PROLETARIAN LITERATURE

The proletarian literature movement in Japan (1920s to 1930s) followed similar political and artistic movements in Europe and Russia. Japan’s isolationist period ended with the Meiji Restoration, when a rapid push toward industrialization caused Japan to rely on its colonized Chinese and Korean workers to fuel industrial growth in an effort to keep stride with its Western rivals. Japanese proletarian writers were heavily influenced by the 1920 Baku Conference, which transferred European ideals of communism and anticolonialism to movements in Asia and Africa. The proletarian movement in Japan began in 1921 when Komaki Omi (1894–1978) published the workers’ journal Tanemaku hito (The Sowers). In 1928, the Nippona Artista Proleta Federacio was formed, eschewing “arts” and embracing “culture” as their key focus.The expansion of international proletarian arts groups grew to include a new variety of writers who fought government criticism and dealt with the social trials of the working class. Notable Japanese proletarian works include Kobayashi Takiji’s Kanikosen (1929; tr. The Factory Ship, 1956), an illustration of the early unionization of fishing workers; Hirotsu Kazuo’s Izumi e no michi (Road to the Spring, 1953–54); and Matsukawa Saiban (The Matsukawa Trial, 1954–58), a responsive defense of supposed Japanese Communist saboteurs after the Matsukawa railway accident in 1949; and Hayama Yoshiki’s Umi ni ikiru hitobito (Men Who Live on the Sea, 1926), a novel about the appalling labor conditions on work boats. Other notable writers include Miyamoto Yuriko and Nogawa Takashi (1901–44). Proletarian literature is occasionally partnered with modernism or descriptive neoperceptionism.

See also CENSORSHIP; ENCHI FUMIKO; FUJIMORI SEIKICHI; HIJIKATA YOSHI; HIRABAYASHI TAIKO; HORI TATSUO; I-NOVELS; KOBAYASHI HIDEO; KUROSHIMA DENJI; LITERARY CRITICISM; MARXISM; MIYAZAWA KENJI; MODERN THEATER; NAGAYO YOSHIRO; NAKANO SHIGEHARU; NATIONALISM; NOGAMI YAEKO; OGUMA HIDEO; PATRIOTIC ASSOCIATION FOR JAPANESE LITERATURE; SHUGI; THOUGHT POLICE; TOKUNAGA SUNAO; TSUBOI SHIGEJI; WAR LITERATURE.