Mats Karlsson

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

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 Japans 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 Hayashis 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 Hayashis 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 Hayashis predilection for adventurous storytelling aims to moderate the conventional image of him as a political thinker.

Thirst for knowledge: women's proletarian literature in Nyonin geijutsu

Abstract This article focuses on a selective reading of some of the longer proletarian writing in Nyonin geijutsu (Womens arts) by Hirabayashi Eiko, Nakamoto Takako, Matsuda Tokiko and Toda Toyoko. It explores the influence of Soviet Russia on their writing and contends that these are powerful works of literary significance.

Kinoshita Keisuke’s film at the end of the rainbow: love, labour, and alienation at the Yahata Steel Works

ABSTRACT The 1958 film The Eternal Rainbow stands out in renowned director Kinoshita Keisuke’s oeuvre. Set entirely on location at the huge Yahata Steel Works, the film explores the lives of workers at the onset of Japan’s economic miracle before problems associated with the GDP-boosting polices appeared, when the pillars of smoke rising from the plant were still perceived as a sign of hope and prosperity. The film exposes the conflict between privileged regular employees and subcontracted workers, mirroring a basic social inequality that has resurfaced during Japan’s recent ‘lost decades’. A further theme running through the film is the existential question of the alienating effects of wage labour. In privileging problems identified with social maladies of decades to come, the film reminds us that Japan’s narrative of discontent might not be such a recent phenomenon. The film became variously praised for its ambitious approach, incorporating stylistic features borrowed from documentary film, and innovative exploration from the inside of the microcosm of a steel works; as well as criticized for its propagandistic features, and for its non-committal attitude towards the social conflict foregrounded by the film. While discussing its aesthetic and thematic features, this article explores critical responses to the film in mainstream newspapers and film publications, as well as commentary by workers in minor non-academic journals.

For Dignity, Justice, and Revolution: An Anthology of Japanese Proletarian Literature ed. by Heather Bowen-Struyk and Norma Field (review)

a wide range of topics related to gender in contemporary Japan, including homosexuality, pornography, censorship, feminism, and “gender-free” legislation. The topic of boys’ love is a nexus of issues related to gender, sexual expression, artistic expression, and public policy. This is the second collected volume on boys’ love, the fi rst being Boys’ Love Manga: Essays on the Sexual Ambiguity and Cross-Cultural Fandom of the Genre (McFarland, 2010), edited by Antonia Levy, Mark McHarry, and Dru Pagliassotti. While the emphasis in that work is on fandom outside Japan, particularly in the United States, the focus here is exclusively on boys’ love within Japan. Boys’ love is gaining popularity outside Japan, even in countries such as Malaysia and Indonesia, where sexual expression and homosexuality are more restricted. But the tendency in Englishlanguage scholarship to focus on fandom outside Japan means the contours of the genre within Japan and engagement with Japanese language scholarship are sometimes overlooked. This collection provides that necessary perspective on boys’ love within Japan. This volume adds depth and complexity to the study of boys’ love manga in English and brings Japanese-language scholarship into the Anglophone discourse. It is a welcome addition to the growing fi eld of scholarship on Japanese popular culture, particularly on manga for girls and women, and should be of interest to scholars of gender and popular culture in Japan. Read alongside Boys’ Love Manga, Straight from the Heart, and Passionate Friendship, it helps provide a fuller picture of what girls and women are reading, writing, and drawing and why.

Samuel Perry, Recasting Red Culture in Proletarian Japan: Childhood, Korea, and the Historical Avant-garde

This volume ‘unapologetically seeks to recast the proletarian [cultural] movement in a more affirmative light’ (xi), by foregrounding literary genres on the margins that have otherwise tended to be overlooked. Paralleling this, the study also challenges – on grounds that it is underpinned by a bourgeois and anticommunist bias – the common critique that holds that the movement became excessively politicized or Bolshevized (e.g. 121–122). The method applied throughout is a careful textual analysis of a wide range of proletarian works of fiction. Firstly, Perry shines a spotlight on children’s literature as it appeared on the pages of, for instance, Shōnen senki (Boys’ Battle Flag) and Hataraku fujin (Working Women), both affiliated with the Marxist hardline faction of the movement. A main argument of this chapter runs,

