as the key event in the history of tenkō, they did not use the term in their statement. It was, however, extensively used in subsequent commentary issued by government security authorities. In other words, there were two sides to the tenkō phenomenon: the renunciation of belief by Communists and the carefully organized efforts by the authorities to cultivate conversion through intensive ‘thought control’ techniques. There was significant continuity between techniques used by security authorities in the 1930s to ‘assist’ former Communists with their process of conversion and similar efforts in the later stages of the Allied Occupation (1945–52)

xviii  Foreword

during the ‘Red Purge’. Not only were the techniques similar, but there was also a clear continuity of personnel. There has been much argument among historians between those emphasizing the ‘autonomous’ conversion of former Communists and those placing greater weight on the efforts of the security authorities to influence and lead the process. In truth, both were involved in roughly similar measures. It may not be too much of a stretch to compare these events in Japan in the 1930s and 1940s with the coercive ‘re-education’ of Uighurs in Xinjiang province of China in the 2010s and 2020s. In both, the central aim of the security authorities was to effect psychological conversion away from alien ideologies (Communism, Islam) towards fervent acceptance of a totalitarian state ethos. The Uighurs are, of course, of a different ethnicity and religious background from the Han Chinese, whereas in the Japanese case there was no ethnic or fundamental religious discrepancy between those who converted and other Japanese. The present contributed work examines the slippery concept of tenkō with analytical sophistication and profound knowledge of relevant sources. The authors examine with great care and from different angles the various meanings that have been given to the concept, its complex history both before and after the War and how far social and cultural factors have influenced the tendency of certain numbers of Japanese people to convert from one set of beliefs to another. The book also reveals in detail and depth the capacities of the Japanese state to engage in thought control. This book is a fascinating addition to the Nissan Institute/Routledge Japanese Studies series, which is now well past its 100th volume. Arthur Stockwin Roger Goodman

INTRODUCTION TENKŌ – MODERNITY, EMPIRE, JAPAN Irena Hayter and Mark Williams

The Sano–Nabeyama statement On 10 June  1933, two senior figures in the Japanese Community Party, Sano Manabu (1892–1953) and Nabeyama Sadachika (1901–79), both imprisoned since 1929, published a surprise declaration of political conversion (tenkō) that was widely reported in the national press, including major newspapers such as the Asahi, Yomiuri and Mainichi. In their statement, Sano and Nabeyama denounced the Comintern as an instrument for the advancement of Soviet Russia’s interests in Japan and worldwide. The two party leaders argued that the Marxist concept of class conflict was ill suited to Japan where ‘the firmness of national unity is a prime characteristic of society’. They also defended the emperor system and insisted that Japan’s war against China’s ‘nationalist clique’ had historical meaning for the entire world. In so doing, they effectively expressed their support for imperial expansion (Sano & Nabeyama 2005 [1933]: 943–4). They envisioned a War that would liberate the people of Asia from the clutches of Western capitalism and precipitate a socialist transformation. Sano and Nabeyama appealed to their comrades to renounce the Comintern and return to the Japanese masses, whose special vigour and devotion to the emperor would make them leaders in the future socialist state encompassing Manchuria and Korea.1 Both Sano and Nabeyama had experienced distinguished careers in the Communist Party. A graduate of the elite Tokyo Imperial University, Sano taught economics at the equally prestigious Waseda University. He attended the Fifth Congress of the Comintern and took part in the drafting of the 1924 Shanghai Theses. Nabeyama was a self-taught labourer who founded the Osaka branch of the JCP and, by 1928, was a member of the Comintern’s Central Committee (Hoston 1983: 97). Sano and Nabeyama’s ideological volte-face stunned members and sympathizers of the left. Thereafter, through complex mechanisms of surveillance, repression,

xx  Introduction: modernity, empire, Japan

punishment and rehabilitation, and a coordinated media strategy, it was skilfully used by the authorities to convince other incarcerated communists to renounce the party. The critic Takabatake Michitoshi has suggested that, within one month of the Sano–Nabeyama statement, a third of all detainees – and 36 per cent of all those convicted under the 1925 Peace Preservation Law – had issued similar declarations of tenkō. Amongst them were prominent members of the proletarian culture movement, such as Hayashi Fusao (1903–75), Nakano Shigeharu (1902–79) and Murayama Tomoyoshi (1901–77). The Sano–Nabeyama statement and the mass ideological conversions that followed should be understood within the particular politico-economic and cultural contexts of the early 1930s in Japan. Japan’s situation at the time had much in common with the crises rocking the rest of the industrialized world. The 1920s were plagued by financial instability and cycles of boom and bust that culminated in the Great Depression of 1929–30. Unemployment soared, deepening the scars of а dislocating modernity marked by stark unevenness between city and country, between small businesses and the big concerns, known as zaibatsu. For the countryside, the 1920s and the early 1930s turned into one long chronic recession because of the volatile domestic conditions and the worldwide surplus of agricultural commodities. Labour activism and tenant farmer disputes proliferated and, at a time of intense urbanization, rising literacy levels, an expanding middle-class and a burgeoning mass media, newspapers and intellectual journals devoted considerable space to Marxist-influenced social and cultural analysis. The actual communist movement and its party in Japan, however, did not represent a serious threat to the authorities, especially when compared to the situation in some European countries at the time. Nevertheless, the Peace Preservation Law, introduced in 1925 explicitly to suppress leftist movements, made crimes of ‘altering the kokutai (national polity)’ and ‘denying the system of private property’, both punishable with up to ten years imprisonment, possibly with hard labour (Hoston 1986: 281). It was revised in 1927, introducing death as the maximum punishment for such crimes. The repression of leftists under the Peace Preservation Law was wide-ranging and brutal. The first mass wave of arrests of Communist Party members and sympathizers occurred in 1928: Beckman cites some 3,426 arrests during that year alone. And numbers peaked at over 10,000 between 1931 and 1933 (Beckman 1971: 150). The year 1925 was also the year when universal male suffrage was introduced with the aim of diffusing social tensions. However, this did not significantly change the oligarchic politics enshrined in the Meiji Constitution: the unelected Upper House of the Diet and the circle of advisors around the emperor wielded the bulk of the power. While the voting population did increase from three to 14 million (out of a total population of 59 million), the military, men under 25 and, of course, women, were effectively excluded from conventional politics. The links between political parties and those they were supposed to represent were traditionally weak, but the depression further deepened the alienation of the masses from the arrangements of power. The social effects of the recession and especially the exhaustion of the countryside were seen as the destructive

Introduction: modernity, empire, Japan  xxi

effects of laissez-faire capitalism and interest politics. The radical right presented political parties as Western-style organizations that thrived on antagonisms alien to the Japanese spirit, obstructed the unification of the public with the emperor and corrupted the sacred bonds between ruler and subject through their political pragmatism and compromises. Waves of radical right terror and political assassinations brought an end to party government in 1932, giving way to rule by military leaders and bureaucrats. With the Manchurian Incident in 1931, the provocations of Japan’s Kwantung army succeeded in turning Japan’s military adventures on the continent into full-scale engagement. The liberal ‘cultural policy’ in Korea and in the other important Japanese colony of Taiwan from the 1920s was replaced with more pressure to prove loyalty and to prepare their economies and populations for support of Japan’s war in China. The Manchurian Incident unleashed nationalistic fervour in a way that similar agitation on the part of the army from 1928 had failed to arouse. Even for some liberal and leftist intellectuals, the incident heralded a new era. The concept of Manchukuo (the Japanese-established puppet state) became, in the words of Yasuda Yojūrō (1910–81), the most prominent figure of the Japan Romantic School, ‘a new philosophy’, ‘a revolutionary worldview’ (Yasuda 1986: 105–6).2 Manchuria stood for a space conceived outside Western domination, where a planned economy and a total integration of the state would resolve the social antagonisms of modernity; in short, it encapsulated the fascist idea of ‘capitalism without capitalism’, to borrow Slavoj Žižek’s phrase (Herscher 1997: 60). Extreme police repression contributed to the demise of the proletarian culture movement, which was troubled by factionalism and internal conflict: the arrests in 1932 directly targeted members of the Japan Proletarian Arts Federation (known by its Esperanto acronym NAPF). And the Proletarian Writers League (NALP) dissolved itself in February 1934. In this political climate, the concept of tenkō came to embrace more than the context of anti-communist state repression and the rehabilitation of so-called thought criminals (shisō-han). In its broadest interpretation, as seen in the paradigmatic figure of Hayashi Fusao (and other former Marxists such as Yasuda Yojūrō and Kamei Katsuichirō who would be major contributors to the 1941 debate on overcoming modernity), tenkō came to signify a cultural change of direction, not just the renunciation of Marxism.3 Because of its materialist conceptions of society and history and its spirit of rational inquiry, Marxism came to be seen as a metonymy for Western modernity. In the words of the postwar political theorist Maruyama Masao (1914–96), tenkō represented ‘an escape from the tensions of selfregulation imposed according to a theory (or formula) . . . an instantaneous return to a “natural” world of inclusivity, blending and conflation’ (Maruyama 1961: 15, translated in Dorsey 2004: 135). Tenkō meant abandoning the abstractions of Marxist theory (and the cold instrumentalism of Western knowledge in general) for native epistemological presence; it signified escaping an impoverished here and now for the plenitude of national myth. The converted subject was restored to a community supposedly untouched by alienation  – to embodied, sensuous Japaneseness. The regeneration of the self was connected to the rebirth of the nation.

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Because of this association with a ‘return to Japan’ (as the title of the seminal essay by the modernist poet Hagiwara Sakutarō (1886–1942) has it) and the swell of fascist longings for presence and immediacy that flowed into the destructive ideologies of wartime, tenkō looms large in postwar debates on war responsibility and casts a long shadow over Japan’s intellectual and literary histories. This Introduction will discuss the major theorizations of tenkō, their insights and blind spots, before mapping the common terrain in which the various contributions to this volume are situated – an understanding of tenkō as a response to a global crisis of modernity (as opposed to an ahistorical and uniquely Japanese experience), inseparable from the politics of empire and deeply marked by an age of mechanical reproduction, mediatization and manipulation of language. Finally, it will outline the arguments of each of the essays, stressing the points of connection in their preoccupations and approaches, and point to future directions.

Postwar interventions The early intellectual discourse on tenkō is complicated by the fact that in the postwar years, quite a few of the writers and political activists who had earlier converted declared their renewed commitment to communist ideas,4 thus rendering their prewar tenkō, in retrospect, purely formal. The category of ‘non-conversion’ (hi-tenkō), used before the War by the Ministry of Justice to designate those who did not renounce Marxism and were imprisoned, was adopted by these recidivists upon their release. It was also embraced by the postwar Communist Party as the political and ethical norm, ‘proof of unique and continuous forms of resistance to fascism’, as Brice Fauconnier stresses in the present volume. Through this rigid binary schema of submission and resistance, tenkō inevitably got enmeshed in the discussions of war responsibility that dominated leftist intellectual circles after the War. The literary critic Honda Shūgo (1908–81) was a dominant figure in these debates. In his seminal Tenkō bungaku-ron (Essay on tenkō Literature 1957), Honda worked with a broader understanding of tenkō that, apart from the communists’ renunciation of Marxism, included not only the rejection of foreign thought and the embrace of the emperor system but also a turn away from ideas of rationality and progress (Honda 1957: 216). In this, Honda adopts a taxonomic approach: very different writers and works are grouped together under the rubric of tenkō literature on the basis of the tenkō experience of the author. Another influential work that appeared in the following year is ‘Tenkō-ron’ (On tenkō 1958) by another major thinker and poet, Yoshimoto Takaaki (1924–2012). Yoshimoto views ideological conversion in abstract terms similar to those of Honda, but for him the experience of tenkō is one of psychic fracture brought on by the intellectuals’ alienation from the masses and their faith in the self-complete world of Marxist theory (Yoshimoto 2011, 1986 [1958]). For Yoshimoto, these intellectuals were ultimately defeated by their inability to overcome the contradictions between modern and feudal elements in Japanese reality – what Bloch (2018 [1935]: 97–118), in a similar context, would call ‘non-contemporaneity’.

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The magisterial, three-volume Kyōdō kenkyū: Tenkō (Collective Research: tenkō), compiled by the Institute of the Science of Thought under the direction of Tsurumi Shunsuke between 1959 and 1962, provided a powerful alternative to abstract totalizing theorizations of tenkō (Shisō no kagaku kenkyūkai 1959–62). Here, Tsurumi offered a definition that went beyond value-laden dichotomies to allow for a complex and contradictory dynamic of external force and agency, coercion and spontaneity. Tenkō, according to Tsurumi is ‘a transformation of thought under the coercion of state power’ (1959: 6). In contrast to previous work, the three volumes (on the prewar, wartime and postwar period, respectively) focused on lived experience, offering critical essays on writers, intellectuals and political figures, and is rich in biographical detail. As contemporary historian Tobe Hideaki has pointed out, the work of Tsurumi and his associates dismantled the opposition between tenkō and teikō, conversion and resistance. The inclusive approach provided much needed nuance and detail. The project had reparative, healing meanings, as highlighted by Tobe: the aim was to go beyond the schisms dividing the postwar left, and to reconstruct a unified Japanese subjectivity. It drew attention to the creative possibilities borne out of psychic and ideological fracture (Tobe 2006: 326). Considering these postwar debates, Tobe (ibid.: 324) and Mark (2014: 1181), amongst others, point out that they were absorbed into the larger analyses of Japan’s failed modernism and its feudal non-contemporaneities. This motif comes across very clearly in Yoshimoto’s schema of the intellectuals’ alienation from the masses, but it is also central to Maruyama’s thought. Maruyama touches on tenkō in his work on ultra-nationalism and the failure to establish a modern, autonomous subjectivity. In this developmentalist paradigm, Japan’s modernity is seen, either as belated and incomplete, compared to an idealized Western norm, or through the Orientalist lens of a never changing essence. For Fujita Shōzō (1927–2003), another political theorist who was a prominent contributor to the collective research on tenkō, modern Japan was not an imagined, secondary community, a Gemeinshaft, but a totality of undifferentiated affective unities, with no separation between the state and the natural world, individual and community, public loyalties and private emotions (Fujita 1959: 351). Many converts gave their reasons as love of family, of mother and father. The family, as Sumiya (1976: 753) has pointed out, becomes the psychic and ideological locus of tenkō. In such accounts, the family is held together, not by domination but by the affective bonds between the head and the family members, replicated in the relationship between ruler and subject, with the emperor at the centre of the family state. In tenkō narratives, the family is often not a castrating patriarchy but an (almost) matriarchal community bound together by empathy, outside the alienation of the symbolic order and the social contract of the modern state. In much postwar work (Yoshimoto, Tsurumi, Fujita, Maruyama), tenkō becomes another allegory of underdevelopment, associated with persistent figures of lack and absence. Tenkō, and by extension the problem of war responsibility, are attributed to an unchanging Japanese self and social structure, a reflex very close to the general essentialist paradigm of Nihonjinron (theories of Japaneseness). Bourdaghs (2003: 42)

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contrasts Yoshimoto’s condemnation of the intellectuals’ isolation from the masses as very ‘un-Japanese’ with Tsurumi’s sympathetic stance towards them: their inability to resolve these contradictions is, for Tsurumi, all too Japanese. Nevertheless, although inflected differently, in both thinkers, tenkō is conceived as irreducible particularism. Norma Field (2005: 3) has also observed that, in the classics of tenkō theory, both the absorption of leftist ideas and their subsequent mass rejection are presented as unique to Japan. In the present volume, Hong Jong-wook’s investigation of the tenkō of Korean intellectuals is accompanied by a critique of the discourses in postwar Japan, in which ‘[t]he rationalism and individualism of the West are contrasted to the paternalism and groupism of Japan and tenkō is identified as a malaise unique to Japanese society’. For Hong, a circular logic is at work here, one that confuses cause and effect, and a lack of historicity. Max Ward’s contribution to the present volume also highlights how in these discourses tenkō is always a pivot between oppositions: West/Japan, abstract theory/national belonging, feudalism/ modernity. Ironically, by casting the experience as distinctly Japanese, postwar tenkō discourses effectively reproduced the tropes of prewar culturalism. This continuity undermines the opposition between tenkō and resistance and the supposed rupture between the prewar and postwar. The debates also had a performative, binding role beyond their actual content: as Bourdaghs (2003: 39) has astutely pointed out, tenkō became ‘an important topos for the reproduction of the national imagination’; even intellectuals who resisted the state effectively ended up espousing forms of cultural nationalism that could be easily co-opted by the state. Despite their formal reproduction of logics whose content they were ostensibly negating, it can be argued that postwar discourses on tenkō elaborated possibilities that were already there from the very beginning, in the Sano–Nabeyama statement. Tenkō is indeed implicated in historical and conceptual divides central to the question of Japanese modernity. It is true that the concept exceeded its own frame of reference, harbouring a real danger of becoming more totemic than analytic. But its presence-absence, its hauntology, to use a term Fisher (2014) adapted from Derrida (1994), allowed the articulation – the symptomatic figuring – of problems that were perhaps otherwise unconscionable. This can explain positions such as that adopted by Tsurumi, summed up in his statement that ‘during the hundred years of modern history, the accumulation of tenkō experiences is the most important seam of resources’ (Tsurumi 1959: 3–4) or the more recent assessment by Tobe (2006: 308) that tenkō and resistance are ‘the great pillars’ of historical research about the wartime period. This centrality of tenkō in the intellectual terrain of postwar Japan contrasts sharply with its rather thin shadow in English language scholarship. The geopolitically driven approaches of area studies influential during the Cold War era were keen to reclaim the former enemy for liberal capitalism and democracy. In the teleologies of modernization theory, tenkō – and 1930s’ Japan in general – were just an aberration. Nevertheless, there have been notable contributions: monographs on individual writers, PhD dissertations, journal articles and book chapters. A list that is not aiming to be exhaustive would include Barshay (1988), Cullen (2010),

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Dorsey (2007), Field (2005), Hoston (1986, 1983), Karlsson (2012), Long (2007, 2000), Shigeto (2014, 2009), Silverberg (1992, 1990), Sipos (2013), and Tansman (2007). However, apart from Ward’s recent work on the evolution of the Peace Preservation Law (Ward 2019), the only book-length study of tenkō is Patricia Steinhoff’s Tenkō: Ideology and Societal Integration in Prewar Japan, which appeared in 1991 but actually represents a reproduction of her 1969 doctoral dissertation with minor edits. Steinhoff’s book did provide ‘a starting point for reframing questions central to the history of modern Japan’, as Silverberg (1992: 554) stressed in her review, but its functionalist sociological approach is very much of its time, the 1960s. Silverberg’s criticism – that Steinhoff’s book works with an idea of Japanese culture as monolithic and ahistorical and lacks a conception of conflict in Japanese society – is valid.

Tenkō in an age of fascism, empire and mass media The present volume originated in an international symposium held at the University of Leeds in June 2017 with scholars from the UK, Japan, Europe and the United States. Our interdisciplinary engagements expand the scope of inquiry of existing work, while remaining reflexive towards the major interventions that constitute transwar discourses on tenkō and opening up new ground. We hesitate to take established terms, positions and developments in intellectual and literary history as self-evident. We scrutinize conceptual devices and critical polarities. We pay close attention to material conditions and institutional structures, as well the politics of representation; to discursive absences, fault lines and displacements. In this way, the volume adds nuance and granularity to well known narratives of tenkō: Ward, for example, eschews well known intellectuals and other elite actors to focus on the writings of rank and file converts. Another factor serving to unite the different essays is also our situating of the tenkō phenomenon in historical and analytical frameworks different from those of previous studies. We work with a concept of ideology that does not denote simply a set of ideas or the classic Marxist ‘false consciousness’ whereby the masses were simply duped or brainwashed. The concept of ideology that emerges from the essays is closer to the Althusserian view of unconsciousness that is sustained by certain material and discursive practices which, as Ward stresses in the current volume, are ‘ritualized, institutionalized, transformed and disseminated over time’. We see tenkō not as a symptom of feudal belatedness, of the ‘longue durée’ of unchanging Japanese culture, to borrow Mark’s phrase (2018: 248), but rather of an excess of modernity. Japan’s situation in the 1920s and 1930s was a local inflection of the global crises of capitalism, liberalism and empire; the dynamics that gave rise to both Marxism and fascism in Japan were shared across much of the world. The present volume is aligned with work that has positioned Japanese modernity as coeval with that of Euro-America, inhabiting temporally the same global moment: Young (1998), Harootunian (2002), Silverberg (1990, 2006), Tansman (2009a, 2009b), Mark (2018). Both as a change of thought inspired by power and as a broader

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‘return to Japan’, tenkō is a modern response to the conflicts and contractions of Japan’s interwar modernity. Fascism is another of these responses, and the affective and ideological terrain of tenkō bleeds into that of fascism. The term itself was present from the beginning in media discourse: the subtitle of the Yomiuri splash on Sano and Nabeyama’s declaration was that they had discarded communism and converted to fascism (fassho ni tenkō). We are aware of the contentious history of the concept of fascism in the field of Japanese studies: a number of Japanese and Western scholars have rejected it because it is too vague and Eurocentric. The analyses of political science have tended to compile a list of features according to which Japan cannot be compared to Italy or Germany. More recent comparative research, however, has brought to the fore connections between fascist intellectuals in Japan, Italy and Germany, similar social and economic policies, as well as shared cultural milieux (Young 2017; Hofmann 2015; Mimura 2011). The focus on economic and political structures has given way to a new interest in the cultural sphere: culture, Tansman (2009a: 1) has argued, is where fascism gathers its ideological power. Work on intellectual history, literature and visual culture has also explored the affective support of fascist ideas and tropes (Harootunian 2002; Brandt 2007; Tansman 2009a, 2009b). Tosaka Jun and Nakano Shigeharu are paradigmatic examples of interwar Japanese intellectuals who knew that what was at stake with both fascism and tenkō was a politics of language and representation.5 Alert to the ideological baggage of seemingly innocuous clichés, such as those in the literature of the socalled industrial patriotism movement, Nakano scrutinized the use of language and pursued a scientific-like objectivity.6 With Hayashi Fusao and Hagiwara Sakutarō, language qua discursive mediation was abandoned for an affect-bound immediate authenticity, as Naitō Yoshitada and Murata Hirokazu argue in the present volume. Fascism in Japan, like its Euro-American incarnations, was an attempt to resolve the multiple crises of the 1930s in the ideological domain, and tenkō was an essential part of it. This relied on ideological work and discursive construction, not only on the part of the authorities but also by all those who embraced cultural nationalism in the 1930s, including prominent converts. Agrarianism (discussed by Murata in his contribution to the present collection) rejected the mediations of both bureaucratic hierarchies and the exchange principle in favour of an authentic relationship between ruler and subjects in an agrarian community. It exploited the ideological vulnerability of Japanese anarchism and its romanticization of the masses working the land. Harry Harootunian, in his groundbreaking Overcome by Modernity (2002), finds liberal thought aligned with more reactionary, fascist ideas such as agrarianism in their shared elevation of authentic culture and community. The definitions of the national community, of the Japanese body politic (kokutai) were assembled discursively or reworked at the time as a direct response to the threat of Marxism and international communism. As Tatiana Linkhoeva argues in her recent study, ‘various programs of liberal paternalism, spiritual mobilization, and cultural regeneration were worked out – ranging from liberal nationalist

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to conservative to fascist’ (Linkhoeva 2020: 123). Like Harootunian, Linkhoeva stresses that the Peace Preservation Law, whose origins lay in anxieties over the communist menace, evolved into the ‘thought conversion’ policy with the tacit approval of liberal commentators. To situate tenkō in the context of the crises of global modernity and empire is not something radically new; in a way, it takes tenkō back to its origins. In this regard, Tobe makes an important point about the Sano–Nabeyama statement: their position is not banal ethnocentric nationalism. While they affirm ‘socialism in one country’ (ikkoku shakaishugi), the country they envisage is a multi-ethnic East Asian state under the leadership of Japan (Tobe 2006: 312–13). The subject of tenkō for Tobe is the subject of empire. In the present volume, Hong elaborates this line of analysis: for Sano, Nabeyama and similar converts in both Japan and Korea, socialism was only possible within the colonial order. Another border-crossing discussion of tenkō by postwar intellectual and Sinologist Takeuchi Yoshimi (1910–77) and the potential of his thought in the context of global capitalist modernity, on the other hand, are the subjects of Viren Murthy’s contribution to this collection. The present volume also situates the tenkō phenomenon in an age of media and mechanical reproduction. Without the media and the publishing industry, as Fauconnier demonstrates so compellingly, tenkō would be limited to legal documents and the history of internal debates within Marxism. This media density, however, was preceded by a media furore around Marxism itself. Nakagawa and Hayter in this collection touch upon the popularity of Marxist theory and literature in the 1920s and early 1930s. According to Jay Rubin (1984: 247), the journals of the proletarian movement, Senki and Bungei sensen, had a combined circulation of around 50,000 in 1929–30, not a small number at the time. Keene (1976: 226) has estimated that almost half of the articles published in leading ‘bourgeois’ magazines and journals were written by intellectuals belonging to the movement. Proletarian works accounted for 29 per cent of the fiction published in the influential journals Kaizō and Chūō kōron in 1929–30 and 44 per cent in 1930–1931 (Kurihara 2004 [1971]: 97). This popularity was inseparable from the expansion of mass media and the boom in sales of cheap paperbacks in the years after the 1923 Tokyo earthquake. Both were implicated in what Marxist critics at the time called print capitalism. During the 1920s, newspapers and magazines experienced a period of exponential growth: the Asahi, the Mainichi and the Yomiuri became truly national newspapers. This was made possible by substantial investments in technological innovation on the part of the big printing companies: the introduction of Japanese language monotype in the 1920s, the adoption of high-speed rotary presses, the installation of telephotographic apparatus in the Asahi’s offices and Mainichi’s pioneering use of aeroplanes to transport flash news of the Taishō emperor’s death in 1922 are standout examples (Fujitake 1967: 773). While in 1928 there were 3,123 titles registered under the newspaper law, in 1932 their number had leapt to 11,118 (Young 1998: 59). The enpon boom of cheap paperbacks sold by subscription made literature much more accessible, but it also contributed to its commodification. In the massive

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advertising campaigns of the publishers, owning books was cast as a means of selfexpression in a glimpse of consumerist attitudes to come. The Marxist boom is inseparable from this commodification of literature. In the pioneering thirty-sevenvolume Gendai Nihon bungaku zenshū (Collected Works of Modern Japanese Literature), launched by the Kaizōsha publishing company in 1926, proletarian literature had its own dedicated volume, edited by Nakano Shigeharu. Works by leftist stars such as Kobayashi Takiji sold extremely well. Marxism did depend on mass publishing and its distribution mechanisms, an early example of how even the most radical critique of capitalism could be co-opted by it. There was an element of vogueishness about the Marxist boom, as Hayter notes in her chapter in this volume. Maeda Ai has perceptively observed that Kaizōsha’s advertising campaign, in its promises to bring culture to the masses, read like a parody of the so-called debate for the massification of literature (bungaku no taishūka) that was taking place within proletarian cultural circles at the time (2001: 296). Taishū, or the masses, is another totemic signifier from the late 1920s, its meanings and connotations changing according to the context and the political inflections of its usage. The term did articulate a new social imaginary – the emergence of the masses. For the intellectual left, the masses represented a new political constituency with a collective subjectivity, an agent for revolutionary change. The burgeoning mass culture industry used the term to conceptualize the diverse consumers of their products. Champions of taishū bungaku, more aptly translated as popular literature, such as the writers Shirai Kyōji (1889–1980) and Naoki Sanjūgo (1891–1934), the latter a self-professed and enthusiastic fascist, used it to appeal to readers outside the claustrophobic community of the bundan, the literary establishment (Gardner 2006: 26). The contributions by Murata and Lee in this volume analyse in depth the role that the ideas and fantasies of the masses played in the tenkō of the anarchist poet Hagiwara Kyōjirō (1899–1938) and the Marxist woman writer Sata Ineko (1904–98), respectively. The very absence of the masses from the anarchist movement  – a dispersed network of intellectuals – made possible their romanticization. Reduced to an abstraction, the image of the masses could rhetorically connect with figures of giants and human pillars, agrarianist tropes of the harmonious unity between emperor and people. Murata connects these integrative figures to the paradigm of shared images that is cinematic experience. In cinema everybody sees the same images simultaneously; because the experience is shared, it is perceived as true. Lee, on the other hand, demonstrates how the strategy of the women’s magazine Fujin kōron to ‘make it for the masses’ led it to abandon its educational, socially liberal ethos to concentrate on articles on beauty, fashion, films and cooking, accompanied by advertisements for consumer goods. Lee traces the ambivalent position of Sata as a communist writer serializing an autobiographical I-novel cum roman à clef (shishōsetsu) in a commercial magazine and the rhetorical strategies Sata employed to displace these tensions.7 What becomes clear from the analyses of Murata and Lee is that, with both anarchists and proletarian writers, the idea of the masses that was originally strongly associated with class gradually connects with ethnicity and race and becomes identical with Japaneseness.

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The media’s manipulation of language, the slippages and absences around the very term ‘tenkō’ emerge as a theme in the essays by Ward and Fauconnier, which excavate the discursive and material conditions behind the Sano–Nabeyama statement. Ward stresses that in the statement – conventionally understood as initiating the phenomenon and as the semantic origin of the concept  – the term tenkō is curiously absent. (It is present, however, in the headlines of the Yomiuri splash, as previously noted). Fauconnier uncovers the reasons behind the choice of Sano and Nabeyama, the participation of the judiciary in the drafting of the document, the ‘leak’ to the media and the authorities’ choice of timing. Through the media and the publishing industry, tenkō became part of the spectacle of mass culture. The invention and dissemination of tenkō can serve as another illustration of Mark’s assessment that ‘mass media actively support[ed] and work[ed] in tandem with the increasingly interventionist state and the military, riding the imperialist/military wave for commercial as well as ideological reasons’ (Mark 2018: 247). The analyses of Fauconnier, Murata and Lee highlight different aspects of the fascist stylization of the ideologico-political domain through the technologies of mass cultural production.

Part I: conceptual excursions In Part I of the present volume, Ward and Fauconnier take issue with the invention and dissemination of the tenkō concept, bringing to light blind spots that have been obscured by postwar discourses. The two other essays in this part, those by Hong and Murthy, are border-crossing interventions that critique the insularity of existing theories and explore their limitations (in relation to the tenkō of the intellectuals in colonial Korea), as well as the possibilities they offer for rethinking cultural and ideological change, as in Takeuchi Yoshimi’s ideas of tenkō. In a wide-ranging consideration of the concept, Ward reviews the various ways that tenkō has been studied and addresses the challenges of constructing a conceptual history of tenkō that takes into account the diversity of meanings, practices and political positions the term has come to signify during the interwar and postwar periods. Ward proposes the notion of historical catachresis as a framework which takes account of the semantic ambiguity of tenkō, while also exploring tenkō’s ubiquity and centrality in a number of important events, debates and projects across the prewar and postwar periods. For his part, Fauconnier brings in a wealth of source materials and innovative quantitative methods to investigate a largely overlooked issue: the political, judicial and media conditions under which the theme of tenkō emerged. Fauconnier’s analysis distinguishes three prewar stages through which tenkō became a prominent subject in Japan, both socially and intellectually: (1) the Marxists’ internal debate phase (1922–35): the epistemological shift brought on by Fukumoto’s critique of Japanese Marxists, their lack of theoretical sophistication and their misreading of Marx (especially in terms of Marx’s analysis of the nature of labour), and Fukumoto’s insistence on the need for ‘theoretical struggle’ before any revolutionary

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action; (2) the thought control phase (1925–45), which offers an in-depth analysis of Marxist discourse focused on the individual statements offered by ‘reds’ in custody; and (3) the media coverage phase, which peaked in 1933, whereby tenkō was portrayed as a personal fault, a deviance or a threat to the community. These overlapping stages represent for Fauconnier the sine qua non material conditions for postwar Japanese and English language studies on tenkō. Without any one of these three stages, tenkō would not have been such an important issue from the late 1950s to the late 1970s, and would probably not have received so much critical attention. Murthy’s contribution demonstrates how the abstraction of tenkō from its original contexts and its expansion beyond its immediate frames of reference can be hugely productive. The use of the concept by Takeuchi Yoshimi allows us to think transnationally about the phenomenon of political or ideological change. Takeuchi’s work enables us to probe the enabling conditions and nature of such conversions, not just in relation to Japan but globally. Takeuchi supported Japan’s involvement in the War and his writings on tenkō during the postwar era attempted to make sense of Japan’s wartime experience from a global perspective. In Takeuchi’s thought, tenkō comes to represent the general superficiality of Japanese consciousness, which he opposes to the Chinese concept of kaishin, a Buddhist term that could similarly be translated as conversion but which also implies holding fast to oneself. In Takeuchi’s view, tenkō implies the absence of resistance or desire to be true to oneself. Murthy’s essay attempts to lay the groundwork for understanding this idea, which involves grasping Takeuchi’s understanding of Lu Xun, resistance and modernity. At the same time, Murthy argues that, by redefining tenkō as not only a personal state of mind but also a broader mode of consciousness or subjectivity, Takeuchi points to continuities between pre and postwar Japan, thus connecting tenkō to a larger problem in capitalist modernity. More specifically, the problem of tenkō points to the loss of autonomy in the modern world, and kaishin emerges as a difficult resistance to this loss. Hong’s essay deconstructs what he terms ‘the methodological and formal universality’ of postwar Japanese tenkō theory, thereby revealing its ethnocentric slant. In so doing, he contrasts the search for agency in postwar Japan with the attempts at the formation of such agency that, in Korea, can be found in the tenkō experience itself – in ‘[the] entanglement of resistance and collaboration’. While recognizing that the theory of total war, as outlined in Yamanouchi (1995), opened up new horizons for interpreting tenkō, Hong argues that insufficient attention has been paid to the phenomenon in Japan’s colonies. If class reconciliation at the heart of the empire was necessary in order to construct the system of total war, then ethnic cooperation was required throughout the colonial empire. Amongst mainland Japanese socialists, the majority of ideological conversions occurred in 1933, but at that stage there was still only a limited number of defectors in colonial Korea. Koreans may have been willing and able to renounce their ideologies, but the wall of ethnicity remained impregnable. The greater number of Korean converts appeared at the time of the Second Sino-Japanese War in 1937, largely because the ideology of East Asian cooperation gave them hope for a solution to the issue of ethnicity. The

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Asian socialists had long fought the problems of ethnicity and colonization, and their decision to commit tenkō stood Asian socialism on its head. This phenomenon lay at the crossroads between the logic of resistance of the occupied race and the machinery of governance of the colonial empire.

Part II: literary possibilities Part II interrogates literary texts, including but not limited to those traditionally classed as ‘tenkō literature’ (tenkō bungaku). As a critical category, tenkō literature was constituted contemporaneously with the publication of the first tenkō narratives in seminal essays by critics such as Itagaki Naoko, Sugiyama Heisuke and Nakamura Mitsuo which appeared in 1934–35.8 These are invariably critical and stake out a high moral ground. Nakamura’s essay in particular takes issue with the proliferation of tenkō narratives in commercial print media so shockingly soon after the demise of proletarian literature. Nakamura did not hide his disappointment with these writers because they wrote in the mode of the shishōsetsu which they had attacked so forcefully not long before: dominated by one interiority, that of the narrator-protagonist, the shishōsetsu stood for bourgeois individualism, disavowed politics and provided ideological support for the status quo. These debates and confrontations are traced in detail in George T. Sipos’s essay in the present volume. It is important to stress that, in these critical writings, as well as in Honda’s postwar study, tenkō literature is treated as a distinctive category. The same heterogeneous body of texts has, however, also been defined as a particular mode of reading. As Andō (1994: 114) has pointed out, the content of the literary work and the political statements and actions of a writer are often confused in an unmediated way. The established protocols of reading use the literary text as evidence, regardless of whether the writer abandoned communism or resisted. Field (2005: 4) has also argued against ‘tenkō literature’ as a category: for her, these narratives are still proletarian literature, freely expressing anxieties and tensions that could not be easily discussed during the heyday of the movement. The present volume builds on existing work in its scrutiny of key critical and literary texts. It maps a broader literary and discursive terrain that is not so divided by categories and classifications. It opens up both taxonomic and temporal boundaries, bringing together authors and texts that are conventionally assigned to different schools and movements. The collection includes Nakagawa’s essay on proletarian texts written before 1933 and David Stahl’s analysis of a novel published in 1987. Apart from representative tenkō writers such as Hayashi Fusao, Shimaki Kensaku and Nakano Shigeharu, there are essays on the more experimental Takami Jun, on anarchist poets and sympathizers (Hagiwara Kyōjirō, Okamoto Jun, Hagiwara Sakutarō), and on the so-called ‘production literature’ (seisan bungaku) and ‘national policy’ literature (kokusaku bungaku). The aim is to dislodge texts from literary histories and reread them within fresh analytical frameworks. As Jeff E. Long writes in the present volume, ‘Tenkō, tenkō literature, and tenkō writer are terms that

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seemingly indicate a related phenomenon; yet when they are subjected to scrutiny, they yield a multiplicity of possibilities’. In all this, we pay close attention to the discursive workings of the texts because it is actually through language and narrative that tenkō exists. We explore articulations of subjectivity and psychic temporality, spontaneity and coercion. As previously discussed with regard to Hayashi Fusao and Nakano Shigeharu and their different visions of language and truth, we pursue the ideological effects of language qua discursive mediation and language as subordinated to affect. The emphasis is on the rhetorical micropolitics of the texts: the ways in which their structures and investments intersect with operations of power and practices of resistance. To this end, Nakagawa focuses on Wolfgang Iser’s concept of ‘imbalance between text and reader’, applying it to the works of a writer usually associated with the proletarian literary movement, Hayama Yoshiki. Exploring the role of affect in proletarian literary works, Nakagawa cross-references Iser’s narratological approach with Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s theorizations of affect in his readings of seminal works by Hayama, such as Semento-daru no naka no tegami (Letter Found in a Cement Barrel 1926) and Inbaifu (The Prostitute 1925), as well as stories by female proletarian writers such as Hirabayashi Taiko (1905–72), Matsuda Tokiko (1905–2004), and the almost unknown Satō Sachiko. Nakagawa traces the connections between the corporeal and the linguistic that proletarian writers pursued and the frequent preoccupation of female proletarian writers with experiences of pregnancy and childbirth. Their focus on corporeal sensations and sometimes ambivalent feelings marks a departure from the state’s official beautification of motherhood. Although proletarian literature ended up reduced to a binary confrontational mechanism between literature and politics, Nakagawa argues that its radical meanings are found in this sustained focus on the dissonance between society and the human body. In his chapter, George T. Sipos validates and re-examines the category of tenkō literature as distinct and separate from that of proletarian literature and identifies its underlying themes and tropes. He attempts a definition and classification of the literary works typically associated with tenkō on the basis of the writers’ political experience and the subjects of their narratives. While it is customary for tenkō works to be classified according to whether the authors had truly committed an ideological conversion or had done so purely performatively in order to be released from prison, Sipos takes a different approach. Switching the focus from the authors to the content and style of the literary works themselves, he identifies two major groups: one dealing with the topic of family and the other utilizing the literary conventions of the shishōsetsu. He then focuses his attention on critical analyses of both groups. Another literary-historical category, that of ‘production literature’, is re-­ examined by Wada. He explores the critical discourses around the concept and traces its transnational roots. While production literature is generally subsumed under the rubric of national policy literature, most writers of production literature were former proletarian writers, and the theory underpinning it was formulated

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by those with Marxist sympathies. Minami Toshio, the earliest proponent of the concept of production literature, insisted on changing the focus of proletarian literature  – whose tenets were articulated under the leadership of intellectuals  – towards works in which workers themselves took the initiative and depicted scenes of production. Despite the Marxist origins of the concept of production literature, however, most writers associated with it supported the wartime regime. Its proponents imagined themselves as an opposition because they focused on production imagery; in fact, however, they were part of the system and its ideology. As Wada contends, their self-deception was similar to the ‘doublethink’ described by George Orwell in 1984, the simultaneous support of mutually exclusive ideas and the disavowal of the contradiction. In his contribution, Naitō compares the tenkō of Hayashi Fusao and Nakano Shigeharu and illuminates the differences in their ideas of literature and literary truth. Both were active in Marxist political and literary movements from their schooldays; both were arrested multiple times from the late 1920s to the 1930s, and both eventually converted. However, in the process of their tenkō, Nakano and Hayashi embraced completely different ideas, despite deploying the same concept of makoto (truth). Hayashi used the term makoto as synonymous with literary truth, but his writing resonated with the dominant ideology of the time, whereas Nakano used it to describe his attitude as a writer determined to excavate an objective, scientifically verifiable truth from what he called ‘ready-made’ language: clichéd phrases whose meanings are taken as self-evident but which are in fact steeped in ideology. Hayashi, on the other hand, rejected abstract rationality and imported Marxist ideas, privileging ‘faith in, and devotion towards, the national polity (kokutai)’ (Hayashi 1941: 22) over ‘theory’. Perhaps the most compelling example of a successful tenkō process, the figure of writer Hayashi Fusao, encapsulates the trope of the rebirth of the self as imperial subject. It is against such figures that Irena Hayter reads Takami Jun’s novel Kokyū wasureubeki (Should Auld Acquaintance Be Forgot 1935), a work described in Honda’s seminal study as one of the peaks of tenkō literature. Unlike most tenkō narratives, which represent the author’s experiences in the thinly disguised autobiographical form of the shishōsetsu, Takami’s work features multiple points of view, distortions of linear temporality and an eccentric narrator who openly manipulates the narrative and interferes with his characters. Rather than accept the organic, self-­evident unity between author and writing, Hayter’s reading pushes to the foreground other, less obvious and less naturalized convergences between the text and the larger material and discursive contexts around it. She argues that the formal inventions of the work are symptomatic of the aporias of tenkō and their effects on narrative, subjectivity and psychic temporality. Takami’s text articulates a perpetually fractured subjectivity: there is no attempt to overcome the crisis through a return to the communal body and a dissolution of the self into the imperial totality. Jeff E. Long’s essay also engages with issues of subjectivity and literary representation in the writings of Shimaki Kensaku (1903–45), arguably the most prominent writer of tenkō literature in the 1930s. Long stresses how Shimaki stands apart: not

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only did his tenkō come in 1929, four years before the term came into common use, but, unlike the majority of so-called tenkō writers who had some experience writing literature or of being active in the arts, he also wrote his first collection of short stories, Goku (Prison), in 1934, with virtually no previous experience of writing fiction before that time. Why did Shimaki become a writer and choose the genre of tenkō literature to fill the void left by his departure from the Marxist movement? Long analyses Shimaki’s first two short stories, ‘Rai’ (Leprosy) and ‘Mōmoku’ (Blindness), drawing on Bakhtinian theories of heteroglossia and double-voiced discourse in order to elucidate the interwoven nature of language and social activity in Shimaki’s initial tenkō writings. He asks how Shimaki used literature to explore the meanings of conviction as a way to build a bridge and thus to fill the internal void created by his renunciation of Marxism. Long considers how the shift from a shishōsetsu-style first-person narrative to an objective, third-person point-of-view narration shaped Shimaki’s attempts to examine what he was leaving behind and to move forward with his life. The anarchist poets Hagiwara Kyōjirō and Okamoto Jun (1901–1978), as well Hagiwara Sakutarō, an anarchist sympathizer, are the subjects of Murata’s contribution. In the late 1930s, all three wrote poems and essays that provided culturalideological support for the war with China. Murata questions the established view, most clearly articulated by Akiyama (1960), that for the anarchists too, tenkō was an ideological volte-face ‘in response to the situation’ and the waves of police repression. Murata argues that Hagiwara’s embrace of agrarianism and its visions of ‘unity of emperor and people’ was not a Marxist tenkō or a ‘false’, purely formal tenkō but that agrarianism was an outgrowth of Japanese anarchism. Following the decline of the anarchist movement, Hagiwara Kyōjirō immersed himself amongst the ordinary folk, but that was no return: he had always been within the agrarian community. Murata asserts provocatively that Kyōjirō’s first tenkō was the turn from agrarianism to anarchism; his second tenkō and support for the War were unselfconscious, not accompanied by the ideological and personal crises through which the Marxists had passed. After the collapse of the anarchist movement, Okamoto Jun, on the other hand, worked for Daiei film studios and wrote scripts for period films that romanticized anti-authoritarian outlaws. Murata traces certain images and motifs in his war cooperation poems to wartime newsreels and actualities, thus highlighting the potency of cinema as a medium for ideological indoctrination. Hagiwara Sakutarō, while not an anarchist, followed a similar trajectory, rejecting the complexity and artifice of modernity for authenticity and the national spirit. For Murata, the absence of the masses from the Japanese anarchist movement made possible their reduction to the ethnic nation. Lee’s paper finds similar displacements in Sata Ineko’s work. Unlike previous studies of Sata’s novel Kurenai (Crimson 1936) that largely revolve around feminist or shishōsetsu-type biographical readings, ignoring, as Lee argues, the material conditions of production of the text, Lee returns the novel to the commercialized media environment of the magazine where it was serialized. Lee analyzes the triangular relationship depicted in the novel as symbolic of Sata’s changing vision of

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the masses – from the proletarian masses to consumers of mass culture. She reads the novel as a metaphor of Sata’s tenkō and her transition from proletarian writer to professional commercial writer. Lee argues that, while conscious of capitalist mass media and its manipulation of the masses as consumers, Sata was deeply implicated in them, eventually embracing the media’s interpellation of the masses as national subjects who could be mobilized in the war effort. If, for intellectuals such as Hayashi Fusao, tenkō was an escape from the rigours of Marxist theory into the national myth and a rebirth of the self as an imperial subject, David Stahl shows how, during wartime, this myth was taken to its extreme, glorifying war and demanding sacrifice. The realization of the deathbound, destructive nature of imperial ideology in a way reverses the formal structures of tenkō. In a reading of Yoshida Mitsuru’s Senkan Yamato no saigo (The End of Battleship Yamato 1974), Stahl explores the potentialities of another form of turning and a different reconstruction of the self. He argues that, while tenkō in transwar Japan is usually understood as ideological conversion effected under duress, the lived experiences of battle produced equally momentous transformations of heart, mind and worldview. Stahl’s analysis of this novel traverses the vivid narrative memory of the psychological effects of indoctrination into imperial ideology. In Stahl’s argument, Yoshida’s recreation of his embodied experience of the failed Battle of Okinawa, interwoven with hard-won post-traumatic insights, warns us how mythic ideologies can insidiously lead to the inversion of life and death: the anthropomorphization of the war machine represented by the Battleship Yamato brings about a dehumanization of man and a willingness to embrace sacrificial annihilation in the abstract names of Emperor and country. The overwhelming sensory realities of war, defeat and naked survival combine to break the collective thraldom with death and prepare the way for the psychosocial and ethical rebirth of an autonomous individual capable of respecting and valuing life – and mortality – for its own sake.

Tenkō and gender The contributions of Nakagawa and Lee, focused as they are on Japanese women writers, expand on critiques of the role of gender in the proletarian culture movement; Lee also investigates the entanglements of gender and tenkō. Ever since the famous debate on politics and literature from 1946–48 between Nakano Shigeharu and the prominent literary critics Hirano Ken and Ara Masahito, in which Hirano harshly condemned the movement because of the gap between its revolutionary ideas and its blindness to the gender problem within its ranks, prewar Marxism has been criticized for its indifference to gender relations and even its complicity in exploitation (Koschmann 1996; Nakayama 1997; Satō 2000; Yoshinaga 2002). Hirano’s argument centred on the treatment of Kasahara, a female character in Kobayashi Takiji’s last work Tō-seikatsusha (Life of a Party Member 1933). Kusahara is the girlfriend of the protagonist Sasaki, the party worker from the title, but her reduction to a housekeeper and his demands that she support him financially

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betray for Hirano a callous affirmation of ends over means and a lack of humanity (Yoshinaga 2002: 39). Feminist critics, however, have taken Hirano himself to task, arguing that his treatment of Kusahara as a victim denies her and the other female characters in proletarian works subjectivity and ‘sociopolitical agency’ (ibid.: 41–2). Here it should be noted that questions of gender and tenkō, and their representations in literature have, however, remained relatively under-explored. Not only has tenkō been discussed as uniquely Japanese, as Norma Field has pointed out (2005: 3), it has been privileged as the experience of elite male intellectuals. Honda Shūgo, in his commentary to Takami Jun’s Should Auld Acquaintance Be Forgot, mentions that Takami’s wife left him for another man when he was still in prison, but according to Hirano, she was an exception. Most of the wives of the intellectuals who committed tenkō comforted and encouraged (itawari hagemashita) their traumatized husbands: their love was a source of cleansing and renewal (Honda 1970: 404). Honda’s remarks give us a glimpse of the gender politics not only of tenkō but also of postwar Marxist criticism. They support feminist critic Nakayama Kazuko’s conclusion that a very backward-looking understanding of ‘woman’ is deeply rooted in masculinist postwar criticism and not simply in the male-dominated structures of the allegedly ‘egalitarian’ organization of the Communist Party (Nakayama 1997: 130). Honda’s comments conjure up a schema in which an idealized but objectified woman (or a female body) becomes a vessel for male trauma, offering comfort and rebirth to a scarred masculinity, a trope which would unfold fully in the so-called ‘literature of the flesh’ (nikutai bungaku) of the postwar years.9 Some of the essays in this volume, such as those by Hayter and Long, work with the idea of tenkō as a crisis of subjectivity, but this understanding needs to be qualified: tenkō is a crisis of male subjectivity, of masculinity in general.10 Tenkō writings often describe the protagonists’ feelings of inadequacy: Honda gives as examples Shimaki’s ‘Leprosy’, ‘Ame no ashita’ (A Rainy Tomorrow 1934) by Fujimori Seikichi (1892–1977) and ‘Yūjō’ (Friendship 1934) by Tateno Nobuyuki (1903–71). Similarly, in Murayama Tomoyoshi’s Byakuya (Midnight Sun 1934), the protagonist suffers because he feels that neither as a fighter in the ideological struggle nor as a lover is he a match for the character who resisted and did not convert (Honda 1957: 200). For leftists, the crisis of political male subjectivity unleashed by tenkō came together with the crisis of wage-earning masculinity during the Great Depression and its aftermath. In this regard, Takami Jun’s Should Auld Acquaintance Be Forgot, analyzed by Hayter in the present volume, offers in one of its long digressions fascinating details about the Tokyo Mannequin Club. The club was one of the first fashion model agencies in Japan, set up in 1929 and owned and run by the models themselves. Its first manager, Komai Reiko (1908–42), was married to Asanuma Yoshimi (1906–65), a Tokyo University law student and member of the Shinjinkai (New Man Society), the radical student organization at the University. Asanuma was an active leftist who also wrote fiction and moved in literary circles. Between 1928 and 1932, Asanuma was constantly in and out of prison, and Reiko was the

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breadwinner. Several of the women in the mannequin club actually had husbands and partners who had been detained in the mass arrests in 1928 and 1932: some languished in prison, others were at home after signing a tenkō declaration, unable or unwilling to find work (Takami 1970: 91–4). The actress Hara Sen (1905–89), wife of Nakano Shigeharu, also did modelling to supplement their income and to be in a position to bring her husband better food and books in prison.11 The top fashion models earned 150–200 yen a month: it was the highest paid female occupation (Hayter forthcoming). At that time, even if a university graduate managed to find a job, he could expect to earn around 120–140 yen a month working for the state bureaucracy or a private company. The persistent portrayal of the fashion models in the media as living dolls – soulless and machinic – is a symbolic reaction to this overall crisis of masculinity.12 It is our hope that the current volume and especially the contributions of Lee and Ward (who discusses the memoirs of a female convert) will open up new lines of inquiry into the gendered political and psychic economies of tenkō and their representations.

The politics of affect It is perhaps too obvious, almost clichéd, to point out that tenkō is relevant to the present and its politics, both in Japan and globally. In the 1920s, the historian and Liberal politician James Bryce warned that ‘the chief practical use of history is to deliver us from plausible historical analogies’ (quoted in Müller 2019). And yet the contemporary moment does resemble the 1930s and the first global crisis of modernity. The 1930s were marked by the conflict between the nation state and the disembedding impulses of international capitalism, by the forces of financialization and mediatization, by nativist returns and attempts to overcome modernity. Sceptics would argue that this crisis was only provisionally resolved by World War II, the ensuing Cold War geopolitical structures and the establishment of the welfare state in the industrialized world. The contemporary moment harbours similar contradictions, including the stark global inequalities produced by decades of neo-liberal consensus and the resurgence of various populisms and nativisms, networked and feeding off one another. There is also the mistrust or outright rejection of scientific rationality as a reigning paradigm and worldview, propagated through cutting-edge technologies for mass manipulation. Tenkō, especially in the form attributed to it by Hayashi Fusao and similar figures, involves exchanging the abstractions of Marxist theory for the performativity of faith and devotion to the emperor. As Naitō points out in the present volume, in journalism such a reflex is now labelled as ‘post-truth’. The difference between Hayashi’s and Nakano’s conceptions of truth show us, however, that politics and truth never mixed, as Moin (2020) has stressed vis-à-vis the thought of Hannah Arendt. Tenkō, as this introduction has argued, was a response to a global crisis of modernity that was locally inflected and grounded in the political and ideological milieux of imperial Japan. The tension between abstract rationality and alienated knowledge, on the one hand, and affect, on the other, is one of the fundamental problems faced by the left globally, both in the

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1930s and in the present. This problem has been elegantly articulated by Terry Eagleton (1990: 34): Feeling, imagination, the priority of local affections and unarguable allegiances, a subliminally nurturing cultural tradition: these things, from Burke and Coleridge to Yeats and T.S. Eliot, are effectively confiscated by political reaction. The political left is then doubly disabled: if it seeks to evolve its own discourse of place, body, inheritance, sensuous need, it will find itself miming the cultural forms of its opponents; if it does not do so it will appear bereft of a body, marooned with a purely rationalist politics that has cut loose from the intimate affective depths of the poetic. There has been a lot of attention devoted to affect and emotion since the 1990s, in fields ranging from the neurosciences to political theory, literature and cultural studies. This is a heterogeneous body of work, enlivened by a diversity of approaches, some difficult to reconcile. Clough (2008: 1) has described this ‘affective turn’ in critical theory as a reorientation towards ‘[the] dynamism immanent to bodily matter and matter generally’, a corrective to the previously dominant paradigms of structuralism and post-structuralism, which saw politics and culture as discursive, as signifying practices. It is important to stress, however, that the first theorizations of affect and the political actually date back to the interwar years, to Gramsci and Freud, among others. Gramsci, for example, called for ‘an organic cohesion in which feeling-passion becomes understanding’ (quoted in Mouffe 2018: 58). Freud, on the other hand, stressed the crucial role of affective libidinal investments in the processes of collective identification; for him, as Mouffe (ibid.: 56) has argued, the social link is a libidinal link: ‘A group is clearly held together by a power of some kind: and to what power could this feat be better ascribed than to Eros, which holds together everything in the world?’ (Freud 2001: 92). Mouffe has warned about the strong libidinal bonds at work in national forms of identification and the dangers involved in abandoning this terrain to right-wing populism (2018: 55). Like the Japanese left in the 1930s, contemporary left and liberal thought is often limited by a rationalist framework. Freud’s theorizations of the subject as discontinuous to herself run against ideas of the subject as a rational, transparent entity fully in control of her conduct and its meaning. The present volume opens up new paths of inquiry with regard to the entanglements of discourse and affect within the ideological field of 1930s Japan. The approaches and the preoccupations of the separate essays differ, but there are points of connection and confluence. Even when not framed in these terms, the contributions by Hayter, Naitō and Nakagawa explore language and meaning (including intensities beyond rationality and beyond signification) and the role they play in the construction of political identifications. Rather than conceive language and affect in binary terms, the underlying position is close to what Stavrakakis has called ‘the constitutive interpenetration between representation and affect’ (2014: 127). Affect

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in language can be mobilized to appeal to different political orientations, as Nakagawa’s analysis of proletarian literary texts demonstrates. Affect, as a bodily response to the outside world that also repairs and compensates for the blank and empty spaces of the literary text, animates the conflict that is central to proletarian literature – between society (and the conditions of labour shaped by modern science and industry) and the body. In Nakagawa’s reading, it is this corporeal experience of the letter-within-a story that, in Hayama’s Letter from a Cement Barrel, precipitates a process of political identification. Tobe (2006: 307–8), on the other hand, has foregrounded the affective weight of the very word ‘tenkō’: even for those who did not go through the experience, the sedimented meanings and connotations of betrayal around the word and the overwhelming feelings of shame it triggers make the body stiffen in sympathetic resonance. At the other end of the political spectrum, affect-laden language that is performative, relying on signification as well as on pre-discursive rhythms and immediacies, can be found in Hayashi Fusao, in the writings of Hagiwara Kyōjirō and Hagiwara Sakutarō, as well the memoirs of rank and file converts such as Kobayashi Morito. We need further explorations of the tenkō experience and its representations through affect as a conceptual lens: it is in this nexus between affect and the political, the different and not necessarily progressive forms of identification that it binds together, that tenkō retains its urgent relevance to the present.

Notes 1 See the chapters by Ward and Fauconnier in the present volume for detailed discussions of the statement and the circumstances surrounding it. 2 For Yasuda Yojūrō and the Japan Romantic School, see Tansman (2009a) and Doak (1994). 3 For the 1941 symposium on ‘overcoming modernity’, see Calichman (2008) and Harootunian (2002). While Yasuda Yojūrō was not present at the symposium, his writings were very influential on those proceedings. 4 Included in this category would be authors such as Nakano Shigeharu and Sata Ineko, as well as activists such as Itō Ritsu and Fukumoto Kazuo. 5 On Tosaka Jun, see Harootunian (2002) and Kawashima, Schäfer and Stolz (2014); for Nakano Shigeharu, see Silverberg (1990), Shigeto (2014), as well as Naitō’s contribution in this volume. 6 Wada discusses the literature of the industrial patriotism movement and so-called production literature (seisan bunkgaku) in the present volume. 7 For discussions of tenkō and the shishōsetsu, see the essays by Sipos and Hayter in this volume. 8 The major critical essays from the 1930s debates on tenkō literature can be found in Hirano, Odagiri and Yamamoto (1956: 263–302). 9 For the ‘literature of the flesh’ and the gendered body in postwar Japanese fiction, see Slaymaker (2004). 10 In this regard, it should be noted, however, that Honda does include Sata Ineko’s Botan no aru ie (The House with a Peony 1934) in his list of tenkō bungaku pieces. 11 See Maruyama (1984: 64–6). Maruyama’s account is based on Sata Ineko’s semi-­ autobiographical novel Haguruma (Cogwheels 1955), in which Hara Sen appears as Kubo Keiko (Sata 1978: 83–4). 12 For a development of this argument, see Hayter (forthcoming).

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References Akiyama, Kiyoshi (1960) ‘Anakizumu’ (Anarchism), in Shisō no kagaku kenkyūkai (ed.) Kyōdō kenkyū: tenkō (Collective Research: tenkō), vol. 2, Tokyo: Heibonsha, 435–67. Andō, H. (1994) Jiishiki no Shōwa bungaku: genshō to shite no watakushi (Showa Literature of Self-Consciousness: The “I” as Phenomenon), Tokyo: Shibundō. Barshay, A. (1988) State and Intellectual in Imperial Japan: The Public Man in Crisis, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Beckman, G. (1971) ‘The Radical Left and the Failure of Communism’, in Morley, J. (ed.) Dilemmas of Growth in Prewar Japan, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 139–78. Bloch, E. (2018 [1935]) The Heritage of Our Times, Cambridge: Polity Press. Bourdaghs, M. (2003) The Dawn That Never Comes: Shimazaki Tōson and Japanese Nationalism, New York: Columbia University Press. Brandt, K. (2007) Kingdom of Beauty: Mingei and the Politics of Folk Art in Imperial Japan, Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Calichman, R. (2008) Overcoming Modernity: Cultural Identity in Wartime Japan, New York: Columbia University Press. Clough, P. (2008) ‘The Affective Turn: Political Economy, Biomedia and Bodies’, in Theory, Culture and Society 25: 1, 1–22. Cullen, J. (2010) ‘A Comparative Study of tenkō: Sata Ineko and Miyamoto Yuriko’, in Journal of Japanese Studies 36: 1, 65–96. Derrida, J. (1994) Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, and the New International, New York: Routledge. Doak, K. (1994) Dreams of Difference: The Japan Romantic School and the Crisis of Modernity, Berkeley, CA & Los Angeles: University of California Press. Dorsey, J. (2004) ‘Review of “War, Occupation and Creativity: Japan and East Asia 1920– 1960” ’, in Monumenta Nipponica 59: 1, 134–7. Dorsey, J. (2007) ‘From Ideological Literature to a Literary Ideology: “Conversion” in Wartime Japan’, in Washburn, D. & Reinhart, K. (eds.) Converting Cultures: Religion, Ideology and Transformations of Modernity, Leiden: Brill, 465–83. Eagleton, T. (1990) ‘Nationalism: Irony and Commitment’, in Eagleton, T., Jameson, F. & Said, E. (eds.) Nationalism, Colonialism, and Literature, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 23–42. Field, N. (2005) ‘Tenkō bungaku ga tankyū shita mono’ (The Explorations of tenkō Literature), in Rikkyō daigaku Nihongaku kenkyūjo nenpō 4, 3–4. Fisher, M. (2014) Ghosts of My Life: Writings on Depression, Hauntology and Lost Futures, Alresford, Hants: John Hunt Publishing. Freud, Sigmund (2001) ‘Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego’, in The Standard Edition, vol. XVIII, London: Vintage, 67–144. Fujita, S. (1959) ‘Shōwa hachinen o chūshin to suru tenkō no jōkyō’ (The Situation of tenkō around 1933), in Shisō no kagaku kenkyūkai (ed.) Kyōdō kenkyū: tenkō (Collective Research: tenkō), vol. 1, Tokyo: Heibonsha, 33–65. Fujitake, A. (1967) ‘The Formation and Development of Mass Culture’, in Developing Economies 5: 767–82. Gardner, W. (2006) Advertising Tower: Japanese Modernism and Modernity in the 1920s, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center. Harootunian, H. (2002) Overcome by Modernity: History, Culture and Community in Interwar Japan, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Hayashi, F. (1941) Tenkō ni tsuite (On tenkō), Yokohama: Sōfūkai.

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Hayter, I. (forthcoming) ‘Retour sur la fille moderne: Spectacle, politique, subjectivité’ (About the Modern Girl, Again: Spectacle, Politics, Subjectivity), in Schaal, S. (ed.) Reconsidérer le “Modan”: La ville, le corps et le genre dans le Japon de l’entre-deux guerres (Reconsidering the Modan: City, Body and Gender in Interwar Japan), Paris: Éditions Picquier. Herscher, A. (1997) ‘Everything Provokes Fascism: An Interview with Slavoj Žižek’, in Assemblage 33: 58–63. Hirano, K., Odagiri, S. & Yamamoto, K. (eds.) (1956) Gendai Nihon bungaku ronsōshi (History of Modern Literary Debates in Japan), vol. 2, Tokyo: Miraisha. Hofmann, R. (2015) The Fascist Effect: Japan and Italy, 1915–1952, Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Honda, S. (1957) Tenkō bungakuron (Essay on tenkō Literature), Tokyo: Miraisha. Honda, S. (1970) ‘Kaisetsu’ (Commentary), in Takami Jun zenshū’ (Collected Works of Takami Jun), vol. 1, Tokyo: Keisō shobō, 401–24. Hoston, G. (1983) ‘Tenkō: Marxism & the National Question in Prewar Japan’, in Polity 16: 1, 96–118. Hoston, G. (1986) Marxism and the Crisis of Development in Prewar Japan, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Karlsson, M. (2012) ‘An Alternative View of tenkō: Hayashi Fusao’s Popular Writings for Shinseinen’, in Japanese Studies 32: 1, 61–76. Kawashima, K., Schäfer, F. & Stolz, R. (2014) Tosaka Jun: A Critical Reader, Ithaca: Cornell University East Asia Programme. Keene, D. (1976) ‘Japanese Literature and Politics in the 1930s’, in Journal of Japanese Studies 2: 2, 225–48. Koschmann, V. (1996) Revolution and Subjectivity in Postwar Japan, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Kurihara, Y. (2004 [1971])  Puroretaria  bungaku to sono jidai  (Proletarian Literature and Its Age), Tokyo: Impakuto shuppankai. Linkhoeva, Tatiana (2020) Revolution Goes East: Imperial Japan and Soviet Communism, New York: Columbia University Press. Long, J. (2000) Overcoming Marxism in Early Showa Japan: Hayashi Fusao’s “Seinen” and the Turn to Ultranationalism, PhD dissertation, University of Hawaiʽi, Honolulu. Long, J. (2007) ‘Songs That Cannot Be Sung: Hayashi Fusao’s “Album” and the Political Uses of Literature during the Early Showa Years’, in Japan Forum 19: 1, 69–88. Maeda, A. (2001) Kindai dokusha no seiritsu (The Formation of the Modern Reader), Tokyo: Iwanami shoten. Mark, E. (2014) ‘The Perils of Co-Prosperity: Takeda Rintarō, Occupied Southeast Asia, and the Seductions of Postcolonial Empire’, in The American Historical Review 119: 4, 1184–206. Mark, E. (2018) ‘Japan’s 1930s: Crisis, Fascism and Social Imperialism’, in Saaler, S. & Szpilman, C. (eds.) The Routledge Handbook of Modern Japanese History, London: Routledge, 237–50. Maruyama, M. (1961) Nihon no shisō (Japanese Thought), Tokyo: Iwanami shinsho. Maruyama, M. (1984) Manekin gāru: shijin no tsuma no Shōwa-shi (Mannequin Girl: A Poet’s Wife’s History of Showa), Tokyo: Jiji tsūshinsha. Mimura, J. (2011) Planning for Empire: Reform Bureaucrats and the Japanese Wartime State, Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Moin, S. (2020) ‘You Have Misunderstood the Relevance of Hannah Arendt’, in Prospect (20 October). Available at: www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/philosophy/hannah-arendtmisunderstood-philosophy-fascism-authoritarianism-trump, accessed 11 November 2020.

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Mouffe, C. (2018) For a Left Populism, London: Verso. Müller, J. (2019) ‘Populism and the People’, in London Review of Books 41: 10 (23 May) www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v41/n10/jan-werner-mueller/populism-and-the-people, accessed 22 October 2020. Nakayama, K. (1997) ‘Sengo hihyō to jendā’ (Postwar Criticism and Gender), in Bungei kenkyū 11: 121–36. Rubin, J. (1984) Injurious to Public Morals: Writers and the Meiji State, Seattle: University of Washington Press. Sano, M. & Nabeyama, S. (2005 [1933]) ‘A Letter to Our Fellow Defendants’, in de Bary, W., Gluck, C. & Tiedemann, A. (eds.) Barshay, A. & Freire, C. (trans.) Sources of Japanese Tradition, 2nd Edition, vol. 2: 1600 to 2000, New York: Columbia University Press, 940–7. Sata, I. (1978) ‘Haguruma’ (Cogwheels), in Sata Ineko zenshū (Collected Works of Sata Ineko), vol. 9, Tokyo: Kodansha, 7–241. Satō, I. (2000) ‘Seiji to bungaku, aruiwa hyōshō no fu/kanōsei’ (Politics and Literature, or the (Im)possibility of Representation), in Gendai shisō 28: 2, 203–15. Shigeto, Y. (2009) The Politics of Writing: tenkō and the Crisis of Representation, PhD dissertation, University of Washington, Seattle. Shigeto, Y. (2014) “Tenkō and Writing: The Case of Nakano Shigeharu’, in positions: asia critique 22: 2, 517–40. Shisō no kagaku kenkyūkai (ed.) (1959–62) Kyōdō kenkyū: tenkō (Collective Research: tenkō), 3 vols, Tokyo: Heibonsha. Silverberg, M. (1990) Changing Song: The Marxist Manifestos of Nakano Shigeharu, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Silverberg, M. (1992) ‘Review of Patricia Steinhoff, “Tenkō: Ideology and Societal Integration in Prewar Japan” ’, in Monumenta Nipponica 47: 4, 554–6. Silverberg, M. (2006) Erotic Grotesque Nonsense: The Mass Culture of Japanese Modern Times, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Sipos, G. T. (2013) The Literature of Political Conversion (tenkō) of Japan, PhD dissertation, University of Chicago, Chicago. Slaymaker, D. (2004) The Body in Postwar Japanese Fiction, London: Routledge. Stavrakakis, Y. (2014) ‘Hegemony or Post-Hegemony? Discourse, Representation and the Revenge(s) of the Real’, in Kioupkiolis, A. & Katsambekis, G. (eds.) Radical Democracy and Collective Movements Today: The Biopolitics of the Multitude versus the Hegemony of the People, Farnham: Ashgate. Sumiya, M. (1976) ‘Tenkō no shinri to ronri’ (The Psychology and Logic of tenkō), in Shisō 624, 15–30. Takami, J. (1970) ‘Kokyū wasureubeki’ (Should Auld Acquaintance Be Forgot), in Takami Jun zenshū (The Complete Works of Takami Jun) vol. 1, 7–139. Tansman, A. (2007) ‘The Atmosphere of Conversion in Interwar Japan’, in Washburn, D. & Reinhart, K. (eds.) Converting Cultures: Religion, Ideology and Transformations of Modernity, Leiden: Brill, 57–79. Tansman, A. (2009a) The Aesthetics of Japanese Fascism, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Tansman, A. (ed.) (2009b) The Culture of Japanese Fascism, Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Tobe, H. (2006) ‘Tenkōron no senji to sengo’ (Wartime and Postwar Theories of tenkō), in Kurosawa, A. et al. (eds.) Iwanami kōza: Ajia-taiheiyō sensō (Iwanami Lectures: The Asia Pacific War), vol. 3, Tokyo: Iwanami shoten, 307–44.

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Tsurumi, S. (1959) ‘Tenkō no kyōdō kenkyū ni tsuite’ (On the Collective Research into tenkō), in Shisō no kagaku kenkyūkai (ed.) Kyōdō kenkyū: tenkō (Collective Research: tenkō), vol. 1, Tokyo: Heibonsha, 1–27. Ward, M. (2019) Thought Crime: Ideology and State Power in Interwar Japan, Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Yamanouchi, Y. (1995) ‘Hōhōteki joron: sōryokusen to shisutemu tōgō’ (Methodological Introduction: Total War and Social Integration), in Yamanouchi, Y., Koschman, V.  & Narita, R. (eds.) Sōryokusen to gendaika (Total War and Modernization), Tōkyō: Kashiwa shobō, 9–53. Yasuda, Y. (1986) ‘ “Manshūkoku kōtei ni sasaguru kyoku” ni tsuite’ (On “A Song Dedicated to the Manchurian Emperor”), in Yasuda Yojūrō zenshū (Collected Works of Yasuda Yojūrō), vol. 2, Tokyo: Kodansha, 102–11. Yoshimoto, T. (1986 [1958]) ‘Tenkōron’ (On tenkō), in Yoshimoto Takaaki zenshūsen, vol. 3: Seiji shisō (Selected Works of Yoshimoto Takaaki, vol. 3: Political Thought), Tokyo: Daiwa shobō, 9–34. Yoshimoto, T. (2011) ‘On tenkō, or Ideological Conversion’, in Levy, I. (ed.) Wake, H. (trans.) Translation in Modern Japan, London: Routledge, 102–21. Yoshinaga, S. (2002) ‘Masculinist Identifications with “Woman”: Gender Politics in Postwar Japanese Literary Debates’, in U.S.-Japan Women’s Journal English Supplement 22: 32–63. Young, L. (1998) Japan’s Total Empire: Manchuria and the Culture of Wartime Imperialism, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Young, L. (2017) ‘When Fascism Met Empire in Japanese-Occupied Manchuria’, in Journal of Global History 12: 2, 274–96.

PART I

Conceptual excursions

1 IDEOLOGICAL CONVERSION AS HISTORICAL CATACHRESIS Coming to terms with tenkō Max Ward

No other term has come to symbolize the vexed decades of the interwar ­Japanese Empire  – if not also the myriad contradictions of Japanese modernity  – more than tenkō.1 The combination of the term’s two Chinese characters (転向) innocuously means a ‘change of direction’, but in the political history of interwar Japan, tenkō assumed a much more insidious significance. There the term referred to the ‘ideological conversion’ of hundreds of political activists and intellectuals (Steinhoff 1991), beginning with incarcerated Japanese Communist Party (JCP) members who publicly broke from the party in a wave of defections, overseen and managed by a cadre of state officials who specialized in so-called ‘thought crime’ (shisō hanzai), in 1933–4. With tenkō in popular circulation after these sensational defections, the term was then applied to proletarian writers, Marxist intellectuals, anti-colonial activists and thinkers, popular front cultural critics and others who purportedly abandoned political activism or began to proactively identify with the emperor system and to support the aims of the imperial state.2 In the postwar period, Japanese scholars studied the tenkō phenomenon in order to understand how intellectuals and activists failed to resist the rise of militarism in the 1930s or so easily succumbed to the ideological allure of fascism’s promise to suture the contradictions of capitalist society. In the process, postwar scholars came to view these interwar apostasies as symptomatic of deeper problems related to the general forms of ‘subjectivity’ (shutaisei) and ‘modernity’ (kindaisei) in Japan, with particular emphasis on the role of intellectuals in modern society. Consequently, tenkō became largely a question of intellectual history, as postwar scholars in Japan and elsewhere pursued a variety of further ­questions through the interwar tenkō phenomenon, including prompting the so-called subjectivity debates (shutaisei ronsō) in philosophy and literary theory (Honda 1957; Koschmann 1996);3 the paradigmatic shifts in modern Japanese intellectual

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history (Shisō no kagaku kenkyūkai 1959; Tsurumi 1986; Fujita 1997); the intellectual transformations in colonial and postcolonial Korea (Hong 2011; Matsuda 1997); the politics of writing and representation (Lin 1993; Silverberg 1990; Shigeto 2014); the role of the intellectual in modern Japanese society (Tsurumi 1970; Barshay 1988); or, as revealing, the constitutive contradictions of Japanese modernity (Yoshimoto 1986) or of modernity more generally (Takeuchi 2005). As we see here, scholars expanded the meaning of tenkō far beyond the political defections of interwar communists and, in so doing, opened the term to a variety of theoretical investments. The objective of this chapter is neither to posit a more adequate explanation of why the political defections occurred in interwar Japan nor to extrapolate another theory of modernity – Japanese or otherwise – from the phenomenon of tenkō. Rather, I  would like to consider how we might begin to develop a conceptual history of tenkō that can account for all the diverse practices, political positions and theoretical investments that the term accrued across the interwar and postwar periods. Towards this end, my objective will be to question some of the basic assumptions that have informed our received understanding of tenkō in order to open new lines of inquiry and to generate new questions. By extension, then, this is also to remind us to reflect on what exactly we mean by identifying our object of analysis as something called ‘tenkō’ and what we hope to find through an analysis of the phenomenon. I agree with Tobe Hideaki who recently argued that ‘in its form and content, the “theorizations of tenkō” ’ not only addressed the question of ‘subjectivity’ but also were themselves implicated in the ‘(re)construction of the subject [shutai no (sai)kōchiku] in the wartime, occupation and the postwar’ periods (2006: 309).4 Following Tobe’s suggestion, a new conceptual history of tenkō will have to address how both the interwar phenomenon of ideological conversion and the postwar theoretical reflections on the phenomenon were addressing questions of subjectivity, with the important qualification that the ‘subject’ indexed by tenkō in the prewar was the ‘imperial subject’ (shinmin) inscribed in the 1890 Imperial Rescript on Education and not the presumed ‘active subject’ (shutai) informing postwar debates on political responsibility.5 However, unlike Tobe, who approaches tenkō as a problem primarily of intellectual history, our conceptual history will have to take into account the very different articulations of tenkō across a variety of discursive, historical and institutional contexts, including as an evolving state policy targeting political criminals in the 1930s. As I will demonstrate in this essay, interwar tenkō was not only a question for proletarian writers, JCP theoreticians or other leftist or colonial intellectuals but was also practiced by detained rank and file communists, labourers and rural organizers, as well as continually redefined by state officials who implemented the policy against ‘thought criminals’ (shisō hannin) in the 1930s. The meaning of tenkō becomes even more complicated when we take into consideration the range of postwar theories of tenkō, which abstracted the question from an anti-communist state policy and the experiences of political criminals who

Ideological conversion  5

purportedly converted, to questions related to subjectivity, representation and modernity more generally. I contend that the centrality but constantly changing definition of tenkō across the interwar and postwar periods correspond to what Tani Barlow has theorized elsewhere as ‘historical catachresis’ (Barlow 2004). In its most basic sense, catachresis is, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, the ‘[i]mproper use of words; application of a term to a thing which it does not properly denote; abuse or perversion of a trope or metaphor’. However, Barlow follows Gayatri Spivak’s postcolonial appropriation of Jacques Derrida’s (1982) theory of catachresis as marking an ‘intermediary status’ between a sign and its purported meaning, revealing the original incompleteness of systems of meaning and how texts open themselves to deconstructive readings.6 Spivak turns catachresis into a deliberate, political intervention, in which the postcolonial critic ‘take[s] positions in terms not of the discovery of historical and philosophical grounds, but in terms of reversing, displacing, and seizing the apparatus of value-coding’ (1990: 228). Building from Spivak’s postcolonial intervention, Barlow reorients catachresis towards the practice of historical analysis, in which she defines catachreses as words ‘that stabilize meaning momentarily’ but that ‘lack true referents and thus reveal their manifold analytic inadequacy’ (2004: 30–1). She calls these terms ‘historical catachresis’ and elaborates this theory through an analysis of the shifting meanings and political displacements of the term ‘women’ (funü, furen, nüren and nüxing) in ‘modern Chinese intellectual history’. Barlow turns catachreses’ analytic inadequacy into an interpretive possibility, arguing that ‘[h]istorical catachreses are highly ideated elements of lived experience’ and thus become for the historian ‘legible repositories of social experience’ that were mediated by the specific socio-historical and ideological formations in which they were articulated (ibid.: 1–2).7 Furthermore, she argues that historical catachreses can be expressions of political opposition, as well as used to regulate such opposition, a quality that will be important when considering how tenkō was an interwar state policy targeting political crime, a practice negotiated by detained political criminals, as well as a question for postwar scholars to consider political possibility. Ultimately, I believe that Barlow’s emphasis on catachreses’ semantic instability, as well as their centrality in a series of historically specific discourses, provides a framework for bringing together the multiple articulations of tenkō across interwar and postwar Japanese history. Informed by Barlow’s theory of historical catachresis, my analysis of tenkō will proceed in two parts. First, I will reconsider conventional explanations of the interwar phenomenon of tenkō – namely, the defections of jailed Japanese Communist Party leaders in the summer of 1933  – by surveying the myriad practices and shifting meanings of tenkō in the 1930s and 1940s. I will organize this first part of my analysis under the heading of ‘historical catachresis’ and focus on the activities of state officials and rank and file communists, two important contributors to the tenkō phenomenon that are often overlooked in postwar studies. Then I will turn to the postwar period and will survey postwar theories of tenkō – which I distinguish as ‘theoretical catachresis’. Here I will focus on the influential definition of tenkō

6  Max Ward

posited by Tsurumi Shunsuke of the Shisō no kagaku kenkyūkai (Institute for the Science of Thought) and question the extent to which it can account for the ideological quality of so-called ‘ideological conversion’. Although a comprehensive overview of tenkō’s conceptual history throughout the twentieth century is beyond the parameters of this essay, my objective will be to question our received understanding of tenkō both historically and theoretically in hopes that we might produce new questions and open new lines of inquiry into Japan’s modern history.

Interwar tenkō as historical catachresis The Sano–Nabeyama defection as absent origin I would like to begin this section by discussing a well known event in interwar Japanese history. On June  10, 1933, the Japanese daily newspapers reported the sensational news that two incarcerated JCP leaders, Sano Manabu and Nabeyama Sadachika, had renounced the policies of the Communist International (Comintern) as ill suited to the ‘realities’ of Japan and condemned the JCP’s slavish adherence to Moscow’s directives. In a co-authored letter titled ‘A Letter to our Fellow Defendants’ (Kyōdō hikoku dōshi ni tsuguru sho), Sano and Nabeyama (1959, 2005) announced a ‘significant change’ (jūyō na henkō) in their political position and urged their comrades to break with the Comintern, to reconnect the revolutionary vanguard to the Japanese masses and to harness the purported nationalist sentiments of the working class in order to carry out a socialist transformation across the Japanese Empire.8 The authorities released the letter to the press on June 10 and distributed the letter to 600 other incarcerated JCP members throughout the country on June 13.9 In the weeks following the Sano–Nabeyama announcement, Justice Ministry procurators met in Tokyo to take stock of these defections and to consider methods for inspiring other incarcerated communists to defect.10 Their efforts paid off and by the end of summer 1933, hundreds of incarcerated JCP members renounced the party and the Comintern.11 In this way, the infamous ‘mass tenkō’ (tairyō tenkō) of 1933–34 was engineered by the state and, building from this success, the state codified tenkō as a central pillar of its ‘thought crime’ apparatus in 1936.12 It is generally accepted that the sensational defection of Sano and Nabeyama marked the beginning of the mass tenkō phenomenon of 1933–34. But, recalling Spivak’s warning about seeking to discover ‘the historical and philosophical grounds’ of a term’s essential meaning, I want to problematize the assumption that this defection serves as the historical and semantic origin for tenkō. The entry for tenkō in the authoritative Kodansha Encyclopedia of Japan tells us that the ‘term was coined in 1933 by Sano Manabu and Nabeyama Sadachika’ when they ‘announced from prison that they had made a political “change of direction” and were breaking their ties with the Communist Party’ (1983: 6–7). However, it is important to note that Sano and Nabeyama did not use the term tenkō in their sensational letter

Ideological conversion  7

to their comrades. In other words, in the text that is conventionally understood as initiating the phenomenon of tenkō – the Sano–Nabeyama declaration – the term tenkō is curiously absent. In a longer, unpublicized report drafted for prison officials, Sano and Nabeyama did use the term tenkō in passing but in a negative sense in order to distinguish their reconsideration of political praxis: We recognize our responsibility for the party [i.e. the JCP], and believe it is absolutely necessary at this time to turn to the working class and reveal the correct path forward. We believe it would be dishonorable and shameful to secretly turn inwards and individually convert [kojinteki ni tenkō suru]. Now we must take the initiative and have the responsibility to publicly recognize the errors [we have made] to our comrades up until now, and, based on our new consciousness, to reveal to the public a [new] course of action [emphasis mine].13 As we can see here, Sano and Nabeyama refer to tenkō in a largely negative sense: i.e. as signifying an individual process of introspection and conversion, not a public declaration of error and reorientation of political strategy.14 It was the authorities that used the term tenkō when they informed the press of Sano and Nabeyama’s defection on June 10, thereby introducing the term into public discourse.15 In fact, justice officials had already started using the term tenkō by the spring of 1933 to signify something to the effect of a political or ideological apostasy.16 For example, in 1932, district court procurators (kenji) passed a directive that mandated assessing ‘whether or not [a political suspect] can effect a thought-conversion [shisō tenkō] and maintain a conventional daily life’ before advancing a case to trial.17 As many legal historians have noted, this was the first time the term tenkō was used in regard to political conversion (Okudaira 2006: 160; Ogino 2000: 60–1). Then, one month before Sano and Nabeyama’s critique of the JCP was publicized, Tokyo District Court Procurators outlined new procedures to assess and guide ‘thought criminals who ideologically convert’ (tenkō shisō hannin) at a May 12 meeting.18 Furthermore, throughout the spring of 1933, the term tenkō started to be used in a criminal reform publication, Hogo jihō, read by prison officials, guidance counsellors (hogosha) and reformed ex-offenders.19 Therefore, on the eve of the sensational Sano–Nabeyama defection, officials in Tokyo had already coined the term tenkō to refer to political defection and were in the process of formulating a set of procedures to assist, if not induce such defections. This does not mean, however, that we have located the ‘origin’ of tenkō, and thus its essential and stable meaning from which all subsequent uses must be measured. Rather, state officials continued to redefine tenkō throughout the 1930s, based on what they learned from hundreds of rank and file communists who were reflecting and writing on their defection experiences. Indeed, the historical catachresis of tenkō emerged from the interaction between officials continually revising their policy to deal with political criminals and the political criminals who were in the process of converting and reflecting on their experiences.

