An Alternative View of tenkō: Hayashi Fusao's Popular Writings for Shinseinen

Abstract

In discussions on tenkō (political re-orientation) the case of Hayashi Fusao is invariably referred to as representative of the type of writer who never recanted his political conversion, not even after Japan's war defeat and return to democracy in 1945. Hayashi officially disavowed his Marxist convictions in 1936 and would for the rest of his life reiterate his rightist political leanings, culminating in his infamous In Affirmation of the Greater East Asia War. When considering Hayashi's tenkō, critics usually rely on his various statements referring specifically to his re-orientation, coupled with an examination of his shift away from proletarian literature in serious works of fiction such as Youth (1934). In contrast, this article is an attempt to comment on Hayashi's purported conversion by focusing on samples of his rarely discussed popular writings that were published in the lowbrow youth literature magazine Shinseinen. This focus on Hayashi's predilection for adventurous storytelling aims to moderate the conventional image of him as a political thinker.