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Against the System: Antiwar Writing of Kuroshima Denji

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  07 May 2025

Zeljko Cipris
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“Slaughter and plunder are inseparable from armies and wars. Whenever war is waged, looting, robbery, and murder are invariably committed. Depending on their merits, such events are either reported with exaggeration or, conversely, passed over in silence.” In 1930, Japanese writer Kuroshima Denji (1898-1943) published an antiwar novel that “remains startlingly and tragically timely in a world of nationalist-driven military intervention.” Zeljko Cipris introduces Kuroshima and presents excerpts from his novel, Militarized Streets, which Cipris translated for the University of Hawai'i Press.

Type
Research Article
Information
Asia-Pacific Journal , Volume 4 , Issue 10 , October 2006 , e7
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Creative Common License - CCCreative Common License - BYCreative Common License - NCCreative Common License - ND
This is an Open Access article, distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivatives licence (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/), which permits non-commercial re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is unaltered and is properly cited. The written permission of Cambridge University Press must be obtained for commercial re-use or in order to create a derivative work.
Copyright
Copyright © The Authors 2006

References

Notes

[1] The prestige of the Japanese military during the 1920s was so low that army officers were said to have trouble finding women willing to marry them and wore their uniforms in public as little as possible. See W.G. Beasley, The Japanese Experience: A Short History of Japan (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000), 239.

[2] Mikiso Hane, Modern Japan: A Historical Survey (Boulder: Westview, 1992), 237-238.

[3] Dissident groups included the Alliance Against Intervention in China (Taishi Hikansho Domei) and the National Antiwar Alliance (Zenkoku Hansen Domei). See Kobayashi Shigeo, “Kaisetsu,” in Kuroshima Denji, Nihon puroretaria bungaku shu 9: Kuroshima Denji shu (Tokyo: Shin Nihon Shuppansha, 1989), 442.

[4] George T. Shea, Leftwing Literature in Japan: A Brief History of the Proletarian Literary Movement (Tokyo: Hosei University Press, 1964), 184. As Shea notes on the same page, the literary historian Odagiri Hideo considers Kuroshima's novel to be a model in illuminating the essence of war.

[5] Another literary historian, Donald Keene, writes that Militarized Streets “may well be the most absorbing work to have been fostered by the proletarian literature movement.” See Donald Keene, Dawn to the West: Japanese Literature of the Modern Era, vol. 1 (New York: Holt, 1984), 608. Zeljko Cipris teaches Japanese language and literature at the University of the Pacific in California. He is co-author with Shoko Hamano of Making Sense of Japanese Grammar, and translator of Ishikawa Tatsuzo's Soldiers Alive and of A Flock of Swirling Crows and Other Proletarian Writings, a collection of works by Kuroshima Denji. This Japan Focus article is adapted from the introduction to A Flock of Swirling Crows, and dedicated to Shane Satori and Ljubomir Ryu. Posted on October 12, 2006.