The Crab Cannery Ship and Other Novels of Struggle by Kobayashi Takiji

I have been MIA for approximately four months. During this time I finished writing the first part of a research project (I’m a student at Tohoku University in Sendai) and I travelled inside and outside of Japan. And I read a lot of books. No less surprising, perhaps, the toll that the research project took on my daily life compounded by the exhaustion and mental depletion following its culmination were sufficient factors in my decision to temporarily abandon this blog — until today. 

Two weeks ago I had just returned from a trip to Hokkaido. I moved around the desolate and frozen landscape visiting Sapporo, Abashiri, Hiretokoshari and Otaru. It felt like traveling through a black-and-white Japanese film. Flashbacks of Yasunari Kawabata’s Snow Country (which I haven’t read since my undergraduate days) were unavoidable even if that novel was set somewhere in Niigata Prefecture. In Sapporo and Otaru I went to the local museum of literature to see the displays of one of my favorite Japanese writers, Kobayashi Takiji. The following photos are from Hokkaido Museum of Literature (北海道立文学館) in Sapporo and Otaru Museum of Literature (小樽文学館) in, well, Otaru. Kobayashi Takiji was given prominent place in both of these establishments. That’s the main reason why I paid them a visit. 

Seeing all those old books written by him and reading all the voluminous information scattered on posters, banners, old newspapers and in photographs made me think of Kobayashi’s magnificent book I read with enthusiasm while vacationing in Singapore last December: The Crab Cannery Ship. But it also conjured the deep resentment I feel for the dissonant history of nationalistic nostalgia that has made such a strong comeback under Prime-Minister Abe’s administration. You only have to walk into a regular Japanese bookstore or pick up a newspaper or switch on any channel of the (predominantly) right-wing media to see what I’m talking about. Kobayashi’s undiluted presence in Hokkaido and the frozen sprawling spectacle peopled with charming inhabitants made me forget for an insular moment the vicissitudes of the Japanese “mainland.” But I want now to talk a little about the book.

Kobayashi Takiji’s The Crab Cannery Ship, in the fresh and exuberant translation by Zeljko Cipris, is more than an established example of the proletarian current that swooped on Japan during the 1930s: it is an explicit articulation of seething outrage as well as indictment of the domestic and international villainies carried out by Japan during the early Showa period. Moreover, it is a condemnation of the capitalist system which rises above insipid demagoguery due to its unique literary value, a fact illustrated by the notable currency and recognition the novel acquired in 2008 after being propelled to the status of national bestseller. This noteworthy media reclamation of a workers’ struggle aboard a cannery ship doing its rounds near Soviet shores is indicative of a general global revival of politically-loaded and humanistically-inclined notions of solidarity, struggle and class. Norma Field and Heather Bowen-Struyk do a far better job of explaining the social, cultural and economic issues underlying this unanticipated Takiji “boom.” Instead, in these few lines I would like to concentrate on the unprecedented intensity of criticism which Takiji leveled at imperialism, the army, capital, labor exploitation and, most outrageously, the Japanese Imperial family. The fact that this novel was published, even in censored form, is an amazing oversight on the part of authorities who began to crack down on leftist ideas following the promulgation of the Peace Preservation Law in 1925. 

I want to enumerate here my favorite passages from the book, all of which reveal Kobayashi’s heroic streak bordering on madness and, naturally, bringing the outrageous truth to light. There are also a few passages that offer a counter-history to the established knowledge about the development of Hokkaido which runs against the glorified selfless, patriotic acts captured in various national museums (one that jumps into my mind is the Abashiri Prison Museum, 網走監獄, which I recently visited). But I’ll let the text to do the rest of the talking. 

