Proletarian Arts and Internationalism in East Asia by Edwin

Home , Dongfang (surname), Duanmu Hongliang, Forest of Piano, Guzhu, Infinity 2, Kurso de Esperanto

Assembling Solidarity: Proletarian Arts and Internationalism in East Asia

Edwin Michielsen

A thesis submitted in conformity with the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Department of East Asian Studies University of Toronto

©Copyright by Edwin Michielsen 2021

Assembling Solidarity: Proletarian Arts and Internationalism in East Asia

Edwin Michielsen

Doctor of Philosophy

Department of East Asian Studies University of Toronto

2021

Abstract

This dissertation examines the theories and practices of proletarian international solidarity during the 1920s and 30s in East Asia, found in various writings and activities. Locating its arguments in concurrent scientific studies, linguistic theory, and literary and art criticism, this dissertation argues that such theoretico-practical manifestations of solidarity did not merely follow a party and union allegiance based on unidirectional and monolithic forms of organization, but were assembled in constant-changing and multidirectional configurations. Through practice in and experience of solidarity emerging in encounters, exchanges, and events, intellectuals, writers, visual artists, activists, workers, and farmers produced networks of international solidarity of unprecedented scale in East

Asia. They understood the literary and artistic production that accompanied these transnational networks not so much supplementary to its realities but rather coeval in constructing realities beneficial to forging relations of solidarity. Grappling with hierarchal divisions inherent in capitalism, proletarian writers aimed to portray strategies for how to evade such divisive mechanisms installed by imperial and nation-state apparatuses and constructed alternative narratives of social relations and organizations of life.

Chapter 1 introduces how proletarian cultural movements across East Asia prepared and organized May Day, the international day of the proletariat, to illuminate how they experimented with various artistic and literary techniques to assemble numerous proletarian struggles into cohesive relations of solidarity. Chapter 2 examines Esperanto as the aspired proletarian language and how proletarian cultural movements reconfigured language as a mode of resistance. They facilitated exchange among Esperantists, created learning materials for proletarians and sympathizers, and wrote literature in Esperanto as attempts to create mutual comprehensible narratives beyond imperial languages. Chapter 3 probes anti-natalist narratives in relation to international debates on birth control politics among proletarian movements, in which writers grappled with the tensions of how to assemble a gendered proletarian solidarity. Chapter 4 analyses the cooperation among East

Asian POW’s, soldiers, workers, and activists agitating against war and militarism in proletarian literature that reveals how international solidarity was essential in resisting Japanese imperialism and fascism, presenting a transnational history of proletarian antiwar literature in East Asia.

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Acknowledgments

This dissertation is the result of numerous encounters with other people that have supported me along the way and significantly impacted my intellectual thinking. The journey spans over fifteen years of my life and started upon my entry as an undergraduate in Leiden University’s Japanese

Studies Department. Here, Professor Ivo Smits kindled my interest in Japanese literature and classical

Japanese. His supervision guided me through the BA and MA, preparing me for the academic path. My language teacher Kunimori Masufumi ignited my passion in studying the Japanese language by sharing his tremendous knowledge of the language and his generosity with his time to answer my endless string of questions. Whenever I asked him a question, he would take a sheet of paper from an enormous pile of used paper and started to unravel detailed entomologies of kanji and vocabulary or various usages of grammatical constructions. His knowledge and teaching became a role model that has informed me throughout my student career. At Leiden University, I was also fortunate to meet friends for life. My senior Clemens Poppe looked after me and his knowledge of linguistics answered the many questions I had about Japanese. With my classmate Jurriaan van der Meer I spent many hours studying Japanese from dusk until dawn. Our first few years of study were completely synchronous because of sheer luck that our family names both started with the same letter.

During my time at Leiden University, I had the opportunity to spend a year in Kyoto participating in the Nikkensei Program of Kyoto University. I would like to thank all the teachers involved in this program who together taught me about a wide range of subjects dealing with various aspects of Japan. Further, I want to thank the innumerable people, including my classmates, who made that year in an unforgettable experience. Special thanks go to the staff at the Den’en Bar and

iv bartender Umemura-san who made me feel at home and helped me with language learning. Many coasters filled with notes have ended in my bag to be reviewed the next day. It is also in Kyoto that I started my study of proletarian literature at a time when the Kanikōsen boom was raging among youngsters in Japan, which crystalized in my BA thesis on Kanikōsen and its author Kobayashi Takiji.

Two years later, I went to Japan again as a research student at Tokyo University for two years. My supervisor Andō Hiroshi introduced me to the world of kokubungaku and the pleasure of intense reading of primary sources. He taught me everything there is to know about kindai bungaku and shared with me his endless knowledge about Dazai Osamu. I also want to thank all the students of the kokubungaku cohort and especially my tutor Kotani Eisuke, who helped me to make my stay productive and enjoyable.

Arriving at Toronto, the second half of my academic journey started. At the East Asian Studies department, I was immersed in a whole new paradigm of critical thinking that continuously triggered me to ask new questions and transform my research. I would like to thank my peers: Derek Kramer,

Josh Baxter, Mark McConaghy, James Poborsa, Jeremy Hurdis, Alexandre Paquet, Michael Tseng,

Michael Roellinghoff, Na Sil Heo, Kristin Sivak, Erin Lofting, Elaine Cheng, Darcy Gauthier, Banu

Kaygusuz, Seongpil Jeong, Sunho Ko, Zachery Nelson, Alex Schweinsberg, Grayson Lee, Brenton

Buchanan, Asako Masabuchi, Shasha Liu, Yu Wen, Jing Wang, Alexandra Jocic, Jennifer Lau, Yuanfang

Zhang, Chen Xi, Yanfei Li, Stephen Choi, Nan Wang, Qieyi Liu, Qiang Fu, Mengran Xu, Mark Lush,

Sophie Bowman, Boyao Zhang, They helped me at various stages to various degrees. Special thanks go to Derek Kramer, my carrel neighbor, who helped me to adjust to graduate life at UofT and for the many lively discussions. I thank my senior Josh Baxter for being so kind to share his house with me

v during my stay in Tokyo. I appreciate the help offered by Alexandre Paquet, Jeremy Hurdis, Mark

McConaghy, and Stephen Choi and their willingness to read my drafts and other writings. Lastly, I am enormously grateful for everything Shumin Cao has done for me. Not only did she scan and copy many materials for me, but also helped me to purchase invaluable research materials. More importantly, she was an amazing companion with whom I could share many interests and who made graduate life a lot more enjoyable.

During my time at Toronto, I also had the opportunity to visit archives in East Asia and relied on the hospitality of many individuals while doing research there. Professor Wang Zhongchen sponsored my stay at the Tsinghua University and provided me with the opportunity to share my research with his students. Professor Olga Fedorenko helped me secure a research position at the

Kyujanggak Institute for Korean Studies of Seoul National University. Professor Toba Kōji was of great support in accommodating my stay at Waseda University and introducing me to the Proletarian

Cultural Movement Research Group. Further, I enjoyed the hospitality of Esperantists in East Asia.

Sun Mingli helped me locate research materials in the Esperanto Museum in Zaozhuang. Fukuda

Masanori provided access to the collection of the Japana Esperanto-Instituto in Tokyo. At the Seula

Esperanto-Kulturcentro in Seoul, Yi Chung-gi invited to me his Esperanto classes and helped me acquire research materials.

I am grateful to the UofT SGS Connaught International Scholarship, the Julia Ching Memorial

Fellowship in Chinese Thought and Culture, the Mitacs Globalink Research Award, the UofT SGS

Travel Grant, the Okamatsu Book Award, the Shinki-kai Scholarship, the Chizuru Suzuki Memorial

Scholarship in Japanese Literature and Japanese Studies, the Kyujanggak Institute’s Junior Fellowship, the UofT Centre for the Study of Korea Doctoral Research Grant, the Esperantic Studies Foundation

Research Grant, and the UofT Doctoral Completion Award for funding my research.

The research for this dissertation has benefited tremendously from the support of UofT’s

Cheng Yu Tung East Asian library and the East Asian Studies administrative staff. I thank Natasja

VanderBerg, Norma Escobar, Paul Chin, and Rebecca Mangra, who were of great help in dealing with administrative and financial matters. Librarians Fabiano Rocha, Hana Kim, Helen Tang, and Lucy Gan assisted me in my endless search for research materials. I am indebted to my editors Lisa Pfau and

Daina Starling, who helped me in preparing the final draft. Any remaining mistakes, however, are exclusively mine.

