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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 07 May 2025
This essay offers an introduction to proletarian arts in East Asia in the 1920s and 1930s. It is based on the introduction to a special edition of positions: east asia cultures critique, entitled Proletarian Arts in East Asia: Quests for National, Gender, and Class Justice (14:2, Fall 2006), which grew out of the international symposium “Proletarian Arts in East Asia,” held at the University of Chicago in 2002.
[1] Yoon-shik Kim, “KAPF Literature in Modern Korean Literary History,” special edition of positions: east asia cultures critique, Proletarian Arts in East Asia: Quests for National, Gender, and Class Justice 14:2 (Fall 2006), p. 412.
[2] The original paper presenters were Yoonshik Kim, Emiko Kida, Samuel Perry, Minato Kawamura, Ping Liu, Bert Scruggs and me; in addition, Norma Field, Xiaobing Tang, Kyong-Hee Choi and Mark Anderson participated in a panel discussion. The special edition of positions has essays by Samuel Perry, Brian Bergstrom, Ruth Barraclough, Yoon-shik Kim, Bert Scruggs, Ping Liu, Xiaobing Tang, Emiko Kida, and me.
[3] “Proletarian” is the umbrella term I am using for “leftwing,” “KAPF”, and “proletarian” as the authors of these essays have chosen to construe their subjects. My phrase “the awkwardness of the term to some ears today” is a nod to Ruth Barraclough's essay, in which she calls the female factory workers, “factory girls,” as she writes, “precisely because of its bitterness to modern ears.” See footnote later for this reference
[4] Michael Denning, Culture in the Age of Three Worlds (London and New York: Verso, 2004), 57.
[5] Ibid., 57-58.
[6] Ibid., 57.
[7] Ibid., 57. The phrase “imagined proximity of social revolution” is from Perry Anderson, “Modernity and Revolution,” New Left Review, no. 144 (March-April 1984), 104.
[8] Sandra Wilson describes how, in an effort to found the first Japanese Communist Party, anarchist Osugi Sakae “went to Shanghai in 1920 and made contact with the Comintern, returning with the considerable sum of 2,000 yen and a promise of more funds… In 1921 Kondo Eizo also received money from Comintern representatives in Shanghai for Communist activities in Japan—this time 6,500 yen.” Sandra Wilson, “The Comintern and Japanese Communist Party,” International Communism and the Communist International 1919-43, edited by Tim Rees and Andrew Thorpe (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 1998), 287.
[9] Wilson writes, “Between 1923 and 1926, for example, some forty-three young Japanese Communists first traveled to Shanghai, where they made contact with a Soviet representative, then were smuggled aboard Russian freighters bound for Vladivostok, from where they continued to Moscow on the Trans-Siberian Railway to begin studying for periods of two to three years at KUTV [Communist University of the Workers of the East].” Ibid., 292.
[10] S. A. Smith, “The Comintern, the Chinese Communist Party and the three armed uprisings in Shanghai, 1926-27,” International Communism and the Communist International 1919-43, edited by Tim Rees and Andrew Thorpe (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 1998), 255.
[11] Ibid., 254-57.
[12] Wang-chi Wong, Politics and literature in Shanghai: the Chinese League of Left-Wing Writers, 1930-1936 (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 1991), 6.
[13] With the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution in China, the term “proletarian” has exercised many duties in the past half century as well. Liu Ping therefore discusses not “proletarian” drama, but “leftwing” drama in China, which he explains is a smaller subset of proletarian.
[14] Liu Ping.
[15] Agnes Smedley, whose autobiographical Daughter of Earth (1929) has been called the first American proletarian novel, traveled the world addressing injustice and is perhaps best known in China where she fought alongside revolutionaries and chronicled their struggles. When Chinese Leftwing writer Ding Ling was arrested by the Guomindang in 1933, Smedley collected some of her translated writings and published them to bring an international spotlight on her arrest. Janice R MacKinnon and Stephen R. MacKinnon, Agnes Smedley: The Life and Times of an American Radical (University of California Press: Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1988), 159.
[16] Shu-mei Shih, The Lure of the Modern: Writing Modernism in Semicolonial China, 1917-1937 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001), 232.
[17] Raymond Williams, The Politics of Modernism (London: Verso, 1989), 44; cited in Seiji Lippit, Topographies of Japanese Modernism (New York: Columbia University, 2002), 81.