“Needless to say, as some of you may know, this crab cannery ship’s business is not just to make lots of money for the corporation but is actually a matter of the greatest international importance. This is a one-on-one fight between us, citizens of a great empire, and the Russkies, a battle to find out which one of us is greater — them or us…” (26)

“Another thing, our fishing industry off Kamchatka is not just about canning crabs and salmon and trout, but internationally speaking it’s also about keeping up the superior status of our nation, which no other country can match. And moreover, we’re accomplishing an important mission in regard to our domestic problem like overpopulation and shortage of food. You probably have no idea what I’m talking about, but anyhow I’ll have you know that we’ll be risking our lives cutting through those rough northern waves to carry out a great mission for the Japanese empire. And that’s why our imperial warship will accompany us and protect us all along the way… Anyone who acts up trying to ape this recent Russky craze, anyone who incites others to commit outrageous acts, is nothing but a traitor to the Japanese empire.” (26-27)

“International competition is never going to be won by acting nice, and you got no business sticking your nose into this!” The manager twisted his lips hard, and spat. (34)

“Japan no good now. Working people, this.” (He bent back and shrank into himself.) “Rich man boss, this.” (Swaggering, he imitated a bully knocking people down.) “That no good! Working people, this.” (With a fierce look, he stood up and lunged forward as if to knock down and trample an oppressor.) “Rich man boss, this.” (He mimed fleeing.) “Japan all working people, good country. Proletariat country…” (46)

Everybody was made to go to the work site before dawn. They were forced to work until their pickaxes glittered bluish-white in the dark and their hands could no longer be seen. Everyone envied the prisoners who worked in a nearby jail. Koreans were treated most cruelly of all, not only by the bosses and overseers but by their fellow Japanese laborers. (54)

It was the same at the mines. New tunnels were dug. To find out how best to deal with whatever gases leaked from the ground and whatever momentous changes the digging would cause, the capitalists — following the methods of General Nogi, sainted hero of the Russo-Japanese War — simply used up tens of thousands of workers whom they could buy more cheaply than guinea pigs, then throw away. It was easier than discarding used tissues! The tunnel walls kept on being reinforced with multiple layers of miners’ raw flesh. Horrors were perpetrated taking advantage of the mines’ distance from cities. In the loaded mine cars, slabs of coal sometimes turned up with severed thumbs and little fingers adhering to them. Women and children did not even raise an eyebrow at such sights. Accustomed to them all, expressionless, they merely pushed the cars to the next station. That coal propelled a gigantic engine churning out capitalists’ profits. (55)

In Hokkaido there were “immigrant farmers” and “new cultivators.” Through movies filled with enticing slogans like “Develop Hokkaido,” “Solve the food problem through promoting immigration,” and the childish “Strike it rich as immigrants,” the powers that be encouraged the mainland’s impoverished peasants who were about to be robbed of their fields to emigrate, only to abandon them on the land that — four or five inches below the surface — turned out to be nothing but clay… By the following spring entire families, buried in the snow and without even potatoes to eat, had starved to death. Such things happened over and over. (55-56)

Even in those rare cases where immigrants managed to cultivate their land for a decade without staving to death, when they finally had turned it into decent fields, they would find that the land now belonged to “outsiders.” The capitalists — usurers, banks, nobles, and the superrich — casually lent out lavish sums of money, so that once the wasteland was transformed into fields as fertile as plump cats they unfailingly fell into their own hands. Imitating such practices, other shrewd people came to Hokkaido determined to make easy money. The peasants found their possessions snatched at from every direction. In the end they were reduced to being just what they had been on the mainland: tenant farmers. (56)

“It’s only the Russkies who quit working the moment the time’s up, even if there are frigging shoals of fish right under their noses. With that kind of attitude, no wonder Russia got to be such a fucked up country. Japanese men must never act like that!”

Some of the men ignored his speech, thinking: “The asshole’s lying.” But the majority swallowed the manager’s suggestion that the Japanese were truly an outstanding people. And they felt somewhat consoled by the notion that their cruel daily sufferings seemed to have something heroic about it. (61)

“It bowled me over when I first heard it, but when you come right down to it the truth is that every single one of Japan’s wars to this day was fought at the orders of a few rich or super-rich men (I’m talking really rich men), with the excuses cooked up any which way. Anyhow, these crooks are itching like crazy to get their hands on every place they mell money. They’re looking for trouble.” (72)

“Nobody’s on our side except our own selves. For the first time, I get the picture.”

“All that bullshit about the navy being on the side of the people…On the side of the people, my ass! They’re nothing but flunkies of the filthy rich.” (94)

Every year as the fishing season drew to an end, it was customary to manufacture some cans of crabmeat to be offered to the Emperor. Yet not the slightest effort was ever made to precede their preparation with the traditional ritual purification. The fishermen had always thought this terrible of the manager. But this time they felt differently.