At UofT, I was lucky to be in the intellectual orbit of professors Eric Cazdyn, Takashi Fujitani,

Anup Grewal, Ken Kawashima, Thomas Keirstead, Yue Meng, Andre Schmid, Lisa Yoneyama, and the people of the Critical China Studies and the Toronto Guattari Research Group. Their classes or casual discussions in the hallway have stimulated my intellectual thinking greatly. I was also privileged to work as a teaching assistant in the Japanese Language Program with Arimori Jōtarō, Komuro Ikuko,

Tomita Yasuyo, and Yoshizumi Yukiko.

Lastly and most importantly, I want to thank my committee members for their unconditional support and intellectual engagement. Without them, this dissertation would have never materialized.

To Professor Janet Poole and Professor Yurou Zhong, I express my gratitude for their engagement in my research and for being generous close readers of each draft. Professor Poole’s persistence on the format of the dissertation and how to think historically has helped me greatly to organize the

vii dissertation. Professor Zhong’s theoretical knowledge opened new worlds and I have benefitted from her willingness to help me work through challenging theoretical questions. From the bottom of my heart, I thank Professor Atsuko Sakaki for her supervision the moment I arrived in Toronto. Professor

Sakaki’s intellectual rigor and enormous investment of her time helped me to overcome a number of intellectual hurdles at various stages. Her guidance and critical questions resulted in adding depth to my research project. Her comments, even the briefest ones, sent me in exciting and illuminating directions that opened avenues I never believed possible. She assisted me in expanding my intellectual abilities of which I will bear the fruits for many years to come. Thank you!

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Lassen sich aus dem Zerfallsprozeß der demokratischen Gesellschaft noch die Elemente aussondern, die - ihrer Frühzeit und ihrem Traum verbunden - die Solidarität mit einer kommenden, mit der Menschheit selbst, nicht verleugnen? Walter Benjamin, “Ein deutsches Institut freier Forschung,” 1938

Car lire un texte n'est jamais un exercice érudit à la recherche des signifiés, encore moins un exercice hautement textuel en quête d'un signifiant, mais un usage productif de la machine littéraire, un montage de machines désirantes, exercice schizoïde qui dégage du texte sa puissance révolutionnaire. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Capitalisme et schizophrénie: L'anti-Œdipe, 1972

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments iv

Table of Contents x

Note on Romanization xii

Introduction. Assembling Solidarity: Proletarian Arts and Internationalism in East Asia 1 0.1 Rethinking Solidarity 0.2 Inventing the Proletariat 0.3 Internationalizing the Proletariat 0.4 Assembling Proletarian Solidarity 0.5 Chapter Overview

1. Celebrating the Proletariat: May Day Strikes and Syntheses of Solidarity 56 1.1 Introduction 1.2 Platforms of Solidarity: May Day and the Rise of Proletarian Activism in East Asia 1.3 Consolidating Proletarian Territories: Syntheses of Solidarity and May Day 1.4 Writing Solidarity and May Day Literature in Murayama Tomoyoshi’s “Record of Victory” and Hayashi Fusao’s “May Day in Prison” 1.5 Conclusion

2. Tongues on Strike: Proletarian Esperanto and Linguistic Solidarity 133 2.1 Introduction 2.2 Reinventing Brushtalk: A Shared Language of Solidarity for the Proletariat 2.3 Translating the Proletariat in Esperanto: Nakagaki Kojirō and (Un)translatability 2.4 Broadcasting Esperanto Voices: Akita Ujaku and Collective Radio 2.5 Epistolary Solidarity: Proletarian Esperanto and International Correspondence 2.6 Writing Voices: Proletarian Esperanto and Literature 2.7 Conclusion

3. Seizing/Ceasing Reproduction: Proletarian Birth Control Politics, Parturient Bodies, and (In)Corporeal Solidarity 207 3.1 Introduction 3.2 Bodies, Birth Strikes, and Becomings 3.3 Proletarian Literature and Birth Control Politics: Feng Keng’s “Child Pedlar” and Matsuda Tokiko’s “Selling Breast Milk” 3.4 Manchuria and Lines of Flight: Carthographies of Becomings in Kang Kyŏng-ae’s “Salt” and Xiao Hong’s Field of Life and Death

3.5 Conclusion

4. War against War: Proletarian War-Machines, Smooth Spaces, and Antiwar Solidarity 271 4.1 Introduction 4.2 Kuroshima Denji’s Treatise of Antiwar Literature and Proletarian War Machines 4.3 East Asian Trajectories of Antiwar Solidarity: Kuroshima Denij’s Militarized Streets and Li Huiying’s Wanbaoshan 4.4 Reconfiguring Spaces of Solidarity in Wartime East Asia: Kaji Wataru’s We, Seven and Xia Yan’s Lilicao 4.5 Conclusion

Epilogue: Proletarian Specters of Assembling Solidarity 342

Appendix Illustrations 353

Bibliography 388

Note on Romanization

Japanese words are transcribed in the modified Hepburn system used by Kenkyūsha’s New

Japanese English Dictionary, Chinese words are in pinyin, and Koreans words in the modified McCune-

Reischauer system. East Asian words that are shared in the lexicons of Japanese, Chinese, and Korean and refer to East Asian contexts broadly are only given in 漢字 without pronunciation. East Asian names are given in the customary East Asian order, with family name preceding personal names, except for cases of European-language publications in which the name is usually reversed. All indented quotations from East Asian texts are given both in translation and original. In the case of

Japanese, the old kana spelling is preserved but kanji are revised in shinjitai. For Chinese, fantizi are used. Unless otherwise indicated, translations from Japanese, Chinese, Korean, and Esperanto are my own.

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Introduction Assembling Solidarity: Proletarian Arts and Internationalism in East Asia

(…) how does proletarian literature treat the issue of nationality (minzokusei) in its international prospects? It shall never acknowledge that as a final and decisive object like in bourgeois literature. Nationality only becomes an issue as particular conditions of concrete circumstances in order to strengthen the international class struggle, to let solidarity activities flourish and become more effective. Whatever the case is, China is not [just] China, and Japan is not [just] Japan. What role do the distinctive characteristics of China and Japan respectively have mutually to the entire international struggle? It is to be taken up from such a perspective. Therefore, as the class struggle in each country tightly assembled international solidarity, the internationality of cultural activities has also expanded more and more these days. Miyamoto Yuriko, “About International Topics in Proletarian Literature”1

The class-conscious proletariat forms a compact mass only from the outside, in the minds of its oppressors. At the moment when it takes up its struggle for liberation, this apparently compact mass has actually already begun to loosen. It ceases to be governed by mere reactions; it makes the transition to action. The loosening of the proletarian masses is the work of solidarity. In the solidarity of the proletarian class struggle, the dead, undialectical opposition between individual and mass is abolished; for the comrade, it does not exist. Decisive as the masses are for the revolutionary leader, therefore, his great achievement lies not in drawing the masses after him, but in constantly incorporating himself into the masses, in order to be, for them, always one among hundreds of thousands. Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility”2

The opposition is between the class and those who are outside the class. Between the servants of the machine, and those who sabotage it or its cogs and wheels. Between the social machine's regime and that of the desiring-machines. Between the relative interior limits and the absolute exterior limit. If you will: between the capitalists and the schizos in their basic intimacy at the level of decoding, in their basic antagonism at the level of the axiomatic—whence the resemblance, in the nineteenth-century socialists' portrait of the proletariat, between the latter and a perfect schizo. That is why the problem of a proletarian class belongs first of all to praxis. The task of the revolutionary socialist movement was to organize a bipolarity of the social field, a bipolarity of classes. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia3

0.1 Rethinking Solidarity

In Kobayashi Takiji’s (1903-1933) Kanikōsen (The Crab Cannery Ship, 1929), the omniscient third-person narrator describes a brief and somewhat simply depicted encounter between

1 Chujō [Miyamoto] Yuriko, “Puroretaria bungaku ni okeru kokusaiteki shudai ni tsuite 3,” Yomiuri Shinbun, 20 September, 1931, 4, Morning Edition. 2 Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility (Second Version),” Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings Vol. 3 1935-1938, ed. Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings, trans. Edmund Jephcott and Howard Eiland (Cambridge, Mass.: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2006), 129N24. 3 Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Robert Hurley, Mark Seem and Helen R. Lane (New York: Penguin Books, 2009), 225.

