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“Art as a Weapon”: Japanese Proletarian Literature on the Centenary of the 1917 Russian Revolution
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 14 March 2025
Extract
One hundred years have passed since the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917. It's surely one of the signal events of the modern era, a project whose significance for humanity is hardly exhausted by its history, including the disastrous, tragic history of Stalinism. A scholarly and curatorial boom in works and exhibits in the centenary reflecting on the impact of the revolution suggests it is not forgotten, even in the former first world, but its legacy remains clouded behind a veil of Cold War hysteria. What complicates matters is that the emotions, and even some of the apparatuses, of that half-remembered, misremembered history are being mobilized in the prosecution of the War on Terror. It may also be that the mad fury of our present makes us too impatient to open ourselves to the aspirations driving that massive transformation of a society still in the midst of war, its population mostly illiterate, desperately cold and hungry, in the throes of awakening to what was their due as human beings. But it's precisely because of the misery and dread produced by unbridled neoliberalism and reckless militarism, along with unmistakable signs of ecological devastation that we, in fact, need to learn about a historic effort to pursue a different vision of modernity—one that insisted on universal literacy and health care, gender and racial equality, and the reimagining of society such that it would both enable and express those goals.
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References
Notes
1 Here are a few of the works published on the centenary: Tariq Ali, The Dilemmas of Lenin (Verso, 2017); Laura Engelstein, Russia in Flames: War, Revolution, Civil War, 1914–1921 (Oxford University Press, 2017); Stephen Kotkin, Stalin: Waiting for Hitler, 1929-1941 (Penguin Press, 2017); China Miéville, October (Verso, 2017); Ronald Suny, Red Flag Unfurled: History, Historians, and the Russian Revolution (Verso, 2017); Yuri Slezkin, The House of Government: A Saga of the Russian Revolution (Princeton University Press, 2017); A. James McAdams, Vanguard of the Revolution: The Global Idea of the Communist Party (Princeton University Press, 2017); a 30-article series in the New York Times on the “history and legacy of Communism” titled the “Red Century,” (February 24-November 6, 2017). In Chicago, where we live, the Art Institute of Chicago mounted the largest exhibit of Soviet art in a quarter century, “Revoliutsiia! Demonstratia! Soviet Art Put to the Test” (October 29, 2017-January 15, 2018); the University of Chicago, “Red Press: Radical Print Culture from St. Petersburg to Chicago” at the Special Collections Research Center Exhibition Gallery (September 25, 2017-February 2, 2018); and the Smart Museum of the University, “Revolution Every Day,” a special exhibit of posters and video and film, mostly focused on women (September 14, 2017-January 28, 2018), yielding a catalog by the same title in the format of a Soviet tear-off calendar, Revolution Every Day: A Calendar (Mousse Publishing, 2017).
2 Joseph Masco, The Theater of Operations: National Security Affect from the Cold War to the War on Terror (Duke University Press, 2014).
3 Kurahara Korehito, “The Path to Proletarian Literature,” translated by Brian Bergstrom, in For Dignity, Justice, and Revolution: An Anthology of Japanese Proletarian Literature (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2016), 178.
4 A partial version was first translated anonymously by Max Bickerton, an English teacher in Japan in the early 1930s, sympathetic to the movement, thanks to which he was subjected to arrest and torture, in The Cannery Boat by Kobayashi Takiji and Other Japanese Short Stories (New York: International Publishers, 1933). This version was reproduced in The Columbia Anthology of Modern Japanese Literature, edited by J. Thomas Rimer and Van C. Gessel (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005).
5 Kobayashi Takiji, “On Wall Stories and ‘Short’ Short Stories: A New Approach to Proletarian Literature,” translated by Ann Sherif, in For Dignity, Justice, and Revolution, 254.
6 Leonardo Boff, quoted in Julie McCarthy, “Pope's Brazil Visit Puts Social Justice in Spotlight,” National Public Radio, May 8, 2007. A variant also appears in Bryan Stevenson's work on racial injustice in the US penal system: “My work with the poor and the incarcerated has persuaded me that the opposite of poverty is not wealth; the opposite of poverty is justice” (Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption (New York: Spiegel and Grau, 2014), 18.
7 “Intervista” (Finding the Words). Screened during the “Revolution Every Day” exhibit at the Smart Museum (see note 1, above).
8 “Chapter 5: Art as a Weapon” is an excerpt from For Dignity, Justice, and Revolution: An Anthology of Japanese Proletarian Literature (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2016). Republished with permission from the University of Chicago Press, the University of Hawai'i Press, the editors, authors, and translators. Not for additional publication without permission.
9 “Leafletting,” omitted from this excerpt. Numbers in brackets refer to works in the anthology [1-40] of which 22, 24, 25, 26, 27, and 29 are included here.