“We’re squeezing our very blood and flesh into these cans. Huh, I’m sure they’ll taste wonderful. Hope they give him a stomachache.”

Such were their feelings as they packed the cans for the Imperial table.

“Mix in some rocks! I don't give a fuck!” (94)

And lest anyone thinks that Kobayashi Takiji had only the interests of his fellow *men* on his mind, then check out these passages from the novella Yasuko. Kobayashi can quite realistically rival the astuteness for anthropological analysis of any social scientist of his era (Hosoi Wakizou and Yasoo Kusama come to mind) and his feminist sympathies and support for Japanese women's social, economic and political emancipation are unmistakable. 

“And yet most people consider this kind of life only natural, or they’re convinced that nothing can ever be done about it. The boss who makes you work like that and doesn’t do a lick of work himself grabs profits dozens of times bigger than what you get. All the same, there’s still a lot of folks in Japan who accept all this as a matter of course because he’s got money and they don’t. Many women tend to think like that…” (156)

“It’s especially women who’ve been trained to submit unquestioningly to everything. Even if she has a family, the woman must not raise her head because it’s the man who brings in the money. A man gets away with doing wrong, a woman gets blamed even when she’s right. That’s why women ought to work on their own, so as to become fully self-reliant…” (156)

“Women’s work has long been limited to sewing, cooking, and taking care of children, but now they’ll find themselves in the wider society, occupying the same workplace as men. As a result women’s way of thinking will also change, and anyway they’ll earn money, enabling them to gain economic independence. Therefore they’ll be able to break free from slavish ways of thought that have taught them till now to depend on men. Right?… First of all, since you’ve got a boss then you don't just cook and clean, you go out to work every single day, and with the money you get working for that boss you provide for your family and you handle various household matters all with your own strength. Without realizing it, you’ve become different from a woman who does needlework…” 

Okei had never before heard such talk. Although this was her first time, she felt she understood its meaning as accurately as if it had struck some measuring instrument within her heart. 

“In the old days, women’s only profession was prostitution. Look at you now: tens of thousands of factory workers, cafè and bar waitresses, office workers, typists, bus conductors. Not only are your numbers growing, but your sphere of work is rapidly expanding too. This sort of thing will have an extremely socializing and elevating effect on women’s way of thinking about things.” (157)

“…Working-class women are bound by double chains: on the one hand they must be liberated from men, and on the other hand they must be liberated from capital. To be liberated from men, women must first of all be economically independent, but to solve that basic economic problem it’s essential that women be liberated as workers. So, enabling women to exist truly as women is only conceivable through a liberation of the working class. It may sound like a self-serving argument, but to join our work on a mass scale is the best way to break both these chains at once.” (158)

And finally there’s the straightforward unveiling of Japan’s overseas intentions and the deluded utopian ambitions that saw a lot of left-leaning humanists abandon their homeland for the harsh, barren wastelands of Manchuria in order to build a better society with the support and/or in the name of his majesty, the Emperor. 

“Unlike earlier wars, they claimed, the present war was not being fought so that Mitsui, Mitsubishi, and other corporations could erect gigantic factories in the occupied territories; it was being fought to create a way out for the dispossessed. Once we took Manchuria, we would exclude the big capitalists and set up a monarchy of our own. The nation’s unemployed would rush off to Manchuria, and some day not a single unemployed person would remain in Japan. There was not a single unemployed person in Russia, and we too must become the same. Therefore, they said, the present war was a war for the good of the proletariat, and we too had to work as industriously as we possibly could at the jobs that we had been given.” (263)

Kobayashi Takiji's death mask

Further reading:

Takiji Kobayashi. The Crab Cannery Ship and Other Novels of Struggle. University of Hawaii Press, 2013.

Bowen-Struyk, Heather. "Why a Boom in Proletarian Literature in Japan? The Kobayashi Takiji Memorial and The Factory Ship." The Asia-Pacific Journal 29 (2009).

Field, Norma. "Commercial Appetite and Human Need: The Accidental and Fated Revival of Kobayashi Takiji's Cannery Ship." The Asia-Pacific Journal 8 (2009).