1 unacquainted proletarians from different locales that highlights a process of assembling international solidarity. After a storm hit one of the fishing ships from Japan and swept it in the wrong direction, the ship Kawasaki washed ashore at the Kamchatka coast and the sailors were saved by locals. Observing daily life in the Soviet Union and its people that appear so different at first, the sailors realize that they are the “same people like us” (oretachi to onaji ningen dewa nai ka) found in the similarities of everyday life, despite not understanding their language. On their last day before they sail back, the locals prepare a farewell party. A proletarian from China, who speaks Japanese and Russian, suddenly appears and acts as an interlocutor between the locals and sailors. In halting Japanese, he explains that proletarians prosper in the Soviet Union as opposed to Japan where capitalists and imperialists exploit and impoverish proletarians, critiquing capitalist uneven development albeit with the rhetoric of an equally problematic socialist developmentalism implied in the time lag between spaces constructing socialism. Realizing that the widespread warning against “turning Red” (sekka), that is becoming a communist, as something “terrifying” (osoroshii) was a lie and encouraged by the interlocutor’s words that proletarians have the potential to resist their oppression, the excited sailors shake hands with and embrace the interlocutor and local villagers.4 Together, they are affected in a moment of mutual connectivity and interpersonal relationality beyond national identities. Disturbed by these amical encounters with foreign proletarians and worried that they indeed “turn red,” the

Kawasaki captain intervenes and tries to stop his sailors from talking.

Different from organizational structures such as political parties, labor unions, and other hierarchal groups, which many proletarian intellectuals considered necessary to foster class

4 Kobayashi Takiji, Kanikōsen (Tokyo: Senkisha, 1929), 52-57.

2 consciousness and prepare revolution, the contingent encounter between “unorganized” (misoshiki)5 proletarians from various backgrounds depicted in The Crab Cannery Ship reveals that proletarian solidarity was not a presupposed relation, but rather a process that needed to be assembled in the event itself. The story shows readers that attempts at defining solidarity were coeval with the probability of encounters from which these very relations of solidarity could emerge. Yet, it was difficult for these encounters to occur because the Japanese Imperial and Guomindang governments together with local (colonial) rulers and warlords constructed various systems to limit and control exchange among proletarians in East Asia; restrictions The Crab Cannery Ship also foregrounds, stating that “[i]n the naichi [Japan proper], the silent and ‘not-killed’ workers gather in groups and oppose the capitalists. However, the workers in the ‘colonies’ are completely ‘isolated’ from such information.”6 Moreover, a mutually intelligible language was required to make exchange possible among the international proletariat. Still, by writing about the possibility of such encounters,

Kobayashi strived to create alternative worlds for readers to emulate and practice.

Kobayashi was far from the only proletarian writer invested in producing such narratives of encounters between proletarians in foreign and domestic locales. Writers presented encounters with coolies, factory workers, and prostitutes, or turned their attention to the exploitation of colonized proletarian figures in their stories to agitate a readership to show solidarity with colonial struggles.

Many of these stories were set in Manchuria further explored in works by writers who grappled with

5 In a literary review of Kanikōsen written in 1953, proletarian theorist Kurahara’s used the term misoshiki to describe the attempt of Kobayashi to “depict the unorganized workers as one lived collective opposing the state and capitalist.” Kurahara Korehito, “Kaisetsu,” Kanikōsen, Tōseikatsusha (Tokyo: Shinchōsha, 1953 [2008]), 277. 6 Kobayashi, Kanikōsen, 63. Translations are mine unless noted otherwise.

3 ethnic tensions created by imperialists while also searching for possibly political alliances of resistance among proletarians.7 And others invested in describing the revolutionary potential in mainland China following the split between GMD and CCP in 1927 inspired to imagine a similar potential to unfold in the Japanese empire. Taken together, thousands of proletarian literary works were written within a decade in East Asia to render visible the growing social anomie and call for solidarity with millions of disenfranchised.

Proletarian writers neither were merely preoccupied with creating alternative worlds in their literary narratives nor celebrated a naïve proletarian harmony, but also concerned themselves with the daily mechanisms of racial and gendered divisions installed by ruling classes that resulted in discrimination and serious enmity among proletarians.8 Proletarian writers strived to expose the divisive ramifications of a multilayered unevenness among proletarians in East Asia and with help of cultural movements explored options to facilitate exchange among proletarians both in their storylines and through social activities.

Proletarian literature focusing on international encounters and interaction between proletarians in East Asia like the one in Crab Cannery Ship appears to unfold along the lines of ethnic differences, such as Russian, Japanese, and Chinese. Understanding solidarity with others as such would not merely assume and reproduce a certain logic of identity produced in capitalist

(nation-)states, but also significantly limit our understanding of what proletarian solidarity was and

7 For recent scholarship on the literary production in Manchuria, see Annika Culver and Norman Smith (eds.), Manchukuo Perspectives: Transnational Approaches to Literary Production (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2019); the 33- volume series Liu Xiaoli et al., Wei Man shiqi wenxue ziliao zhengli yu yanjiu (Beijing: Beijing Wenyi Chubansha, 2017); Kim Chae-yong and Yi Hae-yŏng (eds.), Han'guk p'ŭro munhak kwa Manju (Sŏul: Yŏngnak, 2017). 8 See for example, Paek Sin-ae’s “Kkŏraei” (The Koreans of Russia, 1933) and Lü Heruo’s “Rinkyo” (Neighbor, 1942).

4 could have been. Solidarity in proletarian literature is not so much writing about others stemming from ethno-national differences, but rather about a shared yet uneven relationship of capitalist alienation eclipsing and obfuscating self and other into a proletarian alterity. Put differently, proletarian writers responded to an increasing inequality worldwide by writing about concerns of proletarian struggles, even though the nature of these struggles is often of irreducibly different nature and incommensurable, while trying to find ways how to interconnect and defragment innumerable narratives of suffering and exploitation.

This study examines processes of assembling international solidarity coeval with the production of and narrated in proletarian arts in East Asia during the 1920s and 1930s. Solidarity is understood here as a fluid and elastic process of conjoining people together with their immanent differences and disparate interests into temporary and mobile groups. As such, this study investigates the following question: How did proletarian arts and cultural movements in East Asia assemble a proletarian international solidarity amidst a growing hostile environment of nationalism, racism, misogyny, colonialism, imperialism, militarism, and fascism? Proletarian literature foregrounded how antagonistic mechanisms of division operated in East Asia and why they posed enormous challenges to the enterprise of proletarian solidarity as well as how proletarian arts intended to resist such oppression and exploitation. Following global capitalism together with nation-state building and imperialism, former notions of Sinocentric worldviews were shattered, and a geographical and biopolitical East Asia (東洋/東亞) was constructed and stratified along national, ethnic, and imperial borders. How could proletarian cultural movements imagine and articulate alternative models of social organization in their literature and art? Grappling with the logic of nation-states, how did they

5 deal with the tensions between proletarian internationalism and discourses of imperial nationalism and Pan-Asianism? That is, could proletarian arts rethink and remold territories coded as East-Asia and parcelled into a China, Japan, Korea, and Taiwan? And, for such an endeavor what other formats of literature than those informed by bourgeois (national) aesthetics were needed? Could they present any alternatives to the capitalist nation-state? How did they negotiate between proletarian theories informed by Soviet internationalism and practices rooted in local experiences across East Asia?

Finally, how could they negotiate an economic and spatiotemporal unevenness that created tremendous disparities among equipment, resources, platforms for publication, and venues for exhibition and performance to produce proletarian literature and arts? Considering these difficulties and problematics, this dissertation attempts to reconstruct once imagined possibilities of solidary alliances beyond capitalist social relations found in proletarian literature and art. In doing so, it argues that a proletarian international solidarity was created and practiced coevally in proletarian art and culture, very different from arborescent and hierarchal structures in parties and unions. Solidarity was more often than not a process in which encounters, exchanges, and experiences were constantly

(dis/re)assembled into ongoing (re)configurations of cohesive alliances.

The questions raised in this dissertation are explored through the philosophical concept of de/reterritorialization coined by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari.9 While the next chapter shall further explicate the implications for proletarian politics and arts with respect to territoriality, here it suffices to identify the basic parameters of this concept that help elucidate the emergence of

9 Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: The University of Minnesota Press, 1987), 508-510.

6 proletarian cultural movements and its assembling of international solidarity to be discussed below.

Deterritorialization is a movement and transformative vector by which entities break away, a “line of flight,” from a territory and produces a change in the condition of and relationships between

(in)animate entities. Territorializations are modes of capture to code or disrupt flows of entities into static states of being with fixed functions, which in our context centers around the flow of workers, or as Deleuze put it “the proletariat flow,”10 and the production of an individuated and static body to human beings that serves the production of surplus value in capitalism. The attempt to depart from a territory can be blocked or initiated through de/reterritorializations that either prevent an entity from escape or allows the production of a new territory. This means that de/reterritorializations are inextricably interlocked not simply as two oppositional poles but enmeshed as correlative vectors of multidirectional possibilities either limitative or liberatory. The interplay of such movements is the focal point of this study that examines how deterritorializations in proletarian literary narratives and cultural activities are crucial to assembling solidary alliances and thwart capitalist (nation-)state de/reterritorializations.

