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

Chapter 4: Comrades-in-Arms: Zainichi Communists, Revolutionary Local Color, and the Antinomies of Colonial Representation

comRades-in-aRms Zainichi communists, RevolutionaRy local coloR, and the antinomies of colonial RePResentation on december 8, 1932, 638 people squeezed into the Tsukiji Theater in Tokyo, filling it well beyond its 450-person capacity. Another 300 late arrivals were left standing on the street waiting to get inside.1 On the stage that night was to be a festival of Korean-language skits, music performances, film screenings, dances, and poetry recitations. It was the most highly attended event ever organized by the Japanese Proletarian Culture Association (KOPF), the new umbrella organization of the proletarian cultural movement led by the Japanese Communist Party. According to Zainichi artist Pak Sŏk-chŏng, the audience was filled with Koreans wearing traditional clothes, numerous women and children among them; even the mother of Communist Party martyr Watanabe Masanosuke had made an appearance.2 The KOPF Korean Committee was planning shows in Osaka, Kyoto, Nagoya, and on the island of Kyushu. AccordingtoPak,theclimaxoftheevening’sactivitieswastheplay“Old-Time Village,” a story about poor Korean farmers who have risen up against a village mayor guilty of cheating them out of ten wŏn. In the final act of the play, once the mayor’s deceit has been confirmed through a secret report from a union organizer, the Korean farmers, their wives and children, and the other elders in the neighborhood all descend on the landlord’s mansion with their fists raised in the air. Pak Sŏk-chŏng described the audience toward the play’s conclusion: “Our Korean chapter 4 comrades-in-arms 125 brothers were impassioned, simply brimming with excitement as they listened intently to each word of the script. Our Japanese brothers, too, aided in translation by the Korean workers, were deeply moved by the experience as well. These were happy alliances in the making between the Japanese and Korean proletariat.”3 Pak’s brief work of reportage about the “Korean Evening,” published in the communist journal Hataraku fujin (Working women), concludes with an assertion—as do so many of the articles in the journal—that his readers must continue to support and cooperate with Korean workers in whatever way they can.4 It was not simply a celebration of Korean culture that Pak was offering the readers of Hataraku fujin or yet another occasion to insist on the historical inevitability of revolutionary upheaval. Rather, Pak was emphasizing the possibilities for solidarity between Japanese activists and the Korean diaspora through the shared experience of class consciousness, possibilities that Pak’s demand would suggest were far from being fully realized at the time. The terrain of proletarian struggle had shifted significantly over the course of 1931 insofar as the Zainichi and communist experiences were concerned. With the merger of the major Korean labor union in Japan (Zainichi Chōsen rōdō sōdōmei) into the Japanese Communist Party’s labor union Zenkyō (Nihon rōdō kumiai zenkoku kyōgikai), between 30 and 40 percent of Zenkyō’s membership in Japan was now Korean.5 If the Zainichi, as Pak asserted, needed the support of the Japanese working class, the vilified, underresourced Japanese Communist Party desperately needed the Zainichi as well. The staging of “Old-Time Village” and the other Korean-language performances in Tokyo on December 8, 1932, was both a product and a reflection of these new developments within the Japanese Communist Party, its affiliated labor union Zenkyō, and its affiliated proletarian cultural institutions that fell under the umbrella of KOPF. As we have seen in earlier chapters, by attempting to translate Marxist economic and political analyses into cultural practices, the Japanese proletarian movement both adopted and challenged a variety of dominant assumptions, artistic forms, and structures of feeling that had taken shape with the historic rise of Japan’s modern middle class. Applying Marxist ideas to the experiences of childhood, popular culture, imperialism, and gender, the movement also began to bring a kind of dialectical thinking to bear on social relationships that often fell outside the reified space of industrial production. In chapter 2 we saw how writers, teachers, and other cultural workers strove to incorporate notions of international solidarity in works meant for children as a way of counteracting the racism and xenophobia espoused by the government institutions that were gradually coming under the sway of the armed forces. The events held at the KOPF-sponsored “Korean Evening” 126 chapter four join these stories as examples of cultural...