Marginalia: Langston Hughes in Japan

     In my previous post I described how African American social activists and artists visited Japan during the interwar period. During this interval, contacts between these two ethnic groups were at an all-time high and benefitted extensive cultural exchange. Among those who visited was Langston Hughes (1902-1967), an eminent Harlem Renaissance leader and campaigner for political and social change. In the article I covered for my essay, Prof. Yukiko Koshiro describes the importance of Hughes' visit in the following way:

Langston Hughes, though never a member of the Communist Party, was one of the African Americans who cultivated close ties with Japanese leftists. In 1933, during a tour of Moscow, Hughes met Sano Seki, a communist exile from Japan, a renowned theatrical producer, and also a friend of Ishigaki Eitarō. Sano arranged Hughes' visit to Japan on his way from Moscow to Beijing. Once in Japan, Hughes was overwhelmed by the welcome given by Sano's former colleagues at the Tsukiji Mini Theater, then a center for leftist avant-garde performances, and also by Japan's leftist intellectual artists, writers, and journalists. To his surprise, Hughes found his portrait featured on the cover of the September 1932 issue of shin-ei-bungaku [the newer spirit in british and american literature] (the original title featured all lowercase letters), the Japanese proletarian literary journal, which had placed such literary laureates as James Joyce, Aldous Huxley, and Sinclair Lewis on its cover.

Unlike [W.E.B.] Du Bois, Hughes flatly rejected Japan's Pan-Asianism. Hughes was disturbed that Japanese media reports on crimes committed by Koreans placed an unnecessary emphasis on their racial character, just like the American media's treatment of African Americans. He recognized Japanese racism against other Asians as a fueling force for their aggression. Due to his insights into the nature of Japan's Pan-Asianism, Hughes did not receive the Japanese government's welcome extended to Du Bois. On the contrary, on his second visit to Japan after a several-week sojourn in China, Hughes was detained by the Japanese police and questioned about the purpose of his visits to China and Japan and also his relationship with Japanese leftists. Until his departure from Japan two days later, two plainclothes police officers followed him everywhere. One Japanese was also arrested for his contact with Hughes during his first stay in Japan. 

     I decided to look into Hughes' own account of these events and so, in my research, I stumbled upon his autobiography, I Wander as I Wonder. I'm rendering below an excerpt related directly to his troubles experienced in Japan. I decided to ignore his pleasant accomplishments as a tourist (concisely and eloquently described in the sixth chapter entitled Color around the Globe) and to focus more on the negative aspects of the visit, including Hughes' criticism leveled at the racism behind Japan's imperialistic exploits, already summarized by Prof. Koshiro.

Works cited:

Koshiro, Yukiko. "Beyond an alliance of color: The African American Impact on Modern Japan." positions: east asia cultures critique 11.1 (2003): 183-215.

McLaren, Jospeh. "Autobiography: I Wonder as I Wander." The Collected Works of Langston Hughes, Volume 14. University of Missouri, 2003.

Images of Black People in Late Mediaeval and Early Modern Japan, 1543-1900 by Gary P. Leupp & Beyond an Alliance of Color: The African American Impact on Modern Japan by Yukiko Koshiro

The Arrival of 'Southern Barbarians,' 17th Century

I interrupted my reading of Miriam Silverberg’s masterpiece in order to peruse two articles which call attention to Japan’s earliest exposures to African and African-American people(s) and culture(s) and the historical significance of these contacts. The corpus of identity issues in Japan, especially with reference to race, minority and discrimination, is not only of personal interest but, in my opinion, has carried political and cultural weight from medieval times up to the present day. My intention here is to expose the ways in which images of black people have been a matter of considerable importance to Japan’s history by making specific reference to Gary P. Leupp’s Images of Black People in Late Mediaeval and Early Modern Japan, 1543-1900 and Yukiko Koshiro’s Beyond an Alliance of Color: The African American Impact on Modern Japan. I also want to investigate historical similarities between black people and Koreans (the latter whom I covered in a previous post) in regard to racial acceptance and rejection in a country which constantly redefined its position towards other ethnic groups in order to benefit its shifting geopolitical agenda. Lastly, I want to show the impact of African Americans’ striving for social justice and how this inspired and mobilized Japanese leftist movements.