Throughout the dissertation, the emphasis is on deterritorializations of numerous codes inscribed in “the proletariat flow,” which are expressed through labor, linguistic, birth, and anti-war strikes with the help of art. Each of the four chapters highlights an aspect (ritornello, order-words,

10 In the case of the nineteenth and early twentieth century capitalism, a flow of workers appeared to stage as a result of primitive accumulation. Deleuze argued that the “proletariat flow” was invented as class by the bourgeois class under capitalism that came to recognize the “proletariat flow” as its opposite class. It is this moment of recognition that worker’s struggles are coded and turned into a class bipolarity. Such coding reveals that capitalism, unlike other economic forms of society, is capable of axiomatizing seeping flows, which are initially incongruous with codes. Gilles Deleuze, “Capitalism, Flows, the Decoding of Flows, Capitalism and Schizophrenia, Psychoanalysis, Spinoza.” Cours Vincennes, 16/11/1971. https://www.webdeleuze.com/textes/116 (accessed on 2021-01-25).

7 becoming, war machine) of entangled movements between de/re-territorializations. Although the emphasis is on deterritorialization, this is not to say that reterritorialization is of lesser importance and therefore neglected, but should be understood as always already coexistent in and simultaneous with deterritorializations and vice versa. Deleuze and Guattari argued that deterritorialization can be either positive, negative, or a mix of both. When the movement away from a territory is obstructed by a reterritorialization, deterritorialization is negative. In case the latter prevails or overcomes the former, deterritorialization operates as positive but remains relative. Relative deterritorializations retains the possibility of reterritorialization different from absolute deterritorializations. Absolute deterritorialization works within relative deterritorialization as a perpetual immanence in the virtual toward a plane where it can no longer be territorialized again. While Deleuze and Guattari stressed that their notion of de/reterritorialization is without moral value, their writings have arguably revealed an ambiguous stance, displaying occasionally an ostensible preference for (positive) deterritorialization. This ambivalence resulted in a critique that their thought remains within a binary and dualist mode of thinking, despite their claim that the conceptual pairs in their works are multiplicitous and inseparable rather than oppositional and mutually exclusive. 11 Following Deleuze and Guattari, this dissertation considers the concept of de/reterritorialization useful for its critical potential to rethink the cultural production and politics of proletarian movements beyond national identities and to render visible the un-dialectic nature of immanent differences within the world proletariat and its struggles.

11 For a discussion of such critique see for example, jan jagodzinski, “A Response to: ‘Deconstructing Deleuze and Guattari's A Thousand Plateaus for Music Education,’” The Journal of Aesthetic Education 50, no. 3 (2016): 101-121.

These de/reterritorializations are explored through the above questions which are all interconnected by the concept of solidarity, a concept that has occupied many philosophers, activists, politicians, academics, and artists, among many others, from various strands and fields of thinking over the past few centuries. But what is solidarity and how does one practice solidarity? The definitions of solidarity are rich and various as well as reductionist and essentializing. Prewar social movements dedicated to solidarity have been criticized for being “exclusive” and “adversative” not only in their “commitment against an opponent,”12 but also internally for their unidirectional and monolithic organization of political formations.13 However, upon a closer look, we see that proletarian resistance is much more pluralistic and heterogenous than conventional understandings display.14 Re- examining proletarian literature and arts from East Asia, this dissertation aims to recuperate narratives of proletarian international solidarity that will reveal that forging relations of solidarity was

(and still is) constant-changing and multi-directional assembling of disparate components, both in theory and praxis. Before we turn to detailed conceptualizations of solidarity, we first need to unpack the other two terms, proletarian and international, separately before putting them back together.

0.2 Inventing the Proletariat

The very notion of the proletarian class hinges on the question, Does the proletariat already exist at a given moment, and if so as a body? (Or, does it still exist?) It is evident that Marxists use it in an anticipatory sense, as, for example, when they speak of an "embryonic proletariat."

12 Kurt Bayertz, “Four Uses of ‘Solidarity,’” Solidarity, ed. Kurt Bayertz (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1999), 17. 13 Thomas Nail, Returning to revolution: Deleuze, Guattari and Zapatismo (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2015), 29. 14 Proletarian theorist Li Chuli, for example, argued that proletarian debates do not have a single form, nor merely reiterating each other like “parrots,” but develop unlimited flexibility adapting to the special conditions of various spaces and times. Li Chuli, “Yifeng gongkaixin de huida,” Wenhua pipan, no. 3 (1928): 120.

Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus15

From the early 1920s onward, an enormous interest in proletarian figures circulated worldwide, which had emerged out of imperial capitalist transformations of society as a class binary between the haves and have-not. This interest fueled the literary and artistic production of writers and artists, who considered proletarians to be the historical subject grown out of the contradictions in capitalist production that could alter the course of history and change society radically. Writers and artists invested in what Travis Workman has called “proletarian Bildung,” to denote the (humanist) cultivation of a new social class of proletarians through art and culture that produces a proletarian subjectivity.16 These proletarian figures – often further divided in subfigures based on divisions of labor – were far from homogenous and empty characters occupying literary texts, but rather negotiations and mediations of multifaceted social and material realities of peoples dispersed over numerous geographical locales, which proletarian theorist Kurahara Korehito (1902-1991) understood as “living reality” (ikita genjitsu) and “living people” (ikita ningen).17 The pressing question, then, for proletarian writers and artists was, how to write, stage, film, perform, and draw a people they had grouped and labelled the proletariat. Eventually, their solution was to utilize the word proletariat as a cohesive and relational denominator to glue innumerable experiences of “living reality” by “living people” that would be self-constitutive for the very invention of a proletarian people to come.

15 Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 525n14. 16 Travis Workman, Imperial Genus: The Formation and Limits of the Human in Modern Korea and Japan (Oakland: University of California Press, 2015), 101, 113. 17 Kurahara Korehito, “Ichigatsu no puroretaria bungaku,” Zen’ei, no. 2 (1928): 17.

The attempts by proletarian writers to create a politically engaged literature that takes as its subject a people considered to be related through shared traits were not new to the literary production in East Asia. From the second half of the nineteenth century, intellectuals responded to the immense transformations of planetary life pushed by imperial capitalism and its incessant expansion. These capitalist transformations coincided with imperial discourses of a world divided along ethno-national, racial, linguistic, and cultural borders and ranked in a hierarchal scheme centered around a developmental scale with Euro-American empires as its axiom. Interlaced by capitalism, such epistemological systems presented, as Rebecca Karl puts it, “a familiar picture of the modern world in a stage diachronic temporal hierarchy of difference and spatial distance from the putative center of Euro-America (…), which normatively represent History as universal, teleological, and as hegemonically foreclosed by Euro-American trajectories.”18 While intellectuals in East Asia frequently incorporated such historical understandings in their attempts to imagine a national people, Karl has shown that nascent relations of anti-imperial and anti-colonial solidarity between intellectuals in East Asia and other non-Euro-American locales were crucial for their imagination to be possible: “it was precisely from within this particular node of the new global space of deterritorialized and uneven modernity that new theorization and praxes of ‘the people’ could emerge.”19

Literature played a significant role in producing and rendering visible the uneven global spacetimes and its peoples. Reconfiguring the formats of literary texts and redefining its purposes,

18 Rebecca Karl, Staging the World: Chinese Nationalism at the Turn of the Twentieth Century (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2002), 5. 19 Ibid., 80.

(bourgeois) writers became pivotal figures in shaping social and political realities. The political novel and documentary literature were among the new literary formats useful to unfold national peoples and their relations in uneven global spatio-temporalities.20 Writers tried to address the urgency of the widespread political and social unrest as well as the increasing poverty and inequality across East

Asia. Ingrained in bourgeois aesthetics, they considered literature to have the potential to reform people and contribute to modernization of the nation as a response to the encroaching colonization and the growing ambitions of Japan and other imperial powers in the region. Proletarian writers inherited these bourgeois ideas on literature, which they had to refashion for a new aesthetics of class struggle.

Writers invested either in grand narratives of international and geopolitical relations or focused on the micropolitics and detrimental alterations of people’s everyday life. War accounts, travelogues, and reports of urban slums, rural towns, coal mines, and factories, among others, all aimed to document meticulously the extreme poverty and dreadful working conditions of peoples as well as the flawed political systems in East Asia. In doing so, these writers rendered visible peoples hitherto unknown to literati, politicians, activists, and intellectuals. Such renditions not only happened in textual registers but also in drawings and photographs that accompanied literary texts.