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Ex post facto: official debates over the meaning of tenkō Conservative politicians were surprised by the wave of ‘ideological conversions’ that swept through the population of incarcerated communists during the summer of 1933. Many expressed scepticism as to whether these conversions were authentic or merely a ruse for communists to be released from jail and continue their illegal political activities (what came to be labelled gisō-tenkō [fake-conversion]). Consequently, officials who had direct knowledge of the Sano and Nabeyama’s cases, such as Tokyo procurator Hirata Isao and Ichigaya Prison chaplain Fujii Eshō, quickly set out to define tenkō to sceptics and the public more widely. For example, Fujii (1933) wrote a four-part series of articles in the Yomiuri shinbun explaining ‘How Sano Manabu and the Others Converted’, while Hirata (1934) gave lectures on the meaning of tenkō to gatherings of politicians and justice officials.20 Additionally, as the mass tenkō was unfolding in Tokyo, justice officials worked to develop a conversion policy to apply to detained communists throughout Japan. In June, procurators, prison officials and others from all over the Japanese empire gathered in Tokyo, where Tokyo procurators discussed the recent conversions, distributed copies of the Sano and Nabeyama letter and handed out published biographies of rank and file JCP members who had defected earlier in the decade (one of which was by Kobayashi Morito, whom I discuss shortly). In addition to conferences, officials wrote on tenkō in legal newspapers and criminal reform journals. For example, Tokyo Procurator Hirata Isao wrote an article in Hōritsu shinbun in August, in which he explained that ‘the foundation for performing tenkō is love for one’s family’ and, since ‘Japan’s national spirit is as a large family with the emperor at its center’, it was this ‘national spirit’ that was ‘the source of the sentiments we use to have a thought criminal ideologically convert’ (cited in Ogino 2000: 66). Similarly, the July issue of Hogo jihō included multiple articles related to the recent ‘ideological conversions’, including a report from a recent ‘convert’ (tenkōsha) who was released from jail, a critique of Sano and Nabeyama’s continuing commitment to socialist politics after their tenkō – what they called ‘socialism in one country’ (ikkoku shakaishugi)21 – as well as a report from the June conference previously mentioned in which tenkō was the main topic of discussion.22 In response to the increasing number and variety of defections, in December 1933, the Justice Ministry formulated the following three-tiered ‘Classifications of Repentance’ (Kaishun no jōtai bunrui): A convert [tenkōsha]: a. A person who renounces revolutionary thought and pledges to break with the social movement b. A person who renounces revolutionary thought and joins a conventional, legal social movement c. A person who renounces revolutionary thought but is uncertain of joining a legal social movement

Ideological conversion  9

A semi-convert [jun-tenkōsha]: a. A  person who is vacillating between embracing or renouncing revolutionary thought and will most likely discard it in the future b. Someone who does not renounce their revolutionary thought but pledges to break with the social movement in the future A non-convert [hi-tenkōsha] (Cited in Itō 1995: 43) Notice that tenkō was measured by the degree to which a detainee ‘renounced’ (hōki) or ‘broke’ (ridatsu) with communism; i.e. both acts of negation. Also notice that while organizational affiliation distinguished between a ‘non-convert’ and ‘semi-convert’, the defining characteristic of true converts was that they ‘renounced revolutionary thought’ (kakumei shisō o hōki shita). By the next year, however, concerns had arisen about the degree to which political criminals had truly ‘converted’ even if they broke with the JCP, and the possibility of their ideological ‘recidivism’ (saihan) after they were paroled.23 To answer these new concerns, tenkō shifted from signifying the negation of one’s dangerous thought or party affiliation to a more proactive demonstration of one’s appreciation for the Japanese national polity (kokutai) and loyalty to the imperial state. This transformation coalesced in the Justice Ministry’s 1936 Thought Criminal Protection and Supervision Law (Shisōhan hogo kansatsu hō), which inscribed the term tenkō in law for the first time and established a network of Protection and Supervision Centers to assess ‘thought criminals’ at various stages of conversion. The Justice Ministry’s chief of rehabilitation, Moriyama Takechirō, outlined five stages for classifying ideological converts, starting with a non-convert (hi-tenkōsha): 1 One who accepts and advocates the correctness of Marxism 2 One who, although uncritical of Marxism, rejects a liberal-individualist position 3 One who is in the process of developing a critical position towards Marxism 4 One who recognizes and grasps the Japanese Spirit 5 One who has mastered the Japanese Spirit and is able to actively put it into practice. (1937: 62–5) Notice that a complete conversion was no longer measured by ‘renouncing’ revolutionary thought, as it was in 1933, but now by one’s ability to ‘master’ (taitoku) the Japanese spirit and ‘actively put it into practice’ (jissen kyūkō), however that might be measured. This more active, although ambiguous redefinition rendered tenkō a process to be continued in the ex–thought criminal’s daily life. It also dovetailed with the national mobilization campaigns following Japan’s invasion of China in 1937, where public displays in support of the war effort became one way for converts to ‘actively . . . practice’ the Japanese spirit for their parole officers. Then, on the eve of the Asia Pacific War in 1941, the state confirmed this more ideological definition of tenkō for a newly created ‘Preventative Detention’ (yobō kōkin) system

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designed to detain thought criminals who had not fully reformed.24 In a 1941 Preventative Detention report cited by Ushiomi Toshikata, tenkō was defined as ‘breaking with previous thought and practicing the way of an imperial subject in one’s daily life’ (nichijō seikatsu ri ni shinmindō o kyūko shi) (1977: 97), once more demonstrating how the official definition of tenkō had shifted from negating one’s communist affiliation in 1933 to the proactive demonstration of imperial ideology by the time of the outset of the Asia Pacific War.25 An important factor contributing to changes in the state’s definition of tenkō was the experience of rank and file communists, who provided officials with the earliest examples of defection and reported on their conversion experiences as well as the particular challenges they faced once released back into society. Along with the official writings previously reviewed, a conceptual history of tenkō must also incorporate the writings of rank and file communists who practiced and reflected upon tenkō throughout the 1930s.

Tenkō as practiced by the rank and file Dozens of rank and file JCP members wrote, for both official and public audiences, about their decision to defect, thereby producing an extensive archive of the tenkō experience in the 1930s. However, in intellectual histories of tenkō, these writings are often overshadowed by accounts written by intellectuals, JCP theorists or proletarian writers. A conceptual history of tenkō will need to account for the fact that the vast majority of writings on tenkō in the 1930s were produced by ex–rank and file JCP members and that these writings influenced how officials understood the conversion process. For example, a collection entitled Tenkōsha no shuki (Tenkōsha Memoirs) was published in November 1933, only six months after the Sano–Nabeyama defection (Saotome 1933). This volume collected essays by recent converts, many of whom had received guidance from a Tokyo-based criminal offender reform group called the Teikoku kōshinkai (Imperial Renovation Society). This group started to take on political crime cases in 1931 and, following the Sano–Nabeyama defection in 1933, led the way in defining the procedures and practices of what, by this point, was referred to as tenkō. Heading up the Society’s ideological rehabilitation efforts was a rank and file convert from Nagano named Kobayashi Morito who, after defecting from the JCP in 1931, started to work at the Society in 1932. In that first year, and before the term tenkō signified defection, Kobayashi wrote the first biographical account of political defection, titled Kyōsantō o dassuru made (Up Until Leaving the Communist Party), under the pen name Ono Yōichi (1932). Kobayashi narrated his decision to defect from the JCP as a religious transformation, using terms such as ‘revived’ (sosei), ‘reborn’ (saisei), ‘total salvation’ (zettai kyūsai) and ‘self-awakening’ (jiko no jikaku).26 Ultimately, Kobayashi explained his defection as a departure from the Marxian ‘world of struggle’ (tōsō sekai) to the ‘world of religion’ (shūkyō no sekai), informed by True Pure Land Buddhism, thereby establishing a practical and explanatory form for defection that many

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future converts would follow, including the contributors to Tenkōsha Memoirs (ibid.: 169). The contributors to the 1933 volume were not leaders or theoreticians of the JCP, and thus we can read Tenkōsha Memoirs as addressing the experiences of rank and file converts. The authors came from different sectors of Japanese society, but they narrated their conversion experiences largely as a spiritual process informed by the teachings of Pure Land Buddhism, which exemplified the influence of Kobayashi and others at the Imperial Renovation Society.27 The editor of Tenkōsha Memoirs, Saotome Yūgorō, prefaced the volume by critiquing what he saw as the incompleteness of Sano and Nabeyama’s political defection, arguing that their conversion to national-socialism comprised a ‘a lateral tenkō’ (yoko no tenkō), ‘simply a politico-practical change in direction’ (tan ni seijiteki, jissenteki hōkō tenkan) lacking the deep self-reflection, sincere repentance and spiritual conversion exemplified in the essays that comprised Tenkōsha Memoirs (1933: 1). Recalling the model established by Kobayashi, Saotome (1933: 2) explained that a true ‘conversion’ occurs only when ‘Marxists redirect [tenjite] their search and their passion onto the path of religion’, which requires that ‘they must completely purify themselves, look deeper into themselves and return to their own true inner essence’ (jiko honrai no shinmenmoku) (ibid.: 2). Kojima Yuki’s contribution is typical in this regard.28 Her essay, entitled ‘Daihi no ote ni sugaru made’ (Up to Receiving Buddha’s Grace), begins with Kojima reflecting on her ‘ideals of youth’ (wakaki hi no risō) cultivated during her studies at a women’s school in Tokyo. At this time, Kojima had been concerned with the inequality and social contradictions she saw around her, prompting her to question the received ideals of becoming a productive and patriotic subject. She started to read social-tragedy (shakai higeki) literature and progressed to socialist literature including works by Engels, Lenin, Luxemburg and Marx. Kojima recounts that she found in Marxism ‘a logical explanation of the world’ and that it was at this time that she decided to join the communist movement (1933: 51). She explained that at the time she believed that her ‘power as one individual was insignificant’ but that if she joined the communist movement, her ‘own power would merge with this group and become grand’ (ibid.: 52). After joining the JCP, she committed all her time and energy to political activities, working tirelessly ‘for the new society to come’. Upon reflection, she declared that her ‘total existence was for the party’ (ibid.: 55–6). After her arrest, Kojima received letters from her mother, which spurred her to nostalgically reflect on her life with her family in contrast to the cold detention centre. This reflection led Kojima to realize she had sacrificed her family’s love for the movement. From this new standpoint, her ‘ideals of youth’ were nothing but the ‘ignorance of youth’ (wakage no idari), which had led her to abandon her family. She explains that, as a communist, she ‘had lost sight of [her] true self ’, but through the guidance of Buddhist teachings while in detention, she broke with the party and ‘returned to [her] position as an ordinary woman’ (heibon na ichijosei) (ibid.: 30). Upon being released from jail early for expressing repentance, she returned to Akita Prefecture and married.

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Notice that in Saotome’s definition and Kojima’s example, tenkō concludes with the decision to break with the JCP and communist ideology, reflecting the Justice Ministry’s three-tiered classification of tenkō from December 1933 previously cited. However, similar to the manner in which officials revised their understanding of tenkō in the wake of the 1933 defections, rank and file converts similarly refined the meaning of their tenkō once paroled into society. By 1935, converts no longer concluded their tenkō narratives with the decision to defect from the party and renounce communist internationalism. Rather, they emphasized the need to confirm their loyalty to Japan and the Japanese Emperor as they confronted both discrimination as ex-communists and the socio-economic challenges during the global economic depression. This shift in rank and file depictions of tenkō is evidenced in a second collection of conversion biographies, Tenkōsha no shisō to seikatsu (Thought and Lives of tenkōsha), edited by Kobayashi Morito and published in 1935. The essays contained in this collection focused on the supposedly reinvigorated imperial loyalty that converts were manifesting after defecting, even while they continued to face social discrimination and hardships. This more ideological definition of tenkō was evident in Kobayashi’s introductory essay to Thought and Lives of tenkōsha. Here, Kobayashi no longer presents tenkō as an individual process of self-reflection and religiously inspired repentance, as he had in his 1932 conversion biography. Rather, he explains that it was ‘the Japanese state [Nihon kokka] that naturally sprouted the seeds of tenkō – its three thousand years of history, its actual figure, which exists unyielding before us’ (1935: 7). Extending this idea beyond the practice of tenkō, he argues that ‘we feel that we originated from the imperial household’ and that, as such, tenkōsha and indeed all Japanese recognize that Japan is ‘a single family based on the identity between emperor and subject’ (kunmin ittai no ichidai kazoku) (ibid.: 8). Indeed, Kobayashi argues that the tenkō of ex-communists was but ‘one link in the total conversion of Japan’ (Nihon no zentaiteki tenkō no ikkan) (ibid.: 39). No longer was the ‘tenkō phenomenon . . . a question limited to communists, but today signifies a major turning point in which all domains are being thoroughly evaluated and reanalyzed’ (ibid.: 38). Kobayashi included ‘Western’ capitalism in this re-evaluation, which, according to him, was currently ‘going through a total, Japanese tenkō’, becoming in effect a new ‘Japanese’ socio-economic formation in accordance to Japan’s unique national culture (ibid.: 40). The other essays collected in Thought and Lives of tenkōsha, although perhaps more restrained than Kobayashi’s introductory essay, similarly drew upon imperial ideology and nationalist sentiments to explain the significance of defection and the various activities of tenkōsha upon parole. In this section, I have reviewed two important elements of the interwar tenkō phenomenon often ignored in intellectual histories of tenkō: first, official efforts to define and revise tenkō to keep pace with the changing circumstances of policing political crime and, second, the writings of rank and file communists who continually reflected and wrote on their conversion experiences. Recalling Tani Barlow’s theory that historical catachreses ‘lack true referents’ but serve to ‘stabilize meaning momentarily’ (2004: 30–1), we are able to consider particular stages in

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the development of tenkō as both an evolving official state policy – from signifying renouncing communist affiliations in 1933, to later mastering and practicing the Japanese spirit in daily life – as well as a ‘highly ideated element . . . of lived experience’ (ibid.: 2) for hundreds of rank and file communists who continued to reflect on the significance of their defections long after being paroled. Moreover, the increasing ideologization of tenkō into practicing the ‘way of the imperial subject’ substantiates Tobe Hideaki’s argument that writings on tenkō – including official writings – were themselves implicated in the ‘(re)construction of the subject’ (2006: 309), as exemplified in the increasing mobilization of imperial subjects for Japan’s invasion of China in 1937 and beyond. Turning now to the postwar period, our conceptual history will also have to attend to the veritable boom of theories on tenkō in the 1950s and 1960s, as the term was once again redefined to speak to intellectual and philosophical questions related to the postwar political context.

Postwar tenkō as theoretical catachresis In the early postwar period, the interwar tenkō phenomenon became a lens through which many intellectuals, writers and activists theorized and debated over ethics, subjectivity and political praxis in the wake of defeat and the postwar liberal democratic reforms started during the Allied Occupation (1945–52).29 Through these kinds of debates, the interwar tenkō phenomenon became an important historical question in its own right, prompting postwar scholars to propose a more general definition of tenkō that rendered the phenomenon a symptom of Japanese modernity and the particular form of subjectivity in Japan (or lack thereof). The literature on tenkō from the 1950s is extensive. Here I will focus on Tsurumi Shunsuke’s theory of tenkō, since it has become the foundational definition used in most histories up to today. Specifically, I will consider the adequacy of Tsurumi’s definition for understanding the myriad practices and definitions of the interwar tenkō phenomenon previously reviewed and then briefly consider it in relation to other important postwar theories of tenkō. Although the interwar tenkō phenomenon – what I have categorized as ‘historical catachresis’ – had at every stage of development involved attempts to theorize tenkō, I will categorize postwar theories of tenkō as ‘theoretical catachresis’ since the question of tenkō in the postwar was no longer about a set of practices to implement in the present – either in the form of criminal reform policies or as an everyday ethos for paroled ex-thought criminals – but now became a trope to consider more theoretical questions related to the modern subject, literature, representation and thought in Japan’s modern history.

Ideological conversion and the absence of ideological mediation The exemplary intellectual history of tenkō was organized by Tsurumi Shunsuke and conducted by the members of Shisō no kagaku kenkyūkai (Institute for the Science of Thought).30 Between 1959 and 1962, the Institute published a three-volume

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study of tenkō, which established a methodological framework that continues to influence intellectual histories of the tenkō phenomenon today. The study consists of roughly three dozen individual biographies of intellectuals, writers and political activists who supposedly committed tenkō in the interwar period, categorizing their conversions into four types: radicals, liberals, conservatives and nationalists. The study approached tenkō as largely a phenomenon limited to intellectuals, writers or party theoreticians, overlooking the fact that hundreds of rank and file JCP members underwent conversion and were instrumental in shaping the policy into the late-1930s. However, the three-volume study required a definition that could be used to bring the four types of ‘ideological conversion’ together. To this end, Tsurumi proposed a general definition of tenkō that would both account for the variety of motivations, experiences and degrees of ideological conversion, as well as remain objective. Tsurumi defined tenkō as ‘a change of thought under the coercion of state power’ (kokka kenryoku ni yotte kyōsei sareta shisō no henka) (1959: 6, 1986: 12–13). He elaborated that tenkō had two essential components: ‘the compulsion exercised by the state and the response chosen by the individual or group. The use of force and the existence of spontaneity are the two essential elements’ (1959: 5–7, 1986: 12). This dualistic definition of tenkō as a phenomenon produced between coercion and spontaneity – between external state power and the internal thoughts and decisions of an individual – was hugely influential and continues to inform many studies today. There have been critiques of Tsurumi’s definition of tenkō, but, tellingly, these criticisms have emphasized either state coercion or individual spontaneity, consequently reinforcing the duality of Tsurumi’s original theory of tenkō. From one direction, the historian of the Peace Preservation Law (chianijihō), Okudaira Yasuhiro, argued that intellectual histories such as those of the Shisō no kagaku kenkyūkai ‘limit their subject to the re-examinations of the thought content and the way of undergoing “tenkō” ’ and thus ‘fail to analyze . . . state power’ (1973: 53). From the other direction, Nabeyama Sadachika, who along with Sano Manabu initiated the mass tenkō of 1933, argued in the 1970s that, by supposedly emphasizing ‘only the external conditions for tenkō’, Tsurumi failed to explore the ‘internal spontaneity’ (naiteki jihassei) that led many JCP members such as himself to ideologically convert (1990: 215).31 As we see here, both of these criticisms emphasize one of the polarities of Tsurumi’s original definition of tenkō. This continuous reversion to one or the other polarity in postwar discussions of tenkō can be explained, I believe, by the fact that Tsurumi’s theory of ‘ideological conversion’ paradoxically lacks a theory of ideology. For instance, while many studies recognize the importance of state power, it is unclear whether the coercion that the state exerted was itself of an ideological nature. Rather, these studies imply that state power was an external force that acted upon an individual’s ideas. In other words, Tsurumi and others do not adequately explore the changing state definitions of tenkō and what these changes reveal about the imperial state’s own ideology (Ward 2019). At the same time, it is also unclear whether the new disposition or activities of a ‘convert’ were not simply informed by a new set of ‘ideas’ but were

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themselves ideological. In many studies of tenkō, ‘ideology’ is used to refer to the ideas that exist in the mind of an individual before and after their supposed ‘conversion’. The reduction of ‘ideology’ to simply ideas (shisō) lacks the ability to account for the complex ways whereby ideology and its practices are ritualized, institutionalized, transformed and disseminated over time. Ultimately, what I believe is lacking in the conventional explanation of tenkō is attention to ideological mediation in the process of so-called ideological conversion. In other words, a theory of tenkō needs to account for how tenkō first signified simply renouncing the JCP and Marxism in 1933, but, through experimentation in penal policy and the continuing reflections of rank and file JCP converts, tenkō soon morphed into mastering the ‘Japanese spirit’ and practicing the ‘way of the imperial subject’ in daily life in the 1940s. As I argue elsewhere (Ward 2019), it was in sites such as the Tokyo Imperial Renovation Society criminal reform group and the more extensive Thought Criminal Protection and Supervision Centers after 1936 that the practice of tenkō became yoked to imperial ideology and served as a vehicle for ideological dissemination to the general population. I have focused my critique on Tsurumi’s theory of tenkō since it continues to influence intellectual histories of Japan and elsewhere (e.g. Kim 2013). However, the lack of attention to ideological mediation can be found in many of the other foundational theories of tenkō, almost all of which portray tenkō as a pivot between two, often unmediated polarities. This includes Honda Shūgo’s elaboration of tenkō as arising from the more fundamental problem of naturalizing Western thought into Japanese culture (1957: 216), Maruyama Masao’s definition of tenkō as the ‘escape’ from rigid abstract political theory back to the ‘natural’ world of ‘inclusivity’ (1961: 161),32 Yoshimoto Takaaki’s assumption that ideological conversion emerges when intellectuals confront (or, in the case of Sano and Nabeyama, fail to confront) the contradictory duality of feudal and modern elements constituting Japanese modernity (1986, 2011); to, more recently, Karatani Kōjin who argues that multiple ‘conversions’ (tenkō) occurred in the prewar period when writers and intellectuals posited an ‘other’ or ‘otherness’ (tasha/tashasei) to be internalized and/or overcome, including God in mid-Meiji Christianity and Naturalism, the ‘otherness’ of the masses (taishū) informing proletarian literature; and to later still the ‘West’ in the discourses of ‘returning to Japan’ (Nihon kaiki) and ‘overcoming modernity’ (kindai no chōkoku) (1997: 39–41). Notice that all of these theories portray tenkō as a pivot between two oppositions: e.g. West/Japan, abstract theory/ national belonging, feudalism/modernity, etc. and that the underlying objective of each is to explain something about Japan’s intellectual history.33 Nevertheless, as the multiple examples clearly indicate, preeminent postwar scholars have posed the question of tenkō in order to reflect on a variety of important questions related to Japanese modernity and political subjectivity, questions that continue to inform our study of Japanese intellectual history, literature and society today. The challenge for a new conceptual history of tenkō will be to account for the ubiquity of the term in the variety of postwar theoretical writings and to delineate the different questions that tenkō indexes – including war responsibility,

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subjectivity, the politics of writing, Japan’s modern intellectual trajectory and the sociological function of the intellectual in modern society, etc. – while also relating these postwar theoretical investments in tenkō to the evolving policies and practices of interwar tenkō.

Conclusion: the afterlives of tenkō I would like to conclude by pointing to another curious absence of tenkō similar to the one we noted in Sano and Nabeyama’s 1933 ‘Letter to our Fellow Defendants’, for I believe such absences – e.g. what is not said, who is excluded from analysis, etc. – provide promise for asking new questions related to the category of tenkō. Indeed, a new conceptual history of tenkō could focus on the displacements, shifts and absences in this history, as much as on the momentary stabilization of meaning that obtain in historical catachreses, as Barlow proposed (2004: 30). In his important contribution to the first volume of Shisō no kagaku kenkyūkai’s tenkō study (1959–62), Fujita Shōzō points out that before tenkō was used to signify a defection from communist politics, the influential Marxist theoretician Fukumoto Kazuo had used the term in a 1925 essay entitled ‘What Processes Constitute the “Change in Direction” and Which of These Tendencies Are Continuing Today? On the Marxian Principle of Proletarian Unification’ (Hōkōtenkan’ wa ikanaru shokatei o toru ka: Wareware wa ima sore no ikanaru katei o katei shitsutsu aru ka. Musansha kestugō ni kansuru Marukusuteki genri).34 In this influential essay, Fukumoto argued against the prominent socialist and once central committee member of the first Japanese Communist Party (1922–24), Yamakawa Hitoshi, who earlier had called for a ‘change in direction’ (hōkō tenkan) in the socialist movement, urging his comrades to immerse themselves in the union movement and to construct a mass political movement from the economic struggle (1925). In contrast, Fukumoto called for a theoretically adroit Marxist vanguard that could correctly assess the varying economic, political and ideological conditions in order to guide the masses in the revolutionary struggle (Sipos 2013: 86–100). In his critique, Fukumoto countered Yamakawa’s phrase, ‘change of direction’, with his own ‘necessary change in direction’ (tenkō o nasubeki) (1925: 17). Writing in the 1950s, Fujita finds in Fukumoto’s passing mention of tenkō a position from which to contrast Fukumoto’s attempt to construct a theoretically savvy Marxist vanguard in the 1920s, with the political capitulations of the JCP leadership in 1933 and their ‘return’ to national society (1959: 35–44). Brice Fauconnier’s essay in the present volume addresses the different articulations of tenkō in the 1920s and 1930s more extensively. Here I am interested in how Fukumoto’s use of tenkō is curiously forgotten after Fujita pointed it out, thus allowing tenkō to crystallize into the pejorative meaning of ‘defection’ or ‘apostasy’ as we have come to know it today. In the late 1960s and 1970s there was renewed interest in Fukumoto Kazuo’s theoretical writings from the 1920s, which led to the publication of a three-volume collection of Fukumoto’s early writings by Kobushi shobō.35 In the reprint of the 1925 essay in which Fukumoto used the term ‘tenkō’ to call for the formation of a

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Marxist vanguard, however, ‘tenkō’ was replaced by the term ‘tenkan’ (e.g. ‘tenkan o nasu beki’) (Fukumoto 1972: 148). Clearly, this edit was to safeguard Fukumoto’s legacy from the pejorative meaning of tenkō, which, by then, had been firmly established as ‘defection’. Once again we find a curious absence of tenkō where we expected to find it. Earlier we noted the paradox that Sano and Nabeyama’s infamous 1933 statement  – what has become known as their ‘conversion letter’ (tenkōsho) or ‘declaration of conversion’ (tenkō seimei) – did not in fact contain the term tenkō, thereby requiring us to consider how the term came to posthumously signify the waves of defection that followed. Now, in the 1970s, we see the custodians of Fukumoto’s legacy deliberately changing the term, even though many other reprints of the essay keep the original phrasing (e.g. Fukumoto 1965; Fukumoto 2010). These two absences, I believe, symbolize both the challenges and the continuing possibilities for us to develop a conceptual history of tenkō that can account for both tenkō’s semantic ambiguity but also its centrality across the interand postwar periods.

Notes 1 This essay expands upon questions that I also discuss in Ward (2019): chapter 3. 2 On the communist defections in Japan, see Itō (1995) and Fukunaga (1978). 3 See also the translated essays on ‘tenkō literature’ and subjectivity collected in Ueda et al. (2017). 4 All translations from Japanese are mine, unless noted otherwise. 5 On this point, see Harootunian (2001: 609). 6 Specifically, Derrida (1982: 255) contends that catachresis relates to ‘first the violent and forced abusive inscription of a sign, the imposition of a sign upon a meaning which did not yet have its own proper sign in language. So much so that there is no substitution here, no transport of proper signs, but rather the irruptive extension of a sign proper to an idea, a meaning, deprived of their signifier. A “secondary” original’. My understanding of catachresis in its deconstructive and postcolonial iterations has been informed by the succinct summary provided in Hawthorne and van Klinken (2013). 7 In this way, Barlow’s notion of catachresis contrasts to the practice of Reinhart Koselleck’s (2002) ‘conceptual history’ (Begriffsgeschichte), in which concepts constitute a parallel register to, and thus serve as unmediated reflections of, social experience. For an insightful discussion of the limits of Koselleck’s conceptual history as a methodology, see Müller (2014). 8 For the JCP’s reaction to the Sano–Nabeyama statement, see Sekki (Red Flag), June 16, July 1, and July 11, 1933 editions. 9 The first newspaper reports on Sano and Nabeyama’s ‘reassessment’ were in the morning editions on June 10. The letter was first published in its entirety in the July 1933 issue of the journal Kaizō and again in August in Chūō kōron (Central Review). See Itō (1995: 139–40). For a biographical recollection about how the letter was distributed in jail by procurators, see Hayashida (1986). 10 According to an article in the Asahi shinbun, authorities distributed the letter to 600 detained JCP members on June 13. Then, on June 15, procurator Hirata Isao and chief procurator Miyagi Chōgorō met with Sano and Nabeyama at Ichigaya Prison in order to assess the situation amongst JCP members. (‘Tenkō dōi no kiun, jochō ni noridasu’ [Encouraging the Trend to Convert]), Asahi shinbun (June 15 1933, evening edition, 2). Similarly, Chaplain Fujii Eshō published a series of articles in the June 14, 15 and 17 editions of the morning Yomiuri shinbun asking, ‘How did Sano Manabu and the Others Convert?’ (‘Ika ni shite Sano Manabu-shira wa tenkō shita ka’).

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11 Patricia Steinhoff (1991: 6) calculates that, by the end of July, 548 other detained communists – 133 convicted JCP members and 415 of those awaiting trial – had formally defected from the party, a percentage of 31 per cent (548) of the 1,762 communists still in custody. Okudaira (2006: 155) confirms this number. Ushiomi Toshikata (1977: 100) cites a 1936 report that states that 73 per cent of those indicted under the Peace Preservation Law had committed tenkō by 1936. 12 Itō (1995) chapter five; Nakazawa (2012: 141–4). These conversions, combined with continued police repression, eliminated the JCP as an organization and extinguished any hope of its reformation. George Beckmann and Okubo Genji (1969: 237–8, 239–53) date the organizational death of the JCP with arrests that occurred in the autumn of 1932. 13 Sano Manabu and Nabeyama Sadachika, ‘Kinpaku seru naigai jōsei to Nihon minzoku oyobi sono rōdōsha kaikyū sensō oyobi naibu kaikaku no sekkin o mae ni shite komintān oyobi Nihon kyōsantō o jiko hihan suru’ (The Intensifying Domestic and International Conditions, the Japanese People and the Working-Class: Anticipating the Coming War and Domestic Renovation, A Self-Critique of the Comintern and Japanese Communist Party) in Shihōshō gyōkeikyoku (ed.) Shisō shiryō (May 1933). This rare document is a hand-copied report circulated to prisons throughout Japan as ‘Useful Materials for Thought Guidance’ (Shisō kyōka no kōzairyō). This document contains both Sano and Nabeyama’s longer explanation of their critique (pp. 1–118), as well as the letter to their fellow defendants (pp. 119–132). 14 There are debates as to the extent to which the authorities influenced the wording of this document. For a description of how Sano and Nabeyama came to draft this letter, see Nakano (1933). Honda Shūgo has argued (1957) that Sano and Nabeyama’s letter bears the mark of state pressure. However, Yoshimoto Takaaki disagrees with Honda and argues that he believes ‘the intellectual content of the statement to be independent of the process that created it’ (2011: 103). 15 For example, a headline in the June 10, 1933 morning edition of the Yomiuri shinbun declared that Sano and Nabeyama had ‘discarded communism and converted to fascism’ (fassho ni tenkō). 16 Earlier, the most common term used by officials to signify a communist’s defection or apostasy was ‘repentance’(kaishun). See Okudaira (2006: 156–7). 17 Regulation No. 2006 ‘Shisōhannin ni taisuru ryūho shobun toriatsukai kitei’ (Guidelines for Administering Charges Withheld for Thought Criminals) (December  26, 1932), reprinted in Ogino (1996: 541–2, vol. 1). 18 See: ‘Tenkō shisōhannin ni hogo gakari shinsetsu: Shihōkan kaigi ni tōshin’ (New Policy for Rehabilitating Converted Thought Criminals; Report Submitted to Meeting of Justice Officials), Yomiuri shinbun, evening edition, May 23, 1933, 2. 19 See, for example Kobayashi (1933). The name Hogo jihō was translated into English as Aid and Guidance: The Bulletin of the Central Ex-Prisoners’ Aid Association of Japan. 20 On Hirata Isao’s early attempts to have communists defect from the JCP, see Itō (1994). On Hirata and Fujii’s contributions to engineering and sustaining the tenkō phenomenon in the 1930s, see Ward (2019). 21 On Sano and Nabeyama’s ‘socialism-in-one country’, see Sano and Nabeyama (1934); also Hoston (1985) and (1990). 22 The record for this event is published as ‘Shisōhan ni kansuru hogo jigyō kōshūkai’ (Symposium on the Rehabilitation of Thought Criminals), in Hogo jihō 17: 7 (July 1933): 51–65. 23 The following discussion derives from Ward (2019): chapters 4 and 5. 24 On this system, see Okudaira (1979). 25 According to one detainee (Matsumoto 1986: 174–5), detainees were required to study the Ministry of Education’s infamous text, Fundamental Principles of the Kokutai (Monbushō 1937) while they contemplated ‘converting’ and were given their own personal copy upon parole. For an account of daily life inside a Preventative Detention Center, see Tsuchiya (1988).

Ideological conversion  19

26 Kobayashi (1932: 75, 172, 161, 150, 159, respectively). These are just a few of the terms that Kobayashi uses throughout the text to signify his conversion process. 27 See the biographical sketches in Saotome (1933: 4–6). 28 A biographical sketch of Kojima notes that she joined the movement as a student, was arrested and was sent to Ichigaya Prison. Upon converting, her sentence was suspended, and she was released from prison. She married and was living in Akita Prefecture at the time. See Saotome (1933: 4). 29 For an overview of these debates, see Koschmann (1996). 30 On the Science of Thought, see Bronson (2016). 31 Later, Tsurumi published an essay (2001) in which he admitted that he and the Shisō no kagaku kenkyūkai failed to take into consideration the particular circumstances of the Japanese Communist Party in the 1930s. 32 I have adapted this translation from Dorsey (2007: 472). 33 Drawing upon Nietzsche’s idea of the ‘will to truth’, James Dorsey (2007: 465–6) attempts a similar critique of the binary logic informing conventional theories of tenkō. 34 Originally published in the journal Marukusushugi 3: 4 (October 1925): 1–35. Written under the pen name Hōjō Ichio. 35 Fukumoto, K. Fukumoto Kazuo Shoki chosakushū (Early Writings of Fukumoto Kazuo), vol. 3 (Tokyo: Kobushi shobō, 1972).

References Barlow, T. (2004) The Question of Women in Chinese Feminism, Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Barshay, A. (1988) State and Intellectual in Imperial Japan: The Public Man in Crisis, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Beckmann, G. & Okubo, G. (1969) The Japanese Communist Party, 1922–1945, Stanford: Stanford University Press. Bronson, A. (2016) One Hundred Million Philosophers: Science of Thought and the Culture of Democracy in Postwar Japan, Honolulu: University of Hawaiʽi Press. Derrida, J. (1982) ‘White Mythology: Metaphor in the Text of Philosophy’, in Bass, A. (trans.) Margins of Philosophy, Brighton: Harvester Press, 207–29. Dorsey, J. (2007) ‘From Ideological Literature to a Literary Ideology: “Conversion” in Wartime Japan’, in Washburn, D. & Reinhart, A. (eds.) Converting Cultures: Religion, Ideology and Transformations of Modernity, Leiden: Brill, 465–83. Fujii, E. (1933) ‘Ika ni shite Sano Manabu-shi-ra wa tenkō shita ka’ (How Sano Manabu and the Others Committed Tenkō), in Yomiuri shinbun (14–17 June). Fujita, S. (1959) ‘Shōwa hachi-nen o chūshin to suru tenkō no jōkyō’ (The Circumstances of tenkō Centering on 1933), in Shisō no kagaku kenkyūkai (ed.) tenkō, vol. 1, Tokyo: Heibonsha, 33–65. Fujita, S. (1997) Fujita Shōzō chosakushū 2: “tenkō” no shisōshiteki kenkyū (The Works of Fujita Shōzō, 2: An Intellectual History Study of tenkō), Tokyo: Misuzu shobō. Fukumoto, K. (1925) ‘ “Hōkōtenkan” wa ikanaru shokatei o toru ka: Wareware wa ima sore no ikanaru katei o katei shitsutsu aru ka. Musansha ketsugō ni kansuru Marukusuteki genri’ (What Processes Constitute the ‘Change in Direction’ and Which of These Tendencies Are Continuing Today? On the Marxian Principle of Proletarian Unification), in Marukusushugi 3: 4 (October), 1–35. Fukumoto, K. (1965) ‘ “Hōkōtenkan” wa ikanaru shokatei o toru ka’ (What Processes Constitute the ‘Change in Direction’?), reprinted in Takeuchi, Y. (ed.) Gendai Nihon shisō taikei: Marukishizumu 2 (Survey of Modern Japanese Ideology: Marxism 2), Tokyo: Chikuma shobō, 61–87.

20  Max Ward

Fukumoto, K. (1972) ‘ “Hōkōtenkan” wa ikanaru shokatei o toru ka: Wareware wa ima sore no ikanaru katei o katei shitsutsu aru ka. Musansha kestugō ni kansuru Marukusuteki genri’ (What Processes Constitute the ‘Change in Direction’ and Which of These Tendencies Are Continuing Today? On the Marxian Principle of Proletarian Unification), in Fukumoto Kazuo shoki chosakushū (The Early Works of Fukumoto Kazuo), vol. 3, Tokyo: Kobushi shobō. Fukumoto, K. (2010) ‘ “Hōkōtenkan” wa ikanaru shokatei o toru ka: Wareware wa ima sore no ikanaru katei o katei shitsutsu aru ka. Musansha kestugō ni kansuru Marukusuteki genri’ (What Processes Constitute the ‘Change in Direction’ and Which of These Tendencies Are Continuing Today? On the Marxian Principle of Proletarian Unification), in Fukumoto Kazuo chosakushū: Marukusu shugi no rironteki kenkyū I (Fukumoto Kazuo Collection: Marxist Theoretical Research), vol. 1, Tokyo: Kobushi shobō. Fukunaga, M. (1978) Kyōsantōin no tenkō to tennōsei (The tenkō of Communist Party Members and the Emperor System), Tokyo: Sanichi shobō. Harootunian, H. (2001) ‘Hirohito Redux’, in Critical Asian Studies 33: 4, 609–36. Hawthorne, S. & van Klinken, A. (eds.) (2013) ‘Catachresis: Religions, Gender and Postcoloniality’, in Religion and Gender 3: 2, 207–71. Hayashida, S. (1986) ‘tenkō būmu’ (The tenkō Boom), in Kazahaya, Y. (ed.) Gokuchū no Shōwashi: Toyotama keimusho (A History of Prisons in Shōwa Japan: Toyotama Prison), Tokyo: Aoki shoten, 102–6. Hirata, I. (1934) ‘Kyōsantōin no tenkō ni tsuite’ (On the tenkō of Communist Party Members), mimeograph of lecture delivered on 8 February  1934. Archived at the Ōhara Institute for Social Research, Hōsei University, Tokyo. Honda, S. (1957) tenkō bungakuron (On tenkō Literature), Tokyo: Miraisha. Hong, J. (2011) Senjiki Chōsen no tenkōsha-tachi: Teikoku/shokuminchi no tōgō to kiretsu (Wartime Korean tenkōsha: The Integration and Fissures of Empire/Colony), Tokyo: Yūshisha. Hoston, G. (1985) ‘Emperor, Nation and the Transformation of Marxism to National Socialism in Prewar Japan: The Case of Sano Manabu’, in Studies in Comparative Communism 18: 1 (Spring), 25–47. Hoston, G. (1990) ‘Ikkoku shakai-shugi: Sano Manabu and the Limits of Marxism as Cultural Criticism’, in Rimer, J. T. (ed.) Culture and Identity: Japanese Intellectuals During the Interwar Years, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 168–86. Itō, A. (1994) ‘Tenkō mondai no ichi kōsatsu: Nihon kyōsantō rōdōsha-ha to Hirata Isao’ (A Consideration of the tenkō Question: The Japanese Communisty Party Labour Faction and Hirata Isao), in Chiba kōgyō daigaku kenkyū hōkoku 31 (February), 29–41. Itō, A. (1995) tenkō to tennōsei: Nihonkyōsanshugi undō no 1930-nendai (tenkō and the Emperor System: The Japanese Communist Party Movement in the 1930s), Tokyo: Keisō shobō. Karatani, K. (1997) ‘Kindai Nihon no hihyō: Shōwa zenki’ (Modern Japanese Critique: First Half of the Shōwa Period), in Karatani, K. (ed.) Kindai Nihon no hihyō 1: Shōwa hen [jō] (Modern Japanese Critique 1: The Shōwa Period, Part 1), Tokyo: Iwanami shoten, 13–44. Kim, K. (2013) ‘Japanese Assimilation Policy and Thought Conversion in Colonial Korea’, in Lee, Hon Yung, Ha, Yong Chool  & Sorensen, Clark W. (eds.) Colonial Rule and Social Change in Korea, 1910–1945, Seattle and London: University of Washington Press (Center for Korean Studies Publication), 206–33. Kobayashi, M. (Ono Yōichi, pseud.) (1932) Kyōsantō o dassuru made (Until I Left the Communist Party), Tokyo: Daidōsha. Kobayashi, M. (1933) ‘Shisōhan no hogo o ika ni subeki ya: Teikoku kōshinkai ni okeru jikken ni motozuite’ (How to Rehabilitate Thought Criminals: Based on the Experiments of the Imperial Renovation Society), Hogo jihō 17: 6 (June), 16–24.

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Kobayashi, M. (ed.) (1935) Tenkōsha no shisō to seikatsu (The Thoughts and Lives of tenkōsha), Tokyo: Daidōsha. Kodansha (ed.) (1983) Kodansha Encyclopedia of Japan, vol. 8, Tokyo: Kodansha. Kojima, Y. (1933) ‘Daihi no ote ni sugaru made’ (Before Receiving Buddha’s Grace), in Saotome, Y. (ed.) Tenkōsha no shuki (The Diary of tenkōsha), Tokyo: Daidōsha, 43–73. Koschmann, V. (1996) Revolution and Subjectivity in Postwar Japan, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Koselleck, R. (2002) ‘Social History and Conceptual History’, in Pesner, Todd, Behnke, Kerstin & Welge, Jobst (trans.) The Practice of Conceptual History: Timing History, Spacing Concepts, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 20–37. Lin, S. (1993) Nakano Shigeharu: Renzoku suru tenkō (Nakano Shigeharu: Ongoing tenkō), Tokyo: Yagi shoten. Maruyama, M. (1961) Nihon no shisō (Japanese Thought), Tokyo: Iwanami shinsho. Matsuda, T. (1997) ‘Shokuminchi makki Chōsen ni okeru tenkōsha no undō: Kang Yŏngsŏk to Nihon kokutai-gaku tōa renmei undō’ (The Korean tenkōsha Movement at the End of the Colonial Period: Kang Yŏng-sŏk, National Essence Studies and the East Asia Federation Movement), in Kyōtō Daigaku Jinbun kagaku kenkyūsho (ed.) Jinbun gakuhō 79 (March), 131–61. Matsumoto, K. (1986) ‘Tōkyō yobō kōkinsho no kaisō’ (Reflections on the Tokyo Preventative Detention Centre), in Kazahaya, Y. (ed.) Gokuchū no Shōwa-shi: Toyotama keimusho (A History of Prisons in Shōwa Japan: Toyotama Prison), Tokyo: Aoki shoten, 165–202. Monbushō (ed.) (1937) Kokutai no hongi (Fundamental Principles of the Kokutai), Tokyo: Monbushō. Moriyama, T. (1937) Shisōhan hogo kansatsu-hō kaisetsu (An Explanation of the Thought Criminal Protection and Supervision Law), Tokyo: Shōkadō shoten. Müller, J. (2014) ‘On Conceptual History’, in McMahon, D. & Moyn, S. (eds.) Rethinking Modern European Intellectual History, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 74–93. Nabeyama, S. (1990) ‘tenkō o megutte’ (Concerning tenkō), in Takashi, Itō (ed.) Kataritsugu Shōwa-shi (Oral Histories of the Shōwa Period), vol. 1, Tokyo: Asahi bunko, 209–61. Nakano, S. (1933) ‘Sano, Nabeyama tenkō no shinsō’ (The Truth About Sano and Nabeyama’s Tenkō), in Kaizo (July), 200–4. Nakazawa, S. (2012) Chianijihō: Naze seitō seiji wa ‘akuhō’ o unda ka (The Peace Preservation Law: Why Did Party Government Produce a “Bad Law”?), Tokyo: Chūkō shinsho. Ogino, F. (ed.) (1996) Chianijihō kankei shiryōshū (Collection of Documents Related to the Peace Preservation Law), vol. 4, Tokyo: Shin Nihon shuppansha. Ogino, F. (2000) Shisō kenji (Thought Procurators), Tokyo: Iwanami. Okudaira, Y. (1973) ‘Some Preparatory Notes for the Study of the Peace Preservation Law in Pre-War Japan’, in Annals of the Institute of Social Science, vol. 14, Tokyo: The Institute of Social Science, University of Tokyo, 49–69. Okudaira, Y. (1979) ‘Chianijihō ni okeru yobō kōkin’ (Preventative Detention Within the Peace Preservation Law), in Tokyo Daigaku shakai kagaku kenkyūsho (ed.) Fashizumuki no kokka to shakai 4: Senji Nihon no hōtaisei (State and Society in the Fascist Period, 4: The Legal System of Wartime Japan), Tokyo: Tokyo Daigaku shuppansha, 165–229. Okudaira, Y. (2006) Chianijihō shōshi (A Short History of the Peace Preservation Law), new edition, Tokyo: Iwanami shoten. Sano, M. & Nabeyama, S. (eds.) (1934) Nihonkyōsantō oyobi komintaan hihan: ikkoku shakaishugi ni tsuite (A Critique of the Japanese Communist Party and Comintern: On Socialism-in-One-Country), Tokyo: Musansha.

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Sano, M. & Nabeyama, S. (1959) ‘Kyōdō hikoku dōshi ni tsuguru sho’ (A Letter to Our Fellow Defendants; 1933), reprinted in Sano, M. (ed.) Sano Manabu chosakushū (The Writings of Sano Manabu), vol. 1, Tokyo: Sano Manabu chosakushū kankōkai, 3–20. Sano, M.  & Nabeyama, S. (2005) ‘A Letter to Our Fellow Defendants’, in de Bary, W., Gluck, C.  & Tiedemann, A. (eds.) Barshay, Andrew  & Freire, Carl (trans.) Sources of Japanese Tradition, 2nd Edition, vol. 2: 1600 to 2000, New York: Columbia University Press, 940–7. Saotome, Y. (ed.) (1933) Tenkōsha no shuki (tenkōsha Diaries), Tokyo: Daidōsha. Shigeto, Y. (2014) ‘tenkō and Writing: The Case of Nakano Shigeharu’, in Positions: East Asia Cultures Critique 22: 2 (Spring), 517–40. Shisō no kagaku kenkyūkai (ed.) (1959–62) Kyōdō kenkyū: tenkō (Collective Research: tenkō), vol. 3, Tokyo: Heibonsha. Silverberg, M. (1990) Changing Song: The Marxist Manifestos of Nakano Shigeharu, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Sipos, G. (2013) The Literature of Political Conversion (tenkō) of Japan, PhD dissertation, University of Chicago, Department of East Asian Languages and Civilizations, Chicago. Spivak, G. (1990) ‘Poststructuralism, Marginality, Postcoloniality and Value’, in Collier, P. & Geyer-Ryan, H. (eds.) Literary Theory Today, Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 219–44. Steinhoff, P. (1991) tenkō: Ideology and Societal Integration in Prewar Japan, New York and London: Garland Publishing. Takeuchi, Y. (2005) ‘What Is Modernity? (The Case of Japan and China) (1948)’, in Calichman, Richard F. (trans.) What Is Modernity? Writings of Takeuchi Yoshimi, New York: Columbia University Press, 53–81. Tobe, H. (2006) ‘Tenkōron no senji to sengo’ (Wartime and Postwar Theories of tenkō), in Kurosawa, A. et al. (eds.) Iwanami kōza: Ajia-Taiheiyō sensō (Iwanami Lectures: The Asia Pacific War), vol. 3, Tokyo: Iwanami shoten, 307–44. Tsuchiya, S. (1988) Yobō kōkin-sho (Preventative Detention Centres), Tokyo: Banseisha. Tsurumi, K. (1970) Social Change and the Individual: Japan Before and After Defeat in World War II, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Tsurumi, S. (1959) ‘tenkō no kyōdō kenkyū ni tsuite’ (On the Collective Research into tenkō), in Shisō no kagaku kenkyūkai (ed.) Kyōdō kenkyū: tenkō (Collective Research: tenkō), vol. 1, Tokyo: Heibonsha, 1–27. Tsurumi, S. (1986) An Intellectual History of Wartime Japan, 1931–1945, London: KPI. Tsurumi S. (2001) ‘Kokumin to iu katamari ni umekomarete’ (Buried within the Mass called the Nation), in Tsurumi S. et al. (eds.) Tenkō sairon (Reconsidering tenkō), Tokyo: Heibonsha, 7–30. Ueda, A. et al. (eds.) (2017) The Politics and Literature Debate in Postwar Japanese Criticism, 1945–1952, Lanham, MD: Lexington Books. Ushiomi, T. (1977) Chianijihō (The Peace Preservation Law), Tokyo: Iwanami shoten. Ward, M. (2019) Thought Crime: Ideology and State Power in Interwar Japan, Durham NC: Duke University Press. Yoshimoto, T. (1986) ‘Tenkōron’ (On tenkō; 1958), in Yoshimoto Takaaki zenshūsen, vol. 3: Seiji shisō (Selected Works of Yoshimoto Takaaki, vol. 3: Political Thought), Tokyo: Daiwa shobō, 9–34. Yoshimoto, T. (2011) ‘On tenkō, or Ideological Conversion’, in Levy, I. (ed.) Wake, Hisaaki (trans.) Translation in Modern Japan, London and New York: Routledge, 102–21.

2 THE HISTORICAL ORIGINS OF TENKŌ AS AN INTELLECTUAL AND SOCIAL ISSUE Marxism – thought control – media Brice Fauconnier1

Introduction The multiple usages of the term tenkō, which in its etymological and everyday sense simply refers to a change of direction or orientation,2 are probably at the root of the many attempts to define tenkō conceptually. This question of how to characterize tenkō has led to diverse approaches: as an individual volte-face caused by a psychological gap or a collective lack of cohesive thought; as a historical repetition or cyclical iteration; as a sociological (re)integration into the group after an initial rejection; as an effect induced by so-called imported thought (such as Marxism); as a return to ‘real Japanese values’ or identity, to cite but a few. However, although these attempts to interpret tenkō (tenkō-ron)3 have offered valuable interpretations of the ideological forms of tenkō, none of them identify its historical origins as an intellectual and social issue. In other words, they fail to clarify the process that led the term tenkō to refer to specific issues and debates distinct from its casual everyday connotations from the early 1930s until the most recent conceptual definitions. This study intends to show how particular phenomena referred to as tenkō became issues in a historical context and how the term evolved depending on the groups involved. To this end, I shall detail three levels through which tenkō became a notable theme in Japan, both socially and intellectually: 1 The theoretical Marxists’ internal debates (1922–35) about the changes of strategy for revolutionary action, with particular focus on the years 1922–26, when the term tenkō was first used with its political connotation. 2 The implementation of institutions devoted to thought control (1925–45) which analyzed Marxist testimonies and reinterpreted Marxist issues and terminology of connotation as ideological crimes (shisō-han). This had tremendous repercussions even on postwar interpretations.

24  Brice Fauconnier

3

The media coverage (late 1920s to 1941, with a peak in 1933), manipulated by these institutions, which diffused and amplified the ideological connotations of tenkō as an abnormal social phenomenon which needed to be ‘corrected’.

These three levels represent the necessary basis for postwar studies of tenkō in Japanese and English. Lacking one of these levels, tenkō would not have become such an important issue, particularly between the late 1950s to the late 1970s. Besides, it would probably not have led to other, more recent developments in research, including the present study.

The ‘Marxist Discursive Space’: theory and its application to a changing reality by Yamakawa Hitoshi and Fukumoto Kazuo The first definition: Yamakawa Hitoshi’s call for a complete change of course for the proletarian movement The question of the adaptation of theory to historical and social circumstances began with Marx and Engels themselves, through their struggle on two fronts: philosophical/economic critique and the organization of a real proletarian movement. This had become a pressing necessity for Lenin, Trotsky and others, since they interpreted World War I  as a new step towards (inevitable) revolution. In Japan, so-called ‘veteran socialists’ (kosan shakaishugisha),4 such as Yamakawa Hitoshi (1880–1958), were involved in early ‘socialist’ and unionist activities from the late nineteenth century. But they became particularly sensitive to the direction assumed by the Russian revolution for two particular reasons: the long experience of repression (including arrests) of ‘socialists’ and the labour movement, even before the ‘High Treason Incident’ of 1911; and opposition to anarcho-syndicalists, of which the most famous, Ōsugi Sakae (1885–1923), concerned himself with the organization of a new proletarian movement and revolutionary struggle tactics (Ōkubo & Miyazaki 2005). The success of the Russian Revolution, the creation of the Comintern in 1919 and Soviet contacts with Japanese Marxists, including Ōsugi,5 seemed to confirm Yamakawa’s pro-Bolshevik position of achieving three goals: supporting a strong centralism (against anarchist federalism); developing a political lead for the struggle in the field; and creating a rallying slogan. Yamakawa’s 1922 text, Musan kaikyū no hōkō tenkan (A Change of Course for the Proletarian Movement), first published in the journal Zen’ei in July/August 1922,6 can be considered as his first call for a proletarian united organization and the very first Japanese attempt at the formulation of these issues by groups and individuals professing Marxism in its broad sense (Yamakawa 1967: 336–45, vol. IV). In this respect, the text addresses what was already a common discursive space focused on all facets of Marxist tradition, through translations, discussions and disagreements concerning political action. The text is short, its style close to Lenin’s calls in Our Program (1899) and even closer to his What Is to Be Done? (1902). The content is simple: it is a call to ‘go to the masses’ (taishū no naka e) (ibid.: 342–5, vol. IX) in

Tenkō as an intellectual and social issue  25

the form of a self-critical assessment of the old socialist, elitist (and too theoretically oriented) movement, its internal oppositions and its short (and failed) history hitherto. Suppression of capitalism remains the objective;7 but, since it does not offer a detailed programme for a future political party, its general terms and pragmatic emphasis became an obvious rallying point for many leftists. Yamakawa’s ‘hōkō tenkan’ (literally change of direction/orientation) led to the formation of the first (illegal) bureau of the Japanese Communist Party in July 1922, a formation encouraged by the Comintern. Nevertheless, apparently in contradiction to his 1922 stance, from February 1924, Yamakawa urged the dissolution of the Party in the face of opposition from many party members. While he was accused of being an ‘opportunist’ (hiyorimi-shugisha) by the Comintern, this new shift follows the same logic of ‘going to the masses’ and adaptation to changing circumstances, interpreted by Yamakawa as a new historical step towards maturation of democracy in Japan (Yamakawa 1967: 281–6, vol. IV). These new circumstances include two main factors: Prime Minister Yamamoto Gonbei’s (1852–1933) statement establishing universal suffrage (October 1923) and the admission of the Japanese unions into the International Labour Organization (ILO) group within the League of Nations. The consequences for domestic political rights and the international recognition of labour encouraged Yamakawa, from the end of 1923, to give priority to the legal struggle for workers’ rights over the direct revolutionary action advocated by the Comintern. To this may be added unrest among communists and their political environment as well; for example, the first meeting of JCP members on 15 March 1923 ended without any final decision about the party’s official programme, or ‘Theses’ (especially with regard to the status of the emperor and Japan’s progress towards democracy) (Tachibana 1983: 63–7, vol. I; Beckmann & Ōkubo 1969: 67–9); the first roundup of leftists by political police (June 1923) which destabilized the small communist group that was still active; and the assassinations of Ōsugi Sakae and other union leaders during the unrest triggered by the Great Kantō earthquake in September 1923. All this left most of the Marxists uneasy. All these elements convinced Yamakawa that an illegal party (and its allegiance to a centralized structure from a foreign country) was incompatible with the progressive development of Japanese society as he interpreted it and, above all, that it could be harmful to a unified proletarian organization operating within the law. Having learnt from the failures of his early socialist experience,8 Yamakawa maintained a Marxist vision of the progress of nations through history, but he remained independent inside the Marxist discursive space. He thus relied more on the workers’ demands than on the Comintern Theses or any clandestine activities. His opposition to the Comintern’s view did not focus on the idea of historical development stages but on the means and the pace to achieving proletarian domination in Japan. Termed ‘Marxism outside the JCP’, his interpretation came to represent the bedrock of the Rōnō-ha group, the main opposition to the Kōza-ha group (which remained close to the Comintern interpretations of Japanese capitalist development) during the period 1927–37 (Hoston 1986). After 1924, the second change of policy from Yamakawa led to more profound opposition amongst Marxists concerning their theoretical analysis of Japan’s real development and the

26  Brice Fauconnier

political tactics to be pursued. At that time, the pragmatic choices of Yamakawa represented everything that Fukumoto Kazuo rejected: a fuzzy theoretical position, an abandoning of the avant-garde party and a misunderstanding of tactics. Fukumoto then rallied all the Marxists dissatisfied with ‘Yamakawa-ism’ to his side.

Fukumoto Kazuo: integral critique and the theoretical basis of the avant-garde Fukumoto Kazuo’s opposition to ‘defeatism’ was not limited to Yamakawa. What he intended was clearly to be an integral critic of Japanese socialist thought during the years 1925–7.9 Interested in socialist ideas and Marxist economic theory, he started to point out the lack of rigour and the theoretical weakness of famous university professors, such as Kawakami Hajime (1879–1946).10 He then attacked Yamakawa’s political line, stressing the need for ‘theoretical struggle’ before any practical action, meaning that a clear understanding of Marx’s theoretical (and l­ogical) works was a prerequisite to working out the objectives of any form of class struggle. This in turn constituted a new rallying cry to those opposed to dissolution of the JCP, convinced of the necessity of a centralized party whilst at the same time keen on a certain degree of independence from the Soviet Union. Moreover, Fukumoto’s important yet brief influence on Marxist debate in Japan11 was based on a profound knowledge of the history of Marxism and a thorough analysis of Marx’s Das Kapital.12 His critique focused on the gaps in translation by Japanese Marxists or famous socialist professors (primarily Kawakami Hajime) and dwelt on a specific methodological aspect of Das Kapital to illustrate his point: he thus stressed the originality and ‘scientific’ approach of Marx (opposed to classical economics and ‘vulgar socialism’) with regard to the concept of the ‘double nature of labour’. In other words, Fukumoto emphasized the fact that Marx found a problem in the nature of labour, where other scholars of the time (like David Ricardo) were sure they had found a solution. Through his readings of Marx, Engels, Lenin and Rosa Luxemburg, Fukumoto considered this point a prerequisite to any efficient revolutionary organization and, consequently, the starting point neglected by Japanese Marxists (especially Yamakawa) for the correct comprehension of theory. Such a technical discussion would have been a mere detail had it remained an epistemological issue confined to interpretation of Marx and his legacy within the Japanese discursive space; crucially, however, in representing Marx’s originality as a ‘[complete] change/reorientation of the [nature of labour] problem’ (mondai no tenkō) (Fukumoto 1994, vol. II: 135–42), Fukumoto was the first to use the term tenkō with a powerful theoretical legitimation as a basis for political action.13 This theoretical, complex interpretation by Fukumoto had a double effect. Firstly, it separated the ‘true Marxists’ (as Fukumoto and his followers saw them) from ‘socialists’ or ‘proletarians’ (including Yamakawa and Kawakami) who were unaware of Marx’s new scientific implications. And secondly, it prompted the Comintern to make a quick intervention, leading to the 1927 Theses, which criticized both Yamakawa and Fukumoto, whilst at the same time heightening divisions amongst the Marxist who continued the struggle until the 1928–9 mass arrests and thereafter (see Table 2.1).

Tenkō as an intellectual and social issue  27 TABLE 2.1  Overview of the Japanese Communist Party’s interwar evolution (1922–1936)14

Japanese communist party (JCP)

Arrests/round-ups and membership evaluation

Thesis and political programs

July 1922i Creation of the first bureau (clandestine until 1945) Central Committee (CC) is dominated by the influence of Yamakawa-ism March 1924 The bureau dissolves itself. December 1926 Creation of the second bureau The CC is dominated by the influence of ‘Fukumotoism’. March 1928–June 1929: A temporary bureau is created by Sano Manabu. July 1929 Creation of the Third Bureau Period of the ‘armed JCP’ (busō kyōsantō)ii January 1931 Recreation of the CC Period of the ‘JCP in crisis’ (hijōji kyōsantō) January 1933 A new CC created by Yamamoto Masami (?), trained by Moscow, head of the CC May 1933 Noro Eitarō (1900-1934) becomes the new head of the CC. November 1933 Miyamoto Kenji (1908–2007) becomes the new head of the CC. Spring 1935 End of JCP activities

The first bureau membership: 20–30 Membership at the end of 1922: about 50 Membership around 1923: 100 June 1923: a roundup of leftists The second bureau membership: 95–125, highest at 500 15 march 1928 and 16 april 1929: JCP decimation due to mass arrests Membership during 1929: 100, at the end of 1929: 89 Membership in early 1930: 100 July 1930: JCP dismantled by arrest of cc members Membership summer 1932: around 400 October 1932: JCP dismantled again by the arrest of cc members May 1933: arrest of Yamamoto Masami November 1933: arrest of Noro Eitarō December 1933: arrest of Miyamoto Kenji March 1935: the arrest of Hakamada Satomi (1904– 1990), the last official member

November 1922: ‘Bakunin Thesis’ (Draft of JCP Theses) are not adopted by the CC January 1926: ‘Shanghai Thesis’ are discussed in Shanghai, not adopted by the CC. March 1927: ‘Moscow Thesis’ ‘1928 Thesis’ ‘Immediate tasks of the JCP’ 1930: ‘Decisions concerning the JCP’ March 1932: ‘Kuusinen Report on Japanese Imperialism and the nature of Japanese Revolution’ ‘1932 Thesis’: Thesis on Japanese current situation and the tasks of the JCP’ 1935: ‘Call for a united JCP’ February 1936: ‘A Letter to Japanese Communists’ ( from Okano and Tanakaiii

i

ii

iii

Most of the CC formation dates are subject to doubt, due to clandestine activities, mass arrests, opposition amongst Marxists still alive after the War and official JCP records which simplified the CC discontinuity from a Soviet point of view, namely by maintaining the myth of a continuous and homogeneous struggle by the JCP. See, for example, Nihon kyōsantō no rokujū-nen 1922–1982 (Sixty Years of Japanese Communist Party), Tōkyō: Nihon kyōsantō chūō iinkai (1982). This is especially the case for the first bureau which is recounted from personal recollections. Regarding the genealogy of the first JCP, see Inumaru (1993). This term and those following in quotation marks are from Tachibana (1983), vols. 1 & 2. I shall use this independent study on the JCP because it systematically analyses the JCP changes and runs contrary to the official pro-Soviet version. Aliases of Nosaka Sanzō (1892–1993) and Yamamoto Kenzō (1895–1942), in Moscow at the time.

28  Brice Fauconnier

If the actions of the police prosecutors above all destabilized the small group interested in the formation of a new bureau of the JCP (which the discontinuation of the JCP bureaus demonstrates unambiguously), dissension amongst Marxists, from Yamakawa to Fukumoto (and afterwards Sano Manabu [1892–1953] and Nabeyama Sadachika [1901–79] with their 1933 statement), was another factor of instability that we should consider. In addition, both Comintern efforts to keep the Central Committee of the Party under its leadership by successively sending out new recruits trained in Moscow (albeit they were arrested almost immediately) and the frequent rephrasing of its analysis of rapidly changing Japanese current affairs (or Theses on Japan) were highly disruptive. In this context, in spite of its undeniable influence, the Comintern was never able to completely supervise the direction of the JCP (or the proletarian movement in Japan more generally). As Table 2.1 shows, the numbers of theses issued by the Comintern and, to a lesser extent, the multiple arguments in the various debates on Japanese capitalism are also signs of this failure. In this sense, the Comintern’s normative actions from 1922 to 1932 could be seen as a ‘continuous change of tactics’, which could be tantamount to ‘tenkō’ if, by this, we mean a blinkered policy. For their part, the authorities in charge of thought control would develop a very efficient series of measures and adapt their strategies to improve the surveillance, supervision and neutralization of leftists, wherever they might be found. On this point, it is important to add that, from 1928 to 1936, the reorganization of repression into a consistent process of control over politically and socially deviant thoughts and behaviour would transform what was a Marxist internal issue into a great (and largely overestimated) group menace for the integrity of the community and body politic. These Marxists (or ‘leftists’, as the authorities would have it) would have to be eliminated, isolated or ‘reoriented’ into becoming normal imperial subjects under a system of preventive surveillance (see Table 2.1 and Figure 2.2, as well as the section on media issues). Table 2.1 outlines the vicissitudes of the JCP, the effects of the Police Prosecutors’ strategy on each bureau and the cycle of Theses diffusion.

The system of thought control: recycling Marxist terminology as legal crimes and social deviance Implementation of systematic surveillance and the Peace Preservation Law In light of the developments shown in the previous section (and as shown in ­Figure 2.1), it is clear that it was the ‘leftists’, labelled as ‘socialist’, ‘Marxist’, ‘communist’ or simply ‘red’ (aka) in the press, who were the main targets of the monitoring authorities until the end of the 1920s. Yet the principal difference between the legal surveillance system prior to and after the Peace Preservation Law (PPL)15 was the shift from direct police repression into a systematic administrative and bureaucratic framework. In simple terms, the actions of the political police (Special

Tenkō as an intellectual and social issue  29

High[er] Police Section [SHP]), created in 1910, were efficient enough against an anarcho-terrorist menace (especially those alleged against the emperor) and unionist activities up until the time of reorganization of the ‘socialist’ movement, especially given the influence of the Russian revolution. But, from the 1910s and following the Kōtoku Shūsui Affair, Hiranuma Kiichirō (1867–1952),16 a prominent figure in the Legal Affairs Ministry (LAM, Shihōshō), began to rethink the function of the prosecutors in relation to public surveillance. Reacting to the mass prosecutions following the 1918 Rice Riots, Hiranuma launched a court reform in 1921. In 1927, the growing administrative power of the LAM vis-à-vis the Home Ministry (Naimushō), led to the creation of a prosecutors’ section specializing in ideological crime (or Ideological Crime Prosecutors [ICP]), thanks in large measure to the political support of Hiranuma. This success led to a quick review of the 25 April 1925 PPL, issued on 29 June 1928, following a thorough assessment of the huge number of accused (mainly students of prestigious universities) after the March and April mass arrests. From this period on, the authorities divided those arrested into three categories: ‘leftist’, ‘religious’ and ‘independent’. Collaboration between ICP and SHP services may sometimes have been uneasy (Tipton 1990: 106–9), but the continuous increase in arrests of leftists from 1928 to 1930 and their continuing and dramatic rise from 1931 to the middle of 1933 (see Figure 2.1), are signs that the system was working efficiently. The sudden decline from the middle of 1933 to the middle of 1934, which then continued until mid-1936, highlighted two important shifts in surveillance policy: 1 The ‘Protection and Surveillance of Ideological Crimes Law’ (shisōhan hogo kansatsu hō, PSICL)17 was adopted on 29 May  1936, thereby setting up a national network of preventive detention centres in order to re-imprison individuals suspected of ideological deviance or recidivism (even after an early release, a completed sentence or an official tenkō statement). It also allowed for the continued, quasi-indefinite imprisonment of small groups of hard-core communists still loyal to the USSR until 1945. PPL: Total Arrests per Category: 'Leftists' & 'Others' (1928–1945) 20000 15000 10000 5000 0

FIGURE 2.1 

Leftists Others Total

Peace Preservation Law: number of arrests.

Sources: Statistics compiled from Itō, T. (1983: 348), Mitchell (1976: 142), Ogino (2000: 59), Okudaira (1977: 114–17), and Shiomi (1977: 56).18

30  Brice Fauconnier Ideas, movements or groups conflicting with national polity People under surveillance

Inspection tailing

Arrest Special high police section

Interrogation (at the police station) Release Defendant brought to prosecution

Ideological crime prosecutor

Interrogation (in prison after 1937)

End of prosecution

‘deferred charges’ ryūho shobun (from March 1931 to May 1936)

Defendant charged

Charges dropped

Examination judge Public hearing Trial

Charges dismissed Defendant found guilty Non-custodial sentence

Custodial sentence

Acquittal

Judgement enforced Prison and Institutions monitoring Surveillance/ Detention of ideological Criminals

Criminal released under surveillance (after 1936)

Procedure quashed

Early release Released after sentence served

Preventive detention (after 1936)

Release from preventive detention center

Full term of surveillance period

FIGURE 2.2 

Ideological crimes control process (1925–1945).

Source: Ogino 2000: 3.

2 PPL targets were extended to other groups and individuals: ultranationalists, religious groups, ‘liberal’ intellectuals (jiyūshugisha) or indeed any public figures still critical toward the military, or whose patriotism could be considered as lukewarm, even though they may have been participating in the anti-Marxist LAM/ Home Ministry policy (see Figure 2.1).

Tenkō as an intellectual and social issue  31

As mentioned previously, the PPL-PSCIL framework was a legal system duly adopted by ‘liberal parties’ in the Diet, which included legal counsel, regular hearings and the right of appeal. However, the system encompassed a huge volume of arrests: 68,000 for 18 years, or an average of 3,600 a year. The vast majority of those arrested were identified as ‘leftist’. This accounts for a total of 64,000, with arrests peaking in 1931–3, especially in 1933 (up to 14,000), then a sudden fall to 2,000 in 1934, and thereafter to fewer than 1,000, except in 1941 (due to purges before and after Pearl Harbor). For the period between 1928 and 1936, the summer of 1933, just after the media diffusion of the Sano /Nabeyama tenkō statement (see section on media), was obviously a turning point for the ICP.19 One can identify three stages during this period: firstly, 1928–36, when only the ‘leftist’ category (the highest curve in Figure 2.1) was targeted; secondly, 1936–8, when those in the ‘religious’ category were also targeted; and thirdly, 1938–41 when this was extended to those in the ‘independent’ category (i.e. all persons and groups reluctant to support, or opposed to, the all-out war effort). This led to the final version of the PPL (issued on 15 May 1941), where these various categories are grouped together as ‘others’. This massive work of the SHP teams was launched as a matter of urgency between 1928 and the beginning of 1931, but their subsequent greater efficiency was the result of two essential elements: firstly, a number of lectures, given by famous anti-Marxist, ‘liberal’ intellectuals about theoretically abstruse Marxist discourse and Marxist political growth in East Asia, at conferences organized by the LAM and the Home Ministry in partnership with the Education Ministry.20 Secondly, there was a new perspective in the techniques of surveillance of potential ideological deviance, namely comparison and systematic analysis of legally enforced testimonies and imprisoned individuals’ notes (shuki) that could extend to several hundred handwritten pages.21 Accordingly, the characteristics of the prosecutors’ tactics (known as tenkō yūdō seisaku [guidance on tenkō policy]) can be summarized as follows. The status of the potential tenkōsha (lit. reoriented person)22 depended on the prosecutor’s decision and was kept secret. An arrest did not automatically lead to a prosecution and trial, since the ICP could hold the accused in custody at its discretion in order to make them agree to sign an official tenkō statement. This tactic was linked to the low rate of actual prosecutions compared to arrests: this averaged less than 10 per cent until 1938 and around 25 per cent until 1945, meaning that, as the volume of arrests decreased with the change of arrested groups previously mentioned, the volume of prosecutions increased. Thereafter, depending on criminal liability established by the courts, verdicts were generally lenient for inexperienced individuals, unknown unionists or proletarian group members, ranging from a few months to one to three years of forced labour rather than imprisonment, compared to the ten years maximum under the PPL (all versions). This relative leniency was balanced by severe sentences imposed on Marxist leaders or renowned artists, often increased on appeal, possibly combined with other charges and the preventive detention system after 1936, which sometimes led to (very) long sentences (ten

32  Brice Fauconnier

years or more). The rigorous selection of a few persons potentially useful to media exposure came from this pool of prisoners, e.g. Sano, Nabeyama and Kawakami (see section on media). In light of this, in those groups where there was a low rate of prosecutions (as compared to arrest numbers), a new method of categorization was introduced, dividing accused into ‘leftists’, then ‘religious fanatics’ and, finally, ‘independents’ (including ‘liberals’ of all kinds, and anti-war groups). The last two categories, especially that of ‘independents’, were subject to the same media treatment. This was the case for renowned ‘liberals’ such as Hasegawa Nyozekan (1875–1969), a neosocialist, and anti-Marxist Kawai Eijirō (1891–1944), regarded as an ‘independent’ by the authorities. Crucially, moreover, surveillance of ‘leftists’ quickly came to include an element of socialization, in addition to crude repression. This comprised a combination of three key elements: severe bureaucratic control; the threat of coercive imprisonment; and the use of arguments (to protect the individual from the harmful influence of Marxism, i.e. that which can be called a ‘guardianship rhetoric’), designed to save those exposed to such influences. The ‘withheld charges’ (ryūho shobun) administrative procedure, adopted in March 1931 but abandoned in spring 1936, is typical of the first attempts to send leftist prisoners back into the community while ensuring a degree of cooperation. This procedure led to temporarily suspended criminal charges against the tenkōsha and transferred an element of their oversight, following their release, to ‘guardian’ civil institutions such as temples, veterans’ associations, teachers or even family members.23 The ‘protection’ mission of the administrative procedure relies then, for the most part, on civil protectors who had to ensure that the tenkōsha would go straight. But at the same time, this increased the legal pressure on ‘criminals’ to effect a complete change by two means: the social discrimination suffered during the ‘reintegration’ period as one stigmatized as ‘ex-red’, and the threat of imprisonment if they did not satisfy the prosecutor’s criteria combined with use of strict monitoring implemented by the local police stations to which the tenkōsha were obliged to report.24 Eventually, after the 1936 PSCIL, the Legal Affairs and the Home Ministries resumed control of this framework in order to avoid possible recidivism and also to ensure the irreversibility of a tenkō that could have been faked, hidden by persons still under surveillance until 1936 or previously misinterpreted due to an inappropriate legal framework.25

The evolution of the criteria for tenkō by the authorities Specialists in charge of this fastidious checking of the ‘harmlessness’ of the subjects who were being considered for reintegration into society had to elaborate criteria for tenkō, primarily for leftists, then for the other groups. Two important aspects of this process (see Figure 2.2) were the hardening of the tenkō identification grid until the 1936 PSICL and its full implementation in the 1941 PPL. Simultaneously, the criteria of what constituted tenkō were refined by using vocabulary originally used by Marxists, and these were subsequently transformed to serve the objectives of

Tenkō as an intellectual and social issue  33

surveillance or repression: the definition of socially deviant activities that needed to be either broken or reoriented. In this respect, the creation of the term ‘hi-tenkōsha’ (those who resisted tenkō and remained loyal to Moscow) in December 1933 and that of ‘liberal individualism’ (jiyūshugiteki kojinshugi) in 1936 should be especially noted. Finally, it should be noted that, lexically speaking, the ‘tenkō’ issue was originally either ‘a change of [political] tactics/direction’ (hōkō tenkan) or ‘a [radical] change in raising a problem [about labour categories]’ (mondai no tenkō), a category limited to Marxists. As a result of the ideological crime prosecutor’s analysis, the term ultimately came to refer specifically to a ‘reorientation of political ideas’ (shisō tenkō). The following list shows the detailed concerns of the ICP with regard to the revolutionary action (of both leftists and of various religious groups) and what could be qualified as their future ‘tenkō potential’. The tenkō criteria grid extension evolved from the registration system implemented in 1931 into a broad definition in 1936, aiming for a complete change of behaviour as well as a psychological transformation from all the categories of subjects considered as deviant.

March 1931: Regulations concerning withheld charges for the release on probation of ideological criminals • • • • • • • •

Personality and age; Existence or otherwise of [ideological] criminal record; Record of involvement in subversive movements; Degree of consciousness [of criminality]; Strength of the resolution to commit a criminal act; Potential [criminal] activities; Opportunity to earn one’s livelihood after a reorientation of ideas; Existence or otherwise of an identified and legal person in charge of the convict. (Okudaira 1977: 140–1)

End of July 1933: First official criteria for tenkōsha typology, with examples of Marxists imprisoned •

Behavioural change of orientation: 45 defendants; 20 convicted (Kawakami Hajime’s category); • Theoretical change of orientation: 25 defendants; 8 convicted (Sano and Nabeyama’s category); • Behavioural and theoretical change of orientation: 45 defendants; 13 convicted; • Religious change of orientation: 28 defendants; 34 convicted; • Other changes of orientation: 273 defendants; 58 convicted; Defendants: 416 Convicted: 133 Total: 549 imprisoned

34  Brice Fauconnier

December 1933: ‘Classification of the State of Repentance’ 1) Tenkōsha are individuals who have given up revolutionary ideas which, on the basis of the National Polity Reform, are intended to transform the current social system by illegal means. These include: a) individuals who have undertaken to give up revolutionary ideas and to leave all social movements. b) individuals who have given up all revolutionary ideas but who intend to join a legal social movement in future. c) individuals who have given up all revolutionary ideas but are uncertain about their future involvement in legal social movements. 2) Tenkōsha ‘in preparation’ [jun tenkōsa] include: d) individuals whose revolutionary ideas have been shaken and who can be expected to give up in future. e) individuals who refuse to give up revolutionary ideas but who swear to leave all social movements in future. 3) non-tenkōsha. (Okudaira: 153)

1936: Example of ‘tenkō level’ identification grid after the PSCIL adoption: Level 1. Individuals who maintain or recognize the validity of Marxism. Level 2. Individuals completely or partly critical of Marxism, without necessarily denying the liberal-individualistic position. Level 3. Individuals who have arrived at a critique of Marxism. Level 4. Individuals now able to understand and accept completely the Japanese spirit. Level 5. Individuals at the stage of a practical self-knowledge of understanding of the Japanese spirit.26 The development of the whole system, from the first to the last version of the PPL, is shown in Figure 2.2. Still, without its diffusion via the media, or ‘mediatization’ (a neologism from the Japanese mediaka), tenkō would at this stage have been an issue limited to prosecutors and the police or to those managing convicts in the prison environment and would have remained isolated from the wider public and social debate.

Diffusion through the media: the creation of a social stigma and its continued redemption The context of media diffusion The most obvious sign of the secret preparation of the Sano–Nabeyama statement is that, prior to this, little or no interest was shown in the ideological connotation

Tenkō as an intellectual and social issue  35

of the term in daily newspapers or magazines (see Figure  2.3).27 Since the procedures and actions of the political police and prosecutors were kept secret, the mechanism of reorientation of persons suspected of ideological crimes remained hidden. In other words, what I call the ‘mediatization’ of tenkō depends, in this particular case, almost entirely on the priorities of the authorities. Still, it is important to stress many points about the relation between the controlling authorities and the media. Firstly, the term ‘media’ refers not only to newspapers or magazines, but also to any publication that dealt with tenkō as an ideological concept.28 All media were subject to legal restrictions which served the authorities’ objectives of turning supposedly dangerous political opinions into actual thought crimes, through the use of careful information filtering and selective degrees of censorship.29 Secondly, if one compares Figure 2.1 (PPL arrests in the previous section dealing with PPL implementation process) with Figure 2.3, it is evident that the curves are similar. The year 1933 marked a success for the prosecutors’ strategies and, as shown in both graphs, represented a turning point. But it must be stressed again that the targeting of ‘useful individuals’ was the main factor behind this success. This ensured the presentation of tenkō as a spectacular phenomenon or as a great transformation of the souls of famous and high-ranking individuals. In this way, awareness of a legally punished crime, the fruits of a process of repentance, or even the message of a collective ‘red’ menace surrounding an individual case were reported as existing de facto in the media, since no information was available before the official revelation, and censorship could, if necessary, silence any criticism (see the case of Sano and Nabeyama later in this chapter). From this point of view, the ‘joint statement’ of June 1933, issued by Sano and Nabeyama, represents the archetype of ‘mediatization’. It was meticulously and secretly prepared through organized meetings while the two men were in jail and then spread to other imprisoned leftists in pamphlet form as the newspapers were ‘informed’ of this scoop by the authorities. It is also relevant that Judge Miyagi Minoru (1890–1952), who presided over the trial of the two men, contributed actively to the drafting of the 1933 statement.

500 450 400 350 300 250 200 150 100 50 0

All entries

1927 1929 1931 1933 1935 1937 1939 1941 1943 1945

Ideological connotation

FIGURE 2.3  Tenkō

in the Asahi and the Yomiuri: comparing non-ideological and ideological connotations.

Sources: See note.30

36  Brice Fauconnier

The media success was therefore a result of the efficiency of the policy of tenkō guidance and the cooperation of staff at the LAM, since this joint statement convinced many leftists to sign a tenkō statement. However, it is important to note that, from the mass arrests of April 1929 until June 1933, two elements contributed to the backdrop for the statement. Firstly, two types of media coverage of ‘tenkō by reds’31 already existed prior to 1933: many articles reported on young ‘ex-reds’ welcomed by their tearful mothers upon their release from jail; these began to appear in early 1931 (cf. various articles in the Asahi and Yomiuri newspapers); at the same time, a series of ‘notes from jail’ (gokuchū-ki) by or about ‘reds’, written in a quasi-fictional, half-documentary style, were published in two general magazines, Kaizō and Chūō kōron, from the same period and continued beyond June  1933. This demonstrates that the ‘red issue’ was already relatively familiar from these large public media. Secondly, at least one group of Marxists imprisoned from spring 1929 criticized the JCP’s supposedly self-defeating line and called for a return to ‘labourers’ common sense’ as well as an abandonment of the objective of abolition of the emperor system inasmuch as this objective, considered unsuited to ‘Japanese society’, was strictly based on the model of tsarist Russia. The main figures of this group are Mizuno Shigeo (1899–1972) and Koreeda Kyōji (1904–34). Known as the rōdōsha-ha (labourer faction) or the raitō-ha (faction for [JCP] dissolution)32 by their critics, their early statements stayed within the walls of their prison cells but would be used later by the authorities to prepare the stage for 1933.

The Sano and Nabeyama joint tenkō statement as presented in the media The ‘joint statement’ is the generic name for two texts.33 The first, shorter version was disclosed in the press on 12 June 1933; the second, longer one was published in the July issues of Kaizō and Chūō kōron. What first strikes us when we compare the ‘Labourer faction’ and this statement (which was presented as a ‘defeat’ of two central committee members in the Asahi and the Yomiuri of 12 June)34 is their shared rejection of the Comintern 1927 Theses and the JCP for the two reasons just mentioned. However, the Sano–Nabeyama statement is much more organized. It is developed in a series of carefully argued points: it not only rejects the Comintern and the JCP for their isolation from Japanese workers but also accuses them of manipulating workers’ expectations and accuses the JCP of a blind submission to the Comintern’s bureaucracy. It also rejects the 1927 Theses, which not only demanded the abolition of the position of the emperor as one of the goals of the avant-garde JCP but was based on the admission that the political consciousness of the masses remained, as yet, unachieved. Against this view, the statement by Sano and Nabeyama underlined their loyalty to the imperial lineage of the Japanese ‘working class’ (rōdō kaikyū), which, undeniably, worked as cement for national cohesion. In keeping with the ‘labourer faction’, it also stressed that the Comintern Theses duplicated in Japan a pure model of tsarism. At the same time, it blamed Moscow’s call to oppose Japanese military actions in Manchuria as ‘defeatism’ and

Tenkō as an intellectual and social issue  37

argued that a war in the Far East would become necessary in time. Finally, it criticized Moscow’s views about liberation from colonization as a post-Wilson system adapted and corrupted in order to match Moscow’s priorities. In short, this statement is much more than a rehash of the views of the ‘Labourer faction’; it addresses almost all the difficulties brought about by the political action of Marxism in modern Japan and seeks to ‘resolve’ them not just through a ‘return to Japan’ (Nihon e no kaiki, as advocated by the labourer faction) but through a theoretical and historical approach to the failure of Soviet communism in East Asia and Japan.35 The main target of this criticism was the new policy imposed by Stalin in the Soviet Union, known as ‘socialism in a single country (USSR)’. This policy sought to protect and preserve the only country where a socialist revolution had supposedly succeeded in its first stages against ‘bourgeois countries’. That shift contradicted the objective of world revolution and the call to fight against countries, such as Japan, which were aggressive towards the USSR. Hence we find the accusation of ‘defeatism’ used with regard to Moscow. Sano and Nabeyama’s second point concerned the function of war in history: to them, war was a factor of progress in the capitalist development of the Far East; in other words, it was a means towards resolution of regional conflicts as the first step towards a socialist revolution in East Asia  – and could thus lead to confrontation between the Japanese leadership in East Asia and the ‘Western forces’ (notably those of the United States and Great Britain). In this respect, Japanese actions in East Asia were seen as a temporary stage of liberation (against Western colonialism and subsequent Soviet influence) in the historical development towards a future emancipation of the colonies currently subjected to Japanese military domination. This kind of legitimization of the Japanese invasion of Asia – restricted largely to Manchukuo at that time – was underpinned by two more detailed arguments in July 1933.36 Firstly, the special status of Japan, the sole country in East Asia which was not colonized, created the conditions for resistance (by military means) to ‘Western forces’. This resistance could be found everywhere, according to Sano and Nabeyama, in the ‘abilities of the vigorous Japanese workers’ as an Asian ethnic group (minzoku). Secondly, the dynamism of Japan could, in the near future, bring together other Asian workers in a great ‘socialist’ regional state which would include Japan, Manchuria and Korea. This state would be strong enough to repel these ‘Western forces’.37 It was this utopian regional state vision, combined with resistance to an outside aggression inflicted on Asian people (as an ethnic group), that represented the main reasons why the Sano–Nabeyama statement influenced many of the leftists still in jail. Furthermore, if this statement served, above all, the interests of prosecutors and officials at the LAM, at the same time it recycled the thorny aspects of Marxist debates about Japan’s capitalist development dating back to Yamakawa and linked these with various issues related to the current crisis: the ethnic group interpreted as the main independence factor towards the West (notably Europe, the United States and the USSR), the real status of the emperor, the failure of the JCP tactics with regard to labour, the discrediting of Comintern policy, Japan’s legitimacy

38  Brice Fauconnier

versus the West, etc. In this way, Sano and Nabeyama rejected the tenkō implications presented in the ‘Marxist discursive space’ as revolutionary and a subversion of the Japanese political system, while all the while using Marxist terminology inherited from Lenin and tinged with Hegelianism. As shown in Figures 2.3 and 2.4 during the summer of 1933, Sano and Nabeyama featured prominently in both the Asahi and the Yomiuri newspapers. This was followed by a sharp fall, although the journals Kaizō and Chūō kōron contributed to sustaining this ‘information bubble’.38 A ‘debate’ was then organized for Kaizō’s special column, ‘Tenkō hihyō’ (Criticism of tenkō) in July 1933. Since Sano and Nabeyama were still in prison, the ‘debate’ was strictly controlled but presented as a ‘natural exchange’ between non-imprisoned intellectuals and the two ex-­communists. The July issue of Chūō kōron is shorter, but further articles would appear in August 1933 and May 1934.39 The media disclosure of the Sano– Nabeyama statement suggests it had a double function for the authorities. Firstly, it represented the completion of the ‘guidance towards tenkō’ policy, a collective attack on imprisoned leftists and the wider spreading of the concept of a ‘red menace’ in the Japanese community. This was created by targeting two individuals, Sano and Nabeyama, well known from their public hearings in 1931 and 1932. Secondly, the trigger that induced the statement was the moment when a new level in surveillance was introduced, namely as this tactic was extended to other individuals (e.g. Kawakami Hajime and Hasegawa Nyozekan); in short, it was used as justification for the severe preventive system to monitor potential deviance. This is why Sano and Nabeyama literally disappeared from coverage in the daily media after the summer of 1933:40 by that point, they had become of little use to the authorities and were isolated from events outside the prison. Sano was released in 1943 and Nabeyama in 1940. Thereafter, their paths were typical of those followed by other Marxists leaders, as they were kept under tight surveillance after their release, while cooperating with official Asian policy organs until Japan’s defeat in 1945. In this case, as others have already indicated, the term

'Sano Manabu' & 'Nabeyama Sadachika': article numbers in

Asahi shinburn & Yomiuri shinburn (1926–1945) 200 150

Asahi

100

Yomiuri

50

Total

0

FIGURE 2.4 

Sano and Nabeyama–related articles in the Asahi and Yomiuri newspapers.

