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

Chapter 3: Writing on the Wall: Kabe shōsetsu and the Proletarian Avant-garde

wRiting on tHe wall Kabe shōsetsu and the PRoletaRian avant-gaRde in february 1931, the japanese proletarian arts journal Senki (Battle flag) published a two-page short story titled “Food in the Cafeteria” (see Figure 6), written and illustrated by two women, Sata Ineko and Arai Mitsuko.1 This was the first incarnation in East Asia of what would become a distinctive, though short-lived, genre of the proletarian literary movement: kabe shōsetsu. These works of “wall fiction ” were extremely short works of literature meant to be torn out of newsletters and magazines and posted up on public walls.2 Reminiscent of the layout of woodblock prints of an earlier period, Sata and Arai’s “Food in the Cafeteria” is arranged in four blocks of easily read text wrapped around a diamond-shaped drawing of two women. They have their arms thrust into the air and several benches of seated colleagues shouting in chorus around them. If their story is a fairly straightforward one, recounting a successful protest staged by mill workers in response to ill treatment, its characters are anything but the conventional “modern girls” of mainstream culture. They are standing atop tables and shouting at the tops of their lungs, accorded a dignity in their protest through gestures of physical strength that are neither tamed by a dominant bourgeois femininity nor eroticized by the popular press. Neither the labor movement nor the popular culture industry is known for having recognized the unique consciousness held by working-class women in the early twentieth century.3 But Sata and Arai’s collaborative work suggests an early effort on the part of cultural activists to capture the historical specificity of their experience and to encourage women to act from within it. chapter 3 writing on the wall 71 Bringing traditional media, communist gaze, and women’s politics together in the vibrant context of Japanese popular print culture, “Food in the Cafeteria” offers us a fascinating example of the various pressures and limits on proletarian culture in the early 1930s, or as cultural theorist Raymond Williams might have had it, the way the dominant, the residual, and the emergent become intertwined in all the ideological complexity of this cosmopolitan moment of Japanese literary history.4 Sata and Arai’s work also helps us correct dominant assumptions about the role the Communist Party played in the cultural movement, which is more likely to be scored for its Stalinism than celebrated for the vanguard character of its aesthetic vision. Before we get any further, however, here is Sata’s entire story: Food in the Cafeteria It happened today too—inside the cafeteria of the XX Mill they locked the doors once all the early birds had arrived. Everyone was seated and waiting, but the cafeteria super was up to his old tricks again. He was making fools of the women by refusing to dish out their food. “Hey, we’re hungry!” “C’mon, hurry up and give us our food!” They were shouting out loud from every corner of the room. The cafeteria super came out with a smirk on his face. Figure 6. Illustration by Arai Mitsuko. “Food in the Cafeteria.” Senki, February 1931. (Courtesy of the Museum of Modern Japanese Literature) 72 chapter three “Ya bunch of beggars! Bellies grumblin’ already . . .” It was then that it happened. “Beggars! Just what d’you mean by that?” shouted someone in the middle of the cafeteria. “Don’t you talk to us like that!” Everyone looked back. Then the factory girl who’d shouted jumped up on top of a bench. It was Tanaka Yot-chan, from Weaving. “Listen up, everyone!” cried Yot-chan, a girl with hollowed cheeks and a dark complexion. She whipped her head around to get a good look at all the others. “We ain’t no beggars. We’re up at 7 a.m. working hard, and on our feet all day long. It makes sense we’re hungry come lunchtime. We don’t get to decide when we take our lunch anyway, so you’ve got no right to make us wait like this. Is everybody with me?” “Yeah, that’s right!” “You tell him, girl!” “We want a speech! Speech!” No one was paying attention to their meal any longer. Instead they all had their eyes fixed on Yot-chan. She was worked up by now, and her face was bright red as she...