Commercial Appetite and Human Need: The Accidental and Fated Revival of Kobayashi Takiji's Cannery Ship
Readers
of Changbi are likely to be acquainted with the news that Japan's best-known proletarian novel, Kani Kōsen (The Cannery Ship) by Kobayashi Takiji
(1903-1933), enjoyed an utterly unanticipated revival in the course of
2008. They are likely to know as well that the revival of the novel is
attributed to the deepening impoverishment of the ranks of the irregularly
employed, now widely said to account for one-third of the work force. The majority
of the latter earn less than two million yen per year. It is their
increasingly insistent presence that has given such terms as "income-gap
society" (kakusa shakai), "working poor" (waakingu pua),
and more recently, "lost generation" (rosu jene) widespread
familiarity.
That
said, it remains difficult to formulate a statement along the lines of "Because
of a momentous socioeconomic shift, therefore the revival of a novel
published in 1929." Why not a contemporary novel for grasping contemporary conditions?
How can a novel from eight decades ago even be readable today, especially by
those young readers whose circumstances it is said to elucidate? And finally,
what meaning should we find in the "boom" beyond amazement that it
actually happened?
These
questions entail each other. They can only be answered provisionally, not
only because the process is ongoing, but also because any meaning we might
ascribe to it is itself an expression of our understanding of the present and
of our obligations to the future, in other words, of our consciousness.
In
order to make even rudimentary sense of the "boom," however, it is
first necessary to take account of its implausibility.
Why the "boom" was
improbable
Let
me speak briefly from personal experience. For approximately five years, I have
been studying what is called Japanese proletarian literature with a focus on
Kobayashi Takiji. I have stayed at length in Otaru, the port city in Hokkaido, Japan's northernmost island, where this writer grew up. Even there, where
most people had at least heard his name, if I told people that I was studying
Kobayashi Takiji, I was greeted with surprise. The surprise was often
benign, but it could turn skeptical, and especially with intellectuals,
aggressively so. Why are you bothering with someone like him now,
was the accusation I read in people's faces even, or especially when they
didn't voice it.
In
Japan, it is generally acknowledged that "the season of politics" was
over by the early 1970s, after both the popular struggle against the renewal of
the U.S.-Japan Security Treaty in 1960 had been crushed and the student
struggle of 1968-70, which was an explosive protest against the bureaucratized,
competitive, consumption-centered society that had followed upon the
"income-doubling" plan announced in 1960, ended in a widespread sense
of defeat. What did this mean for the legacy of a writer like Kobayashi Takiji?
At the time of his death, at age 29, by torture at the hands of the Special
Higher Police, he was a member of the then illegal Japan Communist Party.
Leftist intellectuals from the 60s and 70s movements, who might be thought to
feel some affinity for him, were alienated by the fact of his membership in a
party that had sought to control them. For others, saturated in postmodernist
ideology, a body of works produced in a class-based revolutionary movement was
simply laughable. But surely there was more to the hostility of middle-aged
leftists than party affiliation or intellectual camp. Takiji's name awakened an
all but forgotten reconciliation with a retreat from politics. It registered as
a dull, irritating reproach.
For
the young, he was simply an unknown entity or at most, a name attached to a
title in a list of modern Japanese writers.
The "boom" was
manufactured and real
To
be sure, during the five years preceding the boom, several developments laid
the ground for expanding interest in Takiji beyond the tiny circles of
devotees. A Takiji Library（http://www.takiji-library.jp/index.html)
was established through the remarkable initiative of Sano Chikara, a hugely
successful businessman and graduate of Takiji's alma mater, Otaru University of
Commerce. The Library became a centralized source of information; it also
sponsored the publication of ten books including a manga version of The
Cannery Ship to attract a young readership to, and together with the University,
co-sponsored a series of international symposia. A documentary film,
"Strike the Hour, Takiji" (http://home.b09.itscom.net/takiji/)
was released in 2005; screenings became occasions for new Takiji gatherings.
The film's foregrounding of Takiji's opposition to imperialist war served to
link it to the national movement to preserve Article 9 (the no-war clause) of
the Constitution.
These
initiatives were significant achievements in themselves and led to a new
Internet presence as well. It is striking, however, that the antiwar angle
failed to spark a broad interest in Kobayashi Takiji.
What
was required for that to happen was not only a widespread acknowledgement of
economic crisis, but the much more difficult recognition—for a society habituated
to regarding itself as homogeneously middle-class—that the solutions being
adopted were creating dramatic disparities. The bursting of the bubble
economy in the early 1990s led to an onslaught of structural readjustment.