Note: The 1931 and 1932 rises correspond to press coverage of the public hearings and appeals of Sano and Nabeyama.41

Tenkō as an intellectual and social issue  39

‘information bubble’ used the preceding note is apt, since Japanese intellectuals lost any interest thereafter in the two men: tenkō as an inducement to abandon Marxism subsequently became official policy, which would then turn to new targets and usher in the 1936 PSICL and ultimately the final version of the PPL in 1941.

Conclusion The triple historical origins of the notion of tenkō indicate that it was actually a carefully manipulated phenomenon, organized by thought control specialists and amplified by the media. The postwar Occupation period seems to corroborate this fact. Firstly, the ‘non-tenkō’ category created by the ideological crime prosecutors was naturally reused by those JCP leaders still alive after their release from detention centres in 1945, not only as a sign of a stubborn faith in the Soviet Union but as proof of a unique and continuous form of ‘resistance to fascism’.42 It became an anchor for JCP legitimacy until new internal oppositions arose, especially the Cominform’s January  1950 ‘back in line’ intervention and subsequent violent activism. At the same time, the purges launched by the occupying forces (led by Supreme Commander of the Allied Forces [SCAP]) to ‘democratize’ Japan resulted in a dismantling of the Home Ministry but left most of the LAM staff untouched (except for a purge of the top ranks). The continuity of the elite in charge of the surveillance system proved a boon for both SCAP and the Japanese government as security matters became a major concern and international tensions rose. This reorientation of the entire SCAP policy due to the Cold War, warmly welcomed by the Japanese government, was the occasion of the launch of the ‘red purges’ (1949–50) and led to the reinstatement of some of the ex-Legal Affairs and Home Ministries Ideological Department staff into the newly created Special Investigation Bureau.43 This meant that, in this ‘democratized’ context and under SCAP supervision, the procedures and regulations duly applied during the ‘military’ (or ‘fascist’) period were rephrased legally and applied during this ‘democratic period’ in order to label old and new groups as ‘subversive’ or ‘anti-democratic’ and thus subject to penalization: e.g. union leaders; (legal) JCP members or leaders; strike activists; so-called troublemakers and even unproductive and antisocial individuals; in short, all those possessed of attitudes and ideas identified as ‘deviant’ or ‘improper’. The abolishment of the former apparatus for legal censorship served to liberalize the press. However, newspapers and general interest articles retained the 1930s expressions produced by thought control filters, mostly with the same connotations and referring generally to the same people. For example, here too, one finds expressions such as ‘reoriented person’ (tenkōsha), ‘non-tenkō’ (hi-tenkō) or ‘tenkō literature’ (tenkō bungaku). This does not mean that the press was unable to criticize the government, political parties or even SCAP or to uncover scandals as appropriate. But factors such as access to information, the huge number of topics to cover, the search for scoops, the continuity of ‘journalists’ clubs’ (kisha-kurabu) and, above

40  Brice Fauconnier

all, Japan’s economic situation created a number of restrictions. The example of the ‘Red purges’, launched in secret and disclosed only indirectly in the press,44 contrasts with the widely covered Tokyo Trials and demonstrates how efficient the communications strategy of SCAP and its official Japanese partners could be. Such an environment was more favourable to hard critical assessments than to objective studies, in spite of early essays on tenkō. The main systematic analysis of the tenkō phenomenon is, without doubt, Kyōdō kenkyū: tenkō (Collective Research: Tenkō), of which the first volume was published in 1959.45 Here, for the first time, the case of Sano and Nabeyama, until then either left untold as obsolete or rejected as treason after defeat, was put into perspective. At the same time, Yamakawa’s coherence and blind spots were pointed out and Fukumoto’s important role was re-evaluated (Shisō no kagaku kenkyūkai 2000). New individuals and groups, such as liberals and military personnel, were included as possible tenkōsha. Since then, numerous interpretations have tried to address the lacunae of this work or to expand on the subject. Yet the very fact that tenkō, as an ideological and political crime, became a notable issue prior to any objective research has not been seriously taken into account. Analysis of the process whereby tenkō became an ideological and political topic teaches us to be cautious about the terms used, during the 1928–45 period, to describe a phenomenon which was on the whole artificially promoted by the authorities. More importantly, without any one of the stages analysed here, tenkō would have been considered, at best, a by-product of the introduction of Marxism into Japan. In the worst-cases scenario, it is unlikely that it would have become a topic of special attention for researchers. The triumvirate of Marxism, the authorities and the media deserves to be considered as a wholly interactive process in order to comprehend the disparity in early postwar tenkō studies and the more unified form research has often taken thereafter. This aspect of the problem has hardly been addressed hitherto, a fact due not only to the authorities’ strategies at the time but also to the Marxists’ internal dissent in the pre- and postwar periods.

Abbreviations ICP: Ideological Crimes Prosecutors JCP: Japanese Communist Party LAM: Legal Affairs Ministry PPL: Peace Preservation Law PSICL: Protection and Surveillance of Ideological Crime Law SCAP: Supreme Commander of the Allied Forces SHP: Special High(er) Police

Notes 1 I wish to express my gratitude to Irena Hayter and Georges T. Sipos, and a special thank you to Mark Williams, for their comments and editing of this chapter.

Tenkō as an intellectual and social issue  41

2 The most prevalent example in Japanese dictionaries is ‘puro ni tenkō suru’ (to turn professional). ‘Non-ideological’ or casual usages of the term can also be found in the press: ‘Kiito seisan-daka kara Amerika no saisan-nan: kikai mo tenkō-su’ (Raw Silk Production Level News: Payment Difficulties in America. Even Machines to Retrain), Yomiuri shinbun (10 September 1929); ‘Chōki saitōshi ni tenkō no undo: Kōsai shika zento ichidan daka’ (Trend Reversal for Long-term Bonds: Expectations of One-point Increase in the Market), Asahi shinbun (18 February 1931). 3 There are many essays on tenkō. For each example just quoted, we can include, for the first and second examples, Takeuchi (1948) (English translation in Calichman (2005: 43–52) and Yoshimoto (2003 [1959]); for the third example, see Steinhoff (1991) and Tsurumi (1970); for the fourth example, see Maruyama (1961). For a general introduction to tenkō studies in English, see Tsurumi (1964). 4 This expression is used in Inumaru (1993). It is important to note that the term ‘socialist’ takes on broad, and even indistinct, connotations from the beginning of the twentieth century to the mid-1920s. On this point in English, see Crump (2011: 239–90). 5 The initial contact from the Comintern to a Japanese leftist was made with Katayama Sen (1859–1933) in March 1919 in the United States. Contact with Marxists in Japan was subsequently developed during summer 1920 through a Korean student of Chūō University, Yi Ch’un-suk. See Beckmann and Ōkubo (1969: 26–32; Weiner (1989: 147); Crump (2011: 147, 182–211). 6 English translation available at: www.marxists.org/subject/japan/yamakawa/change. htm, accessed 9 August 2020. 7 ‘Without the abolition of Capitalism the proletariat could not be emancipated.’ (Yamakawa 1967, vol. 2: 338). 8 Yamakawa was arrested three times prior to the High Treason Incident: in 1900 (when he received a sentence of three and a half years), 1906 (a ten-month sentence) and 1908 (a two-month sentence). He was arrested again during the 1923 police round-up, but the case was dismissed. Arrested and dismissed again in 1926, he was arrested once more in 1937, found guilty of PPL violation, released in 1939 but kept under surveillance until the end of 1945. 9 As a high school teacher of law and economics, Fukumoto was sent to the United States and Europe by the Ministry of Education. He stayed in Britain, France and Germany (where he became a member of the German Communist Party); but had to come back to Japan after being so ordered by the Ministry in 1924. 10 Kawakami was a pioneer in economic studies and influenced young Marxists at Kyoto University during his professorship. Fired in 1928 for his ‘red’ ideas, he turned to politics in the New Labour Peasant Party (Shin rōnōtō). Expelled from this party in 1930 because of his Marxist tendencies, he joined the JCP in early 1932. Arrested in January  1933 and sentenced to five years’ imprisonment, he signed a tenkō statement in prison, shortly after Sano and Nabeyama, and was expelled from the JCP. After his sentence was served in 1937, he was kept under surveillance until the end of the War. 11 Fukumoto was arrested on 17 March 1928, sentenced to ten years of imprisonment and released under surveillance on 26 April 1942, after a provisional detention period from the end of his sentence to December 1941. The delay between the December 1941 and April 1942 was due to administrative procedures. 12 ‘Keizaigaku hihan no hōhōron: Shihonron no hōhōronteki kenkyū’ (Methodology of Political Economy Criticism: A  Methodological Study of Das Kapital), in Fukumoto (1994, vol. 2: 47–282). This is a redacted version of the essay penned by Fukumoto on 29 April 1926 and published in June 1926. Fukumoto focuses here on the first volume of Das Kapital. 13 There are many occurrences of the term tenkō in Fukumoto’s writing of the time. See Fukumoto (1994: vol. II), especially chapter five, which represents the core of his argument. Fukumoto added ‘Written the 30th of September 1925’ at the end of this chapter.

42  Brice Fauconnier

14 The diagram is created from a comparison of the following studies: Beckmann and Ōkubo (1969: 49, 63, 67, 95, 125, 176, 275) (for the membership evaluation); Inumaru (1993: 176–86); Tachibana (1983: 261–4; 370–2) and biographical notices and diagrams in vol. 3; and Tanaka (1994: 22–38) (JCP historiography and membership evaluation). 15 We cannot, unfortunately, go into detail concerning the evolution of the PPL’s different texts. Nevertheless, the crimes of ‘alteration of the national polity’ and ‘denial of private property’ are well known. The extremely vague definition of ideas and actions punishable by the law has also been frequently noted. 16 Hiranuma can be described as a reactionary conservative and a key figure of ‘red’ control and repression. He was public prosecutor (1912–21), minister of justice (1922–3), prime minister (January–August 1939) and imperial private council president (sūmitsuin, between 1936–9). For biographical sketches, see Ogino (2000: 13–14) and Mitchell (1976: 46). 17 The usual English translation is Ideological Crime Probation Law. However, here the terms ‘surveillance’ and ‘protection’ are preferred, since the 1936 PSICL marked not only a period of supervision (instead of serving time in prison) but a tighter surveillance than before 1936, which could at any moment lead to incarceration in one of the district preventive detention centres. Moreover, the term ‘protection’ has a double meaning: to protect the community from a possible influence, or even a contamination, due to ideologically criminal ideas or improper behaviour; and to protect those criminals from themselves through police monitoring, incarceration and a form of repentance evaluation by the ICP. 18 Each author provides different figures! Yet the volume of arrests, legal proceedings and the general evolution of numbers of arrests are very close. Most reliable are Ogino and Okudaira, who are specialists of the ICP and the PPL versions and of the SHP, respectively. 19 The June 1933 statement of Sano and Nabeyama was considered a success for the ICP section, and most of its members were given awards. See Ogino (2000: 82–4). 20 The rapid implementation of the PPL surveillance system became possible thanks to the commitment of these Japanese intellectuals to the criticism of Marxist vocabulary during LAM Conferences. Examples include Hijikata Seibi (or Shigemi, 1890–1975, professor at Chūō University); Rōyama Masamichi (1895–1980, professor at Tokyo Imperial University); Watsuji Tetsurō (1889–1960) and Kawai Eijirō (1891–1944). Hundreds of conferences are listed in Shisō jitsumuka kaidō kōen-shū (Compilation of Conferences Given by Intellectual Professionals). (These are mostly listed in Shisō kenkyū shiryō tokushū [Documents for Research on Ideas: Special Issue], Kyoto: Tōyō bunkasha [1971–80], 99 vols. There are four volumes on the period 1933–1939, but conferences began from late 1931. For a list of the conference compilations, see Ogino [2000: 2–7]). 21 A cross-examination manual was issued by LAM for SHP and ICP sections from July 1931; see ibid.: 54. 22 The potential tenkōsha, as identified by the ICP bureau from 1928, could be held in prison incommunicado until the beginning of the actual procedure. This illegal status, used until 1931, is described as miketsushū (lit. undecided prisoner or pending prisoner), in contradistinction to kiketsushū (lit. convicted/jailed prisoner); see Okudaira (1977: 143–5). 23 This was originally implemented to unclog courts and ease the LAM budget. Suspension of the indictment procedure was issued by ICP after an official tenkō statement. ICP allowed for a temporary release of conditional prisoners on specific conditions: respecting predetermined criteria to the institution in charge of ‘guardianship’ and reporting at the local police station (from monthly to daily intervals). The checklist is long, but from it we can cite ideas and behaviour (shisō oyobi kōdō); friendship and correspondence (kōyū kankei oyobi tsūshin jōhō); family relationships and life environment (kazoku kankei

Tenkō as an intellectual and social issue  43

oyobi seikatsu jōtai); real efficiency of surveillance of the institutionalized person (mimoto hikiukenin no kantoku no jikkyō), and current state of repentance (kaishun jōkyō) (Okudaira 1977: 140–1). Note that a ‘deferred charge’ was not a suspended sentence duly decided by a judge but a period before or after any judgment, determined by the ICP section, to test the truthfulness and honesty of the tenkōsha, who could be sent back to prison at any time, either as accused (if there had been no official procedure against him) or as convicted (in the case of early release). 24 More than ‘social integration’, tenkō can be qualified in this case as a ‘relative discrimination’ by community members, since the vicissitudes of reintegration into the community considerably exceeded the integration functions. This is why most of the individuals labelled tenkōsha were employed in state-controlled bodies committed to the war effort. This was also a way for the authorities to control their activities once released (Itō 2003: 228–30). 25 The Japanese terms are ‘irreversible’ (fukagyaku) and ‘fake tenkō’ (gisō tenkō). The heads of the Home Ministry also became anxious about the reliability of tenkōsha (Okudaira 1977: 141; Ogino 2000: 62). 26 The example is from the Tokyo Center for Protection and Surveillance Committee, officially dated February 1936, in ‘Chian ijihō ihan jiken no saihan ni kansuru kenkyū’ (Studies of Repeated Offences Related to the Peace Preservation Law), in Shisō kenkyū shiryō tokushū (Documents on the Research on Ideas: Special Issue), Kyoto: Tōyō bunkasha (1971–80), no. 46: 194–5, first published internally in 1938. 27 None of the following magazines published articles about tenkō: Shisō, Bungei shunjū, Shinchō, Bungakukai, or Bungei. Ekonomisuto published only one anonymous article about Kawakami Hajime in July 1933: ‘Kawakami-shi to Ōtsuka-shi’ (Mr. Kawakami and Mr. Ōtsuka), (52–4). 28 It is not possible to detail here other publications controlled and sponsored by the ICPSHP duopoly. See Suzuki (1933) and especially Kobayashi (1935), who called for a return to religious and national values as a prerequisite for rebirth as a true individual. The radio network does not seem to have been involved in this movement. 29 Apart from the PPL system and the PSCIL from 1936, publishers, editors, journalists and any person writing in the press were subject to the Law on Paper Publications (shibunshihō), and enforcement became very severe from 1931 to 1932. Kasza (1988: 17–19) focuses on the legal basis of the 1909 law, reviewed in 1924, especially censorship prior to informal dissemination (with the consent of journalists and/or editorial offices), which was very efficient for thought control from the late 1920s to the 1940s. 30 Yoshida (2010: diagram on p. xiv); Sasaki (1999: 351). The slight rises at the end of 1937 and 1938 correspond to several noteworthy events for the Asahi and Yomiuri: the establishment of a network of preventive detention centres which re-criminalized tenkōsha, the national enthusiasm for war in China presented as tenkō to nationalism for some unions and political parties, and the ‘hunt’ for communist propaganda by the authorities to ensure community homogeneity and the full mobilization process. 31 The other term often used to name ‘reds’ in the press was more explicit: ‘the fallen’ (botsurakusha). 32 Their case was studied by Hirata Isao (1888–1943), head of the LAM Ideological Department at the time, but this was during the experimentation phase of the ‘tenkō guidance policy’. Ogino (2000: 34–8); Shimane Kiyoshi, ‘Nihon kyōsantō rōdōsha-ha: Mizuno Shigeo’ (The Japan Communist Labour Faction: Mizuno Shigeo), in Shisō no kagaku kenkyūkai (2000, vol. 1: 145–58). 33 First secret version, Tokkō geppō (June  1933), Home Minister Police Bureau Security section; first official and internal dissemination 20 July 1933, in ‘Kenkyū shiryō: Nihon kyōsantō’ (Documents for Research: The Japanese Communist Party): 89–90. 34 First publication in the press: Asahi shinbun (10 June  1933): 11; Yomiuri shinbun (10 June 1933): 7, both morning editions.

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35 The statement was treated as ‘treasonous’ by the clandestine Akahata, central organ of the Japanese Communist Party during its non-legal period. During this period, circulation of Akahata was sporadic, and print runs averaged between 200 and 1,000 copies depending on printing conditions. See Beckmann and Ōkubo 1969: 225. 36 Needless to say, neither Taiwan nor Korea were considered ‘invaded countries’ at the time, or in the Sano–Nabeyama statement. 37 Point 7 of the 12 June statement version. This vision of a fraternal regionalism in East Asia would be in tune with the reality after Pearl Harbour and during the launching of the official Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere policy (1941). 38 Monthly circulation of the leading general interest magazines is estimated to have been around 100,000 copies (Kasza 1988: 44). 39 Kaizō (July 1933), 200–15. There are five lengthy reactions from journalists, a union leader, a literary critic and the judge, Miyagi Minoru, who was involved in the preparation of the Sano–Nabeyama statement. In particular, Chūō kōron published an article in July 1933 about Kawakami Hajime. The August issue is interesting because it unveils the reactions of communists still imprisoned, all members of the second bureau (December 1926 to May 1927). Most notable are Fukumoto Kazuo and Koreeda Kyōji, one of the leaders of the ‘Labourers faction’. These short texts, in addition to the extreme control of ICP, were heavily censored with symbols such as ○, . . . . . . or ×, which is not the case with the Sano–Nabeyama statement in newspapers and magazines. 40 Another text by Sano, in the form of a ‘right to reply’, was published in Chūō kōron (May 1934): ‘Iwayuru tenkō ni tsuite’ (About so-called tenkō), 62–71, but the ‘information bubble’ had already burst. Among other noteworthy reactions we can mention Hasegawa Nyozekan, ‘Tenkō’, in Wareware (1 July  1933); Kawai Eijirō, ‘Konton taru shisō-kai’ (A Chaotic World of Ideas), in Chūō kōron (February 1934); and Miki Kiyoshi, ‘Tenkō no seikaku’ (The Character of Tenkō), in Yomiuri shinbun (29 July 1936). 41 The graphs in Figures  3 and 4 are the result of a keyword research using the CDROM versions of the Asahi and Yomiuri newspapers from 1920 to 1945 (conducted at Kyoto University and Ritsumeikan University during 2008–09). No other newspapers had extended CD-ROM versions at the time (except for Kyoto shinbun), and research on paper sources has not been possible. I kept the Asahi and Yomiuri as representative samples, but I am cautious about the limits of this sample. The most widely circulated newspaper at the time seems to have been the Tōkyō Nichinichi shinbun with more than a million copies a day for the Kantō area alone (Sasaki 1999: 351). It has been necessary to distinguish regional and national editions based on the studies mentioned in notes 26 and 29 and the sources on CD-ROM. Concerning the average daily circulation in 1933, the Asahi stood at 1,885,908 (Yoshida 2010: figure p. xiv). The Yomiuri (limited to the Kantō region at the time) had a circulation of about 250,000–300,000 copies (Sasaki 1999: 351). Unfortunately, other data are unreliable. 42 On this point, see Maruyama Masao, ‘Kindai no chishikijin’ (Intellectuals in Modern Japan), in Kōei no ichi kara – Gendai seiji no shisō to kōdō tsuiho (From a Rearguard Position – Addition to Thought and Behaviour in Contemporary Politics), Tōkyō: Miraisha, 1982, especially pp. 109–10, where Maruyama criticizes the unique ‘resistance’ on the part of the JCP at the time. 43 ‘Tokubetsu shinsa-kyoku’, created on 15 February 1948, as a department linked to the Agency of Justice (Hōmuchō). 44 The ‘red purges’ were indirectly revealed as occurring in Mitaka, Shimoyama (including a dead body, July 1949) and Matsukawa (August 1949), locations where disputes and violent action by railroad workers occurred. They were presented as attacks on SCAP security staff but were revealed in 1950 as reactions to secret and illegal purges. 45 Shisō no kagaku kenkyūkai (2000: vol. 1). (First publication January 1959, volume 2 in 1960, volume 3 in 1962). The first studies of this group were published in the journal Me (May–June 1953). The group’s journal, Shisō no kagaku, was published from 1946 to 1996.

Tenkō as an intellectual and social issue  45

References Beckmann, G.  & Ōkubo, G. (1969) The Japanese Communist Party 1922–1945, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Calichman, R. (ed.) (2005) What Is Modernity: Writings of Takeuchi Yoshimi, New York: Columbia University Press. Crump, J. (2011) The Origins of Socialist Thought in Japan, New York: Routledge. Fukumoto, K. (1994) Fukumoto Kazuo shoki chosakushū (Collection of Fukumoto Kazuo’s Early Works), vol. 5, Tokyo: Kobushi shobō. Hoston, G. (1986) Marxism and the Crisis of Development in Prewar Japan, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Inumaru, G. (1993) Daiichiji kyōsantō-shi no kenkyū zōho: Nihon kyōsantō no sōritsu (Studies on the First Communist Party, Supplement: The Creation of the Japanese Communist Party), Tokyo: Aoki shoten. Itō, A. (2003) Tenkō to tennōsei: Nihon kyōsanshugi undō no 1930-nendai (Tenkō and the Imperial System: The Japanese Communist Movement during the 1930s), Tokyo: Keisō shobō. Itō, T. (1983) Shōwa-ki no seiji (Politics during the Shōwa Period), Tokyo: Yamakawa shuppansha. Kasza, G. (1988) The State and the Mass Media in Japan, 1918–1945, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Kobayashi, M. (ed.) (1935) Tenkōsha no shisō to seikatsu (Ideas and Lives of tenkōsha), Tokyo: Daidōsha. Maruyama, M. (1961) Nihon no shisō (Japanese Ideology), Tokyo: Iwanami shinsho. Mitchell, R. (1976) Thought Control in Prewar Japan, Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Nihon kyōsantō chūō iinkai (ed.) (1982) Nihon kyōsantō no rokujū-nen, 1922–1982 (Sixty Years of the Japanese Communist Party, 1922–1982), Tokyo: Nihon kyōsantō chūō iinkai. Ogino, F. (2000) Shisō kenji (Prosecutors Specializing in Ideological Crimes), Tokyo: Iwanami shinsho. Ōkubo, K. & Miyazaki, M. (eds. & intro.) (2005) Ana-boru ronsō: Ōsugi Sakae, Yamakawa Hitoshi (The Anarcho-Bolshevik Debate: Ōsugi Sakae and Yamakawa Hitoshi), Tokyo: Dōjidaisha. Okudaira, Y. (1977) Chian ijihō shōshi (Concise History of the Peace Preservation Law), Tokyo: Chikuma shobō. Sasaki, T. (1999) Media to kenryoku (Media and Power), Tokyo: Chūōkōron shinsha. Shiomi, T. (1977) Chian ijihō (Peace Preservation Law), Tokyo: Iwanami shinsho. Shisō no kagaku kenkyūkai (eds.) (2000) Kyōdō kenkyū: tenkō (Collective Research: tenkō), 3 vols, Tokyo: Heibonsha. Steinhoff, P. (1991) ‘Tenkō’: Ideology and Societal Integration in Prewar Japan, New York: Garland Publishing. Suzuki, T. (1933) Sano Manabu tenkō no dōki to sono shinsō (Motivations and Truth about Sano Manabu’s tenkō), Tokyo: Nisshinsha. Tachibana, T. (1983) Nihon kyōsantō no kenkyū (A Study of the Japanese Communist Party), 3 vols, Tokyo: Kōdansha bunko. Takeuchi, Y. (1948) ‘Chūgoku no kindai to Nihon no kindai: Rojin o tegakari to shite’ (Chinese Modernity and Japanese Modernity: Lu Xun as Key), in Tōyō bunka kōza, Tōkyō daigaku tōyō bunka kenkyūjo-hen (November), 1–60. Tanaka, M. (1994) 1930-nendai Nihon kyōsantō shiron (Essay on the Japanese Communist Party in the 1930s), Tokyo: San’ichi shobō.

46  Brice Fauconnier

Tipton, E. (1990) The Japanese Police State: The tokkō in Interwar Japan, Honolulu: University of Hawaiʽi Press. Tsurumi, K. (1970) Social Change and the Individual: Japan Before and After Defeat in World War II, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Tsurumi, S. (1964) ‘Cooperative Research on Ideological Transformation’, in Journal of Social and Political Ideas in Japan 2: 1 (April), 54–9. Weiner, M. (1989) The Origins of the Korean Community in Japan 1910–23, Manchester: Manchester University Press. Yamakawa, H. (1967) Yamakawa Hitoshi zenshū (Yamakawa Hitoshi: Complete Works), 20 vols, Tokyo: Keisō shobō. Yoshida, N. (2010) Senji tōsei to jānarizumu (Journalism Control During the War), Kyoto: Shōwadō. Yoshimoto, T. (2003 [1959]) Machiu shoshikiron: tenkō-ron (Essay on the Gospel of Matthew: Theory of tenkō), Tokyo: Kōdansha bungei bunko.

3 TENKŌ IN KOREA Revealing the critical threshold of colonial empire Hong Jong-wook

Is Tenkō a concept unique to Japan? In postwar Japan, there was a tendency to regard the issue of tenkō merely as the surrender of socialists who were confronted with the coercion of power. This simplified understanding was further developed as a result of the formation of the ‘non-tenkō’ myth by the Japanese Communist Party. However, in the late 1950s, another understanding of tenkō emerged: it was defined in Tenkō: Kyōdō kenkyū (Collaborative Research: Tenkō), the volume produced by the Shisō no kagaku kenkyūkai group, as ‘change of thought under the coercion of power’ (Tsurumi 1959: 5). This interpretation stressed the intertwined elements of coercion and spontaneity intrinsic to the phenomenon. As a result, tenkō came to be established as a topic of study in the history of Japanese thought. In examining not only the cases of socialists, upon whom the institutionalized coercion of tenkō focused, but also those of liberals, the foundations were laid for the study of tenkō as conversion in terms of thought, in addition to conversion which formally took place within the juridical system. However, Collaborative Research: Tenkō also included many cases not directly associated with the ‘coercion of power’, leading to the problem of how to understand the relationship between the two phenomena accompanying tenkō: conversion within the juridical system and conversion in terms of thought. Around the same time, Yoshimoto Takaaki, the postwar Japanese intellectual whose work, along with Collaborative Research: Tenkō, played a central role in establishing the image of tenkō, focused on its relationship with tradition, which he understood as ‘the entirety of dominant inheritance’ (yūsei iden no sōtai) (Yoshimoto 2010: 103). Yoshimoto maintained that the greatest motivation for tenkō was the intellectuals’ isolation from the masses, who were meant to be the personifications of tradition (ibid.: 106). Based on this alternative perspective, the path was paved for the study of tenkō as conversion in terms of thought.

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It has been noted, however, that the methodology of Collaborative Research: Tenkō and particularly that of Tsurumi Shunsuke, a key figure in the project, features an absence of historicity. In relation to this point, Sumiya Mikio stressed that ‘tenkō is an entirely historical concept’ and criticized attempts to regard tenkō as a ‘change of view’ (hensetsu 変説) while overlooking the fact that it also represents a ‘betrayal of one’s cause’ (hensetsu 変節) (Sumiya 1976: 16). Sumiya maintained that, in Japan, because of the organization of society along familial lines, with the emperor at the core, society had come to be regarded as a pseudo-familial community; therefore, tenkō could be understood as a return to membership of that community (ibid.: 26). There are similarities between Sumiya’s perspective and that of Yoshimoto, who regarded tenkō as a consequence of the conflict between the Anglo-American social sciences and Japanese tradition. In these views, tenkō is regarded as a phenomenon of thought unique to Japan. The rationalism and individualism of the West are contrasted to the paternalism and groupism of Japan, and tenkō is identified as a malaise unique to Japanese society. Honda Shūgo’s observation that, unlike Europe where ideological conversions took place ‘in the name of one’s conscience’, tenkō in Japan took place ‘against one’s conscience’, can also be seen in the same light (Honda 1964: 185). Such perspectives emerged out of the intent to bring to light the pre-modern nature of tenkō and the weakness of Japanese intellectuals. However, because such analyses attempted to locate both the causes and the effects of tenkō in the distinctive elements of Japan’s society, they ultimately fell into the trap of circular logic. As such, these perspectives are also susceptible to the criticism that they lack historicity (albeit in a manner different from that of Collaborative Research: Tenkō) or indeed from the criticism of supra-historicity. Tsuji Shin’ichi (1981: 122) has argued that reflections on tenkō as a social phenomenon require an outsider’s ‘imaginative “eye” ’ which can act to mitigate Japanese society’s view of there being only one ‘absolute or homogeneous totality’. Indeed, even Tsurumi, when discussing Hashikawa Bunzō’s article on the Korean intellectual Yi Kwang-su, noted that Hashikawa’s was a perspective lacking in Japanese studies of tenkō, and he commented that ‘if Japanese intellectuals had regarded the Japanese state with the eyes of Korean intellectuals, they would not have easily converted during the fifteen years of war’ (Tsurumi 1978: 578–9). Tenkō, however, was also present in colonial Korea, where mass ideological conversions took place as a social phenomenon. If this historical fact had been sincerely acknowledged and accepted, the ‘otherness’ of the situation that arose in colonial Korea would not have been lazily used as a means of revealing the distinctive nature of the Japanese situation. It can be said that the universalist methodology proposed by Tsurumi was in fact only limited to Japan as a subject of study and therefore connected to views that focused on the uniqueness and distinctiveness of Japan.

Tenkō in the colonial empire This chapter aims to deconstruct the concept of tenkō, as envisaged in research on the history of Japanese thought, by taking into consideration the phenomenon of

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ideological conversion in colonial Korea. To do so, the question that first must be asked is whether it is appropriate to apply the concept of tenkō to colonial Korea. The starting point when considering this question is the fact that, as in the case of Japan, tenkō as conversion within the juridical system was actively adopted as one of the measures for dealing with ‘thought criminals’ in colonial Korea. As a result, numerous Korean socialists were forced to turn in pledges of conversion. It can be argued that, because tenkō was the product of the authorities’ attempts to absorb anti-establishment ideologies and movements into the establishment, there was no difference between Japan and colonial Korea in terms of this aspect of tenkō. There was, however, a difference in what tenkō entailed in terms of experience and perception. In colonial Korea, the renunciation of socialist ideology was complicated by the issue of nationalism, another ideology – or indeed an even more fundamental issue – that needed to be addressed. Therefore, in colonial Korea, to ‘convert’ also meant to become pro-Japanese; in the context of the Second SinoJapanese War (1937–45) and the policy of ‘Japan and Korea are one entity’ (naisen ittai; naesŏn ilch’e), it also implied active cooperation in the war effort. For the Japanese intellectual, to return to tradition or to return to the masses meant to become part of the establishment. On the other hand, for the intellectuals of colonial Korea, to return to the traditions of Korea or to look towards the masses became the starting point of the discovery of agency within the colonial situation – in other words, the beginnings of resistance. As such, the framework used by scholars of the history of Japanese thought (where tenkō is approached as a return to the community, and thus a natural recovery of sorts) cannot be directly applied to the situation in Korea. But this does not mean that the phenomenon of ideological conversion in colonial Korea should be approached as something different from tenkō. Rather, the definition of tenkō should be expanded to include the experience of Korean socialists and other leftists, something which has not been properly addressed in previous studies of the history of Japanese thought. This is also the reason why the issue of tenkō in Japan itself must be re-examined, alongside examples of tenkō that took place in the colonies. Initially the concept of tenkō was not easily accepted by scholars of the history of Japanese thought. Indeed, Tsurumi (1959: 1) acknowledged the feelings of humiliation that the connotations of surrender contained within the concept could engender and noted the ‘displeasure’ accompanying the adoption of the term tenkō. However, he revealed that the reason for selecting this term was the lack of other means of expressing the subtle ‘entanglement of coercion and spontaneity’. Also, according to Tsurumi, ‘in the process of establishing spontaneous agency, humiliation may be something that cannot be avoided’. In addition, Tsurumi remarked that he wished to ‘accept the pre-existing usage of tenkō and then develop new usages, thereby gradually changing the meaning of the term’ (ibid.: 1–2). Tsurumi’s way of situating the concept can provide valuable insights when attempting to deconstruct Japan-centric theorizations of tenkō through the case of colonial Korea. Another issue that must be addressed is whether it is meaningful to analyse the ideological explorations of the intellectuals of colonial Korea through the concept

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of tenkō. In this regard, Tsurumi’s theory of tenkō again offers important insights. Tsurumi stressed that ‘to relive the tenkō experience of the earlier generation is to draw energy from the deepest point of this country’s tradition of thought’, thereby clearly setting out the objectives of tenkō research. In terms of the meaning of the study of tenkō, he maintained that ‘in the one hundred years of modern history, the accumulation of tenkō experiences contains the most important vein of resources’ (ibid.: 3–4). For Tobe Hideaki (2006: 310), Collaborative Research: Tenkō, the volume edited by Tsurumi, is an attempt to construct agency through tenkō theory. In the present paper, tenkō is a focal concept in which various problems of Korea’s modern and contemporary thought are compressed; as such, the analyses of Tsurumi and his collaborators provide fruitful avenues of inquiry. However, as Tobe has stressed, due to the asymmetry existing between tenkō in Japan and tenkō in colonial Korea, studies of the latter should not simply follow the former (ibid.: 331). Collaborative Research: Tenkō represented an attempt to establish a new agency that could play a role in transforming Japanese society in the postwar period through a critique of tenkō. In the case of colonial Korea, on the other hand, attempts at the formation of such agency can be found in tenkō itself, with its entanglement of resistance and collaboration. The shadow of ideological conversion in postcolonial North and South Korea is an issue that must also be addressed. Therefore, research not only must aim to identify the differences in tenkō between the metropole and the colony but must also begin to examine tenkō as a phenomenon in Japan’s colonial empire. Efforts to explore the nature of tenkō as experienced by colonial Koreans will play a pivotal role in deconstructing the methodological and formal universality of tenkō studies that were possible when research was limited only to Japan. Such an investigation will also allow us to confront the historicity of the colonial empire.

The system of total war: class reconciliation and ethnic coordination The system of ‘total war’, actively explored in work on Japanese modern and contemporary history since the 1990s, provides plentiful insights for the study of colonial Korea in the period between 1937 and 1945. Yamanouchi Yasushi, who has played a key role in the theoretical development of this framework, proposed that the impact of total war contributed to the transition from a class society to a system society, be it communist or capitalist. In this sense he introduced a new conceptual lens for the study of modern and contemporary history. Yamanouchi demonstrated that, in the process of total war, all of society moved in the direction of maximum rationalization in order to contribute efficiently to the war effort; at the same time, ‘policies intended to make all members of society into active agents that could carry out the social functions necessary to the war effort’ were adopted (Yamanouchi 1995: 12). His arguments provided a new approach to the war that went beyond the framework of mobilization and resistance and differed from previous interpretations which had only stressed the irrational and destructive aspects

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of war. Yonetani Masafumi adopted key elements of the theory of the total war system in order to develop his concept of wartime transformation (senji henkaku), a compelling framework for explaining the cooperation of intellectuals in the war effort (Yonetani 1997). For Yonetani, the framework of wartime transformation aimed to find the possibilities of social transformation within the context of total war and could be used to interpret the process by which the desire for decolonization and anti-capitalism could lead to collaboration in the war effort. This research perspective also opened the door for new ways of approaching the tenkō of socialist intellectuals such as Ozaki Hotsumi (1901–44) and Miki Kiyoshi (1897–1945). However, one limitation of the theories of total war and wartime transformation is that they do not address the problem of the colonies. Although they stress the progress of rationalization and the emergence of agency in the metropole, they do not approach the situation of the colonies as a subject of proper analysis. As a result, the colonies remain outside the boundaries of the total war system, in the realm of non-rationality and non-agency. However, by adding modernity to the binary oppositional structure of colonialism and nationalism, a new framework for exploring colonial Korea has been proposed (Shin  & Robinson 1999). This new framework, ‘colonial modernity’, is generally applied to (but not exclusively limited to) studies of colonial Korea in the 1930s. However, it can be proposed that ‘colonial modernity’ can also be used to reinterpret Korean reality during the wartime period (1937–45). It may then also be possible to apply conceptual frameworks such as total war and wartime transformation to the entire Japanese colonial empire. In the metropole total war brought about class reconciliation, but from the perspective of the colonial empire, the system also needed to be accompanied by ethnic coordination in order to successfully mobilize resources from the colonies and other conquered regions. Miyata Setsuko has suggested that the slogan ‘Japan and Korea are one entity’ was regarded by Koreans as ‘an escape from discrimination’ in some sense, thereby providing a new avenue of thought that goes beyond the pre-existing ‘mobilization – resistance’ framework (Miyata 1982: 149). She considers how the policy of creating imperial subjects (kōminka) came to be established in association with the implementation of conscription (Miyata 1992). This is a very clear example demonstrating how the context of war could lead to social change, and it also provides important insights in relation to the theory of the total war system. If the focal points of this theory are applied to the entirety of the colonial empire, then it may be argued that the ‘unity of Japan and Korea’ was a means of transforming colonial Koreans into active agents in the total war effort of the Japanese empire – in other words, a policy of Gleichschaltung, a German term meaning ‘forcible coordination’, ‘forced uniformity’ or ‘synchronization’.1 If we consider colonial Korea within the total war system of the Japanese empire, then it becomes possible to approach the ideological conversion of Korean socialists as an attempt at a kind of wartime transformation. The Korean socialists were consistently and deeply aware of the colonial situation and therefore strove to prevail over colonial modernity through their desire for decolonization and

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anti-capitalism. Even after the process of tenkō, Korean socialists did not abandon their intentions to transform society and overcome colonial rule. They insisted on agricultural reorganization and the establishment of a controlled economy, and they also proposed the idea of the ‘coordinated unity of Japan and Korea’ (kyōwateki naisen ittai; hyŏp’wajŏk naesŏn ilch’e), which was based upon the theory of the East Asian Community (tōa kyōdōtai). Concerning these attempts, we should bear in mind the point made by Sakai Tetsuya: during the interwar period, there had been a ‘discussion about considering the empire as a mutual aid community, while making the colonies semi-independent, rather than giving them complete self-determination’ (Sakai 2004: 91). In this context, the attempt to establish Korea as an active subject, which was the intention underlying the proposal for the ‘coordinated unity of Japan and Korea’, can be understood as a response to the semi-independent strategy from the colonial side, which was linked to a series of criticisms of sovereignty after World War I.

The decline of social movements and the aporia of the anti-imperialist national unification front Shin’ganhoe (New Trunk Organization) was formed in 1927 in colonial Korea through collaboration between the socialists of the left and the nationalists of the right. However, with the adoption of a new strategy for the colonies at the Sixth Comintern Congress in 1928, which involved the dissolution of partnerships with the nationalist bourgeoisie, Shin’ganhoe lost its impetus not long after its establishment and was dissolved in 1931. The Comintern’s instruction to dissolve the Korean Communist Party (which was centred on the intelligentsia) and to strengthen involvement with the masses was issued at a time when the Great Depression brought about great hardship for workers and farmers. This led to a marked increase in social movements in colonial Korea in the years before and after 1930. However, after peaking in 1932, these social movements gradually fell into decline. Japan invaded Manchuria in 1931, but rather than making it into a colony, it established the puppet state of Manchukuo, marking the start of Japan’s new way of ‘imperialism without colony’ (Duus 1992). Manchukuo adopted the motto ‘Five Races under One Union’ (gozoku kyōwa) and established a controlled economy. In other words, Manchukuo experienced a pseudo-revolution of anti-capitalism and decolonization. This context, as well as dissatisfaction with the direction taken by the Comintern, can explain the mass conversion of Japanese communists towards a form of imperial socialism in 1933. In the early 1930s, the time when mass conversions occurred in Japan, socialists in colonial Korea also underwent a tenkō. Possible reasons for this were the systematic oppression by the authorities and the changes in the political sphere as exemplified by the establishment of Manchukuo, as well as the relative social stability following the Rural Development Movement and other policies implemented by the governor-general of Korea (Chōsen sōtokufu keimukyoku 1936: 11–2). However, other important points that must be taken

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into consideration are the facts that conversions in colonial Korea at the time were limited in number in comparison to Japan and that the nature of the conversions was mainly that of ‘restlessness and groping for answers’ (Ryokki Nihon bunka kenkyūjo 1939: 26) rather than an active transformation of beliefs. The reason for this is that there existed another significant obstacle for conversion in colonial Korea – the issue of nationalism. As the fervour of the social movements subsided, a new ‘movement for Korean studies’ (chosŏnhak undong) emerged, driven by the nationalists. The socialists were wary of the propensity towards nationalism and mysticism present in the Korean studies research of some of the nationalists. However, they did not stop at mere criticism: some socialists actively engaged in the movement with the objective of making Korean studies more materialist. A key example of this is Paek Namun’s (1894–1979) Korean Social and Economic History, published in 1933.2 In this volume, Paek proposed that Korea had experienced the stage of a slave society. This represented an attempt to demonstrate that Korean history could be understood in relation to the universal laws of development of world history, thereby criticizing the Asiatic stagnation theory of mainstream Marxist historians. The socialists’ work in Korean studies can be seen as having emerged from a selfexamination of the failure of movements that had been undertaken entirely from positions of internationalism and universalism. In other words, the new Korean studies represented an attempt to combine internationalism and nationalism in order to rescue the subject of Korea from the image of stagnation and regression and to use it as a driving force for new resistance movements. As they showed a clear understanding of the reality of colonization facing Korea at the time, as well as a will to overcome it, such attempts can be regarded as part of a process through which the theoretical framework of anti-imperialism was formulated. In other words, the Korean studies research undertaken by the socialists provided the theoretical foundation for an anti-imperialist national unification front and therefore should be understood in association with wider global movements for the formation of anti-fascist popular fronts taking place at the time. In Europe, the aim of popular front coalitions was to oppose the heightened threat of fascism included in initiatives for the defence of culture and intellectual tradition, launched by writer groups. These developments were introduced in Korea with little time lapse. Amidst the failure of proletarian arts movements as symbolized by the dissolution of the Korean Federation of Proletarian Artists (known by its Esperanto acronym KAPF), writers in colonial Korea were acutely aware of their responsibility to reconstruct and re-establish an agency for the nation. In order to fulfil this task, they came to explore new avenues, such as humanism, as well as philosophies of Bildung and morality, which had been introduced from the cultural spheres of Europe and Japan. These new trends, which strove to overcome KAPF and its focus on class, were led by writers such as Paek Ch’ŏl and Ch’oe Jaesŏ. Im Hwa, a writer who served as secretary of KAPF, maintained the need to adhere to a political position and to retain a critical stance, whilst acknowledging the problematic rigidity of the literature of the previous period. He argued that

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any interest in the ‘particularity of Korea’ or the ‘unique nature of the Korean situation’ was in itself a form of reformism (Im 1936: 4). Im’s position shares a common thread with that of Miyake Shikanosuke (1899–1982), professor at the Japan-established Keijo Imperial University in Seoul, who criticized ‘social democracy’, ‘national reformism’ and Paek Namun’s Korean Social and Economic History for ‘causing strange impulses’ to take hold of Koreans (quoted in Kim 1993: 113). In other words, Im’s position was different from that of the popular front. It is possible to argue that the illegal communist groups in Korea at the time considered adopting the position of the popular front, but this did not materialize in actual practice. Ch’oe Yongdal (1902–year of death unknown), a socialist intellectual who had been serving time in prison on account of the so-called Wonsan group incident, an anti-imperialist illegal trade union movement, pointed out the discrepancy between the position of the popular front and the reality of Korea: ‘It cannot be assumed that [the popular front] will become a reality in Korea just because it is a current international trend’ (Ch’oe 1940: 303). The key point that must be addressed when considering the viability of a popular front or a national unification front is whether the existence of a healthy nationalism and a nationalist bourgeoisie was actually possible within the colonies. As is clear from his preceding statement, Ch’oe Yongdal’s intention was to condemn the corruption of the nationalist bourgeoisie. In reality, although the formation of a national unification front was a necessity, nationalism – one of its key building blocks – was unstable. The reason for this was the colonial situation, in which neither the liberals nor the nationalists could establish themselves as main agents. When considered in association with the various attempts of the writers’ groups and Korean studies research, it can be said that the fundamental problem was the issue of whether Bildung and tradition could truly exist within the colonies and whether humanism was indeed possible there. The situation of colonial Korea was different from that of China, which was in a semi-colonized state. This difference derived mainly from the element of nationalism and the role of the nationalist bourgeoisie (Kajimura 1993). It is due to this difference that Korean society, when faced with the threat of the Second SinoJapanese War, could not establish an anti-imperialist national unification front similar to the Kuomintang–Communist Alliance in China. A colonized state was, in reality, a state in which active agency that could take up resistance was absent. This inevitably leads to the rather pessimistic question of whether resistance is indeed truly possible within the colonies.

The logic of conversion I: expectations of anti-capitalist reform The Second Sino-Japanese War brought about great change in colonial Korea. Active social movements intensified temporarily following the beginning of hostilities, based on expectations that hostilities between the Soviet Union and Japan were also imminent. However, in the face of the passivity of the Western powers

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and the Soviet Union, Japan rapidly gained control over the Chinese mainland. Consequently, hopes for a change in the international situation were soon lost, and a mass conversion of socialists took place in colonial Korea. Prior to the mid-1930s, the reasons given for conversion had mainly been ‘love of family’ or ‘regret over imprisonment’, but after the beginning of the Sino-Japanese War, justifications of a political and social nature, including ‘clearer understanding of the situation’ and ‘self-realization as a subject of the nation’ were most commonly cited (Hong 2011: 47–8). These mass conversions during the Second Sino-Japanese War may have been influenced by factors more important than the discouragement stemming from the might of the Japanese state and its army, namely, expectations of wartime transformation (i.e. that the external impetus of war would act as a motor of social change). This is the perspective shared by proponents of the total war theory. Indeed, following the start of the Sino-Japanese War, Japan’s Social Masses Party (Shakai taishūtō) suddenly changed its policy and declared its intention to participate in building ‘national unity’ (kyokoku itchi). The fact that the philosopher Tosaka Jun (1900–45), a symbol of the anti-fascist stance of the Japanese intelligentsia in the 1930s, also supported the Social Masses Party’s change of course on the grounds that ‘the given fact’ of the war had to be utilized, can be understood in this light (Yonetani 1997: 83). A change can also be observed in the position of the leftist intellectuals of colonial Korea. Kim Myŏngshik (1891–1943) was a socialist intellectual who was active as a critic in the 1920s and 1930s, one who made a considerable contribution to the early socialist movements. In the mid-1930s, he worked in materialist Korean studies and wrote about the traditions and history of Korea. After the Sino-­Japanese War broke out, Kim anticipated the Japanese government’s reform policy and stressed the need to establish a controlled economy. He stated that the role of the controlled economy was ‘to achieve justice by controlling the strong and helping the weak’ and held that the introduction of ‘official prices’ was ‘scientific’ and ‘ethical’ (Kim 1939b: 60–2). He also argued that ‘state management of land’ was necessary for the ultimate solution of agricultural problems (Kim 1939c: 29). The hopes directed at Japan’s reform policies are most dramatically expressed in the position of In Jŏngshik (1907–year of death unknown), a former member of the Korean Communist Party. He expected that the ‘anti-feudal’ policies pursued in rural areas would be strengthened to achieve efficiency in the war effort. These ideas are typical of the ‘wartime transformation’ theories. At the core of In’s vision was industrial development without the sacrifice of agriculture, otherwise known as the ‘simultaneous promotion of agriculture and industry’ (nōkō heishin). He maintained that the parallel development of agriculture and industry was unprecedented and unique to ‘our empire’ and regarded this as proof of the ‘inapplicability’ of Marxist theories to Asian society (In 1938: 30). Compared to In’s earlier position (prior to his conversion), which had adopted the idea of ‘Asiatic stagnation’ from the Japanese ‘lecture school’ (kōzaha) economists, his later stance shows a shift of emphasis from the negative characteristics of Asiatic particularity to

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its positive aspects.3 In regarded the Japanese empire as an exterior force that could liberate China and Korea, both trapped in the impasse of Asiatic particularity, and transform the vicious cycle into a virtuous one. Pak Kŭkch’ae (1904–year of death unknown) and Yun Haengjung (1904–year of death unknown), both graduates of the Faculty of Economics at Kyoto Imperial University and the key Marxist economists active in Korea at the time, published works supporting the policy of a controlled economy in Japan which they viewed as a product of World War I, which they regarded as a total war. Pak predicted that, amidst the construction of a new system which had the so-called high-level national defence state (kōdo kokubō kokka) at its core, a new ‘planned economy’ would develop out of the pre-existing ‘controlled economy’. Pak argued for the need of an economic bloc built on the basis of a new order, a bloc within which the high-level defence state would act to regulate exchange. This would provide an alternative to the free trade system which was seen as little more than a means for exploiting less developed nations (Pak 1941: 354). Yun also hoped that, although the new system still remained at the level of a controlled economy, the nationalization of the main industries would generate a transformation into a planned economy (Yun 1940: 32–6). The planned economy that Pak and Yun discussed was a socialist economy. Their positions were based on the view that a relatively peaceful transformation from a simple controlled economy into a more complex planned economy would take place in the process of undertaking total war.

The logic of conversion II: the ‘coordinated unity of Japan and Korea’ The notion of ‘Japan and Korea are one entity’ was the central problem for colonial Koreans faced with conversion. Nationalism was an unacknowledged major concern, the proverbial elephant in the room, and the logic of ‘colonial modernization’ in itself was not enough to bring about the active participation of Koreans in the total war. This is also the reason why the mass tenkō in Japan in the 1930s did not have a significant influence on colonial Korea. Conversely, the fact that in colonial Korea mass conversions took place after the beginning of the Sino-Japanese War in 1937 indicates that the problem of nationalism had been resolved or bypassed in some way. The slogan ‘Japan and Korea are one entity’ dominated political discourse in colonial Korea during the War. It was a dangerous ideological notion that could lead directly to the denial of Korea itself, but at the same time it also had the potential to be interpreted in a different way that could enhance the status of Koreans and bring about a change in the relationship between the metropole and the colony. The fact that for colonial Koreans the notion ‘Japan and Korea are one entity’ contained the possibility of ‘escape from discrimination’ (Miyata 1982: 149) allowed for alternative interpretations of this slogan. This logic shows similarities with the theory of total war, which focuses on the Gleichschaltung of the war system.

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However, complete abolition of discrimination was impossible, and the question of how to locate and manage the differences between Japan and Korea to achieve the unity of the empire became a key issue surrounding this slogan. Here let us focus on the conflict between the ideas of the ‘coordinated unity of Japan and Korea’ and the ‘complete unity of Japan and Korea’. Backed by figures such as Kim Myŏngshik and In Jŏngshik, the former represents an attempt to reinterpret the unity of Japan and Korea in order to maintain the uniqueness of Korea. The latter, in contrast, aimed for complete assimilation. The key figure advocating this position was Hyŏn Yŏngsŏp (1907–year of death unknown), a former anarchist. The majority of the individuals who converted veered towards the position of coordinated unity. The reason why debates surrounding the interpretation of ‘Japan and Korea are one entity’ were possible was the unique temporal sphere marked off by the SinoJapanese War. As the war continued, the notions of an East Asian Community and East Asian League (tōa renmei) attained concrete meanings within the realm of realpolitik, and a distinctive sphere of thought was formed. In Japan, the theory of an East Asian Community entailed, externally, reconciliation and the end of war with China and, internally, the implementation of measures aimed at anti-capitalist reform. The core argument embodied in this position, whose main proponents were left-wing reformists such as Ozaki Hotsumi and Miki Kiyoshi, was the need to acknowledge the otherness of China. Korean intellectuals who supported the idea for a coordinated unity between Japan and Korea, such as Kim Myŏngshik and In Jŏngshik, directly expressed their hopes for an East Asian community, and proposed that the principle of cooperation used to define the relationship between Japan and China could also apply to Japan and colonial Korea. It is possible to argue that the notion of an East Asian League also influenced the converts of colonial Korea in that it acknowledged the ‘political independence’ of each nation (Matsuda 2015: 27). Kim Myŏngshik proposed that the wartime Japanese slogan ‘the eight corners of the world under one roof ’ (hakkō ichiu) meant ‘to unite and harmonize the myriad states’, and therefore that the individual identity of each state should be respected (Kim 1940: 41). In terms of economic policies, he maintained that a unified controlled economy comprising the metropole and the colony should be strengthened but at the same time argued that this was not in conflict with the independence of the Korean economy. This argument for the need for Korean industry and culture to develop in an independent manner can be seen as connected with the logic that had been in existence since the mid-1930s. Kim’s position can be summarized as proposing the need to establish colonial Korea as a ‘special (economic) unit’ that was an active agent in the East Asian community (Kim 1939a: 58); in this sense, his stance can also be seen as the advancement of self-governance of sorts. In Jŏngshik strongly criticized Hyŏn Yŏngsŏp’s suggestion to abolish the Korean language and argued that the distinctive language, culture, tradition and national spirit of the Koreans should be maintained and developed as they were constituents of the ‘new Japanese nation’ (shin Nihon minzoku) envisaged by the wartime Japanese state (In et al. 1939: 41). The wartime period of colonial Korea, a crisis situation

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during which the governor-general enforced the policy of ‘Japan and Korea are one entity’, led to the unforeseen result in which interest in the notion of Korea becoming an active agent was amplified.

Conversion as a warped common front A change can also be seen in Im Hwa, who had previously maintained an unfaltering critical stance, even after the dissolution of KAPF. Im Hwa’s position during the wartime period is symbolically represented in his discussion with the head of the Cultural Affairs Department of the Korean Federation for National Total Mobilization (kokumin sōryoku Chōsen renmei) published in the March 1941 issue of the journal Cho Kwang (Korean Light). In this discussion, Im acknowledged the need for propaganda literature, whilst at the same time maintaining the demand to preserve the distinctiveness of Korean literature vis-à-vis that of Japan (Yabe & Im 1941: 149–50). As previously mentioned, Im had originally been critical of attempts to establish ‘Korean studies’, but later, during the wartime period, he re-evaluated Korean studies works from the 1930s as ‘a self-examination of the transplanted character and the internationalism’ of Korean literature (Im 1939: 50). Having founded a publishing company, he managed a series entitled Korean Library (Chōsen bunko) and put much effort into systematizing Korean traditions and culture. In later years, after the end of Japanese colonization, Im claimed that, through the literature of the wartime period, Koreans had formed a ‘common front’ in order to safeguard ‘the Korean language’, ‘artistic tradition’ and ‘the rational spirit’ (Im 1946: 38–9). The platform of the common front mentioned by Im was the literary journal Inmun P’yŏngnon (Humanities Review), where Ch’oe Jaesŏ served as editor in chief. In the inaugural issue of the journal, in a section entitled ‘Modern Literary Dictionary’, Ch’oe mentioned T.S. Eliot’s Criterion, one of the key literary journals that represented European intelligentsia during the interwar period. In January 1939, amidst anticipation of an imminent war, T.S. Eliot made the decision to discontinue The Criterion, a symbolic event that illustrated the limitations of the popular front and the defence of culture in Europe. Choi commented that the regrettable discontinuation of The Criterion represented ‘the collapse of literary criteria’ (Ch’oe 1939b: 125–6). In his opening comments for the inaugural issue of Inmun P’yŏngnon, Ch’oe expressed his strong resolve that the journal would continue to uphold ‘the constructive role of literature’ (Ch’oe 1939a: 2–3). Thereafter, Inmun P’yŏngnon provided an arena where Im Hwa and Ch’oe Jaesŏ, who took divergent positions in the 1930s, could work together to form a common front. In this way, within one corner of the wartime spatial and temporal sphere that was colonial Korea in 1939, a ‘united front’ came to be established, albeit in a delayed and rather warped manner. However, this was not an anti-fascist popular front. In wartime colonial Korea, the ‘united front’ represented a vague political stance that was neither the fascist national front nor the anti-fascist popular front.

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This aspect can also be observed in the contradictory position of Kim Myŏngshik, who supported the Japanese government’s anti-modernist and anti-liberal policies whilst at the same time criticizing fascism. Alongside these efforts, ‘illegal’ activities continued in Korea, keeping alive the work and legacy of the communist movement (Im 1991). In addition, there were the exiled anti-imperialist national united front groups which fought alongside the Kuomintang–Communist Alliance, the united anti-Japanese front on the Chinese mainland. However, it is difficult to find traces of any links among these groups. Both the inability of these movements and ideologies to come together and their regionally dispersed nature were products of the colonial situation. The anti-imperialist national united front that was the Kuomintang-­Communist Alliance was established in China during the Second Sino-Japanese War. It brought together the popular front and the national front, and, in terms of theory as well as practice, it was a truly united front. The fact that such a front could come into existence serves as a reminder of the difference between a colonized state (i.e. Korea) and a semi-colonized one. On the other hand, within the metropole, the popular front movement suffered a great blow with two waves of arrests following the commencement of the Sino-Japanese War. It is possible, however, to point out that these movements, which centred on the intelligentsia, gained little support from the masses. In relation to this, the philosopher Kuno Osamu (1910–99) reminisced in 1970 that ‘the situation might have differed greatly had it been possible to undertake movements for the autonomy and independence of the people under the name of nationalism’ (Kuno  & Tsurumi 1970: 10). It is possible to discern an awareness of the direction stressed by Kuno in the actions of Japan’s leftwing reformists, such as Ozaki Hotsumi, during the wartime period. The popular/ national front manifested itself in various guises in the metropole, colonies and semi-colonies of the empire. However, these different guises can be seen to share a common thread in light of Kuno’s comment that ‘there was no way of engaging in reality within the framework of the state vs. the people’ (ibid.). Wartime transformation in Japan began to lose momentum in the early 1940s. The avenues for discourse on ‘the unity of Japan and Korea’ or on reform were also shut down in Korea, and the intellectuals of the left who had committed tenkō stopped writing on these issues. Leftist projects aimed at constructing an active agency in the colonial situation through ideological conversion seem to have failed. ‘The unity of Japan and Korea’ was a slogan that represented the logic of total war, as a result of the need to arouse the voluntary participation of colonial Korea in the total war. Interestingly enough, in the process of adopting this notion, a new stance came to be developed by colonial Koreans: ‘the coordinated unity of Japan and Korea’, in which more agency was demanded in order to participate in the establishment of the total war system throughout the entire empire. However, this stance (i.e. ‘the coordinated unity of Japan and Korea’) and all that accompanied it proved too much for the Japanese: to accept it would have meant going beyond the critical threshold of what could be allowed in the colonies. This failure of wartime transformation revealed the flaws of Japan’s total war system, and indeed its

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impossibility. In other words, this failure was a denial of the agency of Korea, and such a denial was also a denial of the agency of the empire. After this, mobilization for the war effort was enacted only through unilateral coercion. Use of the Korean language was also strictly limited. Against this background, in the magazine Kokumin bungaku, launched in November  1941, Ch’oe Jaesŏ put forward the possibility of producing Korean literature using the Japanese language. This represents the last attempt to include complexity and diversity in the category of the Japanese nation. In Jŏngshik’s argument about agricultural reorganization can also be understood in this context. In proposed that the ‘simultaneous promotion of agriculture and industry’ should be implemented in Korea, not only in Japan, through national land planning. In’s ideas contributed to attempts to enhance the status of colonial Korea within the order of the empire. However, the agricultural strategies implemented by the Japanese governor-general of Korea differed greatly from those advocated by In and resulted in the preservation of the colonial landowning system. The consequences of the debates around agricultural reorganization are clear revelations of the limitations and the subsequent failure of the total war system and indeed of colonial modernity itself.

Conclusion: Tenkō as a project of agency formation In the early 1930s, there was a mass conversion of socialists in Japan. Such a conversion also began in Korea but was much smaller in scale. For the colonial intellectuals, an inscrutable wall of ethnic discrimination remained, even after they abandoned the ideology of socialism. In the mid-1930s, Korean socialists supported the national unification front. However, the nationalist bourgeoisie, the object of their solidarity, was inevitably unstable in the nature in the colonies. As a result, Korean socialists came to be faced with the contradiction of ‘nationalism without a nation’. In the first months of the Second Sino-Japanese war, the Japanese army advanced quickly, but soon the front became deadlocked as the Chinese government maintained a thorough resistance even after the occupation of Wuhan and Guangdong in October 1938. What came out of this was the Japanese government’s statement of an ‘East Asian New Order’, which proposed a kind of federalism that encompassed Japan, Manchuria and China, in recognition of Chinese nationalism. In Japan, the idea of an ‘East Asian Community’ or an ‘East Asian League’ became popular. In the newspapers and magazines of Korea from 1939 to 1940, many articles argued for the autonomy of Korea by reinterpreting the notion of ‘Japan and Korea are one entity’, in line with the ‘East Asian Community’ principle. This reinterpretation, which can be understood as calling for the ‘coordinated unity of Japan and Korea’, brought about a mass conversion of Korean socialists. Against Japan’s coercive policy of obliterating the language and culture of Korea, a kind of common front was formed among the converts of colonial Korea. This was neither a fascist

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national front nor an anti-fascist popular front. It was a distorted and delayed front of anti-capitalism and decolonization. Tenkō for the Koreans was a project of overcoming colonial reality and forming a new subjectivity. This was, however, a subjectivity that was incomplete and located in a grey area between independence and assimilation. After liberation, the two Koreas were formed. North Korea has sought to become a pure entity under the slogans of ‘independent defence’ and ‘independent economy’. Meanwhile, South Korea had once again taken the path of compromise or ‘dependent development’ (Kajimura 1981: 100). In the development of South Korea, the project of the wartime converts acted as a blueprint, although its authors remained hidden. This reading of the tenkō of Korean intellectuals as a project whereby a new subjectivity came to be formed is indebted to Tsurumi Shunsuke’s reading of the Japanese tenkō. Japanese research has identified tenkō as a key resource for analysing the history of Japanese thought, but, unfortunately, the discourse has been constrained by the framework of postwar Japan. The study of the history of Japanese thought describes tenkō as a supra-historic and universal phenomenon or as something unique to Japan that is different from any equivalent trend in the West. The total war system theory opened up new horizons for the explanation of tenkō, by paying attention to the rationalization brought about by war; the colonies, however, were still left in the realm of irrationality, yet to be considered as agents. During the wartime period, Japan closed its eyes to the existence of Korea. It was Chiang Kai-shek who questioned the status of Korea. Chiang recalled that Japan was ‘merging’ Korea by deceiving Koreans with its claim that ‘Japan and Korea are inseparable’ and dismissed the concept of an East Asian Community as nothing more than a ‘China–Japan merger’ (Chiang 1941: 14). As long as there was no change in the status of Korea, the idea of the East Asian New Order was nothing but a myth. Japan’s tenkō or wartime transformation, which was blind to the existence of the colonies, was merely a mirage. The dawning realization of the untenable nature of the so-called ‘coordinated unity of Japan and Korea’ can be regarded as evidence of the impossibility of a Japanese colonial empire. In this sense, the tenkō of Koreans reminds us of the importance of the historicity of the colonial empire, which should be considered in the study of tenkō and of the history of Japanese thought.

Notes 1 For a discussion of Gleichschaltung, see (Yamanouchi 1995: 12). 2 For Paek Namun’s research on Korean Studies, see (Pang 1992). 3 For the lecture school (kōzaha) economists, who focused on the feudal remnants in Japan’s politics and economy, see (Hoston 1986).

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Yamanouchi, Yasushi (1995) ‘Hōhōteki joron: sōryokusen to shisutemu tōgō’ (Methodological Introduction: Total War and System Consolidation), in Yamanouchi, Y., Koschman, V.  & Narita, R. (eds.), Sōryokusen to gendaika (Total War and Modernization), Tokyo: Kashiwa shobō, 9–53. Yonetani, Masafumi (1997) ‘Senjiki Nihon no shakai shisō: gendaika to senji henkaku’ (Social Thought in Japan during the Wartime Period), in Shisō 882, 69–120. Yoshimoto, Takaaki (2010) ‘On tenkō, or Ideological Conversion’ (Tenkōron), in Levy, I. (ed.) Wake, Hisaaki (trans.) Translation in Modern Japan, London: Routledge, 102–21. Yun, Haengjung (1940) ‘Shinch’eje wa kyŏngje kigu’ (New System and Economic Organization), in Cho Kwang 6: 10, 32–6.

4 TAKEUCHI YOSHIMI AND THE PROBLEM OF TENKŌ Viren Murthy

The Japanese term tenkō is usually translated as ‘conversion’ and refers to left-wing intellectuals converting to right-wing ideologies, at times under duress. The use of the term tenkō by the literary critic, Sinologist and postwar public intellectual Takeuchi Yoshimi (1910–1977) expands its scope and allows us to think transnationally about the phenomenon of political or ideological change. His work forces us to ask what were the enabling conditions and nature of such conversions not just from left to right, but also from right to left. Takeuchi supported the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in the early 1940s, but after Japan’s defeat in World War II, he turned towards the left and became a supporter of the Chinese Communist Party. Looking at the surface, one might say that Takeuchi performed a reverse tenkō moving from right to left. However, during the postwar period he rethinks the concept of tenkō and complicates our understanding both of his own political position and the problem of ideological change in general by bringing China into the picture. In Takeuchi’s writings tenkō comes to represent the general superficiality of Japanese consciousness, which he opposes to the Chinese kaishin, a Buddhist term that could similarly be translated as conversion but that also implies holding fast to oneself. In Takeuchi’s terms (2005: 75, 1993: 48), ‘Tenkō occurs where there is no resistance, i.e. no desire to be oneself ’.1 Much of this chapter will attempt to lay the groundwork for understanding this phrase, which will involve grasping Takeuchi’s understanding of Lu Xun, resistance and modernity. While there have been some writings on Takeuchi’s ideas of conversion, they in general fail to grasp the significance of his work in relation to global modernity. Consequently, they overlook the manner in which Takeuchi’s work on tenkō speaks to our own moment. I argue that by redefining tenkō as not only a personal state of mind, but also a broader mode of consciousness or subjectivity, Takeuchi points to continuities between pre- and postwar Japan thus connecting tenkō to a larger problem in

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capitalist modernity. Specifically, the problem of tenkō points to the loss of autonomy in the modern world, and kaishin emerges as a resistance to this loss.

Problematizing the classic conception of tenkō My basic point about Takeuchi’s understanding of kaishin can be understood in relation to Yukiko Shigeto’s recent description of the left-wing writer Nakano Shigeharu’s (1902–1979) unique conception of tenkō, which approaches Takeuchi’s kaishin. In the 1930s, Nakano repudiated his affiliation to Marxism, but Shigeto contends that his was no ordinary conception of tenkō. Using the classic examples of Sano Manabu and Nabeyama Sadachika, Shigeto explains: Sano’s and Nabeyama’s tenkō, a turn toward a brand of national socialism under the imperial family, falls squarely within the definition ‘ideological conversion’. In contrast, Nakano’s tenkō falls short, for it did not result in an adoption of an alternate ideological position. This is not to say that he continued to hold on to a Marxist vanguard position despite his break with the [Japanese Communist Party]. . . . Nakano’s tenkō can be characterized, in the writer Shiina Rinzō word, as ‘falling’. Shiina used this expression to describe his own experience of defection from the JCP in 1933; he claimed that his so-called tenkō wasn’t actually tenkō, for in the strictest sense of the term it was ‘falling’ (datsuraku). This is because ‘tenkō presupposes a position one turns “to”, but in [his] case there was no “to”. Much like Shiina, Nakano fell, or to put it differently, he turned “to” a groundless “position” ’. (Shigeto 2014: 519) Max Ward’s and Brice Fauconnier’s contributions to this volume helpfully problematize Sano and Nabeyama’s respective conversions as well. Moreover, by focusing on the role of Buddhism in Sano’s thought, James Mark Shields (2017: 240) has recently underscored the continuity in his ideas. In particular, although the perspective appears like a conversion from the outside, Sano continued to believe in some form of socialism. On reading Sano and Nabeyama’s famous statement, we see that they launch an internal critique of Marxism, and consequently the change in position was perhaps not as radical as previously believed. However, regardless of how one thinks about Sano and Nabeyama’s statement, Takeuchi’s discussion of tenkō is different from previous treatments for two reasons: first, he focuses on more fundamental structures of subjectivity behind tenkō and, second, he places tenkō in a global historical context connected to the emergence of imperialism and capitalism. Although in Takeuchi’s view tenkō implies a change in position, he claims that this is not what is crucial. He shifts the focus from the positions from or to which one changes, to the subjectivity and crises involved. Nakano’s case previously mentioned provides a clear example of such a subjective transformation. Once he left his first position, he fell into an abyss, a type of Hegelian bad infinity (schlechte Unendlichkeit) where he would linger. Hegel (1986

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[1812]: 155) distinguishes between two types of infinity, bad infinity that is separate from the finite world and might go on endlessly without any meaning and affirmative infinity that is part of a movement in the existent world (Hegel 1986 [1812]: 156). In Shigeto’s reading, Nakano found himself in this liminal space without any transition to the actual world of politics. The groundless position in which Nakano found himself resembles what Takeuchi describes as the opposite of tenkō, namely kaishin, which Richard Calichman (Takeuchi 2005) has translated as conversion. But unlike Nakano’s tenkō, Takeuchi’s kaishin or conversion entails transforming the world. Put simply, according to Takeuchi, tenkō refers to the simple switching from one position to another. In contrast, kaishin refers to a more fundamental type of transformation of the self that is more important than the change in standpoint. Inhabiting a space of nothingness is precisely a prerequisite to this transformation. In Takeuchi’s work, nothingness refers to an abyss, which existentialists such as Jean-Paul Sartre have connected to a complete absence, a void without meaning. However, as we will see, Takeuchi’s concept of nothingness sometimes resembles an ontological source, which enables action. In either of these cases, he claims that through confronting this nothingness, the crumbling of familiar patterns of meaning, one could emerge with a new subjectivity and act creatively in the sociopolitical world. He attempts to think of tenkō, in relation to this problem of the renewal of subjectivity. We might think of tenkō as connected to external pressure, such as being in danger, or the desire to advance in one’s career or in society. From this perspective, one could say that the phenomenon of tenkō has not gone away and exists throughout the world today, where people often have to choose between their ideals and progress in their careers. For example, academics, activists and politicians are still faced with choices about whether to capitulate to prevailing trends to seek gain in some way or to stick to their vision and suffer the consequences. Takeuchi searches for something that exceeds these external reasons for ideological change and contends that there is a mode of being in the world or a form of subjectivity behind tenkō. This suggests that subjectivity goes beyond its immediate context and because of the space of nothingness at the heart of subjectivity, one could affirm agency, even when it appears that there is no choice. The global capitalist world of imperialism serves to set the subjective and objective conditions for both tenkō and kaishin without determining either of them. Kaishin, like Nakano’s unique tenkō, is connected to a certain experience of nothingness, but tenkō flees in the face of this nothingness. Tenkō does not look inward and does not rest in the uncomfortable space of responsibility in the face of uncertainty. Takeuchi inquires into the historical conditions surrounding the superficiality at the root of tenkō and distinguishes this from the nothingness at the root of kaishin. In what follows, in order to examine Takeuchi’s conception of tenkō, I begin with the formation of ideas about kaishin or conversion in his early life and in his work on Lu Xun, before turning to how these early ideas are reconstituted in the postwar period, when he moves from a literary analysis to a more globally oriented understanding of the subjectivities behind tenkō and conversion. Throughout

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this paper, I will attempt to show how Takeuchi’s treatment of such terms points beyond its immediate context both politically and philosophically.

Takeuchi’s early work: kaishin before tenkō – early life and Lu Xun From this introduction, we see that tenkō is fundamentally connected to transformations of identity and individuality. For example, in one of the key works on tenkō in English, Patricia G. Steinhoff (1991) contends that tenkō is fundamentally about social integration. In other words, one of the key reasons that both Steinhoff and Shigeto give for tenkō concerns the disappearance of a discursive community. Isolation appears to make people change ideologically. Takeuchi and his early experience with Lu Xun represents an interesting case because if anything he changed from right to left rather than the other way around, but he also connects resistance to tenkō with a kind of loneliness, which one feels when inhabiting a space of resistance. Takeuchi’s writings about tenkō are connected to an attempt to break out from the look of the other and the general social gaze that evaluated him. The term ‘look of the other’ appears in Hegel and was further developed by various philosophers including Sartre and Lacan. Takeuchi uses the term to imply that one’s identity and values are constituted from the outside, which is partially Lacanian. However, unlike Lacan, the key for Takeuchi is precisely to break free from this look and affirm one’s own existence, which is a gesture towards the existentialists, such as Heidegger and Sartre. Eventually, he will formulate this in terms of the distinction between Japan, the Honours student (yūtōsei) embodying the spirit of committing tenkō and China, which has a different type of formation, something like a rebel student, entailing a different type of conversion. Given that the metaphor of the Honours student is central to Takeuchi’s distinction between China and Japan, it will be good to begin with Takeuchi’s own experience as a student. Takeuchi Yoshimi was born in 1910 in Nagano Prefecture. He recalls that his early life was spent in poverty, which had symbolic significance. More than the actual lack of commodities, he recalls that he dreaded being called ‘poor’ (Takeuchi 1980: 8, vol. XIII).2 For example, in his early years, he would refuse to go the cafeteria during lunchtime because he could not buy an army lunch box and longed for new clothes. In these examples, rather than the actual consumption of use values, Takeuchi was interested in the status that commodities could represent in the eyes of the other. Here there is a conception of hierarchy that is connected to symbolic value. In his diary, Takeuchi contends that this feeling of inferiority was an important motivating factor during his early years. Takeuchi’s China itself appears similar to his childhood self: China was a failed student without recognition as opposed to Japan, the Honours student. We see here a desire for social integration or recognition. Since he could not obtain recognition through wealth, he hoped to do this through his achievement at school. However, he would eventually reject this as well and rebel. In his diary, Takeuchi

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explains that originally he aimed to be an Honours student and in primary school he felt proud when the teacher praised his poems; he kept all the poems with his teachers’ comments. However, once he went to middle school, he changed his attitude about teachers and began to dislike being an Honours student. During middle school, he went to Inokashira Park and burnt all of the assignments in which he had performed well (Takeuchi 1980: 10, vol. XIII; Oguma 2002: 396). In this way, shortly before high school, Takeuchi adumbrated his later concept of self-negation, a refusal to occupy positions of institutional power and money, domains which Jacques Bidet (2004) names organization and market, the two structures that mediate modernity. In Takeuchi’s case, he initially wanted the recognition of the teacher but eventually showed signs of realizing that such recognition also undermines one’s autonomy. This could be understood as an extremely early sign of self-negation, which would be one of the key ways in which one resists tenkō. In high school, around 1930, a high point in left-wing movements, Takeuchi participated in a student movement where one of the leaders was Yasuda Yojūrō (1910–1981), who would himself launch a romantic critique of modernity. By this time, given that Takeuchi had refused to be an Honours student and his grades fell, in 1931 at Tokyo Imperial University he decided to major in contemporary Chinese literature because it appeared the easiest. Not only was China studies an understudied field in Japan but the modern period, or post–May Fourth literature – which was Takeuchi’s focus – was the most unpopular subfield of an unpopular field. Among the 34 students studying China in Tokyo Imperial University, Takeuchi was the only one studying modern Chinese literature. Later he would attack scholars of Chinese studies in Japan for neglecting recent developments in China. In 1932, Takeuchi travelled to Beijing on a study trip and began to learn Chinese with a tutor. As his Chinese improved, he began to read Chinese literature, and he saw in these works the same type of thinking as he had, namely the search for autonomy outside of power (Takeuchi 1980: 92, vol. V; Oguma 2002: 398). This search for autonomy, which we have already seen, will be the key to understanding his idea of conversion when talking about Lu Xun. Before turning to Takeuchi’s book on Lu Xun, which appeared in 1944, it will be helpful to examine briefly a remark that he made a couple of years earlier. The context of the remark concerns the Association for the Study of Chinese Literature (Chūgoku bungaku kenkyūkai), which Takeuchi organized along with his friend and fellow Sinologist Takeda Taijun (1912–76). The Association also had a journal called Chinese Literature (Chūgoku bungaku) After a few years of debating various issues including literature and translation, Takeuchi decided to abolish the journal and at this point, in 1943, he wrote an essay, ‘The Abolition of Chinese Literature and Me’ (Chūgoku bungaku no haikan to watashi), explaining his reasoning.3 Given that the essay was written after the bombing of Pearl Harbor, he writes about the Greater East Asia War favourably and in a way that illuminates aspects of

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his position even after the war, when he turns to the left. The following passage explains his basic reasoning and his critique of the abstractions of modernity: When the Association for the Study of Chinese Literature was abolished, if the space where this association used to exist remains as I expected, it would express itself with a strange elemental groan. I want to hear this groan. I want to wait for the day when the original movement of life emerges from the depths of nothing from nowhere. I really believed that the Association was like this and I would like to seek the place where the fabric of our life until today can be reborn in the formless root of the world of nothingness. (Takeuchi 2007: 53, vol. I)4 Here we see an early instance of the problem of nothingness, which he will use to discuss the problem of conversion in Lu Xun and then more generally. This is a call to struggle against the abstraction embodied in modern institutions such as the state and bureaucracies. Hegel (2018 [1807]) describes the alienation related to the early modern world in a manner that helps to uncover Takeuchi’s point: However, this alienation takes place solely in language, which comes on the scene here in its distinctive significance. In both the ethical world as laws and command, in the world of actuality as counsel only, language has the essence for its content and is the form of that essence. However, here it receives as its content the form which it is, and it is as language that it is validly in force. (Hegel 2018 [1807]: 294) The crucial point here concerns the abstraction of language that becomes especially intense in the modern world. Mentioning the world of ethical order underscores how the Greeks could combine language with content because words such as ‘I’ were connected to roles and duties. In the modern world, these roles have disappeared or have become extremely unstable. Consequently, when one utters the word ‘I’, an abstract sign comes to signify the self, leaving the lived ‘I’ behind. We can call this liberation from the earlier ethical order, but now the self is emptied of content. Form dominates over content; abstract laws preside over concrete human beings and life. We could, of course, add here the domination of exchange value over concrete use value. Against this abstraction, Takeuchi wants to ‘hear a groan’. This term already echoes Lu Xun’s famous concept of the ‘scream’, with which he titled his first collection of essays. The significance of a groan is precisely that it does not negate itself and become abstract in the form of meaning. It represents a type of materiality that resists abstraction. It refuses the alienation of the use of language as a mere container for meaning that eventually becomes congealed in the form of laws and other abstract forms of modern life. This space of materiality is also called nothingness because it cannot refer to any ‘thing’, insofar as such a reference would imply meaning. Takeuchi hoped to create another world out of this critique.

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Given that the world of modernity and abstraction was represented by the West, Takeuchi supported the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. He makes the following comment about the Greater East Asia War: The Greater East Asia War may be called the rewriting of the history of the world. I deeply believe this. It means the denial of modernity, of modern culture, and out of this denial, to build for oneself a new world and new culture. . . . Modern culture must be denied, because it is the projection of Europe onto ourselves. Thus, we must in a sense deny ourselves. For the creation of history, the world must be produced from within. (Takeuchi 2007: 57–8, vol. I)5 Takeuchi equates modern culture with Europe and contends that the Japanese must break free from its projections. Only in this way can they create history, which implies action against mere thought. However, denying the other cannot be done without negating the self that has been constituted by the other, namely the modern West. Consequently, we see an early instance of conversion not quite from left to right or from right to left, but from an abstract alienated self to one that is concrete and agentive. Although Takeuchi initially associated this concrete agency with the Japanese imperialist project, his fundamental critique of the abstractions of modernity goes beyond his various political fluctuations. Moreover, throughout Takeuchi’s writings, conversion is intimately connected to negation and nothingness. One must experience the abyss before one is completely transformed. This conversion (kaishin) forms the foundation for Takeuchi’s understanding of Lu Xun. In the case of Nakano Shigeharu, after he performs tenkō, he stops writing poetry. Takeuchi is interested in a somewhat opposite experience, namely the experience that ‘turned’ Lu Xun, the father of modern Chinese literature and that compelled him to become a writer. Although Takeuchi mobilizes concepts such as conversion in a manner that goes beyond simple political labels, there is some connection between tenkō, a turn to the right and the absence of literature. The absence of literature, in Takeuchi’s sense, made possible the unreflective turn to the right, and such an absence implies superficial politics devoid of subjectivity. Against this, Takeuchi connects literature and conversion to a new type of politics. In 1944, Takeuchi published what would be his most famous book, namely Rojin (Lu Xun); in this text, the problem of Lu Xun’s ‘conversion’ constantly returns. In this context, he has two major points to make: first, to think of conversion in relation to religion and, second, to destabilize earlier narratives about Lu Xun’s decision to be a writer and publish his first collection of short stories, Na Han, which is usually translated as A Call to Arms, but could also be entitled Screaming and which anticipates the ‘groan’ mentioned by Takeuchi. Takeuchi asks how we can explain the advent of this scream. To start with the conclusion first, Takeuchi (2003 [1944]) expounds, ‘[t]he “scream” that proceeds from the pain associated with the “inability to forget” is a “call” and not “a detailed clearing away”. This is just as repentance comes after the sin’ (38–9). With the concept of sin, we are

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already in the realm of religion and its associated notions of conversion. According to the dominant narrative that scholars of Chinese literature continue to reproduce even today, Lu Xun went to Japan to study medicine in 1904 and then after a biology class saw a slide show in which a Chinese man was being decapitated for being a spy during the Russo-Japanese War. There were many Chinese onlookers, but they did nothing. Lu Xun was extremely upset on seeing the lack of sympathy of the Chinese for their fellow nationals. He concluded that more than the bodies of the Chinese, it is their minds that need to be cured, and consequently he switched from medicine to literature. Takeuchi contends that Lu Xun’s turn to writing is more complex than this story indicates. He brings into play another incident that Lu Xun narrates in an essay called ‘Fujino Sensei’ (Lu 2005 [1926]), in which he is accused of cheating. This incident happened before the slide show experience and again involves shame. Takeuchi cites Lu Xun’s own description of the incident: China is a weak country. Thus Chinese children are naturally of low ability. If I scored more than 60 marks, it was not because of my ability. It is not surprising that they had such suspicions. After this, I had the fate of seeing a Chinese person being assassinated [on a slide]. In my second year, I switched to taking bacteriology, and one always used slides to show the form of bacteria. (Lu 2005 [1926]: 317 cited in Takeuchi 2003: 76) Takeuchi contends that if one reads together the slide show and the incident of being accused of cheating, one gets to the more fundamental experience of conversion behind Lu Xun’s turn to literature. The preceding passage in Lu Xun is crucial for understanding Takeuchi’s own position because it connects Lu Xun’s experience, the problem of global unevenness and Asia, problems that would increasingly concern Takeuchi during the postwar period. In other words, the experience of shame for being a Chinese, a person from an oppressed country, is similar to Lu Xun’s feeling of shame at seeing the slide show, which he mentions immediately afterward. We could continue Takeuchi’s logic by noting that Lu Xun then refers to the use of slides to show the form of bacteria. This brings up a certain type of mediation that is common to both Chinese and the bacteria. In other words, there is something dehumanizing about the gaze of the Japanese on a colonized country. But now the problem is not about seeing other people, whom he must change; it is about himself. Takeuchi (2003: 77) writes: More than anything else this was a shame directed at himself. Rather than pitying his fellow citizens, he pitied himself who had no choice but to pity his compatriots. He did not think of literature alongside pitying his compatriots. His pitying his compatriots was a signpost of his own loneliness. This loneliness is the key to Lu Xun’s conversion, which we have already seen could appear in contrast to tenkō – those who are alone refuse the social integration

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of tenkō. In Takeuchi’s view, these various experiences make Lu Xun turn inward and eventually attain a type of transcendence. This transcendent perspective provides him with a critical distance from which to analyse the present. We could call this a quasi-religious perspective, since Takeuchi speaks of transcendence, and the term kaishin itself refers to religious conversion, a change that happens after one realizes one has sinned. However, he eventually connects this experience to the Eastern people: The term ‘religious’ is vague and the form of Lu Xun’s ethos was unreligious and even anti-religious, but his manner of holding on to his position was religious. Or, if one can say that Russians were religious, we can say that Lu Xun was religious in this sense. . . . I wonder whether there was not something for which Lu Xun sought atonement. Lu Xun himself was probably not clear about what this something was. . . . Perhaps the Chinese word gui (demon) comes close. Zhou Zuoren’s statement about ‘the sadness of Eastern people’ could perhaps work only as a note. (Takeuchi 2003: 11–12) This passage outlines the problem of the internal other, which is connected to the Easterners, including the Russians, and which suggests both global unevenness and revolution. Perhaps more importantly for the issue of tenkō, religion here describes a manner of holding on to a position in a way that goes against the grain, a position that differentiates kaishin from tenkō in Takeuchi’s postwar writings. Takeuchi (2003 [1944]) explains Lu Xun’s conversion in the following manner: He stayed in a room of the institute where ‘the soul emerges’ and buried himself in old books. He did not have any contact with the outside world. His ‘scream’ had not yet burst forth as a ‘scream’. He only felt the call fermenting in a painful silence. I imagine that in this silence, he grasped the decisive event of his life, namely what is called his conversion (kaishin). (60–1) Out of the silence a scream bursts forth, and there is an incubation period during which Lu Xun did not write anything. The key here again is the loneliness that Lu Xun himself expressed in his preface. He receded totally from the world, at which point something akin to a primal scream, perhaps related to the groan that Takeuchi mentioned earlier, emerges. When the scream emerges in silence, although Lu Xun has no contact with the outside world, in Takeuchi’s view, he experiences something like an internal other. Takeuchi (2003 [1944]) describes Lu Xun’s other in the following manner. When one reads his work, one feels like one is hit by a constant shadow. This shadow is always in the same place. The shadow itself does not exist, but light emerges from there and vanishes into it. Through this movement, there is a

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point of darkness that seems to hint at existence. If one reads him carelessly, one will not notice but, when one pays attention to it, one will never forget it. As if a skull is dancing in a bright dance hall, in the end it appears that the skull is the one with substance. Lu Xun lived with such a shadow on his back throughout his life. It is in this sense that I call his literature, a literature of atonement (shokuzai). (61) This internal other resembles what Jean Laplanche (1999: 85) calls ‘the permanence of the unconscious, the primacy of the address of the other’, but we can take this metaphor further by focusing on its religious and historical dimensions. The term that Takeuchi uses to refer to ‘atonement’ (shokuzai), consists of two characters: shoku (redemption) and zai (sin). We here have a concrete way in which the idea of the shadow or nothingness – the shadow does not exist – entails a debt to the other. We can compare Takeuchi’s idea of shadow and atonement to Heidegger’s concepts of guilt (Schuld) and conscience (das Gewissen), which he associates with being pulled away from the reified world of the everyday. Heidegger’s work is usually thought of as being individualistic, and his ideas of being-towardsdeath are thought of as a pulling away from community towards an isolated self or Dasein (being-there) However, in understanding Takeuchi, it is helpful to keep in mind a different reading of Heidegger, one by Christopher Fynsk (1993), who contends that in Heidegger, contrary to first appearances, the call of conscience is about the death of the other. This is precisely the sense in which both Lu Xun and Takeuchi understand sin, which represents a debt that they owe to the past and those who died in the resistance or revolution and also an acknowledgement of their own role in the reproduction of the present system. Takeuchi transfers the themes of resistance and subjectivity into a new context in postwar Japan.