[18] See work by Wang-chi Wong, Shu-mei Shih, Leo Ou-fan Lee, Tani Barlow, Xiaobing Tang, etc.
[19] Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism (Vintage Books, a Division of Random House, Inc.: New York, 1994 (1993), 74.
[20] Lippit, 77.
[21] Yokomitsu Riichi, Shanghai, translated by Dennis Washburn (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan, 2001), 207.
[22] Seiji Lippit writes, “On the level of ideological content, the novel's central conflict, between Sanki's nationalism and Qiulan's revolutionary Marxism, is never resolved.” Lippit, 104.
[23] Ibid., p. 313-314.
[24] “The Path to Proletarian Realism” (Puroretariariarizumu e no michi, 1929), forthcoming in English translation by Brian Bergstrom in Literature for Revolution: An Anthology of Japanese Proletarian Writings, co-edited by Norma Field and me.
[25] Bert Scruggs, p. 433.
[26] Xiaobing Tang, p.478.
[27] Xiaobing Tang, p. 476-477.
[28] Barraclough, p. 346.
[29] An English translation of this novel has already been prepared by Samuel Perry.
[30] Barraclough, p. 346
[31] Ruth Barraclough, footnote 11.
[32] Perry, p. 296.
[33] Perry, p. 298.
[34] See, for example, Houjou Tsunehisa, Tanemaku hito: Komaki OUmi no seishun (The Sowers: The Spring of Komaki Oumi) (Chikuma Shobou: Tokyo, 1995).
[35] Wilson, 187-192.
[36] Germaine Hoston, Marxism and the Crisis of Development in Prewar Japan (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1986), 56. The following discussion is indebted to Hoston's discussion of Marxist debates and developments in Marxism and the Crisis of Development in Prewar Japan and in The State, Identity, and the National Question in China and Japan (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994).
[37] Hoston, Marxism and the Crisis, 56.
[38] For a detailed chronicle of proletarian literature in Japan, see G. T. Shea's Leftwing Literature in Japan: A Brief History of the Proletarian Literary Movement (Tokyo: Housei University Press, 1964). In Japanese, see Yamada Seizaburou, Puroretaria bungakushi (A History of Proletarian Literature), vol. 1 and 2 (Tokyo: Rironsha, 1967), and Kurihara Yukio, Puroretaria bungaku to sono jidai (Proletarian Literature and Its Era) (Tokyo: Heibonsha, 1971; reprint Inpakuto Shuppankai, 2004).
[39] Kim Yoon-shik, footnote 5, p. 422.
[40] In Essential Works of Lenin: “What Is to Be Done?” and Other Writings, ed. Henry M. Christman (Dover Publications, Inc.: New York, 1987).
[41] Hoston, Marxism and the Crisis, 202.
[42] Ibid., 202.
[43] Ibid., 203.
[44] S. A. Smith, 256.
[45] S. A. Smith, 254.
[46] Hoston, Marxism and the Crisis, 56-57.
[47] This argument is developed in my essay “Rival Imagined Communities.”
[48] Antoinette Burton, “Introduction: On the Inadequacy and the Indispensability of the Nation,” After the Imperial Turn: Thinking with and through the Nation, edited by Antoinette Burton (Duke University Press: Duke and London, 2003), 6.
[49] Ann Curthoys, “We've Just Started Making National Histories, and You Want Us to Stop Already?” After the Imperial Turn: Thinking with and through the Nation, edited by Antoinette Burton (Duke University Press: Duke and London, 2003), 85.
[50] Burton, 2.
[51] Curthoys, 85.
[52] Mark Driscoll, “Introduction,” in Katsuei Yuasa, Kannani and Document of Flames: Two Japanese Colonial Novels, translated and with an introduction by Mark Driscoll, (Duke University Press, 2005), 28.
[53] Hoston, The State, Identity, and the National Question in China and Japan, 179.
[54] Liu Ping, p. 454.
[55] Nakano Shigeharu, Sata Inekoshū (Nakano Shigeharu and Sata Ineko Collection), Gendai bungaku taikei vol. 57 (Tokyo: Chikuma shobou, 1970), 21. Originally published in Kaizou, February 1929.
