Why is a 1920s proletarian novel a smash best seller (and film) in Japan in 2009?
[Norma Field teaches in the Department of East Asian Languages & Civilizations at the University of Chicago and is a Japan Focus associate. She is the author of In the Realm of a Dying Emperor: Japan at Century’s End.]
Japan's best-known proletarian novel, Kani Kosen (depicting conditions aboard a crab-canning factory ship operating off Soviet waters)[2] [1] by Kobayashi Takiji (1903-1933), enjoyed an utterly unanticipated revival in the course of 2008.
Many attribute the revival of the novel to the deepening impoverishment of the ranks of the irregularly employed, now widely said to account for one-third of the work force. The majority of the latter earn less than two million yen per year. It is their increasingly insistent presence that has given such terms as "income-gap society" (kakusa shakai), "working poor" (waakingu pua), and more recently, "lost generation" (rosu jene) widespread familiarity.
That said, it remains difficult to formulate a statement along the lines of "Because of a momentous socioeconomic shift, therefore the revival of a novel published in 1929."　Why not a contemporary novel for grasping contemporary conditions? How can a novel from eight decades ago even be readable today, especially by those young readers whose circumstances it is said to elucidate? And finally, what meaning should we find in the "boom" beyond amazement that it actually happened?
These questions entail each other. They can only be answered provisionally, not only because the process is ongoing, but also because any meaning we might ascribe to it is itself an expression of our understanding of the present and of our obligations to the future, in other words, of our consciousness.
In order to make even rudimentary sense of the "boom," however, it is first necessary to take account of its implausibility.
Why the "Boom" was Improbable
Let me speak briefly from personal experience. For approximately five years, I have been studying what is called Japanese proletarian literature with a focus on Kobayashi Takiji. I have stayed at length in Otaru, the port city in Hokkaido, Japan's northernmost island, where this writer grew up. Even there, where most people had at least heard his name, if I told people that I was studying Kobayashi Takiji, I was greeted with surprise. The surprise was often benign, but it could turn skeptical, and especially with intellectuals, aggressively so. Why are you bothering with someone like him now, was the accusation I read in people's faces even, or especially when they didn't voice it.
In Japan, it is generally acknowledged that "the season of politics" was over by the early 1970s, after both the popular struggle against the renewal of the U.S.-Japan Security Treaty in 1960 had been crushed and the student struggle of 1968-70, which was an explosive protest against the bureaucratized, competitive, consumption-centered society that had followed upon the "income-doubling" plan announced in 1960, ended in a widespread sense of defeat. What did this mean for the legacy of a writer like Kobayashi Takiji? At the time of his death at age 29 by torture at the hands of the Special Higher Police, he was a member of the then illegal Japan Communist Party. Leftist intellectuals from the 60s and 70s movements, who might be thought to feel some affinity for him, were alienated by the fact of his membership in a party that had sought to control them. For others, saturated in postmodernist ideology, a body of works produced in a class-based revolutionary movement was simply laughable. But surely there was more to the hostility of middle-aged leftists than party affiliation or intellectual camp. Takiji's name awakened an all but forgotten reconciliation with a retreat from politics. It registered as a dull, irritating reproach.
For the young, he was simply an unknown entity or at most, a name attached to a title in a list of modern Japanese writers.
The "Boom" was Manufactured and Real
To be sure, during the five years preceding the boom, several developments laid the ground for expanding interest in Takiji beyond the tiny circles of devotees. A Takiji Library (found here, in Japanese) was established through the remarkable initiative of Sano Chikara, a hugely successful businessman and graduate of Takiji's alma mater, Otaru University of Commerce. The Library became a centralized source of information; it also sponsored the publication of ten books including a manga version of The Cannery Ship to attract a young readership to, and together with the University, co-sponsored a series of international symposia. A documentary film, "Strike the Hour, Takiji" (found here, in Japanese) was released in 2005; screenings became occasions for new Takiji gatherings. The film's foregrounding of Takiji's opposition to imperialist war served to link it to the national movement to preserve Article 9 (the no-war clause) of the Constitution....