Takeuchi and postwar Japan: kaishin meets tenkō Takeuchi never really dealt with tenkō in his early writings during the war, and there was perhaps good reason for this. However, we have seen him develop a theory of religious conversion, which he will later use to criticize tenkō. Takeuchi’s writings during the postwar period are particularly interesting because they do not stop at analysing the phenomenon of tenkō but place tenkō in a historical context emphasizing the global shifts taking place with Japan’s incorporation into the global capitalist world. Takeuchi wrote an essay explicitly dealing with modernity where he considers tenkō, but before turning to this famous essay, we should note the radical change in context associated with postwar Japan. After 1945 and the Japanese surrender to the United States, Takeuchi rethinks his earlier ideas about Lu Xun and conversion in new ways that eventually entail reflecting about tenkō. Through the construction of China as an ideal, Takeuchi supplements his views on subjectivity with a vision of the modern world. In postwar Japan, there was a radical change in images

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of China, especially after 1949, but already as early as 1946, there were important new perceptions of China. Communist leaders such as Nosaka Sanzō returned from China, Yenan in particular, and wrote about the communist movement there. Nosaka was one of the founders of the Japanese Communist Party and went to China in 1940 to convince Japanese soldiers to support the Chinese resistance (Baba 2010). He famously met Mao Zedong and Zhou Enlai. When he returned in 1946, he wrote about the success of the Chinese Communist Party and the real possibility of a Chinese revolution. Such writings would form the foundation for Takeuchi’s comparison of China and Japan, which were in turn linked to conversion and tenkō, respectively. In light of these writings, for Japanese intellectuals on the left, China begins to symbolize resistance to the global capitalist system. Resistance here must be understood in the context of postwar Asia. The American Occupation, the Korean War and the liberation of the old colonies coincided with a move towards state-centred capitalist development in both the centre and the peripheries of the global capitalist system. The liberation of old colonies was a two-sided problem for the Japanese. In Asia, a number of colonies were liberated from Japan after Japan’s defeat in World War II. However, perhaps more importantly, the postwar era was accompanied by the American Occupation, which was eventually perceived as another form of colonialism. In 1953, the popular intellectual Shimuzu Ikutarō (1907–88) claimed that various Asian nations were beginning to discard their long and stained histories and walk the ‘path of beautiful independence’. But the Japanese people had been drawn into ‘a new state of colonization’ (Shimizu cited in Avinell 2010: 59). This would be the beginning of a new era of imperialism that did not entail direct colonization. To some extent this was a type of colonization that Japan had already practiced in Manchukuo, where rather than colonization, the Japanese claimed that they were ‘liberating’ a given land from colonization. The American Occupation authorities also spoke of liberating the Japanese and bringing democracy to them. Indeed, initially Japanese intellectuals on the left saw the United States’ forces as freeing them from a repressive regime. However, after the first few years, especially with the ‘red purges’ from 1949–51, it became clear that the United States was practicing a new form of imperialism, which did not involve direct control. During these purges, government officials and agencies arbitrarily dismissed numerous workers from various companies for being ‘red’ or pro-Communist. The official policy was to target communists, but the government eventually went after democrats and labour union activists (Hirata  & Dower 2007). Although these purges were initiated by the United States Occupation, the Japanese right wing would also often take the initiative in implementing them (Masuda 2015). Both imperialism and the Japanese support for the purges are important for understanding Takeuchi’s position. In his view, the fact that there is support for the right wing shows that people are upset with modernity and are groping for agents of change, with potentially dangerous consequences. With respect to imperialism, Japan would now play a role in the American Empire, which had as its goal making the world receptive to global capitalism

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(Panitch & Gindin 2013). From this perspective, Japan went from being colonizer to neo-colonized in a new framework of imperialism. In this context, during the postwar period, Japanese intellectuals could paradoxically and controversially identify with the colonized. Takeuchi’s question after World War II could perhaps be understood in the following manner: what kind of subjectivity would be required to turn Japan into an anti-colonialist nation? This was not a simple question because Japan propagated anti-imperialist, anti-modernist and pro-Asian discourse during the war as well. However, clearly staying at this superficial level would not be enough. One needed to comprehend the difference between resistance to colonialism in theory and in practice. Takeuchi defined tenkō as involving a lack of resistance. To grasp the phenomenon of resistance at a deeper level and the difference between China’s conversion and Japan’s tenkō, Takeuchi investigates the problem of modernity in a famous essay, first published in 1948, entitled ‘Chūgoku no kindai to Nihon no kindai: Rojin o tegakari ni shite’ (What Is Modernity: The Case of China and Japan) In this essay he defines modernity as follows: Modernity is the self-recognition of Europe as seen within history, that regarding of itself as distinct from the feudal, which Europe gained in the process of liberating itself from the feudal (a process that involved the emergence of free capital in the realm of production and the formation of personality qua autonomous and equal individuals with respect to human beings). Therefore, it can be said that Europe is first possible only in this history, and that history itself is possible only in this Europe. History is not an empty form of time. It includes an infinite number of instants in which one struggles against obstacles so that the self may be itself, without which both the self and history would be lost. (Takeuchi 2005: 54, 1993: 13) This passage first affirms that modernity involves the recognition of the self or a type of self-consciousness. This would be crucial for understanding resistance, which we will see is grounded in subjectivity and self-consciousness. Europe is born out of this consciousness of the separation between feudalism and what comes after. This separation of the past from the present is the root of modern ideas of freedom. In other words, freedom implies being free from the shackles of the past – being able to create history anew. The phrase ‘history is only possible in Europe and Europe is only possible in history’ suggests that Takeuchi theorizes a rupture in time. There was, so to speak, no history before modernity or at least history is radically different before and after modernity. It might be tempting here to use Moishe Postone’s (1993) more recent attempt to connect history to capitalism to explain Takeuchi’s position. Postone argues that with the emergence of capitalism, capital itself becomes the subject of history and that such a unitary but also contradictory subject never existed before. We will not go into the details of Postone’s theory, since it will serve more as way of contrast. The key point is that capital strives to

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greater levels of productivity, which becomes the fulcrum of various global shifts, including the shift from liberal to neo-liberal capitalism. In Takeuchi’s vision, although there is a break from the pre-modern or feudal, the problem is not conceived in terms of complete social totalities. Rather, his perspective is akin to a recent turn in Marxism which stresses that capital’s process of subsumption is incomplete (Harootunian 2017; Walker 2016; Tomba 2013). From this perspective, the subject of history is not capital but life, selfconsciousness and other agentive elements that capital tries to subsume but cannot subsume completely. Indeed, the distinction between kaishin and tenkō assumes a different reading of capitalist modernity, namely one in which there is a gap between capital’s self-representation and its actuality. In short, modernity might present itself as complete and totalizing, but this would mean that there is no room for human action. So the self-recognition of Europe in history is not really history, and, we could add, the self-recognition of capital in history cannot subsume all of history. For this reason, after the assertion about Europe’s self-recognition in history, Takeuchi makes the somewhat Benjaminian point about time, distinguishing, like Walter Benjamin, between abstract conceptions of time and the lived time of political action. Although history might present itself as an empty form of time, it contains infinite instants, which are opportunities for action and making history. Note here that Takeuchi speaks of infinite instants rather than an infinite series of homogeneous instants. This suggests that each of these instants is heterogeneous and unlimited in its own way. We might use Kierkegaard’s discussion of the fullness of time connected to the moment when a student learns about God from a teacher to grasp Takeuchi’s infinite instant. Kierkegaard (2009 [1844]: 13) writes: Such a moment has a peculiar character. It is brief and temporal indeed, like every other moment; it is transient as all moments are; it is past, like every moment in the next moment. And yet it is decisive, and filled with the Eternal. Such a moment ought to have a distinctive name; let us call it the Fullness of Time. Kierkegaard is particularly appropriate in thinking about Takeuchi because they both emphasize the problem of guilt. Moreover, the type of transcendence to which they refer does not really exist outside of time. However, unlike Kierkegaard, Takeuchi is interested in the implications of transcendence for political action and the making of history. The difference between kaishin and tenkō could be described as the difference between making history and being made by history. In addition, Takeuchi is interested in epochal shifts, which imply structures and obstacles that could undermine agency or the making of history. In other words, making history involves confronting obstacles, some of which are created by historical conditions and, in this case, the movement of imperialism and capitalism. The form of invasion was first conquest, followed by demands for the opening of markets, and the transition to such things as guarantees of human

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rights and freedom of religious belief, loans or economic assistance, and support for educational and liberation movements. These changes symbolized the progress of the spirit of rationalism. From within this movement were born the distinctive characteristics of modernity: a spirit of advancement that aims at the infinite approach toward greater perfection; the positivism, empiricism, and idealism that supports this spirit; and quantitative science that regards everything as homogeneous. (Takeuchi 2005: 55, 1993: 14) Takeuchi shows here that the movement of modernity entails a series of changes that both enable and undermine subjectivity. Note that modernity as imperialism and capitalism is connected to a quantitative science that regards everything as homogeneous. Consequently, it is not surprising that modernity presents itself as empty homogeneous time and progress. Takeuchi here distinguishes between history as progress and the empty homogeneous time that he spoke of earlier. Progressive history implies a movement in time, while empty homogeneous time provides the framework for that movement. As Aristotle (1983 [fourth century bce]: 42) claimed, movement can happen faster or more slowly, which can be defined respectively as movement taking less or more time. But such a definition presupposes that one can abstract time from motion. From the perspective of abstract time, one can compare different countries within the same framework and determine speed. This, of course, assumes that countries can be compared to racehorses. Takeuchi (2005: 73, 1993: 44–5) targets such a vision of history: Japanese literature does not enter history in this way; it looks from outside at racehorses running the course of history. Refusing to enter history, it loses sight of the resistance that brings history to completion [rekishi o jūjitsu saseru]. Instead it clearly sees which horse will win. The Chinese horse is lagging behind while the Japanese horse quickly pulls ahead. Such is how things appear, and this view is an accurate one. It is accurate because one is not running. Takeuchi refers here to the relationship between action and time. Because one does not enter history, one merely reifies time and looks at nations as if they are racehorses running towards a common goal. This stance of the onlooker presupposes an abstract conception of time as a series of now points separate from the viewer and from movement or action. From the perspective of intellectual history, one must stress the similarity between this discourse and the Kyoto School philosophers who, in the 1920s and 1930s, constantly underscored the importance of entering and making history (Uhl 2003). Like these philosophers, Takeuchi distinguishes between seeing and acting. However, he changes the terrain of this discourse on action by bringing the geopolitics of the Chinese Revolution and its relation to Japan and the West into play. The Japanese and tenkō are equated with the Western world of seeing and objectivity. This means that like Takeuchi himself

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when he was a child, the Japanese are Honours students of the West and consequently of imperialism. The Chinese and kaishin, on the other hand, are connected to resistance and holding on to their position, while entering history and acting. This does not, of course, mean that the Japanese do not act at all, but their mode of action is different. The Japanese tenkō implies a shift without any change in subjectivity. It could be described as the choices of an oblivious alienated subjectivity, not different from choosing between different commodities in a market or shopping mall: Tenkō is a phenomenon that necessarily occurs when honor students act following their conscience. . . . Conscientious behavior consists in abandoning communism for totalitarianism when the latter appears newer. If democracy comes, the progressive attitude most befitting the honor student is to follow democracy. Tenkō  comes about through progress, and so is not shameful. Rather it is the refusal to commit tenkō that is conservative, and thus (as all the evidence suggests) reactionary. (Takeuchi 2005: 74–5, 1993: 47, translation amended) By mentioning conscience (ryōshin), Takeuchi shows a type of reflection that emerges with tenkō. One cannot overlook the similarity between the character compound for conscience (ryōshin) and the characters for conversion (kaishin). Both have the term for heart-and-mind (shin), but the conscience of tenkō signals a type of conventional morality, where turning inward is always already displaced by a progressive vision of history. At the precise moment where subjectivity could enter, it is refused and turns from position to position. Continuing our earlier comparison with Heidegger, we could say that tenkō expresses what Heidegger (1962: 214) described as curiosity (Neugier), literally, desire for the new: ‘It seeks novelty only to leap from it to another novelty’. Moreover, again similar to Takeuchi’s idea of tenkō, Heidegger connects curiosity to seeing as opposed to acting. In curiosity, Dasein constantly looks for new forms of excitement while being oblivious to a deeper existential dimension of subjectivity. The ideology of progress veils this deeper dimension, and consequently tenkō is seen not as conservative but as part of progress (Takeuchi 2005: 75, 1993: 47). In short, the idea of progress legitimizes changes in thought as necessary and beneficial. Progress provides a narrative that orders the sequence of positions and creates the appearance that the newest is the best. It is a narrative that legitimates desire for the new and gives tenkō an air of progressiveness. In postwar Japan, this is an important point because after the war, tenkō would appear conservative, as it is associated with a position that had been defeated, namely fascism. However, Takeuchi aims to go beyond the mere phenomenon of turning from left to right and to uncover a deeper structure of subjectivity (or the lack of it) behind tenkō. For this reason, the turn from right to left in the postwar period does not imply an overcoming of tenkō but a continuation of tenkō as desire for the new. From this perspective, the Japanese have been committing tenkō from

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the Meiji period, when they entered global capitalist modernity, and the promotion and failure of Japanese democracy can be connected to both tenkō and the lack of subjectivity. For this reason, it is striking to note that, in the early 1950s, Takeuchi (1999 [1952]: 176–7) criticizes the Japanese Communist Party in the same manner he criticizes the wartime fascists: I aver that the communist party’s ‘patriots’ are a fake currency [kara tegata]. The revolution will definitely not emerge from the outside. It is illusory to speak about being saved from outside apart from thinking and acting in the field of everyday life. Revolution is not something that happens once; it is something that continues eternally. If someone believes in the illusion of a one-time revolution and tries to accomplish everything at once, one is foolish. Making a revolution is not like gambling. If we do not make efforts on our own, even if a revolution comes from outside, it will pass us by [sudōri shite shimau]. This is the lesson that we have learned during the first five years after the war. Takeuchi compares the subjectivity of tenkō and its superficiality to fake currency, which suggests a homology between the money form, empty time and a hollow subjectivity. This overall superficiality makes a moot point of the question of whether intellectuals such as Sano and Nabeyama really shifted or not. Even if they had remained communists and part of the JCP, the very structure of the JCP entailed a tenkō-type consciousness. A new politics could have emerged in postwar Japan, but the key remains breaking free from superficial consciousness and making something one’s own, by returning to the nothingness of the subjectivity, which entails in this case the active negation of handed-down ideologies, such as democracy. One needs to negate democracy and make it one’s own for it to work in politically interesting directions. This is where we can return to kaishin, which is precisely about returning to the inside. Indeed, Takeuchi (2005: 75, 1993: 48) explains: ‘Conversion may resemble tenkō on the outside, but its direction is the reverse’. Kaishin turns inward and resembles religious conversion: Tenkō occurs where there is no resistance, i.e., no desire to be oneself. The person who holds fast to the self cannot change direction, but only walks his own path. However, walking is changing the self. The self changes by one’s holding fast to it. (That which does not change is not a self.) I am ‘I’ and yet not ‘I’. If I were simply ‘I’, that would not even be ‘I’. In order that I be ‘I’, there must necessarily be a juncture at which I am outside of ‘I’. This is the juncture at which old things become new and the Antichrist becomes Christian. A deep transformation takes place in conversion (kaishin) because of a fundamental resistance. In tenkō one changes from one position to the next  – one changes direction without any change in the self. In conversion one holds on to

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the self, and through this one incurs a more radical transformation that does not merely transform direction but the very significance of direction. One realizes the lack that is constitutive of the self – a not-I that is at the centre of the I, and out of this abyss one becomes a new self. But realizing such a constitutive lack is not just about cognition but about action: ‘walking is changing the self ’ (aruku wa jiko o kaeru koto de aru). It is only through the act of walking or entering history that one can really change. Those who commit tenkō flee from this constitutive nothingness and consequently keep changing. They constantly search on the outside to find subjectivity and inevitably come up empty. Takeuchi (2005: 72–3, 1993: 43–4) invokes the problem of a constitutive nothingness to distinguish between superficial and real progressive movements. He explains this using the example of a slave: Ignorant of his own status as slave, the subject of liberation movements remains trapped within the fantasy that he is not a slave, and from this position he attempts to emancipate the people (the backward students). This subject attempts to awaken others when he himself refuses the pain of awakening. Regardless of his efforts, then, subjectivity fails to emerge, i.e., he is unable to awaken these others. He then looks to the outside in search of that ‘subjectivity’ which ought to be given. Liberation cannot come from the outside. It is not a question of liberating the slave as if one’s own self is not problematic but rather of recognizing that one’s own existence is not separate from the condition of slavery or domination. Recall that the constitutive lack involved a type of guilt or consciousness of sin, which implied that one was responsible for the reproduction of domination. We can be part of the solution only if we realize that we are part of the problem. Refusing the pain of awakening is precisely fleeing from the constitutive lack at the heart of one’s own existence. When one flees from this, one might commit tenkō from a position looking for subjectivity in all the wrong places. In Takeuchi’s view, in the case of conversion, there is no simple right place to look, since it points to a non-position. ‘[T]he slave rejects his status as slave while at the same time rejecting the fantasy of liberation, so that he becomes a slave who realizes that he is a slave. This is the state in which one must follow a path even though there is no path to follow’ (Takeuchi 2005: 72). It is precisely at this point that there emerges the possibility of radical transformation. Takeuchi connects his theory of tenkō and conversion to historical developments in China and Japan.6 In short, he contends that Japan turned to modernity so easily precisely because it turned in the form of tenkō, which itself expresses the superficiality of modernity. However, China’s initial attempts to modernize in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries constantly met with failure, and it was pushed into an abyss.7 As a result, China was forced to follow a path where there was none to follow. In such an impasse, the Chinese began to create a unique road to socialism, which had a complex relationship to modernization. This is a position that never posits a final goal but is connected to an idea of an unending revolution.

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Conclusion We have seen how Takeuchi develops a theory of tenkō and conversion based on his interwar critique of modernity and his reading of Lu Xun. During the postwar period, Takeuchi changes his position from right to left, while keeping the same basic theoretical framework. We might ask whether Takeuchi was just committing tenkō after the war or whether he was experiencing conversion, where he had the experience he associated with kaishin. Interpreting Takeuchi with his own concepts, we could say that he was holding on to a position that resulted from an earlier conversion, which has its antecedents in Lu Xun’s own famous conversion experience. His larger point is that the problem of modernity and subjectivity goes beyond the distinction between the pre- and postwar or between the simple distinction between right and left. For this reason, one must analyse Japan’s turn to fascism in the larger context of the struggle against modernity. One cannot merely turn to democracy because in this case, one might overlook the fact that many fascists targeted precisely some of the processes that undermined democracy, namely the dynamic of global modernity. The fascists did not adequately grasp these dynamics to their own peril. Moreover, part of what they did not grasp was the problem of subjectivity, which is precisely what made fascism possible and continues to haunt politics during the postwar period. If postwar progressives ignore such issues, to use Harry Harootunian’s felicitous phrase, postwar democracy would be ‘overcome by modernity’ just like the wartime fascists (Harootunian 2002). Avoiding this fate has become increasingly difficult as the problems of global modernity have worsened and most alternative projects have been discredited. In this context, Takeuchi’s work remains crucially significant.

Acknowledgements The author would like to thank the Berggruen Institute for Philosophy and Culture and the University of Wisconsin–Madison, Office of the Vice Chancellor of Research and Graduate Education with funding from the Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation for generous support during work on this paper.

Notes 1 Page references to Takeuchi (2005) refer to Richard Calichman’s translation, and those to Takeuchi (1993) refer to the original Japanese text of the essay, respectively. I  have amended the translation in certain places. 2 All translations from the Japanese are mine unless otherwise indicated. 3 For more on this association and the various debates therein, see Murthy (2016). 4 The reference to nothingness and other terminology that Takeuchi uses suggests that he was influenced by Nishida Kitarō’s philosophy. For an in-depth discussion of the relationship between Nishida and Takeuchi, See Uhl (2003). For a more philosophical discussion of the same topic, see Calichman (2004). 5 On this point, see also Olsen (1992: 52). 6 I have dealt with Takeuchi’s comparison of China and Japan more extensively in Murthy (2012). 7 I discuss Takeuchi’s interpretation of Meiji Japan and late Qing China in Murthy (2012).

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References Aristotle (1983) [4th Century BC], Physics Books III and IV, Hussey, E., trans., intro. and notes, Oxford: Clarendon Press. Avinell, Simon Andrew (2010) Making Japanese Citizens: Civil Society and the Mythology of the shimin in Postwar Japan, Oakland: University of California Press. Baba Kimihiko (2010) Sengo Nihonjin no Chūgoku-zō: Nihon haisen kara bunkadaigakumei/ Nichū-fukkō made [Postwar Japanese People’s Image of China: From the Japanese Loss in the War to the Cultural Revolution/Resumption of Diplomatic Relations Between Japan and China], Tokyo: Shinyōsha. Bidet, Jacques (2004) Explication et Reconstruction du Capital (Explanation and Reconstruction of Marx’s Das Kapital), Paris: PUF. Calichman, Richard (2004) Takeuchi Yoshimi: Displacing the West, Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Fynsk, Christopher (1993) Thought and Historicity, Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Harootunian, Harry (2002) Overcome by Modernity: History, Culture and Community in Interwar Japan, Princeton: Princeton University Press. Harootunian, Harry (2017) Marx after Marx: History and Time in the Expansion of Capitalism, New York: Columbia University Press. Hegel, G. W. F. (1986 [1812]) Wissenschaft der Logik I (The Science of Logic I), Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. Hegel, G. W. F. (2018 [1807]) Phenomenology of Spirit, Pinkard, T., trans., Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Heidegger, Martin (1962 [1927]) Being and Time, Macquarrie, J. & Robinson, E., trans., Oxford: Blackwell. Hirata, Tetsuo & Dower, John W. (2007) ‘Japan’s Red Purge: Lessons from a Saga of Suppression of Free Speech and Thought’, Middleton, B., trans., in Japan Focus 5: 1, 1–7. Kierkegaard, Søren (2009 [1844]) Philosophical Fragments, Fort Myers: Feather Trail Press. Laplanche, Jean (1999) Essays on Otherness, Fletcher, J., ed., Oxon: Routledge. Lu Xun (2005 [1926]) ‘Fujino sensei (Professor Fujino)’, in Lu Xun quanji (Complete Works of Lu Xun), Bejing: Renmin chubanshe, 313–20. Masuda, Hajimu (2015) Cold War Crucible: The Korean Conflict and the Postwar World, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Murthy, Viren (2012) ‘The 1911 Revolution and the Politics of Failure: Takeuchi Yoshimi and Global Capitalist Modernity’, in Frontiers of Literary Studies in China 6: 1, 19–38. Murthy, Viren (2016) ‘Resistance to Modernity and the Logic of Self-Negation as Politics: Takeuchi Yoshimi and Wang Hui on Lu Xun’, in positions: asia critique 24: 2, 513–54. Oguma, Eiji (2002) Minshu to aikoku: sengo nashonarizumu to kōkyōsei (Democracy and Patriotism: Postwar Nationalism and Public Nature), Tokyo: Shin’yakusha. Olsen, Lawrence (1992) The Ambivalent Moderns: Portraits in Japanese Cultural Identity, New York: Rowman and Littlefield. Panitch, Leo & Gindin, Sam (2013) The Making of Global Capitalism: The Political Economy of the American Empire, London: Verso. Postone, Moishe (1993) Time, Labour and Social Domination: A Reconstruction of Marx’s Critical Theory, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Shields, James Mark (2017) Against Harmony: Progressive and Radical Buddhism in Modern Japan, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Shigeto, Yukiko (2014) ‘tenkō and Writing: The Case of Nakano Shigeharu’, in positions: asia critique 22: 2, 517–40. Steinhoff, Patricia G. (1991) Tenkō: Ideology and Social Integration in Prewar Japan, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

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Takeuchi, Yoshimi (1980) Takeuchi Yoshimi zenshū (The Complete Works of Takeuchi Yoshimi), vol. 17, Tokyo: Chikuma shobō. Takeuchi, Yoshimi (1993) Nihon to Ajia (Japan and Asia), Tokyo: Chikuma bunko. Takeuchi, Yoshimi (1999 [1952]) Nihon ideorogii (Japanese Ideology), Tokyo: Koboshi shobō. Takeuchi, Yoshimi (2003 [1944]) Rojin [Lu Xun], Tokyo: Noma sawako. Takeuchi, Yoshimi (2005) What Is Modernity?, Calichman, R., trans., New York: Columbia University Press. Takeuchi, Yoshimi (2007) Takeuchi Yoshimi serekushon I: Nihon e/kara no manazashi (A Selection of Works by Takeuchi Yoshimi: Looking to and from Japan), Marukawa, T.  & Suzuki, M., eds., Tokyo: Nihon keizaisha. Tomba, Massimiliano (2013) Marx’s Temporalities, Leiden: Brill. Uhl, Christian (2003) Wer War Takuchi Yoshimis Lu Xun: Ein Anneherungsversuch an ein Monument der japanischen Sinologie (Who was Takeuchi Yoshimi’s Lu Xun? An Approach to a Monument of Japanese Sinology), München: Iudicum. Walker, Gavin (2016) The Sublime Perversion of Capital: Marxist Theory and the Politics of History in Modern Japan, Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

PART II

Literary possibilities

5 LITERATURE AND AFFECT Proletarian literature as discovery Nakagawa Shigemi Translated by George T. Sipos

When reading literature, there is always a slight sense of guilt that one cannot shake off. Reading literature is an activity that stays very much within the boundaries of the quotidian. Yet whilst we know that fictional reality is the given premise for any literature, the spatio-temporal experience of the ‘strange’ reality that arises from the act of reading throws us into a world of unsettling emotions. Even when we return to reality and our normal perception is recovered after finishing reading, the emotions that are left behind by the literary work persist in the form of vague shivers in and around the body. That realization of having escaped from ordinary reality makes us feel deeply unsettled, especially since we appear on the surface as if we are adjusting back to ordinary reality. Moreover, our other self – the one we left behind in the story who has gained the new experience – cannot go back to being the old self, and we are left with the feeling that we are somehow deceiving ourselves. Of course, reading provides unlimited satisfaction. And the excitement one experiences upon encountering particularly excellent literature will probably stay with one forever. Nevertheless, when it comes to lingering emotions that cannot possibly be anchored in reality, it seems most appropriate to call that feeling, as Wolfgang Iser does, ‘the asymmetry between text and reader’ (Iser 1978: 163). Iser is arguing here that understanding another’s behaviour resulting from practical action in normal interpersonal relationships cannot be achieved through reading – precisely because the reader cannot experience something ‘previously not within his experience’ without changing the way in which they have projected themselves within the text (ibid.: 167). This is where the desire to compensate, to fill in that ‘blank’, is born. Iser describes this intent to supplement with the imagination that which cannot be narrated, that which is not experienced directly as that which gives ‘shape and weight to the meaning’ of the text (ibid.: 168). As the unsaid comes to life in the reader’s imagination, so the said ‘expands’ to take on greater significance then might have been supposed: even trivial scenes

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can seem surprisingly profound. . . . . . Communication in literature, then, is a process set in motion and regulated not by a given code but by a mutually restrictive and magnifying interaction between the explicit and the implicit, between revelation and concealment. What is concealed spurs the reader into action, but this action is also controlled by what is revealed; the explicit in its turn is transformed when the implicit has been brought to light. (ibid.: 168–9) According to Iser, the reading act as exercised by the reader on the text is determined by the intention to seek that which is not explicitly narrated. At the same time, however, the reader will also be influenced by that which is being verbalized, thus helping them move forward. Equally well understood is the fact that what has been clearly verbalized in the text goes through further changes on account of the reader’s imagination and perceptual restructuring. Readers are also well aware from their own experiences of how they compensate for the ‘blanks’ and the ‘empty spaces’ of which Iser talks and transform them into different and complex contexts. That being said, how are we to account for the lack of resolution always present in the act of reading? The problem persists not simply due to the fact that ordinary reality is so far removed but also because we experience it within the time and space occupied by the text with which we are supposed to be so familiar. Although we adopt various strategies in interpreting texts, in fact, we find ourselves interpreting them by relating the worlds depicted therein to daily life, common sense and habits stemming from actual lived experience and well tested examples. Emotions, however, are not exclusively derived from such practical realms. How does one approach the existence of a text that is impossible to unravel? How is one to account for that latent feeling that claws at the chest and returns periodically to torment the heart? It is by raising such overly naïve questions that I  would like to engage with the works of proletarian literature.

Proletarian literature and affect Communism came to have a strong social impact in Japan in the late 1920s. Taishō Period (1912–26) socialism had come under the influence of Marxist-style leadership following the success of the Russian Revolution of 1918. Socialism had become popular towards the end of the Meiji period (1868–1912), during the first decade of the twentieth century, only to succumb to state suppression (as typified by the so-called High Treason Incident of 1910),1 which in turn resulted in a keen interest in liberalism and democracy and spurred proletarian and labour movements and ultimately Marxism. While the translation of the ‘Communist Manifesto’ was banned, the first volume of Marx’s Das Kapital was published in 1918 in Ikuta Chōkō’s translation and then in a complete translation by Takabatake Motoyuki in 1923 (published by Daitōkaku and Jiritsusha, respectively). In 1927, Kaizōsha also published a new translation. It should be noted here, of course, that to have so many translations of Marxist theory published in an imperialist state is a rare

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phenomenon around the world. Moreover, to have proletarian literature as the main trend in the publishing world in the early Shōwa Period (1926–89), from around the mid-1920s through the 1930s, is equally unique. On the other hand, at the end of the Taishō period and especially after the Great Kantō Earthquake of 1923, the crackdown on socialism was extremely violent, while in 1925 one of the most restrictive laws in the world, the Peace Preservation Law, was promulgated and enacted in Japan. The fear of a global communist movement was akin to our present counterterrorism measures, and, to this end, the state was instrumental in enacting and enforcing oppressive legislation. It is important to remember here that the Peace Preservation Law in Japan was the most draconian of all the other pieces of legislation adopted and that it allowed state authorities to suppress liberalism, thereby facilitating the transition to a fascist state. I would like to pause here and consider why the Japanese came to believe in the idea of communism to such an extent. The fact that the 1920s were a turning point in world history can be attributed to a variety of cultural phenomena that emerged with the conclusion of the trend towards modernism. With the expansion of capitalism and imperialist colonialism, the world was divided through forceful and violent distribution of wealth. In turn, social contradictions increased, and soon extreme injustice reached the point of no return. The world economic depression of 1929 was triggered precisely by this unfair distribution of capital, but, more than that, it created the opportunity for the war for world hegemony to take a turn toward total warfare, thus serving as the catalyst for the all-out war that was World War II. Following the Meiji period, the rapidly changing labour system transformed the daily world of the Japanese people. Particularly for lower-class workers, the impact of the transformation of the modern labour system was striking, and hard labour enforced in the name of promoting new modern industries was enough to deprive them of all human dignity. The gap between rich and poor was normalized, and the extreme pressure it put on everyday life led to an abrupt decline in the life consciousness – the perspective on life as a whole – of the lowest-level workers. Let us turn now to the fact that the early works of Japanese proletarian literature deal with this tension between labour and life consciousness. The situation where even the lowest level of human living conditions could no longer be guaranteed irrevocably for them inevitably changed their life consciousness. Love, marriage and the most basic conditions for family life were annulled and lost. A perspective on life that honours the natural rhythm of human nature is a prerequisite for the preservation of the basic conditions of daily life, but this was eroded by the harsh working conditions in modern industry. This dissonance between society and the human body emerged as the main subject of proletarian literature, although it ended up converging into a binary confrontational mechanism between politics and literature and rarely focused on the desire for internal expression with which proletarian literature is typically identified. Hayama Yoshiki’s Semento-daru no naka no tegami (Letter Found in a Cement Barrel), published in 1926, is one of the works imbued with precisely that

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consciousness. A letter secretly placed in a cement barrel contains a terrible story. The letter provides scarcely credible details of the writer’s lover who had fallen inside the cement grinder and whose body had been crushed, becoming one with the cement he was making. There is no way to ascertain the truth of the facts in the letter, so the recipient, Matsudo Yozō, cannot possibly respond in any way. My lover became cement. The next day, I  wrote this letter and slipped it inside the barrel. Are you a worker? If you are, please take pity on me and write back to me. I’d really like to know what this cement ended up being used for. (Hayama 1984: 31)2 The request from this ‘lover’ is grotesque. The image of the lover having fallen into the cement machine and having his bones and flesh crushed into cement is explicit in this letter. If we are to reformulate this according to Iser’s logic, in response to the implicit verbal message, the recipient, Yozō, is shaken by this extraordinary image that has no connection with his regular daily routine. A reading of the image in this letter, of the shattered body mixed into cement, as a metaphor of humans becoming the object of their harsh labour, represents the conventional interpretation of this story.3 However, is this really it? With his wife pregnant with their seventh child, reading the letter makes Yozō uncomfortable. When contrasting the man’s crushed body with that of the pregnant woman, one cannot help but notice that there is a strange feeling lurking in the depths of this story. In this case, the man’s presumed will to live, his desire to hold his lover, are left unquenched and buried with him in the cement. Yozō lives and impregnates his wife as if to replace that man’s desire. That is a natural desire, part of daily life. What, then, is the strange anxiety that overwhelms him? Matsudo Yozō became once more aware of the children making a racket around him. He took another look at the address and the name at the bottom of the letter, poured himself some sake and drank it all in one gulp. ‘Let’s then just get hammered! Then, we’ll see how to destroy this whole thing’, he yelled. ‘And then we will all have to put up with your drunken rage!?’ said his wife. ‘What about the children?’ He took another look at his wife’s big belly carrying his seventh child. (ibid.: 32) Yozō’s sudden desire to ‘destroy this whole thing’ is silenced by his wife’s reasonable words anchored as they are in daily reality. This would usually be a scene in which Yozō’s depression would render him helpless in the face of his wife’s realistic words. However, while the sudden desire to destroy everything is obviously an expression

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of anger over social inequity, the transformation experienced by Yozō due to a letter of dubious authenticity is never properly described. The exact nature of his desire to overturn the quotidian routine is nowhere properly explained and remains unclear, even uncanny. Yozō would endure more than eleven hours working in harsh conditions on the construction of a power plant where even the slightest negligence could lead to his nostrils being stuffed with solid cement, all the while looking forward to his night cap for that day. Or, to be more precise, he was not even aware that he was ‘enduring’. He had no choice but to provide for his pregnant wife and six children. If we focus on the new-found ‘scepticism’ instilled in Yozō and its origins within the strange letter mixed in the cement barrel, we can only conclude that it is precisely the act of reading that crushes him. It represents a masochistic act which Yozō inflicts upon himself in accepting the image of the man pulverized in the cement barrel. And yet he never completely trusts the image produced by the text of the letter. After all, this is a rather unbelievable story. To be truly transformed by this letter, Yozō had to be actively participating in the story, albeit unbeknownst to him. Why, however, attempt a story that relies on Yozō’s own physical participation? Given that this is a Hayama text, it would be usual to conclude that this ending was penned as a political message aimed at his proletarian literature readership. However, the process whereby Yozō is attracted to – and destroyed by – the letter is utterly absent from the piece. ‘We’, the readers who read the letter as a literary work, do compensate for these ‘blanks’, but the strangeness of the situation derives from the letter which Yozō is purported to have read: If you are a worker, please write back to me. In return, I’ll give you the torn cloth of my lover’s work clothes. This letter is wrapped in it. It’s soaked with his sweat and cement dust. How tightly would he hold me in these torn clothes? I beg of you! Please, please, let me know the day and the month, the location, and what kind of place this cement was used for, and then also your name, if you don’t mind! You too should take good care of yourself! Good bye! (ibid.) What on earth is the intent behind the person writing this? She is asking for a ‘letter’, but is there an actual address written on this? As far as the letter quoted in the text is concerned, neither the name nor the location of the ‘woman’ writer is indicated. Moreover, the letter is wrapped in a piece of work clothing belonging to the man who was her lover, thus making the entire thing even more unpleasant. The letter is imbued with the sweat and the body odour of the man, and the sexual boasts of the ‘woman’ who claims to have been embraced when he was wearing his work clothes are almost morbid in tone. While it could be argued that the death of her lover broke the ‘woman’s’ spirit, her final words are certainly frightening: the words, ‘You too should take good care of yourself!’, thrown out there by way of

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conclusion by a ‘woman’ animated by deep resentment, make it difficult to take the content of the letter at face value and induce a deeply unpleasant feeling. The reader of Letter Found in a Cement Barrel becomes the recipient of the letter together with Yozō and is placed in the position of deciphering its meaning as well. The mysterious violent intent that overwhelms Yozō comes and goes unexpectedly. The violence aroused by the ‘woman’ existing only in his imagination is extinguished by the reality of his pregnant wife. The vector of that unexpected violent impulse within Yozō is not shared with us, the readers – because Yozō’s reaction to the letter is never revealed in the story. What he does reveal is that the world he is inhabiting has been shaken. And yet, in spite of this, he is doing his best to believe the ‘woman’ as he is aware that, if not, her very existence risks becoming nullified. The fictionality of the text relies, first and foremost, on the reader’s belief in that fiction. And Yozō does try to believe this somewhat strange letter. It is when, in choosing to portray his reckless violence as a physical demand, he seeks to place the ‘woman’ and the man who is reduced to cement as part of reality, that Yozō gives voice to his unrelenting anger. This is, of course, social awakening. The important thing to remember here, though, is that this social awakening does not exist a priori; rather, it all stems from the formation of emotions that defy logical explanation and that are experienced at the physical level. In her Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity, Eve Sedgwick develops a deeply interesting theory that may be of relevance here. Sedgwick (2003) talks about drive as the bodily desire necessary for sustaining life, such as eating and sleeping, and about affect as the emotional activity unrelated to life support that constitutes the bodily response to the outside world. And, while it is usually believed that the affect is subordinated to the drive, that is not true, at least not in Sedgwick’s view. The two do not represent a binary conflict, nor should they be confused with one another. Their purpose is different. The drive is there to support life, so the focus and object of that desire are clearly delineated. The affect, on the other hand, does not have a clear direction and possesses a complex structure that spawns a whole variety of actions. The decisive difference between the two is time. The drive has a tight relationship with time, while affect remains unrestricted by it. For instance, unmotivated anger can occur in the blink of an eye, go on for a while and then disappear as fast as it appeared. The drive, on the other hand, works differently: once you eat, hunger is satisfied and the action ends there; in the same way, sleep invariably ends with an awakening. Freud posited sexual desire as the most important element of human behaviour, thus making it a drive. Nevertheless, more recent theories of emotion place it clearly within the realm of affect. The source of sexual desire tends to be interpreted as a biological and/or physical instinctive desire; in practice, however, it is rooted in a much more complex structure. In Letter Found in a Cement Barrel, the violent impulse experienced by Yozō is not enacted as an action, but it is this section that gives clearest voice to Yozō’s renewed physical awareness that had been caused by his reading of the letter. Yozō’s senses are awakened to this realization, both by the image of the crushed body and by the sexual symbolism of the

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cloth that had enveloped that same body. Granted, since the origin of the image is Yozō himself, this should be seen as a conflation of images born of Yozō’s internal imagining. But Sedgwick argues that such images are formed by also mobilizing various nonverbal phenomena that exist beneath the linguistic framework. The divide between linguistic and nonverbal phenomena is forever changing, and the letters supporting Yozō’s images (i.e. the linguistic) actually also comprise a series of nonverbal phenomena that continue to be generated infinitely. He keeps making complex revisions by constantly bringing such external stimuli into contact with his own internally induced images. As such, it can be said that affect has no definitive origin or beginning. One could argue that the textual defects – that which Iser calls ‘blanks’ or ‘empty spaces’ – are actually repaired and compensated for by affect. To Hayama, the impetus for writing proletarian literature was the ability to distance himself from such language-based imagery. What he really pursued was the power to stir up the readers’ affect by mobilizing nonverbal imagery (actions) while drawing a connection between the physical and the linguistic. As such, it is not too far-fetched to claim that proletarian literature was born of that horizon of expectations.

Hayama Yoshiki’s proletarian literature works Hayama’s first acclaimed work, Inbaifu (The Prostitute), published in 1925, was written during the author’s incarceration in Nagoya Prison. Like Letter Found in a Cement Barrel, this piece has a dubious nature, inasmuch as it is difficult to trust its discursive content. Its methodology can be described as akin to surrealism. Here, once again, Hayama constructs his work by viewing the intersection of the several twisted narrative perspectives as close to a kind of a reading act. There is, of course, also the intervention of affect, derived from this strange structure. And in that aporia, we, the readers, sense the cruelty of an abused body and its ensuing freedom. Hayama himself completed this story in prison, with his own physical body incarcerated. This is how the story begins: If someone were to ask me about what I’m about to write down here – ‘Hey, did it actually happen, or is it fantasy? Which in blazes is it?’ – I’d be hard-pressed to say for sure it was one or the other. I myself have, by turns, concluded about this question, this incident, that I did experience something terrible, then wondered if it was all simply fantasy, just something I’d only imagined, for if I hadn’t. . . . In the course of ten years this curious memory – I still don’t know if that’s what it is – has inscribed itself indelibly on my being in ever more elaborate and minute detail. (Hayama 2004: 145) A young sailor finds himself lured to visit a prostitute. The woman lies fully naked in a building that assumes the appearance of a storehouse. Her face is dirty

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with vomit, and her body secretes a bad odour. Overwhelmed by righteous indignation against the men who are profiteering from this obviously sick woman, the protagonist is determined to beat them up. His immediate concern is that he must help the woman one way or another. The woman, however, asks him not to do anything: the men support and protect her, and that is enough for her. It’s best to stay quiet, she pleads with him. They are not causing her any harm: they are merely showing her to him completely naked in an attempt to induce him to feel pity for her. Here again, Hayama’s mysterious sensibility toward sexuality renders the story unique. The ‘perversion’ of the fully nude prostitute – from object of sexual desire into means of soliciting sympathy – has traditionally been interpreted as an indictment of the unfair sexual labour and violence against women that was endemic at the time. Nevertheless, if we pay attention to the fact that, from the beginning, the issue as to whether the scene taking place here is ‘fantasy’ or reality is brought into question by the narrating character, we may make more sense of the ambiguity of this plot whereby the woman who is incapable of ‘commercialization’ is transformed into a prostitute. The focus turns, instead, to the very impossibility of a sexual connection, once it is established that the prostitute is also suffering from tuberculosis and uterine cancer. The reader’s interest is consequently drawn to the mysterious image of the prostitute, symbol of sexual desire, here established as testimony to an unrealizable sexuality. While ridiculing the male obsession with intercourse, the text nullifies the social stigma that females suffer due to the same. Furthermore, the key to deciphering the story lies precisely in the portrayal of the sanctification of the prostitute, normally an object of scorn, into a kind of a martyr. Reading this story will most likely force readers to go beyond their own understanding of things. At the very end, the sailor sheds a tear out of sympathy for the miserable lot of the woman. And yet, right before that, he calls the ‘prostitute’ a ‘martyr’ and changes his perception of the men who are supporting her. Such an abrupt change of heart remains rather unconvincing perhaps due to the story being so short. ‘Whadya think? You probably think it strange that we don’t all just die. You must think it dumb that we’re livin’ like maggots in a crypt, absolutely the dumbest thing we could do, but listen, some good might come of livin’. We’re buoyed by the slim hope that at some point we’ll get a break of some kind’. I had completely misread the situation. I had been utterly without shame. I went over to the other side of the beer case partition. She was lying there as before. A summer yukata now covered her nakedness. She seemed to be asleep. Her eyes were closed. I was looking at a martyr, not a prostitute. (ibid.: 156)

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The sailor’s rapid transformation may seem mundane; in contrast, the woman’s quiet strength is impressive. Observing that the sailor had scolded the men on her account, she admonishes him. ‘Kid, these men never once violated me. You’ll understand when you get a little older’ (ibid.: 153); here she is quite clearly addressing him not from the position of a victim but from an equal footing, as an independent human being. The astute reader notices something right away: while experiencing a sense of weakness at being supported by these men in this way, the woman owns her role and is determined to remain professional. To the sailor, however, she has to be a pitiful prostitute, and in that way his sense of justice is protected. The woman pities him for his childish, naïve sensibility. She even calls him ‘kid’, but the sailor does not grasp the implications behind this. Readers of The Prostitute who catch this will immediately understand the humour of the story. Her eyes may be closed, but the woman is far from asleep. In order to complete her performativity, she plays the role of the sickly prostitute. There is no neat ending to this story. Everything is left enshrouded in uncomfortable feelings. The power to fill that gap is left to the affect. The drive of the prostitute in negotiating her unavoidable existence of dependency and the affect of her customer, the sailor, who reacts in a naïve manner to the miserable ‘demonstration’ put on for him, intersect here and begin telling an entirely different story. Herein lies the significance of the protagonist’s strong feelings invoked at the very beginning of the text. His affect has continued to hold on to the ‘prostitute’s’ image across ten years of his life, but there is not a single word written here about the woman. The most convenient way for the sailor to contain his emotions would be to have her die; instead, the possibility remains that she recovers her fitness, moving from place to place and making a good living. The very impossibility of such a scenario constitutes the main focus of this work, and it is this that leads to a different life, a different story, motivated by affect, luring the readers and the novel to a new horizon.

Proletarian women writers In reading proletarian literature written by female writers, one cannot fail to notice the high percentage of works dealing with the issues of pregnancy and childbirth. There is, however, no discussion about love or marriage. In ‘Seiji to bungaku’ (Politics and Literature), a 1946 article published in the magazine Shinchō,4 literary critic Hirano Ken brought up and pointed an accusatory finger at the issue of the ‘housekeeper’ within the Communist Party, as he identified it in Kobayashi Takiji’s work, ‘Tōseikatsusha’ (Life of a Party Member) (Kobayashi 1982 [1933]). His claim that male Communist Party members operating underground used women in fake marital partnerships, either as sex slaves or as domestic workers, was a critique against an inhumane party system which found significant support in the postwar era. However, how was this system ultimately possible? The norms of gender relations are here clearly aligned with the modern family system, which, once connected to a secular morality, led to the oppression

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of women. To be sure, the determination to limit even those women who were involved in the movement exclusively to domestic work was a manifestation of male-dominated oppression. But surely, at the core of such ‘pity’ for the woman’s plight, lay a hatred of the need for them to ‘escape’ from the lives of ‘chastity’ imposed upon them and from happy married life? And surely such a conservative male ethical perspective serves as a critique of the ‘housekeeper’ scenario? It is my belief that the female proletarian writers of the time consciously resisted the conservative position of their male counterparts. Through their works, they sought to give expression to the oppression exercised by society on their bodies at times such as pregnancy or childbirth, presenting them as real-life issues. A clear example of such literature is Hirabayashi Taiko’s story ‘Seryōshitsu nite’ (In the Charity Ward) from 1927. Fleeing Tokyo in an attempt to prevent being arrested under the precepts of the Peace Preservation Law, a young socialist couple runs away through the Korean Peninsula and arrives in Manchuria. Lushun, however, was the Japanese colony of Port Arthur at the time, and the young husband, who goes out carelessly leafletting, is apprehended and imprisoned. For lack of any alternative, the pregnant wife gives birth in a charity hospital. But she is also afflicted by vitamin deficiency and is aware that her breast milk can be fatal for the baby. However, she has no money to buy artificial milk. Giving in to the crying baby, she offers her breast milk: The milk rushed out of my breast with frightening force. In the morning the pain from my breast so full of milk had reached all the way to my shoulders. It was as if part of my body was full of pus. I let the baby suckle at my breast three times through the night, her tongue and her throat enjoying sucking the milk at my nipples. The feeling of having the milk sucked out lured me into a pleasant state of doziness. (Shin Nihon shuppansha henshūbu 1987a: 87) Hirabayashi is here giving voice to the physical pleasure induced by the act of breastfeeding, one that best expresses, perhaps, the feeling of ‘maternity’. I  do, however, think that we need to reconsider the twisted image of the milk being described as ‘pus’ being sucked out of the body by the baby. Hirabayashi is referring here, after all, to a pleasant physical sensation. The protagonist remembers the physical sensation of the ‘cleansing’ as the pus was being sucked out of her body, which leads her to a pleasurable ‘doziness’, and that is all recalled as the physical sensory memory of the protagonist. She immerses herself completely in a sensation of sexual pleasure. The meaning of the image in which she offers the unsuitable breast milk out of pity for the baby is transformed by the pleasure she herself obtains from the act. The scene in fact describes a sense of deep physical satisfaction, one in which the presence of a man is completely unnecessary. Eventually, however, the baby dies. The protagonist is unable to stand up and cannot bring herself to look at the dead body. From her bed, she recalls not the child’s face but the trickling sound of water flowing from the tap she had heard

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in the morgue where her baby has been lain to rest. What this strange conclusion expresses is not simply resignation but a recollection of the physical drama inherent in her exchanges with her baby. The trickling sound of the water pleasantly overwhelms her senses, thereby protecting her from the grief over her baby’s death. One common thread present in the works of female proletarian writers during this period is the dearth of the perspective of themselves as victims to be pitied. One might expect them to deploy the sorrows they had experienced as literary material. But they resolutely refrain from such ‘self-pity’. What Hirabayashi seeks to delineate in ‘In the Charity Ward’ is a determination to rediscover her own existence from a physical perspective. In his ‘Hirabayashi Taiko’, Hirano Ken described this as a ‘strong desire for self-affirmation’, an example of ‘inherent female egoism’ (Hirano 1975b: 409). This is, of course, a measure of the limitation of male critics of the time, but Hirano’s ‘annoyance’ at Hirabayashi is subtly shown by his dismissal of the ‘desire for self-affirmation’ as an ‘inherently female’ characteristic. Hirano cannot and is not even trying to understand Hirabayashi’s ambivalence regarding her own body. Rather, what we see imposed on Hirabayashi here is the male-dominated perspective implying that self-identification as a victim would have been an easier choice. Taiko is not, however, prepared to deny her inner desires. For men, such desires are abominable and to be denied. Particularly, the manner whereby Hirano attributes Hirabayashi’s being different to other women as the reason for her being an excellent writer strikes me as misguided, reflecting, rather, the critic’s desire to preserve the status quo and a male-centred perspective that denies anything that does not fit the established gender system. Such different gender-based readings are testament to the existence of reading systems heavily dependent on gender, regardless of the fact that the act of reading represents the discovery of a completely different Other. In other words, it can be argued that the filling in of the ‘blanks’ and ‘empty spaces’ to which Iser alluded is highly dependent on gender biases. And in this way, Sedgwick’s affect, while preserving these gender biases, opens the possibility of multiple readings and discovery of meanings. In other words, the very ‘difference’ revealed here becomes a critical tool for understanding the text. In her works ‘Umu’ (Birthing) and ‘Chichi o uru’ (Selling Milk), published in 1928 and 1929 respectively, Matsuda Tokiko vividly engaged with the physical senses of women from the lower working class. In this, she can be seen challenging the enforced female physical abstinence and social acclimatization of the day. ‘Birthing’ is the story of a poor couple who have to deal with an unplanned pregnancy. Concerned as to whether they will be able to raise the child, the husband indirectly suggests abortion. However, promising to ‘work hard and raise the child,’ the wife decides to have the baby. Deep in her heart, however, she is tormented by ‘cruel thoughts’: ‘A pregnant woman who swallows poison, a mother who crushes her baby under the mattress and other such images played in front of the woman’s eyes’ (Shin Nihon shuppansha henshūbu 1987b: 9). What Matsuda is really describing here, through the grotesque images of infanticide, is the agonized physical sensations of a pregnant woman. The image of the

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baby trampled on and turned into a bloody mess invokes a drastic transformation within her. This is how she feels one thunderous night: It was a night when the devil, intent on thorough destruction, appeared subject to enormous, powerful bursts of violence in his attempt to fashion a new world. . . . And then, there was the kick of the foetus against the walls of her womb. A  strong kick. A  life that is eventually to emerge from her bloody agony. (ibid.: 10) The pregnant woman’s transformation has typically been interpreted as the emergence of the maternal instinct. In practice, however, surely this is more the story of the blood-covered foetus awakening physical recollections in her? In the same vein, Matsuda continues to detail changes of physical perception in ‘Selling Milk’. The poverty-stricken protagonist decides to become a wet nurse in a wealthy household. The master’s sickly son is kept alive with the milk of two nannies. However, the character is tormented by the contradiction that, because she is giving her milk away to the master’s son, she does not have enough left for her own daughter. As she proceeds with the humiliating process of lactation, she muses: As she painfully stretched and tightly squeezed the mammary gland, covered in the crimson skin of her plump breast, it looked like an elaborate pump with dozens of canals emerging from the nipple not half a centimetre in diameter. All this aroused in her a strange sense of pleasure. (ibid.: 20) The protagonist explains the pleasure she experienced as probably the joy of “fulfilling one’s duty” as prescribed by capitalist society. Admittedly, this physically pleasurable sensation that Matsuda did not fully understand undoubtedly derived from the contradictions inherent in capitalist society; but there was still this deepseated pleasurable sensation of hers that defied plausible explanation. And this was not just something internal but also a bodily reaction triggered by something external, a physical sensation that in turn led to an uncontrollable sense of regeneration. The works of Satō Sachiko, a largely unknown writer, are also filled with similar unusual desires. At the time of composition, NAPF (All-Japan Proletarian Arts Federation) was trying to find the best connection points with the general masses through an enlightening movement recognizing wall newspapers and slogans as literature. Satō submitted her work ‘Aigō!’ (Wail!)5 of 1932 in support of that movement. In this work, a Korean woman ends up in a proletarian clinic. Due to doing hard work right after giving birth, she now has a prolapsed uterus which she had treated with folk remedies  – but this has led to necrosis of part of her uterus. Although she complains about it as a mere ‘embarrassing affliction’, the situation requires immediate attention. The main character, who is in charge of the woman’s case, addresses a message directly to the readers. ‘You sisters who read this! Have

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you ever heard of such a story elsewhere? I’m sure you have! Let us now, without hesitation, take all our health concerns to the clinics affiliated with the Japan Proletarian Medical Union!’ (ibid.: 432). This very short piece undoubtedly serves as propaganda for the clinics. However, Satō’s story is built around the background of pregnancy, childbirth and uterine disease afflicting lower-working-class women from the colonies. Intuitively, the image of the necrotic uterus draws the reader’s attention to the trope of physical exhaustion and collapse. Using the rather didactic framework of the ‘wall newspaper’, Satō here describes the quotidian by means of the grotesque image of the deteriorated female body of the colony. But how should modern readers interpret this interest in the body? In all this, our attention is drawn to the bodies that these proletarian writers discovered and to the power of affect, uncontrollable by reason and yet clearly present as integral parts of their being. While previously this had been interpreted as an extremely personal spontaneous impulse born of internal speculation, what they discovered was a separate, external stimulus calling for a response. Affect is not something that functions autonomously. Rather, in response to that external call, it is transformed into actual action, behaviour and sensory perception. And, if that is the case, it was the very physical power with which they responded to this external call that led these writers to join the proletarian literary movement. And that cannot be achieved simply by waiting aimlessly. It is possible only with the will to delve deeper into the invisible, the incomprehensible. As Fredric Jameson noted in his classic 1981 work The Political Unconscious: So the literary structure, far from being completely realized on any one of its levels tilts powerfully into the underside or impensé or non-dit, in short, into the very political unconscious, of the text. (Jameson 1981: 49) It is no easy feat to approach the impensé and the non-dit, using one’s ears, eyes and sensations or even the body. However, the scepticism born of the discrepancy with the quotidian that the proletarian writers of the 1920s discerned allowed for a variety of expressions. Communism should not be restricted to political issues alone. What communism brought to Japan was a re-examination of the cultural conditions of daily life and, with it, the discovery of fertile expressions previously obscured by gender and sexuality. This also served to shed a different light on ‘daily acts’ such as love, marriage, pregnancy and childbirth. Particularly in the case of the female writers, this new perspective allowed them, for the first time, to view their own sexuality and bodies as their own subjective issues. It was this, in turn, that allowed them to engage with what Jameson called the ‘political unconscious’. Within the realm of proletarian literature, the concept of ‘politics and literature’ represents a gateway along the path to this realization. The two are not separated. They are one and the same. And this is where affect operates. And so we have arrived at the point where we need to consider the fundamental power of literature, a power that can only be captured through imagining the invisible and the

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unwrite-able and in pursuing the unthinkable, the impensé, and the inexpressible, the non-dit.

Notes 1 Part of the early crackdown on leftist activities in Japan, the High Treason Incident was an alleged plot by anarcho-syndicalists to assassinate the emperor. Put on trial in 1910, twelve activists were executed in January 1911, including the prominent leader of the movement, Kōtoku Shūsui (1871–1911) and his common law partner, feminist author Kanno Sugako (1881–1911). 2 Unless otherwise specified, translations of quotes from the literary works are by George T. Sipos. 3 Tsuda Takashi sums up this conventional wisdom as follows: ‘This image beautifully captures the very essence of capitalist exploitation robbing the workers’ lives of the last drop of blood’ (Tsuda 1984: 425). 4 Hirano criticized Kobayashi for his descriptions of the female character Kasahara, which suggested ‘contempt for humanity’. See Hirano (1975a: 210–2). 5 The word in the title is a Korean language onomatopoeia, the approximate equivalent of a sigh.

References Hayama, Y. (1984) Nihon puroretaria bungakushū 8: Hayama Yoshiki (Collected Works of Japanese Proletarian Literature, vol. 8: Hayama Yoshiki), Tokyo: Shin Nihon shuppansha. Hayama, Y. (2004) ‘The Prostitute’, Lawrence Rogers, trans., in Critical Asian Studies 36: 1, 143–56. Hirano, K. (1975a) ‘Seiji to bungaku 2’ (Politics and Literature 2), in Hirano Ken zenshū, vol. 1, Tokyo: Shinchōsha, 208–15. Hirano, K. (1975b) ‘Hirabayashi Taiko’, in Hirano Ken zenshū, vol. 8, Tokyo: Shinchōsha, 406–14. Iser, W. (1978) The Act of Reading: A Theory of Aesthetic Response, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Jameson, F. (1981) The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act, Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Kobayashi, T. (1982 [1933]) ‘Tōseikatsusha’ (Life of a Party Member), in Kobayashi Takiji zenshū vol. 4, Tokyo: Shin Nihon shuppansha, 343–446. Satō, S. (1932) ‘Aigō!’ (Wail!), in Hataraku fujin (April), n.p. Sedgwick, E. K. (2003) Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity, Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Shin Nihon Shuppansha henshūbu (ed.) (1987a) Nihon purporetaria bungakushū 21: fujin sakkashū 1 (Collected Works of Japanese Proletarian Literature, vol. 21: Women writers 1), Tokyo: Shin Nihon shuppansha. Shin Nihon shuppansha henshūbu (ed.) (1987b) Nihon puroretaria bungakushū 22: fujin sakkashū 2 (Collected Works of Japanese Proletarian Literature, vol. 22: Women Writers 2), Tokyo: Shin Nihon shuppansha. Tsuda, T. (1984) ‘Kaisetsu’ (Commentary), in Nihon puroretaria bungakushū, vol. 8 (Collected Works of Japanese Proletarian Literature vol. 8: Hayama Yoshiki), Tokyo: Shin Nihon shuppansha, 419–38.

6 COMMON TROPES AND THEMES IN JAPAN’S TENKŌ LITERATURE George T. Sipos

Introduction In the late 1950s, a group of Japanese social scientists, known as the Shisō no kagaku kenkyūkai (Institute for the Science of Thought), conducted what is arguably the most exhaustive collective research on the prewar tenkō (coerced conversion) phenomenon. Under the coordination of intellectual historian and philosopher, Tsurumi Shunsuke (1922–2015), the group gathered, in three volumes, research that is still a sine qua non point of reference for researchers of tenkō. The members analysed the phenomenon across roughly twenty years, from the promulgation of the Peace Preservation Law in 1925 until the end of the Asia Pacific War in 1945. In a collective effort, they arrived at a more concrete and concise definition for the term tenkō: ‘a change of thought which occurs under coercion from an authority’ (Shisō no kagaku kenkyūkai 1978: 1, 6).1 Based on the thorough research of various groups whose ideology was at odds with that of prewar Japan’s military state propaganda, this definition allows for the reinterpretation of several other moments in Japan’s modern history as periods of tenkō. As a result, some of the early Shisō no kagaku kenkyūkai members, such as Shimane Kiyoshi (1931–87), dedicated most of their subsequent research to the interpretation through a tenkō lens of several historical moments after Japan’s Meiji Restoration of 1868 (see Shimane 1969a, 1969b, 1976).2 In his introduction to the group’s collectively authored work, Tsurumi Shunsuke, the coordinator and initiator of the project, identified the key terms of the Shisō no kagaku kenkyūkai definition as kyōsei (coercion) and kenryoku (authority), a characterization he justified in a later iteration of the original research from 1959 (see Tsurumi, Suzuki & Iida 2001: 9–12). At the same time, he did, however, recognize the shortcomings and relative looseness of the initial definition and subsequently came to reformulate it as ‘a change in the way of thinking of

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individuals or groups which is brought about by state compulsion’ (Tsurumi 1986: 120). ‘Coercion’ and ‘authority’ from the 1959 definition were dropped in favour of ‘state compulsion’, a term significantly more limited in scope. As such, Tsurumi restricted the applicability of the word tenkō to a very specific phenomenon that could only occur in historical moments when the state was clearly identifiable as the aggressor forcefully imposing the ‘change in the way of thinking’ upon individuals and ideological groups. For the purposes of my research, the operational definition of tenkō is derived from Tsurumi’s 1986 version, and it restricts even further the scope of the key elements. Tenkō, as defined here, is a publicly declared ideological and epistemological conversion which takes the form of an individual narrative and which is brought about by brutal and sustained coercion from the state, the state apparatuses or any other authority with power of life and death over the subject of conversion. Thus, tenkō is a public declaration presented by the conversion subject as a narrative of the events and causes that led to the conversion decision or of the effects of that decision. Tenkō is the result of brutal and sustained coercion that may be exercised by the state or any other authority with life and death power over the conversion subject (Sipos 2013). The means through which that power is exercised do not need to be exclusively physical (incarceration, torture, etc.); they may also be psychological (life threats, public shaming, social ostracizing), economic (interdiction to work and earn income), as well as other life and livelihood-threatening means.3

Tenkō literature In June 1933, imprisoned prewar Japan Communist Party (JCP) leadership cadre, Sano Manabu and Nabeyama Sadachika, issued a tenkō declaration in which they recanted their allegiance to the communist ideals, accused the Comintern of working against the interests of the Japanese people and committed to finding a more appropriate path for Japan’s social movements. Their declaration found 392 members of the JCP already in prison and convicted of thought crimes (Yamamoto & Arita 1950: 382). Of these, 133 followed the two leaders’ example by the end of that year and declared their own tenkō. The numbers continued to increase every year, the last year of data recorded and analysed by the Shihōshō (Ministry of Justice) being 1942 (Shisō no kagaku kenkyūkai 1978: 18, vol. 1).4 According to the information provided, of the 2,440 JCP members arrested over the years, only 37 had refused to commit tenkō by that year. The proletarian literary and artistic organizations were some of the most important arms of the prewar Japan communist movement. Members of these organizations, regardless of whether they were party members or not, were seized and detained during the repeated mass arrests. In his 1957 seminal effort to coherently recount the effects of tenkō on the literary world, literary historian and critic, Honda Shūgo, estimates that, of the approximately 500 communist writers arrested at various points in time, over 95 per cent had declared tenkō by 1942 (Honda 1964: 180). Some of those who recanted and denounced their allegiance to the JCP were

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subsequently released from prison and allowed to resume writing. The authorities continued, however, to keep them under constant surveillance until the end of the Asia Pacific War. The literary texts the former proletarian writers wrote in their attempts to make sense of their imprisonment and tenkō experiences have generically been categorized as tenkō bungaku (tenkō literature). Literary texts produced in the same period by other members of the puroretaria bungaku undō (proletarian literary movement) who did not have to issue a formal declaration of tenkō in prison – but who ultimately could not sustain and justify allegiance to a political movement organizationally dismembered by 1935 and who faced the danger of being arrested and interrogated at any time – are also included in the tenkō literature category. For the purpose of this research, tenkō literature is defined as the corpus of narratives dealing mainly with tenkō as a historical, social, political, psychological or personal experience and which were produced by members and non-members of the former Japanese proletarian literary movement between 1934 and 1942. Tenkō literature is as much a political, social and artistic phenomenon with significant ramifications within Japan’s intellectual history as tenkō itself. Through the narratives of those who committed tenkō we get some idea of the tortuous process that led to a seemingly drastic change of political ideas. Although, overall, the narratives traditionally designated as tenkō literature do not always and necessarily share stylistic or thematic elements, there is, on the one hand, a striking presence of the family trope in the work of several of the most representative tenkō authors and, on the other, an overwhelming number of what can at least be, upon a superficial look, characterized as shishōsetsu (I-novel) narratives. A quick overview of some of the most celebrated writers who committed tenkō and produced tenkō literature reveals three major categories. To the first belong works by some of the tenkōsha who were forced to denounce their previous political engagement while in prison, under pressure, with the spectre of long years of imprisonment hanging over their heads. Overall, for this category, a true change of political conviction and the demise of the idea that the communist revolution was appropriate for Japan played a minor role. State pressure, physical and psychological torture and miserable prison life conditions, combined with family obligations and responsibilities, concern for the well-being of those left to care for themselves on the outside – as so many of the activist and artist tenkōsha were sole breadwinners in their families – deteriorating health after months and sometimes years spent in hygienically precarious conditions in prison, as well as other more practical reasons, played a much larger role in their decision to commit tenkō. A second category of tenkō narratives belongs to those who, although not indicted for JCP affiliation – either because the authorities were not aware of their party membership and other comrades did not divulge their names or because they were indeed not members of the party  – used tenkō literary narratives to declare their separation from the proletarian artistic movement as a result of the

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ever-deteriorating political environment. They were also driven by the same personal, financial and safety concerns as their imprisoned comrades. Finally, constituting a category in and of himself, Shimaki Kensaku became an established writer through his tenkō work. Ostensibly, he produced one of the best works of the genre, Seikatsu no tankyū (Pursuit of Life) in 1937 (Shimaki 1976: vol. 5–6), after the initial emotions of the big names were more settled and tenkō itself was no longer surrounded by the shroud of guilt, shame and sense of failure that had dominated it for the first couple of years after 1933. It is as if Shimaki was able to move forward and look for the positive side of tenkō itself – if there is such a thing – in his 1937 novel. The main characters in tenkō texts such as Sata Ineko’s Kurenai (Crimson, 1936) or Shimaki Kensaku’s Pursuit of Life express their determination to leave the past behind and move forward, on a path of their own, even at the price of appearing selfish (as Sugino Shunsuke, Shimaki’s main character in Pursuit, is, in fact, accused of doing).

Tenkō literature and family Following Fujita Shōzō’s argument in his ‘Shōwa hachi-nen o chūshin to suru tenkō no jōkyō’ (The Conditions of Tenkō around 1933) (Shisō no kagaku kenkyūkai 1978, vol. 1: 32–63), sociologist Patricia Steinhoff described tenkō as a social integrative effort made by Japan’s state authorities. Fujita linked the theoretical basis of tenkō with Marxist philosopher and thinker Fukumoto Kazuo’s idea that, in order to develop a real class consciousness, the shutai (individual subject) ‘had to become deeply aware of class consciousness’ and not simply acknowledge its existence (kaikyū ishiki wo ishiki shinakereba naranu) (ibid.: 39). Drawing on Fujita’s explanation, Steinhoff, Richard H. Mitchell and Germaine A. Hoston have analysed tenkō not from the perspective of the conversion subjects but from that of the state authorities. The goal of the authorities was to (re)integrate JCP members and all other political groups deemed dangerous into Japanese society, the kazoku kokka (family-nation) as defined by the 1889 Meiji Constitution, led by the 2,500-year-old, ‘unbroken’ imperial dynasty whose origins were purportedly traceable back to Amaterasu, the Sun-Goddess of the Shintō pantheon. Perceived primarily as a symbolic threat to the concept of the kokutai (national polity), which formed the ideological backbone of prewar Japan, members and sympathizers were targeted from very early on in the development of the leftist movement at the end of the nineteenth century. Careful not to allow even the slightest dissemination of the idea that they sought the elimination of the imperial system, late Meiji authorities made a point of periodically dismantling the organizations and portraying their leaders as dangerous elements who did not abide by the rules of, and hence did not belong to, the family-nation. A quick look at the history of Japan’s prewar leftist movement shows an alternation of highly active periods followed by absolute silence induced by government oppression. Viewed as part of such historical ups and downs, it is not surprising that the tenkō phenomenon, started by Sano and Nabeyama in 1933, led within two years to the almost complete silencing of the

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prewar leftist movement, until the country’s defeat in World War II, in 1945 (Beckmann & Okubo 1969: 249 et passim; Steinhoff 1991: 6). If, however, we consider the ramifications of tenkō to be intimately tied to Japan’s imperial dynasty and its convoluted history and not only to the formation of its modern state and nation, then we would need to take into account the fact that tenkō might not be easily explained without giving a great deal of historical, social, political and religious background stretching back in time, a topic beyond the scope of this research. Instead, the focus here will be on a concise explanation of the connections between the concept of the family-nation and tenkō, which in turn heavily influenced the production of tenkō literary works. Japan’s process of modernization put considerable strain on traditional social and family structures such as the ie (family household).5 Based in village communities, the traditional family, defined by its long ancestor-lineage, residence stability and social position within the village hierarchy, was slowly falling apart by the end of the nineteenth century, as more and more household heads, driven by poverty and misery, were making the decision to move their families to urban areas to join the ranks of the working proletarian masses. The destruction of the traditional family household was dubbed ie-goroshi (domicide) by ethnographer Yanagita Kunio in his address ‘Inaka tai tokai no mondai’ (The Problem of Rural vs. Urban) at the 1906 meeting of the Greater Japan Agricultural Association: Even if the living members of the family raise no objection, when one takes into account the descendants as yet unborn, then domicide, or the killing of the house, is not suicide – it’s murder. If killing one’s own children is homicide, then is it not equally criminal forever to deprive our living descendants of the awareness of their lineage? Is the ie, which is second to the nation in the length of its existence, to be destroyed overnight at the discretion of the head of the household? And yet, today, moving one’s permanent residence to a big city nearly always results in just this kind of domicide, or ie-goroshi. . . . The awareness that our ancestors have lived and served under the imperial family for thousands of generations forms the surest basis for the feelings of loyalty and patriotism. If the ie were to disappear, it might even be difficult to explain to ourselves why we should be Japanese. As individualism flourished, we would come to view our history no differently from the way we view that of foreign countries. (Yanagita 1962: 16, 38–9; Irokawa 1985: 288) At about the same time, in the early 1900s, the ‘illusion’ of the family-nation (a term used by historian Irokawa Daikichi) was born from the reality of the demise of the traditional household under the pressure of modernization and capitalism. Carol Gluck, however, traced the origins of the demise of the traditional household to legal changes in its status that took place as early as 1871 when the Kosekihō (household register law) was adopted. As proof of some of the earliest appearances of the notion of family-nation in modern Japan, Gluck quotes the 1876 words of

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Kawaji Toshiyoshi (1829–79), the founder of Japan’s modern police: ‘the nation is a family, the government the parents, the people the children, and the police their nursemaids’ (Gluck 1985: 187). Family-nation became the third pillar of the Meiji ideological tripod, joining the imperial system and the national polity. Ingrained in the conceptual definition of the latter, the image of the emperor as father of the nation with whom all Japanese citizens were connected through family ties from times immemorial was used to instil patriotism and to create a sense of belonging to an imagined community. In the first historical study of the concept, Itō Tasaburō (1909–84) defined national polity as ‘the harmonious unity of the ruler and the people, the whole nation as one family under the rule of the emperor, his line unbroken for ages eternal (Itō 1936: 5; Irokawa 1985: 247, emphasis added). In the end, Meiji state propaganda was so successful in asserting the reality of the family-nation that Irokawa wrote, ‘The emperor system gradually became part of the landscape, disappearing into the Japanese environment until people thought it was a product of their own village community rather than a system of control imposed from above’ (Irokawa 1985: 246). The flexibility and vagueness of the imperial system and national polity concepts, combined with the pervasive nature of the latter in the Japanese subconscious,6 allowed for the inclusion into state policies and laws of seemingly contradictory theories and justified the dissolution of political and religious movements or their adoption (integration) into state-sponsored institutions and organizations (ibid.: 251). Even Japanese Christians could justify bowing to the emperor as not contradictory to their faith, as he was a lord of a different realm than Christ. The only political groups that contested the emperor system and the national polity from the very beginning of their existence in the late 1890s were the leftists. It is no wonder, then, that by the beginning of the Shōwa Period in 1926 and the adoption of the Peace Preservation Law, Japan’s police authorities decided to eliminate once and forever the ideological disturbance caused by socialists and communists. From the perspective of the government, the elimination of the leftist movement would have, indeed, represented a (re)integration of the ‘confused’ and ‘lost’ Japanese nationals who mistakenly went against their emperor, their national polity, and their family(-nation). By arresting them and by guiding them with parental care along the path of tenkō, helping them ‘see’ the wrongness of their ways and allowing them to rejoin their families and their family-nation (most of the tenkōsha were, in fact, released into their elderly fathers’ custody), Japan’s police state was doing these national subjects a favour. It was magnanimously granting them their freedom as long as they were willing to confess and recant. Richard H. Mitchell remarked in his Thought Control in Prewar Japan that traditionally the Japanese ‘attached great importance to an admission of guilt and a promise to repent’ (Mitchell 1976: 98). One researcher of the penal system of Japan in the late 1920s, Sakamoto Hideo, also noted that penal punishment and strict laws were not adequate to counter thought crimes. Using the concept of ‘love’, he underscores the following: ‘We must make the proletarians love the country and the country

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must also love them’ (cited in ibid.: 98). The tenkō process itself was imbued with spiritual and religious undertones. As a result, many of the tenkō literary narratives touch upon, in one way or another, the topic of family. For within the overall discourse of the family-nation, there is also the complicated process of the transformation of Japan’s traditional family. Not only were household heads moving their families to the city in search of a better life, but urban families were also inventing themselves as modern ­couple-based units. The concept of the modern, middle-class, urban family has its own discursive history, which begins around the 1880s and attempts to configure new rules and rituals. Tokutomi Sohō (1863–1957) was the first publisher to add the journal Katei zasshi to his monthly Kokumin no tomo in 1892. Other publications of the time followed suit (Sand 2003: 25 et passim). Key ideological concepts meant to define the new type of hōmu, an obvious neologism borrowed without change from English, such as ikka danran (family circle), home life as ‘paradise’, ‘harmony of the home’ and others became an integral part of the private family discourse. As Jordan Sand argues, the family circle in particular was assigned a high educational value: But since the moral discourse of domesticity was alien, [some] were not content to leave the form the family gathering should take to chance. To make its moral value self-evident, champions of the katei gave the family circle a ceremonial character, providing specific protocols for its enactment and investing with symbolic significance. (ibid.: 29) The need to impose such rituals for the modern family may have been a reaction to the seemingly unstructured mode of modern life. But, as much as they may have been connected with older practices of sitting together for meals especially in traditional farming families, many reformers were also invested in adding modern elements. According to prominent socialist activist Sakai Toshihiko (1871–1933), one important element in establishing a good communion among family members at dinner time was the adoption of Western-style tables. In a series entitled ‘Katei no shin-fūmi’ (A New Taste for the Home), which he published in 1901–2, Sakai writes: A family meeting is held at mealtime. Scenes of the so-called family circle occur most often at mealtime. In light of this, meals absolutely must be taken at the same time and the same dining table. When I say dining table, I mean one large surface, whether round or square – you can call it a teeburu or a shippokudai. In any event, I believe we should abandon the old trays (zen). (ibid.: 33) Slowly but surely, other major changes took place, from the reshaping of the living space to more efficient and modern ways to maintain smaller, urban households.

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The bourgeois, middle-class family integrated harmoniously within the larger, allencompassing family-nation, without challenging the status quo. The intensification of leftist activities in the second half of the 1920s, however, brought with it a new generation of activists who came from various socio-­ economic and class backgrounds but who shared the political ideals of socialism and communism. Inspired by the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917, their family choices were at odds not only with the family-nation but also with the bourgeois family standards invented during the Meiji period. As they were not abiding by the prescribed social rules and mores of the time, proletarian couples and their intimate life became a favourite tabloid topic, and their relationships were made into the subject of scandal and gossip. Some of them, writers, actors, musicians, painters or filmmakers, were well known artistic personalities, stars whose personal lives were avidly followed by fans all over Japan. Their love, invariably described as ‘akai koi’ (red love), their family life with its ups and downs, as well as their take on domesticity were reported in great detail by newspapers and magazines, not out of admiration and respect but out of mercantile voyeurism.7 Not surprisingly, some of the proletarian artists’ tenkō narratives focused on the topic of divorce. Divorce, the separation of two supposedly equal members of the household, was the ideal means to relate a seemingly autobiographical event in a shishōsetsu or personal narrative mode, as well as to indicate metaphorically one’s separation from communist political activities and, as such, a tenkō. The microcosm of the modern communist household came to represent the larger family of the party and the family-nation, in an unusual and paradoxical tandem. As exemplars of the ‘return to Japan’ (Nihon e no kaiki) movement from the city back to the village, often associated with tenkō literature, works like Mura no ie (House in the Village, 1935) by Nakano Shigeharu, Fuyugare (Winter Withering, 1935) by Tokunaga Sunao and Botan no aru ie (The House with the Peony Tree, 1934) by Sata Ineko come to mind. They share the trope of the return to the parental home, although in their cases it is not a complete ‘return’, as envisioned by the thought crime prosecutors in Tokyo, but a return to a space that allows the characters to realize that they still possess the strength to continue the struggle. The main characters there are tenkōsha who are seeking not only solace but also new hope once they are back home with their parents or siblings. The parental home, although conceived by the authorities as the representative space of the familynation – as previously indicated, in a perverted process of infantilization, some of the most feared political activists of prewar Japan were being released into the custody of their elderly fathers – takes on a different dimension, especially in Nakano’s story. Paradoxically, it becomes the space where the character finds new hope for the revolutionary struggle and where he decides that, as long as he can write, he can still fight for his ideals, in spite of the public declaration of tenkō he had issued under pressure while in prison. A separate group of tenkō texts such as Sata’s Crimson, Byakuya (Midnight Sun, 1934) by Murayama Tomoyoshi, or Fūun (Wind and Clouds, 1934) by Kubokawa Tsurujirō focuses on divorce and the failure of the modern communist family,

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ideally built on the premise of gender equality but in effect reproducing the same fallacies and female oppression as its modern bourgeois counterpart. As such, of particular interest is the divorce narrative and the differences between the female and the male author perspectives. Sata and Kubokawa specifically, were a married couple and wrote their tenkō narratives (Crimson and Wind and Clouds) in dialogue with each other, Sata’s text responding to Kubokawa’s and relating the same events that led to their divorce, with both using the semi-autobiographical narrative convention of the shishōsetsu.8 Finally, as a category in and of themselves, novels such as Seinen (Youth, 1932) and the later Seinen no kuni (Country of Youth, 1943) by Hayashi Fusao are read as perfect expressions of complete reintegration into the family-nation and represent an absolute embracing of its ideology. Hayashi, a writer and literary critic, started his career as an active and passionate member of the proletarian literary movement and supporter of the Japanese Communist Party. Arrested in 1930, he committed tenkō before Sano and Nabeyama and was released from prison in April 1932, thus belonging to the first wave of communists who committed tenkō, that of activist Mizuno Shigeo’s Dissolutionist faction. In August 1932, a few short months after leaving prison, Hayashi began serializing the novel Youth in the journal Chūō kōron.9 Together with the article ‘Sakka toshite’ (As a Writer) published a month later in the literary journal Shinchō, Youth came to be regarded as an expression of Hayashi’s tenkō. Youth does not, however, deal directly with the issue of tenkō. The main characters are modelled after two historical figures, young samurai from the Chōshū domain who supported the Meiji Restoration and who helped shape the face of modern Japan: Itō Hirobumi (called in the novel Itō Shunsuke, a name by which the historical Itō was known in his youth) and Inoue Kaoru (reworked in the novel as Shiji Bunta). The nationalist fervour, the passion in the descriptions of Japan’s beauty and, last but not least, the historical theme itself were perceived by contemporaries as clear indications of estrangement from Marxism and the ideals and objectives of proletarian literature. Youth was followed by another novel, Sōnen (Maturity, 1936), (Hayashi 1936) and then by a third, Country of Youth, published in 1943. Hayashi’s trilogy, along with numerous articles about the nature of tenkō,10 represents probably the most aggressive and radical statement of conversion from communism to national socialism and ultra-nationalism. It may be argued that Hayashi Fusao is the most ‘successful’ example of tenkō as a project designed to reintegrate former leftists into the family-nation.11 In addition to the family, other tropes common to many of the tenkō narratives that complete the picture of a group of literary texts brought together by their authors’ political past rather than by their ideological present and future include shame, guilt, sickness, failure and disappointment.

