Recasting Red Culture in Proletarian Japan: Childhood, Korea, and the Historical Avant-garde

Chapter 1: Introduction: Recasting Red Culture in Proletarian Japan

intRoduction Recasting Red cultuRe in PRoletaRian JaPan So commonplace it comforts me That Lenin, too, loved Reading Pushkin’s poetry. —Ishigure Shigeru let us begin with that unforgettable image: Yanase Masamu’s red hand, adorning the frontispiece of this book, which stretches out from a page of the Musansha shinbun (Proletarian news) in a gesture of solidarity, strength, and reassurance . Yanase’s artistry is impeccable if self-consciously crude, different shades of red and black ink brought together with such meticulous craftsmanship that the hand offers the illusion of having three dimensions—of reflecting a source of light from somewhere above. The stylized headline calls out to the same reader the arm reaches out to: “Join hands with 50,000 readers of the Proletarian News, a true friend of the people!!”1 Yanase’s image did not appear on the pages of the Musansha shinbun itself, but rather formed the centerpiece of a promotional poster meant to publicize the newspaper, first published in 1925 when various proletarian cultural organizations began to consolidate themselves throughout Japan in the wake of the Russian Revolution . The poster indeed acknowledges the familiar icons of Soviet revolutionary modernity; a hammer, sickle, and red star lie in the lower left-hand corner. But on the opposite side, offering the clever illusion of a dog-eared page, there also chapter 1 2 chapter one appears an advertisement within the promotional poster itself. The advertisement features the “complete translation” of Karl Marx’s Capital, translated by Kyoto University professor Kawakami Hajime and published by Iwanami Shoten, one of Japan’s premier publishing houses. In the background we find a partial image of a gated factory and several articles that offer important context. They report on the anti-Japanese resistance movement in Manchuria and Mongolia, on the first general elections soon to be held in Japan, and on the government’s expenditures of some nine hundred million yen in “blood taxes” extracted from the people. Whatever its intended effect in early twentieth-century Japan, what Yanase’s poster for the Musansha shinbun does for us now is to make visible the extraordinary coincidence of political revolution, sophisticated social analysis, and a highly advanced, consumer society in the Empire of Japan, a country where intellectuals, publishing houses, and proletarian artists such as Yanase had begun to lend their formidable talents and resources to a working-class movement. As many have argued , Japan was experiencing a period of cultural “doubling” in the early twentieth century, a widespread effort to reproduce forms of capitalist culture in line with Western modernity, which had already led Japan to create its own distinctive forms of modern art and literature.2 But here was a “doubling” of a very different sort, whereby that capitalist culture newly reproduced in Japan was helping to create the conditions for its overturning. This was an exhilarating time for revolutionary artists and intellectuals across the globe, a time when the aspirations of the international avant-garde were focused not only on the innovation of new artistic forms, but also on new strategies for activism and new forms of social life, a moment when culture was understood as both a matter of aesthetics as well as mode of daily practice. Bringing together bourgeois aesthetics, radical politics, and a flourishing popular print culture, the proletarian cultural movement in Japan thus emerged out of a complex and contradictory intersection of local and global forces. A highly capitalized marketplace had helped to precipitate a widespread interest in Marxist analysis as well as the formation of institutions dedicated to improving the lives of the poor, and new communities of cultural workers committed to translating communist egalitarianism into forms of Japanese culture and social practice. What were the defining characteristics of a cultural movement that took shape under these specific conditions, and how did Japanese cultural workers seek to accommodate the many contradictions they engendered? What people, ideas, and institutions helped the movement to sustain a faith in the idea that even art and literature were indispensible to the task of revolution? It was from the mid-1920s to the mid-1930s that an unprecedented number introduction 3 of cultural workers came to together under the banner of proletarian cultural. The movement’s political allegiances ranged from Christian socialism to anarchism to internationalist communism; its aesthetic forms ran the gamut from comic books to Bildungsromans, and from muckracking reportage to new takes on haiku. By...