Suicide rates took a leap beginning in 1998. (The figure of 30,000 per year has
not changed in ten years and places Japan second only to Russia in the G8.) Signs of economic "recovery" came around 2003 and were
heralded in the media without acknowledgment of the cost, which was growing income
disparity. Prime Minister Koizumi himself provided distractions from such
recognition by playing up his eccentricity as evidence of independence and by
engaging in a hyper display of patriotism in visits to Yasukuni Shrine,
obscuring the real damage he was doing to the majority of Japanese citizens.
Concurrently, a blame-the-victim approach was prepared through government
responses to the three young hostages in Iraq (2004), captured in the
expression jiko sekinin, "personal responsibility."
Perhaps
the first sign of recognition that the economy, if indeed it was recovering,
was doing so in a way that benefited the few and injured the many came in the
selection of the phrase "income-gap society" as one of the ten keys
expressions of the year 2006. The alarming numbers of the irregularly
employed and the concentration of unemployment among the young made it apparent
that the emphasis on "free" in the expression "freeters" (furiitaa)
was no longer appropriate. If increasing numbers of the young were to be
found in dispatch and other forms of irregular employment, it was no longer because
they preferred to be unshackled to a regular job, but because they had no
choice. The precariously situated young (yielding the term
"purekariaato," said to derive from an Italian grafitto combining
"precario" and "proletariato") found their champion in the
erstwhile rightist punk-rock-band-singer-turned-labor-activist-and-writer
Amamiya Karin. Amamiya, a conspicuous media figure in her "gosu rori"
(Gothic Lolita) fashion. It is one of her book titles that has provided a
slogan for the anti-poverty movement: "ikisasero," or
"make us live," a neologism insofar as it is a demand and not
a plea to "let us live." Amamiya was to play a key role in the
Cannery Ship revival.
Here,
a brief chronology of the boom might be useful. Two newspaper articles served
as major catalysts. First, a conversation between Amamiya and established
novelist Takahashi Genichirō in the nationally circulated daily Mainichi (January
9, 2008) in which Amamiya observed that reading Cannery Ship, she was
struck by how the conditions depicted mirrored the current desperate situation
of young workers. (Why was Amamiya reading this work? She was preparing for a
discussion on literature and labor to be published on the pages of Minshu
Bungaku (Democratic Literature), a formally independent journal with close
ties to the Japan Communist Party. Amamiya, in her early 30s, seems to
effortlessly cross the boundaries between old and new left and new new left,
liberal, socialist, and communist publications.) Amamiya's comment was quoted
widely and found its way into the second influential article, in the major
liberal daily Asahi on February 16. In the course of the article,
senior editorial writer Yuri Sachiko referred to an essay contest on Cannery
Ship in which she had been a judge. Cosponsored by the Takiji Library and
Otaru University for Commerce, the contest targeted (a) young readers (age
limit of twenty-five) but also (b) made room for older and unconventional
readers (such as homeless readers, through internet café submission) and
offered substantial prize money for responses to Cannery Ship, or more
precisely, the manga version published in 2006 by the Library. (In fact,
the winning entrants went on to read the novella, as evident from the
collection of submissions, which in turn sold well: Watashitachi wa
ikani kani kōsen o yonda ka, or How We Read the Cannery Ship).
The
Asahi article prompted a bookstore worker in charge of stocking paperbacks
to read the novel. Stunned by how it spoke to her own experience of three years
as a "freeter," she ordered 150 copies from Shinchosha, the
publishers of a paperback edition, who were frankly bewildered to receive such
an order for a long-forgotten title. Once received, the copies were
stacked with a handwritten pop-up sign suggesting that the conditions of the
"working poor" might constitute a veritable "cannery ship."
"Working poor" was already familiar as a phrase, and here it was
effectively paired with the unfamiliar, but concretely suggestive "cannery
ship." Middle-aged male readers, the first to notice, began to yield to
young people in their twenties. Then, on May 2, during the slow-news period of
"Golden Week," the top circulation conservative daily Yomiuri
made the boom—which did not yet exist--its topic article of the evening
edition. Soon, television stations began vying with one another to take up the
improbable hot topic of the day, their cameras going to bookstores, and filming
essay contest winners. By the end of May, Shinchosha had reprinted 200,000
copies. By December 2008, it is estimated that 600,000 copies of this edition
alone had made their way to bookstores. Other publishers followed suit; one
(Shūkan Kinyōbi) produced a new hard-cover edition with an introduction by
Amamiya in which she meticulously analyzed the parallels between labor conditions
as depicted in the novel and those of the present-day. There are now four manga
versions on the market. A documentary on Takiji's life by Hokkaido
Broadcasting Corporation won the Agency for Cultural Affairs Grand Prize,
edging out major productions by the National Broadcasting Corporation (NHK).
Not only are more titles forthcoming in 2009, but a stage production and a
feature film scheduled as well. All of this would surely have been welcome to
Takiji, an eager filmgoer, ardent yet critical fan of Charlie Chaplin, interested
in all genres that would bring the movement to more people.