The textual and visual register together solidified an imagery of laborers, frozen and isolated in a vacuum, objectifying and colonizing their working bodies. Such an objectification of laboring bodies,

20 For more on the political novel, see Atsuko Sakaki, “Kajin no Kigū: The Meiji Political Novel and the Boundaries of Literature,” Monumenta Nipponica 55, No. 1 (2000): 83-108; Catherine Vance Yeh, The Chinese Political Novel: Migration of a World Genre (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2015). For more on documentary literature, see Tachibana Yū’ichi, Meiji kasō kiroku bungaku (Tokyo: Chikuma Shobō, 2002).

12 however, did not evade the risk of disentangling peoples from their social environments and effacing a spatio-temporal unevenness between images.21 Throughout the 1920s and 1930s, these problems of representation continued to haunt proletarian writers who constructed their stories while mediating, affirming, or challenging these solidified images of laborers.

Together with the circulation of proletarian imagery, politically engaged literature raised social awareness among established and aspiring writers and a growing readership. Subsequently, writers started to organize numerous literary coteries and movements with an explicit political agenda in East Asia from the 1900s onward together with dissemination of new political philosophies, such as anarchism, socialism, communism, humanism, Marxism, and liberalism.22 In these literary circles, writers and literary critics debated the political role of literature and how literature could contribute to social equality and emancipation. Through extensive exchange across East Asia between writers and the circulation of their literary and theoretical texts, both in original and translation, fuelled by a shared concern over social alienation, deprivation of human life, and disintegration of human relations all linked to imperial capitalism. What these writers were invested in, then, was the production of subjectivity for a people they believed would become the centrifugal force behind social

21 Questioning the possibility of representing laborers through photography, Nancy Armstrong has observed that “the photograph strips them [working-class figures] of all use value (…) to reduce people to the status of objects (…) extract[ing] labor, in the figure of the worker himself, from the situation in which that labor had been performed (and thus) it detached (…) subjects from the symbolic economy in which they once had human purpose and labor value.” Nancy Armstrong, Fiction in the Age of Photography: The Legacy of British Realism (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1999), 98, 102. 22 The coteries and movements and movements I refer to are White Birch School (Shirakaba-ha), New Culture Movement (Xin wenhua yundong), May Fourth Movement (Wusi yundong), New Tendency Literature (Sin kyŏnghyangp'a such as Pakyusula and Yomgunsa), and New Taiwan Culture Association (Xin Taiwan wenhua xiehui).

13 change by and for the people, albeit proposed in quite different political organizations; a task proletarian writers continued to undertake and enhance in the 1920s and early 1930s.

The emergence of proletarian politics and arts coincided with the solidification of terms to refer to laborers and their imagery. The politically engaged literature was published in feuilletons of newly established newspapers as part of the burgeoning print culture. In addition to these publications in newspapers and journals, journalists and scholars wrote extensively about labor disputes, living and working conditions of the poor, and widespread poverty and inequality that all contributed to the production of a cohesive disenfranchised people with common traits. While politically engaged stories often referred to these people simply as “people” (民衆, 民間) without class distinctions, “factory workers” (労働者), or “the poor,” (貧民), print media together with nascent fields of scientific research, such as sociology, psychology, and anthropology, and the aforementioned political philosophies, all invested in proper terms with which to refer to disenfranchised peoples. While the foreign word “proletariat” had already entered Japanese dictionaries of European languages, it was at first translated as 賤民 (lowly people), followed by 平民 (commoner or plebeian) to differentiate from 華

族 (aristocracy), echoing and reproducing a feudal caste system. For example, anarcho-socialists

Kōtoku Shūsui (1871-1911) and Sakai Toshihiko (1871-1933) used 平民 for the proletariat in opposition to

紳士 (bourgeoisie) in their translation of Marx’s Communist Manifesto (Kyōsantō sengen, 1906) based on the English edition, leading to a widespread use of 平民 and 平民階級 (plebeian class) among anarchist groups in East Asia.23 Further, the term 無産 (property-less), which would become the most

23 For more on the term 平民 in relation to anarchism, see Konishi Sho, Anarchist Modernity: Cooperatism and Japanese- Russian Intellectual Relations in Modern Japan (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Asia Center, 2013).

14 common translation of proletariat in East Asian languages in the 1920s, already circulated in Japanese texts as early as 1869 to refer to unemployed and property-less people, albeit without Marxian class distinctions.24 Thus, in the late 1800s and early 1900s, these terms floated around in literary, journalist, political, and scientific texts that tried to construe millions of people into an all-encompassing category.

Around the turn of the century, intellectuals in East Asia started to articulate class and class divisions tied to capitalist production. They considered the new class of waged laborers quite different from proletarians in cities since Roman times.25 However, as historian Hayashi Yū’ichi writes, it was not until after the Great War (1914-1918) together with many other crucial events, such as the Russian

Revolution in 1917 and the various mass demonstrations in Asia in 1919, that the terms 無産 and 階級 came together to mean “proletariat” and 無産者 “proletarian” imbued with a Marxist understanding of class relations.26 Immediately afterward, the term 無産階級, and various combinations such as 無産芸術

(proletarian art), 無産文学 (proletarian literature), 無産大衆 (proletarian masses), 無産農民 (proletarian peasants), 無産政党 (proletarian political party), filled the pages of numerous essays, newspaper articles, short stories, and scientific studies in the shared logographic scripts of the Chinese, Korean, and Japanese languages. Further, numerous publishers included the term in dictionaries that

24 Fukuzawa Yukichi, Bunmeiron no gairyaku 1 (Tokyo: Jiji Shinpōsha 1875), 8. See also Hayashi Yū’ichi, Musan kaikyū no jidai: Kindai nihon no shakai undō (Tokyo: Aoki Shoten, 2000), 18. 25 Hayashi, Musan kaikyū no jidai: Kindai nihon no shakai undō, 21-22. This is not to say that such a shift happened overnight. The meaning of the Latin word proletarius in ancient Rome referring to the lowest class without property whose only contribution to the state is their children was still used. For example, in his critique on the quality of translation in China, Lu Xun wrote that translators still use the Latin meaning of the word proletariat even though “people with some common sense should know the present is not Rome and the current proletarians (無産者) are not those in Rome.” Lu Xun, “‘Yingyi’ yu ‘wenxue de jiejixing,’” Mengya yuekan, no. 3 (1930): 67. Chapter 3 returns to the problem of reproduction among proletarians. 26 Hayashi, ‘Musan kaikyū’ no jidai: Kindai Nihon no shakai undō, 13.

27 connected the loanword proletariat (프롤레타리아트, プロレタリアート, 普羅列塔利亞特) to the translation 無産階級 as a general term for all those (un)employed people without property and living in extreme poverty regardless of manual or mental labor. Moreover, (translated) studies were published in great numbers containing detailed accounts of proletarian everyday lives.28 As a result, the concept proletariat categorized the masses of millions making their lives mutually explicable and comparable.

While terminology gradually solidified, its meanings were frequently debated by proletarian intellectuals from the 1920s onward, raising the question how to produce a literature inventing for and about the proletariat and how to negotiate local, social, and material realities of proletarians in literary forms. Many intellectuals questioned their (petty-)bourgeois backgrounds and discussed who were entitled to write proletarian literature. Further, they wondered if educated intellectuals should write about the lives of proletarians or if it was possible to reconfigure the bourgeois modes of art production that proletarians could create a proletarian culture for and by themselves. Particularly,

Kurahara’s notion of class reveals the complexity and fluidity of its meaning, defying any absoluteness about it. He understands class as an abstract concept that could operate in a practical sense that allowed a “unified diversity” (tayōsei no tō’itsu).29 Kurahara states that humanity (ningensei) is not

27 Spelling in East Asia scripts varies.

28 A surge in studies dealing with the proletariat were published across East Asia during the 1920s, such as 無産階級の生活百態 (Various Phases in the Daily Life of the Proletariat, 1919), 無産階級の生活状態 (Daily Life Situation of the Proletariat, 1920), 無産階級の研究 (Study of the Proletariat, 1920), 無産階級の世界史 (World History of the Proletariat, 1925), 朝鮮無産階級の研究 (Study of the Korean Proletariat, 1926), 無産階級から見た支那問題 (The China Problem seen from the Proletariat, 1927), 世界無產政黨發達史 (History of the World Proletarian Political Party, 1927), 無產階級之哲學:唯物論 (The Philosophy of The Proletariat: Materialism, 1927), 論無產階級專政 (Treatise on the Proletarian Dictatorship, 1928). 29 Tanimoto Kiyoshi [Kurahara Korehito], “Geijutsuteki hōhō ni tsuite no kansō (kōhen),” Nappu 2, no. 10 (1931): 68. For more on Kurahara’s literary theory see, Mats Karlsson, “Kurahara Korehito’s Road to Proletarian Realism,” Japan Review, no. 20 (2008): 231-273.