Read entire article at Norma Field at the website of Japan Focus
Japan's best-known proletarian novel, Kani Kosen (depicting conditions aboard a crab-canning factory ship operating off Soviet waters)[2] [1] by Kobayashi Takiji (1903-1933), enjoyed an utterly unanticipated revival in the course of 2008.
Many attribute the revival of the novel to the deepening impoverishment of the ranks of the irregularly employed, now widely said to account for one-third of the work force. The majority of the latter earn less than two million yen per year. It is their increasingly insistent presence that has given such terms as "income-gap society" (kakusa shakai), "working poor" (waakingu pua), and more recently, "lost generation" (rosu jene) widespread familiarity.
That said, it remains difficult to formulate a statement along the lines of "Because of a momentous socioeconomic shift, therefore the revival of a novel published in 1929."　Why not a contemporary novel for grasping contemporary conditions? How can a novel from eight decades ago even be readable today, especially by those young readers whose circumstances it is said to elucidate? And finally, what meaning should we find in the "boom" beyond amazement that it actually happened?
These questions entail each other. They can only be answered provisionally, not only because the process is ongoing, but also because any meaning we might ascribe to it is itself an expression of our understanding of the present and of our obligations to the future, in other words, of our consciousness.
In order to make even rudimentary sense of the "boom," however, it is first necessary to take account of its implausibility.
Why the "Boom" was Improbable
Let me speak briefly from personal experience. For approximately five years, I have been studying what is called Japanese proletarian literature with a focus on Kobayashi Takiji. I have stayed at length in Otaru, the port city in Hokkaido, Japan's northernmost island, where this writer grew up. Even there, where most people had at least heard his name, if I told people that I was studying Kobayashi Takiji, I was greeted with surprise. The surprise was often benign, but it could turn skeptical, and especially with intellectuals, aggressively so. Why are you bothering with someone like him now, was the accusation I read in people's faces even, or especially when they didn't voice it.
In Japan, it is generally acknowledged that "the season of politics" was over by the early 1970s, after both the popular struggle against the renewal of the U.S.-Japan Security Treaty in 1960 had been crushed and the student struggle of 1968-70, which was an explosive protest against the bureaucratized, competitive, consumption-centered society that had followed upon the "income-doubling" plan announced in 1960, ended in a widespread sense of defeat. What did this mean for the legacy of a writer like Kobayashi Takiji? At the time of his death at age 29 by torture at the hands of the Special Higher Police, he was a member of the then illegal Japan Communist Party. Leftist intellectuals from the 60s and 70s movements, who might be thought to feel some affinity for him, were alienated by the fact of his membership in a party that had sought to control them. For others, saturated in postmodernist ideology, a body of works produced in a class-based revolutionary movement was simply laughable. But surely there was more to the hostility of middle-aged leftists than party affiliation or intellectual camp. Takiji's name awakened an all but forgotten reconciliation with a retreat from politics. It registered as a dull, irritating reproach.
For the young, he was simply an unknown entity or at most, a name attached to a title in a list of modern Japanese writers.
The "Boom" was Manufactured and Real
To be sure, during the five years preceding the boom, several developments laid the ground for expanding interest in Takiji beyond the tiny circles of devotees. A Takiji Library (found here, in Japanese) was established through the remarkable initiative of Sano Chikara, a hugely successful businessman and graduate of Takiji's alma mater, Otaru University of Commerce. The Library became a centralized source of information; it also sponsored the publication of ten books including a manga version of The Cannery Ship to attract a young readership to, and together with the University, co-sponsored a series of international symposia. A documentary film, "Strike the Hour, Takiji" (found here, in Japanese) was released in 2005; screenings became occasions for new Takiji gatherings. The film's foregrounding of Takiji's opposition to imperialist war served to link it to the national movement to preserve Article 9 (the no-war clause) of the Constitution....