Tenkō literature and the shishōsetsu An equally important topic in the understanding of tenkō literature is its connection with the shishōsetsu narrative mode. Very early in its critical reception, tenkō

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literature was equated with the shishōsetsu. The word is approximately translatable as ‘I-novel’, although the apparent German parent category, the Ich-Roman, comes from a different tradition, and most scholars and critics of the genre have made sure to clarify the differences. In 1925, novelist and critic, Kume Masao, wrote his ‘Watakushi shōsetsu to shinkyō shōsetsu’ (The shishōsetsu and the Soul-searching Novel), a treatise, published in the January–February issue of the magazine Bungei kōza, that has since become one of the canonical theoretical texts of the genre (Hirano, Odagiri & Yamamoto 2006, vol. 1: 163–72).12 His argument is encapsulated in the following passage: I consider the shishōsetsu to be the true path and essence of prose art. . . . What I  call the shishōsetsu is not a translation of the German Ich-Roman. Instead, it refers to another sort of shōsetsu [narrative], the ‘autobiographical’ shōsetsu [jijo shōsetsu]; it signifies a shōsetsu in which the author reveals his self directly. The shishōsetsu, however, does not signify ‘autobiography’ [jijoden] or ‘confession’ [kokuhaku]. Above all, it must be a shōsetsu; that is to say, it must be art [geijutsu]. (ibid.: 164; Suzuki 1996: 15)13 The classification of most tenkō literary texts between 1934 and 1942 as shishōsetsu had the effect of directing the postwar critical reception into the realm of the personal, into categories such as ‘the psychology of the tenkō process’ as experienced by the literary characters who were inevitably perceived as alter egos of the authors themselves, the tenkōsha. This postwar tradition began with Honda Shūgo’s 1953 ‘Tenkō bungaku to shishōsetsu’ (Tenkō Literature and the shishōsetsu) and continued with his 1954 Tenkō bungaku-ron (Studies on Tenkō Literature) (Honda 1964: 179–229). The shishōsetsu genre is an important literary development of modern Japanese literature that took place at the beginning of the twentieth century. It is usually associated with the prose of authors such as Tayama Katai, Shiga Naoya, Kasai Zenzō and Dazai Osamu, although many more writers before and after World War II wrote in this vein or at least employed its conventions. Moreover, the category is said to have survived the twentieth century and to be still alive and well in contemporary Japan. The conventional understanding of shishōsetsu is that the author and the main character are one and the same, and although the literary text includes fictional elements, the story is purported to be a truthful biographical account of the author’s experiences and thoughts, and it is read as such. In order for this paradigm to function, the reader must, of course, assume an active role as an important player in the shishōsetsu convention. As such, the readers  – almost always self-selected insiders and connoisseurs of the literary circles, or bundan – play an extremely important role and function as the author’s intended recipients and interpreters of the narrative. The relationship between proletarian literature and the shishōsetsu is complicated, and for a short while the theoretical debate that involved the two literary

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categories was leaning in favour of the former, and shishōsetsu appeared ready to slip into oblivion. ‘The tradition of shishōsetsu [thus] finally died,’ wrote critic Kobayashi Hideo (1902–83) in his 1935 seminal study of the genre, Watakushi shōsetsuron (Studies on shishōsetsu) (Kobayashi 1970: 142; Hijiya-Kirschnereit 1996: 82). Kobayashi’s essay appeared at the end of almost two decades of debates over the nature of the shishōsetsu in Japan’s modern literature and its relationship with European counterparts, and it was meant as a conclusion to the debates. The article, however, was written at a time when Marxist literature in Japan was also coming to an end due to the tenkō phenomenon, so Kobayashi’s only positive remark ever about proletarian literature – that shishōsetsu would be replaced by the convictiondriven literature of the left – came to naught. Moreover, in the years that followed, tenkōsha writers would come to embrace the shishōsetsu genre as well. Nakamura Mitsuo’s 1935 contribution to the discussion started by Kobayashi Hideo follows up on the connection between the two literary categories. In his article ‘Shishōsetsu ni tsuite’ (On the shishōsetsu), published in the journal Bungakkai, Nakamura took a completely different stance on the role of proletarian literature and its relationship with the shishōsetsu (Nakamura 1935: 70–92). The critic considered that, paradoxically, it was leftist literature that would ensure the continuation of the genre, despite the fact that it attacked it on formal grounds. For Nakamura, proletarian literature was not capable of developing a new tradition using foreign ideas, and he consequently argued that the end result would be a return to the shishōsetsu. He concluded his article on a tone opposite to that of Kobayashi: The form of the shishōsetsu may have disappeared from the mainstream of literature, but its spirit lives tenaciously on, transformed into a skeleton, in contemporary literature. (ibid.: 91; Hijiya-Kirschnereit 1996: 87) Irmela Hijiya-Kirschnereit has shown that the conventional understanding of the genre was set at the very beginning of its theoretical construction, in the 1920s. According to that tradition, the most important characteristic of the shishōsetsu is that it belongs within the realm of the ‘truth’, ‘truthful experience’, or ‘reality’, where ‘reality’ is defined in contrast to ‘fiction’ (Hijiya-Kirschnereit 1996: 161). The ‘reality’ that characterizes shishōsetsu refers to the restriction of the subject matter to ‘the life experienced by the author’ as ‘fact’. Any fabrication (fiction) is immediately excluded as lacking in complete sincerity. (ibid.: 161–2) When she summarized the traditional view of the concept of makoto (‘truth’, ‘reality’), Hijiya-Kirschnereit found it to be constituted of three distinct parts or relationships: the ‘one-to-one’ relationship between literary and real-life events, which is assumed; ‘reality’, understood to mean the ‘spiritual condition of the hero,

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the inner reality’ (the case in which factual accuracy becomes, in fact, of secondary importance); and the relationship between the work and the reader, the impression that the work creates on the reader. I believe that these three relationships, which define the concept of ‘truth’ at the core of the shishōsetsu, played a major role in the tenkō writers’ choice for the genre despite it being remote from the literary principles of proletarian literature. In Hijiya-Kirschnereit’s structural definition of the shishōsetsu, two fundamental principles are combined. One is ‘factuality’, defined by the author as ‘the relationship presumed in the view of the Japanese reader between the literary work and reality . . . a rule which states that the work reproduces the reality experienced by the author’ (ibid.: 174) and which represented the perfect means to convey the feelings of the author about the tenkō experience, as well as about his or her posttenkō personal developments. The second is the ‘focus figure’, a single perspective common to the protagonist, the narrator and the author. The shishōsetsu writer and theorist Uno Kōji (1891–1961) described factuality as the product of a tacit agreement between author and reader. In his 1920 story, Amaki yo no hanashi (Tale of a Sweet World), Uno described the process of identification between author and narrator that takes place at the readership level. In the shishōsetsu, ‘a mysterious person simply appears who calls himself “I” ’, he argued, but no further information about his physical appearance, occupation or character is given. Uno continues: However, if we are very observant then [it becomes clear] that the writer of the novel is similar to this ‘I’. This is usually the case. That is why the narrator is a writer by profession. And so, neither the readers nor the authors are in the least sceptical about the strange phenomenon that, when there is talk of ‘I’, the reference is to the writer of the novel. (quoted in ibid.) This process leads, in turn, to an ‘agreement’ between the reader and the work or the author. Based on signals found in the text, on certain similarities between the hero and the author, and on the basis of previous experience with similar readings, the reader assumes that the narrative s/he is reading ‘corresponds to the truth’. The signals could be, especially in the case of the literature of the bundan (literary circles) of the 1920s and 1930s, initials of the names of other members of the circle, places, or events from the life of the author that the readers would know from public mass media sources. ‘In this way’, writes Hijiya-Kirschnereit, ‘the text is interspersed with direct references – including mention of recent events  – and allusions to reality that the reader can check at any time’ (ibid.: 176). Without much effort, a regular reader of proletarian literature would have been able then to identify the characters in the tenkō narrative and look for other signals in the text that would have shed more light on ‘reality’ (i.e. ‘the internal reality of the author’). In the case of the shishōsetsu, Donald Keene has asserted that, when the narratives were populated with other

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characters from reality hidden under altered names, they were ‘generally read as romans à clef’ (Keene 1998: 509). I am foregrounding those elements that would make the shishōsetsu an ideal narrative convention for those proletarian writers who declared tenkō, not only in order to explain why this genre, so much identifiable with Japan’s modern literary practices, became their preferred narrative format but also because I believe that the conventions and symbols associated with the shishōsetsu represented the perfect carrier of meaning hidden from the long reach of the censorship of the time. When it comes to the shishōsetsu’s communicative function, Hijiya-Kirschenereit analysed three actors involved in the process: the author, the hero and the reader. Among other aspects of communication for the author, ‘self-revelation’ as a moral act seems to be particularly relevant for tenkō writers. As for the reader, their identification with the hero, as well as voyeurism and moral support are invoked, but the most important aspect remains the ‘authority of authenticity’ (Hijiya-Kirschnereit 1996: 285 et passim). Another researcher of the genre, Edward Fowler, paid particular attention to the issue of ‘authenticity’ in the shishōsetsu. After going into detail about the traditional and modern meaning of shōsetsu (fiction), Fowler considered the factors that made it ‘slide’ into the shishōsetsu (Fowler 1988: 3–27). Fowler addressed author–character identification as well, calling into question the common practice of Japanese literature scholars of relying on literary texts to document the author’s biography. He drew attention to the reader’s willingness to participate in the author–character identification. With most shishōsetsu texts, knowing certain details of the author’s life influences the understanding and reception of the text. At the same time, autobiographical details alone do not necessarily shed a different light on the text. Fowler captured this interpretative conundrum: The Japanese as readers of shishōsetsu have tended to regard the author’s life, and not the written work as the definitive ‘text’ on which critical judgment ultimately rests and to see the work as meaningful only insofar as it illuminates the life. The Japanese reader constructs a ‘sign’ out of the signifying text and the signified extraliterary life, with no misgivings about this apparent blending of ‘intrinsic’ literary and ‘extrinsic’ biographical data. (ibid.: xviii) Fowler posited this conundrum in terms of culture, explaining that for Western writers ‘representation was the sum total of the narrative enterprise; the narrator exercised his creative license, giving birth to fictional situations and characters answerable only to his authority’. Japanese writers, on the other hand, preferred to describe the world as they experienced it, the narrative being of little concern. Since they were not preoccupied with developing a plot in the Western sense, Fowler argues, the scope of their authority was limited to their personal experiences, thoughts and actions (ibid.: xxiii–xxiv). This was, of course, an unfair generalization on Fowler’s part, and it purposefully left out writers such as Tanizaki

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Jun’ichirō (1886–1965) or Mishima Yukio (1925–70) for whom plot building was a constant preoccupation. When he addressed the author–character–reader triangle, Fowler found that it was the very specific nature of the bundan, which he defined as ‘that close alliance of writers, critics and interested readers who had an emotional or intellectual stake in the equation between art and private life’, that made its functioning possible, although he may be overstating the importance of the closeness between readers and the bundan writers, especially since so many of the latter were public figures whose life events were related by the mass media, with the result that many members of the Japanese public may have inadvertently been part of an enlarged, more public, literary circle unrestricted by the rules and the conventions of the actual coteries (ibid.: xxvi). Fowler’s recourse to tradition has been questioned by Tomi Suzuki in her take on the shishōsetsu. Suzuki repositioned the genre as no more than a ‘mode of reading’ (Suzuki 1996: 6). The continuity that Fowler emphasizes between the shishōsetsu and the ‘indigenous tradition’, however, is the direct result as well as a sophisticated reinforcement of what I call I-novel discourse, the explanatory and analytical narrative schema that retroactively constructed the ‘indigenous’ tradition according to the I-novel paradigm. (ibid.: 4) Suzuki considers the shishōsetsu discourse to be an ‘I-novel meta-narrative’ assigned, post factum, to a body of texts in Japanese modern literature. Moreover, the author’s analysis of the shishōsetsu moves the initiation of the author–reader contract from the first party to the second. In his study of autobiography and littérature intime, Philippe Lejeune pointed out that the author is usually understood to be the agent who initiates the mutual contract (Lejeune 1982: 210–11).14 In the case of Japanese literature, however, ‘the referential, autobiographical reading of these texts was not necessarily the result of a contract proposed by the author. In the case of the I-novel, it is ultimately the reader who assumes a “hidden contract” in the text’ (Suzuki 1996: 6). This distinction is important, as the ultimate responsibility for interpreting and understanding the message within the narrative lies with the reader, which I  believe is what happens in the case of the tenkō shishōsetsu narrative as well. That does not mean that the author was not aware of that convention. On the contrary, the author, as Tomi Suzuki showed, ‘presupposes these autobiographical assumptions on the part of the reader’, and most shishōsetsu novelists of the 1920s, such as Kamura Isota (1897–1933), Kanbayashi Akatsuki (1902–80), Ozaki Kazuo (1899–1983) and others, ‘emerged as “self-conscious I-novelists” ’; that is, they became novelists after the notion of the I-novel had been established, and they presupposed and internalized the I-novel reading mode’ (ibid.: 7).

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As such, Tomi Suzuki’s final definition of the shishōsetsu is as follows: The I-novel is best defined as a mode of reading that assumes that the I-novel is a single-voiced, ‘direct’ expression of the author’s ‘self ’ and that its written language is ‘transparent’ – characteristics hitherto regarded as ‘intrinsic’ features of the I-novel. The I-novel, instead of being a particular literary form or genre, was a literary and ideological paradigm by which a vast majority of literary works were judged and described. Any text can become an I-novel if read in this mode. (ibid.: 6) Suzuki’s take on shishōsetsu also rejects the idea, launched by Japanese critics and adopted by Fowler, that the genre was the result of the guild-like relationships inside the bundan. While she argues that the expansion of journalism helped spread and institutionalize the I-novel critical discourse, Tomi Suzuki does not address how the socially engaged proletarian writers interacted with the shishōsetsu paradigm. The obvious autobiographical component of the tenkō narratives was not lost on contemporary critics. Nakamura Mitsuo used his biting criticism to address the issue in a February 1935 issue of the magazine Bungei sekai. In this article, reproduced as ‘Tenkō sakkaron: Bungei jihyō’ (Studies on tenkō Writers: Comments on their Art) (Satō 1998: 91–109), Nakamura wrote: One gets used to anything. And one of the cleverest ways of getting along in this dizzy age of ours is to get used to everything, no matter how peculiar, as quickly as possible. Perhaps that is why it does not seem especially strange that there should be a spate of novels these days by so-called tenkō writers who have described their prison experiences. But, when one stops to think about it, this is indeed a truly bizarre phenomenon. In the first place, it is strange that so many authors have been imprisoned. Most of them, moreover, have left prison at almost exactly the same time, and in less than two or three months have published accounts of their prison experiences in the form of autobiographical fiction in the major magazines. Surely this must be virtually without precedent in world literature. (ibid.: 91–2; translated in Keene 1998: 880–1) The association between tenkō literature and the shishōsetsu genre, however, was canonized by Honda Shūgo’s sweeping generalization from his aforementioned 1953 short article, ‘Tenkō Literature and the shishōsetsu’. According to Honda, ‘more than 95 per cent of the former proletarian writers who passed through that long, dark period, committed tenkō, and the majority of them switched to shishōsetsu’ (Honda 1964: 180). The critic did not further develop the argument in his more comprehensive analysis, Studies on tenkō Literature, so the initial reference to shishōsetsu remained rather puzzling. Moreover, he discarded what he called ‘the

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first stage’ of tenkō literature (1934–7) as irrelevant to the category itself because the literary texts identified by critics and the literary milieu as ‘tenkō texts’ did not deal with the ‘internal psychology of tenkō’ (ibid.: 205 et passim). From Honda Shūgo’s point of view, tenkō literature only begins with Shimaki Kensaku’s 1937 Pursuit of Life (ibid.: 211 et passim). My argument here is that the very nature of shishōsetsu as an expression of the ‘close’ connection with an informed readership, as well as the Japanese tradition of understanding shishōsetsu as a truthful account of the author’s experiences, combined with the potential for looser censorship, made the genre an ideal carrier of political meaning and resistance against the authoritarian state. When read again and again in search of meaning, the literary text becomes a universe. Each and every word opens up different paths of interpretation; each line illuminates corners unexplored before. But in this hermeneutical process mostly employed by those who engage with the text professionally – i.e. critics or scholars of literature, the ability to innocently read that text as if for the first time is lost. So, paradoxically, the person most knowledgeable about the text turns into the one least able to grasp the invisible bridges connecting the author, the narrator and the reader as they were shaped only by that first, direct encounter with the text. Herein lies the complicated nature of the shishōsetsu, a literary genre where the author–reader relationship is seemingly never naïve and plays a definite role in shaping not only meanings but the nature of writing itself. On the one hand, readers open the text for the first time with the assumed voyeuristic expectation that they will find in there biographical information, intimate thoughts and personal confessions to which third parties (reporters, interviewers, admirers) are not privy. On the other hand, the author employs the conventions of this unspoken covenant, aware of the fact that regardless of the narrative persona, the reader’s mind will identify the main character of the story as well as the narrator with the author him- or herself. But if this were exclusively so, if Fowler’s take on the genre as an exclusively literary circle product were accurate, would not the shishōsetsu be nothing more than a glorified ‘news bulletin’ of sorts for Japan’s prewar literary circles and would cease to exist outside the closed coterie that created it, as critic Itō Sei famously wondered in his classic 1948 study, Shōsetsu no hōhō (Methods of the Novel) (Itō 1971: 65)? Outside the zeitgeist that made possible its hermeneutical exercise, what other significance can shishōsetsu texts still have? In the context of tenkō literature, the reading as romans à clef still offers extraordinary potential for reading many of the narratives as acts of political resistance. And that is a premise worth exploring further through close reading of the literary texts.

Notes 1 This is the revised (kaitei zōho) edition of the original findings published by the Shisō no kagaku kenkyūkai in 1959. All translations from this and other Japanese sources are mine unless otherwise indicated. 2 Meiji Restoration refers to the ‘return’ of the emperor to the throne of Japan, after centuries of the military leadership of the shōgun, and it marks the beginning of Japan’s

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modernization process. See, among others, Gordon (2003: 61–76) and Hane (1986: 84–109). 3 For a recent discussion on tenkō, see also Ward (2019). 4 Here Tsurumi cites data from a publication of the Shihōshō hogokyoku (Ministry of Justice, Bureau of Custody) entitled Shisōhan hogo taishōsha ni kansuru shochōsa (Various Studies Concerning Thought Criminals in Custody), published in 1943. 5 I use the term ‘modernization’ as defined in Berman (1983: 15). For Berman, ‘modernity’ is a ‘mode of vital experience – experience of space and time, of the self and others, of life’s possibilities and perils – that is shared by men and women all over the world today. . . . [I]t is a paradoxical unity, a unity of disunity: it pours us all into a maelstrom of perpetual disintegration and renewal, of struggle and contradiction, of ambiguity and anguish. To be modern is to be part of a universe in which, as Marx said, “All that is solid melts into air” ’. In Berman’s view, ‘modernity’ is born out of the dialectical tension between ‘modernization’, defined as a socio-economic process, comprising a host of social processes, such as scientific discoveries, industrial upheavals, demographic transformations, urban expansions, nation-states, mass movements, all born as responses to the ‘ever-expanding, drastically fluctuating’ capitalist world market, and ‘modernism’, an amazing variety of visions and ideas that explain and justify ‘modernization’. For a critique of Berman, see Anderson (1988). 6 Irokawa shows that kokutai was not merely a creation of the Meiji propaganda but had a long history with roots reaching back to the ancient chronicles, the Kōjiki and Nihon shoki (248–50). 7 The term akai koi is a literal translation into Japanese borrowed from the title of the 1927 English translation of the story Vasilisa Malygina by Bolshevik feminist writer, politician and diplomat Aleksandra Kollontai (1872–1952) which was included in the 1923 volume Liubov’ pchel trudovykh: iz serii rasskazov ‘Revoliutsiia chuvstv i revoliutsiia nravov’. In English, see Kollontai (1927). A full version of the 1927 translation is available on the Marxists.org archive, at: www.marxists.org/archive/kollonta/red-love/index.htm. For more information on Kollontai’s stories about love, sex and marriage in the Soviet Union during the 1920s, and especially on Vasilisa Malygina, see Farnsworth (1980: 326 et passim). 8 For more on Crimson and the narrative ‘dialogue’ with Kubokawa, see Lee Juhee’s contribution to the present volume. One still understudied aspect of Sata’s Crimson is the constant presence in the story of the character Kishiko, considered, in good shishōsetsu tradition, the literary incarnation of proletarian writer and activist Miyamoto Yuriko whose marriage with JCP leader Miyamoto Kenji became legendary for its solidity in the midst of the couple’s political strife and Kenji’s long years of imprisonment. (He was one of the very few communists who refused to commit tenkō and remained in prison until 1945.) 9 Published in complete book format as Hayashi (1934). 10 The most (in)famous being the 1941 pamphlet ‘Tenkō ni tsuite’ (Concerning tenkō), in Hayashi (1968, vol. 3: 377–445): ‘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 to scrub himself in cold water. He must cleanse himself to the marrow in his bones before he makes his fresh start’ (p. 377; for English, see Keene 1998: 891–2). For more on Hayashi’s tenkō and Youth, see, among others, Naitō (2009); Long (2019). 11 Albeit different in the nature of the tenkō process and its aftermath, one other ‘success story’ may be that of Kamei Katsuichirō (1907–66), who, following his tenkō, turned to Japan’s past, exalting its virtues. Tenkō for Kamei was more of a spiritual experience than anything else. 12 The translation ‘soul-searching novel’ for shinkyō shōsetsu is not fixed, but it best renders the actual meaning of the word shinkyō (condition/state of the soul/heart). Donald Keene has rendered the term as ‘mental attitude novel’ (see Keene 1998: 508), while Tomi Suzuki and Irmela Hijiya-Kirschnereit opt for ‘state-of-mind novel’ (see Suzuki 1996: 49; Hijiya-Kirschnereit 1996: 70 et passim).

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13 A longer discussion on the tradition of comparisons between the shishōsetsu and European counterpart genres, including Satō Haruo and Kume Masao’s take on the IchRoman parallel, appears in Hijiya-Kirschnereit (1996). 14 Lejeune defines autobiography as ‘a retrospective prose narrative produced by a real person concerning his own existence, focusing on his individual life, in particular on the development of his personality’ (cited in Suzuki 1996: 6, 190).

References Anderson, P. (1988) ‘Modernity and Revolution’, in Nelson, C.  & Grossberg, L. (eds.) Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, Urbana & Chicago: University of Illinois Press. Beckmann, G. M. & Okubo, G. (1969) The Japanese Communist Party, 1922–1945, Stanford: Stanford University Press. Berman, M. (1983) All That Is Solid Melts into Air: The Experience of Modernity, New York: Simon & Schuster. Farnsworth, B. (1980) Aleksandra Kollontai: Socialism, Feminism, and the Bolshevik Revolution, Stanford: Stanford University Press. Fowler, E. (1988) The Rhetoric of Confession: Shishōsetsu in Early Twentieth-Century Japanese Fiction, Berkeley, CA, Los Angeles & London: University of California Press. Gluck, C. (1985) Japan’s Modern Myths: Ideology in the Late Meiji Period, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Gordon, A. (2003) A Modern History of Japan: From Tokugawa Times to the Present, New York & Oxford: Oxford University Press. Hane, M. (1986) Modern Japan: A  Historical Survey, Boulder, CA and London: Westview Press. Hayashi, F. (1934) Seinen (Youth), Tokyo: Chūō kōronsha. Hayashi, F. (1936) Sōnen (Maturity), Tokyo: Daiichi shobō. Hayashi, F. (1943) Seinen no kuni (Country of Youth), Tokyo: Bungei shunjūsha. Hayashi, F. (1968) Hayashi Fusao chosakushū (The Collected Literary Works of Hayashi Fusao), Tokyo: Tsubasa shoin. Hijiya-Kirschnereit, I. (1996) Rituals of Self-Revelation: “Shishōsetsu” as Literary Genre and Socio-Cultural Phenomenon, Cambridge, MA: Council on East Asian Studies, Harvard University Press. Hirano, K., Odagiri, H. & Yamamoto, K. (eds.) (2006) Gendai Nihon bungaku ronsō-shi (A History of Literary Debates in Modern Japanese Literature), 3 vols, Tokyo: Miraisha. Honda, S. (1964) Zōho tenkō bungaku-ron (Theories on tenkō Literature, Revised), Tokyo: Miraisha. Irokawa, D. (1985) The Culture of the Meiji Period, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Itō, S. (1971) Shōsetsu no hōhō (Narrative Methods), Tokyo: Kawade shobō. Itō, T. (1936) Kokutai kannen no shiteki kenkyū (A Historical Study of the Notion of National Polity), Tokyo: Dōbunkan. Keene, D. (1998) Dawn to the West: Japanese Literature of the Modern Era (Fiction), New York: Columbia University Press. Kobayashi, H. (1970) X e no tegami, Watakushi shōsetsu-ron (A Letter to X: A Study of the I-Novel Genre), Tokyo: Shinchōsha. Kollontai, A. (1927) Red Love, New York: Seven Arts. Lejeune, P. (1982) ‘The Autobiographical Contract’, in Todorov, T. (ed.) French Literary Theory Today, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 192–222. Long, J. (2019) Stories from the Samurai Fringe: Hayashi Fusao’s Proletarian Short Stories and the Turn to Ultranationalism in Early Shōwa Japan, Ithaca: Cornell University Press.

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Mitchell, R. H. (1976) Thought Control in Prewar Japan, Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press. Naitō, Y. (2009) ‘Hayashi Fusao Seinen ni okeru honbun idō no senryaku: Kokumin bungaku e no michi’ (Strategies of Revision in Hayashi Fusao’s Youth: The Path towards National Literature), in Nihon kindai bungaku 80, 52–66. Nakamura, M. (1935) ‘Shishōsetsu ni tsuite’ (About the I-Novel), in Bungei sekai, Tokyo: Bungei. Sand, J. (2003) House and Home in Modern Japan: Architecture, Domestic Space, and Bourgeois Culture, 1880–1930, Cambridge, MA & London: Harvard University Asia Center. Satō, K. (ed.) (1998) Nakano Shigeharu Mura no ie sakuhinron shūsei (A Collection of Essays on Nakano Shigeharu’s Mura no ie), Tokyo: Ōzorasha. Shimaki, K. (1976) Shimaki Kensaku zenshū (The Complete Works of Shimaki Kensaku), 15 vols, Tokyo: Kokusho kankōkai. Shimane, K. (1969a) Tenkō: Meiji ishin to bakushin (Tenkō: The Meiji Restoration and Feudal Retainers), Tokyo: San’ichi shobō. Shimane, K. (1969b) Minken shisō to tenkō (Popular Ideology and tenkō), Tokyo: Kinokuniya shoten. Shimane, K. (1976) Meiji shakaishugisha no tenkō (The tenkō of Meiji Socialists), Tokyo: Tōyō keizai shinpōsha. Shisō no kagaku kenkyūkai (ed.) (1978) Kyōdō kenkyū: tenkō (Collective Research: tenkō), 3 vols, Tokyo: Heibonsha. Sipos, G. T. (2013) The Literature of Political Conversion (tenkō) of Japan, PhD dissertation, University of Chicago, Department of East Asian Languages and Civilizations, Chicago. Steinhoff, P. G. (1991) Tenkō: Ideology and Societal Integration in Prewar Japan, New York: Garland Publishing. Suzuki, T. (1996) Narrating the Self: Fictions of Japanese Modernity, Stanford: Stanford University Press. Tsurumi, S. (1986) An Intellectual History of Wartime Japan 1931–1945, London  & New York: KPI. Tsurumi, S., Suzuki, T. & Iida, M. (2001) Tenkō sairon (Tenkō: A Reconsideration), Tokyo: Heibonsha. Ward, M. (2019) Thought Crime: Ideology and State Power in Interwar Japan, Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Yamamoto, K. & Arita, M. (1950) Nihon kyōsanshugi undō-shi (A History of the Japanese Communist Movement), Tokyo: Seiki shobō. Yanagita, K. (1962) Teihon Yanagita Kunio-shū (The Complete Works of Yanagita Kunio), 36 vols, Tokyo: Chikuma shobō.

7 ‘DOUBLETHINK’ IN PRODUCTION LITERATURE THEORY1 Wada Takashi Translated by George T. Sipos

Introduction The defining tenkō moment of the Japanese proletarian literary movement is typically considered to have occurred not in June 1933, when Japan Communist Party leaders Sano Manabu and Nabeyama Sadachika issued their tenkō declaration, but in February 1934, when the Nihon Puroretaria Sakka Dōmei (Japanese Proletarian Writers’ Alliance [NALP]) officially ceased its activities.2 Viewed negatively, one can argue that this was the turning point when all proletarian writers who abandoned political activities declared their tenkō. On the other hand, simply because authors may have renounced their political activities does not mean that all their literary work can or should be labelled as ‘tenkō literature’. For example, Shimaki Kensaku’s post-NALP dissolution story, ‘Mōmoku’ (Blindness 1934) was published in translation in International Literature, a revolutionary literary magazine that published works in Russian and three other languages and, in the German edition, Shimaki was introduced as ‘a young revolutionary Japanese writer’ (Shimaki 1935: 118). Given the context of the times, it is rather difficult to assess the nature of a given author’s tenkō simply on the basis of the extent of their political engagement. Viewed in a more positive light, one can equally argue that, even after the NALP dissolution, proletarian writers continued to wage vanguard action by incorporating Marxist ideas and themes into their literary works. The writers centred on the literary magazines Bungaku hyōron (March 1934–) and Bungaku annai (July 1935–) were particularly prominent in this regard. The first period of the latter journal, in particular, called for ‘narratives depicting scenes of production and labour’ and brought out a special issue for the ‘promotion of literary works by labourers’. The focus of this chapter is on the so-called seisan bungaku (production literature) which began when some of these writers turned their attention to depictions of

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the process of production by workers and which was eventually incorporated into kokusaku bungaku (national policy literature). Several significant studies have already been written on the relationship between production literature and national policy literature. For example, Ikeda Hiroshi drew a link between production literature, with its origins in reportage literature, and war literature, with its similar focus on offering accurate reporting of events, and showed how, at the end of the Asia Pacific War, many writers returning from the front penned production literature as an expression of national policy (Ikeda 1997: 220–49). In a similar vein, Lin Shukumi has commented on the manner in which the government at the time was advocating the propagation of production literature by the Sangyō hōkoku undō (Industrial Patriotism Movement), as follows: The common thread within all production literature is the orientation towards a sense of unity with the ‘working masses’ and the satisfaction with the sense of unity thereby achieved. However, this also represented an ethical element imposed on intellectuals by the Industrial Patriotism Movement, which focused on the strengthening of moral standards within industry and labour for the enhancement of productivity. Since emotional connection with the ‘working masses’ could not be attained within the limitations of a revolutionary movement, throughout the ideological monitoring period following the tenkō phenomenon, writers found themselves lured into an ideology system that sought an increase in productivity based on the righteousness of the ‘working masses’. . . . Maybe it is such a commitment to a meaning paradigm totally at odds with that which had preceded it, one which sought its ethical principle in the ‘righteousness’ of proletarian literature, that represents the true defining characteristic of Japanese-style tenkō. (Lin 1994: 5–6, my emphasis)3 This all suggests that we are talking here of the characteristics not only of production literature but also of tenkō literature. Ikeda and Lin present excellent arguments demonstrating that many writers of production literature were converts from proletarian literature who established a close theoretical connection with the national policy ideology. However, the process these authors underwent as they came to connect with the national policy has not yet been sufficiently analysed. The aim of this chapter, therefore, is to examine closely the trajectory from the emergence of production literature to the literature of national policy.

The origins of production literature The origins of production literature were not clearly understood, either at the time when the category was popular or during the postwar period when tenkō literature and national policy literature became serious research topics. Hirano Ken has pointed out that production literature started to gain in popularity after 1939,

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when the Shun’yōdō Publishing House began printing its ten-volume series Seikatsu bungaku senshū (Selections from Life Literature) (Hirano 1977: 380). As suggested by the advertisements for this series that divided works into categories such as ‘Stories from the Lives of Fishermen’ or ‘Stories from the Lives of Farmers’, this was a series aimed at depictions of the daily lives of workers committed to production, and publication of this collection certainly represented a symbolic moment in the development of production literature.4 This was, however, only the beginning of the trend. Ikeda Hiroshi’s research addresses the ensuing process in detail. According to Ikeda, production literature was first noticed by writers and critics as a distinct literary trend ‘the year after the Incident’ and was subsequently deliberately promoted. Following the establishment of the ‘Productivity Expansion Committee’ in response to the governmental push for production expansion in March 1939, the trend ‘became a serious issue within the history of Japanese literature’. And, with the subsequent full-on commitment to total war in the Pacific, production literature ‘came to be discussed as an important matter all the more’ (Ikeda 1997: 233–4). Assuming that the ‘Incident’ to which Ikeda was referring is the start of the Second Sino-Japanese War (July 1937), often referred to in Japan as the ‘China incident’, that would mean that production literature first came under the spotlight in 1938. As early as 1937, however, there were indications of the forthcoming trend. The finalists for the Sixth Akutagawa Literature Prize in the second half of 1937 were Hakui sagyō (White Coat Work) by Nakamoto Takako, Tankō nikki (Diary of a Miner) by Ōshika Taku, Aragane (Ore) by Mamiya Mosuke, Yokudo (Fertile Land) by Wada Tsutō, Haru no emaki (Spring Scrolls) by Nakatani Takao, Fukurō (Owl) by Itō Einosuke and Fun’nyō-tan (Tales of Faeces and Urine) by Hino Ashihei. Lin notes that the writer Uno Kōji, who served on the selection committee of the Akutagawa Prize at that time, pointed out that ‘all the finalists, except for Spring Scrolls, had in common a concern with production and industry’; to Uno, this was a foretaste of the trend towards production literature (Lin 1993: 83–4). In this sense, the circumstances surrounding the emergence of the production literature boom are more or less clear. It is, however, a bit more challenging to identify who ended up defining the trend and naming it. According to Miyamoto Yuriko, ‘production literature was a concept proposed by Mamiya Mosuke’ (Miyamoto 1947: 200), but that is not entirely accurate. In the articles he wrote at the time, Mamiya did, with the benefit of hindsight, try to come up with a theoretical underpinning for production literature (Mamiya 1939), but there is no evidence that he was the one to propose the concept in the first place. In his postwar memoirs, he wrote: ‘I continued to depict the world of production and of labour, but I never called my own work “production literature” ’ (Mamiya 1970b: 136).5 But, if not Mamiya, who, then, proposed the concept? First to attempt a theoretical definition using the term ‘production literature’ in the mid-1930s was, in fact, Minami Toshio (1908–38), a young critic. Minami died in relative obscurity in 1938, albeit as a well known advocate of production literature within the literary circles of the time. His theory of production literature first appeared in the Marxist

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critical journal Yuibutsuron kenkyū and subsequently in its successor Gakugei and led to some significant debate with critics Niijima Shigeru (1901–57) (Niijima 1936) and Honma Yuiichi (1909–59) (Honma 1936).6 The gist of Minami’s argument boils down to the following: traditional proletarian literature was mostly comprised of vanguard novels with intellectuals at the forefront, in which labour was described as pain. With the building of a new society emerging as a primary focus of literature, however, workers were expected to play a leading role. Consequently, labour could no longer be portrayed as pain but as a joyful activity, and literature was to place more focus on production scenes.7 Minami’s ideas were largely influenced by two theories. One was, of course, Japanese proletarian literary theory. In a paper published in 1931, when the proletarian literary movement was still flourishing, proletarian literary critic Kurahara Korehito (1902–99) wrote: Bourgeois economics tries to solve issues within the parameters of distribution and consumption as much as possible, without touching upon the subtlety of the production process. Bourgeois art too avoids production scenes as much as possible and seeks to hide them. . . . In his criticism of economics, Marx was the first to ruthlessly analyse the production process shunned by the bourgeoisie and to give theoretical expression to the secrets of its functioning mechanism. . . . Following Marx’s example, proletarian writers should reveal through their art the contradictions inherent in the capitalist production process. . . . By offering clear and concrete depictions of scenes of productive labour vis-à-vis reality, proletarian writers can express these notions through their own art. (Kurahara 1931: 59, my emphasis) Minami’s theory of ‘production literature’ can be seen, not so much as continuing Kurahara’s focus on exposing the ‘contradictions’ inherent in the capitalist exploitation of the labour force, but as a restyling of that into a call for portrayals of the labour that the workers were carrying out in pursuit of a socialist revolution as a profound and, on occasion, joyful activity. Another influence on Minami was the literary work of French writer Pierre Hamp (1876–1962), which was described early on by his Soviet admirer, constructivist writer Sergey Tretyakov (1892–1937), as ‘proizvodstvennyi roman’ in Russian, or ‘roman de production’ in French. Minami encountered the term seisan shōsetsu (production novel) in its Japanese rendition, when it was introduced through two books translated from the Russian at the time by Kumazawa Mataroku (1899–1971): Ivan L. Matsa (János Mácza)’s Modern European Literature and the Proletariat (Matsa 1931) and Vladimir M. Friche’s European Literature in the 20th Century (Friche 1931). It was through Japanese translations of these ‘production novels’ that Minami arrived at the term ‘production literature’. However, Hamp’s work was not necessarily positively presented in these books. His production novels were experiments in reportage, designed to showcase the

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realities confronting the workforce and to suggest various potential improvements. In his Modern European Literature and the Proletariat, Matsa summarized Hamp’s ideals as follows: completion of productive mechanisms, rationalization of labour, and the consequent rise of national happiness; completion of the distribution of the material results of production (as well as its social functions); and improvement of the general cultural level of those engaged in production. Matsa then concluded that ‘Hamp is not a proletarian writer at all’ (Matsa 1931: 68–9). It is also interesting to note here that Tosaka Jun wrote an article entitled ‘In Support of the Production Romance Novel’ (Tokyo Asahi shinbun, 6 August 1936) shortly after Minami launched his concept of production literature. Tosaka called for ‘works focusing on – and offering a comprehensive dissection of – all aspects of Japan’s major industrial substance’ (Tosaka 1936). His position clearly resonates with Minami’s theory. Tosaka’s notion of the ‘production romance novel’ was based on Friche’s ideas, who had critically applied Hamp’s vision of the production novel to the concept of the socialist state.8 In other words, ‘production literature’ can be considered as but one manifestation of the socialist romance novel that emerged in the wake of the collapse of the proletarian literary movement. Judging upon the praise for labour in production literature that persisted even after its incorporation into the ‘national policy literature’ movement, there is also the possibility that the category identified by Tosaka was an archetype of the proletarian literary movement.

The process of tenkō in Ore As already noted, the concept of production literature was first advocated around 1935 by the critic Minami Toshio, traditionally viewed as the standard bearer of Japanese proletarian literary theory under the influence of Pierre Hamp’s ‘production novels’. At pretty much the same time came the calls for depictions of production scenes in the journal Bungaku annai and Tosaka Jun’s concept of ‘production romance novels’. But how was production literature, the product of the Japanese literary landscape between 1935 and 1937, incorporated into the national policy ideology? The answer to this question may reside in the works of Mamiya Mosuke, the author considered by Miyamoto Yuriko to be the main proponent of ‘production literature’. A closer look at the novel Aragane (Ore), one which Itagaki Naoko described as ‘the first work of the category known today as production literature’ (Itagaki 1941: 107), may provide the necessary clues. Ore was serialized in the literary journal Jinmin bunko between May 1937 and January 1938. The journal was forced to cease publication before the serialization was complete and a full version of the novel, including the previously unpublished fifth chapter, was published in March 1938 by publisher Oyama shoten. As previously mentioned, the novel was shortlisted for the Sixth Akutagawa Prize and attracted considerable interest among aficionados of so-called ‘pure literature’ at the time. The story in Ore takes place around 1918, thus being contemporaneous with the rice riots, a time of severe social unrest in the wake of World War I.

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Set in K Copper Mine, a facility operated by the Ōkawa Mining Company, the novel opens with a cave-in accident at one of the test pits, which leads to miners being buried alive and numerous deaths and casualties. This is not an isolated incident, and we learn that other accidents continue to occur at the copper mine. In one of them, the daughter of one of the miners is killed by an overloaded truck. Meanwhile, Sone, a young ore weighmaster, is troubled by the thought that the root cause of the accidents is poor management. Feeling increasingly dissatisfied with the work conditions, he stirs up resentment among the labourers. Another character, Kobayashi, a miner who enjoys the trust of his comrades, expresses similar dissatisfaction with the company management. As rice prices rise in the days preceding the riots, the miners’ anger reaches a point of no return and they overrun the company office demanding rice price cuts. Some of the corporate employees use guns in an attempt to violently stop the uprising, but Sone, concerned from the beginning that rioting would only escalate the situation, intervenes and stops the potential bloodshed. Grateful for the peaceful settlement of the workers’ revolt, the company director Ōe promises rice price cuts and praises Sone for having kept the situation in check. He then promotes Sone to company accountant. Sone subsequently falls in love with one of the women who had lost their husbands in the cave-in accident, the widow Kiyo, and gains additional recognition for exposing a fraud in the company accounting. In the end, the entire mine falls victim to the Spanish flu, and both Kiyo and Kobayashi are lost to its ravages. In collaboration with Okino and other miners, Sone takes the initiative once more to summon doctors and nurses from the whole country to the mine, leading to a peaceful resolution of yet another crisis. Mamiya had been briefly a member of the proletarian literary movement. An ostensibly non-politically engaged writer, he was part of the team behind the proletarian literary journal Bungei sensen. After writing a few successful literary and critical pieces, he withdrew from the group and moved to another proletarian group, NALP. As a NALP member, he engaged in activities with the Japan Transportation Labour Union doing editing work for the union organs. Arrested in the mass arrests of the leftists on 5 March, 1933, shortly after Kobayashi Takiji’s murder in custody, Mamiya was released from prison in December 1935. By then, NALP had already been dissolved. Written after his release from prison, the novel Ore can be classified as tenkō literature. In his preface to the novel at the time of its publication in book format, literary critic Uno Kōji unequivocally indicated that the work was indeed perceived and read as such: Ore uses a mine as location, and there are quite a few readers who admire its ‘well-researched’ quality. Moreover, the characters, their lives, and the various incidents in the mine are lively, impressively well-written and with sharp depictions of nature. This is a novel with very little of the atmosphere of the so-called proletarian literature (in a bad sense), is not at all boring (in a good

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sense) and leaves us wanting more when we finish reading it. A rare feat in recent literature, to be sure. (Uno 1938: 1–2) On the other hand, given the depiction of at least one side of the 1918 Rice Riots and of the way in which the company’s arrogant and incompetent management leads to deadly and life-threatening accidents for the workers, it can easily be argued that Ore incorporates themes from Mamiya’s former adherence to proletarian literature standards. This March 1938 ‘first edition’ of the novel, albeit classified as tenkō literature, is not yet within the definition of production literature and contains none of the ideological elements of national policy, as will his later works. The term ‘first edition’ is in quotes because there are in fact several variant texts of the novel. Mamiya published the short story entitled ‘Kōzan’ (Mine) that would serve as a preliminary draft for Ore in 1931, at a time when the proletarian literary movement was still at its peak. Some six years later, he would serialize the work in the journal Jinmin bunko and publish the first edition in book format, but the two versions have several differences. Furthermore, a sequel Zoku-Aragane (Ore: The Sequel) was published in November  1938. A  chronology of the editions would thus look like this: ‘Mine: Mining Workers of Japan, Unite!’ (1931, short story, ST); Ore, serialized from May 1937 to June 1938 (first version, FV); Ore, in book format, published at Oyama shoten in March 1938 (second version, SV); and Ore: The Sequel, published by the same Oyama shoten, in November 1938 (sequel, SQ). A brief comparative analysis reveals that ST corresponds roughly to Chapter 1 of FV and SV: a cave-in accident occurs at the mine, and miners are buried alive. The company tries to keep that information from victims’ families as well as from the other miners. The families are, however, informed by other sympathetic workers who take the risk of going against company policy. It is interesting to note that there is not much of a change in motif between ST, which was published when the proletarian literary movement was flourishing, and FV, which was serialized after NALP’s dissolution. There are, of course, other differences between the two texts. For instance, there is a lot more emphasis on the company trying its best to control information in the ST, while the FV brings a full new scene in which one of the managers is bribing witnesses to keep them quiet about the accident. Overall, it cannot really be argued that the depiction of capitalism in FV improves significantly on that in ST. On the other hand, while FV and SV share the same plot, the latter leaves the reader somewhat dissatisfied. There are not only brief additions but numerous deletions in SV, as exemplified in the following paragraphs, where the wife of one of the cave-in accident victims is having an argument with the foreman (Chapter 1, section 5, my emphasis): I don’t give a damn about no foreman, so you better stay out of this! My bone to pick is with the director. And if he doesn’t get it, then I’ll fight the damn president

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in Tokyo, foreman! There’s no way you can get it, but miners’ wives are women too. And when our men go off to work, we make protective charms praying for their safe return, and we never turn our backs in the direction of the mountain gods while we wait for them. (FV) In SV, this becomes: I don’t know if you’re different from any other foreman, but if you’re not, how the hell can you understand our feelings?! Miners’ wives are also women. When our men go off to work, we make protective charms praying for their safe return, and we never turn our backs in the direction of the mountain gods while we wait for them. (SV) Or, in another scene, Kobayashi speaks to Sone on the way back from the funeral of the miner’s daughter who was killed by an overloaded truck (Chapter 2, section 7, my emphasis): ‘Do you read the papers?’ asked Kobayashi bringing Sone to the foot of a thick cedar. ‘I do’. ‘And, what do you think. . .?’ Kobayashi added, watching Sone with his deep-set eyes, his protruding front teeth grinding and his knees shaking. ‘About. . .?’ Sone asked. ‘What do you mean “about”? Goes without saying . . . About the fishermen’s wives in Itoigawa and their uprising. We want rice! The rich should give rice to the poor! Their voices rose from the lowest depths of hunger. It’s in the newspaper every day that the military has been called, and that the riots will spread to other places, and so on’. (FV) In SV, this becomes: ‘Do you read the papers?’ asked Kobayashi bringing Sone to the foot of a thick cedar. ‘I do.’ ‘And, what do you think. . .?’ Kobayashi added, watching Sone with his deep-set eyes, his protruding front teeth grinding and his knees shaking. ‘About. . .?’ Sone asked. ‘What do you mean “about”? Goes without saying. . . . It’s in the newspaper every day that fishermen’s wives in Namerikawa have grown angry and trouble will be spreading to other places, and so on’. (SV)

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In the first quote, direct complaints attributing responsibility for the cave-in accidents to the company top management have been deleted. And in the latter quote, direct description of the rice riots has been eliminated. Especially in the latter text, the section immediately following the one quoted here, FV goes on to describe the K Copper Mine rice riots which start in the fishing village of Mizuo. All those passages have been eliminated in SV. It is here, in these edits and omissions, in the textual differences between Ore’s FV and SV that Mamiya Mosuke’s tenkō process can be easily detected. In order to protect himself from being prohibited from publishing, the author decided to eliminate direct expressions of frustration with the capitalist system, the company management, and all descriptions of the rice riots present in the FV. Even so, however, with numerous and significant edits and deletions, the workers’ miserable plight leading to untimely deaths at the hands of incompetent and indifferent management is still clearly present in SV. It can thus be argued that Mamiya, while not necessarily giving up the fight altogether, did proceed with caution up to the publication of the SV. When it comes to Ore: The Sequel, published about eight months later, the situation is completely different. The protagonist is no longer Sone, the miner who remained dissatisfied with the company at the end of SV, but Okino who stood with him against the crisis of the Spanish flu. In fact, the theme of this novel (the SQ) is the revival of the K Copper Mine, and the workers are no longer represented by a protagonist. The novel is set in 1936, some twenty years after the events in SV, and the K Copper Mine has been gradually failing after the long recession. The main character now is Dr Ōe, an authority on ore sorting, and he has been reappointed director with the direct mission to restore the K Copper Mine to its former glory. True to his purpose, Ōe applies modern methods to thoroughly revitalize the mine. He adds gold mining to the copper production and focuses on introducing welfare programmes for all the mine workers. It is in this modern work environment that Okino, of whom we learn that Ōe thinks very highly, is entrusted with the gold mining operation, and we see him grow as a worker. Throughout the story, the focus in SQ is on the increase in production on the premise of enhanced cooperation between workers and management. Of particular importance in the SQ is the way in which the management takes the lead in improving working conditions. One such example is the abolition of the hanba or naya (bunkhouse) system. This was a labour management system practiced in mines and civil engineering worksites before World War II that sought, in effect, to bind workers to the worksite. In the hanba system, single workers lived in the naya, while those with families were made to live in nagaya (tenements) on the worksite. Workers and their hanba gashira (hanba heads, foremen) were organized in groups, with the foremen entrusted by the management to take care of the workers in their respective hanba. The system kept workers from escaping worksites and their miserable conditions through methods such as deducting clothing, food and housing expenses directly from salaries or paying wages with company cash

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vouchers usable only within the hanba. In the SQ, the new director Ōe takes the initiative to abolish the hanba system. The impact that the abolishment of the hanba system would have on the miners was obvious to Okino who could not wait to transmit that joy to Dr Ōe at every opportunity. And while walking along the dark tunnel to the watchhouse shoulder to shoulder with Nakamura, Okino could not help remembering all the huge disputes and struggles that the demands for the abolition of the hanba system had led to in the past. . . . And then he realized that, with the mining industry playing such a major role in building up the civilization of the nation, it did not need to be the monopoly of the socialists to make the lives of workers in that important industry a little bit brighter. . . . Mining and the hanba system can’t be separated no matter what. . . . [I]t could be argued that this belief had been unconsciously ingrained in Okino’s heart. And now, to see that abolition almost achieved at the K Copper Mine by the decision of Dr Ōe, for whom he had worked twice. (Chapter 1, section 7, my emphasis) This quote focuses on Okino’s emotions as he learns of Dr Ōe’s commitment to abolish the hanba system at the K Copper Mine in 1936, through a decision of the mine’s capitalist management, a feat leading to radical improvement of working conditions and that had proven impossible during years of labour struggle. A story similar to Mamiya’s Ore: The Sequel is Nanbu tetsubinkō (The Nanbu Ironworkers 1938) by Nakamoto Takako (1903–91), a writer who also came to be regarded as a standard-bearer of production literature at the time. In this novel, the iron kettle craftsmen of Nanbu in Iwate Prefecture are exploited as subcontractors by large capitalist companies and live in dire poverty. A union is formed and, with the tutelage and support of the prefectural government, including the governor, the conditions for the ironworkers improve. There is, of course, a difference between reforms being pursued by the capitalists themselves, as in Mamiya’s novel, and reforms initiated by the local political administration. What the two stories have in common is the fact that the workers do not make demands themselves but rather patiently wait for the improvement of their circumstances to come from the top. Surprisingly, in wartime Japan, efforts were directed at improving working conditions (regardless of how thoroughly this was implemented) from the top, as a matter of national policy. Cooperation between labour and capital was a major discussion topic, especially in the Industrial Patriotism Movement. For instance, the ‘Mission Statement’ of the Industrial Patriotism Union, promulgated on July 30, 1938, included the following: Armed with a strong conviction of the need for organic unity between investors, management and workers, individuals in our industry aim for its healthy development. Management is expected to devote themselves to the task of providing guidance with sincerity and to strive at all times for the welfare of

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the employees; employees on their part should commit themselves to diligent performance of their duties and to the pursuit of unity of labour and capital in the industry. (Kanda 1981: 43, my emphasis) The ostensible improvement of the workers’ treatment by capitalists and company management as we see it described in Ore: The Sequel and The Nanbu Ironworkers follows, as such, this idea originating from the Industrial Patriotic Movement and aiming for the labour–management cooperation in direct correlation with the national policy of the time. Of course, as already noted, the hanba system contained a plethora of problems such as intermediate exploitation. However, in the latter half of the 1930s when the Industrial Patriotic Movement was launched throughout the nation, the abolition of the hanba system emerged not only as a reform of feudalism but also as a means to regulate the relationship between workers and owners.

Proletarian literature and national policy ideology Mamiya Mosuke began to serialize Ore in 1937, taking advantage to some extent of the momentum of the proletarian literary movement. However, when the novel was first published in book form in 1938, all sections critical of capitalism were deleted as that momentum had waned. Later on, when the sequel was written, a different trend, that of the new national policy ideology, had gained momentum, lending this work a renewed impact. So what, then, is the connection between proletarian literature and national policy ideology? The key to this question resides in the aforementioned concept of labour–capital cooperation. The theoretical background for the cooperation between labour and capital as described in the works of production literature rests with the notion of ‘productivity theory’ as advocated by lawyer Kazahaya Yasoji (1899–1989) and economist Ōkōchi Kazuo (1905–84). In brief, productivity theory is highly critical of the illogical economic policies of the ‘total war’ system, proposing rather that, in order to increase domestic capital, it was required to expand production capacity which could only be achieved through rationalization of the system and improvement of the working environment. Originally scholars of Marxist economics, Kazahaya and Ōkōchi’s premised their assumption on the implicit idea that, with the improvement of working conditions, workers themselves would come to recognize their own roles in the production process and that this, in turn, would lead to a strengthening of their sense of ownership in rapport with their labour.9 As history has shown, of course, in the end such advocacy of rationalization remains within the purview of totalitarianism with its advocacy of total war and is powerless to overcome it. Izumi Aki wrote in critical terms about the relationship between production literature and production theory: When compared to the productivity theory that exercised considerable influence on economic policy at the time, it can be argued that production

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literature is simply the literary manifestation of productivity theory. The latter sought to intentionally distort Marxism in an attempt to strengthen the domestic economic system in support of the war. Therefore, it represents an abuse of Marxism, the most striking example of the tenkō phenomenon in terms of economic theory. Within the literary realm, production literature was never seriously theorized in a conscious manner. Put simply, portrayals of the working conditions of the Japanese people during the War served to exalt the war spirit as a consequential result. (Izumi 1956: 216) Izumi is right. But as suggested by her use of the notion of the ‘consequential result’, there is doubt as to the extent to which these writers were consciously ‘exalting the war spirit’. Especially in the case of writers such as Mamiya, whom we see increasingly incorporating elements of national policy in the literary chronology of Ore from ST  to SQ, it is very possible that they maintained a critical stance towards state authority, at least to a certain extent. And then, if Mamiya (and other production literature writers who emerged from a proletarian literature background) preserved some of that critical spirit, it may be argued that it was best captured in depictions that Minami Toshio labelled ‘the joy of labour’. I have addressed the relationship between ‘the joy of labour’ and production literature elsewhere (Wada 2009: 40–5), but as I re-examined Ore, I became keenly aware of that sense of ‘the joy of labour’ clearly depicted in this text as well. In the following quote from SQ, Okino, who has acquired gold mining experience in Kanayama, has been summoned by Director Ōe and tasked with the oversight of gold mining operations. He flopped down in front of the dusty office desk, his arms crossed. Looking up at the ceiling, he let the Director’s words envelop him, his eyes sparkling with earnest emotion, lively and beautiful. As was the case with so many others before him, since graduating high school until his early forties, Okino Keikichi had not been given the opportunity for a steady job despite his knowledge and experience. And he had to accept that, whichever mine he was given a job in, the individual miner was simply one small cog in a much larger organization, and that, for better or for worse, each represented no more than a small part of a pre-existing institution. (SQ, Chapter 2, section 6, my emphasis) Okino had just been promoted to a mid-level management position, so his joy is already, strictly speaking, different from the joy of the working class. However, if we consider the fact that many works of production literature focus on the process whereby workers acquire a skill and, in so doing, emerge as full-fledged individuals, then we can interpret this story as a portrayal of Okino, too, becoming intoxicated by his experience and his success. Moreover, if we compare Kobayashi’s words from

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the SV – and he is the most virtuous character in the story – as he declares that “All jobs are boring. Not work, but life and society are what’s truly interesting” (Chapter 2, section 6) with the view of labour in the SQ, then the difference is striking and self-explanatory. Okino’s dissatisfaction with the mining work is, in effect, a statement about workers being alienated from their labour. This is very much in line with Marx’s theory of the alienation of labour: ‘the external nature of labour for the worker appears in the fact that it is not his own, but someone else’s, that it does not belong to him, that in that labour he does not belong to himself but to someone else’ (Marx 1983: 136–7). As exemplified in Okino’s joy, production literature depicts this reversal of the workers’ labour very much as if they have been subjugated. However, the truth is that a totalitarian state system ended up seeking to rationalize the workplace in privately owned companies within a capitalist system, leaving the workers simply destined to serve the state. In Izumi’s words, that was a ‘distortion’ and an ‘abuse’ of Marxism. Having workers experience the joy of labour motivates them to work better and leads to better productivity. Not only literature but science also contributed to supporting this theory of work motivation. In 1938, the very same year that Mamiya’s SV and SQ were published, the physiologist Teruoka Gitō (1889–1966), a pioneer of ‘labour science’ and director of the Japan Labour Science Institute, published a scientific book in which he measured workers’ physical strength and analysed work methods and working time, hoping to maximize the productivity of the Japanese workforce. This is what he said: We need to be particularly mindful of the fact that, regardless of the nature of the work, the work force is heavily dependent on  – and characterized by – the worker’s personality. . . . This is shown by the fact that human production activities are not like some simple function performed by machines, but that they are distinguished by some deep and fundamental differentiation between one human being and another. (Teruoka 1938: 12–13, my emphasis) Such criticism of the mechanization of labour in the production process and the notion of the ‘differentiation between one human being and another’ are heavily reminiscent of Marx’s theories of worker alienation and of the individual as a ‘species-being’. In this way, both literature and science used Marxist elements in the articulation and implementation of national policy.

Conclusion After publishing Ore: The Sequel, Mamiya Mosuke came to be regarded as a leading proponent of production literature and emerged as a popular writer. At the same time, as Japan’s total war intensified rapidly, many writers were deprived of the

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ability and freedom to choose their subjects. Reminiscing on those days, Mamiya would write in 1970: As one of those who wrote quite a lot from that time to until around 1940, I remember struggling with an indescribable sense of self-hatred every time I sat down to write to an extent that it is beyond words. Not as a writer, but as a human being, the pain of going against your own heart even only slightly, and the sense of guilt of having to avoid your conscience were the object of constant internal struggle that can only be imagined by those who have actually experienced it. At the time, I did not think that my works represented a complete betrayal of my values and, to this day, I remain convinced that I did not simply pander to the demands of the times. And yet each of my works contains certain places, scenes, lines and words that served as escape routes, and with those compromises I was guilty of bowing to the demands of the times. (Mamiya 1970a: 200, my emphasis) Mamiya’s recollections can be read as an excuse, an act of penitence, or as a frank expression of his feelings at that time. From an ethical standpoint, it is easy to criticize him for his war responsibility and his pandering to the exigencies of the times. Rather than that, however, I would like to point out that this logic is similar to the ‘doublethink’ described in George Orwell’s dystopian novel, 1984. In this novel, whilst recognizing that the state authorities clearly alter the truth and deceive the people, Winston Smith, an official serving the totalitarian state, is trained to believe that the altered facts were, in fact, the truth. Mamiya was no doubt aware of the fact that his literary work was used to raise the productivity of the working masses and that those rare examples of ‘personal ideology’ that infiltrate his works would have been irrelevant given the prevailing circumstances of the time. But are we not justified in catching a glimpse of the ‘doublethink’ inherent in Japan’s tenkō phenomenon in going ahead with writing whilst all the time remaining aware of the extraordinary circumstances that spawned these works? We need to remember, however, that ‘doublethink’ not accompanied with practical application is all in the mind: the only alternatives are either, like Winston, to break free from the norms of society only to be arrested and subjected to ‘rebirth’, or, like so many others, to live out one’s days blindly following the dictates of the regime. The literature of Mamiya, who remained steadfast in his belief that he did ‘not pander to the authorities of the time’, can therefore be seen as clearly implicated in the trend towards production literature, which itself represented a vital element of national policy literature. As previously noted, the impetus toward such ‘doublethink’ here was the rationalization of the working environment premised as it was on productivity theory and the accompanying foregrounding of the joy of labour. And at the root of the issue is the fact that these (former) Marxists remained uncritical of the state’s pursuit of productivity increases.

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In her 1955 essay ‘Reflections Concerning the Causes of Liberty and Social Oppression’, Simone Weil pointed out that Marxist ideology, which transferred ‘the principle of progress from mind to things’ is closely aligned with ‘the general current of capitalist thought’ and argued that it was this in turn that generated the totally unscientific theory that ‘productive forces are capable of unlimited development’ (Weil 1958: 44). She then goes on to explain the affinity between the socialist movement, which is based on the concepts of revolutionary Marxism, and capitalism: This religion of productive forces, in whose name generations of industrial employers have ground down the labouring masses without the slightest qualm, also constitutes a factor making for oppression within the socialist movement. All religions make man into a mere instrument of Providence, and socialism, too, puts men at the service of historical progress, that is to say of productive progress. (ibid.: 45) Production literature has its theoretical origins in the renewed attention afforded to descriptions of the process of production following the dissolution of NALP. The movement joined forces with the author Mamiya Mosuke in its pursuit of rationalization of the process of production. Ultimately, production literature morphed into national policy literature with its descriptions of production growth serving the goals of Japan’s total war effort. Of course, it was not only tenkō writers but countless others as well who cooperated with the war effort in their literary works. It was, however, those authors who turned to production literature following a conversion (tenkō) from the proletarian literature movement and who, as a consequence of their unequivocal faith in the development of productivity, were ultimately subsumed by the very power dynamics that they had formerly opposed.

Notes 1 The research in this chapter was supported by kakenhi (Japan Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology grant-in-aid for scientific research) awards #16K16761 and #19K13053. 2 The decision was made at the NALP Extended Central Committee meeting held at writer Kishi Yamaji’s home on 22 February 1934, and announced on 12 March of the same year. 3 All translations from the Japanese are mine unless otherwise indicated. 4 The titles in the series include Mamiya Mosuke, Dotō (Tumultuous Waves, January 1939; listed as a ‘fisherman’s tale’); Wada Tsutō, Kachō (Household Head, March 1939; listed as a ‘tale of rural life’); Itō Einosuke, Gan (Wild Geese, February 1939; listed as a ‘tale of rural life’); Hashimoto Eikichi, Kurai machi, akarui machi (Dark City, Bright City, April 1939; listed as a ‘mining tale’ (title later changed to Kōdō [Mine Shaft]); Ōshika Taku, Kōzan buraku, July 1939; listed as a ‘mining tale’ (title later changed to Kinzan [Gold Mine]); Tokunaga Sunao, Hataraku hitobito (Working People, September 1939; listed as an ‘industrial city tale’); Nakamoto Takako, Kensetsu no meian (Light and Darkness in Construction

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Work, May 1939; listed as a ‘local mining tale’); Ōe Kenji, Warera no tomo (Our Friend, March  1939; listed as a ‘vagabond tale’); Hayama Yoshiki, Rurō no hitobito (Itinerant Labourers, June 1939; listed as a ‘tale of life in the workers’ living quarters’). In addition to the works cited here, Sawa Sōichi’s Ohotsuku-kai (Sea of Okhotsk) was added as the final volume of the series in September 1939. 5 However, that is not an entirely accurate recollection. There is ample evidence in Mamiya’s wartime essays that he was aware that his work was being identified as production literature. 6 Minami was, in fact, introduced as the proponent of production literature in Niijima’s and Honma’s articles. They were followed in 1940 by Okazawa Hidetora (1902–73), a scholar of Russian literature, who claimed that ‘the first to talk about production literature seems to have been the late Minami Toshio’ (Okazawa 1940: 194). 7 See ‘Seisan bungaku ni tsuite’ (On Production Literature), in Sakka-gun (November 1935); ‘Seisan bungakuron’ (Theory of Production Literature), in Yuibutsuron kenkyū (September 1937); ‘Seisan bungaku no mondai’ (Issues around Production Literature), in Gakugei (April 1938); and ‘Seisan bungakuron (zeppitsu)’ (Theory of Production Literature: Concluding Thoughts), in Enju (April 1939). 8 See Com-Academy Literature Section (1936). 9 For more on the relationship between productivity theory, tenkō and national policy, see Takabatake (1978).

References Com-Academy Literature Section (eds.) (1936) Bungei no janru (Artistic Genres), Mataroku, K., trans., Tokyo: Seiwa shoten. Friche, V. (1931) Nijusseiki no Ōshū bungaku (European Literature of the Twentieth Century), Kumazawa, M., trans., Tokyo: Tettō shoin. Hirano, K. (1977) Shōwa bungaku shiron (Shōwa Literature: A  Personal Consideration), Tokyo: Mainichi shinbunsha. Honma, Y. (1936) ‘Geijutsu ni tsuite no ni-san no mondai’ (Two or Three Issues Concerning the Arts), in Yuibutsuron kenkyū 44, 92–106. Ikeda, H. (1997) Kaigai shinshutsu bungakuron: Josetsu (Literature of Overseas Expansion: A Preliminary Discussion), Tokyo: Inpakuto shuppankai. Itagaki, N. (1941) Jihenka no bungaku (Literature Following the Sino-Japanese Incident), Tokyo: Daiichi shobō. Izumi, A. (1956) ‘ “Kokumin bungaku”-ron shuhen’ (A Discussion of ‘People’s Literature’), in Kubokawa, T., Hirano, K. & Odagiri, H. (eds.) Nihon puroretaria bungaku: Shiteki tenbō to saikentō no tame ni (Japanese Proletarian Literature: Towards a Historical Perspective and a Re-Examination), Tokyo: Aoki shoten, 199–219. Kanda, F. (1981) Shiryō: gendaishi 7 (Modern History Documents 7), Tokyo: Ōtsuki shoten. Kurahara, K. (1931) ‘Geijutsuteki hōhō ni tsuite no kansō (kōhen)’ (Thoughts on Artistic Methodology, 2), in NAPF 2: 10, 52–77. Lin, S. (1993) Nakano Shigeharu: Renzoku suru tenkō (Nakano Shigeharu: Ongoing Tenkō), Tokyo: Yagi shoten. Lin, S. (1994) ‘Tokushū 20-seiki no “shippai”: jinbutsu-hen: Mikettei no shisō: Nakano Shigeharu’ (Failures of the Twentieth Century (People) An Undecided Ideology: Nakano Shigeharu), in Shisō no kagaku 8: 13, 5–7. Mamiya, M. (1939) ‘Seisan bungaku ni tsuite no oboegaki’ (Thoughts about Production Literature), in Shinchō 36: 5, 99–104. Mamiya, M. (1970a) ‘Koe-naki jidai no bungaku 1’ (Literature of the Voiceless Generation, 1), in Bunka hyōron 100, 196–209.

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Mamiya, M. (1970b) ‘Koe-naki jidai no bungaku 2’ (Literature of the Voiceless Generation, 2), in Bunka hyōron 101, 133–44. Marx, K. (1983) ‘From Economico-Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844’, in Kamenka, E. (ed.) The Portable Karl Marx, New York: Penguin Books, 131–45. Matsa, I. (1931) Gendai Ōshū bungaku to puroretariāto (Modern European Literature and the Proletariat), Kumazawa, M., trans., Tokyo: Tettō shoin. Miyamoto, Y. (1947) Fujin to bungaku (Women and Literature), Tokyo: Jitsugyō no Nihonsha. Nakamoto, T. (1938) ‘Nanbu tetsubinkō’ (The Nanbu Ironworkers), in Shinchō 35: 2, 2–192. Niijima, S. (1936) ‘Saikin ni okeru geijutsu riron no kentō, 3’ (A Consideration of Recent Art Theories, 3), in Yuibutsuron kenkyū 43, 34–60. Okazawa, H. (1940) Shūdanshugi no bungei (Group Art), Tokyo: Shōnen shobō. Shimaki, K. (1934) ‘Mōmoku’ (Blindness), in Chūō kōrōn 49: 8, 1–32. Shimaki, K. (1935) ‘Der Blinde’ (The Blind Man), Schwartz, L., German trans., in Internationale Literatur 5: 5, 53–63. Takabatake, M. (1978) ‘Seisanryoku riron: Ōkōchi Kazuo to Kazahaya Yasoji’ (Theory of Productivity: Ōkōchi Kazuo and Kazahaya Yasoji), in Shisō no kagaku kenkyūkai (ed.) Kyōdō kenkyū: Tenkō, vol. 2, Tokyo: Heibonsha, 201–47. Teruoka, G. (1938) Seisan to rōdō (Production and Labour), Tokyo: Kagakushugi kōgyōsha. Tosaka, J. (1936) ‘Seisan roman no teishō’ (In Support of the Production Romance Novel), in Tokyo Asahi shinbun (6 August), 7. Uno, K. (1938) Aragane: jo (Ore: Preface), Tokyo: Koyama shoten, 1-3. Wada, T. (2009) ‘ “Rōdō no kachi” ga imi suru mono: Tokunaga Sunao no tenkō sakuhin to seisan bungaku’ (The True Meaning Behind the ‘Value of Labour’: The tenkō Works of Tokunaga Sunao and Production Literature), in Ronkyū Nihon bungaku 91, 33–48. Weil, S. (1958) Oppression and Liberty, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.

8 THE PROBLEM OF LITERARY TRUTH The Tenkō of Nakano Shigeharu and Hayashi Fusao Naitō Yoshitada Translated by Toby Walters and Irena Hayter

Two comrades Nakano Shigeharu (1902–79) and Hayashi Fusao (1903–75) were both authors and critics active in the Japanese proletarian literature movement. Nakano was born in Fukui Prefecture in 1902 and, after graduating middle school, attended the Fourth Higher School in Kanazawa. In 1924, he enrolled in the department of German studies at the elite Tokyo Imperial University. Hayashi Fusao, on the other hand, was born in Oita Prefecture in 1903 and, after middle school, went on to the Fifth Higher School in Kumamoto. In 1923, he entered the law faculty of Tokyo Imperial University. The two met in 1925, during the course of their university studies. Nakano was 23 years old at the time, and Hayashi was 22. They met through the Shinjinkai (New Man Society), a student movement group formed at Tokyo Imperial University in 1918. Hayashi was the first to join the Shinjinkai, encouraging Nakano later. The Shinjinkai was established with the aim of organizing students from inside and outside the university in order to build up a socialist movement. Nakano and Hayashi became key members of the group. In October 1925, as part of Shinjinkai activities, the two started a literary society called the Shakai bungei kenkyūkai (Social Arts Research Group), which gathered students involved in the socialist movement. Nakano and Hayashi won over a number of their peers through their pursuits, and, in 1926, the Social Arts Research Group changed its name to the Marukusu-shugi geijutsu kenkyūkai (Marxist Arts Research Group). The two took on leadership roles of this new group, supported one another and became central figures in the socialist movement of the day as student activists. As well as throwing themselves into the sphere of political activism, the two produced a number of literary works in a short space of time and showed themselves to be highly gifted authors. Nakano published many poems, such as the collection

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Yoake-mae no sayonara (Goodbye before Dawn) which appeared in May  1926 in Roba, a coterie journal put together by Nakano and other young writers such as Hori Tatsuo (1904–53) and Kubokawa Tsurujirō (1903–74), among others. With his debut story Ringo (Apple), published in the proletarian literary journal Bungei sensen in February 1926, Hayashi made a striking impression on the literary world as a promising young writer. The two writers, who had established a reputation as proletarian authors and activists, could have continued their lives of prolific political and literary activity, but the historical situation did not allow this. Nakano and Hayashi were arrested several times under the Peace Preservation Law, which was introduced in 1925 with the aim of quelling the Japanese socialist movement and, in the end, they were forced to recant their ideological beliefs. This essay will compare and contrast the tenkō processes of Nakano Shigeharu and Hayashi Fusao and re-examine the ideas of both writers with regard to literature. There has been some research on the subject of Nakano’s and Hayashi’s individual tenkō, but little has been done to compare and contrast the two and consider the tenkō processes of both concurrently or to attempt to cast some light upon the differences and similarities between both writers’ understanding of literature.1 How did the literary ideas of these two writers, who started out as comrades with common goals, change following their respective tenkō? How is one to evaluate the outcomes of their respective tenkō? This essay aims to draw attention to the relationship between Nakano’s and Hayashi’s thinking concerning the language of literature and the concept of truth and to throw light upon the literary significance of their respective tenkō.

Towards tenkō Nakano and Hayashi were instrumental in the proletarian literature movement and were arrested and detained several times in the late 1920s and 1930s. Their experiences of tenkō were informed by a history of oppression at the hands of state power. In late March 1926, Hayashi was arrested as a suspect in the so-called Kyoto student union incident, which is known within Japan as having prompted the first application of the Peace Preservation Law. The incident saw Marxist research societies active in universities in Tokyo and the Kansai area targeted by the authorities. Hayashi was incarcerated in Kyoto Prison whilst still wearing the uniform of a Tokyo Imperial University student. In 1930, he was arrested once again for the crime of donating money to the Japanese Communist Party. Hayashi was found guilty on both occasions and sentenced to imprisonment. He was held at Ichigaya, Chiba and Toyotama prisons between July 1930 and April 1932 and in Shizuoka prison from November 1934 to November 1935. Similarly, Nakano was arrested in February  1928 during an election support campaign in Kagawa Prefecture and was detained following the March 15 Incident (1928) and the April 16 Incident (1929), both of which included mass arrests of leftists. In 1930, like Hayashi, he was arrested, prosecuted for the crime of donating

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money to the Japanese Communist Party, and incarcerated at Toyotama Prison. Nakano was rearrested in April  1932 as part of the government crackdown on the Federation of Japanese Proletarian Cultural Organisations (KOPF) and was once again incarcerated in Toyotama Prison from December 1932 to May 1934. In 1933, during his incarceration, Nakano learned that fellow proletarian writer and activist Kobayashi Takiji (1903–33) had died in custody, tortured by the police. Nakano and Hayashi were harshly interrogated. They were coerced into tenkō by state power and had no choice but to withdraw from their engagement in political activity. However, after being released from prison, both Hayashi and Nakano aimed to continue their resistance through literature. After the war, when asked at a roundtable discussion if he had been forced to commit tenkō following his arrest, Hayashi gave the following answer: HONDA SHŪGO:  Were

you forced into it? (laughs) course I  was forced into it. Initially I  wasn’t involved in political activism, but I found a way back in by focusing on my writing. The prosecutor’s office was tolerant of this at first. There was a time when I thought to myself, ‘I can use my writing. I may not be able to be an activist, but I can fight by using my writing’. I thought I could use the purity and revolutionary zeal of my old comrades to create something like the journal Bungakkai, and make the most of that. For instance, I’d written my novel Seinen [Youth] with a strong sense of being a Marxist. (Honda et al. 1954: 111)

HAYASHI: Of

Rather than giving in to political pressure, Hayashi intended to resist the state with all that he had, as both a proletarian writer and an activist who believed in Marxism. Nakano also left prison promising in court to retire from left-wing activism, but he did not stay silent. As well as writing literary criticism, starting with the essay ‘Ideorogiiteki hihyō o nozomu’ (Desiring Ideological Criticism), Nakano (1934) published a series of semi-autobiographical shishōsetsu (a term typically rendered in English as ‘I-novels’) revisiting the history of the proletarian literature movement, which he himself had experienced first-hand (his so-called ‘tenkō quintet’).2 One of these novels involves a discussion between a man who is involved in activism and his father, who tries to persuade him to quit. The following excerpt describes the protagonist’s determination to continue writing: ‘Well,’ Magozō asked after a pause. ‘Just what are your plans, anyway? What are you going to do with yourself after this?’ Benji didn’t answer. ‘As far as your father is concerned, you can give up being a writer’. . . . ‘So what are you going to do?’ But Benji did not know. He only knew that if he gave up his writing now, it would be all over for him. He thought he could explain his position logically enough, but not to his father. . . . Yet, by his very nature, in some way

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other people would never understand, he was an utterly shameless human being, he told himself, and felt a vague, stupid loneliness. In answer to his father’s question, he said, ‘I understand everything you’ve said. But I want to keep on writing’. (Nakano 1979: 69, 72) In this way, continuing to write and refusing to be silenced became for both Nakano and Hayashi their raisons d’être as proletarian writers, a practice of resistance that refused to yield to pressure. Both were determined to continue fighting through their writing even after their tenkō. However, the outcomes of their resistance would be very different. Immediately after being released from prison, Hayashi started writing his novel Youth. At the time of composition, Hayashi self-identified as a Marxist, as previously discussed. This was a historical novel, based on the so-called Shimonoseki campaign (the armed conflict between the Chōshū domain ­ and the alliance of British, French, Dutch and American forces in the mid-­ nineteenth century), featuring the great Meiji figures Itō Hirobumi (1841– 1909) and Inoue Kaoru (1836–1915) as protagonists who worked to open Japan to the West. With this work, Hayashi sought to situate Japan’s revolution within world revolutionary movements and to carry on the ideas of proletarian literature. However, Hayashi reworked Youth several times after its publication and, through this process, his thinking gradually evolved.3 Hayashi spoke of his revisions of Youth: For a long time, I boasted to myself that having been defeated in politics, I would be victorious in literature. For instance, in the first edition of Youth (regardless of the fact that it is, in essence, my tenkō work), I  very openly incorporated Marxism as a literary method. I revised Youth by my own volition, and it has taken more than five years since the novel’s first edition to bring it into its current form. (Hayashi 1941: 8) In 1936, Hayashi wrote, ‘I am not a proletarian writer any more’, declaring his departure from the proletarian literature movement and announcing his tenkō (Hayashi 1936: 9). Furthermore, in the postscript of the definitive edition of Youth, which was published during the war with China, Hayashi asserted that Marxism was a relic of the past, no longer of any use, writing: ‘To us Japanese, Marxism is now little more than a belief system of times gone by’ (Hayashi 1938: 426). Hayashi had continued his resistance through literature and, even after being arrested for it, he tried to be a proletarian writer. In the process of completing his tenkō, however, he abandoned Marxist ideas completely. Nakano, on the other hand, took a path totally different to that of Hayashi. Nakano could not simply abandon Marxism the way that Hayashi had done. In

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Hitotsu no chiisai kiroku (One Small Record), one of his tenkō I-novels, he wrote of his distress at being unable to renounce Marxism: I was lying on my bed, wrapped in a blanket, writing a report of my tenkō. I’d come up against a problem which was difficult to overcome. I had to explain my rejection of Marxism. It was absolutely unthinkable to consider the text anything other than academically dishonest and aesthetically hideous. In my great distress, I wrote everything that there was to write about myself. It was more or less logically coherent throughout. But no matter what, it was not consistent with a rejection of Marxism. (Nakano 1996a: 120) For Nakano, to reject Marxism amounted to a betrayal. In another of his works, Shōsetsu no kakenu shōsetsuka (The Novelist Who Could Not Write Novels), Nakano writes: He had to write in no uncertain terms of his betrayal. To that end, he had to write what it was that he had betrayed. He had betrayed Japan’s revolutionary movement and its revolutionary organisations. He had to write of all of this. (Nakano 1996b: 135) Nakano could not simply abandon Marxism in the same way that Hayashi had done: he dismissed himself as ‘hideous’ for having committed tenkō, and he felt a great responsibility for having let down the proletarian literature movement. Consequently, he tried to fulfil his duty as an author by recognizing his own hideousness and recording the naked truth in writing (ibid.). Nakano attempted to endure the difficulty of his post-tenkō life by writing of his own weakness and looking unflinchingly at the ugliness of his own self that had succumbed to tenkō. Hayashi, on the other hand, described tenkō as ‘the rebirth of the human’ (Hayashi 1941: 4), considering himself to have been regenerated through his tenkō. Despite being placed under a publication ban, Nakano kept thinking about the proletarian literary movement and carried on writing fiction and literary criticism. Hayashi also continued his literary pursuits vigorously, but when Japan slid into a full-scale war with China in 1937, he actively supported the conflict, and his thinking became closer to ultranationalist ideology.

‘Truth’ and ‘What Appears to Be True’ Nakano and Hayashi started from the same position, so how did they come to walk such different paths? In order to consider this question, let us compare and examine Nakano’s essay ‘Nechinechi shita susumikata no hitsuyō’ (The Need to Proceed in a Tenacious Manner 1939) and Hayashi’s ‘Kinnō no kokoro’ (The Heart of Imperial Loyalty 2008 [1943]).

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‘The Need to Proceed in a Tenacious Manner’ was written as a critique of so-called ‘production literature’ (seisan bungaku), which was conceived of, within the industrial patriotism movement, as an attempt to unify workers and capitalists under the wartime system.4 Production literature sought to represent actual scenes of labour, depicting them as in line with national policies. Nakano wrote that the kinds of literary criticism which either advocated or, conversely, criticized production literature, were actually equally bewitched by its ready-made language and did not see the true nature of literature or language as they really were. Nakano held that to review a piece of writing that had already been labelled as production literature was to be dragged along by ‘ready-made language’ and to confuse truth (makoto) with what appears to be true (makotoshiyakana mono): ‘The more language is subjected to worldly use and circulation, the stronger its ready-made character and the more separate it is from the true nature of things’ (Nakano 1939: 311). Nakano warned against making emotional judgements based on understanding via the use of clichéd, hackneyed language, without ascertaining the facts. He argued that, for literature to develop: [a]ll literature must be correctly studied by using the words of literature itself. A scholar must have the mental attitude, ‘I am a country bumpkin who calls a spade a spade’. . . . In order to call a spade a spade, and to learn that the word ‘spade’ applies to a spade, we must not despise the journey there, nor the journey back, and proceed in a tenacious manner. (Nakano 1939: 312) Nakano’s idea of literature was to distinguish between truth and what appears to be true and to understand the true nature of things by closely scrutinizing the accuracy of the words themselves. As a writer, Nakano attached a great deal of importance to the accuracy of expression. He believed that, through the rejection of ‘what appears to be true’ and the correct understanding of words based on truth, literature could represent the epochal changes of the age and bring about progress towards the future. But what of Hayashi’s position towards literature? Interestingly, Hayashi also used the word makoto (truth, sincerity, integrity) in his essay ‘The Spirit of Loyalty to the Emperor’ to express his views on literature. In this essay, Hayashi looked back on his life and considered how it was that he had come to lose sight of his ‘spirit of loyalty to the emperor’. According to Hayashi, it was literature that had caused him to lose his sense of imperial loyalty: It was the literature and literary trends of the time that turned most of us intellectuals in our forties into a settlement race that forgot both country and emperor. . . . [T]he general literary trends of the time . . . turned us into petty egoists, rationalists and hedonists who forgot emperor, country and the gods. (Hayashi 2008 [1943]: 105–6, translation modified)

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Hayashi labelled proletarian literature ‘an error and a serious crime [that] cannot be forgiven’ (ibid.: 109). The ‘error’ of proletarian literature was to try to save Japan and fight through the use of ‘borrowed’ language imported from Marx, Engels, Lenin and Stalin (ibid.). Hayashi heavily criticized the proletarian literature movement as being dependent on Western ideas, losing sight of Japanese realities and causing its adherents to forget the spirit of loyalty to the emperor. In order to regain this lost spirit, Hayashi argued that the ethos of a pure literature had to be restored: Japanese literature, return to your true nature! You are the progeny of the country. You are the valiant son who, born from your country, can now exalt it. You must succeed to the proper lineage and genealogy of Japanese literature. Reject contemporary literature! The true [makoto] purity sought by literature can be found in the spirit of loyalty to the emperor. You must cultivate only this sense of imperial loyalty as it lies within your own heart! Do not look anywhere else, just walk straight on the path as revealed by this loyalty. (ibid.: 110) Hayashi also wrote that ‘there can be no literature where the heart does not desire purity. Such desire represents the ideal of literature and it is because of this ideal that, for youth, literature holds the allure of eternity’ (ibid.: 107, translation modified). Hayashi believed that the spirit of literature lies not in ready-made language borrowed from foreign thought but rather in the spirit of loyalty to the emperor. Furthermore, the truth (makoto) sought after by literature again exists within the purity which swears loyalty to the emperor. Reading Hayashi’s essay ‘The Spirit of Loyalty to the Emperor’ alongside Nakano’s ‘The Need to Proceed in a Tenacious Manner’, it becomes clear that there are striking differences in meaning between the two authors’ uses of the term makoto. The main reason that Nakano and Hayashi walked totally different paths following their tenkō is found in this dissonance between their respective understandings of the concept of truth, which both authors held to be an essential component of literature.

The problem of literary truth As previously discussed, Nakano Shigeharu rejected ready-made language as only appearing to be true rather than being true, and he believed that literature must express truths based on ascertainable facts. Similarly, Hayashi Fusao criticized borrowed words and asserted that literature, in essence, seeks purified truth. Both writers criticized ready-made language and held truth to be an indispensable element of literature; at a glance, one might perceive that both writers are making the same statement. However, it is apparent that there is an irreconcilable difference between the two writers’ conceptualization of truth. How is one to evaluate the

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differences and similarities between Nakano and Hayashi? To provide a clue to this, let us finally examine that which forms the basis of these two writers’ concepts of makoto. Nakano’s understanding of truth in literature is grounded in logical coherence and concrete facts that can be scientifically proven. He expresses this as follows: We Japanese must become even more tenacious than the Europeans, who are said to be obstinate themselves, if we are to make them understand us. Phrases such as ‘the currently popular Japanese style’ lead one to a sense of knowing all things, which can only bring all to ruin. To be content with such a solitary hope means that truth and what appears to be true become easily confused. When rhetoric and eloquence are unavailable, when accurate questions and answers are demanded, then the inability to provide the evidence necessary to progress from A to B would be exposed. The nation and its literature cannot proceed beyond this point and this is the first step towards retreat and collapse. These circumstances are now strongly overlaid with complications in a way that has never before been seen in Japanese literature. To overcome this situation, scientific rigour in theory, in other words, factual truth, concreteness and comprehensiveness in terms of the phenomena that become the foundation and the object of theory, are required in a manner that is completely different to what has gone before. (Nakano 1939: 302) Nakano avoids stating so explicitly, but the concepts of science and theory to which he refers here are based on Marxism. He warns against voguish expressions such as ‘things Japanese’ and ‘the Japanese spirit’ that can lead the reader into the mistaken belief that they understand their meaning. Concrete facts and the theory that integrates them, the logical coherence that can present evidence without contradictions: for him these are the indispensable elements of truth. Hayashi, on the other hand, asserts that the basis of truth in literature is the awareness of one’s own sin of rejecting Japan’s gods and faith in the emperor who brings salvation from this sin. Hayashi expresses this as follows: A path that leads to the rejection of the gods, the bestiality of man, rationalism, egoism and individualism, naturally represents the rejection of ‘Japan, the land of the gods’. This path was travelled by contemporary Japanese writers either consciously or unconsciously. We writers thus misled the youth and the country. How can this wrong be atoned? How can amends be made? Death is perhaps the only way to deal with the guilty. Yet the gods of Japan have not condemned us to die for this crime. Rather, they commanded those who fell into this hell of vice and filth to return and to be reborn, so that we may purify ourselves in the limpid stream of our country’s traditions.