16 absolute, but materializes in the production of various societal relationships, creating numerous groups of societal people. While class might not be absolute, Kurahara writes, it is crucial in shaping these relations. According to Kurahara, the communalities of particular classes group people together, but class itself is again built from various layers and groups. Ultimately, then, for proletarian theorists such as Kurahara proletarian writers should avoid “class-based fixed formulas” (kaikyūteki monkirigata) and instead depict the “complexity” (fukuzatsusei) of social realities and “living people” that renders visible “mutual influence with other classes and strata” (hoka no kaikyū, hoka no sō no sōgoteki eikyō).30 Kurahara’s remarks show that any representation of proletarians would be discursive and conflictive.

Preceding proletarian literature, writers were skeptical of proletarian representability by writers, who were born in the (petit-)bourgeoisie class.31 In contrast, many proletarian writers challenged the former’s doubts by experimenting with (modernist) formats, such as montage and reportage, in which they explored possibilities to represent proletarians. Despite the optimism among proletarian writers, their possibility of proletarian representability was bound to be always already limited.32 That is because representation in itself contains an impossibility, or more specifically,

30 Ibid., 63. 31 Negotiating such limits, a generation of writers immediately preceding proletarian movements grappled with how to write about proletarians. Arishima Takeo (1878-1923), for example, concluded in his essay “Sengen Hitotsu” (A Manifesto, 1922) that being born in the privileged class he could not act on behalf of the “fourth class.” Akutagawa Ryūnosuke (1892- 1927), in his essay “Puroretaria bungakuron” (Treatise on Proletarian Literature, 1924) further complicated Arishima’s point by stating that the difference between bourgeois and proletarian literature was not the writer’s background nor the content of its writings, but rather the writer’s support of the proletarian spirit. Finally, Lu Xun added in a speech titled “Geming shidai de wenxue” (Literature in Times of Revolution, 1927) that revolutionary literature only appears after the arrival of revolutionaries, while also acknowledging the potential of literature to challenge politics. 32 Marston Anderson, Limits of Realism: Chinese Fiction in the Revolutionary Period (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), 7.

17 human language falls short to represent in totality, always reducing, essentializing, mediating, and deferring differences to allow for equilibria to materialize. In the act of representing, that is, by imposing form and properties to differentiate (in)animate entities, unrepresentability sifts through the infinite list of naming analogous, opposed, or identical differences, destabilizing the

(re)presentation. Following Deleuze, we must move underneath representation where unrepresentable and immanent differences underlie (in)sensible in repetitions.33 Does this mean, then, that proletarian literature is merely about representation because a myriad of concurrent debates and literary criticisms discussed representability? On the contrary, their vehement investment in proletarian representability by writing about suffering bodies resulted more often than not in affective rather than representational literature, which, as Kimberly Chung puts it, precipitated a “shift from the interiority of the subject to a figuration of body and external social processes” that invoked “an embodied proletarian in literature, criticism, and visual culture.”34 Hence, proletarian intellectuals urged writers and artists to visit factories, farms, and slums, to experience, feel, and sense proletarian life to create art that could affect (proletarian) readers and spectators as well as participants in strikes and festivities. Consequently, the becomings-proletarian of (petit-)bourgeois writers were crucial in setting in motion the metamorphosis of peoples into proletarian literary figures.

As a result of an increasing visibility of proletarians and widespread human suffering and inequality in numerous fields, a growing sentiment of anomie or the anticipated breakdown of social

33 Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, trans. Paul Patton (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), 43. 34 Kimberly Chung, “Proletarian Sensibilities: The Body Politics of New Tendency Literature (1924–27),” Journal of Korean Studies 19, no. 1 (2014): 43.

18 relations emerged. This anomie was articulated in phrases such as “population problem,” “society problem,” “poverty problem” and “laborers’ problem” found in journalism, literary and art criticism, and scientific publications, and discussed among intellectuals, writers, and activists across East Asia, which led to the invention of disenfranchised peoples into the proletariat during the 1920s.

My understanding of the proletariat as an invented people is theoretically informed by Gilles

Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s notion of “minority.”35 In tandem with the rise of bourgeois politics and

(nation-)state formations, majorities created a universal axiom of fixed and normative identities

(ethno-nationality, race, gender) through capitalist social relations that excluded and marginalized minorities who did not conform to these identities. This exclusion relegated minorities without any coherent and stable identity to a “cramped space,” where the social milieu of individuals merged with the political. Simultaneously, the loss of autonomy also constituted particular minority conditions that interconnect numerous minorities what Deleuze and Guattari observe as “[t]he power of minority, of particularity, [which] finds its figure or its universal consciousness in the proletariat.”36

Lacking a fixed identitarian subject in the universalized consciousness, minorities have the opportunity to redefine social relations with each other where “the missing people are a becoming, they invent themselves, in shanty towns and camps, or in ghettos, in new conditions of struggle to

35 In their study of Franz Kafka’s writings, they explain the “missing people,” quoting Kafka: “[L]iterature is less a concern of literary history than of the people,” which he described as: “What in great literature goes on down below, constituting a not indispensable cellar of the structure, here takes place in the full light of day, what is there a matter of passing interest for a few, here absorbs everyone no less than as a matter of life and death.” Franz Kafka, The Diaries 1910-1923, ed. Max Brod, trans. Joseph Kresh (New York: Schocken Books), 193-194. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature, trans. Dana Polan (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986), 17. 36 Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 472.

19 which a necessarily political art must contribute.”37 Engaging with or writing within minor conditions, writers can invent “another possible community” not of individual concerns but of collective value.38

Characters populating the narratives of minor literature resist the institutionalization and bordering by nation-state-capital codifications, moving through exteriorities outside private and public spaces and inventing a minor language that undermines major languages and its dominant discourses. Minoritarians’ resistance is not only against nation-state-capital’s systems of capture, but elude all majoritarian attempts to silence, represent, or enslave minoritarian movement, including hierarchal politics by self-proclaimed leftist intellectuals and their political parties. All majoritarian political ideologies appear to maintain a (nation-)state and a form of capitalist production that causes

“[a] lack [of] creation […and a] lack [of] resistance to the present. The creation of concepts in itself calls for a future form, for a new earth and people that do not yet exist. [It is] the history of capitalism, which prevents the becoming of subjected peoples.”39 Hence, the recurring predicament of minoritarian politics and revolutions, for Deleuze and Guattari, and, as the subsequent chapters will show, for proletarian politics and arts in East Asia, although unfolding quite differently, is “to find some unity in our various struggles without falling back on the despotic and bureaucratic organization of the party or State apparatus.”40

37 See also, Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 2. The Time-Image, trans. trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Robert Galeta (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1985), 215-224. 38 Deleuze and Guattari, Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature, 17. 39 Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, What is Philosophy?, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Graham Burchell (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), 108. 40 Gilles Deleuze, “Nomadic Thought,” Desert Islands and Other Texts 1953-1974, ed. David Lapoujade, trans. Michael Taormina (Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2004), 260.