[56] Miriam Silverberg, The Changing Song of Nakano Shigeharu (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1990), 162.
[57] Translation from Silverberg, 161.
[58] Translator Yoon Sun Yang's note in Kim Yoon-shik's essay.
[59] Paper presented at the University of Chicago in the Workshop on “Art and Politics in East Asia,” March 2004. Hotei provided a list of the following Korean proletarian writers who published in Japanese: Kim Chung-saeng, Kim Hui-myong, Kim Yak-su, Chong Yon-gyu, Yi Yang, Kim Ki-jin, Han Sik, Yi Pung-man, Han Sor-ya, Im Hwa, Kim Hwang, Sin In-ch'ul, Kim Kun-yol, Kim Kwang-uk, Paek Ch'ol, Chang Hyok-chu, Pak Yong-je, An Mak, Kim Tu-yong, Pak Sok-chong, Yi Cho-myong (Yi Pung-myong), Kang Kyong-ae, Hyon Min (Yu Chin-o), Yi Hyosok, Hong Chong-u, Kim Kyong-su, Kim Saryang, Kim Kwang.
[60] Samuel Perry, p. 383. Perry refers to the following works: Pak Kyong-sik, Zainichi chousenjin undoushi 8 .15 kaihoumae (The Resident Korean Movement in Japan: Before the August 15 Liberation) (Tokyo: San'ichi shobou, 1979), 221. Robert A. Scalapino and Chong-sik Lee, Communism in Korea (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1972), 188-189.
[61] This is a reference to Benedict Anderson's idea of the nation as an “imagined political community—and imagined as both inherently limited and sovereign,” an idea that has influenced this discussion and has catalyzed discussions of modern nation states in immeasurable ways. Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, Revised Edition. (Verso: London and New York, 1991), 6.
[62] Kida, p. 520.
[63] Samuel Perry, “Korean as Proletarian: Ethnicity and Identity in Chang Hyok-chu's ‘Hell of the Starving‘” p. 303; Miyamoto Yuriko citation from Miyamoto Yuriko, “Puroretaria bungaku ni okeru kokusaiteki na shudai ni tsuite” (“International Themes in Proletarian Literature”), Yomiuri Shinbun, October 16,17,20~22, 1931. Reprinted in Miyamoto Yuriko zenshÅ«, vol. 10 (Shinnihon Shuppansha: Tokyo, 1980).
[64] Tang Xiaobing, p. 468.
[65] Tang Xiaobing, p. 473.
[66] Kida, p. 520.
[67] At the Symposium upon which this volume is based, Kawamura Minato presented on the leftwing farmer-poet Nogawa Takashi, who produced poetry while living in Manchukuo before his incarceration in 1942, which led to his death. See also Funo Eiichi, “Nihon no puroretaria bungaku ga egakaita ‘ManshÅ«’,” and Ino Mutsumi, “Kakimura Hiroshi no ‘kantou paruchisan no uta’: puroretaria kokusaishugi to rentai,” both from Shokuminchi to bungaku, edited by Nihon shakai bungakukai (Orijin shuppansha senta-: Tokyo, 1993). This important volume, based on a conference exploring literature during the Japanese empire, closes with an afterword reflecting on the significance of Japan sending its so-called Self-Defense Forces as a Peace Keeping Organization (PKO) to the former President Bush's war on Iraq. Nishida Katsu reflects that the ambivalence of intellectuals to Japan's remilitarization might be likened to the atmosphere following the Manchurian Incident in 1931 (Nishida, 269).
[68] Kawamura Minato, “One View of the History of Japanese Proletarian Literature: On Nogawa Takashi,” translation by David Rosenfeld, paper delivered at the Proletarian Literature in East Asia Symposium, University of Chicago, 2002. We should note that Amakasu Masahiko was responsible for murdering Socialist Osugi Sakae in the wake of the Great Tokyo Earthquake (1923).
[69] Ruth Barraclough, footnote 25. Barraclough cites the following sources: See Carter Eckert, et al, Korea Old and New, Seoul: Ilchokak, 1991, pp. 185, 243, 273. See also Yi Yi-hwa (ed.), Hanguk Kunhyondaesa Sajon [Dictionary of Modern and Contemporary Korean History], Seoul: Karam Kihoek, 1990, pp.90-93.
[70] Kim, p. 411.
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