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When, heeding this auspicious voice, we kneel before the gods and the emperor and realise the depth of our sins, new reeds will gently sprout up in our breast, bowels and every part of our body. This, then, is the spirit of loyalty to the emperor. . . . The spirit of imperial loyalty emerges when we come to understand the depth of our sins and, abandoning all individuality and sense of self, kneel before the gods of Japan. Only this spirit can create true [makoto no] patriots and lovers of their country. (Hayashi 2008 [1943]: 109, translation modified) Hayashi also writes that ‘tenkō is not simply repenting the sins of one’s past. It is not simply abandoning the ideologies of the past. Nor is it recanting communism in favour of totalitarianism. Tenkō means abandoning everything and attaining faith in, and devotion towards, the national polity (kokutai) (Hayashi 1941: 22). Thus, Hayashi rejects those facts that can be scientifically proven and those theories that can explain them without contradiction. On another occasion, at a roundtable discussion on the faith of the Japanese, Hayashi stated, ‘I cannot explain the gods to others. I cannot explain other than say that I believe in them’ (Bungakkai dōjin zadankai 1943: 19). In contrast to Nakano’s premise that commensurability with the other is achieved through language, Hayashi’s major premise is incommensurability with the other. Viewed this way, the ideological conflict between Nakano and Hayashi can be perceived as similar to the opposition between modernism and postmodernism. Nakano, who depended on Marxism’s ‘grand narrative’, as defined by Lyotard (1986), and Hayashi, who publicly dismissed that grand narrative as outdated, advocating instead the unique narrative of ‘the spirit of loyalty to the emperor’, were at odds with one another. Hayashi’s overcoming of modernity made relative the modernity on which Nakano relied. Nevertheless, the relationship between Nakano and Hayashi cannot be fully captured in terms of relativism. To quote Tetsuo Najita: ‘As Jean-François Lyotard has argued, there are no controlling “codes” in postmodernity: what is true and false, orthodox and heterodox, loses its boundary lines. Or, more pertinent perhaps, the true is less scientific and methodologically accurate, as it is ideologically controlled’ (Najita 1989: 19). The rightfulness of Marxism, on which Nakano depended, was a rightfulness that could only function within a Kuhnian fixed paradigm and not an absolute (Kuhn 1962). In the same manner, Hayashi’s rightfulness was propped up by faith and lacked a substantial foundation. However, in the season of tenkō, it was Hayashi’s narrative of loyalty to the emperor that boasted the greatest influence. Hayashi’s discourse, which had the ideology of wartime emperor worship (tennōshugi) at its base, was perceived as the overriding truth. If one recalls at this point the difference between ‘truth’ and ‘what appears to be true’ as emphasized by Nakano, the truth described by Hayashi is little more than truth dominated by an ideology which was relatively powerful at that time and no different from the mere appearance of truth criticized

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by Nakano. Truth or makoto, as defined by Hayashi, gives itself over to the fanatical emperor worship of the day. It is opportunistic, overestimates reality and is nothing more than a subjective idea arising from within Hayashi’s own imagination.5 One might even say that Hayashi’s makoto, which was based on the unscientific and illogical ideology of faith in the Japanese emperor system, was ‘fake’. However, because it was not based on objective fact, Hayashi’s thought was not open to logical rebuttal; it was a very influential position during the War. Considered in the light of the world in which we now live, Hayashi’s tenkō can perhaps be understood as a post-truth political practice. Nakano’s tenkō was necessary in order to confront the tenkō of Hayashi. To eliminate things ‘appearing to be true’, based on falsehood, and to ascertain authentic fact, Nakano relentlessly pursued the truth expressed in literature as though he were examining and correcting his own thinking, whilst also extracting as much meaning as possible from language. To pursue the accuracy of language ‘tenaciously’ and to deploy language as if wrenched from one’s own body is a form of resistance against post-truth politics. In light of this examination of the tenkō of Hayashi Fusao and Nakano Shigeharu, we can conclude that, by using the word makoto to mean literary truth, Hayashi expressed the dominant ideology, whereas Nakano spoke of a stance which pursued actual truth. The writers used the same word to refer to a different concept, and this, arguably, led them to take different paths following their tenkō.

Notes 1 For instance Rin (1993), Sugino (1979) and Mitsuta (1981) are notable studies of Nakano Shigeharu’s tenkō. Long (2000) discusses in detail the problem of Hayashi Fusao’s tenkō and links it to the problematic of his magnum opus, Seinen (Youth). Satō (1962), Shimizu (1967) and Seo (2003) are among the works which compare and contrast Nakano and Hayashi. These works all draw attention to the fact that the two writers were in opposing camps during the factional struggles of 1927, which saw the non-Marxists purged from the movement. The present essay focuses on the similarities and differences between Nakano and Hayashi in the context of their post-tenkō literary positions. 2 The works referred to as the tenkō quintet appeared in various journals in the following order: Dai isshō (Chapter One, Chūō kōron, January 1935); Suzuki, Kōriyama, Yasoshima (Bungei, April  1935); Mura no ie (The House in the Village, Keizai ōrai, May  1935); Hitotsu no chiisai kiroku (One Small Record, Chūō kōron, January 1936); Shōsetsu no kakenu shōsetsuka (The Novelist Who Could Not Write Novels, Kaizō, January 1936). 3 On Hayashi’s Youth, see Long (2000) and Naitō (2009). 4 See Wada (2009) and his chapter in this volume for a detailed discussion of ‘production literature’. 5 To understand Hayashi Fusao’s opportunism, it is necessary to examine his romantic disposition: as Carl Schmitt (1986: 18) puts it, ‘Romanticism is subjectified occasionalism because an occasional relationship to the world is essential to it. . . . Because the final authority is shifted from God to the genius of the “ego”, the entire foreground changes’.

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References Bungakkai dōjin zadankai (1943) ‘Zadankai: Nihonjin no kami to shinkō ni tsuite’ (Roundtable Discussion: On the Gods and the Faith of the Japanese), in Bungakkai 10: 1 (January), 2–21. Hayashi, Fusao (1936) ‘Hayama Yoshiki ni kotau’ (A Response to Hayama Yoshiki), in Tokyo nichinichi shinbun 9 (16 April). Hayashi, Fusao (1938) ‘Ketteiban no batsu’ (Epilogue to the Definitive Edition), in Seinen (Youth), Tokyo: Daiichi shobō, 424–7. Hayashi, Fusao (1941) ‘Tenkō ni tsuite’ (On tenkō), in Bungakkai 8: 3 (March), 4–29. Hayashi, Fusao (2008 [1943]), ‘The Heart of Imperial Loyalty’, in Calichman, Richard (ed.  & trans.) Overcoming Modernity: Cultural Identity in Wartime Japan, New York: Columbia University Press, 92–110. Honda, Shūgo et al. (1954) ‘Zadankai: Narupu kaisan zengo to tenkō no mondai’ (Roundtable Discussion: The Problem of tenkō around the Time of the Dissolution of the Japan Proletarian Writers League (NALP)), in Kindai bungaku 9: 4 (April), 93–120. Kuhn, Thomas (1962) The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, Chicago: Chicago University Press. Long, Jeff E. (2000) Overcoming Marxism in Early Showa Japan: Hayashi Fusao’s Seinen and the Turn to Ultranationalism, PhD dissertation, University of Hawaiʽi, Honolulu. Lyotard, Jean-François (1986) Posutomodan no jōken (The Postmodern Condition), Tokyo: Shoshikaze no bara. Mitsuta, Ikuo (1981) Zōho Nakano Shigeharu-ron (A Critique of Nakano Shigeharu: Revised and Enlarged), Tokyo: Yagi shoten. Naitō, Yoshitada (2009) ‘Hayashi Fusao Seinen ni okeru honbun idō no senryaku: Kokumin bungaku e no michi’ (Strategies of Revision in Hayashi Fusao’s Youth: The Path Towards National Literature), in Nihon kindai bungaku 80 (May), 52–66. Najita, Tetsuo (1989) ‘On Culture and Technology in Postmodern Japan’, in Miyoshi, M. & Harootunian, H. (eds.) Postmodernism and Japan, Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 3–20. Nakano, Shigeharu (1934) ‘Ideorogiiteki hihyō o nozomu’ (Desiring Ideological Criticism), in Bungaku hyōron 1: 9 (November), 18–20. Nakano, Shigeharu (1939) ‘Nechinechi shita susumikata no hitsuyō’ (The Need to Proceed in a Tenacious Manner), in Kakushin 2: 7 (July), 299–312. Nakano, Shigeharu (1979) Three Works by Nakano Shigeharu: The House in the Village, Five Cups of Sake, the Crest Painter of Hagi, de Bary, B., trans., Ithaca: Cornell University Japan, China Program. Nakano, Shigeharu (1996a) ‘Hitotsu no chiisai kiroku’ (One Small Record), in Nakano Shigeharu zenshū (Collected Works of Nakano Shigeharu), vol. 2, Tokyo: Chikuma shobō, 99–132. Nakano, Shigeharu (1996b) ‘Shōsetsu no kakenu shōsetsuka (The Novelist Who Could Not Write Novels), in Nakano Shigeharu zenshū (Collected Works of Nakano Shigeharu), vol. 2, Tokyo: Chikuma shobō, 133–52. Rin, Shukumi (1993) Nakano Shigeharu: renzoku suru tenkō (Nakano Shigeharu: Ongoing tenkō), Tokyo: Yagi shoten. Satō, Masaru (1962) ‘Puroretaria bungaku no tenkai: Hayashi Fusao to Nakano Shigeharu (The Development of Proletarian Literature: Hayashi Fusao and Nakano Shigeharu), in Kokubungaku: Kaishaku to kyōzai no kenkyū 7: 10 (August), 29–37. Schmitt, Carl (1986) Political Romanticism, Oakes, G., trans. & intro., Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

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Seo, Dong Ju (2003) ‘Nakano Shigeharu no shoki puroretaria shōsetsu ni tsuite: Hayashi Fusao ni taisuru taikō ishiki o tōshite’ (The Early Proletarian Novels of Nakano Shigeharu: Through His Opposition to Hayashi Fusao), in Bungaku kenkyū ronshū 21 (March), 41–55. Shimizu, Shōzō (1967) Nakano Shigeharu to Hayashi Fusao (Nakano Shigeharu and Hayashi Fusao), Tokyo: Kanna shobō. Sugino, Yōkichi (1979) Nakano Shigeharu no kenkyū (A Study of Nakano Shigeharu), Tokyo: Kasama shoin. Wada, Takashi (2009) ‘ “Rōdō no kachi” ga imi suru mono: Tokunaga Sunao no tenkō sakuhin to seisan bungaku’ (The Meaning of ‘the Value of Labour’: The tenkō Works of Tokunaga Sunao and Production Literature), in Ronkyū Nihon bungaku 91 (December), 33–48.

9 THE DISJOINTED NARRATIVES AND FRACTURED SUBJECTS OF TAKAMI JUN Irena Hayter

‘One gets used to anything. And one of the canniest ways to get ahead in this vertiginous age of ours is to get used to anything, no matter how perverse’.1 In an essay from 1935, the literary critic Nakamura Mitsuo (1911–68) noted wryly the normalization of political developments that used to be considered extraordinary: the repressions of leftists and liberals and the creeping hegemony of the state over civil society (1968 [1935]: 314). Not only were people untroubled by the staggering number of imprisoned intellectuals; they did not think strange the fact that only a couple of months after their release, many writers published accounts of their prison experiences in the thinly disguised autobiographical form of the shishōsetsu (I-novel).2 There was, according to Nakamura, a real vogue for tenkō narratives in the mass circulation magazines. Nakamura begrudgingly acknowledged the cultural longevity of the shishōsetsu form and its domination of literary production since the Meiji period (1868–1912). Yet he still hurled some angry questions at the tenkō writers: Was it not you, the proletarian writers, who most boldly crushed, or at least attempted to crush, this tradition of the shishōsetsu? Did you, gentlemen, abandon your literary theory together with your so-called political position? (ibid.: 315) Nakamura went on to remind his readers that it took Erich-Maria Remarque ten years to give form to his experience of the Great War (in All Quiet on the Western Front) and that Dostoevsky wrote The House of the Dead more than a decade after his Siberian internment; moreover, Dostoevsky presented the work as the recently discovered prison notes of an aristocrat, a convicted murderer, reinforcing the divisions between diegetic narrator and biographical author rather than blurring them.

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It should be noted that the works often cited as the best examples of tenkō literature all appeared in quick succession in 1934–35. They were authored by proletarian writers and they do conform to the narrative and rhetorical grammar of the shishōsetsu: Murayama Tomoyoshi’s Byakuya (Midnight Sun, May 1934); ‘Rai’ (Leprosy, April 1934) and ‘Mōmoku’ (Blindness, July 1934) by Shimaki Kensaku (1903–45); Dai isshō (The First Chapter, January 1935) and Mura no ie (The House in the Village, May 1935), both by Nakano Shigeharu, amongst others.3 Serialized between February and November 1935, Takami Jun’s debut novel Kokyū wasureubeki (Should Auld Acquaintance Be Forgot, hereafter Auld Acquaintance) is contemporaneous with this boom. Active in the proletarian culture movement, Takami was arrested in February 1933 and released three months later after signing a tenkō statement. His novel, however, is strikingly different from the texts of Murayama Tomoyoshi and Nakano Shigeharu, for example: for a start, the experience of tenkō is treated obliquely and mentioned only in passing, instead of forming the narrative and ethical centre of the work. Rather than a protagonist based on the author, we have a radically decentred narrative universe with the perspective switching between several major characters. There are frequent digressions and distortions of linear temporality. The work is sprawling and discursive; now and then its verbose narrator comments on his own writing, addresses the characters directly and even intervenes into their thoughts and reminiscences. The conventions of realist narrative are at times laid bare with Tristram Shandy–like, playful pedantry. Shortlisted for the first Akutagawa prize, Auld Acquaintance launched Takami in the literary world and brought him fame and commissions. (The prize that year, however, went to Ishikawa Tatsuzō’s Sōbō [The Common People], a much more straightforward narrative of the experiences of Japanese emigrants in Brazil). Honda Shūgo, in a seminal critical essay, described Takami’s novel as ‘one of the high peaks of tenkō literature’ (1957: 209). Honda’s assessment very much belongs to the political and intellectual contexts of the postwar era, dominated as they were by debates on tenkō and war responsibility. Apart from Honda, however, the handful of Japanese critics who have written on the work consider it a failed attempt at proper realism; an unsuccessful tenkō novel that is not confessional enough. (Like much tenkō writing, Takami’s novel has been largely absent from English language scholarship, with the exception of Keene (1998) and Torrance (2010), who provide short overviews.) The idiosyncratic form of the novel, its modernist denaturing of narrative order and deep interiority are either ignored or attributed to extratextual, biographical facts about its author. This essay will take issue with such readings: I will concentrate on the formal structures of the work and situate them in the larger historical and discursive moment of the mid-1930s in Japan. Form, after all, can never be purely form; for Fredric Jameson, the critic whose work remains the most formidable theoretical synthesis of formal and historical concerns, narrative inventions are always symbolic enactments of historical dilemmas and political aporias. Narrative form, Jameson has taught us, ‘must be read as an unstable and provisory solution to an aesthetic dilemma which is itself the manifestation of a social and historical contradiction’ (1979: 94). I will argue that, in Auld

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Acquaintance, the formal stages the historical: rather than being simply whimsical or immature, the structures of the novel are deeply motivated, indeed symptomatic, of the aporias of tenkō and the way they affected issues of narrative, subjectivity and psychic temporality.

Divisions unsettled To understand Nakamura’s dismay at the flood of confessional tenkō narratives, we need to be conscious that, like Takami Jun himself, Nakamura came of age in the late 1920s, amidst the oedipal revolt of a young literary generation of modernists and proletarian writers against the shishōsetsu, the master genre of the Taisho era (1911–26). Both Marxists and modernists attacked forcefully Taisho beliefs in the self as a natural, socially unmediated subjectivity and a transparent vessel for psychological interiority. Cultural discourse in the Taisho years had privileged the cultivation of the self through literature and the humanistic disciplines, in contrast to the coarse materialism of the Meiji era (1868–1912). Culture was sanctified, posited in terms similar to the Bildung of nineteenth-century German neo-­idealist thought: autonomous, non-instrumental, locus of absolute value. Emblematic Taisho figures, such as the philosophers Nishida Kitarō (1870–1945) and Watsuji Tetsurō (1889–1960), were taught at Tokyo Imperial University by the Russian German Raphael von Koeber (1848–1923), who emphasized Geist, a term with strong connotations of ‘inwardness, spirituality and cultural refinement’ (Pincus 1996: 34). Komori Yōichi (1988: 16) finds in Taisho culturalism a dynamic of sublimation, just as in the years after the High Treason Incident of 1911 a politically disenchanted generation found in literature a simulacrum for life.4 It was an attitude best summed up in Akutagawa Ryūnosuke’s famous statement that life is not worth a single line of Baudelaire. The ideological work of the shishōsetsu can be found in the privatization of experience and the channelling of all energies subversive to the Meiji project into a purely inward, psychological project of salvation. Marxist theory, as Peter Duus (1988: 710) has pointed out, presented a powerful alternative to the philosophy of self-cultivation and its passivity and ahistoricity. For literature and cultural discourse, Marxism represented a profound break with the solipsism of a privatized interiority; it introduced the absolute otherness of social forces that existed beyond individual consciousness. Here, according to postwar political theorist Maruyama Masao (1914–96), was an integrating methodology which held, not only that ‘economy, politics and law were ineluctably linked, but that even the field of literature and art had to be seen not in isolation, but as linked mutually to them’ (quoted in Barshay 2007: 202). Even Yokomitsu Riichi (1898–1947), modernist par excellence and supposedly an arch anti-Marxist, acknowledged that the ideas of dialectical materialism sent shockwaves through the literary world and pushed to the forefront intellectual debates about consciousness and matter (Fukada et al. 1968 [1933]: 414–5). Both proletarian writers and modernists mounted assaults on self-contained subjectivity. In their texts, interiorities are emptied out, and there is a new preoccupation with surfaces: labouring bodies,

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the skin of machines, the superficial stimuli of urban life.5 In proletarian works such as Kobayashi Takiji’s Kani kōsen (The Crab Cannery Ship) and Tokunaga Sunao’s Taiyō no nai machi (Streets without Sun), both published in 1929, we find staccatoed sentences and montage-like juxtapositions of images, the signature modernist techniques of Yokomitsu’s novel Shanghai (1928–32) Hayter (2017; 2010: 24–7).6 Language emerges as something existing prior to and outside the subject, with its own material reality. It is true that the bolshevization of the proletarian culture movement in the late 1920s led to the adoption of Comintern diktats about socialist realism and denunciations of avant-garde formalism. Moreover, because of its domination of the literary world, proletarian literature was, for modernists such as Yokomitsu, the powerful ‘other’ against whom they defined themselves. But in most literary and cultural histories of interwar Japan, the tensions between Marxists and modernists are reified, elevated into rigid binaries such as ‘literature of revolution’ and ‘revolution of literature’. In his preface to the influential volume Showa bunka 1925–1945 (Showa Culture 1925–45), the cultural historian Minami Hiroshi (1987: iii) asserts that in the 1930s, modernism was attacked by both Marxism and fascism and declined under their pressure. The famous phrase of the critic Hirano Ken (1963: 7) sanpa teiritsu, or ‘three-way opposition’ – between the three conflicting camps of Marxism, modernism and ‘old’ realism – as defining the discursive parameters of early Showa, is rehearsed in a number of accounts. Takami Jun is one of the figures who confound the neat dichotomies of Marxism and modernism and who trouble the orthodoxies of literary and cultural history. Takami grew up poor in the affluent Yamanote area of Tokyo, the illegitimate son of Matsumoto Sannosuke (1857–1936), an elite bureaucrat and amateur kanshi poet with a long and illustrious career in government (he was governor of Fukui Prefecture when he had an affair with Takami’s mother) but who was also uncle to Nagai Kafū (1857–1936) – which makes Takami and Kafū cousins, although both preferred to remain silent about this fact. Academically brilliant, Takami entered the Tokyo First Higher School supported by a scholarship from a respected philanthropist.7 While at higher school, he was deeply affected by the last blossoming of Japanese anarchism before the murder of its charismatic leader Ōsugi Sakae in 1923 (Kobayashi 2010: 14–9). These were the early years of the proletarian culture movement, very much exemplified by the journal Tane maku hito (The Sower 1921–24), a platform for the vibrant and politically diverse voices of anarchists, nihilists, Marxists and Christian socialists. But Takami also frequented Dadaist cafes, drank vodka and made speeches about the supremacy of art: by his own admission he was obsessed with avant-garde art movements (Takami 1973: 362–3). In October 1925, he started a Dada journal, its title Kaiten jidai, clearly echoing the title of Bungei jidai, the emblematic modernist periodical edited by Yokomitsu, Kawabata Yasunari and Kataoka Teppei, amongst others. The avant-garde artist and Takami contemporary at the First Higher School, Murayama Tomoyoshi, designed the cover of the inaugural issue of Kaiten jidai; he also worked on several Bungei jidai covers (Kōno 1997: 167). Takami’s juvenilia features the fragmented sentences typical of the ‘neo-sensationist’ style of the Bungei jidai group as well as visual and

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typographic experiments: ‘brrrr’, ‘grrr’ sounds in Roman letters, onomatopoeia expressing machinic noises and rhythms, different font sizes (Takami 1973: 362–3). Takami’s years at Tokyo Imperial University coincided with the radical bolshevization of the proletarian culture movement. The many debates and disagreements between the Marxists, who advocated a centralized organization integrated with the international communist movement, and the anarcho-syndicalists who insisted on direct action and favoured more autonomous structures, led to a number of traumatic splits and purges. In 1926, young Marxist radicals such as Nakano Shigeharu and Hayashi Fusao (1903–75) effectively ousted the non-Marxists from the Japan Proletarian Literature Federation (Iwamoto 1974: 162). The term ‘proletarian’ itself, which had formerly signified a broad front of anti-capitalist politics, came to possess exclusively Marxist connotations (Hirano 1963: 29). The Federation adopted Comintern positions about socialist realism and the priority of political struggle. Together with other ‘dialectical anarchists’ (Kawanishi 2011: 100), Takami did convert to communism, but this first tenkō of his again blurs established categories and questions the very meaning of these ideological turns. In contrast to Murayama Tomoyoshi, the quintessential avant-garde artist, and Kataoka Teppei, a major figure in the neo-sensationist group, both of whom passionately embraced the politicization of the movement and accepted the primacy of content over form, Takami remained ambivalent about it: in an essay from 1928 published in the coterie journal Daigaku saha, he argued that the inherited bourgeois art forms could not contain the voice of the proletariat and that it was therefore imperative to smash these forms. Takami’s view that art as an establishment and the refined culture accumulated by the bourgeoisie should be destroyed is precisely that of the avant-garde. He emphasized that the proletarian movement and the literary avant-garde together, side by side, should forcefully reject bourgeois art; for him, avant-garde art was a stage in the growth of the proletariat’s will to self-expression (Takami 1971: 36–46). Nevertheless, Takami did join the Marxist All-Japan Proletarian Arts Federation (known by the Esperanto acronym NAPF) in 1930 and, in the three years before his arrest in February 1933, was active as a labour organizer for the metalworkers union and an area rep for NAPF, while working full-time for the Japanese subsidiary of Columbia Records and trying to write. When taken into custody, he was interrogated by a police agent who boasted that he had tortured Kobayashi Takiji. Takami was released in May 1933, after signing a tenkō statement. (It should be stressed that Takami’s experience was not part of the wave of recantations unleashed by the news of the tenkō of Sano and Nabeyama which hit the headlines some weeks later, on 10 June 1933). Days after his release, his first wife Aiko left him for a rich, older man. This rather sensational personal history might to a certain extent explain why, despite the modernist destructuring of narrative order and psychological interiority, biographical and ethical approaches to Takami’s first novel dominate. Most Japanese critical writing on Auld Acquaintance has attempted to uncover biographical facts behind its complications of perspective and temporality. Such readings remain within the interpretive paradigm of the shishōsetsu: the text is considered

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a secondary gesture, a simple and reliable record of the writer’s tenkō experience. (To confuse things even further, two months after his release from custody, Takami published a shishōsetsu-like story titled Kanjō (Feelings), often used by critics and biographers as a reliable source about this period of his life). In one of the earliest critical essays on Auld Acquaintance, Hirano Ken persistently references the work with biographical details and calls it ‘literature of self-blasphemy and self-­ regeneration’ (1949: 341). Everything about the work is attributed to Takami’s origins and upbringing. Isogai Hideo (1966) is one of a number of critics preoccupied with the question of which characters are alter egos for the author (at least three characters share biographical elements with Takami).8 For Isogai, the intrusive narration points towards the Edo tradition of gesaku (playful writing), but there are again purely psychological explanations for this: the shock of tenkō and the departure of Takami’s wife. It is implied that this traumatic experience prevented Takami from achieving a proper realist novel. Umemoto Masayuki also claims that in each character it is possible to see a different side of Takami the author; for Umemoto, Auld Acquaintance is ‘a private confession’, its meaning found in the earnestness and depth of the disclosure (2002: 14). The only critical position which brings to the foreground the formal inventions of the novel and acknowledges them as conscious gestures of resistance to realist representation is that of the writer and critic Nakamura Shin’ichirō (1918–97). For Nakamura, Auld Acquaintance is ‘more or less the first realization of the twentiethcentury novel in Japan’ (1983: 20–1), the post-Dostoevsky novel that reached its pinnacle with Joyce and Proust. Dostoevsky, Joyce and Proust radically changed the nineteenth-century realism of Balzac and Dickens: according to Nakamura, they destroyed the illusion of the organic unity of character. The unity of a novelistic character, his or her ‘depth’, the continuity of identity were exposed as simply the conventions of an outdated literary mode. Nakamura points to Takami’s selfconfessed love affair with Dada and stresses that he was one of the few leftist writers who did not dismiss avant-garde art as bourgeois decadence. It is possible, of course, to find even more compelling biographical or paratextual evidence in Takami’s letters, reminiscences and essays that the eccentric form of the work is intentional; that he was a writer interested in literary experimentation and modernist technique. At Tokyo University, for example, Takami studied English literature, and his graduation thesis was titled ‘On George Bernard Shaw as Dramatic Satirist’. His views of fiction were not bound by a native genealogy: his concepts of realism and modernism were grounded in the AngloAmerican tradition. To rely on the organic, self-evident unity between author and text, however, is to remain within the hermeneutics of the shishōsetsu. The aim of my analysis is to push to the foreground other, less obvious and less naturalized convergences between the text and its larger discursive and material contexts. The loosening of linear temporality and the deconstruction of narrative hierarchies betray a concern with broader issues of subjectivity. The formal structures of the work, I argue, are symptomatic of the historical aporias of the 1930s, and, in order to grasp their meanings, we need to read the novel against

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the discourse of tenkō as a regeneration of the self, as a return to natural, organic Japaneseness.

Narrative transgressions, temporal perversions An outline of the plot of Auld Acquaintance is due, although any attempt to do so will do violence to this digressive and hyper-retrospective text. Ozeki Kenji, a Tokyo University graduate working in a shabby company publishing English dictionaries, feels stifled by the mediocrity of his life: by the cramped sunless house that he and his wife share with his mother, by the women’s depressing obsession with daily economies. While receiving treatment for alopecia at a hospital, Ozeki runs into Shinohara, a friend from higher school. Confident, arrogant and popular with women, Shinohara is everything Ozeki is not. Shinohara takes Ozeki to the Ginza bar where Akiko, his current love interest, works. In the following weeks, Ozeki meets two other old classmates, Tomonari and Matsushita, and the novel then devotes three whole chapters to their time at higher school. All four had been involved with a group studying leftist social thought, although Tomonari did not like their denunciation of art as the enemy of Marxism and, together with Shinohara, left to start a Dadaist literary journal. Following new directives about ‘thought guidance’ from the Ministry of Education, school authorities ordered the social studies group to disband. At the last meeting of the group, Matsushita, in a fit of blind rage, threw out the school official supervising the gathering. Tomonari gave a passionate speech and, as a sign of protest, submitted an empty sheet at the yearend exams. When they meet years later, an air of gloomy decadence hangs over them; it seeps out even of the exuberant dandyism of Shinohara. Matsushita, also a Tokyo University graduate, but working as an insurance salesman, invites Ozeki to go out drinking with him, with the hope of selling him insurance. Shinohara’s feelings towards Akiko cool, and she reluctantly accepts Ozeki’s attentions. What brings the divergent strands of the plot together is the suicide of another former classmate, Sawamura. Sawamura’s life and death are the only story told as a straightforward, coherent narrative: his commitment to the political movement; his work as a labour organizer; his arrest, imprisonment and tenkō; the slow and painful path to rebuilding his life and the shock of his suicide, which happened after his return to normal middle-class existence. The work closes, rather abruptly, with a memorial gathering for Sawamura, the characters singing ‘Should Auld Acquaintance Be Forgot’ in honour of their dead friend. At the time, autobiographical fiction was often attacked for the claustrophobic domination of one interiority, that of the protagonist. However, in contrast to the one-dimensional world of the shishōsetsu, Auld Acquaintance represents a radically decentred universe of autonomous subjectivities. Ozeki, Shinohara, Akiko, Tomonari and Matsushita are complex people endowed with psychological depth and a rich inner life. This is achieved through narrative modalities that emphasize agency and autonomy. Sections of the novel are presented as omniscient narrative, but most of the time we have point-of-view narration from the perspective of a

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single character. The effect approximates free indirect style or even the stream of consciousness mode, especially because of the long, drawn-out sentences and the absence of some conventional punctuation: consider the first sentence, for example: Ozeki had been telling himself for half a month that he needed a haircut, it wouldn’t do to keep going around so dishevelled, but even though he was firmly resolved (tonight, I will do it tonight for sure. . .), three days passed before he finally managed to step inside the barber shop with the rows of potted azalea bonsai trees. (Takami 1970: 7)9 It is important to stress that this focalization, to use Gerard Genette’s (1980) term, is varied. Sometimes the beginning of a new chapter marks a shift in focalization: the first three chapters unfold through Ozeki’s perspective, while chapter four is narrated from the point of view of Shinohara. There are also changes in focalization within chapters, as well as intense situations in which abrupt shifts of perspective occur – like the first date of Shinohara and Akiko, for example: This woman has fallen for me, [Shinohara] thought, and wiped his forehead with a perfumed handkerchief. She doesn’t want to be regarded as a delinquent. He took a cigarette out of his pocket and patted it slowly with his thumbnail. This man has fallen for me, Akiko muttered to herself, hidden in the trees, and felt like sticking her tongue out at him. He is jealous of my ex-husband, that’s why he said such unpleasant things . . . how funny. (49) Shinohara and Akiko are trying to see through each other, to reach beyond appearances and grasp the other person’s feelings. Such sharp, tense juxtapositions and reversals of perspective have the effect of emphasizing not only the psychological interiority of the characters but also their isolation and opaqueness. Other modalities which construct a character’s autonomous subjectivity are the many flashbacks, retrospections that function to confirm the continuity of the self across past and present. These narrative strategies effectively suppress the presence and signs of the narrator, creating the illusion that these subjectivities present themselves to the reader directly, without mediation. There are also recurrent moments, however, when a narrator does appear, and a verbose and flamboyant one at that. He refers to himself in the third person, using the rather old-fashioned hissha (the author) common in Edo-period gesaku fiction. He directly addresses the characters and interferes with their thoughts and actions; his long digressions constantly threaten to unravel the main narrative into sheer incoherence. He comments on and appraises his own work. Here he is, in a

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digression about the characters’ time at university, addressing the timid, submissive Ozeki, who has been ordered to clean up after the drunken Shinohara: Why didn’t you refuse, Ozeki? A forceful ‘No!’ would have probably cooled the reckless arrogance of your roommate. Your author’s heart aches at the sight of your wretched figure; I can hardly bear writing about you. At that moment, as if nature had begun singing its tune about the strong preying on the weak, a piercing cold wind blew against the glass in the corridor and bit into your skin through the cracks in the window. (64) It is as if the convention of the transcendental narrator is deconstructed by being deployed too literally, in a grotesquely exaggerated manner. It can be quite disconcerting, this gleeful freedom with which the narrator transgresses narrative orders: one moment he can comment on the story and the characters from a removed, abstract meta-position; the next he can play with the conceit that the time of the diegesis and the time of his narration overlap. This creates the illusion that the narrator is positioned on the same ontological plane as the characters, as in the following two examples: Come to think of it, what a ridiculous detour did our story take! While the author was rambling on, our protagonist Ozeki Kenji finished his haircut and returned to his dark house. (15, my emphasis) Readers might harbour feelings of disbelief, because the present Akiko, namely the image of her which readers have painted in their imagination after reading the beginning of the chapter, and Akiko as she appeared in the retrospections following, are quite different. This, however, is not a lapse on the part of your author. I did intend to describe this change in her in a composed, assured manner, but while I had abandoned [Shinohara and Akiko], they got ready to go out and would leave the apartment any moment now. I don’t really mind them going out, but there was a conversation between them that should not be missed. (51–2, my emphasis) In the second passage, the narrator casually collapses narratological hierarchies: the beginning sees him take a transcendental position vis-à-vis his character, commenting on the changes in Akiko. He does provide an explanation for this discontinuity, but the effect is to draw attention to the fact that Akiko is simply a fictional character. Further on, however, we are again given the impression that the narrator is inside the diegesis, at the same ontological level as his characters, listening in on and reporting their conversation.

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The exposure of artifice is performed in an even more straightforward manner in the following passage about Ozeki: If we are to say it again, he thought he was ‘beyond hope’. But these days, a feeling that there might be hope, something like strength or joy, a desire, a dream, in any case, a lightness began fluttering inside him. If your author was accustomed to popular fiction [tsūzoku shōsetsu], I would say it was his longing for Akiko. There was this as well – but the reason was different. (80) The ontological volatility of the characters – their construction as autonomous subjectivities and their exposure as fictional constructs  – represents one of the fundamental tensions running through the work. The fluid positionality of ‘the author’ – from disembodied omniscient narration that suppresses the enunciating subject to a highly personalized figure  – collapses narrative orders and creates a certain epistemological indeterminacy. This is an ironic, reflexive narrator pointing to his own mask. The exaggeration of his powers paradoxically creates an effect of disintegration of narrative authority, laying it bare as sheer artifice. The discontinuities in the supposedly organic selves of the characters are also emphasized through radical distortions of linear temporality and plot chronology. The following diagrams represent roughly the temporal structure of chapters one and four. It is important to stress that temporal shifts are often accompanied by changes in other narrative modalities such as perspective and that secondary temporal movements can often occur within the major temporal segments. There is also the distinction between subjective and objective retrospections (Genette 1980: 39), told through a character or by the narrator respectively; where possible, I  have tried to mark this distinction in the diagrams. Rather than a detailed presentation of the complex temporal structure of the work, the purpose of these diagrams is to show how the work deviates from conventional linear narrative. The sequence A→B→C→D→E signifies normal chronological succession.

Chapter one D: Ozeki in the barber shop excusing his unkempt hair with neurasthenia (shinkei suijaku) (rather than just being tight with money) → B (unidentified past moment): retrospection about the colleague who told him about neurasthenia → C: the following morning after B: Ozeki sees in the morning paper an advertisement for a tonic against neurasthenia → C: same day Ozeki has lunch with the same colleague→ A: eight years before at higher school: retrospection about the day Ozeki shared a table with Shinohara in the school canteen → the narration goes back to D: ‘While the narrator was rambling on, our protagonist Ozeki Kenji finished his haircut and returned to his dark house’ (15).

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Temporal structure of the chapter: D →B → C → A → D (B → C → A is Ozeki’s subjective retrospection).

Chapter four D: Shinohara and Akiko are in Akiko’s apartment → A (two months before D): Shinohara and Akiko meet for the first time → B (several days later than A): their first date → return to D: Shinohara and Akiko in Akiko’s apartment → C (several days earlier than D): Shinohara takes Ozeki to the bar where Akiko works. Temporal structure of the chapter: D → A → B→ D→ C (A →B is Shinohara’s retrospection). These simple diagrammatic presentations reveal the absence of any will towards a chronologically linear narrative. What comes to the fore instead is the work’s hyper-retrospectivity, the characters’ almost perverse fixation on the past. Ozeki is the one most nostalgically immersed in the past; he articulates directly the plenitude of the past against the barrenness of the present: Daydreams are pleasant only when you have hopes. But what dreams and hopes were there for him now? A boring job and a tedious family life. What does he live for? What is the point of this life? Only higher school was a happy time. Back then he had dreams. (12) The past emerges as somehow more authentic than the present. The subjective retrospective digressions are often triggered by the resemblance of a certain present situation to a past one, the associative principle typical of modernist psychological narrative: Ozeki and his neurasthenia in chapter one, the sight of Akiko playfully sticking out her tongue at Shinohara in chapter four. A dialectic of originals and copies can be discerned: the past experience is always vital, the present one its pale imitation: the monotony of Ozeki’s petit bourgeois existence and the feeling of having lived life to the fullest at higher school; Shinohara and Akiko in the present of the narrative, when their feelings have cooled, and the aching intensity of the first day they spent together. If the past is so important for the characters of Auld Acquaintance, then what are we to make of the narrator’s interventions into their subjective retrospections? Here is how the narrator interferes in Ozeki’s daydreaming about the past: The author would like to draw the attention of the reader to Ozeki’s lustfulness: the reader might have caught a glimpse of it earlier in the dinner scene.

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Despite his indecisiveness, Ozeki has sharp and keen amorous instincts. His lust will play a very active part further on in this narrative. (22) Although a large part of chapter four consists of Shinohara’s recollection of the beginning of his relationship with Akiko, at some point the narrator intrudes to state: ‘It is unclear where the idea came from, but some days after, the faces of Shinohara and Akiko were seen in the corner of a train bound for [Yokohama’s] Sakuragichō’, and, a few pages later, ‘That night the two were seen at the Odeon cinema’ (45, 49). At times, the narrator even dismisses their reminiscences, refusing them the right to own their past: ‘Instead of recording here the exchange of recollections that took place, I  would like to sketch briefly the history of their friendship’ (55). Retrospection is based on the self-identity of an interiorized subjectivity: me in the present is the same me from the past, and it is only me who can recall that very personal experience. The transgressions of the narrator and the fragmented temporal structure of the work have the effect of depriving the characters of agency with a wilfulness that is close to violence. This undoing of autonomous subjectivity and the exposure of literary artifice do amount to a destruction of the supposed ‘organic unity’ of novelistic character, to return to Nakamura Shin’ichirō’s phrase. However, the discontinuities in the characters and the ruptures of psychic temporality can also be seen as strategies that symbolically enact the crisis of Taisho-esque ideas of personality (jinkaku) and inwardness, ideas that re-emerge in tenkō literature and its confessional idiom. In Auld Acquaintance, the self is just a rhetorical construct, but this destructuring of subjectivity resonates powerfully with the historical and political intensities of the 1930s and particularly with the ideological reversals of tenkō.

Tenkō as a crisis of subjectivity To understand why tenkō had such profound effects on issues of subjectivity and psychic temporality, we need to consider the influence Marxism wielded in intellectual and academic circles in the late 1920s and early 1930s. Proletarian literature and cultural critique were a dominant presence in cultural production. Even in terms of sheer volume, Keene (1976: 226) has estimated that almost half the articles published in leading ‘bourgeois’ magazines and journals were written by intellectuals belonging to the movement. A  certain element of faddishness, of a commercial boom staged by a burgeoning print media is, however, undeniable. As Yoshimi Shun’ya (2002: 24) has stressed, at that time Marxism was a valuable intellectual commodity not only in Japan but in the globally synchronous networks of discursive practice. Das Kapital came out in Japanese in 1920 in the translation by Takabatake Motoyuki; in 1925–7, the publishers Shinchōsha and Kaizōsha both produced mass-market editions which were so popular among students that extra

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print runs had to be ordered (Nakamura 1998: 58). In Auld Acquaintance, Takami’s narrator comments on Shinohara’s infatuation with Marxism in a typically selfconscious manner: If all of a sudden I say now that at the time [Shinohara] was very left-wing, the readers might think that this is novelistic artifice, but the left swing phenomenon indeed had assaulted the youth indiscriminately like a tropical disease; if one were to write truthfully about that time, things would come out more exaggerated than fiction; to make it fiction proper, you would need to bend the truth. (72) The Marxism that took student radicals by storm was Marxism as interpreted by the young theoretician Fukumoto Kazuo (1894–1983). In its early days, leftist thought in Japan did not even distinguish between the ideas of Marx and those of Engels; Karatani Kōjin (1997: 31) describes it as heavily economistic, with a strong social-evolutionary slant. The founder of the Japanese Communist Party, Yamakawa Hitoshi (1880–1958), was in many ways a typical figure with his emphasis on syndicalism and economic struggle. Fukumoto brought to the movement hitherto unknown theoretical sophistication and Lukácsean intellectual rigour. In the writings of Fukumoto, the term tenkō appeared with the meaning of a subjective political turn. Tenkō was a change in the subject that involved both action impacting on the outside world and interior reflection (Fujita 1959: 32–4). It had connotations of spontaneity and agency and implied a reshaping of the self (jiko henkaku) (Karatani 1997: 17). In Fukumoto’s thought, as Karatani has pointed out, class struggle is conceived as intrinsic to subjectivity (1997: 32). To be a pure Marxist, you had to liberate yourself from petit bourgeois mentality, sacrifice private happiness for the movement and reject the vulgar careerism of risshin shusse (worldly success, one of the ubiquitous slogans of Meiji), even if you were a graduate of the elite Tokyo University. There was a strong element of repression and self-denial. Fujita Shōzō (1959: 34–8) situates Fukumotoism and the turns of tenkō in the post–World War I context in Japan, when an explosion of ‘print capitalism’ and rising standards of education produced, en masse, an intelligentsia shaped entirely by the internalization of Western written texts. These were subjects separated from the primordial community; instead, they formed a secondary, mediated community constructed by Western literature and humanist philosophy, by abstract texts divorced from Japanese reality. It is this textualism, this obsession with theory that makes the generation of leftist students so different from that of earlier radicals like Ōsugi Sakae. For the followers of Fukumoto, Western theory was the orthodoxy, and Japanese society was simply the object onto which it should be applied. The superiority of Western theory over the knowledges of a non-Western society was not questioned.

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This total reshaping of subjectivity according to written theoretical texts and the disciplining of desire and the body can be seen as a technology of the self, in Foucault’s terms. For Foucault the technologies of the self: permit individuals to effect by their own means or with the help of others a certain number of operations on their own bodies and souls, thoughts, conduct, and way of being, so as to transform themselves in order to attain a certain state of happiness, purity, wisdom, perfection or immortality. (1988: 18) Foucault breaks with the Western philosophical tradition that identified subjectivity with consciousness (conceived as transcendental) and emphasized instead its historical formation through practices, including those of the body. For Foucault, the self constitutes itself at any given time using the techniques historically available to it (Kelly 2013: 513). It is a model of active agency, not coercion, that can help us think about the role of Marxist theory for the young Japanese radicals of the 1920s. The fetishization of abstract knowledge and the will to theoretical purity not only contributed to the excessive factionalism and subsequent defeat of the movement, according to postwar thinkers such as Fujita Shōzo (1959) and Maruyama Masao (1961: 57–8); they also condemned Japanese Marxists to a total isolation from sensuous reality and from inherited social bonds. As Fujita has argued, the mass ideological apostasies of the second tenkō, of Marxists renouncing their beliefs, cannot be explained only with coercion by the authorities; Japanese Marxism’s abandonment of the present for the abstractions of theory is also an important factor: ‘Tenkō usually occurred as an interior transformation linked to external incidents which dragged homo theoreticus (rironjin) from the transcendental level of his confrontation with Japanese society down to the real world’ (1959: 44). The bonds of commonality and the epistemologies of empathy, which Fukumotoism broke, reasserted themselves with full force. Amongst other things, tenkō stood for cultural realignment, for a return to natural, organic Japaneseness. Marxism, because of its materialist conceptions of society and history, could be a metonym for Western modernity. It is in this broader meaning of abandoning modernity and the West in order to immerse oneself in a commonality supposedly untouched by alienation that tenkō can be the governing metaphor for the long 1930s in Japan. Structurally, it resonated with the anti-modern epistemologies articulated in the more intellectualized discourses of the ‘return to Japan’ and overcoming modernity.10 The opposition of theory and affect, of Marxism and Japaneseness, are the most potent tropes of tenkō discourse. In the pamphlet ‘Tenkō ni tsuite’ (On Tenkō 1941), Hayashi Fusao wrote: I managed to free myself completely from the constraints of abstract theory. I have never been much of a theorist. With tears in my eyes, I will share my

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life with the life of the Yamato people; with tears in my eyes I will lend my strength to the advance of the nation. (1969 [1941]: 384) Hayashi is in many ways a paradigmatic figure: very active in the drive towards ideological purity that saw non-Marxists ousted from the proletarian literature federation, he was also the first to rebel against its doctrinaire politics and the instrumentalization of art. In the preceding passage, the duality of the abstract and the sensuous is clearly laid out; through the repetition of the phrase ‘with tears in my eyes’ and the rhythmic structures, pure affect is made superior to cold conceptual thought. Hayashi argues that Marxism is just an ideology that originated in the class-divided society of nineteenth-century Europe and is therefore alien to Japan; it does not stir the blood of young people and cannot be a supporting pillar of their soul. What supports the spirit of the nation should be something intrinsic to the nation (ibid.: 382). The naturalness of tenkō is another recurrent motif: Hayashi rejects the model of ideological conversion, the slogan ‘from Marxism to Japanism’, as the simplistic replacement of one abstract -ism with another. Hayashi called on the tenkōsha to discard everything, to connect directly to the self and to their humanity. In the collaborative postscript to Hayashi’s pamphlet, the writer Iwakura Masaji quoted these words with admiration: when you go back to the natural self, tenkō should be happening spontaneously (onozukara); it should be emerging from a feeling of loyalty to the land of the ancestors (1941: 76). Another contributor to the postscript, the poet Asano Akira (1941: 82), a founding member of the Japan Romantic school, defined tenkō as a continuous ritual purification of the self, a turning away from the private and advancing towards the collective (ōyake, a term which also refers to the imperial family). The narrative of tenkō as regeneration of the self was highly charged affectively, as seen even in these brief statements. Figures of rebirth (fukkatsu), return (fukki) and revival (saisei) abound in this discourse. If we follow Fujita’s contention that Fukumotoism posited a subjectivity shaped by written theoretical texts, it would be possible to argue that the collapse of Marxism as a technology of the self would bring on a crisis of subjectivity. The celebratory discourse of rebirth glosses over a rupture of psychic temporality. The subject of tenkō constructs retroactively an inauthentic past in order to embrace their authentic present. Psychoanalysis calls this retrospective mechanism ‘secondary revision’, a rearrangement of psychic material according to a new logic or outcome. Secondary revision comes from the intellectual and psychic demand for ‘unity, connection and intelligibility from any material, whether of perception or thought. . . . [If] it is unable to establish a true connection it does not hesitate to fabricate a false one’ (Freud quoted in Laplanche and Pontalis 2004: 412). Causation, in other words, can work backwards as well as forwards, creating meanings that did not previously exist; certain events can gain significance by retroaction. Tenkō, then, does not only complicate the continuity and coherence of the self in time; it also problematizes narrative temporality. The renunciation of one’s past

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devotion to abstract theory and the secondary construction of the past as inauthentic sutures the traumatic crisis of subjectivity opened up by tenkō. The return to the naked self is also a return to the village community. The countryside is present as a topos in a number of tenkō narratives, such as Nakano Shigeharu’s The House in the Village but most notably in Shimaki Kensaku’s Seikatsu no tankyū (Quest for Life), where the protagonist returns to his native place and looks back on his infatuation with abstract ideas. The release from the theoretical is often accompanied by a yearning for a mystical identification with nature, as in the following passage by Kobayashi Morito (1902–84): The mountains give birth to dreams. How pleasant it must be to walk in these mountains!  .  .  . The mountains give birth to beauty. The sublimely beautiful form of the mountains inspires aesthetic feeling in Ono (Kobayashi) [sic]. In that way, the mountains become imbued with spirit. (quoted in Fujita 1959: 49) Kobayashi’s was the first autobiographical account of defection from the JCP, published in 1932. It established the trope of tenkō as a religions transformation and rebirth that would structure many tenkō narratives.11 In such narratives, the family is not a castrating patriarchy, but a matriarchal community bound by empathy, outside the alienations of the Lacanian symbolic order. The breakdown of subjectivity as constructed by Marxist texts was to be overcome by a renunciation of subjectivity, by a return to mother-bound plenitude. Imperial ideology had always emphasized immediacy and organic presence, the unity of emperor and people (Hayter 2010). In the 1930s, it also began to stress the maternal, allembracing and forgiving aspects of the emperor. The ethics textbook Kokutai no hongi (Fundamental Principles of Our National Polity, published in 1937) assured readers that the emperor ‘loves and protects [his subjects] as one would sucklings’ and ‘nurtures them’ (Hall 1949: 45, 76). Presenting Marxism as abstract foreign thought and identifying the emperor, through the affective charge of language, with nature and the maternal, showed that the ideology of tenkō worked in much more sophisticated ways than simple coercion. The discourse of self-regeneration via communal bonds was used skilfully by the authorities: according to Richard Mitchell, ‘Procurator Hirata Susumu summed up this view: “No thought criminal was hopeless. Since they were all Japanese, sooner or later they would all come around to realizing their ideas were wrong”. . . . Daily indoctrination would reform even hardened thought criminals, whose Japaneseness was bound to surface sooner or later’ (Mitchell 1976: 127, 170). It was the naked, natural self, supposedly free of ideology and -isms, of techniques of subjectivation, that was the ideal imperial subject. This is ideology not in the classic conception of false consciousness but in the Althusserian sense of unconsciousness, of reproduction of ‘desires and discourse’ (Kaplan 1986: 20): using language not for rational argument but to mobilize and bind nationalist affect, to stir the blood, in Hayashi Fusao’s phrase.

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Of language and time: towards conclusion The importance of language and conceptual thinking to Japanese Marxism has been noted: Steinhoff has described the Marxist infiltration of legal organizations as a ‘war of words’ and ‘primarily an intellectual and verbal activity’ (1991: 82). Shigeto has also stressed that participants in the movement were adept at Marxist terminology and well versed in the art in debate and persuasion (2014: 520). Conceptual language, abstract theory, the interpellation of the subject in discourse: these are all prime instances of the Lacanian symbolic. The fear of insanity is a common motif in tenkō writing, pointing to a crisis of meaning, to an anxiety that the symbolic order might be unravelling. In Takami’s Auld Acquaintance as well, Ozeki has a recurring experience of words suddenly not making sense, of disintegrating written characters. He cancels his subscription to the high-brow intellectual journal Kaizō and switches to a magazine with popular fiction. Even the rigid font of Kaizō seems to him difficult to understand. The thirst with which he was reading the journal has long gone, but even when he forces himself to read, he cannot grasp the meaning of the sentences and gives up (10). The language of Auld Acquaintance itself rejects both the conceptual rigour of Marxist discourse and the affective pull of most celebratory tenkō writing. It is, in a way, language at its most mundane, stripped of auratic qualities. With its dense textuality, its style of paratactic accumulation and the digressions of the narrator, Takami’s language resists totalization. The garrulousness of the novel points to an excess of language and an evacuation of narrative content proper. Towards the end there is a rather mischievous reversal of the meaning of the title, through homonymy, that exposes the unreliability of language and subverts its claims to referentiality and truth. The novel begins with an epigraph, the first verse of the Robert Burns poem, ‘Auld Lang Syne’. Its repeated rhetorical questions guide the reader towards a certain interpretation of the title. In the last scene of the novel, the characters have moved on to a bar after the formal gathering in honour of Sawamura’s death. Overcome by drunken sentimentality, Ozeki suggests that they sing ‘Auld Lang Syne’, referring to it by the first line in Japanese translation, ‘Kokyū wasureubeki’. Shinohara misunderstands the rather archaic Sino-Japanese compound kokyū (old friend) to mean ‘cocu’, the French for cuckold. (‘Cocu’ is used in Japan and included in the Nihon Kokugo Daijiten (Big Dictionary of the Japanese Language). This is a self-conscious reference to the fact that Ozeki has managed to sleep with Akiko, officially still Shinohara’s girlfriend. ‘Auld Lang Syne’ is quite banalized in Japan because entirely different lyrics have been attached to the melody. The Japanese version was included in the first Japanese school music textbook in 1881 and is customarily sung at school and university graduation ceremonies. The solemn but also rather mawkish image of all the characters singing together is dragged down to the level of the comic and made to point reflexively to the slippages of language. Words and texts might not have an ultimate referent; lost in writing, origins might be constructed and fictionalized.

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Significantly, for Ozeki and the other characters of Auld Acquaintance, the moment of tenkō is present in the text only obliquely. It is true that, compared to Sawamura, who was active in the labour movement, they remained only ‘leftist fans’ (sayoku fan) (73). For them, tenkō might have been a release from the demands that Marxist theory placed on both body and consciousness, but it is not a celebratory one. After giving up Marxism, they sink into the tedium of suburban married life or of drinking and shallow affairs. For the characters of Auld Acquaintance, the past is where the authentic, full-blooded life exists. The mediocrity of their present openly resists the ideological constructions of tenkō as a second life. The novel ends rather abruptly: intelligibility and closure are allowed only to Sawamura, the character who has escaped the barrenness of living. The lives of the others remain fractured and disjointed; a secondary revision is refused to them. Even purely spatially, Takami’s narrative remains within the city, the locus of Westernized modernity. There is no salvation through a return to the countryside. The return of the shishōsetsu in the guise of tenkō literature that critics such as Nakamura Mitsuo decried was the return of the natural self as an imperial subject. In another uncanny repetition of Taisho, literature was becoming again an imaginary compensation for the severely curtailed realm of the political. However, to write a confessional novel about the experience that tells a coherent story and validates an autobiographical mode of self-representation would be to gloss over the contradictions of tenkō. In Takami’s work, the traumatic rupture and the aporetic unrepresentability of the whole experience are not suppressed but are brought to the foreground. Tenkō can be narrated only symptomatically, through the eccentric formal structures of Auld Acquaintance. Form, as Žižek has it in his deceptively simple conception, always articulates the repressed truth of the content (1989: 118). In this sense, Takami’s text exposes not only the hidden artifice of the shishōsetsu but also the historicity of the genre and its limits. The novel’s obsession with the past is a radical inversion of the official discourse on ‘thought criminals’: of rebirth, of inauthentic pasts and authentic presents. The ontological instability of the characters, the interventions and manipulations of the narrator should be seen as symbolic enactments of the dislocations of subjectivity brought on by tenkō. Auld Acquaintance articulates a perpetually fractured subjectivity; there is no attempt to overcome the crisis through a return to the communal body and a dissolution of the ego into the imperial totality. Amidst swelling nativist currents and calls to transcend modernity, Takami’s volatile characters remain figures of resistance, resolutely decentred and modern.

Notes 1 All translations from the Japanese are mine unless otherwise indicated. 2 One of the most potent and, at the same time, most contested terms in Japanese literary history, the shishōsetsu has been the subject of heated debates ever since its supposed emergence in the mid-1920s and in numerous later studies in Japanese. A protean form whose very existence and identity have been challenged by more recent critical interventions, it can be loosely described as a prose narrative in the third person

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(although some are first person) that represents faithfully the experiences of its author. The shishōsetsu strives for immediate authenticity, ostensibly eschewing fiction and the manipulation of narrative material. See Fowler (1988), Hijiya-Kirschnereit (1996) and Suzuki (1996). Fowler’s study in particular has questioned the myth of sincerity and has shown that the immediacy of the shishōsetsu is produced by literary artifice. Suzuki, on the other hand, has argued that the existence of the genre was made possible by the gradual naturalization of a mode of reading that collapsed differences between author, narrator and protagonist. For Suzuki, the genre category of the shishōsetsu was invented post factum by critical discourse and projected retroactively onto very heterogeneous texts. 3 For English translations, see Murayama (2016) and Nakano (1979). 4 In the so-called High Treason Incident of 1910–1, several hundred anarchists and socialists were interrogated by the police and twenty-six charged with plotting to assassinate the emperor and sentenced to death. Twelve were executed, including the anarchist leaders Kōtoku Shūsui and Kanno Sugako. 5 On proletarian literature, see Nakagawa Shigemi’s chapter in this volume. 6 For an English translation of The Crab Cannery Ship, see Kobayashi (2013). 7 The higher school (kōtō gakkō) was a unique feature of the Japanese education system before the War. Higher education took place in two completely different institutions, the higher school and the university. While university education was professional, utilitarian and unemotional, the three-year higher school had a liberal curriculum that emphasized individual fulfilment and encouraged self-expression. It was, as Smith (1972: 8) writes, an environment in which student radicalism flourished. 8 Sakusha no bunshin (the author’s alter ego) is a recurring phrase in critical writing on Takami’s novel: see, for example, Honda (1970: 403), Gotō (1996: 60) and Umemoto (2002: 14). 9 All subsequent citations from this novel are referenced as page numbers only in the text. 10 An overview in English can be found in Najita and Harootunian (1988). On separate schools and individual thinkers, see Harootunian (2002), Karatani (2008), Pincus (1996) and Doak (1994), amongst others. The work of the philosopher Tosaka Jun (1900–45) represents the most powerful critique of culturalism and Japanism in the 1930s: for translations and critical readings of his key texts, see Kawashima et al. (2014). The original contributions and discussions from the 1942 symposium Kindai no chōkoku (Overcoming Modernity) are collected in Kawakami and Takeuchi (1979); an English translation is available in Calichman (2008). 11 On Kobayashi Morito, see Max Ward’s contribution to this volume.

References Asano, A. 1941. ‘Tenkō ni tsuite o yomu’ (Reading ‘On Tenkō’), in Hayashi, F. Tenkō ni tsuite (On tenkō), Yokohama: Sōfūkai, 82. Barshay, A. (2007) The Social Sciences in Modern Japan: The Marxian and Modernist Traditions, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Calichman, R. (2008) Overcoming Modernity: Cultural Identity in Wartime Japan, New York: Columbia University Press. Doak, K. M. (1994) Dreams of Difference: The Japan Romantic School and the Crisis of Modernity, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Duus, P. (1988) ‘Socialism, Liberalism and Marxism: 1901–1931’, in Duus, P. (ed.) The Cambridge History of Japan, vol.6: The Twentieth Century, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 654–710. Foucault, M. (1988) Technologies of the Self: A Seminar with Michel Foucault, Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press.

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Fowler, E. (1988) The Rhetoric of Confession, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Fujita, S. (1959) ‘Showa 8-nen o chūshin to suru tenkō no jōkyō’ (The Circumstances of Tenkō Centring on 1933), in Shisō no kagaku kenkyūkai (ed.) Tenkō: kyōdō kenkyū (Collective Research: Tenkō), vol. I, Tokyo: Heibonsha, 33–65. Fukada, K., Hirotsu, K. & Yokomitsu, R. (1968 [1933]) ‘Bungei fukkō zadankai’ (A Roundtable Discussion on the Cultural Revival), in Muramatsu, T. (ed.) Shōwa hihyō taikei (Anthology of Showa Critique), vol. I, Tokyo: Banchō shobō, 468–91. Genette, G. (1980) Narrative Discourse: An Essay on Method, Levin, J. E., trans., Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Gotō, M. (1996) ‘Takami Jun no tenkō to sensō (Takami Jun’s Tenkō and the War), in Nihon bungaku shiyō 54, 59–67. Hall, R. K. (ed.) (1949) Kokutai no hongi: Cardinal Principles of Our National Polity, Gauntlett, J., trans., Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Harootunian, H. D. (2002) Overcome by Modernity: History, Culture and Community in Interwar Japan, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Hayashi, F. (1969 [1941]) ‘Tenkō ni tsuite’ (On Tenkō), in Hayashi Fusao chosakushū (The Works of Hayashi Fusao), vol. III, Tokyo: Tsubasa shoin, 377–414. Hayter, I. (2010) ‘In the Flesh: The Historical Unconscious of Ishikawa Jun’s Fugen’, in Cornyetz, N. & Vincent, J. K. (eds.) Perversion in Modern Japan: Psychoanalysis, Literature, Culture, London: Routledge, 201–20. Hayter, I. (2017) ‘Figures of the Visual: Japanese Modernism, Technology, Vitalism’, in positions: asia critique 25: 2, 299–322. Hijiya-Kirschnereit, I. (1996) Rituals of Self-Revelation: Shishōsetsu as Literary Genre and SocioCultural Phenomenon, Cambridge, MA: Council on East Asian Studies, Harvard University. Hirano, K. (1949) ‘Kaisetsu’ (Commentary), in Takami, J. Kokyū wasureubeki (Should Auld Acquaintance Be Forgot), Tokyo: Rokkō shuppansha, 333–43. Hirano, K. (1963) Shōwa bungakushi (A History of Shōwa Literature), Tokyo: Chikuma shobō. Honda, S. (1957) Tenkō bungakuron (A Study of Tenkō Literature), Tokyo: Miraisha. Honda, S. (1970) ‘Kaisetsu’ (Commentary), in Takami, J. Takami Jun zenshū (The Complete Works of Takami Jun), vol. I, Tokyo: Keisō shobō, 401–24. Isogai, H. (1966) ‘Kokyū wasureubeki’ (Should Auld Acquaintance Be Forgot), in Nihon kindai bungaku 4, 38–50. Iwakura, M. (1941) ‘Arigataki kasho’ (A Moving Passage), in Hayashi, F. Tenkō ni tsuite (On tenkō), Yokohama: Sōfūkai, 76–7. Iwamoto, Y. (1974) ‘Aspects of the Proletarian Literature Movement in Japan’, in Harootunian, H. & Silberman, B. (eds.) Japan in Crisis: Essays on the Taisho Democracy, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 156–82. Jameson, F. (1979) Fables of Aggression: Wyndham Lewis, the Modernist as Fascist, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Kaplan, A. Y. (1986) Reproductions of Banality: Fascism, Literature, and French Intellectual Life, Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press. Karatani, K. (1997) ‘Kindai Nihon no hihyō I: Shōwa zenki 1’ (Modern Japanese Critique I: First Part of Showa Period 1), in Karatani, K. (ed.) Kindai Nihon no hihyō I: Shōwa hen, Tokyo: Kōdansha bungei bunko, 13–44. Karatani, K. (2008) ‘Overcoming Modernity’, in Calichman, R. (ed.) Contemporary Japanese Thought, New York: Columbia University Press, 101–18. Kawakami, T.  & Takeuchi, Y. (eds.) (1979) Kindai no chōkoku (Overcoming Modernity), Tokyo: Fuzanbō.

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Kawanishi, M. (2011) Showa modan to tenkō (Showa Modernism and Tenkō), Tokyo: Iwanami shoten. Kawashima, K. C., Schäfer, F., Tosaka, J. & Stolz, R. P. (eds.) (2014) Tosaka Jun: A Critical Reader, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University East Asia Program. Keene, D. (1976) ‘Japanese Literature and Politics in the 1930s’, in Journal of Japanese Studies 2: 2, 225–48. Keene, D. (1998) Dawn to the West: Japanese Literature of the Modern Era, New York: Columbia University Press. Kelly, M. (2013) ‘Foucault, Subjectivity and Technologies of the Self ’, in Falzon, C., O’Leary, T. & Sawicki, J. (eds.) A Companion to Foucault, Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 510–25. Kobayashi, A. (2010) Sei to shite no bungaku: Takami Jun-ron (Literature as Life: A Study of Takami Jun), Tokyo: Kasama shoin. Kobayashi, T. (2013) The Crab Cannery Ship and Other Novels of Struggle, Cipriš, Z., trans., Honolulu: University of Hawaiʽi Press. Komori, Y. (1988) ‘ “Chishikijin” no ronri to rinri’ (The Logics and Ethics of ‘the Intelligentsia’), in Komori, Y., Tōgō, K. & Ishihara, C. (eds.) Toshi to kigō: Shōwa shonendai no bungaku (Signs and the City: Literature in the First Years of Showa), Tokyo: Yūseido, 15–27. Kōno, T. (1997) ‘Shōyō bungakushi (73): Kaiten jidai (jō)’ (A Peripatetic History of Literature: Kaiten Jidai (1), in Kokubungaku 42: 7, 166–9. Laplanche, J. & Pontalis, J. B. (2004) The Language of Psychoanalysis, London: Karnac Books. Maruyama, M. (1961) Nihon no shisō (Japanese Thought), Tokyo: Iwanami shinsho. Minami, H. (1987) ‘Maegaki’ (Preface), in Minami, H.  & Shakai shinri kenkyūjo (eds.) Shōwa bunka: 1925–1945 (Shōwa Culture, 1925–1945), Tokyo: Keisō shobō, i–iv. Mitchell, R. (1976) Thought Control in Prewar Japan, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Murayama, T. (2016) ‘Midnight Sun (Excerpt)’, in Bowen-Struyk, H. & Field, N. (eds.) Oakes, C., trans., For Dignity, Justice, and Revolution: An Anthology of Japanese Proletarian Literature, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 335–64. Najita, T. & Harootunian, H. D. (1988) ‘Japanese Revolt Against the West: Political and Cultural Criticism in the Twentieth Century’, in Duus, P. (ed.) The Cambridge History of Japan, vol. 6: The Twentieth Century, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 711–74. Nakamura, M. (1968 [1935]) ‘Tenkō sakkaron’ (An Essay on Tenkō Writers), in Muramatsu, T. (ed.) Shōwa hihyō taikei (Anthology of Showa Critique), vol. I, Tokyo: Banchō shobō, 314–28. Nakamura, S. (1983) Sengo bungaku no kaisō (Reflections on Postwar Literature), Tokyo: Chikuma shobō. Nakamura, T. (1998) A History of Showa Japan, 1926–1989, Tokyo: University of Tokyo Press. Nakano, S. (1979) Three Works by Nakano Shigeharu: The House in the Village, Five Cups of Sake, the Crest-Painter of Hagi, de Bary, B., trans., Ithaca, NY: Cornell University China – Japan Program. Pincus, L. (1996) Authenticating Culture in Imperial Japan: Kuki Shūzō and the Rise of National Aesthetics, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Shigeto, Y. (2014) ‘Tenkō and Writing: The Case of Nakano Shigeharu’, in positions: asia critique 22: 2, 517–40. Smith, H. (1972) Japan’s First Student Radicals, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Steinhoff, P. G. (1991) Tenkō: Ideology and Societal Integration in Prewar Japan, New York: Garland.

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Suzuki, T. (1996) Narrating the Self: Fictions of Japanese Modernity, Stanford: Stanford University Press. Takami, J. (1970) ‘Kokyū wasureubeki’ (Should Auld Acquaintance Be Forgot), in Takami Jun zenshū (The Complete Works of Takami Jun), vol. I, 7–139. Takami, J. (1971) ‘Wagakuni ni okeru sentan geijutsu undō ni kansuru ichikōsatsu’ (A Consideration of the Avantgarde Art Movements in Our Country), in Takami Jun zenshū (The Complete Works of Takami Jun), vol. XIII, 36–46. Takami, J. (1973) ‘Shojosaku to shussesaku’ (My Maiden Works and the Works That Launched Me), in Takami Jun zenshū (The Complete Works of Takami Jun), vol. XVII, Tokyo: Keisō shobō, 362–5. Torrance, R. (2010) ‘The People’s Library: The Spirit of Prose Literature Versus Fascism’, in Tansman, A. (ed.) The Culture of Japanese Fascism, Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 56–79. Umemoto, M. (2002) Takami Jun kenkyū (Studies on Takami Jun), Tokyo: Izumi shoin. Yoshimi, S. (2002) ‘1930-nendairon no keifu to chihei’ (Genealogies and Horizons of the Theories of the 1930s), in Yoshimi, S. (ed.) 1930-nendai no media to shintai (Media and Body During the 1930s), Tokyo: Seikyūsha, 12–64. Žižek, S. (1989) The Sublime Object of Ideology, London: Verso.

10 CROSSING THE VOID Shimaki Kensaku’s search for meaning in ‘Leprosy’ and ‘Blindness’ Jeff E. Long

Shimaki Kensaku (1903–45) emerged as one of the prominent writers of tenkō bungaku (tenkō literature) in the 1930s. His name is one of the first mentioned when people speak or write about this genre, but there is a twofold irony in this statement. First, Shimaki’s ‘tenkō’ came in 1929, four years before the term came into common use. He had been working in a farmer’s cooperative in Shikoku when the police arrested him in the wake of the March 15 round-up of communists in 1928. While imprisoned at Takamatsu prison, he remained in solitary confinement, and the authorities encouraged Shimaki to make a formal declaration renouncing his ties to the Communist Party and pledging to forgo political activities. Shimaki did this at his trial in 1928, but the court convicted him nonetheless of violating the Peace Preservation Law (chian iji-hō) of 1925 and sentenced him to four more years in prison. The police transferred Shimaki to Osaka prison where he ended up serving three years. With his case of tuberculosis growing steadily worse, the authorities commuted his prison sentence in March 1932. It was not until June 1933 that two leaders of the Japanese Communist Party, Sano Manabu and Nabeyama Sadachika, published the first tenkōsho (tenkō statement) using this specific terminology, tenkō (a political and/or ideological renunciation of the Communist Party and its affiliated organizations and activities) to indicate an ideological change away from communism. Many other political prisoners then followed Sano and Nabeyama’s lead, issuing their own tenkō statements. However, Shimaki had already served his prison sentence, and the authorities had released him by that time. This temporal gap between the historical emergence of the word tenkō and the timing of Shimaki’s experience suggests perhaps a subjective interpretation that led to other writers labelling Shimaki a ‘tenkō writer’; moreover, it begs the question of how we define tenkō literature. We will examine these two questions in the first part of this study of Shimaki, drawing on several critical works from Japanese authors concerning the problem of tenkō, tenkō literature, and Shimaki’s oeuvre.

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The second point to bear in mind is that Shimaki wrote his first collection of short stories, Goku (Prison), in 1934 with virtually no previous experience of writing fiction before that time. Most of the other tenkō writers besides Shimaki had some experience writing fiction before their arrest: indeed, many were former members of the proletarian literature movement such as Nakano Shigeharu, Hayashi Fusao and Aono Suekichi. Donald Keene also mentions Takeda Rintarō, Takami Jun, Kamei Katsuichirō and Murayama Tomoyoshi as other notable tenkō writers (Keene 1984: 846–905). Each of these authors had some experience writing fiction or in the arts before becoming known as tenkō writers, but Shimaki did not have this background as an author. Shimaki (his real name was Asakura Kikuo) was born in the city of Sapporo on the island of Hokkaido. Raised by his mother after his father’s premature death, Shimaki struggled for every bit of education he received during his youth. He twice attempted to establish himself in Tokyo, but, both times, circumstances forced him back home. The first time in 1920, he caught tuberculosis, and the second time, in 1923, he was injured during the Great Kantō Earthquake. In 1925, he entered Tohoku University in Sendai without a higher school degree. But Shimaki became active in the radical student movement and left Sendai the year after to pursue work with the farmer’s cooperative in Kagawa Prefecture in Shikoku. Shimaki formally joined the Japan Communist Party in 1927. Hashikawa Bunzō sums up this period of Shimaki’s life suggesting that ‘what led [Shimaki] to walk down that undeviating road was the abandonment of his studies and his participation in the real socialist movement’ (Hashikawa 1969: 270). Shimaki’s political activities seem to have dominated the years immediately preceding his time in prison, yet two years after his release he was able to publish a set of stories that were well received by such leftist literary critics as Moriyama Kei and Tokunaga Sunao. Why did Shimaki become a writer? How did he write literature? How did he use language in his works, and how did that language reflect the times and the genre of tenkō literature? These questions will frame the second part of this study. Here the analysis of Shimaki’s first two published stories, ‘Rai’ (Leprosy, April 1934) and ‘Mōmoku’ (Blindness, July 1934), drawing on the theory of Mikhail Bakhtin, will help elucidate the interwoven nature of language and social activity.

Problematizing tenkō literature Tenkō, tenkō literature and tenkō writer are terms that seemingly indicate a related phenomenon; yet when they are subjected to scrutiny, they yield a multiplicity of possibilities. Honda Shūgo, the acknowledged expert on tenkō literature in Japan, defines tenkō in three ways: The first kind of tenkō refers to the communist who abandons communism. . . . A second type indicates the rejection of progressive and rational

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thought in general. . . . The final broader sense of tenkō . . . points to the phenomenon of an ideological turnaround (a change of heart). (Honda 1985: 216) Honda suggests that readers today identify tenkō literature solely with the problem of tenkō: tenkō, in this case, being the first type of tenkō. Thus readers expect to find out ‘why communists abandoned their communist beliefs and distanced themselves from the communist party’ (ibid.: 187). In short, the word tenkō, although having other possible meanings, has become synonymous with a specific period, the 1930s; a particular political group, the Japanese Communist Party; a certain process, rejecting Marxism or abandoning political activities that harm the state; and a fixed geographic location, Japan. Nevertheless, Honda argues that this definition of tenkō literature fails to convey the feelings of those who wrote tenkō literature during the 1930s. Drawing on the critical works of Sugiyama Heisuke and Itagaki Naoko, Honda points out that the tenkō writers considered themselves to be carrying on the work of the then defunct proletarian literature movement. These tenkō writers were still Marxist writers essentially, even though they had been forced to disavow political activity related to their beliefs, and yet they showed some ‘flexibility’ when faced with the state suppression of Japanese Marxists and communists (ibid.: 187–8). The literature tenkō writers produced reflected the need at that time to step back for a moment and try to comprehend what was happening to them. Honda asserts that the standard for judging their conduct was the deceased proletarian literature writer, Kobayashi Takiji (ibid.: 192). Kobayashi had chosen death rather than repudiation of his beliefs. As such, he was a martyr to the communist cause, but his death was also a potent example of state power. Honda contends that those who chose to live and renounce their ties with the Communist Party rather than defend them as Kobayashi had done, considered themselves to be tenkōsha (those who committed tenkō). However, what was the significance of the tenkō act for Japanese literature? Fukuda Kiyoto and Yano Kenji answer this question by stressing that ‘literature explores the real way of living. However, the Japanese tenkō of this period was one where the person was forced to change his way of living. To not tenkō meant death, and Kobayashi Takiji was proof of this fact’ (Fukuda  & Yano 1969: 84). Fukuda and Yano thus identify two concepts, coercion and submission, that the tenkō writer group introduced into Japanese literature through the genre of tenkō literature (ibid.: 85). The former Marxist writers, as Fukuda and Yano claim, felt a dual sense of defeat derived from their surrender to state coercion and failure to adhere to Kobayashi Takiji’s example (ibid.: 87). These writers turned to apolitical forms of literature, seeking some means of expressing and coping with their inner turmoil. Shimaki Kensaku, though not a writer beforehand, moved from political activities into literature where for a variety of reasons he made a name for himself as a tenkō writer. A  brief analysis of these reasons will provide a more concrete framework in which to understand better the genre of tenkō literature.

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Shimaki Kensaku and tenkō literature Shimaki, on the one hand, chose to be a tenkō writer; at the same time, however, others labelled him a tenkō writer. One of the most in-depth inquiries into Asakura Kikuo’s decision to become the writer Shimaki Kensaku comes from Kitamura Iwao’s work, Shimaki Kensaku-ron (Kitamura 1994). In this work, Kitamura gives four reasons behind Asakura’s decision: ‘First, he was taken ill [again] in December of 1933. . . . Second, [his first story] received a favourable review by the bundan (the Japanese literary circle). . . . The third was his meeting with Miyai Shin’ichi [after the authorities had released both from prison].  .  .  . Moreover, fourth was the tragedy of 1933’ (Kitamura 1994: 64–71). Shimaki experienced coercion both externally and internally. While in prison, his tuberculosis flared up, and the prison authorities moved him into the isolation ward with the lepers instead of the other tubercular patients. Eventually, his case of tuberculosis grew worse, and the warden commuted his sentence in 1932. Furthermore, empowered by the Peace Preservation Law, which had been amended in 1928 to add the death penalty, the police began an intense, year-long attack on the remnants of the communist and socialist movements. Notable results of their offensive were Kobayashi Takiji’s torture and death in February of 1933, the tenkō statement of Sano and Nabeyama that June and the ‘Investigation of the Communist Movement for Spies Incident’ in December. Kitamura surmises that Shimaki was picked up by the police and tortured during this last incident, causing him extreme physical and mental anguish (ibid.: 72–3). As Honda noted, ‘the greatest cause of tenkō was external coercion’ (Honda 1985: 198). Facing the overwhelming power of the state and stricken with a potent illness, Shimaki wavered in his beliefs. Kitamura argues convincingly that the ‘three pillars’ supporting Shimaki: ‘(1) his mother Matsu’s life of poverty, (2) the discrimination he felt as a youth, and (3) his close and trusting relationship with Miyai Shin’ichi’ were beginning to crumble during his time in prison (Kitamura 1994: 74). Shimaki still believed he could actively contribute to the communist movement, Kitamura suggests. However, when Shimaki and Miyai renewed their relationship after seven years apart, Shimaki came away from the meeting beset with self-doubt, confusion and the pangs of a guilty conscience. Realizing that he could not live up to the example Miyai set as a hitenkōsha (a person who does not commit tenkō), Shimaki reached the stage of what Patricia Steinhoff has termed a ‘spiritual (shūkyōteki) tenkō’ (Steinhoff 1991: 129–30).1 Miyai and Shimaki met while working at the farmer’s cooperative in Shikoku. Miyai was three years older than Shimaki and sponsored the latter’s membership in the Communist Party. In Kitamura’s words, ‘Miyai was like a god to Shimaki’ and, if Kobayashi Takiji’s life was the measuring stick for proletarian literature writers, Miyai represented a personal, tangible example of how a communist should live his life for Shimaki (Kitamura 1994: 48). The fact that Shimaki had renounced his ties with the Communist Party at his trial in 1929 weighed heavily on his mind while in prison, but with the success of his first couple of stories, Shimaki began to feel better about his situation. It was at this point in October 1934 that Miyai, just

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released from Osaka prison, arrived in Tokyo to discuss the possibilities of returning to the Party with Shimaki. Kitamura describes the shock Shimaki felt when he realized that Miyai intended to resume his political activities: Miyai, who had retained his firm belief in the party and refused to tenkō, felt something vaguely different in the Shimaki who had still not settled on his course as a writer. Finally, Shimaki told Miyai that ‘he already had cut his ties to the party’. As you can imagine, that meeting between the two of them left deep scars on both of them. . . . Once again, Shimaki was deeply impressed by Miyai’s determination to serve the Party and, at the same time, Shimaki was hounded by feelings of inferiority a second time. (ibid.: 68–9) Succumbing to his illness, constrained by the state and unable to live up to Miyai’s example, Shimaki committed, what Shinpo Yuji calls, a ‘vertical tenkō’ (suichoku tenkō) (Shinpo 1990: 112). In other words, Shimaki did not attempt to replace Marxism with ‘Japanism’ (Nipponshugi) or any other -ism. He did not betray his feelings for the proletarian and farmers’ movements and attempted through his literary works to help their cause in any way he could. Nevertheless, Shimaki found that, as time went by, he could no longer support the Communist Party leadership or its doctrine. Shinpo argues that Shimaki was ‘on a search for god’ and that what many have referred to as Shimaki’s ‘second tenkō’ in 1937 was actually a ‘tenkō to god’ (ibid.: 113). Fukuda and Yano relate Shimaki’s ‘second tenkō’ to his literature: ‘Shimaki Kensaku’s literature marked the end of his political (seijiteki) tenkō, and he used literature as a tool to grope impatiently for a “guiding principle” (daiichigi) to live by’ (Fukuda and Yano 1969: 89). Inasmuch as he took up literature as a means to escape the terrible external and internal pressures oppressing him, Shimaki chose to be a tenkō writer. Still, as Honda Shūgo writes, ‘Shimaki Kensaku often employed heroes who were not writers in his works. Nevertheless, I believe that the readers and critics, following the traditional Japanese style of interpreting a novel, associated the characters in the novel to the author himself as they read’ (Honda 1985: 191). Shimaki’s works dealt with the problem of tenkō at a time when tenkō was a major concern to many readers; thus, he became known as a tenkō writer even though the characters in his stories were often hitenkōsha. By Honda’s definition, Shimaki was a tenkō writer, but he did not write tenkō literature as evidenced in his first published stories, ‘Leprosy’ and ‘Blindness’ (ibid.: 201).

Shimaki’s search for meaning through literature Shimaki completed ‘Leprosy’ in January of 1934 and gave it to a friend, Yonemura Masaichi, to read. Yonemura took the story to the editors of Bungaku hyōron, and they published it in their April issue. The main character of the story is Ōta Jirō, a communist who was active in the farmer’s cooperative in Shikoku before his

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arrest. Ōta is serving a five-year sentence in solitary confinement when his illness, tuberculosis, flares up. He is moved to the isolation wing and placed with the lepers instead of the other tubercular patients because of the nature of his crime. While in the isolation wing, Ōta is traumatized more by his surroundings, begins to hallucinate and shows signs of a nervous breakdown. At this point, a new prisoner arrives in his cellblock; the prisoner is Okada Ryōzō, a once highly placed member of the Communist Party who has since contracted Hansen’s disease. Okada remains firm in his beliefs and encourages Ōta to do the same. However, Ōta, his physical and mental condition deteriorating rapidly, resigns himself to the fact that he will never achieve the resolve and determination to sustain his beliefs like Okada. The story ends with Ōta being carried out of the prison, his sentence commuted. Nevertheless, the question of Ōta’s tenkō persists with no clear resolution. After a reading of ‘Leprosy’, the alienating discourse in the short story, together with Shimaki’s incorporation of many different points of view into the narrative, leaves a lasting impression of self-exploration. Fukuda and Yano assert that literature, for Shimaki, was a vehicle in which he searched for a larger purpose in life (Fukuda & Yano 1969: 89–90). When he wrote, Shimaki created a fictive space in which he could probe the tenkō theme socially and linguistically. The question, then, is how he went about his task. One type of fictional discourse that the critic Mikhail Bakhtin introduces in The Dialogic Imagination works especially well to explain the language in ‘Leprosy’. Bakhtin writes: Heteroglossia, once incorporated into the novel (whatever the forms for its incorporation), is another’s speech in another’s language, serving to express authorial intentions but in a refracted way. Such speech constitutes a special type of double-voiced discourse. It serves two speakers at the same time and expresses simultaneously two different intentions: the direct intention of the character who is speaking, and the refracted intention of the author. (Bakhtin 1981: 324, Bakhtin’s italics) The term ‘heteroglossia’, as defined by historian Dominick LaCapra, ‘refers to the objective condition of language marked by a plurality of perspectives and the value-laden, ideological practices that are in challenging contact with one another’ (LaCapra 1983: 312). Writer and critic David Lodge defines doubly oriented or doubly voiced speech as ‘all speech which not only refers to something in the world but also refers to another speech act by another addresser’ (Lodge 1990: 59). In this piece, we define double-voiced discourse as setting the self of this world in relation to the other existing in the world of literature. The self/other differentiation acts to assert the fragmented, multiple perspectives that characterize both, and it allows the self and the other to engage in a mutually beneficial dialogue. The relationship is an active, dynamic one that is always in a state of flux moving from one form to another. In ‘Leprosy’, this study considers the double-voiced discourse to revolve around the tension between Shimaki, Ōta and the problem of tenkō.