While at first glance, it might seem counter-intuitive to describe proletarians as minoritarians as there is no need to be nostalgic about party fanatics who guided the historical proletariat into despotic states, it allows us to rethink proletarian literature and present alternative narratives of politics and arts in East Asia. Rather than considering proletarian figures as minoritarians, however, this dissertation regards minoritarian as a process, an action of molecular becoming. Resisting the molarity of identities, which in the case of subjectivity refers to a static state of being that can be altered on the molecular level through creation, proletarian figures are in a continuous flux like a proletarian “unnamable,”41 undermining constantly capitalist capture through a politics not of representation but creation. Nicolas Thoburn explicates such a political force as a “stripped-down formulation of the proletariat (…and) a mode of composition which calls forth processes of minor difference and creativity without or against determined subjectivity.”42 Recalling the above scene in

Kobayashi’s The Crab Cannery Ship, the encounter between several “unorganized” proletarians presents us such a creative yet embryonic process of forging relations of solidarity and seeking unity among their struggles, and thus deterritorializing nation-state-capital codification that could have stymied the very possibility of the encounter. Examining such processes of assembling proletarian encounters, this dissertation aims to move away from orthodox Marxist and Soviet models of proletarians as molar subjects. Shifting the focus will help to illuminate hitherto neglected molecular creation of international solidarity found in proletarian literature and cultural activities.43

41 Nicholas Thoburn, Deleuze, Marx, and Politics (London: Routledge, 2003), 60. 42 Ibid. 43 For a history on Soviet Communism and East Asia see, Tatiana Linkhoeva, Revolution Goes East: Imperial Japan and Soviet Communism (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2020). For a study on the Soviet Union and internationalism see,

0.3 Internationalizing the Proletariat

From the second half of the nineteenth century, governments and ruling classes uprooted innumerable peoples and launched continuous fluxes of migration worldwide through modes of primitive accumulation, destroying existing social fields and creating new urban locales filled with strangers. Stirred by capitalist expansion, (nation-)state and imperial organizations of land and life caused a sense of spatio-temporal contraction of distances and times both mediated through new media and arts, new modes of infrastructure and technology, and international warfare, what philosopher Karl Marx (1818-1883) called “Raum zu vernichten durch die Zeit” (the annihilation of space by time) and later Frankfurt School philosopher Ernst Bloch (1885-1977) observed as

“Gleichzeitigkeit der Ungleichzeitigen” (simultaneity of the non-simultaneous).44 As a result, a synchronous and syntopogenous globality of capitalist production worldwide interlocked by the monetary form of capital and labor redefined and absorbed social relations as homogenous and interchangeable. Ample research has mapped these major transformations in numerous fields of transportation, infrastructure, financing, education, military, interlocking enormous flows of peoples and commodities as well as economic integration of capitalist markets across East Asia and

Katerina Clark, Moscow, the Fourth Rome: Stalinism, Cosmopolitanism, and the Evolution of Soviet Culture, 1931-1941 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2011). 44 Karx Marx, Grundrisse: Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy, trans. Martin Nicolaus (London: Penguin Classics, 1993), 524; Ernst Bloch, Heritage of our Times, trans. Neville Plaice and Stephen Plaice (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1991), 101-116. Originally published as an essay titled “Ungleichzeitigkeit und Pflicht zu ihrer Dialektik” (1932).

22 worldwide.45 Consequently, capitalist expansion and globalization created fertile ground for various philosophies of internationalism to emerge by interlacing numerous locales.46

Governments worldwide invested in organizing capitalist flows and controlling the mobility of people, capturing and molding them into national and imperial subjects, while also creating an infrastructure of migrant labor unbounded to move across territories. These (nation-)state formations were aimed to secure territoriality through de/reterritorialization of non-territorial flows of capital.

Deleuze and Guattari explicate this process where capitalism disentangles labor power from its territory and homogenizes wealth into “independent capital,” allowing labor power and capital to circulate as a “worldwide axiomatic,” and the state is isomorphic in relation to the capitalist axiomatic, striving to recode capitalist flows.47 The constant decoding of capitalism undermines the legitimacy and existence of states, eluding its attempts of capture and changing its forms of governance. From its territory, a state tries to maintain its relation with the capitalist world market by recodifying labor power and its “materialized labor,” resulting in capitalist flows circulating freely through the territories of various forms of states.48 For Deleuze and Guattari, the nation-state is a well- suited mutation of former organizations of state that can accommodate the flows of capital by not

45 Among the numerous studies on Japanese empire building see for example Louise Young, Japan's Total Empire: Manchuria and the Culture of Wartime Imperialism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999); Daqing Yang, Technology of Empire: Telecommunications and Japanese Expansion in Asia, 1883-1945 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Asia Center, 2010); Michael Schiltz, The Money Doctors from Japan: Finance, Imperialism, and the Building of the Yen Bloc, 1895-1937 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2012); Aaron Moore, Constructing East Asia: Technology, Ideology, and Empire in Japan's Wartime Era, 1931-1945 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2015). 46 For a general history on various strands of internationalism and international organizations see, Glenda Sluga and Patricia Clavin (eds.), Internationalisms: A Twentieth-Century History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017). 47 Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 452-456. 48 Ibid.

23 only “struggl[ing] against imperial or evolved systems, the feudal systems, and the autonomous cities” but also by “crush[ing] their own ‘minorities.’”49

In response to deterritorializing flows of capital ensuing the unequal treaties of Euro-

American imperial powers, the Meiji state de/reterritorialized these flows by colonizing adjacent regions, starting with Ezo (Hokkaidō, 1869) and the Ryūkyū islands (Okinawa, 1879) followed by

Formosa (Taiwan, 1895) and Chosŏn (Korea, 1910), and molding a people into nation-state and imperial subjects through homogenization and standardization of regions. To counter Euro-American universalism, Japanese imperialism unfolded an alternative universalism of Pan-Asianism based on ideas of “same race” (同種) and “same script” (同文) to justify its colonialism, while reconfiguring spatio- temporal hierarchies across the empire with Japan as its axiom. This imperial Pan-Asianism facilitated new possibilities for colonized subjects to herald Japan as liberator of Asia and to supplant Euro-

American modernity with a counternarrative of Asian modernity, while they also (un)intentionally accepted and reproduced unequal conditions embedded in the Japanese ideology. Targeted by Meiji’s colonization, intellectuals on the Korean peninsula initially tried to (re)conceptualize a people with various alternatives of nationalism, Pan-Asianism, and East-Asianism to thwart colonial territorialization. Following the peninsula’s annexation, however, the Meiji state subsumed the

Chosŏn state, recodifying the territory to accommodate the ever-expanding capitalist flows. This imperial encroachment marked, as historian Andre Schmid has observed, a shift from the hope of an

East Asian unity to the “disintegration of Eastern solidarity.”50

49 Ibid., 456. 50 Andre Schmid, Korea Between Empires, 1895-1919 (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002), 92-100.

Unlike their Meiji counterparts, intellectuals under the Qing state, troubled by a deteriorating state and potential integration into one of the colonial empires, not only reconceptualized a proximate people but also overseas peoples into a homogenous ethno-nationality called “Chinese.”

Rebecca Karl has argued that it is not migration itself that led to this recoding of a diaspora, which was already happening for centuries, but rather the “characteristics of modern global space” as a result of capitalist deterritorialization that allowed “new premises for concept-formation and praxis.”51

Informed by Deleuze and Guattari, Karl understands this reconceptualization of peoples and the production of a national space within “the properly global moment (…,) the emergence of a relationship between national territoriality and the deterritorialization of capital and labor, the apparent ‘paradox’ of bounded space/unbounded people, [which] far from appearing paradoxical, instead becomes an integral or even an inherent historical dimension of modern nationalism, for

China and elsewhere.”52 Thus, Karl reminds us to consider local, national, and regional political structures not as independent entities nor as a neat universal whole, where intellectual discourses in

East Asia merely operate in relation to Euro-American imperial powers, but instead as “a disjunct world striving to reconfigure itself.”53 That is, a world of unequal and unstable spatio-temporalities where (colonial) nationalisms were the first attempts of creating relations of solidarity with those oppressed and exploited by (nation-)state capitalism in forms of mutual resemblance. Such imaginations of an unequal global space were crucial not only for the invention of a proletarian

51 Karl, Staging the World: Chinese Nationalism at the Turn of the Twentieth Century, 57. 52 Ibid., 56. 53 Ibid., 11.

25 people discussed in the previous section, but also the internationalization of proletarian resistance among numerous unequal spatio-temporalities.

Like Meiji and late-Qing intellectuals who turned their attention to such colonial spaces as

Hawai’i to rethink the positionality of their nations, proletarian intellectuals investigated imperial- colonial relationships to articulate modes of resistance against capitalist de/reterritorialization and

(nation-)state de/reterritorialization. In contrast to early geographical atlases designed to unfold national histories and possibly futures in linear and comparable fashion,54 Marxist cartographer Alex

Rado (1899-1981) published his proletarian atlas in 1930 to map an international history of the proletariat.55 Despite resemblances of the world represented on imperial maps, Rado’s cartography mapped the capitalist and (nation-)state colonizing forces interlocking and parcelling the world by drawing maps of imperial competition over natural resources, sea and land borders, and trade routes.