10 Samuel Perry, Recasting Red Culture in Proletarian Japan: Childhood, Korea, and the Historical Avant-garde (University of Hawai'i Press, 2014), 79-82; Kawabata, Palm-of-the-Hand Stories, translated by Lane Dunlop and J. Martin Holman (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1988).
11 Kurumisawa Ken, “Kabe shōsetsu no shūdan geijutsusei: ‘operētā‘ to shite no puroretaria sakka” [The group aesthetic of the wall story: The proletarian writer as “operator”], in Takiji no bungaku, sekai e, edited by Ogino Fujio (Otaru Shōka Daigaku Shuppankai, 2013), 341-46.
12 Kamei Hideo, “Kobayashi Takiji no ‘Tegami’: Kabe shōsetsu no jikkensei” [Kobayashi Takiji's “Letter”: The experimental nature of the wall story]. Lecture, Otaru Bungakukan (February 23, 2003).
13 Kobayashi Takiji, “Tegami” [Letter], Chūō kōron (August 1931): 64-67; in Kobayashi Takiji zenshū [Collected works of Kobayashi Takiji] (Shinsōban) (Shinnihon Shuppansha, 1993), vol. 3:358-62.
14 Kawabata Yasunari, (Bungei jihyō) “Bungakuteki shibutsu: seisai no nai kabe ‘shōsetsu‘” [(Literary Review) Literary cadavers: lackluster wall “stories”], Jiji shimpō (July 30, 1931); in Kawabata Yasunari zenshū (Shinchōsha, 1999), vol. 30:503.
15 Kawabata Yasunari, “Sangatsu bundan no ichi inshō” [A certain sense of the literary establishment in March], Shinchō (April 1933): 97-103; in Kawabata Yasunari zenshū, vol. 31:76-80.
16 Kurumisawa, “Kabe shōsetsu no shūdan geijutsusei,” 347-50.
17 The Xs here appear in the original and represent self-censorship by either the editors or the author. The last line most likely refers to Kimi-chan's desire to march in the streets holding up a flag or banner in her hand—as many children were portrayed doing in the proletarian media. (Translator)
18 Yi Tong-gyu, “Kesip'an kwa pyŏk sosŏl” [The bulletin board and the wall story], Chiptan (February 1932): 37-38.
19 The first date is given in “Yi Tong-gyu,” the second, in Kwŏn Yŏng-min, Han'guk kyegŭpmunhak undongsa [History of the class-literature movement] (Seoul: Munyech'ulp'ansa, 1998), 387.
20 Perry, Recasting Red Culture, 189n100.
21 Theodore Hughes, Jae-yong Kim, Jin-kyung Lee, Sang-kyung Lee, eds., Rat Fire: Korean Stories from the Japanese Empire (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press/Cornell East Asia Series, 2013).
22 Hosono Kōjirō. “Hyakushō kan” [A farmer among farmers], Puroretaria bungaku (February 1932): 126-27; in Nihon puroretaria bungakushū [A collection of Japanese proletarian literature], (Shinnihon Shuppansha, 1985-87), vol. 29:503-504.
23 Maeda Kakuzō, “Hosono Kōjirō,” in Kindai Nihon shakai undōshi jimbutsu daijiten/Biographical Dictionary of the Social Movements in Modern Japan (Nichigai Associates, 1997), vol. 4:228.
24 Strike-throughs mark passages not available to readers of the first published versions, usually because of preemptive (protective) self-censorship on the part of the publisher.
25 Kuroshima Denji. “Chichiharu made” [To Qiqihar], Bungaku shimbun (Feb. 5, 1932): 1; in Nihon puroretaria bungakushū [A collection of Japanese proletarian literature], (Shinnihon Shuppansha, 1985-87), vol. 20:494-95.
26 Perry, Recasting Red Culture, 93-94.
27 Nagano Kayo. “Kōjō no ichinichi” [A day at the factory], Bungaku shimbun (April 25, 1932): 6.
28 Kobayashi Takiji, “Kabe shōsetsu to ‘mijikai’ tampen shōsetsu: puroretaria bungaku no atarashii doryoku” [Wall stories and “short” short stories: A new initiative for proletarian literature], in Shinkō geijutsu kenkyū, vol. 2, Shu to shite geijutsu no keishiki ni kansuru tokushū, edited by Itagaki Takaho (Tōkō Shoin, 1931): 1-5; in Kobayashi Takiji zenshū, vol. 5:254-58.
29 Anatoli Lunacharsky, “Theses on the Problems of Marxist Criticism” [1928], translated by Y. Ganushin, in A. Lunarchsky: On Literature and Art (Moscow: Progressive Publishers, 1973), sec. 9.
30 Kobayashi Takiji, “Bungei jihyō: Tokidoki, kata o sobiyakashite” [Literary review: Let's hold our heads high from time to time], Chūō kōron (May 1931); in Kobayashi Takiji zenshū, vol. 5:250-51.