Interesting things I learned from reading Prof. Leupp’s article:

• The first appearance of black people in Japan occurred in the 16th century;
• Black people arrived on European ships, either as slaves, sailors or attendants to Christian missionaries or traders; 
• They were the subject of intense fascination among people of various social status (both upper-class and commoners);
• One famous African was a man from Mozambique to whom Oda Nobunaga gave the name ‘Yasuke.’ Nobunaga was so intrigued by this foreigner that he put him on his payroll. Yasuke fought for his new master until Nobunaga was forced to commit suicide. Akechi Matsuhide (Nobunaga’s vanquisher) spared Yasuke and eventually released him from service;
• Before the deterioration of tolerance towards foreign presence and the closing of the country in the early 17th century, black people were allowed to move freely, take Japanese wives, buy Japanese slaves and were even recruited in the service of various daimyō;
• The black people employed by the Dutch East India Company served as translators at the shogun’s court and sometimes engaged in smuggling European goods;
• African people were often confused with Indian people. This confusion contributed to radical revisions of Buddhist art as when Bodhidharma and Sakyamuni Buddha were depicted as having black skin. 

     With the advent of Dutch Studies (Rangaku), the overall positive, tolerant attitudes towards people with dark skin changed radically. Derogatory descriptions and terms started to appear in poetry and scholastic writings as early as 1764. In all instances, dark skin was associated with low status and a lack of civilization. However, some scholars adopted a more skeptical view. For example, Ōtsuki Gentaku, a Dutch Studies scholar, had this to say:

Among koronbō [a term heterogeneously spelled referring to black people, which only later started to carry derogatory connotations] there is certainly a distinction between the noble and the lowly and the wise and the foolish.

Following the weakening of bakufu closed-country policies and the arrival of the Black Ships in 1853, interactions with white Westerners became more widespread. Feelings of appreciation and awe for Western superior technology and weapons gave way to disparaging attitudes towards all non-white people, especially those colonized or conquered by the West. These included non-Japanese Asians such as Indonesian, Chinese Koreans, etc. White color skin became associated with superior intellect while the opposite judgement was accorded to dark color skin. Questionable Western perspectives of an absolute racial hierarchy (with white-skinned Europeans and Americans at the top and black Africans at the bottom) were readily accepted. Moreover, foreign racialist attitudes had a role to play in the dissemination and assimilation among the Japanese people of the idea that blacks belonged to an inferior civilization. The American envoy, for example, was no stranger to such circumstance:

In Yokohama on 23 March 1954, Perry announced a ‘minstrel show’ after dinner and drinks with his hosts. (One diary referred to the event as an ‘Ethiopian Concert’). Crewmen in Perry’s vessel, The Powhatan, put on black faces and sang ‘Mistah Tambo’ and ‘Mistah Bones’ to the apparent delight of the Japanese in attendance. The show was a huge success.

Assembled Paintings of Commodore Perry's Visit, 19th Century

This and other similar depictions of black people as innately inferior or as objects of ridicule became ingrained on the Japanese psyche. Soon, Japanese scholars and politicians started to promulgate this notion far and wide. For instance, various members of the ambassadorial missions to US were recorded as making the following distasteful remarks:

The blacks are inferior as human beings and extremely stupid.

The laws of the land separate the blacks. They are just like our eta caste… The whites are of course intelligent, and the blacks stupid. Thus the seeds of intelligence and unintelligence are not allowed to mix together.

It seems that the whites are beautiful and shrewd and intelligent; and the blacks are ugly and stupid. So the whites always despise the blacks.

Statements like these were proof of the enthusiasm and willingness by which Japanese people adopted and routinely parroted Western behavioral norms and morals. The deep-rooted racist structures of the colonial West appeared in the mind of the Japanese as perfectly acceptable social prerequisites for a strong national economy and state-of-the-art military. There were only a few resisters to this view but it’s important to mention that they existed. However, when the tenets of Social Darwinism began to make incursion in the Japanese academia, these dissenting voices were largely suppressed in favor of a theory that stimulated and endorsed feverish dreams of empire — a modern nation’s new grail — and Japan’s superiority over non-Japanese Asian nations. It also upheld the social divisions in the society as the discourse of nationalism became more ingrained and accentuated: discrimination against Koreans and burakumin was now not only admissible by centuries of tradition but it was also justified by modern science imported from the West. 

