Recasting Red Culture in Proletarian Japan

Abstract

This book turns a critical eye on the influential proletarian cultural movement that flourished in 1920s and 1930s Japan. This was a diverse, cosmopolitan, and highly contested moment in Japanese history when notions of political egalitarianism were being translated into cultural practices specific to the Japanese experience. The book offers an account of the passions—and antinomies—that animated one of the most admirable intellectual and cultural movements of Japan's twentieth century, and argues that proletarian literature, cultural workers, and institutions fundamentally enrich our understanding of Japanese culture. What sustained the proletarian movement's faith in the idea that art and literature were indispensable to the task of revolution? How did the movement manage to enlist artists, teachers, and scientist into its ranks, and what sorts of contradictions arose in the merging of working-class and bourgeois cultures? The book asks these and other questions as it historicizes proletarian Japan at the intersection of bourgeois aesthetics, radical politics, and a flourishing modern print culture. The book details how cultural activists “recast” forms of modern culture into practices commensurate with the goals of revolution. It offers a new approach to studying revolutionary culture. By examining the margins of the proletarian cultural movement, the book redefines its center as it historicizes proletarian children's culture, avant-garde “wall fiction,” and a literature that bears witness to Japan's fraught relationship with its Korean colony. Along the way, the book shows how proletarian culture opened up new critical spaces in the intersections of class, popular culture, childhood, gender, and ethnicity.