Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2014. xii, 228 pp. (Illustrations.) US$49.00, cloth. ISBN 978-0-8248-3893-5.
By the late 1920s, the proletarian cultural movement had evolved into one of the most complex and vibrant movements in the cultural and intellectual history of twentieth-century Japan. In this well-presented volume, Samuel Perry sets out to shed new light on the flourishing cultural activities associated with the Japanese Communist Party. He does this by drawing on a wide array of writings ranging from reportage to fairy tales and also from poetry to educational journals. In order to foreground what the author calls “marginal” aspects of the proletarian cultural movement, the book delves into three case studies: childhood literature, the revolutionary genre of “wall fiction,” and literary works about Korea and the Korean minority in Japan. Purposely shifting the focus away from canonized works of proletarian literature and art, these detailed case studies serve to “restore much of the forgotten ideological and aesthetic complexity of Japan’s proletarian movement and show that it must be central to any understanding of modern Japanese culture in the early Shōwa period” (3). Perry maintains that in Japan proletarian literature “was rich and diverse as were the social experiences of its many participants and it came into being within a history that gave a particular shape to its evolving aesthetic forms, critical consciousness, and social practices in Japan” (8).
Following an introductory chapter, the book takes up the formation of revolutionary children’s literature. Motivated by the founding of a revolutionary school for poor farmers’ children in the village of Kizaki in Niigata Prefecture, from about 1926 the genre of leftwing children’s fiction emerged among proletarian authors who contested many middle-class assumptions about childhood by criticizing traditional “liberal” or “nationalist” approaches to education. Citing a wide range of writers and sources, Perry argues that the proletarian movement made an “immense impact on children’s culture in Japan” (68) by indefatigably insisting that the division of classes produced different childhood experiences and by emphasizing the children’s revolutionary potential, which ran counter to the bourgeois ideal of the innocent child. The chapter stresses global influences on children’s literature that not only fostered class solidarity and praise for the Soviet Union, but also internationalism and a critique of Japanese imperialism. A variety of writers like Kaji Wataru or Fujieda Takeo wrote stories about African or Chinese boys becoming revolutionaries and defying colonial authorities. Another positive aspect is the citation of the periodical Shōnen senki that favourably reported on the Korean Children’s Day, eliciting compassionate responses from its young readers, who stressed the importance of international solidarity. Nevertheless, at times it seems that Perry exaggerates the political content as well as the impact of single works for young children. While the inclusion of questions of race and imperialism add another important layer to the analyses, one is left wondering about the relationship between proletarian children’s literature and the children of other marginalized groups within Japan, in particular Dōwa Japanese.
By analyzing kabe shōsetsu (“wall fiction”) in chapter 3, Perry goes on to buttress the central narrative of the book: offering a correction to the “dominant assumptions about the role the Communist Party played in the cultural movement” and to point out “the vanguard character of its aesthetic vision” (71). A highly visual form of literature, kabe shōsetsu were illustrated short narratives designed to be cut out and posted on the walls of factories or in public that were also taken up by mainstream intellectual journals like Chūō Kōron (75). Perry shows how this short-form literature evolved into a platform for labour protest and antiwar activities. Furthermore, the chapter includes works by Korean writers in order to strengthen the argument that the practice of wall fiction not only radiated across Japan’s borders where it was adopted by Korean and Chinese revolutionaries, but also carried over into the postwar period. However, Perry only briefly touches upon other forms of participatory literature that might prove equally defining for postwar literature and art if more thoroughly examined.
As in both the preceding chapters there had already been a special focus on the role of Koreans within the movement, the narrative comes full circle in the last chapter when Perry turns to Japanese communist writers’ perceptions of colonial subjects. Citing works by Japanese authors Makimura Kō and Nakano Shigeharu alongside Korean works like Chang Hyŏk-chu’s Gakidō, he describes a wide array of literary strategies to expand class analysis across the borders of the Japanese nation-state. One does not have to concur with his blatant dismissal of scholarly critiques of the above-mentioned Japanese writers for putting class over nation as mere ahistorical anti-communism. However, he carefully reconstructs the “many different, often competing, claims within the movement about how best to translate revolutionary politics and radical literature into discussions about colonial Korea and the Korean people” (169). Against a backdrop of very low literacy rates the question as to what extent the majority of ordinary Koreans were able to actively participate in these debates remains unanswered.
Recasting Red Culture succeeds in offering an important corrective to the view that the proletarian cultural movement in prewar Japan and its expanding empire was merely a crude but ultimately ineffective instrument of communist propaganda. Perhaps its greatest contribution lies in adding another layer of complexity to our understanding of proletarian culture that was clearly more than a monolithic product of the typical male Japanese industry-worker. Nonetheless, the book covers only marginal literary and artistic works that reached only a comparatively small number of recipients during a rather short period of time. Due to its scope, the book is clearly not designed to provide an introduction to leftwing literature in Japan before World War II. Indeed, a concluding chapter that brings together the three interesting case studies under the main narrative certainly would have facilitated the reader’s understanding of the coherencies between prewar and postwar proletarian literature, as well as between the different forms of literature analyzed in this book. Hence, this work will mostly appeal to an audience that already possesses a substantial knowledge of the proletarian culture of prewar Japan and Korea.
Dolf-Alexander Neuhaus
Goethe University, Frankfurt am Main, Germany
pp. 909-911