What
can we make of this concatenation of events? It seems to be a miraculous
meeting of pure contingency and absolute necessity, of commercial appetite and
human need. Without the long investment in Takiji and his works (collecting,
editing, reprinting, issuing newsletters, observing his death anniversary) on
the part of a few groups, many associated with the Japan Communist Party, the
resources would not have been available for this historic moment. Takiji could
have lived on like this for another decade, until the aging keepers of the
flame died out. To be sure, there were individuals newly interested in him
thanks to the activities of the Takiji Library, but they did not constitute a
group; if they knew each other, it was through the Internet. For Takiji to
survive beyond dusty library shelves, something utterly different needed to
happen. That is, somehow, there had to be a meeting between his 1929 fiction
and the political-social order of the present, a meeting that could only take
place in the hearts and minds of those compelled to live under the strictures
of the latter.
Two
liberal newspaper articles, an initial book order of 150 copies, then a conservative
newspaper article turned the trickle of interest into a flood. Finding a story
that sells is of course a central preoccupation of the media, with the
hoped-for outcome being a cascade of sales. The aura of newsworthiness prompted
publishers to reprint more copies, bookstores to provide more space, provoking
further media attention, then more copies reprinted.
And in
this largely commercial process, something began to happen. Kitamura Takashi,
in a report at the 2008 Kobayashi Takiji Memorial Symposium at Oxford in October
(collected papers published by Kinokuniya Shoten as Takiji no shiten kara
mita shintai chiiki kyōiku [Body, Region and Education from Takiji's
Viewpoint] in February, 2009) observes a shift in the nature of the reporting,
which began with the familiar observation of similarities but then evolved to
registering and reproducing the novella's claim that banding together in
resistance can lead to social transformation. In other words, journalists
following the story began to recognize themselves in it and to express their
own desires in print and on the airwaves.
Not That We Are Exploited,
but Why and How, and What We Must Do
The
phrase "kani kōsen" ended up among the top ten key expressions of
2008. The phrase, in other words, had become a metaphor that enabled many
people to grasp their condition. It drew together terms such as "working
poor," "lost generation," and "income-gap society"
into a coherent whole in its image of inescapable exploitation: a factory ship,
subject neither to international maritime law nor factory regulation because of
its hybrid nature, operating in frigid waters near the Soviet Union, with
workers of diverse origin who were driven to compete for marginal advantages in
literally deadly conditions of labor. In fact, it was this condition—that
workers were confined on board ship and faced with a visible enemy in the form
of slave overseer-like bosses—that led some to question the applicability of
the novella to present-day conditions, wherein temporary workers are scattered
and the exploitation often abstract and impersonal. Takiji makes clear in the
work, however, (1) that it is a slow, difficult process for the hierarchically
separated, motley group of workers to reach the understanding that only through
solidarity do they have any chance of survival and (2) that their real enemy is
not the brutal overseer before them, but the structure comprised of bankers in
Tokyo, the imperial military, and global capital. (In fact, the workers' first
uprising fails because they expect the imperial navy to defend them, loyal
imperial subjects, against their unjust bosses. Having learned their lesson,
they must rise up "again…and again.") About his next major work
Fuzai jinushi (The Absentee Landlord, 1929), Takiji wrote his editor
that his purpose was not to show tenant farmers that they were wretched, which
they knew all too well, but why and how they were maintained in that condition,
and that the way forward was struggle through solidarity not only among themselves
but with urban workers as well.
After
decades of depoliticized emphasis on consumer pleasures, accompanied by
atomization masquerading as individualism and fostered by educational and
workplace competition—decades in which the word "labor" was all but
forgotten despite the rising phenomenon of death-from-overwork (karōshi)—it
should, in fact, not surprise us that there was no contemporary literary work
that could provide such an intuitively compelling image of both exploitation
and resistance. Indeed, now that we have been thrust in a worldwide depression,
the image of the "cannery ship" is more comprehensive than ever,
coinciding with that image of "spaceship earth" from a time when
astronauts still provided us heady excitement and hope.
The
aspect of the "cannery ship" image that continues to be
under-recognized is that of the military. Acutely attuned to the imbrications
of the class system, colonialism and imperialism, Takiji argued for the need to
join the class struggle with anti-imperialist struggle. In his penultimate work
of fiction, Tōseikatsusha (The Life of a Party Member), published after
his murder in 1933, the protagonist, together with comrades, is organizing in a
factory that has suddenly been ordered to produce gas masks for use on the
continent. The goal is to persuade regular and temporary workers to stand
together for their rights and to oppose the use of their labor for an
imperialist war. Since permanent workers were inclined to safeguard their
privileges from encroachment by cheaper temp labor, and temp workers were grateful
for a war that was providing at least short-term wage labor, we can imagine how
daunting this organizing task was.