Strange as it may seem, the fate of the earliest contacts between Japan and black people suffered the same fate as the Koreans. While the initial exposure to blacks and Koreans before and during Tokugawa rule was graced with vibes of inquisitiveness and acceptance, after the Meiji Restoration these tendencies took a turn for the worst, mostly under the auspices of Western influence. For decades afterwards up to the end of WWII, Japanese scholars and statesmen became entangled in the push for world racialization both at home (where domestic legislature and tradition discriminated against burakumin and Koreans) and overseas (where the Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere was ideologically and materially built upon racialist views of Japanese superiority). And even though Japan tried to use the exploitation of blacks in the USA as a warning signal to other Asian nations and urged them to unify and stay strong against Western imperialism (under the aegis of the Japanese Emperor, it was implied), in the end, as Mr. Leupp wrote, “such exploitation itself served racist and fascistic goals.”

But there was another side to relations between Japan and black people. Prof. Yukiko Koshiro describes in her article the substantial role that African Americans played in Japanese culture and politics. She argues that African American history, literature and especially the struggle for recognition, acceptance and equality were extensively celebrated in Japanese arts and politics as early as the 1930s. In her detailed exploration of race relations beginning with the Meiji period, prof. Koshiro manages to put together a pastiche of positive causes and effects resulting from the interactions between Japanese and African Americans. In fact, she argues that,

Throughout the twentieth century, African American struggles for freedom and equality have inspired Japanese people far beyond the doomed rhetoric of alliance under the Japanese banner of Pan-Asianism. Those Japanese who attempted to build different kinds of trans-Pacific relations with African American people…dissented from the troublesome race ideology of the nation, challenged it, and envisioned a better Japan.

Before race relations took a sour turn, it is worthy to remember that the Iwakura Mission of 1871-1873 showed respect and admiration for African American advancements in society and politics. The encounter with African American culture had a constructive effect upon members of the mission who went on record stating the following:

It is obvious that skin color has no bearing on one’s intellect. Therefore, those ambitious blacks who saw the importance of education strove to learn and work harder and became great intellectuals, for who uneducated whites were no match.

The history and social condition that befell African Americans were a source of inspiration for Japanese people, especially for the nation’s newly-ensconced statesmen who tried to replicate the gains of a supposed inferior Asian race back at home. Just in the same way that black people managed to secure rights and freedoms in America (albeit limitedly), so Japan wanted recognition of its worth as an equal, strong Asian nation on the world stage. Even though it sought the validity of white supremacy in this matter (validity which, ironically, was incentivized by colonial prospects and, in time, came to be applied brutally against other non-Japanese Asian races) it can be said that Japan’s earliest understanding of African-American people was handled with natural, positive charm.

Another example of positive Meiji attitudes towards African Americans was the translation of Uncle Tom’s Cabin which came out in print in 1896. The publication of similarly-themed books continued in the Taishō period with the appearance of Booker T. Washington’s autobiography in 1919. In a show of admiration for black culture that continued to be evidenced in Japan around this time, many prominent African American leaders were invited to special events or held lectures at distinguished academic institutions. For example, James Weldon Johnson became the first  African American to be invited at the emperor’s garden party in 1929 and W.E.B. Du Bois visited Japan in December 1936. When relations between Japan and America became tarnished, even ultranationalists like Mitsukawa Kametarō and Kita Ikki turned in their writings to examples of African American struggles, such as Marcus Garvey’s call ‘return Africa to the Africans’, in order to spark a national reaction against Western influence.  

Unfortunately, this seeming appropriation and defense of African American culture was nothing but a facade. While Japan continued on an imperialist path and began occupying other Asian nations, it borrowed Western methods of discrimination and exploitation in their dealings with their colonies. Western racist hierarchies of social division  started to be enacted both at home and overseas with little concern for the hypocrisy behind political maneuvers like the racial equality motion put forward by Japan at the Paris Peace Conference in 1919. Here, Prof. Koshiro is in agreement with Prof. Leupp when she observes that “Pan-Africanism [was] merely one branch of Japan’s Pan-Asianism.”

Into this complicated fold of identity politics and race enter the Japanese Marxists who regarded African Americans as “a revolutionary resource” and “as the vanguard of the world’s proletarian movement.” Prof. Koshiro’s article deals at length with Japanese Marxists and the cultural and political impulses coming from African Americans which galvanized their movement. I found this part to be the most interesting.

