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The Two-Sen Copper Coin

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  14 March 2025

Extract

A key voice in Japan's proletarian literature movement of the 1920s and 30s, Kuroshima Denji (1898-1943) is best known for his antiwar writings. These include a number of short stories depicting Japan's participation in the 1918-1922 Siberian Intervention, as well as Militarized Streets (Busō seru shigai, 1930), a novel set during Japan's 1928 military intervention in China. Militarized Streets earned the dubious distinction of being censored by both the wartime Japanese state and the postwar U.S. Occupation.

Type
Research Article
Copyright
Copyright © The Authors 2014

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References

Notes

1 A translation of Militarized Streets and a number of Kuroshima's short stories are available in Kuroshima Denji, A Flock of Swirling Crows and Other Proletarian Writings, trans. Zeljko Cipris (Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press, 2005); an excerpt from that translation is available online. See also Heather Bowen-Struyk, “Rival Imagined Communities: Class and Nation in Japanese Proletarian Literature,” positions: east asia cultures critique 14.2 (2006) 373-404; and Kuroshima Denji, “Siberia Under Snow,” trans. Lawrence Rogers, Critical Asian Studies 38:2 (2006), 309-319.

2 See Jonathan Abel, Redacted: The Archives of Censorship in Transwar Japan (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012), 117-120.

3 For biographical details, see Zeljko Cipris's “Introduction” in Kuroshima, A Flock of Swirling Crows and Other Proletarian Writings, 1-13.