Daunting,
but correct in terms of principle and analysis. If Japanese activists today,
often securely middle-class, well educated, and middle-aged and older, who are
dedicated to problems of historical consciousness, the former military comfort
women or Article 9,have not seemed engaged by the antipoverty movement of the
young, then the latter have not taken up the antiwar cause. Given the
limitations of time and resources, this is altogether understandable. But
in order to catch up with the consciousness of Takiji and his comrades of the
late 1920s and early 30s, in order, therefore, to be adequate to the demands of
the present, it is necessary to join the antipoverty and antiwar struggles.
That entails overcoming the sectarian residues from the 1960s and 70s as well
as generational divides.
Two
new journals give a hint of the discussions and actions that are underway:
POSSE (http://www.npoposse.jp/magazine/index.html),
run by an NPO membership in their early twenties and dedicated to labor issues,
and Losgene, which bills itself as a "Pan-left Journal" (http://losgene.org/).
The New Bearers of Solidarity
and Struggle
The
Cannery Ship boom issued from and feeds a hunger for collectivity and
activism amid the loneliness and cynicism produced by neo-liberal callousness.
Communist Party membership has been increasing at the rate of 1000 per month
over the past year and has attracted mainstream media attention. New
kinds of unions are springing up around the country, welcoming single members,
providing legal advice and support, demonstrating that collective bargaining is
possible even for dispatch workers. From December 31st to January 5th,
twenty some organizations, including these unions as well as mainstream labor
confederations, came together as part of the Anti-poverty Campaign (http://www.k5.dion.ne.jp/~hinky/)
to establish a "Greet-the-New-Year-Dispatch-Workers' Village" for
workers who had been summarily terminated and rendered homeless just as
administrative offices closed for the new year holidays. Tents went up in the
heart of Tokyo in Hibiya Park, under the nose of the Labor Ministry; food and
legal advice were provided, and most importantly, the New Year was greeted in
the company of others and before the eyes of the nation.
No
doubt Takiji would have rejoiced in these developments, too. Committed as he
was to the cause of poor women—often depicting their skills as organizers in
his fiction--he might have been especially intrigued by the case of Iwagami Ai,
who was unlawfully fired by a shop specializing in the BABY line of Lolita
fashions. (http://blog.goo.ne.jp/koube-roudou/d/20090112
) Clad in her long black Gothic Lolita dress, surrounded by customers in pink
and white ruffled dresses, Iwagami speaks at May Day rallies and labor-rights'
study groups. She has won broad support from the new unions and is taking her
case to court: "Workers have the right to stand in unity, to engage
in collective bargaining, and to take collective action."
Why Literature?
In
Cannery Ship as well as in other works, Takiji makes frequent reference
to the colonies and to the "semi-colonial" brutality of the police.
He understood the periphery to represent both backwardness and possibility.
Looking to the Scandinavian writers who raised key issues in modern literature,
he acknowledged a similar aspiration for himself, an "absentee
writer," absent, that is, from the center in Tokyo, situated as he was in
the semi-colonial periphery of Hokkaido. But he expected truly great
"absentee writers" to emerge from the colonies, from Korea and
Taiwan.
No
doubt, again, that he would have been gratified to see a new Korean translation
of Cannery Ship appear in 2008. But he would also have been
thrilled with the rediscovery of an earlier translation and the journey of the
translator (李貴源, Yi Kwiwon) and
publisher (李相炅, Yi Sanggyŏng)to speak at his birthplace in Akita Prefecture
in February of 2008. Yi Kwiwon recounted how, as he translated the works of Marx or Lenin from
Japanese translations in the course of underground activities in Pusan, he
began to yearn for works of literature. Encountering Takiji's works for
the first time, and feeling a strong affinity for the portrayal of state
violence (in "March 15, 1928") and underground struggle ("The
Life of a Party Member") as well as the narrative of the Cannery Ship,
he translated the three, and his friend published them under the title of The
Cannery Ship as soon as the Chun Doo-hwan regime came to an end.
Why
did Yi Kwiwon feel the need for works of literature? Why, for that matter, did
Takiji and his comrades feel the need to produce literature during their busy,
danger-ridden pursuit of social transformation? And how important is the fact
of its being a work of literature to the revival of the Cannery Ship?
We know that the title has provided an invaluable metaphor enabling people to
grasp their current condition, but what about the work as a whole?
It
remains to be seen if, and how, in these strange and familiar times, the experience
of novelistic ways of seeing, feeling, and thinking will serve people seeking
to redefine their world: from a collection of atomized consumers to a
collectivity of citizens who, by forging solidarity around the necessity of
work, have once gain begun to dream of a society dedicated to the flourishing
of all.
The Accidental and Fated Revival of Kobayashi Takiji's Cannery Ship