Recasting Red Culture in Proletarian Japan: Childhood, Korea, and the Historical Avant-garde by Samuel Perry (review)

Samuel Perry’s Recasting Red Culture is an important new study of the proletarian cultural movement in 1920s and 1930s Japan. The author provides a long-overdue corrective to the pejorative or dismissive Cold War anticommunist representations of the movement by reexamining it from a new analytical perspective that situates it within worldwide proletarian culture as well as global cultural modernity. In so doing, Perry makes a strong case for the often-ignored ideological and aesthetic affinity between proletarian culture and the modernist avant-garde, countering the common premise of their antagonism. As he amply illustrates, these cultural movements were coeval and closely intertwined at their births, regardless of their respective development into the official cultural doctrine of the capitalist and communist blocs during the Cold War era. Recognizing this fact helps us grasp modern Japanese proletarian culture in its actual complexity, richness, and originality beyond its stereotyped image as “a crude instrument of propaganda” (p. 4).

From a theoretical perspective, the book occupies a fruitful place at the intersection of postcolonialism and Marxism. On the one hand, a postcolonial inspiration enables Perry to recast his subject within the transnational context of colonial modernity rather than the conventional Soviet-centric history of international socialism. On the other hand, the suggestions of Marxism influence not only Perry’s choice of subject matter but also his analytical emphasis on class struggle over identity politics. Perry shares his intersectional theoretical position with other researchers associated with the University of Chicago—such as Heather Bowen-Struyk, Norma Field, Harry Harootunian, and Ken Kawashima—whose studies have usefully reshaped our knowledge of socialist labor and cultural movements in imperial Japan and of modern Japanese culture in general. In a still broader academic landscape, his study is part of a recent scholarly wave that has rekindled the public interest in the radical past partly in critical response to the global economic crises and their class-divisive impacts.

Chapter 1 outlines the main arguments of the book by recasting the proletarian cultural movement in imperial Japan as a quintessentially modernist avant-garde that was born out of the critical synergy between radical politics, “bourgeois” aesthetics, and a thriving modern print culture. Relying on the insights of critics such as Peter Bürger, Matei Calinescu, and Raymond Williams, Perry defines an avant-garde as an autocritique of modernity and its established artistic institutions. The proletarian cultural movement merits its place in the historical pedigrees of the avant-garde, he shows, because it was a cultural activism that sought to reshape not only art but also life itself and its idea of modernity. In this introductory chapter he offers crucial insights into the differences between Russian and Japanese proletarian culture—in contrast with the former, the latter was a resistance movement in a richer, capitalist country that enjoyed a flourishing print culture supported by an almost entirely literate population—foreshadowing the book’s frequent comparison between Japanese and German, rather than Russian, proletarian culture. While thus emphasizing the local specificity of Japanese proletarian culture, Perry simultaneously questions the notion of what is “Japanese” in the historical context of imperial Japan and proposes to expand it to acknowledge its multiethnic people and diverse cultural influences.

A modernist work in its spirit, Recasting Red Culture has a rather fragmented structure. Following chapter 1 are three stand-alone essays that in many ways feed on and interweave with each other. Chapter 2 provides a rich and comprehensive account of the development of proletarian children’s literature and the socialist pedagogical practices surrounding it. The chapter traces the dialectical engagement of socialist writers with the then-new modern science of childhood, touching on the 1926 opening of the Kizaki Village Proletarian Farmers’ School, the 1929 launching of the children’s magazine Shōnen senki, the 1930 appearance of Makimoto Kusurō’s Issues in Japanese Proletarian Children’s Literature, and Kitayama Yasuo’s 1932...