Anne Allison, Precarious Japan

People attracted by the title Precarious Japan and who perhaps anticipate a sociological approach might be disappointed by the present volume. In fact, Precarious Japan is more of a road-movie than a traditionally ‘academic’ book, somewhat reminiscent of John Nathan’s Japan Unbound. On her travels across Japan, carried out over three summers of fieldwork since 2008, Anne Allison goes through the case sheet of Japan’s contemporary maladies of what she calls ‘social precarity’. She interviews social activists, takes part in a ‘stop suicide’ performance event in downtown Tokyo, joins a regional youth self-help group in Niigata and an initiative at the grassroots to pull the elderly out of alienation. By the end of her travels she joins volunteer relief operations in the aftermath of the Great East Japan Earthquake that struck in 2011. Along the way, she quotes from a newspaper article or a letter to the press that she reads on the shinkansen bullet train going to one or other destination. The account of her participant observation becomes a real-time probing of the here and now Japanese zeitgeist, one which reminds us that Japan has problems besides economics to tackle before Abe Shinz o’s fellow citizens can join with him in his prediction that ‘Japan is back!’ Although her style is invigorating, the situation she conjures becomes increasingly disheartening as the symptoms accumulate. Allison describes her method thus: ‘This is the ethnography I do, gathering stories from not only encounters, conversations, interviews, or events that I was party to but also news accounts, books, movies, television specials, manga and anime, and stories passed on from others’ (17). Her impressionistic reportage style is thus intentional:

The Aesthetics of Shadow: Lighting and Japanese Cinema

fantasies” (p. 206) in popular culture or mass media. Part 4 explores the women who achieved great success beyond national boundaries and how these women are envisaged overseas – as the field of self-cultivation and/or the key to women’s social advancement. The volume highlights the importance of interdisciplinary analysis to fully understand a complex phenomenon in an unprecedentedly shifting era – the phenomenon of “historical and cultural contingency” (p. xiii). The collection also clearly depicts what working outside the home meant to these modern girls, showing how to step boldly out of the shadows of gender norms. Japanese women were engaged in gendered labour. This book mirrors these women’s diligent efforts and pride in their occupations, which provided an innovative and meaningful life beyond their home – as many girls moved to the public sphere on a quest for independence and a new persona. As Christine R. Yano concludes, “What did matter to these modern girls is that they found the means to go” (p. 105). Upon finishing the volume, a question may well arise in the reader’s mind: Who are the next modern girls on the go and what will their journey be like in the twenty-first century?

Proletarian Writers and the Great Tokyo Earthquake of 1923

This chapter delineates the typical leftist and socialist approaches to the disaster, focusing mainly on contemporary testimony of writers and intellectuals who were more or less involved in the rising Proletarian Literary Movement. When one considers these approaches, one finds that the focus tends to be on the ensuing persecution rather than on the natural disaster as such. In Hayashi Fusaos 1955 Literary Reminiscences ( Bungakuteki kaisō ) one can find the more unusual reflections on the great earthquake from a leftist perspective. Hayashi, who would go on to become one of the most prominent proletarian writers and activists, had enrolled at the Tokyo Imperial University in April 1923, or rather, as he explains, he had enrolled in New Man Society ( Shinjinkai ). In the history of the Proletarian Literary Movement Hayashi Fusao is infamous for having dealt the movement its first blow from an insider position, when he announced his political conversion. Keywords: earthquake; Proletarian Literary Movement; proletarian writers; socialist approach; Tokyo

Politics, Porn and Protest: Japanese Avant-garde Cinema in the 1960s and 1970s

premising this claim on the artist’s deployment of tension between a culturally distant form and an awareness of a very different present. In other words, the artist works with a cultural amnesia of traditional art forms to innovatively present or reinsert them into contemporary creative practice. This brings the author’s discussion full circle, to assert Terayama’s referencing and appropriation of others’ creativity, both historical and contemporary, as cross-pollination, as well as drawing attention to his continued selfpollination. As a transmedia artist who naturally gravitated toward the centre of antiestablishment activity, Terayama’s movement between literary and visual modes was timely and reflected innovation occurring in a variety of cultural spaces at particular times. Ridgely’s discerning analysis effectively spotlights Terayama’s controversial exploitation of text, image and body to express his politicized vision of Japanese society and its relationship to global culture after the end of the Pacific War.