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Throughout ‘Leprosy’, the theme of alienation works its way into the narrative mode. The character for sickness (byō) which usually accompanies the character for leprosy (rai) in the compound is dropped in the title. Ōta is spatially alienated when the prison officials transfer him ‘from the prison in a sleepy little town along the Inland Sea’ to the ‘newly built prison on a high hill close to a major city’ (Shimaki 1963b: 191).2 When he becomes ill, Ōta is moved to the isolation ward. He is physically alienated by being confined with the lepers instead of with the other tubercular patients, and psychologically alienated by the disgust of the guards and healthy inmates for the weak and sick prisoners. Ōta is also temporally alienated in the prison. Little news reaches the prisoners, in particular those in the isolation ward. As Okada tells Ōta: ‘This is a dead world, while the outside is a living, growing world’ (ibid.: 210). Ōta is alienated and downtrodden in ‘Leprosy’ by an authorial voice that speaks through space and time. The irony is that the authorial voice belongs to Shimaki who, in torturing Ōta, indirectly punishes himself. Shimaki’s intention is to ask how Ōta can continue to live when faced with complete alienation. Shimaki’s question is refracted through the speech of other characters in the story and in the many metaphors referring to Ōta’s illness and the power of his illness and the state over him. The metaphor of blinding light represents the power of the state in an early passage: ‘Unconsciously [Ōta] let out a deep sigh and looked up at the faraway sky; the little square of it visible through the iron bars of his window overflowed with sunlight like white flames, so bright his weakened eyes could hardly bear it’ (ibid.: 192). Still, Ōta is not simply a mouthpiece for Shimaki. Ōta continues his daily routine. He is overwhelmed by the horror of the actions and appearance of the other prisoners around him. He laughs, cries and experiences mental anxiety. In other words, Ōta overcomes the extraordinary circumstances surrounding and threatening to overpower him by expressing ordinary human feelings and attempting to cope with prison life and his illness as best he can. The dialogue between Shimaki and Ōta is a struggle for meaning that is universal, but the language of the text gives ‘Leprosy’ its specificity. In ‘Leprosy,’ Shimaki is searching for a new perspective, a new language through which he will be able to explore the problem of tenkō. Ogasawara Masaru suggests that, even though Shimaki wrote ‘Leprosy’ from a subjective point of view, that of a leper, he retreated to the genres of social realism and shishōsetsu (autobiographic fiction) realism for his method of writing fiction (Ogasawara 1965: 52). Ogasawara calls on Okubo Tsuneo’s work to illustrate the make-up of Shimaki’s fiction more fully: As will be seen later, in contrast to the well-known tenkō shōsetsu (tenkō novels) of Murayama Tomoyoshi, Byakuya (White Night), and Nakano Shigeharu, ‘Mura no ie’ (The house in the village), that depended on the shishōsetsu method, Shimaki’s ‘subjective method’ of fictionalization is clearly different. Shimaki’s originality was highly praised for acknowledging tenkō as a radical phenomenon in the Japan of the 1930s, overcoming the shishōsetsu

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method of theorizing subjective experience, and capturing the history of movements that surrounded the tenkō era. . . . . . The originality of Shimaki Kensaku was in the way he unconsciously and vividly could describe his own tenkō experience in such an objectified and universal fashion. (Ogasawara 1965: 53, citing Okubo Tsuneo 1960: 3 ‘Shimaki Kensaku nōto, 1–3’, Bungakusha [August–October], 3) The combination of techniques from the shishōsetsu fiction and the proletarian literature movement gave ‘Leprosy’ its form, but as Hashikawa Bunzō noted, the tragic quality of the prose in ‘Leprosy’ is based on the tragic lives of the tanka poets who inspired Shimaki (Hashikawa 1969: 267).3 In ‘Leprosy’, Ōta is startled easily by the actions and appearance of others around his cell, by the physical and mental conditions of his illness and depression and finally by Okada’s profound faith in the party line. Ōta is out of step with the times and with others around him. Lost and alienated, Ōta should choose between tenkō and hi-tenkō, Japan or the Communist Party, but as the story ends, Ōta does not choose between the two. He resigns himself to his fate whatever that may be, and the prison orderlies carry him out of prison on a stretcher, his sentence commuted by the warden. Ōta’s perspective on life in a Japanese prison is a highly subjective one, and he vividly depicts his surroundings with brutal realism. The irony of Ōta being lost in the times of 1930s Japan in which he is still physically engaged mirrors the irony of Shimaki using the language of two genres of Japanese literature that have been discarded to create a new genre, tenkō literature. Shimaki and Ōta represent the self and the other of the double-voiced discourse in ‘Leprosy’, but thus far we have examined them principally as two different voices straddling the text in opposition to each other. As Michael Holquist has observed in his critical work on Bakhtinian theory: ‘Dialogue is a manifold phenomenon. . . . [It] is composed of an utterance, a reply, and a relation between the two. It is the relation that is most important of the three, for without it the other two would have no meaning’ (Holquist 1990: 38). If we separate Shimaki and Ōta, consigning Shimaki to the real world of society and Ōta to the fictional world of literature, we deny the simultaneity of their existence and the meaning of their struggle. The relation that unifies their discourse is the problem of tenkō. Like two men facing each other, one of Bakhtin’s favourite examples, Shimaki and Ōta have perspectives enabling each to see things the other cannot. If Shimaki sees many reasons for committing tenkō, Ōta shows Shimaki those reasons for not recanting. Both men are deeply affected by the other’s point of view, and neither is left unscathed by the relationship. A poignant passage in ‘Leprosy’ is an extended meditation on this point: Whether it was their fate to die in prison from sickness or at the gallows, [Ōta] was caught up in a strange intoxication that was not the excitement he had felt talking with his comrades long ago, nor was it rebellion or the

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confused longing to live on no matter what. It was simply a deep feeling of resignation that pervaded his whole being. Where this feeling came from, even Ōta did not know. Ōta also frequently saw Okada’s face in his dreams during this time. Perhaps, it was because he realized how much he had learned from Okada and how moved he had been by him in a way difficult to express in words. (Shimaki 1963b: 213) Most critics interpret the relationship between Ōta and Okada referentially to Shimaki and Miyai. However, from the Bakhtinian perspective, Okada’s speech reflects Shimaki’s intention to push Ōta to the limit. Ōta realizes that he cannot achieve Okada’s conviction, but neither does he commit tenkō. As a result, both Shimaki and Ōta are stuck in a transitional phase where they are faced with the problem of tenkō, enduring the torment of the external pressure to yield and the internal struggle to survive. Like an object set between Shimaki and Ōta, the question of tenkō ties them together in a world existing simultaneously outside of, and inside, their respective worldviews. In the end, Shimaki’s search for meaning in ‘Leprosy’ is always related to his search for the appropriate daiichigi in life by contemplating the problem of tenkō.

Exploring the meaning of conviction in ‘Blindness’ In his next short story, ‘Blindness’, Shimaki removes the intermediary ‘Ōta’ figure from the narrative, collapsing the space between himself as author and his hitenkōsha hero, Koga Ryōkichi. As critic Uchikura Hisatsugu has noted in his study of ‘Leprosy’ and ‘Blindness’, Shimaki in his second short story moved from describing the physical conditions of prison life to examining the interiority of the hitenkōsha’s conviction and dedication to Marxism (Uchikura 1998: 27). Still, Uchikura draws on Ogasawara’s analysis to argue that this study of Koga was more than a substitute examination of Okada’s motivation that was missing in ‘Leprosy’. Uchikura stresses that Shimaki depicts Koga as the ideal hitenkōsha figure to fulfil the desire of Ōta to become the hitenkōsha that he should have been, that he yearned to be. Thus Uchikura asserts that not only should ‘Blindness’ be read as a continuation of ‘Leprosy’ but also that it should be read as Shimaki’s exploration of the ‘thought’ (shisō) that sustained hitenkōsha like Koga (Uchikura 1998: 27; here, Uchikura draws on Ogasawara’s analysis in Ogasawara 1965: 44–55). From this perspective, Shimaki attempts to rebuild his sense of conviction by grounding it in the physical fortitude of Okada from ‘Leprosy’ and in the mental and spiritual resilience of Koga in ‘Blindness’. Shimaki begins ‘Blindness’ by describing a day in the life of Koga following his loss of sight while in prison. Koga’s boredom and depression are palpable in this section as he describes pacing back and forth across his cell and the sounds of an autumn day both within the prison and outside his cell window that sustain him. A meeting with his lawyer about the trial date for the court appeal of his prison

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sentence sends Koga deep into his own thoughts. In particular, he rehashes the incident three years ago that spring when the police had arrested him for his participation in the efforts to restructure the local Communist Party organization. He is a devoted communist then and now, but the cruel circumstances of his present condition constantly feed an emotional challenge to his commitment that Koga must confront and snuff out mentally each day, he relates (Shimaki 1963a: 214–9).4 Next, Koga recounts that fatal bath time where he contracted the disease that destroyed his eyesight and left him devastated. He explains in detail the filthiness of the prison bathhouse and the agony of the incident. Prison orderlies had to restrain him for a month before he returned to his cell where he had to learn how to acclimate to the darkness around him. Koga worries about going insane and at times prays for the sweet physical and emotional release of suicide and death, but over the course of a year, he learns to cope with this mental and physical distress. Ultimately, Koga comes to realize that there is no one or no group upon whom to depend except himself. He is a ‘lost soldier’ (haihei), abandoned and cut off from society and the Party. Still, that is no reason to recant his belief in communism, Koga states, as he reflects on his personal – but certainly not religious – decision to allow nature to run its course and live the life of a hermit if need be (ibid.: 219–26). Feeling good about internally restoring a sense of conviction and determination to his life, Koga attends the court date with his lawyer who tells him that his elderly mother is in the audience; this unsettles and troubles Koga once again. In the following section of the story, Koga then explicates those distressing memories of the times that his mother and his ex-wife visited him in prison. He had refused to meet his mother since losing his sight but narrates the story of the autumn when he had last parted from his mother four years ago. Koga tells the emotion-laden account in sentimental terms, ending with a description of her fragile appearance when she came to see him in jail after his first arrest. Tersely, Koga then turns to his much less pleasant memories of his ex-wife’s visit before his upcoming appeal court date. Her name is Nagai Misako, and she was not only his wife but also a ‘comrade’. Misako has come to present Koga with a ‘Dear Ryōkichi’ letter asking for a divorce since she has fallen in love with comrade Uemura and desires to end their relationship. So much for Koga imagining that Misako would remain faithful to him while he languishes in prison! Now he must face the fact that he is truly on his own. This realization shifted Koga’s memories to the following February court hearing when the judge gave Koga the opportunity to declare his tenkō in consideration of the tragedy that had befallen him (ibid.: 226–30). Koga then moves the narrative forward to the present day, ten months after the hearing at the appeals court and reveals his response to the judge that day. However, he prefaces his answer by detailing the visits by the prison chaplain and then the warden of the prison who, in progressively coaxing terms, attempt to convince him to declare his tenkō. These visits only wipe out any remaining doubt about his decision, Koga declares, and then Koga explains the process through which he overcame the initial misgivings he had harboured about his decision. He also recounts the repeated falls into nihilism that he experienced during this

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process and that only ‘time’ (toki) had taught him how to handle this progression of emotional reactions to his decision and to regain his composure each time. What taught him this sense of restraint, Koga asks? Was it accepting that he was just a cog in the movement of history, or coming to grips with being a ‘lost soldier’ to the cause? There was no particular trick to achieving this sense of resolve, Koga divulges: When all is said and done, believing that the road you have followed up to this moment is the correct one, and trusting that that path will be victorious eventually . . . only that confidence in your chosen path will give one the ability to overcome the darkness that fate presents. Even while suffering through a sense of nihilism gnawing away at his resolve in the blackness of solitary confinement, Koga’s strength, which allowed him to recover, still lays in that determination [to follow his chosen path]. Only when the time comes that you have made that sense of resolution your own, even more so than now, a budding sense of willpower to live will grow strong inside. You will become a man who lives without losing hope, who thinks about the future, and who dreams, even in the face of death. In his head, Koga imagines being that kind of man. (ibid.: 231–2) With this in mind, Koga concludes his story by requesting in a letter that his lawyer communicate his answer to the judge that he will not tenkō, the same answer he gave the court at the end of his first trial (ibid.: 230–2). Returning to our Bakhtinian viewpoint on Shimaki’s writing, here Shimaki switches the relationship between himself and Koga to the determination of the hitenkōsha. It is Koga’s sense of conviction that Shimaki intends to challenge in this short story and, in the double-voice discourse Shimaki introduces to this story, he endeavours to discover what accounts for Koga’s and thus for other hitenkōsha’s ability to resist the authorities. Swirling in the blackness together, Shimaki places as many obstacles as possible in Koga’s way. First is Koga’s struggles with the mental toil of the tedium of prison life; then Shimaki introduces the lack of hygiene in the public bathing area and the generally poor treatment of the thought criminals while incarcerated. Next, Shimaki presents the physical trial of disease that destroys Koga’s sight and sends him into the emotional depths of nothingness and contemplation of suicide. Finally, Shimaki details the typical ploy that police officials used to entice the thought criminal to tenkō: playing on the victim’s sentimental relationships to family, kin and spouse. In the concluding section of the story, both the prison chaplain and the prison warden ask Koga if they can invite his mother to call on him. Of course, the chaplain and warden’s not-so-ulterior motive is to allow the ties that bind Koga and his mother to melt Koga’s resolve and lead him to declare his tenkō from communism (see Steinhoff 1991: 110–6, for her discussion of the police’s use of personal relationships to induce tenkō). Shimaki even confronts Koga with the loss of his wife to another comrade and her request for a divorce!

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Still, while Koga admits that it is a constant battle, he upholds and affirms his hitenkō declaration to the courts in the concluding paragraph of the short story. Cut off from society and from the organizational ties of the Communist Party as well, Shimaki continues to press Koga to explain how he maintains his almost inhuman yet courageous sense of conviction. Through the course of Koga’s deliberation, he confesses that he is an unabashed communist, that he believes in himself and this principle, and that this is his path in life. He notes that he does not mean this statement in a religious (shūkyōteki) fashion, so we should not take this as a statement of faith (Shimaki 1963a: 225). However, he is prepared to follow this path no matter where it leads him. Ultimately, in his final declaration, Koga reiterates his belief in this path and that this sense of resolution will help him develop a stronger will (iyoku) to live for the future, even while imprisoned (ibid.: 231–2). As Uchikura observes, Tokunaga Sunao and other former proletarian writers thought that Shimaki included too much subjective perspective in ‘Blindness’, instead of employing the objective historical materialism representing the Marxist viewpoint to buoy Koga while enduring his prison stay (Uchikura 1998: 29). Thus, instead of highlighting the objective qualities of Marxist thought that should have bolstered Koga, these writers were unhappy with Shimaki’s conclusion that it was Koga’s personal willpower to live by his internal principles that nourished his intent to remain a hitenkōsha in the short story. As such, in pushing Koga to reveal his source of mental, emotional and physical strength, Shimaki also confirms his search for an appropriate daiichigi in life. It lies in following his course in life, which at this point was that of a tenkōsha. In this way, Shimaki delineates Koga as a hitenkōsha hero for others to appreciate his resilient and gallant sense of conviction grounded in what amounts to Koga’s faith in his ‘path’ moving forward, despite his protestations to the contrary. Still in presenting Koga as determined and persevering, the relation between Koga and Shimaki is a polar opposite one in perspective and discourse. As a result, whereas Koga’s sense of resolve here is poetic and heroic, that of the hitenkōsha, Shimaki from the other side can only admire Koga from a distance as a tenkōsha attempting to find his way back into Japanese society. Thus, as Bakhtin has noted: If the art of poetry . . . gives rise to the conception of a purely poetic, extrahistorical language, a language of the gods – then it must be said that the art of prose is close to a conception of languages as historically concrete and living things. The prose art presumes a deliberate feeling for the historical and social concreteness of living discourse, as well as its relativity, a feeling for its participation in historical becoming and in social struggle; it deals with discourse that is still warm from that struggle and hostility, as yet unresolved and still fraught with hostile intentions and accents; prose art finds discourse in this state and subjects it to the dynamic unity of its own style. (Bakhtin 1981: 331)

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Koga’s achievement is timeless and monumental, and ‘Blindness’ is a poem and ode to the hitenkōsha, while Shimaki’s search for meaning is incremental and mundane, an attempt to adjust and reintegrate into everyday Japanese life. Still, in ‘Blindness’, what Koga does teach Shimaki is the difficulty and yet the necessity of making that path his own in order to restore a sense of conviction to his life as a tenkōsha living in the Japan of the 1930s.

Notes 1 In her work, Steinhoff changed the English translation of shūkyōteki tenkō from its more literal meaning, ‘religious tenkō’, to ‘spiritual tenkō’ in order to ‘encompass the search for meaning in nationalistic and philosophic as well as religious frames of reference’. In addition to the spiritual tenkō, Steinhoff also discusses the ‘common-man’ tenkō (shiminteki) and the ‘political’ tenkō (seijiteki), terms that she has borrowed from the main Welfare and Rehabilitation Organization that worked with the tenkōsha (Teikoku kōshin-kai). 2 Originally published as Shimaki Kensaku (1963b [1934]) ‘Rai,’ Bungaku hyōron (April): 130–70. 3 Shimaki took his pen name from the famed Meiji tanka poet, Shimaki Akahiko (1876– 1926), and from Tokitō Kensaku, the hero of Shiga Naoya’s novel An’ya kōro (A Dark Night’s Passing, serialized in the journal Kaizō from 1921 to 1937). 4 Originally published as Shimaki Kensaku (1963a [1934]) ‘Mōmoku’, Chūō kōron 49:8 (July): 1–32.

References Bakhtin, M. M. (1981) The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays, Emerson, C. & Holquist, M., eds. & trans., Austin: University of Texas Press. Fukuda, Kiyoto & Yano, Kenji (1969) Shimaki Kensaku: Hito to sakuhin (Shimaki Kensaku: The Man and His Works), vol. 33, Tokyo: Shimizu shoin. Hashikawa, Bunzō (1969) ‘Shimaki Kensaku-den’ (A Biography of Shimaki Kensaku), in Hideo, Kobayashi, Fusao, Hayashi & Kensaku, A. Shimaki (eds.) Gendai Nihon Bungakukan, vol. 28, Tokyo: Bungei shunju, 264–79. Holquist, Michael (1990) Dialogism: Bakhtin and His World. New Accents, Hawkes, T., ed., New York: Routledge. Honda, Shūgo (1985) Tenkō bungaku-ron (A Study of tenkō Literature), 3rd ed., Tokyo: Miraisha. Keene, Donald (1984) ‘Tenkō Literature: The Writings of Ex-Communists’, in Dawn to the West: Japanese Literature of the Modern Era, vol. 1: Fiction, New York: Henry Holt & Co, 846–905. Kitamura, Iwao (1994) Shimaki Kensaku-ron (A Study of Shimaki Kensaku), Tokyo: Kindai bungeisha. LaCapra, Dominick (1983) ‘Bakhtin, Marxism, and the Carnivalesque’, in Rethinking Intellectual History: Texts, Contexts, Language, Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 290–324. Lodge, David (1990) After Bakhtin: Essays on Fiction and Criticism, New York: Routledge. Ogasawara, Masaru (1965) Shimaki Kensaku, Tokyo: Meiji shoin. Okubo, Tsuneo (1960) ‘Shimaki Kensaku nōto’ (Notes on Shimaki Kensaku), in Bungakusha (August–October), 1–3. Shimaki, Kensaku (1963a [1934]) ‘Mōmoku’ (Blindness), in Sei, Itō (ed.) Nihon Gendai bungaku zenshū, vol. 80, Takeda Rintarō, Shimaki Kensaku-shū (Anthology of Modern Japanese Literature), Tokyo: Kodansha, 214–32.

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Shimaki, Kensaku (1963b [1934]) ‘Rai’ (Leprosy), in Sei, Itō (ed.) Nihon Gendai Bungaku Zenshū, vol. 80, Takeda Rintarō, Shimaki Kensaku-shū, Tokyo: Kodansha, 191–214. Shinpo, Yuji (1990) Shimaki Kensaku: Gi ni uekawaku mono (Shimaki Kensaku: Thirsting for Meaning), Shirizu minkan Nihon gakusha  & Shunsuke, T., eds., vol. 26, Tokyo: Riburopoto. Steinhoff, Patricia (1991) Tenkō: Ideology and Societal Integration in Prewar Japan, Harvard Studies in Sociology, New York: Garland Publishing. Uchikura, Hisatsugu (1998) ‘Shimaki Kensaku Goku ni okeru tenkō: “Rai”, “Mōmoku” o chūshin ni’ (Shimaki Kensaku’s Prison Tenkō: Focussing on “Leprosy” and “Blindness”), in Jinbun Ronkyū 48: 3 (December), 18–33.

11 THE TENKŌ OF ANARCHIST POETS Agrarian and cinematic latencies Murata Hirokazu Translated by Irena Hayter and Toby Walters

Introduction: the absence of the masses The socialist Kōtoku Shūsui (1871–1911) travelled to the United States at the end of 1905; on 18 April the following year, he experienced the Great San Francisco Earthquake. In the decimated and chaotic city, Kōtoku was struck by how the people worked together to help one another. Kropotkin’s concept of ‘mutual aid’ was alive before his very eyes. Kōtoku was convinced that anarchism was not a fantasy but a revolutionary vision for a feasible reality. He returned to Japan and publicly declared his conversion to anarchism (Kōtoku 1907). Japan’s anarchist movement began after Kōtoku’s return. Like the Western anarchist thinkers whose ideas they embraced, the Japanese anarchists rejected all state authority and the system of universal suffrage. They did not recognize parliamentary representation; rather, they adopted direct action and the direct agitation of the workers and the masses (taishū) as the means to precipitate revolution. However, as of 1910, Japan had few big factories and almost no organized workers. The ‘movement’ established by Kōtoku to bring about anarchist society focused mostly on creating networks of like-minded individuals and propaganda activities through journals and pamphlets. Following on from Kōtoku Shūsui, Ōsugi Sakae (1885–1923) and Ishikawa Sanshirō (1876–1956) came to the fore as influential anarchist thinkers and activists. However, like Kōtoku, they lacked support from the masses. Rather than working to gain mass support, the young activists around Kōtoku Shūsui planned to enlighten the people by assassinating the emperor. Their highly amateurish plot was detected by the police following the test explosion of a small bomb which they had built. The police and the courts used this to fabricate a massive assassination plot known as the High Treason Incident. As a result of this, twelve dissidents, including Kōtoku Shūsui and the anarcho-feminist Kanno Sugako (1881–1911),

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were sentenced to death by hanging in 1911, and ‘the movement’ was dealt a devastating blow. The following few years were known as the winter years of the Japanese socialist movement. The absence of the proletarian masses was the greatest weakness of the Japanese anarchist movement. Ishikawa Sanshirō, who fled to Europe after Kōtoku Shūsui’s execution, later arrived at the idea that anarchism was not inconsistent with the emperor system, but this conclusion too was closely related to the problem of the absent masses. Ōsugi Sakae stayed in Japan and, during the Taisho era (1912–26), continued to work towards strengthening the anarchist movement. He was the single most influential anarchist in Japan. During his periods of incarceration, he learned languages and translated a number of anarchist texts, including Kropotkin’s Mutual Aid. He was also active as a literary critic and was admired by his peers for his charisma. Ōsugi and his associates established the Labour Movement Company (Rōdō undōsha), which published Rōdō shinbun. He also set up an anarchist group, the so-called North Wind Society, seeking to establish connections with the workers. Japanese capitalism developed rapidly during World War I, and, correspondingly, labour unions began to spring up one after another. In that way, finally, anarchism came to receive wide support at this time. For this very reason, on 16 September 1923, immediately after the Great Kantō earthquake, Ōsugi Sakae was seized by the military police and killed, along with his wife Itō Noe (1895–1923) and nephew Tachibana Munekazu (1917–23). This was one of the main factors in the loss of influence and power of the Japanese anarchist movement. Two young Japanese anarchist poets, Hagiwara Kyōjirō (1899–1938) and Okamoto Jun (1901–78), also experienced the Great Kantō Earthquake. Hagiwara was from Gunma Prefecture, and Okamoto was born in Saitama Prefecture and raised in Kyoto. They were friends who together published a small poetry journal called Aka to kuro until just before the earthquake. The aftermath of the disaster saw a lot of vigilante violence against Korean immigrants. On one occasion, Hagiwara tried to stop a group of people from throwing stones at some Koreans, but, in doing so, he was targeted himself. Okamoto, a known socialist, was summoned before a vigilante group known as Busō shimin (Armed Citizens). However, Okamoto’s neighbours in his tenement house came to his defence, insisting that he was not a dangerous individual and thereby ensuring his safety. The people who saved Okamoto were probably nameless members of the masses. At the same time, however, it was these same masses who endangered the lives of these two men. There was still a gulf separating the nameless anarchists from the masses.

A dispersed network The relationship between anarchism and literature was strengthened by the journal Kindai shisō, launched by Ōsugi Sakae and Arahata Kanson (1887–1981) in 1912. The Japanese government suppressed all political and popular publications issued by the socialists who had survived the High Treason Incident. However, the views

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of Ōsugi and his associates were tolerated, provided that they refrained from political discourse. They utilized literature to advance their cause, and so a small current that would emerge as the new literary field known as proletarian literature was born. This current derived from the movements for labour literature (rōdō bungaku) and popular arts (minshū geijutsu) of the World War I era and was close to the proletarian literary periodical, Tane maku hito, first published in 1921. At that time, proletarian literature offered a mixture of anarchism and Marxism. By 1922, the Japanese labour movement had seen a schism between anarchists and Marxists, but, in the world of literature, awareness of a united front persisted even after the earthquake. In November 1926, however, young Marxists aligned with Fukumotoism in effect ousted the non-Marxists from the Japan Proletarian Literature Federation and changed the organization to the Japan Proletarian Arts Federation (later the All Japan Proletarian Arts Federation, known by its Esperanto acronym NAPF).1 For the first time, anarchist sympathizers had to decide whether or not they identified as anarchists. Aka to kuro (1923–4), first published by Hagiwara Kyōjirō, Okamoto Jun and their associates before the earthquake, was a poetry journal with strong anarchist features. Hagiwara was also involved in the editing of MAVO (1924–5), one of prewar Japan’s foremost avant-garde art journals. MAVO’s daughter publication Damudamu (1924) ceased publication after only one issue, but the poets involved in it introduced Dadaism and Futurism to Japan and would continue to release collections of their avant-garde poetry. Hagiwara Kyōjirō’s Shikei senkoku (Death Sentence, 1925), Ono Tōzaburō’s Hanbun hiraita mado (A Half-opened Window, 1926) and Okamoto Jun’s Yoru kara asa e (From Night to Morning, 1928) are examples of works which shattered the received lyrical idiom and, through a radically new language, expressed the anxieties and fears of the urban poet. However, these anarchist poets would quickly lose their avant-garde position with the launch, in January 1927, of Bungei kaihō, a journal aimed at uniting anarchist writers and poets. This was the first time that anarchism was joined to the literary ‘movement’. Anarchist poets moved towards explicit politicization: making poems on their loyalty to the ‘black flag’, concentrating and strengthening their subjectivity around the values of anarchism. This meant a hiatus for avant-garde art and amounted to little more than a feeble imitation of the proletarian cultural movement, which the Marxists had worked hard to build up. Following on from the eleven published issues of Bungei kaihō, Kokushoku sensen (February 1929– January 1931), Dandō (February 1930–September 1932) and Anākizumu bungaku (June 1932) became some of the major publications of the anarchist literature movement. The anarchists were organizationally weak, and many journals folded after only a brief run. The Marxists, especially the NAPF wing, systematically mobilized writers and set up regional reading groups, but the anarchists did not adopt this kind of centralized organized movement. In reality, the anarchist literature movement lacked a mass base and offered only sporadic bursts of activity. In recognition of this state of disarray, the Kaihō bunka renmei (Liberation Culture Alliance) was formed in 1932 with the aim of reviving the anarchist literature movement. The

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organization published the bulletins Kaihō bunka (June 1932) and Bungaku tsūshin (August 1933), as well as several series of books. They are also known to have put on a small number of theatrical performances. However, from the late 1920s to the early 1930s, the anarchist literature movement was active regionally rather than centrally. In 1928 and 1929, Okamoto Jun, who was living in Chiba Prefecture at the time, published the journal Mujun. And in 1932, Hagiwara Kyōjirō, who was living in his home region of Gunma, launched Kropotkin wo chūshin ni shita geijutsu no kenkyū (Arts Studies Centred on Kropotkin). The mimeograph publication Hokui gojūdo started in 1930 in Teshikaga, Hokkaido, engaging in debate with the aforementioned Dandō on the topics of anarchism and agrarianism. Other similar anarchist periodicals came out across Japan. Many of them were published in small numbers using mimeograph printing devices. Issues were exchanged both regionally and inter-regionally, and gradually an interlinked, dispersed network was established. Dispersion and solidarity were characteristic traits of the anarchist literature movement. The so-called Anarchist Communist Party of Japan Incident of November 1935, in which large numbers of anarchists and anarchist sympathizers were arrested by police forces across the whole of Japan, marked the end of the anarchist literature movement.2 Many of the detainees were released without prosecution, but it was now impossible to publicly align oneself with anarchism. The Federation of Japanese Proletarian Cultural Organizations (KOPF), which had been incorporated into the Japanese Communist Party, was disbanded by 1934, and the old Bungei sensen group, which supported the Japan Labour–Farmer Party (Nihon rōnōtō), ceased organized activity around 1935. However, unlike the Marxist writers, for whom tenkō was the unavoidable subjective outcome of their confrontation with power, the anarchist writers were not set upon such a path. The existence of the Anarchist Communist Party of Japan was barely known beyond its own members. The anarchists did not have a political party to which they could readily swear their allegiance as did the Marxists. Naturally, they did not criticize the party or turn (tenkō) away from it either. According to the Marxists, ‘the party’ (the Japanese Communist Party) was bound to represent the proletarian masses: to betray the party was to betray the masses. If the party could not represent the Japanese masses, then its members should return to the Japanese reality: this is how the logic of the subjective tenkō took shape. On the other hand, the majority of Japanese anarchist poets did not have a mass base to betray. Without a party and a mass base from which to turn away, they did not face a similar ideological crisis to the Marxists. Moreover, because the anarchists rejected organized activities and worked in a decentralized, individual manner, they could quickly become isolated if they lost contact with one another. Even though they had lost the freedom to publicly uphold anarchism, there was no need for them to abandon its principles. It followed naturally that these writers, in their isolation, sought to hold fast to their personal anarchist creed deep in their hearts. Ironically, little by little, this did bring changes to these bodies.

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Hagiwara Kyōjirō Hagiwara Kyōjirō published the mimeograph-printed literary periodical Kropotkin wo chūshin ni shita geijutsu no kenkyū in 1932 on his own, including in it poems about the realities of life in poor farming communities. The poem ‘Mōrokuzukin’ (The Hood), about an old farmhand who leaves his village in search of work, is one of Hagiwara’s representative works. The anarchist poet Akiyama Kiyoshi contributed a chapter on the tenkо̄ of Japanese anarchists to the second volume of the collection Kyōdō kenkyū: tenkō (Collaborative Research: Tenkō 1959), in which he analyses the ideological change of direction undergone by Hagiwara Kyōjirō and Iwasa Sakutarо̄ (1879–1967). Akiyama himself was active in the prewar anarchist literature movement along with Hagiwara and his associates and held to his anarchist convictions until after the war. He describes Hagiwara’s ideals as ‘anti-authoritarian, autonomous, self-governing anarchism’ to be realized within an agrarian community (Akiyama 1959: 461). Upon Hagiwara’s death in 1938, he left behind a poem entitled ‘Ajia ni kyojin ari’ (A Giant in Asia). This poem describes the ‘giant’ of ancient mythology crossing the continent of Asia, ‘soaring with the spears of history as his wings’, as well as the resolve of a collective ‘we’ to join the giant in ‘forging a new world’. The poem ends as follows: The giant takes up his spear with flashing eyes and gazes upon the advance of the nation He seats himself at the source of the Orient, deep in mountain fog Behold the determined gaze of the great parent god (Hagiwara 1940: 5) The ‘giant’ of Asia is, first and foremost, the ancestral god of the Japanese people come back to life in the present day; he is organically related to the emperor as the incarnate deity (arahitogami). Akiyama argues that this ‘unity of emperor and people’ is what the giant metaphor stands for (ibid.: 462). This represents a reflection of the ideas of the agrarian thinker Gondō Seikyō (1866–1937), whose works Hagiwara read after 1933. Gondō argued for the autonomy of farming communities and rejected bureaucracy. This stance is very close to anarchist thought. However, through the rejection of artificially created institutions, Gondō called for the direct unification of emperor and people in what he termed kunmin kyōchi (shared governance by the sovereign and the people). He imagined a system with the selfgovernance of the masses as its foundation, in which the ruler stands as a ‘model’, a moral symbol. From a traditional anarchist standpoint, agrarianism, which tolerates the emperor system, would be unacceptable. However, through ‘being close to the life of the villages’ and absorbing himself in the ‘ways of the ordinary folk’ (Akiyama 1959: 464), Hagiwara gradually moved away from anarchism towards agrarianism.

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Even though this change from anarchism to agrarianism might be termed tenkō, it differs greatly from the tenkō of the Marxists. Fujita Shōzō defines tenkō as ‘a concept that captures the unity of systematic change in the external actions of an autonomous subject and the simultaneous systematic deepening of their internal introspection’ or ‘an autonomous change of position in response to a situation’ (Fujita 1959: 34–5). According to Akiyama (1959: 464), Hagiwara’s thinking arrived at agrarianism as a result of his continuing ‘anarchist self-identification as a source of internal support’ during his time ‘submerged among the ordinary folk’. Hagiwara’s agrarianism was neither a Marxist nor a false tenkō. Rather, agrarianism was an extension of his anarchist ideology. If Hagiwara Kyōjirō’s change of direction is to be labelled tenkō, it was caused by his allowing his anarchism to lie latent within himself, amidst a change in the political situation towards fascism. Hagiwara’s latent anarchism brought a change of thought without any symptoms of self-awareness. Akiyama, who considered anarchism and agrarianism as distinct ideas, saw the shift towards agrarianism as the failure of anarchism. It is only natural that Akiyama, who by all accounts held fast to anarchism, insisted that a change towards agrarianism constitutes tenkō. Akiyama did not offer a specific explanation for defining the shift from anarchism to agrarianism as tenkō. However, the tenkō of anarchists is not volitionally determined as a proactive, independent act in response to a situation. According to the analysis of Itō Shinkichi, before the shift from anarchism to agrarianism, Hagiwara, whose roots were in farming, had experienced tenkō from agrarianism, broadly conceived, to anarchism. Or, to put it differently, Hagiwara had always been a radical agrarianist and his ideological foundations never changed. His move to the city in the 1920s led him to assume the form of an avant-garde poet, a Dadaist and a Futurist, and to take on the mantle of anarchism, but this was a mantle which he cast off upon his return to the agricultural community (Itō 1981: 159–60). Akiyama (1959: 466–7) writes that ‘a single thread ran through [the Japanese anarchist movement], joining anti-Western, anti-Marxist, anti-modernist, and antienlightenment thought’, and points out that a ‘feudalistic Japanese pre-modernism’ had survived without assimilation amongst Japanese progressive anarchists since the Meiji era. However, even if the anarchists’ agrarianism derived from a ‘feudalistic pre-modernism’, it was, if anything, the urban-focused ‘modernism’ that revived that very pre-modernism in the 1930s.

Hagiwara Sakutarо̄ The eminent poet Hagiwara Sakutarо̄ (1886–1942) was thirteen years older than Hagiwara Kyōjirō. Although the two were not related, they had some literary interaction beginning in Kyōjirō’s middle school days, and Kyōjirō viewed Sakutarо̄ as a respected senior by virtue of their common hometown and family name. In

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June  1933, Hagiwara Sakutarо̄ wrote a poem entitled ‘Kunisada Chūji no haka’ (The Grave of Kunisada Chūji), published in the first issue of the journal Seiri. In that desolate plain The heavenly bodies cast me down and depart And destroy all persons with a will. (Hagiwara 1976 [1933]) Hagiwara Sakutarо̄ and Hagiwara Kyōjirō’s home region of Gunma was known as Kōzuke-no kuni, or Jōshū, until the Meiji period. Kunisada Chūji (1810−51) was a late-Edo period folk hero who established a number of extraterritorial districts called tōku (thieves’ areas) throughout the region around the foot of Mount Akagi. He abolished the official ruling order (under the shogunate) in the wealthy farming villages in the northern Kantō area and established a type of self-governing commune there.3 The story of Kunisada has been told again and again since the Meiji era through popular cultural forms such as kōdan oral storytelling and film. For the people of Jōshū, Kunisada Chūji has special meaning as an anti-­ authoritarian outlaw. In the midst of ‘life’s poverty and suffering’ (Hagiwara 1976 [1933]), tending towards nihilism, Hagiwara Sakutarо̄ visited the grave of Kunisada Chūji and gave voice to his feelings. The landscape of his native place, devastated by the great agricultural depression of the 1930s, is superimposed onto Hagiwara’s own spiritual crisis, but Kunisada’s grave remains silent, as if to suggest a certain ‘futility’ (ibid.) in self-awareness. In the author’s preface to Hyōtō (Iceland),4 the collection containing ‘The Grave of Kunisada Chūji’, Hagiwara Sakutarо̄ writes: It seems to me that the culmination of the multi-coloured is the monochrome, that the culmination of complexity is simplicity, and that the culmination of all advanced artifice goes back to artless, natural unity. When all historical development has finally reached its end, the ultimate idea is that poetry as art belongs to the simplest, most elementary substance, that is, it is the pure and simple exclamation of poetic passion. . . . The author of these lines, while living in Tokyo, always feels in his heart the sky above the fields of his native Jōshū and fiercely conveys his poetic feeling. For that very reason, this entire collection is a declamation, sung with the emotion of a recitation. (Hagiwara 1976 [1934]: 103–4) From ‘complexity’ to ‘simplicity’, from ‘art (poetry)’ to ‘recitation’, from Western materialist civilization to the national traditional spirit: Hagiwara Sakutarо̄’s thinking was changing. Hagiwara is not generally regarded as an anarchist, but his shift towards the Japanese romantic school shares the trajectory of the anarchists’ tenkō.

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The phrase just quoted, ‘going back to artless, natural unity’, is consistent with Iwasa Sakutarо̄’s appeal to return to the ‘innate character of a state that has come into being naturally’ (Iwasa 1937: 16). Iwasa himself turned from anarchism to agrarian nationalism at this time. In 1937, Hagiwara Sakutarо̄ also rejected Western civilization, which had nurtured his identity as a poet, and declared his return (or tenkō) to ‘Japan’, in his celebrated essay ‘Nihon e no kaiki: waga hitori utaeru uta’ (Return to Japan: A Song I Sing Alone 1937). What is more, his notion that ‘the simplest, most elementary substance’ itself is the ultimate idea was shared by Hagiwara Kyōjirō. In his essay ‘Hagiwara Sakutarо̄-ron’ (On Hagiwara Sakutarо̄ 1937), Kyōjirō points out that Sakutarо̄’s poems express ‘the idea of romantic revenge’ and writes that this ‘romantic idea’ was a culture which developed out of ‘the concept of ethnic nationalism’ and that the ‘masses’, who bear that culture, understand the ‘fundamental principle determined by nature’ (Hagiwara 1982 [1937]: 401–2). To Kyōjirō, ‘the simplest, most elementary substance’ was represented by the masses themselves. Kunisada Chūji was a symbol through which Hagiwara Sakutarō silently rejected the decadence of contemporary society. Common to Sakutarо̄ and Kyōjirō was the admiration of ‘nature’ and ‘simplicity’ as concepts that opposed a complex civilized society and the elevation of ‘the native place’, and ‘the masses’ figured as embodiments of these values. Kunisada Chūji is a symbolic representation around which these elements coalesce. However much the native place and the masses might come to ruin in front of the poet’s eyes, or perhaps precisely because they did come to ruin, the idea of the native place and the masses increased their lustre as concepts which must not be tarnished by civilization. Through that process, the rebellious anarchist spirit of the poets changed painlessly, and the reaffirmation of ‘the homeland’s proper tradition of culture’ (Hagiwara 1982 [1937]: 404) came to be understood as the most critical position towards contemporary society. The most important aspect of this unselfconscious tenkō was the image of a transcendent being who would connect this real world with the ideal world that should be. The ‘model’ proposed by the agrarian ideologue Gondō Seikyō was an abstract, conceptual figure, but, by substituting the emperor of Japan for this transcendent being, he found an extremely pragmatic solution. In the case of Hagiwara Kyōjirō, this was expressed through his ‘giant’ of Asia. The Kunisada Chūji who appeared in Sakutarо̄’s poem was also a transcendent being. The ‘model’ ruler existed to show the people their duty and to point towards the ideal world through his actions; he was not someone who simply led with words. Kunisada Chūji was a popular hero, born of the masses and supported by them, but the silence of his ‘grave’ functions as a ‘model’ within the preliterate world of folk custom. The solitary poet gets ‘the masses’ (an abstract conceptual entity) on his side and puts them to use as a moral symbol, without abandoning anarchism. This symbol mediates and integrates images, for the reason that it forcibly unifies many varied and conflicting positions and viewpoints through the logic of ‘the fundamental

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principle determined by nature’ (ibid.). The inclusion of such images of tradition is based on an experience underpinned by a modern sensibility rather than ‘feudalistic pre-modernism’. This is a sensibility predicated on the assumption that these images are held in common by all people. Or, more simply, this is close to the paradigm of shared images based on a cinematic experience.

Okamoto Jun Okamoto Jun was arrested by Tokyo’s Suginami district police force in the Anarchist Communist Party of Japan Incident of November  1935. He returned to Kyoto thereafter and, in May 1936, joined the film company Makino Talkies with the help of his friend Sasai Suesaburō (1901−69). This was the beginning of Okamoto’s life in film. Sasai Suesaburō was a crime boss for the Senbon-gumi, a yakuza syndicate in Kyoto that dealt in timber. Alongside their criminal activities, they also operated a legitimate, non-yakuza business enterprise of the kind known as katagi. This led to their being referred to as katagi yakuza. In his youth, Sasai had been an anarchist infatuated with Ōsugi Sakae. Sasai came to be involved with a film studio in Kyoto through his timber deliveries and is known for having supported the director Makino Shōzō (1878–1929), who has been called ‘the father of Japanese cinema’. Nagata Masaichi (1906−85), a yakuza protegé of Sasai, went on after the war to become the head of Daiei, the film studio behind Kurosawa Akira’s Rashomon. In 1937, Okamoto Jun moved to the script department of the Shinkō Kinema Kyoto film studio. His primary role was writing scripts for jidaigeki period dramas. In 1942, film companies became subject to tight government controls. Upon establishment of Daiei, Okamoto found himself in Tokyo once again, working at their Tamagawa film studio. Okamoto wrote repeatedly in his diary about his company’s pandering to popular taste and his contempt for its outmoded organization (Terashima 1983). In spite of this, however, Okamoto was a very diligent worker. He would ride the crowded train to the studio every single day, even when he didn’t have work to do. He kept this habit even after the air raids began. Of course, his primary motivation was his salary. He is known to have written seven scripts. These scripts remain undiscovered, but the six he wrote before the war were all chanbara eiga, period films with an emphasis on action and sword fights, written for Shinkō Kinema and based on well known Japanese tales and Kabuki dramas. Yanagawa Shōhachi, which opened in October  1937, is a typical example of a revenge drama and was adapted for film more than ten times before the war. Okamoto described his script as follows: ‘a wandering, lone-wolf samurai joins a peasant uprising, and aims to overthrow the establishment’ (Okamoto 1974: 285). The plot follows an outlaw who has dropped out of the political order of the Tokugawa shogunate. He supports a farmers’ uprising and rebels against the warrior class. Okamoto’s script seems to have

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incorporated anarchist ideas. However, it was ‘significantly watered down’ by the director and revised into a stereotypical ‘revenge drama’ (ibid.). Okamoto’s other scripts were also changed into something very different from the stories that he had wished to tell. This is, however, fairly common in the world of cinema. Filmmakers are bound to produce works that fit with what the public would like to see. It was the masses who had the final say. In this way, the ‘lone wolf ’ Okamoto learned the correct way of thinking and the correct way of behaving during the war. Accepting the revision of his scripts was an important exercise in discipline which prepared him for war collaboration. This is an experience similar to that of Hagiwara Kyōjirō, who submerged himself into the farming community. Akiyama Kiyoshi describes this period of Okamoto’s life as ‘the time when he retreated to the lower depths, mostly for the sake of making a living’, and, citing Okamoto’s poetry collection Yoru no kikansha (The Night Train, 1941), he writes, ‘one has a sense that he spent this time in deep contemplation, and one could even observe within him a sensibility akin to the warm emotions of the common people’ (Akiyama 1978: 571). Okamoto Jun became absorbed deep in everyday life, but he did not abandon anarchist ideas. His anarchism gradually transformed into support for the war. He contributed poems to the two notable anthologies of war cooperation poetry compiled by the Association of Japanese Writers in the Service of the Nation (Nihon bungaku hōkokukai). Okamoto’s ‘Sekai chizu o mitsumete iru to’ (When Gazing upon a Map of the World) was included in the poetry collection Tsuji (Crossings, 1943); another poem, ‘Ikite iru hitobashira’ (Living Human Pillars) appeared in Daitōa: shishū (Greater East Asia: An Anthology 1944).5 The final passage of the latter poem reads as follows: The naked shoulders show titanic strength like that of the ancient gods, They bear the boards of bridges like mighty rocks. In a torrent of mud, A bridge of living human pillars built in a moment, and a squad advancing in glory. Can this be so? The fierce will of my people to forge ahead. (Okamoto 1944) This passage depicts a scene in which Japanese soldiers act as supports for a bridge. Okamoto undoubtedly understood what his writing of wartime collaboration poetry would mean. Perhaps that is why he purposefully chose this seemingly inhuman scene. Okamoto even rewrote this poem after the war in an anti-war context. He admitted in the postwar version that the idea of living human pillars was inspired by wartime news reels.6 These films often depicted scenes of bridge building, most likely because the construction of bridges is often used as a symbol, albeit a rather hackneyed one, to evoke the construction of new cultures.7

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But Okamoto was not the only one who was inspired to write poetry by news photographs and footage. In his poem ‘Hokushi hōmen’ (Towards North China, 1938), Hagiwara Kyōjirō writes: This morning I saw a photograph of Chinese boys learning Japanese. Look at them. They’re lined up so neatly at their desks, each one with a hand raised high Eager to give an answer. (Hagiwara 1980 [1938]: 517) The photograph mentioned in this poem was featured in large print in the 30 November 1937 edition of the Tokyo Asahi shimbun. It showed a group of Chinese children studying Japanese in a primary school in Tianjin. It is hard to believe that Hagiwara Kyōjirō honestly approved of this sort of colonial education policy. However, his tenkō had progressed within him so deeply that he easily incorporated such images into his hopes for the future.

Conclusion Hagiwara Kyōjirō and Okamoto Jun returned to their hometowns in the wake of the crackdown on anarchists. There, they held fast to their anarchism in secret. This resembles the Marxist ‘false tenkō’. However, unlike the Marxists who had to sign a tenkō statement as a condition of their release from prison, the anarchist poets did not declare tenkō in the judicial meaning of the term. It appears that they allowed their anarchism to lie latent during the time they spent living among farming communities or working for film companies making period dramas. This anarchism changed by degrees during its latency. Disconnected from the masses, their anarchism was strongly coloured by an imagery of symbolic unity and integration. A decentralized network sprung up, but it disintegrated again in a short space of time. Agrarianism took on this crisis of anarchism, and so widened its support base. However, this was not simply a return to feudalistic thinking. The image of the anti-authoritarian outlaw was ubiquitous in popular media. Kunisada Chūji and Yanagawa Shōhachi were certainly pre-modern figures, but they were remade and reconstructed again and again in moving pictures. Limited political participation, harsh working environments and miserable living conditions were among the factors feeding the popularity of the anti-authoritarian outlaw. The anarchist poets did not necessarily hold in high esteem these popular heroes, who sought to contend with authority through private acts of violence. However, it is conceivable that the re-creation of the classics on film helped pave the way for the construction of a visual image of the ‘transcendent being’ of anarchist poetry. The important thing is that the true image of the masses, recognized in photographic reportage and newsreel film footage, and the metaphors of ‘the giant’ and ‘the ancient god’ arose in a mutually complementary way. If all this is to be called anarchist tenkō, then it was not brought about by the Japanese Special

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Higher Police. Rather, it was a defeat by the politicized forces of visual expression in modern mass culture. Be that as it may, Hagiwara Kyōjirō and Okamoto Jun never once renounced their anarchism. Instead, they sought out the possibilities of anarchism in their everyday lives. Their bodies, however, did change without feeling pain. This was not an abandonment or a betrayal of anarchism. It was anarchism itself that was singing through their war collaboration poems.

Notes 1 On Fukumotoism, see the contributions by Irena Hayter, Brice Fauconnier and Max Ward in this volume. 2 The Anarchist Communist Party of Japan (Museifu kyōsantō) was established in January  1934, with the aim of bringing Leninist ideas to anarchism. The anarchist poet Uemura Tai (1903–59) was the committee chair. In the Anarchist Communist Party incident, 350 people across Japan were apprehended by the authorities under the Peace Preservation Law, starting in November 1935 and continuing through the following year. 3 Regarding Kunisada Chūji, see Takahashi (2000). 4 Literally, the title means ‘Ice Island’, but the English translation given by Hagiwara himself on the cover of the original work is ‘Iceland’. 5 The Japanese term hitobashira (lit. ‘human pillar’) refers to a form of human sacrifice in which humans were buried alive in or around important structures such as bridges and castles so that the gods would protect them from destructive forces, such as natural disasters or enemy attack. 6 There is no positive proof that Okamoto saw these, but images of bridge building exist in the following news films, for example: Nippon nyūsu 72-gō: tekizen kakyо̄ seikо̄ dо̄dо̄ no kaishingeki (Japan News issue 72: Successful Bridge-Building in the Face of the Enemy: An Impressive Attack, 21 October  1941) and Nippon nyūsu 75-gō: sо̄retsu dan’uka ni tekizen kakyо̄ enshū (Japan News issue 75: A Heroic Exercise in Bridge-Building under a Rain of Bullets in the Face of the Enemy, released 11 November 1941). See NHK sensо̄ shо̄gen ākaibusu (NHK War Testimony Archives), viewable at www.nhk.or.jp/archives/ shogenarchives. 7 For more on the bridge in Okamoto’s poem, see (Murata 2012).

References Akiyama, Kiyoshi (1959) ‘Anakizumu’ (Anarchism), in Shisō no kagaku kenkyūkai (ed.) Kyōdō kenkyū: tenkō (Collaborative Research: Tenkō), vol. 2, Tokyo: Heibonsha, 435–67. Akiyama, Kiyoshi (1978) ‘Okamoto-kun ni tsuite’ (About Okamoto Jun), in Okamoto Jun zenshishū (The Complete Poems of Okamoto Jun), Tokyo: Hongо̄ shuppansha, 565–73. Fujita, Shōzō (1959) ‘Shōwa 8-nen o chūshin to suru tenkō no jōkyō’ (The tenkō Situation around 1933), in Shisō no kagaku kenkyūkai (ed.) Kyōdō kenkyū: tenkō (Collective Research: Tenkō), vol. 1, Tokyo: Heibonsha, 33–65. Hagiwara, Kyōjirō (1940) ‘Ajia ni kyojin ari’ (A Giant is in Asia), in Hagiwara Kyōjirō shishū (Collected Poems of Hagiwara Kyōjirō), Tokyo: Hōkokusha, 3–5. Hagiwara, Kyōjirō (1980 [1938]) ‘Hokushi hōmen’ (Towards North China), in Hagiwara Kyōjirō zenshū (Collected Works of Hagiwara Kyōjirō), vol. 1, Tokyo: Seichisha, 517–18. Hagiwara, Kyōjirō (1982 [1937]) ‘Hagiwara Sakutarō ron’ (An Essay on Hagiwara Sakutarō), in Hagiwara Kyōjirō zenshū (Collected Works of Hagiwara Kyōjirō), vol. 3, Tokyo: Seichisha, 398–409.

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Hagiwara, Sakutarō (1976 [1933]) ‘Kunisada Chūji no haka’ (The Grave of Kunisada Chūji), in Hagiwara Sakutarō zenshū (Collected Works of Hagiwara Sakutarō), vol. 2, Tokyo: Chikuma shobō, 127. Hagiwara, Sakutarō (1976 [1934]) ‘Jijo’ (Author’s Preface), in Hagiwara Sakutarō zenshū (Collected Works of Hagiwara Sakutarō), vol. 2, Tokyo: Chikuma shobō, 103–5. Itō, Shinkichi (1981) Reppū no naka ni tachite (Standing in the Violent Wind), Tokyo: Seichisha. Iwasa, Sakutarо̄ (1937) Kokkaron taikō (Fundamental Principles of the Theory of the State), Tokyo: Ajia seisaku kenkyūsho. Kōtoku, Shūsui (1907) ‘Yo ga shisō no henka’ (The Change in My Ideas), in Heimin shinbun (5 February). Murata, Hirokazu (2012) ‘Okamoto Jun no senchū sengo: “Ranru no hata” no koro’ (Okamoto Jun During and After the War: Around the Time of Composition of ‘Tattered Flag’), in Ronkyū Nihon bungaku 96, 83–97. Okamoto, Jun (1944) ‘Ikite iru hitobashira’ (Living Human Pillars), in Nihon bungaku hōkokukai (ed.) Daitōa: shishū (Greater East Asia: An Anthology), Tokyo: Kawade shobō, 41. Okamoto, Jun (1974) Shijin no unmei: Okamoto Jun jiden (A Poet’s Destiny: The Autobiography of Okamoto Jun), Tokyo: Rippū shobō. Takahashi, Satoshi (2000) Kunisada Chūji, Tokyo: Iwanami shoten. Terashima, Tamao (ed.) (1983) Jidai no soko kara: Okamoto Jun senchū sengo nikki (From the Depths of the Era: The Wartime and Postwar Diaries of Okamoto Jun), Tokyo: Fūbaisha.

12 A PROLETARIAN WRITER IN THE SHOWCASE WINDOW The shifting representation of ‘the masses’ in Sata Ineko’s Kurenai Lee Juhee

The personal is political In its 1936 New Year’s issue, Fujin kōron, a women’s magazine published by the Chūō kōronsha publishing company, began simultaneously serializing novellas by multiple female writers. At the time, even for a magazine aimed at a female readership, it was extraordinary to have the literary section filled with female writers’ works. The editors at Fujin kōron boasted about the serializations by using the rhetoric of war, entitling the section ‘All-Out Mobilization of Female Writers’ (Joryū bundan sōdōin no shōsetsuran). The section featured established women writers of the period, including Yoshiya Nobuko, Uno Chiyo, Hayashi Fumiko and Nogami Yaeko. The proletarian writer Sata Ineko (1904–98), on whom I focus in this chapter, also took part in Fujin kōron’s serializations with her autobiographical work Kurenai (Crimson 1936).1 For Sata, writing under the name of Kubokawa Ineko, using her husband’s surname at the time, Crimson was the first full-length work that she wrote for a commercial women’s magazine. It was serialized in five instalments until the May issue (Kubokawa 1936a, 1936b, 1936c, 1936d, 1936e). And, two years later, in 1938, the last part of the story was additionally published as a separate short story entitled ‘Banka’ (The Late Summer) (Kubokawa 1938b). This appeared in the August issue of Chūō kōron, just before publication of the entire work in book form in September 1938. Crimson revolves around the protagonist, Kakimura Akiko, and the conflict between her career as a proletarian writer and her domestic life as a wife and mother. She comes to feel that her role as a wife is disrupting her growth as a writer after her husband, Hirosuke, a leftist literary critic, returns home from prison following his decision to embrace tenkō. One day, Hirosuke asks Akiko for a divorce and confesses that he has met another woman. According to

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him, the woman, who works as a café waitress in Shinjuku, resembles Akiko not only in appearance but also in character. Akiko becomes depressed after learning about her husband’s affair, but she agrees to the divorce because she believes that this woman can satisfy Hirosuke’s desire for an ‘ordinary housewife’ (Kubokawa 1938c: 172; my translation), a gender role that she refuses to accept for herself. The story is based on Sata’s own experience in the summer of 1935, when she prepared to divorce her husband, Kubokawa Tsurujirō (1903–74), who had had an extramarital affair. Importantly, the breakdown of their marriage followed periods of intense political oppression in both their lives. Kubokawa, one of the leaders of the proletarian literary movement from the late 1920s through the early 1930s, was arrested in March 1932 during the round-up of Japanese Federation of Proletarian Culture Organizations (KOPF) members. In November 1933, he was released from prison after issuing a tenkō declaration in court. Two years later, in May 1935, Sata herself was arrested and accused of involvement in multiple leftist organizations. She was released on bail after thirty-eight days, without her membership in the Japanese Communist Party having been detected. But she was then prosecuted on the charge of editing the leftist journal Hataraku fujin with Miyamoto Yuriko (1899–1951), another female proletarian writer of the time. In May 1937, just before the outbreak of the Second Sino-Japanese War, she was sentenced to two years in prison with three years of probation. Sata and Kubokawa’s divorce was suspended, however, as Kubokawa’s affair came to an abrupt end for reasons unknown. Nevertheless, right after that, several newspapers reported the dissolution of their marriage. The first article that appeared in Tokyo Nichinichi shinbun, on September 1, announced their ‘divorce’ by publishing an interview along with photographs of Sata and Kubokawa with a caption that read ‘the couple are going their separate ways’ (Anon 1935). While the photos placed side by side show them as if they were looking face to face and smiling, the caption paradoxically cuts across them (Figure 12.1). In fact, Sata and Kubokawa consciously dramatized their story with the media. They even published essays together in the October 1935 issue of Fujin kōron to depict their relationship from each other’s perspective. In her version of the story, entitled ‘Osoroshiki mujun’ (Dreadful Contradiction), Sata announced that she and Kubokawa had finally determined to live separately without breaking up their marriage relationship. She further explained that the event reflected the difficulties faced by contemporary women when they tried to combine a job and family life. She also intimated that she would publish a novel based on this, mentioning that ‘the truth would be best understood, not by reporting it as a kind of incident, but by writing it in the form of a novel’ (Kubokawa 1935: 74). The primary significance of the essay, however, was that Sata differentiated herself from other female writers by emphasizing her special position as a proletarian

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couple are going their separate ways’: the article, published in Tokyo Nichinichi shinbun on September 1, 1935, which announced the dissolution of Sata and Kubokawa’s marriage (translation: ‘The Ideal Marital Love Finally Breaks Up after Ten Years: The Leftist Critic Kubokawa Tsurujirō gets divorced from Mrs. [Kubokawa] Ineko’).

FIGURE 12.1 ‘The

writer from the working class. She highlighted this position by noting that she had experienced ‘the life of the masses’ (taishū no seikatsu): Among writers, hardly anyone other than me speaks of women, or of being a woman. For me, this is shameful and cumbersome, since it reminds me how much I care about this issue. But on the other hand, I have considered that this is my own uniqueness as a writer, who arose from a working life, as well as evidence showing how desperately I have struggled in my own life. There are women writers who, from the beginning, have grown up as writers while revolting against ‘feminine things’, or who lead their writing careers without

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being interrupted by those ‘feminine things’. I, however, as if embodying one of the characteristics of proletarian literature, emerged from the so-called life of the masses. Thus, what defined me as a writer was not the conscious efforts to adjust my whole life under a strong desire for creating literature, but my own tough life as a working woman. . . . While I was endeavouring to become a writer, I could not afford to avoid ‘feminine things’. Rather, I  have been writing while at the same time managing all such ‘feminine things’. This is the reason why I poignantly understand how a woman’s life fetters her life as a writer. (ibid.: 76) Sata here presents herself as one of the female masses. Indeed, she was an exceptional figure in the proletarian literary movement, both because she was a woman and because of her working-class background. In 1928, she started her writing career as a novelist by publishing the short story ‘Kyarameru kōba kara’ (From the Caramel Factory) in the February issue of the journal Puroretaria geijutsu. The story was based on her own experiences: at the age of eleven, she was forced to leave school as a result of her family’s economic difficulties and she began to work at a caramel factory.2 As Jennifer Cullen points out, her appearance as a proletarian female writer was accepted as filling the ‘problematic empty space’ of the proletarian literary movement, in which most works were written by male intellectuals lacking in ‘the practical experience of poverty and labour’ (2010: 69). After her writing debut, Sata published works inspired by her own experiences and jobs, including those as a clerk in the Maruzen bookstore and as a waitress.3 She was a figure embodying the female proletariat who wrote of their own working conditions and class consciousness. In the preceding passage, Sata mentions her class identity that had previously vouched for her authenticity as a proletarian writer in the movement. But this time, she seems to do so in order to promote herself as a female writer who can best understand contemporary women’s concerns. Firstly, she uses the term ‘feminine things’ (onnateki na mono) as referring to the work imposed on women in their households. She then argues that, because she was one of ‘the masses’ who have nothing without their own labour force, she could not afford to avoid these ‘feminine things’ while working as a writer. In this way, Sata presents herself as a female writer who is constrained by gender roles, as if to assert that she is worthy of representing contemporary female concerns. At this point, she seems to change her position, from a writer who represents the female proletariat to a writer who represents women who, like the readers of Fujin kōron, cannot easily be assigned to any given class. After publication of this essay, Sata began serializing Crimson in Fujin kōron during the next year, at the request of Shimanaka Yūsaku, the president of the Chūō kōronsha (Sata 1977–79, vol. 2: 420). Crimson can be posited in Sata’s long-term writing career as the text that enabled her to publish her work in commercial women’s magazines.4 In the novel, Sata depicted her conflict, which

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she felt as a proletarian writer over this transition toward commercial media, through a drama focused on representation of the masses. She sought to do this by fictionalizing her own private scandal that had received the media spotlight. Crimson was written as a kind of autobiographical novel in which the author confesses about her own personal life, a genre common to women’s magazines of the time. On the other hand, however, as George T. Sipos points out, it also uses one of the patterned narratives of tenkō literature, which ‘focus on divorce and the failure of the modern communist family’ as an event that symbolizes the author’s own ideological tenkō (2013: 18). Sata, by consciously utilizing the narrative of tenkō literature in Crimson, seems to represent and criticize her transitional writing as her tenkō. Hitherto, scholars, who have read Crimson as a text that gives a glimpse of Sata’s tenkō, have focused their analysis on descriptions of Akiko’s internal state. Kitagawa Akio, for example, has pointed out that Sata renounces her critical distance from Akiko at some points – such as when portraying her as pulled along with ‘the age of tenkō’ while focused on the ‘individualistic’ issues of everyday life (Kubokawa 1938c: 122). Kitagawa argues that this can be considered evidence of ‘Sata’s weakness as a literary subject’ who would start to collaborate with the wartime regime after the outbreak of the Second Sino-Japanese War (1987: 96). These kinds of approaches, however, seem to pay less attention to the material conditions in which the novel was published, and therefore they treat Sata’s tenkō as something irrelevant to the capitalist system within which she was located. One exception is Takeuchi Emiko, who has rightly pointed out that Sata makes references in Crimson to the circumstances of composition of the novel by repeatedly depicting Akiko as writing manuscripts to earn money for her living. According to Takeuchi, this exemplifies that Sata regarded her literary creativity as an act of producing commodities in a capitalist society, which might run counter to the norms of the proletarian literary movement. At the same time, however, Takeuchi has emphasized that, in this ‘age of tenkō’, in which the male-dominated leftist movement lost its authority, Sata came to recognize herself as an independent subject both as a woman and as a writer. Takeuchi has argued that Sata thus could not help but write about her self-awareness as an individual in Crimson, even though its publication for the mass market could be seen as ‘capitalistic’ from the viewpoint of proletarian literature (1994: 29–39). Takeuchi’s reading of Crimson followed that of feminist critics, such as Hasegawa Kei (1977: 70–82) and Yamashita Etsuko (1991: 176–98). These critics agree that the novel reflects the gender inequality that had been incorporated not only into Sata’s own married life but also into the leftist movement of the period, and they argue that Crimson is a text in which Sata expressed the female yearning to become an autonomous subject in both the personal and public spheres. On the other hand, however, they fail to pay sufficient attention to Akiko’s relationship with the other female character, the café waitress. As a result, they overlook the fact that, through the division between these two women, Sata fictionalized the power politics underlying her representation of the masses.

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Building on preceding studies, in this chapter, I first situate the text of Crimson in relation to the commercialized media environment of the Fujin kōron of the 1930s. In so doing, Sata’s inner conflict that she would have experienced as an anticapitalist when she serialized the novel will be analysed. This analysis is followed by a reading of Crimson’s love triangle narrative, specifically focusing on the asymmetric relationship between Akiko and the café waitress. Here I argue that Sata dramatized the process in which she shifted the representation of the masses – from the working classes to the consumers of mass culture. Finally, it is also important to note that Sata concluded the novel in the midst of the Second Sino-Japanese War, in 1938, when she started publishing articles calling for women’s war collaboration. By discussing how Akiko’s plan for the divorce is frustrated in the last part of the story, I argue that Sata criticized, whilst at the same time affirming, her writing for the capitalist mass media, which manipulated the masses not only as consumers but also as national subjects who can be mobilized for the war effort.

A proletarian writer who went to a department store Opening the pages of Fujin kōron in which Crimson was published, along with the illustrations by Yoshimura Jirō (1899–1942), many advertisements that accompany the text of the novel come to our attention. Over the course of the five installments, twenty-two advertisements appeared at the bottom or both ends of the text for Crimson. Various types of commodities were marketed: non-prescription drugs, cosmetics, stationery, beauty salons, a millinery school, a correspondence school for nurses, a double eyelid machine, and more (see Figures 12.2, 12.3, and 12.4). Was Sata aware that her novel, just like the advertised products juxtaposed with the text, was simply one of the cultural commodities adorning the pages of the magazine? To answer this question, we need to examine the ‘massification’ (taishūka) strategy of the late 1920s, which, in turn, led to the adoption of this type of page layout for the literary section of Fujin kōron. Fujin kōron was originally launched in January 1916 as a commercial magazine for middle-class women with post-secondary education. As if having inherited the spirit from Seitō, the coterie magazine of the early feminist group ‘Atarashii onna’ (New Woman) which ceased publication just one month later, Fujin kōron featured enlightening articles delivering liberal opinions on various women’s issues of the time. By the end of the 1920s, however, the publishers of Fujin kōron began to transform the magazine in order to broaden its readership to women with lesser levels of education; starting with the January  1928 issue, the editors moderated their previous educational tone and increased the number of articles on issues of urban daily life such as beauty, fashion, sports, films, cooking and family medicine. The magazine’s editors explained these changes as part of their strategy of taishūka, which can be literally translated as ‘making it for the masses’.5 Remarkably, Fujin kōron, transformed to attract readers to the consumer culture, began to function as a mail-order magazine. The publishers established a dairibu (mail-order section) within the company to sell the products promoted in the

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advertisement for cosmetics on the pages of Crimson’s first episode in Fujin kōron.

FIGURE 12.2 An

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FIGURE 12.3 An

advertisement for a correspondence school for nurses on the pages of Crimson’s second episode in Fujin kōron.

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advertisement for a double eyelid machine on the pages of Crimson’s final episode in Fujin kōron.

FIGURE 12.4 An

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magazine by mail.6 Moreover, beginning with the June issue of 1928, they inserted a separate section in the magazine to catalogue the dairibu’s products. Those products were less expensive than commodities sold at typical department stores and aimed at readers living in rural areas, for whom shopping was inconvenient. After becoming a magazine for the masses, Fujin kōron thus embraced its expanded readership as potential consumers of the commodities it advertised. The taishūka policy, on which Fujin kōron had embarked toward the end of the 1920s, further accelerated at the beginning of the 1930s. It can be observed in the way the literary texts were laid out on the pages of the magazine. Starting with the July issue of 1930, for example, novels, which had hitherto been gathered together towards the end of each edition, now appeared separately here and there throughout the magazine, thereby blurring the distinction between literary texts and other types of articles. Interestingly, at the same time as the page layout changed in this way, advertisements also appeared on the pages of novels, as seen in the serialization of Crimson. Furthermore, as if reflecting the outcome of the changed advertising strategy, Chūō kōronsha lowered the price of Fujin kōron from seventy to fifty sen from the October issue of the same year. In 1930, the noted socialist feminist, Yamakawa Kikue (1890–1980), criticized contemporary women’s magazines for their commercialism. Yamakawa claimed they exploited women ‘close to the proletariat’ by running a dairibu, while pretending to be ‘the most accessible apparatus of education and recreation to solve their concerns and teach them about tastes, trends and urbane pleasures’ (1930: 110–1). She wrote: Just like the Honganji Temple, which maintains its prosperity through donations from the poorest and most suffering peasant women, the recent major women’s magazines, whose circulation reaches two or three hundred thousand, are wielding absolute power, particularly among the women who belong to the most suffering, and the most left behind, class. . . . Sticking with this line of argument, women’s magazines are making young women a present of earthly paradise, just as Honganji promises old women a paradise in their afterlife. If it is a common desire for women to become beautiful, make money and win a man’s love, and if women’s magazines can fulfill all their desires for just fifty sen, how is that not an earthly paradise? One way in which these women’s magazines are different from Honganji, however, is that they incorporate commercial sections, or ‘dairibu’, whilst all the time promoting paradise. Ranging from cosmetics to kitchen products, layettes, bedclothes, and gift sets for the Obon holiday, any sort of item that could be sent by mail was manipulatively marketed through advertisements masquerading as highlighted news, intended to incite their readers to buy, especially those who are living in the countryside where shopping can be seen as an inconvenience. (ibid.; my translation)

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Subsequently, in criticizing each of the major women’s magazines one by one, Yamakawa also discussed Fujin kōron: she lamented that, even in this magazine, which had once been ‘almost the only place for women to express their progressive opinions, nowadays articles on such topics as beauty and trends, which had not been seen before, have begun to hold the overwhelming power’. Yamakawa wrote that she hoped that Fujin kōron, for its own sake, would refrain from ‘exposing celebrities’ personal lives as if it were peeping into a public bath over a fence’ or from ‘publishing their sensational confessions and whinings about their own marriages and divorces’ (ibid.: 113–4). Considering the commercialism behind Fujin kōron’s ‘taishūka’, as well as the criticism that this engendered, it is not hard to imagine that Sata could have been confronted with a paradoxical situation when she began serialization of Crimson: she, a proletarian writer, was exhibiting her ‘personal life’ as a commodity in the media space of Fujin kōron, thereby engaging in the magazine’s capitalist strategy to promote the consumer culture to its readers. The narrative of Crimson reflects the process whereby Sata attempted to deal with this paradox by redefining the meaning of the masses. At the beginning of the novel, the protagonist, Akiko, suffers, not only from discord in her marriage but also from writer’s block. A proletarian writer from a working-class background, Akiko experiences this crisis as self-doubt over whether she can legitimately write for and about ‘the life of the masses’ (taishū no seikatsu). Although she attempts to live and work among the masses, she is conscious that, as a writer with a successful career, she is not one of the masses anymore. She opens up about this concern to her comrade, Takii Kishiko, who is often regarded as having been modelled after Miyamoto Yuriko: What supports us in times of stagnation like this are simply our political beliefs. If it weren’t for those, there’d be nothing but the routine life of a professional writer for us. But a life like that is quite different from the life of the masses, so how to bridge the gap ought to be our major concern, at least in my opinion. (Sata, trans. Tanaka 1987: 168; Kubokawa 1938c: 50–1)7 In order to break her writer’s block, Akiko rents a room in the Jōtō8 area, a workers’ district in Tokyo. There she tries to write a novel, but eventually returns to her home without any satisfactory results. Watching the street that ‘gradually [grows] brighter with electric lighting’ as her taxi approaches her home in the Totsuka area, Akiko recognizes the gap between her life and the lives of the people in the working-class neighbourhood (153; Kubokawa 1938c: 56). She feels that she needs to study ‘the life of the masses’ more, but at the same time she fears that ‘there are several aspects of her past lifestyle that cause her to sink into the low life of the masses’ (jibun ga kanojo no kako no seikatsu kanjō kara, hikui taishū no seikatsu ni oborete shimau yōso no aru no mo osoroshii koto datta) (Kubokawa 1938c: 56). Her feelings about the masses are contradictory: on the one hand, she idealizes them, but on the

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other hand, she is afraid that she can be easily assimilated with the ‘low’ life of the masses to which she once belonged. Akiko fails to identify herself with the masses in this way, as she continues to perceive them as the labouring class. However, not long after that, Akiko succeeds to some extent in identifying herself with the masses by defining them not as class agents fighting against capitalist society but as consumers of the capitalist market. She discovers these masses, for example, when she visits a department store while preparing to send her two children to a seashore village for the summer: Department stores made Akiko feel restless and agitated, oppressed by the stuffiness of the large crowds. . . . [S]he began to weave her way through the bustling crowds with a look of utter emptiness. Later still, Akiko became conscious of herself – sweat beading at the tip of her nose – picking through, no, digging through, a mountain of kids bathing suits, in search of something just the right color, something just the right price. Haha, what man, it suddenly dawned on her, would ever deign to join this vulgar frenzy! ‘Resist everything about you that is foolish, old-fashioned, and weak!’ Akiko pulled her hands off the pile of clothes and took two or three steps back. From each and every direction, there were housewives, and homemakers, and well-powdered ladies bumping into her, rubbing up against her, frantically pushing her aside. Each of them was searching for the best possible outfit with which to dress her child, mused Akiko, beneath the store’s seductive display, gazing at all the women gathered there. (177–8; Kubokawa 1938c: 105–6)9 In this scene, Akiko finds herself surrounded by women picking through a mountain of commodities. From her point of view, the women’s shopping behaviour in this department store is but one aspect of societal inequality by which she was surrounded: while the women continued to manage their households, men were exempt from such ‘vulgar frenzy’. As a result of her own experiences, Akiko feels genuine empathy for them. At this point, she seems to have found ‘the women’, or the female masses, as a new subject which should be represented through her writing. From ‘beneath the store’s seductive display’, Akiko looks out at the crowd of women. This setting, a department store where anonymous individuals gather as potential purchasers, sharing a mutual gender identity as women, can be read as a metaphor for the media space of Fujin kōron, which contains a commercial section, or dairibu, within it (see Figure 12.5). Here, Sata can be seen as attempting to justify her writing for the commercial magazine by arguing that that is where she can best touch bases with the female masses for whom she needs to speak. After this episode, Akiko learns of Hirosuke’s love affair and, deciding to separate from him, she makes herself a promise to ‘write about all the hardships and all the grief that women face’ (206; Kubokawa 1938c: 166). However, might not ‘the

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FIGURE 12.5  Dairibu’s

mail-order section in the January 1936 issue of Fujin kōron, in which Crimson first appeared.

women’, whom Akiko found to be her readers as well as her subject matter, represent a construct manufactured as consumers by the commercial media, just like the women in the earlier department store? As we shall see in the next section, Sata reveals her suspicion that she is deceiving the women of the masses while professing herself as their voice, through the creation of the love triangle narrative between Akiko, Hirosuke and the café waitress.

Melodramatic tenkō Perhaps it is not difficult to assume that Akiko’s conjugal relationship with her spouse and comrade, Hirosuke, represents the author’s own affinity toward leftist thought. Moreover, given that Akiko comes from the working class, her marriage even seems to symbolize a unity between the intellectuals and the masses. At the time of the narrative, however, Akiko is about to separate from Hirosuke. If the divorce of Akiko and Hirosuke is a trope born of some of the changes in Sata’s own political position (i.e. her tenkō), Sata here represents her own tenkō as similar to the unavoidable choice of Akiko to distance herself from her husband, who has committed adultery at the same time as his tenkō. When she hears about Hirosuke’s

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affair, Akiko is inwardly pleased with the appearance of the new woman, which renders her divorce a passive, inevitable choice: The situation was playing out, in fact, exactly as it had in her dreams. Free from any responsibility, out there all on her own, she could now live her life however she wished to. In pursuing her own hopes and dreams she wouldn’t in the end hurt Hirosuke, and Hirosuke too would be free to pursue his. (197; Kubokawa 1938c: 146)10 This plot, in which Akiko decides to cede her position as Hirosuke’s wife to the other woman, echoes Sata’s own situation at the time she began serialization of Crimson: just as with Akiko, who attempts to free herself in order to continue her independent writing career by assigning the role of ‘ordinary housewife’ to the other woman, Sata shifted the meaning of ‘the masses’ at this time – from the proletariat to the mass consumers of commodity culture. At this point of the narrative, Sata can be seen as rationalizing her transformation into a commercial writer as caused by the masses who have come to be seen as mass-consuming subjects. Curiously enough, although they are about to split up, Akiko and Hirosuke still agree that Hirosuke needs a wife to assist him in his work. In this love triangle, in which Hirosuke’s needs and desires take priority over those of the two women, by transferring ‘feminine things’ to the other woman, Akiko attempts to transfer the woman instead of herself to Hirosuke. She expects that, through this collusion, she will be able to occupy a relatively autonomous position in this triangular relationship. Akiko’s assumption that the other woman would gladly become Hirosuke’s ideal wife, however, is based on the hierarchical differences between herself and the other woman: Akiko is an intellectual writer, and the other woman is a café waitress working in the entertainment business. If this woman provides her feminine charm as a commodity to male customers visiting her café and she makes income from the tips they pay for her gendered labour, Akiko here believes that the woman could also play such a subsidiary and thus ‘feminine’ role for Hirosuke, even at home away from her workplace.11 Significantly, the woman remains unnamed throughout the whole text, and at no time does she appear except in the conversations between Akiko and Hirosuke. In particular, the scene in which Akiko and Hirosuke talk about their impressions of the woman while gazing at her picture illustrates that the couple’s attempt to enthrone the woman as Hirosuke’s ‘regular housewife’ comes to constitute the act of representing the nameless female masses. In this scene, right after confessing his affair, Hirosuke shows Akiko a photograph of the woman. In it she is sitting on a horse, wearing a yukata, a cotton robe that seems to have been provided for guests by a hotel. The couple exchange ideas about the picture taker – either her aunt, as she had told Hirosuke, or another man who had accompanied her on the trip. In collaborating to invent stories about the woman, who has no chance to speak for herself, they strengthen their bond as a heterosexual couple. In her imagined

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relationship with the other woman, however, Akiko rather assumes the viewpoint of an honorary male: ‘[h]ad Akiko been a man’, the narrator says, ‘she surely would have been smitten’ by the other woman. She feels ‘almost envious’ of Hirosuke, imagining ‘how much more relaxed he would be with this type of woman looking after him’ (195; Kubokawa 1938c: 142). By gendering the social class difference that exists between them, Akiko distinguishes herself from the other woman. There is an episode epitomizing how the narrative of Akiko’s divorce is juxtaposed with the issue of Sata’s own tenkō. After agreeing to a divorce, Akiko goes out to Shinjuku with Hirosuke, who is going to the café to meet the waitress. There she herself heads to the hairdresser and cuts off her long hair (see Figure  12.6). This episode is significant not only because it implicitly shows Akiko’s resolution to become independent from her husband but also because, in its detailed description, it hints at the change in Sata’s political perspective on her relationship with the masses. In fact, the text of Crimson presents Akiko’s political position as reflected in, or even performed through, her hairstyle and clothes. The narrator informs us that Akiko has so far kept her long hair in a knot ‘to blend in with the girls in the factories and the housewives in the tenements’ (197; Kubokawa 1938c: 147–8). For Akiko, her hairstyle was thus a medium to disguise herself as one of the working-class women when she researches and writes about their lives. But

FIGURE 12.6 Akiko’s

haircut scene, illustrated by Yoshimura Jirō, which appeared in the fourth installment in the April 1936 issue of Fujin kōron.

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now, by contrast, she wants to change her hairstyle, feeling that ‘all this fuss would hardly make a difference anymore, insofar as her relationship with factory girls was concerned’ (198; Kubokawa 1938c: 148). She seems to feel anxious that the figure of the masses, which she has expressed through herself, might be different from the way they wish to present themselves. Therefore, she transforms herself with bobbed hair, the emblematic hairstyle of the modern girl. If the modern girl was the figure embodying consumer subjects in that period, Akiko here seems to make a fashion statement through her hairstyle change in order to declare that she would be a writer to serve the entertainment of the masses by adjusting herself to their consuming desires. Yet Akiko soon feels embarrassed with her changed hairstyle. Having left the hair shop, she sees herself reflected in the showcase windows while walking the street. We can presume that she is looking at her image juxtaposed with the merchandise on display there: Her hair was neatly bobbed now, looping around her ears and coming out again onto her cheeks. But the cut fell short of Akiko’s expectations. Akiko walked out of the shop heedless of the rain showers that had just begun to fall.  .  .  . Since nobody was looking, she kept on walking, glancing at her reflection in the showcase windows until she found yet another beauty parlor a few blocks down. This new shop catered to women in the entertainment business, and when the shopkeeper greeted her like a woman of more colorful sorts, she played the part perfectly with a spirited retort. (199; Kubokawa 1938c: 150–1) ‘[G]lancing at her reflection in the showcase windows’, Akiko feels herself to be one of the commodities displayed in the showcases for sale. This reflects back on Sata’s earlier recognition that she is distributing herself as a commodity in the media market. Sata’s imagining of herself as a commodified woman further develops into the recognition that she, an intellectual, is not so different from the women who commodify their sexual allure in service sectors: at the beauty parlor, where Akiko goes to have her hair fixed, she is mistaken for ‘a woman of more colorful sorts’. This depiction can be interpreted as referring to a woman engaged in the entertainment business, just like the café waitress whom Hirosuke is meeting somewhere in Shinjuku. Ironically at this moment, Akiko, who had differentiated herself from the other woman in the earlier scene, experiences the boundaries between themselves as precariously blurred. This scene, in which Akiko unintentionally encounters the other woman as a mirror image of herself, foreshadows the possibility that the masses, who have appeared as mass consumer subjects before the author, might be an imaginary construct onto which Sata’s own desire – to legitimize her tenkō toward the media capitalism as a passive, inevitable choice – is projected. As previously examined, Sata narrativizes her inner conflict over her writing for the media market as a love-triangle melodrama, in which Akiko agrees to the divorce from her husband following his affair with another woman. At first glance,

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Sata seems to compare her transformation into a commercial writer to Akiko’s decision to free herself from the restrictive marriage. But on the other hand, she portrays Akiko as attempting to achieve her independence by placing the other woman into the subordinate position of housewife as a stand-in for herself, thereby revealing her self-delusion surrounding the representation of the masses. Significantly, Sata ceased serialization with the May issue of Fujin kōron without communicating how this triangular relationship is resolved. Do Akiko and Hirosuke put an end to their marriage with a divorce, or do they maintain their life together while the other woman stands between them? It was not until publication of ‘The Late Summer’, in the August 1938 issue of Chūō kōron, that she revealed the whole story.

Embracing media capitalism ‘The Late Summer’ begins a few days after the point where the previous story had left off. Between publication of these two texts, it is significant that there was a two-year time gap. During the intervening years, Japan had plunged into the war against China in July 1937, and, as the war continued, the media environment surrounding Sata also underwent considerable change. Firstly, the publishing market came to enjoy an economic boom in general, despite the state-sponsored censorship and control of printing materials, even whilst companies were adjusting themselves to the patriotic mood of wartime (Satō 2001: 126–49). As for Fujin kōron, from around the September 1937 issue, war-related articles began to fill its pages. Those articles treated the War as a radical catalyst for women to rationalize their domestic life or to display their abilities in industry as labourers substituting for men who were drafted to the battlefield.12 In the meantime, however, various advertisements attuned to the wartime regime still accompanied those articles. Dairibu’s mail-order sales continued as well. Even though frugality and restraint became the norm in public discourse, the consumer culture linked with the modernization of daily life was promoted on the pages of the magazine without any collision with war propaganda. During this period, Sata started writing articles in support of the war, mainly for newspapers and women’s magazines. This was a surprising turn, given that she had revealed her strong opposition to war, at least until the early 1930s. For instance, in her short story ‘Nani o nasubeki ka’ (What Is to be Done?), which she had written about the strike at the Tokyo muslin factory in 1930, Sata had criticized the mass redundancies, carried out under the guise of rationalization after the Shōwa depression, as part of preparation for the imperialist war that the capitalist nation Japan was about to begin (Kubokawa 1932: 35). By contrast, since the late summer of 1937, she had started to exhort women to offer service for the war effort in her writing, expressing her sympathy for the hardships that women faced in the wake of the War. In an essay contributed to the December 1938 issue of Fujin kōron, entitled ‘Shokuba o owareru joseitachi ni’ (To Women Displaced from

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Their ­Workplace), while echoing the hardships faced by contemporary women – those who sent their family members to the battlefield, housewives who had to cut back on their family consumption, waitresses who left their cafés after losing their customers who had been drafted into the army, and female workers dismissed from textile factories due to the wartime changes to the industrial structure – Sata eventually claimed that they nevertheless should understand the difficulties the present War imposed on them from a broader national perspective (Kubokawa 1938d: 402–9). In short, by modifying the meaning of the masses to refer to ‘the masses of the single nation’,13 she was able to continue writing in the mass media market in which war fever was gradually intensifying. Through the last part of Crimson, Sata seems to critically present her self-deception surrounding these shifting representations of the masses but at the same time affirm her decision to collude with media capitalism (Figure 12.7).

essay, published in the March 1938 issue of Fujin kōron, in which Sata depicted working women enjoying their break time in various workplaces, from a public tobacco corporation to a textile factory and a hospital, and to Tokyo municipal bus company (Kubokawa 1938a). Interestingly, as seen on the left side of the double page spread, an advertisement for ‘Hechima cologne’, which features an image of two women smiling brightly, is placed seamlesly within the article, just next to the page that features telephone operators singing ‘Aikoku kōshinkyoku’ (March of Patriots) together during their break time.

