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Preface 1. Japanese and Korean names used in this book follow the Asian convention of listing surname first. Subsequent references to certain beloved authors, namely Kobayashi Takiji and Murayama Kazuko, make use of their given names alone as is common practice in Japan. 2. See Norma Field, “Commercial Appetite and Human Need: The Accidental and Fated Revival of Kobayashi Takiji’s Cannery Ship,” The Asia-Pacific Journal, vol. 8-8-09, February 22, 2009. 3. Nagae Akira, “Nihonjū ga ‘Kanikōsen’ka shite iru,” Shūkan Asahi, expanded edition, May 8, 2009. 4. Arundhati Roy, Public Power in the Age of Empire (New York: Seven Stories Press, 2004), 33. 5. Friedrich Engels, “Ludwig Feuerbach and the End of Classical German Philosophy ” [1886], Marxist Internet Archive. http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/ works/1886/ludwig-feuerbach/ch01.htm. 6. I have drawn on language here from Alan Wald, “The 1930s Left in U.S. Literature Reconsidered ,” in Radical Revisions: Rereading 1930s Culture, ed. Bill Mullen and Sherry Lee Linkon, 13–27 (Urbana University of Illinois Press, 1996). chaPter 1: IntroductIon 1. Yanase Masamu, poster for the Musansha shinbun, featuring the front page of the newspaper published on September 25, 1927. 2. See, for example, Harry Harootunian, History’s Disquiet, History’s Disquiet: Modernity, Cultural Practice, and the Question of Everyday Life. (New York: Columbia University Press, 2000), xvii. notes 172 notes to pages 3–7 3. The various acronyms used to refer to the various proletarian arts associations in Japan and colonial Korea can be confusing. Though there were many proletarian cultural associations in Japan, especially early on, the two major communist-affiliated associations were Zen Nihon musansha geijutsu renmei (All Japan Federation of Proletarian Arts), usually referred to as NAPF, and Nihon puroretaria bunka renmei (Japanese Proletarian Culture Association), usually referred to as KOPF, into which NAPF was absorbed in 1931. In Korea, KAPF, or the Chosŏn p’ŭrollet’aria yesul tongmaeng (Korean Proletarian Arts Federation) retained its name for a decade (1925–1935) but underwent various shifts in policy, leadership, and organization. 4. Heather Bowen-Struyk makes a cogent argument about canonization in her “Rethinking Japanese Proletarian Literature” (PhD diss., University of Michigan, 2001). 5. Nakano Shigeharu explicitly includes these different groups in a definition of the proletarian “we” (wareware) in 1927. See Nakano Shigeharu, “Geijutsu ni kansuru hashirigakiteki oboegaki,” Nakano Shigeharu zenshu, vol. 9, 72; originally in Puroretaria geijutsu (October 1927). 6. Kobayashi Takiji emphasized the importance of respecting heterogeneity in proletarian reading groups, in particular where cultural workers had to understand the “plurality” (tayōsei) of the reading public and respect the “mixed assortment of different characters ” (samazama zatta na shitsu) of its members. Kobayashi Takiji, “Kinkyū no kadai,” Miyako shinbun, August 16–20, 1931. 7. Nakano Shigeharu, “Geijutsu undō no soshiki,” Puroretaria bungaku 1, no. 2 (August 1927). 8. Yamamoto Senji, “Sei to shakai,” in Yamamoto Senji zenshū, vol. 3, ed. Sasaki Toshiji and Akinori Odagiri, 393–394 (Tokyo: Chōbunsha, 1979). 9. Hirano Ken, Kurahara Korehito, Odagiri Hideo, Noma Hiroshi, Takeuchi Yoshimi, eds., Nihon puroretaria bungaku taikei (San’ichi Shobō, 1955), 9 vols. By contrast the forty-volume anthology of proletarian literature (Nihon puroretaria bungakushū), published in the mid-1980s, devotes an entire volume to “wall fiction” and carries several stories about Koreans in Japan scattered throughout various volumes, but still contains no children’s stories whatsoever. 10. Akita Ujaku, Gojūnen seikatsu nenpu (Tokyo: Naukasha, 1936); Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (London: Routledge, 1992). 11. For an admirable study of Zainichi literature beginning in the 1960s, see Melissa Wender’s Lamentation as History: Narratives by Koreans in Japan, 1965–2000 (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2005). Also an invaluable resource is her edited collection of short stories, Melissa Wender ed., Into the Light: An Anthology of Literature by Koreans in Japan (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2010). Sociologist John Lie also incorporates literary sources into his study Zainichi (Koreans in Japan): Diasporic Nationalism and Postcolonial Identity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008). 12. Ken C. Kawashima, The Proletarian Gamble: Korean Workers in Interwar Japan (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2009), 28. 13. For a recent study of how Japanese constructed a cultural identity in relation to its colonies, see Robert Thomas Tierney, Tropics of Savagery: The Culture of Japanese Empire in Comparative Frame (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010). For a wide-ranging collection of critical essays on Japanese culture in the period immediately following that of...

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