(Emerita) I. WHY THE PRESCIENCE OF "ANOTHER BATTLEFRONT": A QUESTION POSED AGAINST THE CURRENT RA... more (Emerita) I. WHY THE PRESCIENCE OF "ANOTHER BATTLEFRONT": A QUESTION POSED AGAINST THE CURRENT RAPACIOUS DISREGARD FOR HUMAN WELL-BEING THE WORLD OVER, BUT MOST ESPECIALLY IN THESE UNITED STATES In April of 2005, good fortune gave me a seat in the large hall where the first meeting to discuss the life and works of Matsuda Tokiko was convened. Tokiko was recently deceased, in December of 2004, at the age of 99. At the time, I was in the middle of a yearlong stay in the once vibrant port city of Otaru in Hokkaido, the home of Kobayashi Takiji (1903-1933), Japan's best-known proletarian writer. It is a city where the Japanese Communist Party has managed to hang on to five out of twentyseven seats in the city assembly. Living there, however briefly, gave me a glimpse of people associated with a party hated, feared, and above all, avoided. But these people-for the most part members, but also allies, maybe subscribers to Akahata (the Red Flag)-were leading a range of ordinary lives. The Tokyo gathering, on the other hand, brought together many of the luminaries of the leftist (not all communist) culture movement dating back to the prewar era. Two moments in particular have stayed with me. The first comes from a video of Tokiko herself, interviewed days before her death. She was responding to a question on the Iraq War (in 2001, aged 96, she had participated in a women's march against the dispatch of Japanese Self-Defense Forces to Iraq) by recalling how she was targeted by a low-flying fighter plane in the last year of World War II. Close enough to see the faces of those onboard, she had desperately turned her very pregnant belly upward. The aircraft turned away. The second is a pair of statements made by two men: one a former defendant from the Matsukawa Incident (1949), a train derailment case in which three crew members were killed; the other, her son, Ōnuma Sakundo, a Slavic-language expert in the Party's Central Committee who resided in Prague for a number of years and co-translated The Three Sources and Three Components of Marxism in the "Classics of Scientific Socialism" series published by Shin Nihon Shuppansha. The Matsukawa
Fiction created by and for the working class emerged worldwide in the early twentieth century as ... more Fiction created by and for the working class emerged worldwide in the early twentieth century as a response to rapid modernization, dramatic inequality, and imperial expansion. In Japan, literary youth, men and women, sought to turn their imaginations and craft to tackling the ensuing injustices, with results that captured both middle-class and worker-farmer readers. This anthology is a landmark introduction to Japanese proletarian literature from that period. Contextualized by introductory essays, forty expertly translated stories touch on topics like perilous factories, predatory bosses, ethnic discrimination, and the myriad indignities of poverty. Together, they show how even intensely personal issues form a pattern of oppression. Fostering labor consciousness as part of an international leftist arts movement, these writers, lovers of literature, were also challenging the institution of modern literature itself. This anthology demonstrates the vitality of the "red decade" long buried in modern Japanese literary history.
(Emerita) I. WHY THE PRESCIENCE OF "ANOTHER BATTLEFRONT": A QUESTION POSED AGAINST THE CURRENT RA... more (Emerita) I. WHY THE PRESCIENCE OF "ANOTHER BATTLEFRONT": A QUESTION POSED AGAINST THE CURRENT RAPACIOUS DISREGARD FOR HUMAN WELL-BEING THE WORLD OVER, BUT MOST ESPECIALLY IN THESE UNITED STATES In April of 2005, good fortune gave me a seat in the large hall where the first meeting to discuss the life and works of Matsuda Tokiko was convened. Tokiko was recently deceased, in December of 2004, at the age of 99. At the time, I was in the middle of a yearlong stay in the once vibrant port city of Otaru in Hokkaido, the home of Kobayashi Takiji (1903-1933), Japan's best-known proletarian writer. It is a city where the Japanese Communist Party has managed to hang on to five out of twentyseven seats in the city assembly. Living there, however briefly, gave me a glimpse of people associated with a party hated, feared, and above all, avoided. But these people-for the most part members, but also allies, maybe subscribers to Akahata (the Red Flag)-were leading a range of ordinary lives. The Tokyo gathering, on the other hand, brought together many of the luminaries of the leftist (not all communist) culture movement dating back to the prewar era. Two moments in particular have stayed with me. The first comes from a video of Tokiko herself, interviewed days before her death. She was responding to a question on the Iraq War (in 2001, aged 96, she had participated in a women's march against the dispatch of Japanese Self-Defense Forces to Iraq) by recalling how she was targeted by a low-flying fighter plane in the last year of World War II. Close enough to see the faces of those onboard, she had desperately turned her very pregnant belly upward. The aircraft turned away. The second is a pair of statements made by two men: one a former defendant from the Matsukawa Incident (1949), a train derailment case in which three crew members were killed; the other, her son, Ōnuma Sakundo, a Slavic-language expert in the Party's Central Committee who resided in Prague for a number of years and co-translated The Three Sources and Three Components of Marxism in the "Classics of Scientific Socialism" series published by Shin Nihon Shuppansha. The Matsukawa
Fiction created by and for the working class emerged worldwide in the early twentieth century as ... more Fiction created by and for the working class emerged worldwide in the early twentieth century as a response to rapid modernization, dramatic inequality, and imperial expansion. In Japan, literary youth, men and women, sought to turn their imaginations and craft to tackling the ensuing injustices, with results that captured both middle-class and worker-farmer readers. This anthology is a landmark introduction to Japanese proletarian literature from that period. Contextualized by introductory essays, forty expertly translated stories touch on topics like perilous factories, predatory bosses, ethnic discrimination, and the myriad indignities of poverty. Together, they show how even intensely personal issues form a pattern of oppression. Fostering labor consciousness as part of an international leftist arts movement, these writers, lovers of literature, were also challenging the institution of modern literature itself. This anthology demonstrates the vitality of the "red decade" long buried in modern Japanese literary history.
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