FIGURE 12.7 A photo

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FIGURE 12.7 (Continued)

In the story, as if alluding to Sata’s own hesitation in publishing works that collaborated with the war effort, Akiko, preparing for the divorce from Hirosuke, repeatedly expresses to him her fears about her future writing after their separation: ‘I wonder if I can possibly write in this state of mind? It’s an entirely different world out there that I  need to describe now’ (238; Kubokawa 1938c: 233). By contrast, Hirosuke, who is engrossed in writing, encourages her to come up with something to write by saying, ‘There’s not much else we can do but to work’ (238; Kubokawa 1938c: 232). In this way, the text shows the couple seriously discussing their respective writing agendas after their divorce. At one point, there is a quarrel scene that shows the tension between them escalating to a climax. It opens when Akiko talks again about her agony, ‘I still wonder if I’ll be able to write anything once I’m all on my own’. She then goes on to say, ‘If I hadn’t started working, that is. Sometimes I  wonder why I  even started’ (245; Kubokawa 1938c: 248–9). In response, Hirosuke lays bare the desperate desire that he had felt when in jail to be free and to return to work at all costs. Remarkably, Hirosuke’s words affirming his own work as a writer can be also read as an explanation for his tenkō: Only a published author, someone overflowing with confidence, could possibly be so arrogant. . . . You can easily say you want to give it all up, while here I am breaking my back like a fool just to make a bit of progress. How could you possibly understand how that consumed me for two whole years while I was in prison? Do you know how afraid I was of dying there with

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nothing to my name? How deep that sort of frustration reaches? When you’re locked up in prison, you lose all of your confidence, Akiko. So, honestly, I don’t care what it takes now, because all I know is that the time has finally come for me to do my work, and I’m not about to let someone like you get in my way. (246–7; Kubokawa 1938c: 250–1) Disclosing his jealousy of Akiko, who had established herself as a writer during his absence, Hirosuke confesses the frustration he had experienced in jail at being unable to make a contribution to ‘society’ with his work. He is suggesting that this was the reason why he had chosen tenkō in prison. He affirms his tenkō as a choice to return to society, from which he had been excluded as a result of repression by the authorities. Moreover, he emphasizes that this is an experience exclusive to men: when Akiko asks him again if he is ‘willing to give up everything [he has] achieved so far’, he insists that neither Akiko, who was kept in custody for a couple of months, nor her female protégée, Takii Kishiko, who had been arrested more than half a year previously and was still behind bars, has ever experienced ‘the humiliation of not having work’ (247; Kubokawa 1938c: 251–2). Here, he implicitly assumes that it is men who should be in ‘society’ or, more precisely, ‘the labour market’. At this point, Akiko, who was able to escape long-term imprisonment, finds it hard to criticize her husband’s tenkō, convincing herself that she has no choice but to separate from him. After this argument, Hirosuke begins his preparations to start a new life with the other woman, enlisting his male friend, Miyazaki, who works for a newspaper, as a go-between. The story, which had been premised on the emergence on the scene of the other woman, is, however, abruptly suspended as it turns out that she had no intention of pairing off with Hirosuke. She already has a husband – the owner of the café. Returning home as soon as he learned this fact, Hirosuke recounts to Akiko ‘how the woman in question then declared that Mr. Kakimura should please consider their negotiations over and done with’; at this point, the four – Hirosuke, Miyazaki, the owner of the café, and the woman  – had had ‘a real showdown’. Just as he had defended his own ‘declaration’ of tenkō as inevitable in the face of the state repression against leftists, he tries to comfort himself by thinking that the woman’s act of denouncing him was her ‘declaration’, made against her own will under coercion from her oppressive husband: ‘Well, what else could she have said in front of this guy? He’s a scary one, I’ll tell you’ (249; Kubokawa 1938c: 257). Meanwhile, Akiko, who has believed that she could hold an autonomous position in this love triangle, finds out that she did not even exist in this ‘real showdown’ scene. As their plans for divorce are halted in this way, Akiko realizes that she has never cared about the woman’s own intentions from the beginning. The woman might have just maintained a close relationship with Hirosuke in the same spirit as when she entertained her other regular customers. Or she could have been in a genuinely subordinate state vis-à-vis this man, who is not only the owner of her workplace but also the ‘owner’ of her household. What is

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certain is that she is not going to be the ‘ordinary housewife’ as the couple has envisioned her. I argue that the woman is one of the ‘masses’ whom Akiko had been seeking to represent in her writing. Through this reversal near the end of the story, in which the couple’s idea of giving the role of ‘housewife’ to the woman comes to naught as a result of her own rejection, Sata reveals her recognition not only that she is fabricating the representation of the masses as grounds authorizing her own writing but also that it might be declined by the very masses for whom she believed she had been advocating. Nonetheless, after the woman disappears from the story, Akiko and Hirosuke continue to play out their drama. Together with Hirosuke, Akiko visits the newspaper office where Miyazaki works to announce suspension of their divorce to the public. Surrounded by ‘all the movers and shakers of this leading newspaper’, they explain the details of Hirosuke’s recent affair and inform them that, although they have decided to separate, there would not be a complete divorce (252; Kubokawa 1938c: 262–3). Akiko tells her ‘interrogators’, ‘It’s been terribly difficult up until now, with both of us working, but when we start living separately I think it’s only going to be harder’ (252; Kubokawa 1938c: 263). The following scene – a photo shoot – reminds us of the previously mentioned article from three years before, in which the dissolution of Sata and Kubokawa’s marriage had been announced: ‘Could I ask you to please face each other now and smile?’ . . . [I]n a corner of the newspaper’s conference room, . . . Hirosuke and Akiko did as they were told, shifting their knees toward each other and gently smiling. . . . ‘Well, thank you’, said the photographer, lowering his camera. Akiko turned around to hide her face from him, as though she were adjusting her chair. But as she faced the wooden screen, where no one could see her, she felt compelled in a very natural way to scratch an itch that she felt, emotionally speaking. Without giving it much thought, she suddenly screwed up her face, and bared her teeth with a snarl. (253; Kubokawa 1938c: 263–4) Sata hints at her own tenkō from a proletarian writer to a commercial writer and then an advocate calling on the masses to become ‘the nation’s people’ by presenting Akiko’s interview as a public media event reported in the commercial space of the mass media. Sarcastically depicting Akiko, who assumes a fake smile as she is confronted by the photographer, Sata can be seen as criticizing herself pandering to the media that she sees as manipulating the masses, not only into consumers but also as ‘the nation’s people’ or human resources who can be mobilized for the War at any time. Akiko’s interviews, the first announcing the dissolution of her marriage and the latter repudiating it, imply that Sata has finally embraced her tenkō to media capitalism but that she would nevertheless continue to speak up for the masses, unlike the other woman who, though purportedly one of the masses, had opted to abandon them. Akiko’s screwed-up face, made ‘where no one could see

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her’, conveys Sata’s interior disillusionment at herself who had decided to continue writing in the media market professing to be the voice of the masses.

Performing the masses, mobilizing the masses During ‘the age of tenkō’ (Kubokawa 1938c: 122), in which the proletarian literary movement collapsed as a consequence of state repression, Sata, who had commenced her writing career as a proletarian writer at the end of the 1920s, started to publish her works in commercial women’s magazines, beginning with serialization of Crimson in Fujin kōron. In this novel, Sata reconstitutes a series of events surrounding her suspended divorce from her then husband, Kubokawa Tsurujirō, as an allegory of her contradictory writing condition whereby she, an anti-capitalist writer, is creating a novel for a commercial women’s magazine devoted to the promotion of capitalistic consumer culture for its readers. The plot of Crimson focuses on the manner in which Akiko, who is modelled after the author herself, prepares to divorce her husband, Hirosuke, who had had a love affair with a café waitress. At one level, Sata presents this divorce as an event that suggests a change in her own position as a writer: the story, in which Akiko concedes her position as Hirosuke’s wife to the other woman who appears as his new fiancée, seems to indicate the process whereby the meaning of ‘the masses’, which until then Sata has embodied as the subjects of revolution, the proletariat, is replaced by the subjects of mass consumption. By using this metaphor, Sata shows the process whereby she transforms herself from a proletarian writer to a commercial writer as part of a process in which she modifies the meaning of the masses that she has hitherto represented. At this point, Sata’s tenkō as a proletarian writer comes to be described as an unavoidable choice, prompted as it is by the new masses emerging as mass consumers. By the end of the novel, however, Sata intentionally frustrates her own attempt to represent her tenkō with Akiko’s divorce by adding the reversal in which the waitress disappears from the story after refusing to become Hirosuke’s wife. Sata, in this way, hints at the fact that the presence of the masses is merely a fictional construct, one designed to legitimize her tenkō as having been for the masses. At the same time, through this reversal, she is also revealing her acceptance that her determination to speak on behalf of the masses represents a misappropriation of the voices of the women on whose behalf she had previously sought to advocate. Nevertheless, Sata suggests towards the end of the novel that she would never stop representing the masses in the media market. Through the episode where, after the plan for the divorce was suspended, Akiko reports to the newspaper office along with Hirosuke that their marriage had been dissolved, Sata presents her tenkō not as the divorce itself this time, but as the voluntary act of making it an issue as a commodity in the media market. Akiko’s interview, wherein she announces that her marriage was effectively over but that she would nevertheless maintain her legal status as Hirosuke’s wife, can be interpreted as Sata’s statement of tenkō declaring that she would continue to perform the role of the masses within the media

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market, even though she is clearly aware that she is not one of the masses anymore. At this point in the year 1938, when the last part of the story finally appeared, the implication is that she would engage in the media’s capitalistic strategy of representing and mobilizing the masses not only as consuming subjects but also as national subjects who could be used as human resources for the war effort. Sata and Kubokawa’s marriage officially continued until 1945. After publication of Crimson in book form, Sata continued to write articles calling for women’s collaboration in the war effort. Thereafter, following the outbreak of the Asia Pacific War, she was sent as a war journalist to Japan’s colonies, old and new, including Manchuria, Korea, Taiwan and Singapore. Like Akiko, who decided to play Hirosuke’s wife in the media even after their marriage was dissolved, Sata continued to work during the wartime period as a writer who represented ‘the masses’.

Notes 1 Unless otherwise noted, citations from Kurenai in this chapter refer to Samuel Perry’s English translation, Crimson, included in Sata (2016: 126–261), and are cited as page number only (followed by page numbers for the original Japanese version [Kubokawa 1938c] where appropriate). In some cases, where I have departed from Perry’s translation, citations are either my own translations from the original Japanese version (Kubokawa 1938c) and cited as such or taken from Tanaka’s translation (Sata 1987) and cited as ‘Sata, trans. Tanaka 1987). 2 It was Nakano Shigeharu (1902–79) who encouraged Sata to write this story (Sata 1983: 144–9). Sata had been acquainted with Nakano since 1926, when she was working as a waitress in a café which Nakano often visited with his colleagues from the poetry coterie, ‘Roba’ (Donkey); these colleagues included Sata’s future husband, Kubokawa. From 1927, along with some members of Roba, Sata immersed herself in Communism and was active in the proletarian art movement. For more on Sata’s biographical details from the late 1920s through the early 1930s, see her reminiscence, Sata (1983: 106–208). Ronald P. Loftus provides an excerpted English translation with analyses in Sata (2004: 185–228). 3 For example, Sata wrote the short story ‘Kanojora no kaiwa’ (The Conversation of the Female Clerks) in 1928, inspired by her working experience in the Maruzen bookstore (Kubokawa 1928), and ‘Resutoran rakuyō’ (Restaurant Sunset) in 1929, based on her experience as a café waitress (Kubokawa 1929). 4 Previously, Sata had contributed her works to leftist journals such as Senki and Hataraku fujin, the progressive women’s magazine Nyonin geijutsu and commercial magazines such as Chūō kōron, Kaizō and Bungei shunjū, which published the works of the major writers in the bundan, or literary world. By the mid-1930s, Sata had lost the former two types of media as publishers of her works. 5 For more on Fujin kōron’s ‘taishūka’ strategy, see (Matsuda 1965: 97–126; Chūō kōronsha 1955: 409–11, 1965: 245–52). See also (Frederick 2016: 79–83). 6 It is assumed that this mail-order section was set up and started selling products just before its taishūka. A cosmetic advertisement for ‘mastā vanishingu kurīmu’ (master vanishing cream) featuring the phrase ‘On sale in our dairibu’ can be found in the December 1927 issue (Anon 1927: 131). 7 I have used this translation since Tanaka translated the Japanese word taishū as ‘the masses’ – and I believe that this translation encompasses the meanings of both the agents of class struggle and the consuming subjects of mass culture better than Samuel Perry’s translation of taishū as ‘ordinary people’.

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8 Sata wrote a series of documentary fictions on the Tokyo muslin strike of 1930 in the Jōtō area, which featured female workers in protest against the massive layoffs. Among them, in her story, ‘Kyōsei kikoku’ (Compulsory Repatriation), Sata depicted a factory girl who is about to find a job as a waitress after being dismissed from the factory (Kubokawa 1931: 122–3). 9 I have modified the last sentence. Samuel Perry’s translation reads, ‘mused Akiko, gazing at all the women gathered beneath the store’s seductive display’. In the original Japanese text, however, it is Akiko who is ‘beneath the store’s seductive display’, not the women at whom she is staring. 10 In this citation from Samuel Perry’s translation, I  have modified the male character’s name from Kōsuke to Hirosuke in order to match the first version of the name that appears in Fujin kōron’s serialization of Crimson (where the Chinese characters for his name are glossed as Hirosuke). 11 Miriam Silverberg delineated the café waitress (jokyū) as the working-class embodiment of the modern girl, who entered the entertainment business with the rise of the mass consumption society from the 1920s through the 1930s. While discussing cultural history and representations of the café waitress, Silverberg formulated the coexisting agency of them as ‘contained and resisting within a capitalist culture wherein she is both consumer-subject and commodified sex object’ (2006: 73–107). 12 For example, see the November 1937 issue of Fujin kōron, entitled ‘War and Rationalization of Life’. This is the journal’s first war-related special issue, featuring articles that discuss women’s new role on the home front and predicting how the War can bring about the rationalization of daily life in various ways. Yamakawa Kikue, mentioned earlier in this chapter, also contributed an article, ‘Shōrai no ifuku to jūtaku’ (The Future of Clothing and Housing), to this issue. Here, Yamakawa discussed how to reform clothing and housing in order to prepare for war situations, by arguing that ‘modern warfare is not just the fight between military forces, but the competition of the living abilities of all nationals’ (1937: 98). 13 The expression ‘the masses of the single nation’ (ikkoku no taishū) can be found in Sata’s essay ‘Senji taiseika no fujin no hataraki-kake’ (Women’s Efforts under the Wartime Regime), which first appeared in the August 1938 issue of the magazine Gurafuikku. The citation is from the version reprinted in Sata Ineko zenshū, vol. 16 (Sata 1977–79: 219).

References Anon (1927) ‘Mastā vanishingu kurīmu’ (Master Vanishing Cream), in Fujin kōron 12: 12 (December), 131. Anon (1935) ‘Risō no fūfuai jūnen ni shite yaburu’ (Ideal Marital Love Finally Breaks Up After Ten Years), in Tokyo Nichinichi shinbun (1 September). Chūō kōronsha (ed.) (1955) Chūōkōronsha shichijū-nen (Seventy Years of Chūō kōronsha), Tokyo: Chūō kōronsha. Chūō kōronsha (ed.) (1965) Chūōkōronsha no hachijū-nen (Eighty Years of Chūō kōronsha), Tokyo: Chūō kōronsha. Cullen, Jennifer (2010) ‘A Comparative Study of tenkō: Sata Ineko and Miyamoto Yuriko’, in The Journal of Japanese Studies 36: 1 (Winter), 65–96. Frederick, Sarah (2016) Turning Pages: Reading and Writing Women’s Magazines in Interwar Japan, Honolulu: University of Hawaiʽi Press. Hasegawa, Kei (1977) ‘Kurenai kara Haiiro no gogo e no kussetsu: Shōwa jū-nendai o megutte’ (Distortion Between Kurenai and Haiiro no gogo: Focusing on the Second Decade of the Shōwa Period, 1935–1944), in Nihon bungaku 26: 1 (January), 70–82. Kitagawa, Akio (1987) ‘Kurenai-ron: Sata Ineko ni okeru tenkō no naijitsu’ (On Kurenai: The Substance of Sata Ineko’s tenkō), in Nihon kindai bungaku 36, 85–97.

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Kubokawa, Ineko (1928) ‘Kanojora no kaiwa’ (The Conversation of the Female Clerks), in Senki 1: 3 (July), 100–7. Kubokawa, Ineko (1929) ‘Resutoran rakuyō’ (Restaurant Sunset), in Bungei shunjū 7: 9 (September), 13–32. Kubokawa, Ineko (1931) ‘Kyōsei kikoku’ (Compulsory Repatriation), in Chūō kōron 46: 1 (January), 104–24. Kubokawa, Ineko (1932) ‘Nani o nasubeki ka’ (What Is to Be Done?), in Chūō kōron 47: 3 (March), 24–59. Kubokawa, Ineko (1935) ‘Osoroshiki mujun’ (The Dreadful Contradiction), in Fujin kōron 20: 10 (October), 74–81. Kubokawa, Ineko (1936a) ‘Kurenai (1)’ (Crimson), in Fujin kōron 21: 1 (January), 234–49. Kubokawa, Ineko (1936b) ‘Kurenai (2)’, in Fujin kōron 21: 2 (February), 230–44. Kubokawa, Ineko (1936c) ‘Kurenai (3)’, in Fujin kōron 21: 3 (March), 286–301. Kubokawa, Ineko (1936d) ‘Kurenai (4)’, in Fujin kōron 21: 4 (April), 210–25. Kubokawa, Ineko (1936e) ‘Kurenai (5)’, in Fujin kōron 21: 5 (May), 354–71. Kubokawa, Ineko (1938a) ‘Shokuba no ikoi’ (Relaxation in the Workplace), in Fujin kōron: 23: 3 (March), 18–22. Kubokawa, Ineko (1938b) ‘Banka’ (The Late Summer), in Chūō kōron 53: 8 (August), 32–63. Kubokawa, Ineko (1938c) Kurenai, Tokyo: Chūō kōronsha. Kubokawa, Ineko (1938d) ‘Shokuba o owareru joseitachi ni’ (To Women Displaced from Their Workplace), in Fujin kōron 23: 10 (December), 402–9. Matsuda, Fumiko (ed.) (1965) Fujin kōron no gojū-nen (Fifty Years of Fujin kōron), Tokyo: Chūō kōronsha. Sata, Ineko (1977–79) Sata Ineko zenshū (Complete Works of Sata Ineko), 18 vols, Tokyo: Kōdansha. Sata, Ineko (1983) Nenpu no gyōkan (Between the Lines of My Chronology), Tokyo: Chūō kōronsha. Sata, Ineko (1987) ‘Crimson’, in Tanaka Yukiko (ed. & trans.) To Live and to Write: Selections by Japanese Women Writers, 1913–1938, Seattle: Seal Press, 167–80. Sata, Ineko (2004) ‘Re-presenting the Self: Between the Lines of My Personal Chronology’, in Loftus, Ronald P. (ed. & trans.) Telling Lives: Women’s Self-Writing in Modern Japan, Honolulu: University of Hawaiʽi Press, 185–228. Sata, Ineko (2016) ‘Crimson’, in Perry, S. (ed. & trans.) Five Faces of Japanese Feminism: Crimson and Other Works, Honolulu: University of Hawaiʽi Press, 126–261. Satō, Takumi (2001) ‘Shuppan baburu no naka no fashizumu’ (Fascism in the Publishing ‘Bubble’), in Hideto, Tsuboi (ed.) Henken to iu manazashi: Kindai Nihon no kansei (The Gaze of Prejudice: Sensibilities of Modern Japan), Tokyo: Seikyūsha, 126–49. Silverberg, Miriam (2006) Erotic Grotesque Nonsense: The Mass Culture of Japanese Modern Times, Berkeley, CA & Los Angeles: University of California Press. Sipos, George T. (2013) The Literature of Political Conversion (tenkō) of Japan, PhD thesis, The University of Chicago, Chicago. Takeuchi, Emiko (1994) ‘Sata Ineko Kurenai-ron: “Watashi” e no manazashi, aruiwa “kaku koto” e no unagashi’ (On Sata Ineko’s Kurenai: Gazing on the “Self ”, or Urging to “Write”), in Ensō: Kindaibungakuronshū 3, 29–39. Yamakawa, Kikue (1930) ‘Gendai fujin zasshi’ (Contemporary Women’s Magazines), in Keizai ōrai 5: 12 (November), 110–14. Yamakawa, Kikue (1937) ‘Shōrai no ifuku to jūtaku’ (The Future of Clothing and Housing), in Fujin kōron 22: 11 (November), 98–103. Yamashita, Etsuko (1991) Mazakon bungakuron: Jubaku toshite no ‘haha’ (Mother Complex Literatures: The ‘Mother’ as Spell), Tokyo: Chūō kōronsha.

13 MYTHIC REALITY, BATTLEFIELD SURVIVAL AND PSYCHOSOCIAL CONVERSION IN YOSHIDA MITSURU’S THE END OF BATTLESHIP YAMATO David Stahl

Introduction While tenkō in transwar Japan is typically thought of in terms of coerced ideological conversion, lived experiences of battlefield defeat eventuated in equally momentous changes of hearts and minds.1 In his first-person recollective account, Senkan Yamato no saigo (The End of Battleship Yamato 1974), Yoshida Mitsuru2 creates narrative memory of the enduring psychological effects of indoctrination into Japanese imperial ideology and how the overwhelming existential realities of modern combat, defeat, loss of Japan’s mythical battleship and naked survival combined to break the spell of thraldom with glorified death and to prepare the way for the psychosocial rebirth of an autonomous human being once again able to recognize, respect and value life – and death – for their own sakes. By recreating his unfolding experience just before, during and after the failed Battle of Okinawa and interweaving hard-won postwar insights and lessons, Yoshida succeeds in documenting, critiquing and forewarning his readers regarding how mythic ideologies can insidiously eventuate in the inversion of life and death, the collectivization, dehumanization and automatonization of man and the anthropomorphization of the war machine and the willingness to embrace sacrificial annihilation.3 To assist in our understanding and appreciation of these integral aspects of Yoshida’s depiction of his major psychosocial turning point experience, I open with discussion of Lawrence LeShan’s psychological concepts of ‘sensory reality’ and ‘mythic reality’ and highlight key elements of John Dower’s explication of the imperial ideology which informed and shaped the War, the way in which it was prosecuted and its increasingly catastrophic outcomes. LeShan writes that: we now understand that we habitually organize our perceptions of reality in a variety of ways, with the ability to shift from one way to another without

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necessarily being aware that we are doing so.  .  .  . When we go to war, our perception of reality  – of what we are and what is happening in the world around us – is quite different from that which we commonly use in peacetime. (LeShan 2002: 3) Since we are already familiar with sensory reality from our own normal, everyday modes of perceiving, experiencing and responding to the world, I will focus primarily on LeShan’s treatment of the alternate reality and altered state of consciousness characteristic of extraordinary wartime conditions. According to LeShan, our restructuring of reality during times of war resembles that commonly seen in fairy tales and mythical narratives such as Cinderella, The Wizard of Oz and The Lord of the Rings.4 When we shift to the mythical mode, the complexities of the world are reduced to black and white, Good and Evil, Us and Them, absolutely right and absolutely wrong; we are convinced that the great motivating forces of the cosmos, such as God, Heaven or History are on our side; we care only about the results, not the root causes, of armed conflict; life is simple – there is only one major problem that started with an evil act on the part of the enemy and ‘can only be solved by breaking his will or by making him helpless to act on it’; and we are convinced that the outcome of the war will fundamentally change the world for good (ibid.: 35–6). This mythical restructuring of reality not only ‘inspires people to great heights of loyalty and self-sacrifice, and a willingness to suffer great hardship, injury, and even death’ (ibid.: 42) but is also marked by a tenacious optimism, a firm belief that since Good always prevails, ‘even defeats are seen as just ongoing action . . . and action, we know, will eventually lead to victory’ (ibid.: 50). It is important to bear in mind that this ‘sudden total realignment in perspective’ (ibid.: 40) is instigated by ideological indoctrination. According to John Dower, Japanese ideologues were mainly concerned with inculcating the uniqueness, ‘purity’ and superiority of the ‘Yamato race’ vis-à-vis other peoples and cultures. He explains that such ‘intense self-preoccupation ultimately led to the propagation of an elaborate mytho-history which emphasized the divine origins of the Japanese imperial line and the exceptional racial and cultural homogeneity of the Japanese people’ (Dower 1986: 205). Dower goes on to introduce a pivotal propaganda document that goes far towards identifying key elements of mythic reality associated with the Asia Pacific War: the enemy’s ‘selfish desire for world conquest’ made war unavoidable, and Japan’s cause was a moral one. The country’s goal was to create a ‘new world order’. . . . [T]he conflict [was] a holy war for the establishment of eternal world peace.  .  .  . The purpose of domestic propaganda was to spiritually mobilize the Japanese for a protracted conflict and inspire them to take up ‘shield and spear’ to destroy evil, bring about justice, and protect the country’s ‘shining history of 2,600 years’. (ibid.: 205–6)

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Dower also writes that Japanese subjects were indoctrinated: to see the conflict in Asia and the Pacific as an act which could purify the self, the nation, Asia, and ultimately the whole world. All Japanese were to participate in this process, not merely those on the battlefield; but the purest accomplishments . . . entailed the greatest sacrifices, culminating in the supreme sacrifice of life itself. (ibid.: 215–6) In this way  – especially once the tides of war turned decisively against Japan – gyokusai, or ‘sacrificial death in battle’, was increasingly glorified, aestheticized and demanded as a paramount act of honor and patriotism. Dower closes his essay with the following observation: In the spring of 1945. . . the gyokusai phrase . . . was extended to embrace every man, woman, and child of the Yamato race. Beginning around April, a new slogan appeared: ichioku gyokusai, ‘the shattering of the hundred million like a beautiful jewel.’ The supreme sacrifice and ultimate state of purification, by this terrible logic, had finally come to mean readiness to embrace extermination. (ibid.: 232–3) In the following analysis of The End of Battleship Yamato, I divide discussion into the various altered states of consciousness Yoshida describes himself experiencing and shifting between before, during and after battle with an eye to articulating the profound psychological effects of ideological indoctrination, and how direct exposure to the overwhelming sensory realities of modern combat, overwhelming defeat and survival functioned to weaken and break the psychological spell of mythic reality and the vital lessons Yoshida draws from his haunting passage from mythical death and destruction to psychosocial rebirth as an individuated human being.5

Pre-battle experience Yoshida’s literary recreation of his pre-battle experience as a twenty-two-year-old junior officer on the bridge during the Yamato’s final mission contains clear evidence of mythic reality. It is prominent, for instance, in Admiral Toyoda’s farewell address to the men of the Yamato, as well as in their reaction to it: This task force of the Imperial Navy, in cooperation with the army, is about to stake its entire air, sea, and land might on an all-out attack against enemy ships in the vicinity of Okinawa. The fate of the empire hangs in the balance.6 For this occasion we have organized a naval special attack force and have given it orders for an attack unparalleled in its heroic bravery. We have

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done this to exalt the glorious tradition of the surface forces of the Imperial Navy, gathering together the might of the Imperial Navy for this one battle, and to transmit its glory to posterity. Let each unit, special attack unit or no, fight fiercely, annihilate the enemy task force at every turn, and thereby make secure for all eternity the foundations of the empire. (Yoshida 1985: 31–2)7 After listening to this heady exhortation, the men all bow in the direction of the divine emperor, sing the national anthem (kimigayo) and shout banzai. The code name of their mission, Operation Tenichigo, too, is evocative of mythic reality: according to Yoshida, the ten of Tenichigo, which means ‘heaven’, probably derived from the phrase ‘a heaven-sent opportunity to reverse one’s fortunes’ (kaisei no tenki). After making this connection, Yoshida asks, ‘In the face of the all-out storming of Okinawa by the American forces, won’t heaven grant us divine resources to reverse the fortunes of this war?’ (6–7). The indisputable centrepiece of mythic reality is the great, ‘unsinkable’ battleship itself. This is made clear in an early description: ‘The Yamato’s gigantic body of 73,000 tons, hull painted a uniform silver-white, displays on [its]8 sturdy prow the imperial chrysanthemum crest: titanic, immovable, the Yamato dominates the scene’ (5). This crest is intimately associated with the emperor and the name of the battleship with Japan. The combination of these weighty associations and the description of the ship’s ‘gigantic body’ (kyotai), moreover, readily bring to mind the central ideological element of kokutai (‘national polity/body’). In his depictions of pre-battle perceptions and experiences, Yoshida writes frequently about the extraordinary honour of serving on the Yamato, the need to fight selflessly and single-mindedly and the imperative to die a ‘worthy death’. And he clearly believed that these attitudes and values were shared by every one of his brothers in arms: as he asserts early on, ‘the 3,000 men of the crew. All shipmates in battle, one in body and spirit’ (isshin dōtai) (23). Be that as it may, the decisive shift to the mythic reality mode does not psychologically preclude or prevent instances of rational, objective, practical thinking. On the bridge just before battle, Yoshida listens to officers discuss the grave prospects of the ‘decisive battle’ (kessen) for Okinawa (Operation Kikusui), which hinges on all-out attacks on American landing forces by land-based kamikaze planes, and conclude that ‘there is a very strong likelihood that the special attacks will miscarry’ (35). This realization, along with the knowledge that the Yamato will have absolutely no air cover, leads to sober assessments and critical questions regarding its role in the mission: That being the case, it is deemed wise to have the Yamato act for the duration as decoy to draw off the swarm of American interceptors and weaken those defenses. . . . Our real aim is to become the target of a concentrated attack by the crack American task force. . . . Bravery? Recklessness? (ibid.)

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In the end, most officers agree that Operation Tenichigo, too, is doomed to failure (39). Yoshida goes on to write, however, that one Lt Usubuchi effectively saves the day by finding alternative meaning, purpose and value in their collective sacrificial deaths: To lose and be brought to one’s senses [makete, mezameru koto]: that is the supreme path. . . . How else can Japan be saved except by losing and coming to its senses? . . . We will lead the way. We will die as harbingers of Japan’s new life (shinsei). (40) Knowing intellectually that he is actually on ‘an expedition to certain death’ (18), Yoshida alternates between efforts to register the existential reality that he is going to die and attempts to persuade himself that his death in combat will be an act of unprecedented valour and significance. As he departs Japan, he wonders if he will ever return, greet another spring or see cherry blossoms in his native land again. The awareness that he is having his last breakfast leaves him shaking his head in disbelief. And the taste of polished rice during his final lunch, while delicious, is haunted by ‘dark premonitions’ (58). Yoshida relies on mythic images of glorious battle to assuage his mounting anxiety and apprehension. When perceiving reality in the mythic mode, he not only sees the upcoming battle as inherently meaningful but even looks forward to it. Yoshida’s memoir opens with the following: This is it – the sortie we’ve been waiting for. . . . How we have awaited this moment! Ours is the signal honour of being the nation’s bulwark. One day we must prove ourselves worthy. . . . Let’s push forward and seek the decisive battle! Let’s fight it out with the American task force! (3–4) Yoshida goes on to reassure himself that the naval engagement will be a ‘rare trial by fire’ (16), one in which he and his comrades will have to rely on their high degree of readiness and ‘determined fighting spirit’ (tōkon) (18). As the day of reckoning draws near, he grasps for expressions evocative of a profound sense of history and destiny such as ‘the arrow has been loosed’ (ya wa hanataretari) (30), and ‘the die is cast’ (mohaya subete sadamareri) (34). Nevertheless, on the day before battle, he still seems to be struggling to absorb the actuality that he is about to experience combat: ‘We are about to do battle. We are about to do battle. Tomorrow is the day of battle. We must fight singlemindedly, with no second thoughts’ (46). Such efforts have mixed results symptomatic of incipient psychic splitting, ‘Ah, who would have thought I would stand the Yamato’s final watch? . . . Keeping watch is so difficult, and the duties of watch are so important! I feel as if my cheeks are twitching. Is the tension so great?’ (58). This pre-battle dissonance in thought and physical reaction naturally gives rise to

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unsettling moments of anxiety, confusion and doubt. Yoshida’s main line of defence against such instances of mental destabilization is to ward them off by forcing himself to stop pursuing disturbing lines of thought and self-questioning and to absorb himself completely in his duties. At one point early on he asks: Still, how to reconcile my awareness that we are not yet ready with my conviction that we must win [hisshō no shinnen]? What is it, anyway, this conviction that we must win? Don’t get side-tracked. This will be a rare trial by fire. When the moment of attack comes, just give it our best. (16) One of Yoshida’s most challenging and revealing experiences comes when he composes his final letter home: What to do about a mother’s grief? Is there any way that I, unfilial in dying ahead of her, can now console her? . . . No. Chin up. What is left inside me is battle, nothing more. I am a warrior about to take the field, nothing more. Don’t picture her bent over in grief. . . . I can only submit and die. I can only hope that my death will bear fruit. Rejoice, mother, if I am lucky enough to die a death of which I need not be ashamed. . . . Why is it that even at this moment my father’s grief is so little in my thoughts? For only a moment does my memory summon up the rather lonely sight of his back as he drinks his evening sake. (27–8) What is involved here and elsewhere in the text is a fundamental internal discord between two contradictory belief and value systems. On the one hand, there is the indoctrinated imperial ideology according to which the divine emperor, or father of the ‘family nation’ (kazoku kokka), is paramount and the most fitting object of love, loyalty, devotion and self-sacrifice. He is simultaneously the physical embodiment and representative of the national essence (kokutai) and by extension the masculine, militarized state/country. Love for the emperor and all he stands for (aikoku, ‘patriotism’, literally ‘love of country’), up to and including the Yamato, effectively requires that the affection, filiality and devotion formerly reserved for family in general, as well as mother and all she represents in particular, be redirected accordingly. In keeping with the natural shifting of reality constructs and states of mind, however, Yoshida is momentarily able to revert to an earlier relational mentality. In contrast to how he faced east and bowed in the direction of the emperor, when Yoshida finds himself alone the night before battle, he pauses on the way up the ladder to the bridge, and his heart and mind realign with family, friends and acquaintances: Wait! Say a last prayer here for those at home. A fine opportunity. Fail to make use of it, and there won’t be another. If even a single person were to

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observe me, the sanctity of the moment would be profaned. My heart would not be in it. . . . Orienting myself according to the ship’s compass course and turning to face what I presume to be the direction of home, I grip the handrail tightly and bow my head. . . . Father, mother, older sister. . . . They stand clearly before me. . . . People I have met in my short life and cannot forget. . . . I pay my respects to them as if they really stood in front of me. . . . ‘I am grateful to you’, I whisper repeatedly, instinctively. . . . ‘Please permit me to hope for one beam of light on my path [to certain death]. That you will have joys in the future. That you will have the blessings of a new life [shinsei]. Never underestimate how precious life is’ [seimei no tōtosa]. (44–5) Here, we see Yoshida perceiving and responding to an alternate set of relationships and values that differ markedly from those dictated by imperial ideology. Perhaps most important among them is the reassessment of life – not death – as being of supreme value, importance and sanctity. While Yoshida is and continues to be capable of warding off such humanizing, yet destabilizing trains of thought and feelings, he concurrently bears troubled witness to comrades who ‘fail’ to do so, who break down, grieve, despair and who become incapacitated before and, increasingly, during battle. When the full sensory and existential realities of their grave predicament break through the protective psychological shell of mythic reality, the men are immediately confronted by the unbearable prospect of meaningless, gratuitous death and the loss of loved ones who, in every important instance, turn out to be female: mothers, sisters, girlfriends, fiancées, new brides, wives, etc.

Experience of battle and overwhelming defeat The extent to which Yoshida is psychologically insulated by mythic reality and altered states of consciousness once the battle begins is remarkable. On the one hand, he is traumatized by the brutal experiential actualities of the modern battlefield, and his overwhelmed emotions become dissociated from cognition and awareness of the terrifying suffering, death and destruction occurring all around him; on the other, he embraces and succumbs to seductive notions of the ‘ease’ and ‘sweetness’ of death in combat. When the battle commences, Yoshida, who cannot experience it as reality, ‘mechanically’ takes up his duties on the bridge. As the idea that the final battle is underway gradually sinks in, his thoughts and reactions – or lack thereof – show that he has entered an extraordinary frame of mind marked by psychic splitting, conflicting thoughts, sensations and facial expressions and emotional numbing: My baptism of fire [ware wa uijin]. I feel like puffing out my chest and my legs want to dance; restraining myself, I measure the weight pressing down my knees. As my whole body tingles with excitement, I observe my own exhilaration; as I grit my teeth, I break into a grin. A sailor near me is felled

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by shrapnel. In the midst of the overwhelming noise, I distinguish the sound of his skull striking the bulkhead; amid the smell of gunpowder all around, I smell blood. (64) Yoshida’s radically detached, altered state of mind becomes increasingly apparent when he goes to check on the aft radar compartment after receiving word that it has taken a direct hit. Rushing to the ladder, he encounters tangible evidence of the terrible human destruction wrought by mechanized warfare, ‘To the right of the rail, as if eating into the iron bulkhead, a chunk of flesh. I brush it off with my elbow, and it goes sliding away’ (68). Upon reaching the gutted radar compartment, he is confronted by a far more intimate – and utterly incomprehensible and inassimilable – scene of carnage belying metaphorical abstractions such as trial by fire and baptism of fire: I notice a chunk of flesh smashed onto a panel of the broken bulkhead, a red barrel of flesh about as big around as two arms can reach. It must be a torso from which all extremities – arms, legs, head – have been ripped off. Noticing four hunks scattered nearby, I pick them up and set them in front of me. . . . The smell of fat is heavy in the air. . . . As I lift them, they are still hot from burning: when I run my hand over them, they feel like the bark of a rough tree. My fellow officers and men who were alive and at work here until a few minutes ago, and these hunks of flesh: one and the same, separated only by time! How can I believe that? The lives lodged in these four bodies – where have they gone? . . . What emptiness! How did they die, those beings who only a moment ago were so real? I cannot stop doubting, stop marveling. It is not grief and resentment. It is total disbelief. As I touch these hunks of flesh, for a moment I am completely lost in thought [bōga]. (70–1) When the cacophony of the next wave of aerial attack breaks through into this strange ‘reverie’, Yoshida snaps out of it, reminds himself that he has duties to perform and returns to the bridge at the double: ‘I rush up the ladder, spurring on my daunted self, whipping up my hostility, repeating in a loud voice the report I must deliver to the division officer, ‘All crew dead; instruments completely destroyed; compartment unusable’ (72). When reports come in that the aft water-control headquarters necessary for correcting the list, too, have been destroyed, Yoshida writes, ‘The staff officers on the bridge are mute, speechless’, and then revealingly he asks, ‘Heaven isn’t on our side [ten ware ni kumisezaruka]?’ (81). Before long, the Yamato is heavily damaged, its turrets fly skyward and the ship lists irreversibly. Even as he witnesses the embodiments of the ‘pride of the Japanese Navy’ break down, despair, become incapacitated and succumb to the ‘god of death’ (shinigami) (89), with the exception of the internal self-interrogations to

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be considered next, Yoshida remains relatively undaunted and ‘functional’ until the bitter end. Nonetheless, he too in his own way progressively submits psychologically to the ‘god of death’. The first intimations of this can be seen in his thraldom with and aestheticization of instruments and instances of death and destruction: ‘Forming beautiful patterns, the torpedo tracks chase after our giant stern. . . . The torpedoes hit aft. Floating in the air for a moment, the stern is mantled in pillars of flame, pillars of water’ (95). And even after the Yamato is ‘mortally wounded’, Vice Admiral Itō calls an end to the operation (unbeknownst to Yoshida), and the ship begins to capsize and sink, Yoshida still cannot adequately fathom what is happening: At this point I still do not dream that Yamato’s final gasp is near. My mind has realized long since that the end is near; but my emotions, a different matter, blaze up, irrationally. Is it because of the severe strain that has gone on so long? Or have I been bewitched by the magnificence of this giant ship? (104) The full degree to which Yoshida remains transfixed and captivated by the awful ‘beauty’ and allure of death, dying and decimation can be seen in his vivid descriptions of his and his shipmates’ extraordinary mental states just before the ship goes down: At what do they gaze with ecstatic eyes? The eddies, extending as far as they can see. The boiling waves, interlocking in a vast pattern. Pure white and transparent, like ice congealing around this giant ship and propping [it] up. And the sound of the waves, deafening our ears, induces still deeper rapture. . . . ‘Are we sinking?’ For the first time, as if on fire, I ask myself that question. . . . Bodies flying in all directions . . . become mere gray dots and scatter in all directions, effortlessly, happily. . . . In multiple mirrors the water engulfs human figures. (115–6) Yoshida describes having two serious verbal confrontations with himself during the extraordinary moments leading up to the sinking of the Yamato in which he consciously tries to resist, yet psychologically succumbs to the authority, ‘ease’, ‘peace’, ‘relief ’ and ‘sweetness’ of death. While such self-interrogations are most likely the products of post-survival reflection and imagination, they nonetheless portray him meaningfully engaged in self-critical internal debates involving the mesmerizing mythical reality and terrifying sensory reality of his life-and-death predicament: Suddenly, from within, a voice. ‘You, you on the brink of death. Embrace death; enjoy the anticipation of death. . . . You, what do you have to show for your life?  .  .  . Isn’t there anything at all you can be proud of at this moment?’ . . . ‘My life has been short. I’m too young. . . . Let me alone. Let

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me go. Don’t transfix me. Don’t tear me apart. I know better than anyone else how miserable it is to die’. (100) The second, more sustained instance begins similarly and occurs when Yoshida is obviously in a radically altered state of consciousness: Though there is no letup in the sounds of destruction hastening the end of fighting, I am oblivious; only a gentle silence touches my ears. Everything I see shines with a white light. I gaze in wonder, as if my eyes were seeing things for the first time. . . . Space comes to a stop before me; time freezes around me. I am I and yet not I. Barely a few instants, this interval. Again, the voice from inside my chest presses me, virtually out loud. ‘You, I pity you. Finally given in to death? Think: do you have anything at all to be proud of?’. . . . ‘Cut it out. Don’t cross-examine me. I’ll be the judge of myself ’. The voice, with a derisive laugh: ‘Judge yourself? Ha! You fool. Judging yourself even as you are being engulfed in the stench of death! Still deceiving yourself even at this late hour?’ ‘Leave me alone. Don’t take this last brief moment of ease too from me. . . . I’m sinking: Where am I going? . . . Please kill me. Rescue me from this fathomless terror. Kill me’. (106–7) As noted at the outset, Yoshida portrays Yamato as if it were an animate, living, belligerent being and the crew as its depersonalized, automatonized components. Such anthropomorphism and dehumanization, too, are insidious by-products of imperial ideology constructs and brutal military training and discipline, and Yoshida demonstrates that nothing short of the total defeat and destruction and loss of this mythical warship – and all it embodies and stands for – was a powerful enough actuality to break the deadly spell of glorified mass self-destruction and create psychological possibilities for re-humanization, individuation and return to life. Yoshida characterizes the bridge of the Yamato as ‘the heart and brains of the ship’ (31). As the vessel comes under increasingly devastating bombardment and torpedo attack, he describes ship and crew collectively as being ‘on one leg and limping’ (83). When the communications compartment is subsequently flooded after suffering torpedo strikes, Yoshida observes, ‘take away ears and mouth, and even a giant [kyojin] can do little’ (89). The pivotal passage in this regard comes during the fifth wave of aerial bombardment: ‘This giant body is left to total disintegration [bunretsu]; its parts [saibō, lit. ‘cells’], lacking connection with each other, head separately on the path to destruction’ (93). As Yamato is relentlessly bombed, torpedoed and strafed, it is progressively ‘covered all over with wounds’ (95), ‘paralyzed’ (96) and, in the end, left helplessly ‘writhing in agony on the surface of the water’ (98). The death blow is delivered by torpedo bombers concentrating on the ship’s ‘exposed and vulnerable belly’ (99). Just before sinking, moreover, a loyal

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sailor respectfully attends to the ‘soul’ (seimei) of the Yamato (its battle ensign) just before it touches the water (114).

Post-battle and survival experience Yoshida treats his miraculous post-battle survival in terms of a desperate internal struggle to overcome his fixation on death and fight for life, for physical and spiritual rebirth. He symbolically prepares for the latter in his characterization of the bloody aftermath left on the bridge: ‘even though we have cleared away the lumps of flesh that were scattered all over, the bloodstains remain, like birthmarks’ (aza) (86). Although Yoshida was unaware of it at the time, Admiral Itō had already called an end to Operation Tenichigo and given orders for the remaining ships of the task force to rescue survivors and to return home. Consequently, when the captain orders all hands on deck, Yoshida assumes that the time has come for collective suicide. His potential for turning away from death, however, is noticeable in his description of his conflicted reaction to this directive: Around me, all at once, I see no one. The command ‘All hands on deck’, manipulating the exhausted survivors like puppets, has lured them to leave the bridge. My post: should I  leave it? The bridge: a capital place to die. Nothing left for me to do here? . . . For a moment, an involuntary restlessness. As if possessed by something, I stick my fingers in the grating of the deck and clamber up onto the lookout stand. (112) Yoshida’s vital loss of self-control at this critical juncture signals his reviving will to live. As he subsequently stands on deck once again enraptured by the mesmerizing sights and sounds of death and destruction all around him, he is thrown into the roiling waters: Just as my heart delights for a moment in this beauty, this gracefulness, I am swept into a large whirlpool. Without thinking, I draw as deep a breath as I can. Grabbing my feet and rolling up into a ball, like a baby in the womb, I brace myself and do my utmost to avoid being injured [and am] tossed up, thrown down, beaten, torn limb from limb. (116) Thus does Yoshida describe his movement from the sacrificial ‘birthmarks’ of his comrades’ deaths on the bridge to his own instinctive foetal positioning and endurance of the throes of existential rebirth. Eventually, Yoshida miraculously resurfaces to bear witness to comrades who go mad and sink from swallowing too much heavy oil and young sailors who call out to their mothers just before drowning (123). His experiences of intense, ‘unreasoning anger’ (125) and tears of joy upon seeing a comrade smile at him in recognition of the blessing of their mutual survival are

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important indications that he is gradually returning to life emotionally. Here again, Yoshida takes up his officer’s duties, gathers together fellow survivors and leads them on an epic swim to a destroyer engaged in rescue operations. After helplessly watching desperate acts of survival egoism in which drowning men latch onto others desperately clinging to ropes and pull them back down to their deaths, Yoshida, again ‘driven on by something involuntary’ (onozukara naru mono ni kararete) (132), fights on to save a handful of men before finally realizing that he is alone in the water. While Yoshida may have been physically reborn by curling up like a foetus and passing through an oceanic ‘womb’ of obstructions and violently contracting waters to emerge anew into the external world, his full psychological, spiritual, volitional and personal rebirth is not only still before him but ultimately impossible without overcoming the powerful enticements offered by death of rest, peace, oblivion and irresponsibility. In the end, Yoshida finds himself locked in a life-and-death battle with himself: Unexpectedly, in front of my eyes, a rope ladder. . . . Pitching forward, I grab hold. . . . My strength falls away, seems about gone. It falters, as if to test whether I really am attached to life. With half my body about to be carried away by the waves, I fight desperately against my own body – Let go? Shall I let go? Okay, just unclench my fingers a bit, let them slide off. That’s all it takes. To be at ease, a peace like that of sleep – I yearn to be at ease. I’ll simply go ahead and die. Ah, how sweet death is, how easy! ‘You can do it! You can do it!’ Voices of sailors from the deck above, piercing my ears. . . . A voice within me calls: ‘Live! Live!’ . . . For the first time, for really the first time, the will to live [inochi o motomuru iji] fills me. It is not a desire, that I should like to live; it is an obligation, that I must live. Just as my physical body is on the point of dying, my soul [konpaku] finally ignites; with everything stripped away, only that which is truly me remains. (132–3, emphasis in original)

Critiques, warnings, insights and life lessons When Yoshida reflects on his extraordinary battlefield experience from a postwar sensory reality perspective, he cannot help but be sharply critical of himself and his comrades. After being indoctrinated into an imperial ideology promising certain, ‘heaven-sent’ victory, honourable death and unprecedented martial pride and glory, overwhelmed by the traumatizing experiential actualities of modern war and defeat, disillusioned and reborn as an autonomous, life-embracing individual, Yoshida has gained hard-won insights and lessons to pass on to posterity. Yoshida is unsparingly hard on himself and his compatriots for blindly embracing mythic reality. This can be seen early on in his reevaluation of an incident in which a junior officer drops his sake cup during a pre-battle farewell ritual: Raising his glass in toast, assistant navigator Ensign Suzuki loses his grip on it; it falls to the deck, shattering into a thousand pieces. . . . He pales and is

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crestfallen. . . . Our scornful glances pour in on him immediately – on the eve of departure, why should omens have frightened us? And what were we relying on, those of us who held him in contempt? How did we maintain our calm? In fact, weren’t we deluding ourselves that our own deaths would have the honour due to the chosen few? Imagining that we would die spectacular deaths in the suicide attack, weren’t we clinging to the excitement of the extraordinary? . . . We deceived [itsuwareru] ourselves. What awaited us was death and nothing else. Death beyond a doubt. No matter how splendid is raiment, death is death. . . . Only Ensign Suzuki had gone beyond illusion and faced up to his own death. (19) It is significant that Yoshida stresses here and elsewhere that he and his brothers in arms actively deluded themselves as opposed to having been passively deceived by others. In so doing, he pivots to place responsibility and blame firmly with the individuals who bought into, embraced and acted in accordance with imperial ideology and who fell for its mythical glorification and the aestheticization of sacrificial self-destruction. Yoshida returns to this important point toward the end of his memoir. While his closing assertions are scathingly self-critical and seemingly paradoxical, they make sense in light of his fundamental postwar insight that the cost of believing in the ‘divine Emperor’ and ‘holy war’ being waged in his name, faith in the Yamato as a mythical, omnipotent, ‘unsinkable’ warship and singleminded devotion to martial obligations and duties was the loss of humanity itself: I did not choose death of my own free will; rather, death seized me. There is no easier death. It is not a death of the spirit [seishin]; it is a death of the flesh [nikutai]. It is not the death of a human being; it is the death of an animal. . . . Did I look death in the face for even a single moment? . . . In the last moments, did I have even the slightest sense that life was worth living? I do not know death. I have not come into contact with death. What spared me a confrontation with death, I see now, was the extraordinariness of battle. . . . The road to an inevitable death is broad and smooth. . . . We ought to revere death solely because it is natural. Just as we revere Nature. If so, ask about our experience not on the grounds that we faced certain death. . . . Didn’t I submit to death quite willingly? Didn’t I cloak myself in the proud name of special attack and find rapture in the hollow of death’s hand? (148–50) Yoshida is especially censorious of the catastrophic Tenichigo Operation, the greater Kikusui Operation and the conduct of the final stages of the war more generally. He subsequently learned that, based on his own objective assessment of the strategy and tactics proposed at the time, Vice Admiral Itō had expressed strong opposition to the operation from the beginning and called attention to the obvious disadvantages of having absolutely no air support and woefully inferior surface

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forces (13). Faced with the resolute opposition of the entire staff of Task Force II, up to and including Admiral Itō, it was decided back in Tokyo that ‘only personal persuasion had any prospect of success’ (37). Consequently, Admiral Kusaka, chief of staff of the Combined Fleet, was dispatched to convince his old friend and former classmate to agree to carry through with the assigned mission (ibid.). Upon arrival, however, he does little more than mouth a variation of Admiral Toyoda’s farewell exhortation. Itō was wholly unmoved by Kusaka’s ‘rhetorical flourishes’ and ‘was won over at last only after receiving the final word – “you are being requested to die gloriously, heralding the deaths of 100,000,000 Japanese who prefer death to surrender [ichioku gyokusai]” ’ (38). From the time he took his seat on the bridge on the day the battle began until he withdrew into his private quarters to commit suicide after calling an end to the operation, Admiral Itō sat ‘with arms folded, like a rock amid the smoke of the guns and the rain of bullets. All those around him [would] be killed or wounded, but he [would] move not at all’ (61–2). Seeking retrospectively to understand the significance of his behavior, Yoshida asks: Was he too proud to assert control over this operation forced through over his opposition, opposition so strong that he risked losing his command? Or was this his silent protest against the fate of being remembered as the highestranking officer of an operation that will live on in naval annals for its recklessness and stupidity? (62) It is telling, moreover, that Yoshida includes the following descriptions of the sinking of the Yamato based on a postwar reconstruction of events: At the instant the Yamato, rolling over, turns belly up and plunges beneath the waves, [it] emits one great flash of light and sends a gigantic pillar of flame high into the dark sky. . . . [T]he pillar of fire reached a height of 2,000 meters [and] the mushroom-shaped cloud rose to a height of 6,000 meters. (118) This ‘great flash of light’ and towering ‘mushroom-shaped cloud’ readily bring to mind the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and this in turn begs the question of why Yoshida would portray the Yamato’s finale in such terms. The catastrophic ‘end of the Battleship Yamato’ is linguistically and symbolically associated with the ‘end of Imperial Japan’ and ‘end of the war’ that was punctuated by apocalyptic nuclear attacks. As with the Battle for Leyte Island, the decisive battle for Okinawa called for desperate, reckless, ‘stupid’ and ultimately useless military operations that went against all reason and common sense and eventuated in nothing but gratuitous, mass loss of life and the prolongation of a war already long since lost. Had Japanese leaders been able to break the spell of their own mythic reality constructs, ‘come to their senses’, recognize and accept the objective, sensory

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reality of total defeat and abject failure and courageously call an end to the war instead of committing even more soldiers, subjects and dwindling resources to a series of hopeless decisive battles, the lives and futures of innumerable combatants and non-combatants at home and abroad might have been spared and the hellacious incendiary and nuclear bombings of Japanese urban centres averted. Lamentably, as Dower has observed: [The Japanese] had . . . become prisoners of their own war rhetoric – of holy war, death before dishonor, blood debts to their war dead, the inviolability of the emperor-centered ‘national polity’, the imminence of a decisive battle that would turn the tide [of the war]. Long after it had become obvious that Japan was doomed, its leaders all the way up to the emperor remained unable to contemplate surrender. They were psychologically blocked, capable only of stumbling forward. (Dower 1999: 22)

Conclusion In The End of Battleship Yamato, Yoshida vividly exposes and warns against the psychological susceptibility of leaders and followers alike to the deadly, insidious attractions, seductions and convictions of mythic reality and mythic war. In so doing, he effectively shows that people must be ever vigilant regarding any signs of political and ideological turning away from ordinary sensory reality orientations, worldviews and values. For, as is readily apparent in Admiral Toyoda’s postoperation rhetoric, integral aspects of imperial ideology, too, survived the defeat, destruction and sinking of the Yamato: In the early part of April  1945 our naval special attack forces carried out a resolute attack, unparalleled in its ferocity, against enemy forces in the vicinity of Okinawa. This action greatly enhanced the traditions of the Imperial Navy and the glory of our surface units. Many brave men, the commander in chief of the task force to the fore, laid down their lives in the noble cause of defending the Empire. Their utter sincerity in serving the country goes straight to our hearts and their unswerving loyalty will shine through the ages. I hereby acknowledge their meritorious deeds and notify the entire navy. (151–2) Yoshida’s hopes and wishes for his compatriots both in the context of a ‘decisive’ battle and after defeat can be gleaned from the comments, observations and characterizations interspersed throughout his memoir. Lt Usubuchi is undoubtedly the central figure in this regard. It was he who managed to break out of the psychological prison of imperial ideology and find new meaning, purpose and value in their

238  David Stahl

collective sacrificial deaths. After briefly reporting Usubuchi’s death in combat, Yoshida eulogies him: The young warrior who was both wise and courageous leaves behind not one bit of flesh, not one drop of blood. He hoped by dying to awaken new life. His body, offered up in the cause of a genuine national rebirth [makoto no kensetsu], has disappeared into thin air. (73) It will be recalled that, when Yoshida was ascending the ladder en route to the bridge the night before battle, he paused for a moment to reorient himself toward home, bow his head, express his thanks and gratitude to his loved ones, pray that in future they would have the ‘blessings of a new life’ and implore them never to underestimate the ‘preciousness of life’. Conspicuous in these heartfelt expressions of thought and feeling are not the emperor, empire, country, honourable death, etc., but family, nation and the sanctity of life, peace and normalcy. Following rescue and repatriation, Yoshida is granted survivor’s leave and able to reunite with the parents he was convinced he would never see again. Upon noticing the tear-soaked telegram announcing his return that he sent them, he castigates himself: Did I truly know that she would be so beside herself with grief at my death? Did I know how absolutely selfless she was? That being the case, did I know how precious life is? How despicable the slightest pride in having seen actual combat? (148) After setting forth in the closing section of his memoir the central insights he drew from his lived experience of mythic indoctrination, battle, loss, disillusion, survival and psychosocial conversion, Yoshida takes a solemn vow: ‘Make of yourself an empty vessel. Make of this moment a turning point (tenki) toward a life of constancy and dedication’ (151). While he doesn’t go on to explicitly state to what he intends to devote himself, in light of the preceding discussion, it is hard not to conclude that he resolved to become a lifelong disciple, follower and champion of life, love, family and peace. This dovetails nicely with his imagination of the final thoughts and feelings of his fallen comrades. In the concluding passage of The End of Battleship Yamato, Yoshida challenges his readers to fathom what was in their disillusioned, tormented hearts and minds at the end in the context of Admiral Toyoda’s disingenuous post-operation rhetoric: ‘The Yamato sank and [its] giant body lies shattered 200 miles northwest of Tokunoshima. 430 meters down. Three thousand corpses, still entombed today. What were their thoughts as they died?’ (152). One representative scene from the text should suffice as a revealing response to this haunting, ethical query/inquiry. As touched on earlier, Yoshida bore traumatized witness to youths who survived the sinking of the Yamato only to cry out to their mothers – not the emperor – just before drowning, ‘Many young sailors seem with their last breaths to call out their love for their mothers; then, with both hands raised as if trying in vain to grasp the sky, they go under and are gone’ (123).

The End of Battleship Yamato  239

In this essay, I  have sought to demonstrate, through analysis and interpretation of The End of Battleship Yamato, how Yoshida Mitsuru’s lived experience of indoctrination in imperial ideology, battlefield combat, defeat and survival can be approached, understood and appreciated as eventuating in a transformation of heart and mind as momentous in historical, experiential and psychosocial terms as the more widely recognized and examined instances of political tenkō discussed in other chapters in this volume. In so doing, I hope to have drawn useful attention to the integral psychological dimensions of such traumatic historical experiences and their enduring afterlives.

Notes 1 Ōe Kenzaburō’s Hiroshima Notes is another example of this type of postwar ethical/ideological conversion. For more information, see Stahl (2007). 2 Yoshida Mitsuru was born in 1923 and died in 1979. He was conscripted directly out of college, given a brief course of military training and posted to the Yamato in time to take part in its ‘special attack mission’ as part of the Battle of Okinawa in April 1945. Yoshida completed the first draft of his memoir in October 1945, but it ran afoul of prepublication censors the following year and was not published until 1952. The definitive edition of the work was first published in 1974, together with two of Yoshida’s essays, in a collected volume entitled Chinkon senkan Yamato (Requiem for Battleship Yamato). In his English translation, Richard Minear uses the title of this collected volume for that of the translated memoir itself. In this essay, I will refer to the work by using a more literal English translation of the 1978 stand-alone Japanese book title, Senkan Yamato no saigo (The End of Battleship Yamato). The memoir was written in bungotai, or ‘literary style’. For more information on the author, the text and the Battle of Okinawa, see Minear (1985). 3 Senkan Musashi no saigo author Watanabe Kiyoshi underwent a comparable transformation after surviving the sinking of the Musashi in the failed Battle for Leyte Island in October 1944. For more information, see John Dower’s examination of Watanabe’s scathingly critical memoir (‘One Man’s Shattered God’), in Dower (1999: 339–45). 4 LeShan writes that the television series, Star Trek, is a good example of a popular serial narrative based on sensory reality constructs (LeShan 2002: 50). 5 In a postwar essay, Yoshida asserts that defeat occasioned ‘the rebirth of the “human being” inside [him]’ (Minear 1985: xxvi). 6 According to Minear, this weighty phrase was first deployed in 1905 by Admiral Tōgō, just before the Battle of Tsushima (Minear 1985: xii). 7 Subsequent quotations from The End of Battleship Yamato will be referenced by page number only. 8 In an otherwise masterful translation, Minear follows the dated convention of linguistically gendering the Yamato feminine. Since there is no such equivalent in Japanese, and the Yamato is, if anything, decidedly masculine in terms of its characterizations and symbolic associations, I have taken the liberty of globally replacing the gendered possessive pronoun ‘her’ with the gender-neutral ‘its’.

References Dower, J. W. (1986) War Without Mercy: Race and Power in the Pacific War, New York: Pantheon. Dower, J. W. (1999) Embracing Defeat: Japan in the Wake of World War II, New York: The New Press. LeShan, L. (2002) The Psychology of War: Comprehending Its Mystique and Its Madness, New York: Helios Press.

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Minear, R. H. (1985) ‘Translator’s Introduction’, in Requiem for Battleship Yamato, Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press. Stahl, D. C. (2007) ‘The Way of the Survivor: Conversion and Inversion in Ōe Kenzaburō’s Hiroshima Notes’, in Hutchinson, R. & Williams, M. B. (eds.) Representing the Other in Modern Japanese Literature: A Critical Approach, London and New York: Routledge. Yoshida, M. (1985) Requiem for Battleship Yamato, Minear, R. H., trans., Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press.

INDEX

1984 (Orwell) xxxiii, 133 advertising xxviii, 203, 204 – 6, 207, 214, 215 – 16 affect xxiii, xxvi, xxxii, 92 – 3; family and xxiii; politics of xxxvii – xxxix; proletarian literature and 88; reading and 87 – 8; tenkō literature and 165; vs. theory 162 – 3 affective turn xxxviii agrarianism xxvi, xxviii, xxxiv, 188 – 90, 192, 195 ‘Aigo!’ (‘Wail!’) see ‘Wail!’ (‘Aigo!’) (Satō Sachiko) akai koi (‘red love’) 108, 117n7 Akiyama Kiyoshi 189 – 90, 194 Allied Occupation see occupation of Japan Althusser, Louis xxv, 164 American Occupation see occupation of Japan anarchism xxviii, xxxiv, 152, 185 – 96; tenkō and 188 – 91 Anarchist Communist Party of Japan 188, 193, 196n2 anti-capitalism 51 – 2, 57, 61, 153, 203, 219 anti-communism xvii, xxi, 4 anti-fascism xxii, 39, 53, 55, 58, 61 anti-Marxism 30 – 2, 151, 190 Aragane (Ore) see Ore (Aragane) (Mamiya Mosuke) Ara Masahito xxxvAsahi Shinbun xix, xxvii, 35, 38 Asakura Kikuo see Shimaki Kensaku Bakhtin, Mikhail xxxiv, 172, 176, 178 – 9, 181 – 2 ‘Birthing’ (‘Umu’) (Matsuda Tokiko) 97 – 8

‘Blindness’ (‘Mōmoku’) (Shimaki Kensaku) xxxiv, 120, 172, 175, 179 – 83 Bolshevik Revolution xvii, 108 Byakuya (Midnight Sun) see Midnight Sun (Byakuya) (Murayama Tomoyoshi) capitalism xxi, 25, 37, 66 – 7, 76 – 7, 214; affinity with Marxism 134; fascism and xxi; global xxvii, 67, 74 – 5; Japanese 12, 25, 28, 37, 186; Mamiya Mosuke and 128 – 30, 132; Matsuda Tokiko and 98; modernization and 105; ‘print capitalism’ xxvii, 161; proletarian literature and 123; Sata Ineko and 202 – 3, 213, 215, 218 – 20; Western xix, 12 catachresis xxix, 5 – 6, 17n6, 17n7; definition of 5; historical xxix, 5 – 7, 12 – 13, 16; theoretical 5, 13 ‘Charity Ward, In the’ (‘Seryōshitsu nite’) (Hirabayashi Taiko) 96 – 7 ‘Chichi wo uru’ (‘Selling Milk’) see ‘Selling Milk’ (‘Chichi wo uru’) (Matsuda Tokiko) China 54, 56 – 7, 59 – 61, 81, 195; Japanese invasion of 9, 13; Kuomintang– Communist Alliance in 54, 59; ‘re-education’ in xviii; Takeuchi Yoshimi and 65, 68 – 9, 74 – 6, 81; see also Second Sino-Japanese War ‘China incident’ 122; see also Second Sino-Japanese War Ch’oe Yongdal 54 Chūō kōron xxvii, 36, 38, 109, 198, 214 cinema xxviii, xxxiv, 193 – 5

242 Index

Collective Research: Tenkō (Kyōdō kenkyū: Tenkō) (Tsurumi Shunsuke) xxiii, 13 – 14, 40, 47 – 8, 50, 189 colonialism 37, 51, 56, 60, 75 – 6 Comintern 24 – 6, 28, 41n5, 52, 152 – 3; Sano-Nabeyama Statement and xix, 6, 36, 102 communism 9, 37, 88 – 9, 99, 108, 171 – 2; in ‘Blindness’ (Mōmoku) (Shimaki Kensaku) 180 – 1; Hayashi Fusao and 109, 145; Takami Jun and 153 conversion see tenkō Crimson (Kurenai) (Sata Ineko) xxxiv – xxxv, 104, 108 – 9, 198 – 203, 204 – 6, 207 – 20 Dadaism 152, 154 – 5, 187, 190 Daiei film studio xxxiv, 193 dairibu (mail order) 203, 207, 209, 210, 214 Das Kapital (Marx) 26, 88, 160 domicide (ie-goroshi) 105 doublethink xxxiii, 133 Dower, John 223 – 5, 237 emperor 12, 100n1, 142 – 6, 228, 235, 237 – 8; as center of family-nation xxiii, 8, 48, 106, 164; Taishō xxvii; unity of people and xxviii, xxxiv, 106, 164, 189; see also emperor system emperor system xvii, xix, xxii, 3, 36, 106, 186 Empire, the Japanese 6, 52, 55 – 7, 237 – 8; colonialism and 51, 61, 76; tenkō and xxii, xxvii, xxxv, 3, 48 – 50, 61 End of Battleship Yamato, The (Senkan Yamato no saigo) (Yoshida Mitsuru) xxxv, 223 – 39; altered states of consciousness in 225, 229 – 30, 232; ‘mythic reality’ and 223 – 6, 229, 234, 236 – 7 fake/false conversion (gisō tenkō) xxxiv, 8, 32, 190, 195 fascism 53, 58 – 9, 79 – 80; capitalism and xxi; in Japan xxv – xxvi, 82; Peace Preservation Law and 89; tenkō and xxvi, 3, 79 – 80 Foucault, Michel 162 Freud, Sigmund xxxviii, 92, 163 Fujin kōron 198 – 9, 204 – 6, 210, 212, 214, 215; ‘massification’ (taishūka) of xxviii, 203, 207 – 8 Fujita Shōzō xxiii, 16, 104, 161, 190 Fukumoto Kazuo xxix, 16 – 17, 26, 27, 40, 161 – 3; arrest of 41n11; Marxism and xxix, 26, 161; opposition toward Yamakawa Hitoshi 16, 26 Futurism 187, 190

gender 99, 109, 199, 201 – 2, 209, 211; family system and 95 – 6; reading and 97; tenkō and xxxv – xxxvii gisō tenkō see fake/false conversion Goku (Prison) see Prison (Goku) (Shimaki Kensaku) Gondō Seikyō 189, 192 Hagiwara Kyōjirō xxviii, xxxiv, 186 – 92, 194 – 6 Hagiwara Sakutarō xxii, xxvi, xxxiv, xxxix, 190 – 2 Hara Sen xxxvii Hasegawa Nyozekan 32, 38 Hayama Yoshiki xxxii, xxxix, 89, 91, 93 – 4; Letter Found in a Cement Barrel (Semento-daru no naka no tegami) xxxii, xxxix, 89 – 93; The Prostitute (Inbaifu) xxxii, 93 – 5 Hayashi Fusao xxvi, xxxii, xxxix, 137 – 46, 162 – 3; arrests of 109, 138 – 9; tenkō and xxi, xxxiii, xxxv, xxxvii, 109, 138 – 40, 145 – 6; truth (makoto) and 141 – 6; Youth (Seinen) 109, 139 – 40 Hegel, G. W. F. 66 – 8, 70 Heidegger, Martin 68, 74, 79 heteroglossia xxxiv, 176 High Treason Incident 24, 88, 100n1, 151, 167n4, 185 – 6 Hirabayashi Taiko xxxii, 96 – 7; ‘In the Charity Ward’ (‘Seryōshitsu nite’) 96 – 7 Hirano Ken xxxv – xxxvi, 95, 97, 121 – 2, 152, 154 Hiranuma Kiichirō 29, 42n16 hi-tenkō see non-conversion Honda Shūgo xxii, 15, 48, 102, 110, 115 – 16, 172 – 3 House in the Village (Mura no ie) (Nakano Shigeharu) 108, 150, 164, 177 ideological conversion see tenkō ideological crime 23, 29, 30, 35, 39; see also thought crime ie-goroshi (domicide) 105 ikkoku shakaishugi (‘socialism in one country’) xxvii, 8 Im Hwa 53 – 4, 58 imperial ideology 164, 223, 228, 232, 234 – 5, 237; see also subject, imperial Inbaifu (The Prostitute) see Prostitute, The (Inbaifu) (Hayama Yoshiki) I-novel see shishōsetsu Iser, Wolfgang xxxii, 87 – 8, 90, 93, 97 Ishikawa Sanshirō 185 – 6 Itagaki Naoko xxxi, 124, 173

Index  243

Jameson, Fredric 99, 150 Japanese Communist Party 25 – 6, 27, 28, 36, 39, 188, 199; formation of xvii, 25; tenkō and 3, 5 – 6, 10, 15, 47, 80, 164, 171; tenkō literature and 102 – 3, 173 – 6, 178, 180, 182 Japan Proletarian Arts Foundation (NAPF) xxi, 98, 153, 187 JCP see Japanese Communist Party kaishin (conversion, Chinese concept of) xxx, 65 – 8, 71, 73 – 4, 77, 79 – 80 Kaizō xxvii, 36, 38, 165 Kanno Sugako 100n1, 167n4, 185 – 6 Kawai Eijirō 32 Kawakami Hajime 26, 33, 38, 41n10 Kierkegaard, Søren 77 Kobayashi Morito xxxix, 10 – 12, 164 Kobayashi Takiji xxviii, xxxv, 95, 152 – 3; Life of a Party Member (Tō-seikatsusha) (Kobayashi Takiji) xxxv – xxxvi, 95; murder of 125, 139, 173 – 4 Kojima Yuki 11 – 12, 19n28 kokusaku bungaku see national policy literature kokutai see national polity Kokyū wasureubeki (Takami Jun) see Should Auld Acquaintance Be Forgot (Kokyū wasureubeki) (Takami Jun) Korea xix, xxi, 37, 47 – 61, 96, 220; colonial modernity in 51, 56, 60; socialism in 49, 51 – 3, 55 – 6, 60; tenkō in xxx, 47 – 61 Kōtoku Shūsui 29, 100n1, 167n4, 185 – 6 Kubokawa Ineko see Sata Ineko Kubokawa Tsurujirō 108 – 9, 199, 200, 219 Kunisada Chūji 191 – 2, 195 Kurenai (Crimson) see Crimson (Kurenai) Sata Ineko Kyōdō kenkyū: Tenkō (Collective Research: Tenkō) see Collective Research: Tenkō (Tsurumi Shunsuke) labour literature (rōdō bungaku) 187 ‘Leprosy’ (‘Rai’) (Shimaki Kensaku) xxxiv, xxxvi, 172, 175 – 9 LeShan, Lawrence 223 – 4 Letter Found in a Cement Barrel (Sementodaru no naka no tegami) (Hayama Yoshiki) xxxii, xxxix, 89 – 93 Life of a Party Member (Tō-seikatsusha) (Kobayashi Takiji) xxxv – xxxvi, 95 Lu Xun xxx, 65, 67 – 74, 82 Lu Xun (Rojin) (Takeuchi Yoshimi) 71 mail order see dairibu Mainichi Shinbun xix, xxvii

makoto see truth Mamiya Mosuke 122, 124 – 6, 128 – 34; Ore (Aragane) 124 – 8; Ore: The Sequel (Zoku-Aragane) 126, 128 – 30, 132 Manchukuo xxi, 37, 52, 75; see also Manchuria Manchuria xix, xxi, 36 – 7, 52, 60, 96, 220; see also Manchukuo Manchurian Incident xxi Maruyama Masao xxi, xxiii, 15, 151, 162 Marx xxix, 11, 24, 26, 123, 143; Das Kapital 26, 88, 160 Marxism xxv, 11, 77, 88, 132, 141, 145, 151; affinity with capitalism 134; as alien to Japan 163 – 4; anarchism and 187; Japanese 24 – 6, 37, 140, 153, 160 – 3, 165; mass media and xxvii – xxviii; tenkō and xxi, 9, 15, 23, 34, 40, 162 – 3; Western modernity and xxi, 162 masculinity xxxvi – xxxvii, 228 masses, the (taishū) xxviii, 185 – 6, 188, 192, 195, 200 – 1, 208 – 15; as consumers 203, 207, 209 – 11, 213, 218 – 20; ‘false consciousness’ and xxv; female masses 201, 209, 211; Japanese intellectuals and xxii – xxiv, 15, 47, 121, 201, 210; as nation 215, 218, 220, 221n13; proletarian/working masses xxxv, 105, 121, 133, 186, 188 massification see taishūka mass media xxvii – xxix; government authorities and xxix, 35 – 6, 38 – 40; Marxism and xxvii – xxviii; tenkō and xxix, 34 – 6, 39 – 40; see also mediatization Matsuda Tokiko xxxii, 97 – 8; ‘Birthing’ (‘Umu’) 97 – 8; ‘Selling Milk’ (‘Chichi wo uru’) 97 – 8 MAVO (art journal) 187 mediaka see mediatization mediatization (mediaka) xxii, xxxvii, 34 – 5; see also mass media Midnight Sun (Byakuya) (Murayama Tomoyoshi) xxxvi, 108, 150, 177 Minami Toshio xxxiii, 122 – 4, 131 Miyai Shin’ichi 174 – 5, 179 modernism xxiii, 89, 145, 152, 154, 190 modernity: capitalist xxvii, xxx, 66, 77, 80; colonial 51, 56, 60; crisis of xxii, xxxvii; definition(s) of 117n5; family and 107; global xxvii, 65, 80; Japanese xxiii – xxiv, 3 – 4, 13, 81; language and 70; subjectivity and 3, 76, 78, 82; tenkō and xxii, xxxvii, 4, 13; Western xxi, 71, 162 modernization xxiv, 56, 81, 105, 117n5, 214

244 Index

‘Mōmoku’ (‘Blindness’) see ‘Blindness’ (‘Mōmoku’) (Shimaki Kensaku) Mura no ie (House in the Village) see House in the Village (Mura no ie) (Nakano Shigeharu) Murayama Tomoyoshi xx, xxxvi, 108, 150, 152 – 3, 172; Midnight Sun (Byakuya) xxxvi, 108, 150, 177 ‘mythic reality’ 223 – 6, 229, 234, 236 – 7 Nabeyama Sadachika xvii, xix, 14, 38, 66; see also Sano-Nabeyama statement Nakamura Mitsuo xxxi, 111, 115, 149, 166 Nakano Shigeharu xxvi, xxxii – xxxiii, xxxvii, 66 – 7, 108, 137 – 46; arrests of 138 – 9; House in the Village (Mura no ie) 108, 150, 164, 177; tenkō of 66 – 7, 71, 139, 141, 146 NALP see Proletarian Writers League Naoki Sanjūgo xxviii NAPF see Japan Proletarian Arts Foundation (NAPF) national polity (kokutai) xxvi, 9, 104, 106, 145, 226, 237 national policy literature (kokusaku bungaku) xxxi – xxxii, 121, 124, 133 – 4Nihon e no kaiki see return to Japan non-conversion (hi-tenkō) xxii, 9, 39, 174 – 5, 179, 181 – 2 occupation of Japan xvii, 13, 39, 75 Okamoto Jun xxxiv, 186 – 8, 193 – 6 Okinawa xxxv, 223, 225 – 6, 236 – 7 Ore (Aragane) (Mamiya Mosuke) 124 – 8 Ore: The Sequel (Zoku-Aragane) (Mamiya Mosuke) 126, 128 – 30, 132 Orwell, George xxxiii, 133; 1984 xxxiii, 133 Ōsugi Sakae 24 – 5, 152, 161, 185 – 7, 193 Paek Namun 53 – 4 Peace Preservation Law (PPL) xx, 28, 29, 30 – 1, 89, 106, 138, 171; death penalty and 174 political conversion see tenkō Prison (Goku) (Shimaki Kensaku) xxxiv, 172 production literature (seisan bungaku) xxxii – xxxiii, 120 – 4, 130 – 4, 142 proletarian literature xxxii – xxxiii, 89, 93, 121, 123, 138 – 41, 201; affect and 88, 92 – 3; national policy ideology and 130 – 1; origins of 187; shishōsetsu (I-novel) and 110 – 13, 115; tenkō and 103, 115; tenkō literature and xxxii, 103, 173; women writers of 95 – 100 proletarian movement xxvii, 24, 28, 153, 175 Proletarian Writers League (NALP) xxi, 120, 125 – 6, 134

Prostitute, The (Inbaifu) (Hayama Yoshiki) xxxii, 93 – 5 Pursuit of Life (Seikatsu no tankyū) (Shimaki Kensaku) 104, 116, 164 ‘Rai’ (‘Leprosy’) see ‘Leprosy’ (‘Rai’) (Shimaki Kensaku) ‘red love’ (akai koi) 108, 117n7 ‘red menace’ 35, 38 Red Purge(s) xviii, 39 – 40, 44n44, 75 ‘return to Japan’ (Nihon e no kaiki) xix, xxii, 37, 108, 162, 192 rōdō bungaku (labour literature) 187 Rojin (Lu Xun) (Takeuchi Yoshimi) 71 Russian Revolution 24, 29, 88 Sano Manabu xvii, xix, 14, 38, 66; see also Sano-Nabeyama statement Sano-Nabeyama statement xvii, xix – xx, xxvii, 6 – 7, 34 – 8, 66, 102, 120 Sasai Suesaburō 193 Sata Ineko xxviii, xxxiv – xxxv, 104, 108 – 9, 198 – 220; as commercial writer 214, 218 – 19; Crimson (Kurenai) xxxiv – xxxv, 104, 108 – 9, 198 – 203, 204 – 6, 207 – 20; support of war effort 214 – 16, 220; tenkō of 202, 210, 212 – 13, 218 – 19 Satō Sachiko xxxii, 98 – 9; ‘Wail!’ (‘Aigo!’) 98 – 9 SCAP (Supreme Commander of the Allied Forces) 39 – 40 Second Sino-Japanese War xxx, 54 – 7, 59 – 60, 122, 199, 202 – 3 Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky xxxii, 92 – 3, 97 Seikatsu no tankyū (Pursuit of Life) see Pursuit of Life (Seikatsu no tankyū) (Shimaki Kensaku) Seinen (Youth) see Youth (Seinen) (Hayashi Fusao) seisan bungaku see production literature ‘Selling Milk’ (‘Chichi wo uru’) (Matsuda Tokiko) 97 – 8 Semento-daru no naka no tegami (Letter Found in a Cement Barrel) see Letter Found in a Cement Barrel (Semento-daru no naka no tegami) (Hayama Yoshiki) Senkan Yamato no saigo (The End of Battleship Yamato) see End of Battleship Yamato, The (Senkan Yamato no saigo) (Yoshida Mitsuru) ‘Seryōshitsu nite’ (‘In the Charity Ward’) see ‘In the Charity Ward’ (‘Seryoshitsu nite’) (Hirabayashi Taiko) Shimaki Kensaku xxxiii – xxxiv, 104, 116, 120, 171 – 83; ‘Blindness’ (‘Mōmoku’) xxxiv, 120, 172, 175, 179 – 83; early life of 172; ‘Leprosy’ (‘Rai’) xxxiv, xxxvi,

Index  245

172, 175 – 9; Prison (Goku) xxxiv, 172; Pursuit of Life (Seikatsu no tankyū) 104, 116, 164; tenkō of 171, 174 – 5 Shimane Kiyoshi 101 Shirai Kyōji xxviii shishōsetsu (I-novel) xxxi – xxxiv, 103, 108 – 16, 149 – 51, 153 – 5; as contested term 166n2; definition(s) of 110, 112, 115; as mode of reading 114; tenkō and 149, 166 shisō hanzai see thought crime Should Auld Acquaintance Be Forgot (Kokyū wasureubeki) (Takami Jun) xxxiii, xxxvi, 150 – 1, 153 – 61, 165 – 6 Singapore 220 socialism: in China 81; in Japan 88 – 9, 138; in Korea 49, 51 – 3, 55 – 6, 60; ‘in one country’ (ikkoku shakaishugi) xxvii, 8, 37; Sano-Nabeyama statement and xxvii, 6, 37 Soviet Union 26, 37, 39, 54 – 5 Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty 5 – 6 Steinhoff, Patricia xxv, 68, 104, 165, 183n1 subject, imperial 51, 164, 166; tenkō and xxxiii, xxxv, 4, 10, 13, 28 subjectivity xxxiii, 78, 82, 160 – 4, 166; Japanese 3, 13; Korean 61; male xxxvi; tenkō and xxxvi, 4, 67, 79 – 80, 160 – 4 Sugiyama Heisuke xxxi, 173 Supreme Commander of the Allied Forces see SCAP taishū see masses, the taishūka (massification) xxviii, 203, 207 – 8 Taiwan xxi, 220 Takami Jun xxxiii, xxxvi, 149 – 66; Dadaism and 152; early life of 152; Should Auld Acquaintance Be Forgot (Kokyū wasureubeki) xxxiii, xxxvi, 150 – 1, 153 – 61, 165 – 6; tenkō of 153 – 4 Takeuchi Yoshimi xxx, 65 – 82; early life of 68 – 9; Lu Xun (Rojin) 71; Lu Xun’s concept of ‘scream’ and 70 – 1, 73 tenkō (conversion): as catachresis xxix, 5 – 7, 13; as crisis of subjectivity xxxvi, 160 – 4; as cultural change xxi; definition(s) of xxi, xxiii, 3, 10, 14 – 15, 23, 101 – 2, 163, 172 – 3, 190; empire and xxii, 48 – 50, 61; gender and xxxv – xxxvii; insanity and 165, 180; in Korea xxx, 47 – 61; legal criteria for determining 8 – 9, 32 – 4; masculinity and xxxvi – xxxvii; mass media and xxix, 34 – 6, 39 – 40; modernity and xxii, xxxvii, 4, 13; political 7, 175, 183n1, 239; as psychic fracture xxii – xxiii, 163, 166; as

psychosocial rebirth xxxv, 223, 225, 233 – 4, 238 – 9; religious 10 – 11, 164, 183n1; as ‘return to Japan’ xxvi, 15, 162, 192; spiritual 174, 183n1; translations of xvii, 65; ‘vertical’ 175 tenkō bungaku see tenkō literature tenkō literature (tenkō bungaku) xxxi – xxxv, 102 – 4, 120 – 1, 125 – 6, 171 – 83; definition(s) of 103, 173; family as theme in 104 – 9; as mode of reading xxxi; proletarian literature and xxxi, 103, 173; shishōsetsu (I-novel) and xxxi, 103, 108 – 16, 149 – 51, 166 thought control xvii, xxx, 23, 28, 39, 106 thought conversion see tenkō thought crime 3 – 4, 6 – 7, 9, 35, 106, 166; see also ideological crime Tokunaga Sunao 108, 152, 172, 182 Tokyo Mannequin Club xxxvi – xxxvii Tokyo Nichinichi shinbun 199, 200 Tosaka Jun xxvi, 55, 124 Tō-seikatsusha (Life of a Party Member) see Life of a Party Member (Tō-seikatsusha) (Kobayashi Takiji) total war 50 – 1, 55 – 6, 59 – 61, 130, 134 truth (makoto) xxxiii, 111 – 12, 142 – 6 Tsurumi Shunsuke xxiii – xxiv, 13 – 15, 48 – 50, 61, 101 – 2; Collective Research: Tenkō (Kyōdō kenkyū: Tenkō) xxiii, 13 – 14, 40, 47 – 8, 50, 189 ‘Umu’ (‘Birthing’) (Matsuda Tokiko) see ‘Birthing’ (‘Umu’) (Matsuda Tokiko) ‘Wail!’ (‘Aigo!’) (Satō Sachiko) 98 – 9 women writers xxxv, 95 – 100, 198 – 201 Yamakawa Hitoshi 16, 24 – 6, 27, 37, 40, 161; arrests of 41n8 Yamanouchi Yasushi 50 Yanagita Kunio 105 Yasuda Yojūrō xxi, 69 Yokomitsu Riichi 151 – 2 Yomiuri Shinbun xix, xxvii, 8, 35, 38 Yoshida Mitsuru xxxv, 223 – 39; The End of Battleship Yamato (Senkan Yamato no saigo) xxxv, 223 – 39; ‘mythic reality’ and 223 – 6, 229, 234, 236 – 7 Yoshimoto Takaaki xxii – xxiv, 15, 47 – 8 Youth (Seinen) (Hayashi Fusao) 109, 139 – 40 Zoku-Aragane (Ore: The Sequel) see Ore: The Sequel (Zoku-Aragane) (Mamiya Mosuke)