Japanese leftists fighting against imperialism at home were largely and brutally crushed. Some of them, like Katayama Sen (1860-1933) and Ishigaki Eitarō (1893-1958), successfully fled to the United States where they continued their fight against social injustice while drawing inspiration from the emancipation of African Americans. Katayama built relations with African American radicals and even published their writings in his journal, The Liberator. Ishigaki portrayed the struggles of black people throughout his work. For a Japanese immigrant to make art which criticized the discriminatory culture of his adopted country and to imbue this art with proletarian flavor (at a time when socialist trends were frowned upon) is nothing short of remarkable. It’s no wonder that in 1938 his works were removed and destroyed after 

the New York City Concil found it offensive that a Japanese not only took it on himself to interpret American history, but also publicly gave African Americans a heroic appearance. Worse, the concil also condemned Ishigaki of panting Abraham Lincoln “with Negroid features.”

     Meanwhile, back in Japan, black writers continued to be translated and published. The most radical works by Jean Toomer, W.E.B. Du Bois and Walter White appeared between 1923 to 1928. In 1933 Langston Hughes visited the country and built close ties with Japanese leftists (I will talk more on this subject in a future post). Prominent leftist intellectuals like Akamatsu Katsumaro and Hayasaka Jirō built their own critiques of their country’s imperialist, racist exploits around the thesis that African American discrimination was an inevitable consequence of the capitalistic order. Japan’s brutal modes of racialization and exploitation were entangled with the newly technological, militaristic and capitalist codification of society, which mimicked Western advancements. Akamatsu argued that an alliance with African Americans was necessary in the anti-imperial, proletarian struggle, for this fight was also against Japan’s racist views of other Asian people. Hayasaka criticized Japan for its aggressive tactics in expanding its imperial reach and accused it of ignoring the voices of oppressed Asians in the national literature, “proving no match for African American literature.”

The close ties between Japanese leftist intellectuals and African American culture survived WWII. Unfortunately, the sources of WWII tragedy — embodied in the emperor system, militarism and oligarchic control of the economy — survived as well and they now thrived and enjoyed the protection of the American occupation. With the American occupation in force, the sufferings of the Japanese people were being compared to African American persecution. Marxist historians like Kikuchi Ken’ichi saw similarities between the exploitation of black people in the US and Japanese people in Japan. As the social emancipation of both ethnic groups was kept in line and regimented under the new imperialist order of capitalism, Nukina Yoshitaka published in October of 1956 the journal Kokujin Kenkyū (Journal of Black Studies), which further cemented the relations between leftist intelligentsia and African American culture. 

But the most notable social development in Japan during the postwar years was the emancipation of Japanese minorities who found new strength to voice their discontentment with decades of state-enforced discrimination and abuse. These minorities sought inspiration for their challenges in the historical experience of African Americans. As a result, burakumin, Ainu, Korean and Okinawan people 

“stood up to challenge the notion of Japan as the land of a homogenous population. Their postwar movement looked at the African American experience as a lesson and a model, and it hoped to eventually find a solution for a universal pattern of discrimination.”

The two articles I dealt with in this post made me acknowledge the depth to which black people and African American culture were able to permeate the historical and social edifices of Japan. Prof. Koshiro especially articulated the interlinkages between African American struggle for social justice and Japan’s battle for recognition on the international stage, but also at a domestic level with regard to minority issues. Resistance against Japan’s imperialist action in Asia (and the repulsive racism which it demonstrated in its expansion) existed with the impetus of African American influence. But this was only expected because, as we saw from prof. Leupp’s essay, the links between black people and Japanese people ran deeper than one might think.

K.K.K., 1936

Whipping, 1925

The Noose, 1931

Works cited:

Koshiro, Yukiko. "Beyond an alliance of color: The African American Impact on Modern Japan." positions: east asia cultures critique 11.1 (2003): 183-215

Leupp, Gary P. "Images of black people in late mediaeval and early modern Japan 1543-1900." Japan Forum. Vol. 7. No. 1. Taylor & Francis Group, 1995

Ishigaki Eitaro's images borrowed from here and here.

        Credit for the The Arrival of 'Southern Barbarians' and Minstrel Show paintings goes to Visualizing Cultures Website, developed by MIT.