The production of such atlases interlinked geographical spaces with the temporality of historical events, rendering visible the relationships among proletarian locales explicated by narratives of imperial oppression and exploitation that accompanied each map (see. Fig. 0.1-0.5). The proletarian atlas reframed national histories of (nation-)states into international histories of proletarian resistance and struggles of minority, indigenous people, and other oppressed groups against

54 See for example Fukuzawa Yukichi, Sekai kuni zukushi (Tokyo: Kei’ō Gijuku, 1869). The atlas consisted of six volumes divided by continent. For a discussion of Fukuzawa’s publication, see Christopher Hill, National History and the World of Nations: Capital, State, and the Rhetoric of History in Japan, France, and the United States (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press Books, 2009), 1-4. 55 Alex Radó, Atlas für Politik Wirtschaft Arbeiterbewegung 1. Der Imperialismus (Wien: Verlag fur Literatur und Politik, 1930 [1980]). The Japanese translation was published as Arekkusu Rādō, Puroretaria chizu: dai 1 shū, trans. Kobayashi Yoshimasa (Tokyo: Nanban Shobō, 1931). An advertisement in proletarian journal Senki (Battle Flag) promoted the atlas as “new maps” of a “new imperial geography,” connecting the fields of economics, sociality, politics, and history based on a Marxist dialectical materialism. Anonymous, “Odoroku beki shin-chizu no shutsugen! Nani o ka shin-chizu to iu?,” Senki 4, no. 5 (1931), no page number.

26 imperialist exploitation. At the same time, such spatio-temporal renditions of the world equally ran the risk of being espoused for a universal history that encapsulated economic and cultural stages, dividing proletarians along a hierarchical axiom of socialist modernization as we saw in Crab Cannery

Ship between an advanced Soviet proletariat and a belated Japanese proletariat. Nevertheless, the proletariat atlas helped proletarian intellectuals unfolding a different topography where relationships of proletarian solidarity could be imagined internationally not based on identitarian modifiers but rather on associational relationships. Consequently, this international imagination immediately fueled artistic production that aimed to grasp such proletarian worldviews in short stories, theater plays, and poetry, such as Kim Ch'angsul’s (1903-1950) poem “Chihyŏngŭl ttŭnŭn muri” (Troupes

Spreading Across the Earth, 1927), describing proletarians “draw[ing] a world map with thick lines.

Troupes [of proletarians] that spread across the earth. Asia……Moscow, Calcutta, Shanghai, Seoul,

Tokyo (…) Europe……Berlin, Paris, London, Vienna…… hurriedly draw[ing] a battle map.56

The reconfigurations of proletarian struggles in an uneven global space emerged from the drastic capitalist transformations of social fields, interconnecting numerous regions. These changes, however, also opened up avenues for new modes of spatial mobility, not only psychically but also through various new media, among proletarians artists and proletarians. In tandem with the invention of the proletariat, proletarian intellectuals started to relate and relay local struggles to one another, creating an interconnected map of proletarian exploitation worldwide. This mapping occurred within newly established international networks of proletarian (cultural) movements initiated by the Third International and Comintern, as well as regional initiatives, such as Henri

56 Kim Ch'angsul, “Chihyŏngŭl ttŭnŭn muri,” Chosŏn Ilbo, June 22, 1927, 3.

Barbusse’s (1873-1935) international writer’s association Clarté, the Congress of the Peoples of the East conference held by the Comintern in Baku in 1920, and the Opposition to Intervention in China

Alliance in 1927.57 New modes of international exchange between proletarian artists worldwide and new forms of multilingual cohabitation among proletarians quite different from pre-industrial times gave rise to proletarian internationalism and its international organization of politico-social formations. Building off previous intellectual and activist networks of cosmopolitan anarchists and

(Christian) socialists,58 proletarian cultural movements were convinced that to stop the capitalist and imperial rampage and capture, proletarians needed to create international networks of support and intelligence from which emancipatory politics could arise.

Following the numerous events of social unrest and warfare worldwide between 1917 and 1921, proletarian movements in East Asia were founded. After plentiful splits and internal conflicts, proletarian writers and artists formed unifying national and regional organizations, many with

Esperanto names to emphasis their internationalist outlook, such as Korea Artista Proletaria

Federacio (KAPF, Proletarian Federation of Korean Artists, 1925), Taiwan wenhua xiehui (Taiwanese

Culture Association, 1927), Nippona Artista Proletaria Federacio (NAPF, Proletarian Federation of

Japanese Artists, 1928), and Zhongguo zuoyi zuojia lianmeng (Zuolian, League of Left-Wing Writers,

1930).59 Together with numerous local political and art groups, these proletarian federations, leagues,

57 Michael Denning, Culture in the Age of Three Worlds (London: Verso, 2004), 57-58. Chapter 4 discusses in greater depth antiwar and anti-militaristic movements. 58 For recent studies on Marxist and communist internationalism see, Brigitte Studer, The Transnational World of the Cominternians (Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015); Rossen Djagalov, From Internationalism to Postcolonialism: Literature and Cinema between the Second and the Third Worlds (Montreal: McGill-Queen's University Press, 2020). 59 For national histories of proletarian movements in East Asia written in English see, George Shea, Leftwing literature in Japan; a brief history of the proletarian literary movement (Tokyo: Hosei University Press, 1964); Wang-chi Wong, Politics

28 and associations made extensive use of imperial infrastructures, despite the risks of arrest and imprisonment, to exchange their literary and artistic production as well as to articulate shared visions of proletarian internationalism.

The construction of extensive infrastructure across East Asia resulted in an increased spatial mobility and into new and renewed circulation of literary texts and other cultural artifacts in what

Karen Thornber, informed by Mary Pratt’s “contact zones,”60 has called “artistic contact nebulae,” to refer to “the physical and creative spaces where dancers, dramatists, musicians, painters, sculptors, writers, and other artists (…) in unequal power relationships grapple with and transculturate one another’s creative output.”61 Proletarian writers and artists utilized these transcultural and translingual spaces for international practices, such as direct encounters, or for the circulation of various media like telegrams, letter correspondences, print media, translations, among others.

Moreover, they further organized proletarian resistance internationally by celebrating festivals simultaneously, learning the international auxiliary language Esperanto useful for international exchange, and discussing shared concerns, such as birth control politics and anti-militarism, in print media. While proletarian writers and artists in East Asia were no exception to interact with each other

and literature in Shanghai: The Chinese League of Left-Wing Writers, 1930-1936 (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1991); Sunyoung Park, The Proletarian Wave: Literature and Leftist Culture in Colonial Korea, 1910-1945 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2015); Bert Scruggs, Translingual Narration: Colonial and Postcolonial Taiwanese Fiction and Film (Honolulu: University of Hawaiʻi Press, 2015), especially Chapter Four, “Class Consciousness, Fictive Space, and the Colonial Proletariat,” 57-87. 60 Mary Louise Pratt describes “contact zones” as “social spaces where cultures meet, clash and grapple with each other, often in contexts of highly asymmetrical relations of power, such as colonialism, slavery, or their aftermaths as they lived out in many parts of the world today.” Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (London: Routledge, 2007), 4. 61 Karen Thornber, Empire of Texts in Motion: Chinese, Korean and Taiwanese Transculturations of Japanese literature (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2009), 2.

29 within unbalanced power relations of “transcultural (…and) heterogenous literary worlds,”62 they actively questioned the very nature of these relations through their critiques of capitalism and imperialism, challenging the hierarchies imbued in national and ethnic modifiers dispersed by

(nation-)states and empires.63 Thus, as Heather Bowen-Struyk has observed, proletarian internationalism presented an alternative to compete “with the nation-state for the privilege of becoming the most significant imagined community for proletarian writers and artists.”64

Proletarian print media presented disparate and dispersed struggles of a “disjunct world” in revolt within a cohesive collage of texts, photographs, and drawings to readers, synthesizing and conjoining numerous uneven spatio-temporalities into an international proletariat.65 Montage, the editing and cutting of singular shots connected into a filmstrip, was the inchoate technique that precipitated a panoply of visual and textual compositions in various art forms believed to be capable of disrupting and undermining capitalism’s (de)fragmenting of globalized locales into homogenous and exchangeable components.66 Questioning the discourse of uneven spatio-temporal divisions of

62 Ibid., 21. 63 I am informed here by Samuel Perry’s observation of proletarian writers in Korea and Japan, writing that “[p]roletarian cultural workers were not necessarily immune to the mechanisms of empire, which were deeply rooted in Japanese culture, or to the bourgeois ideology embedded in practices of everyday life, structures of feeling, and aesthetic forms. But class consciousness helped these cultural workers to enact practices 一 literary and otherwise—to challenge them.” Samuel Perry, Recasting Red Culture in Proletarian Japan: Childhood, Korea, and the Historical Avant-Garde (Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press, 2014), 169. 64 Heather Bowen-Struyk, “Introduction: Proletarian Arts in East Asia,” positions: east asia cultures critique 14, no. 2 (2004): 262. 65 See for example such proletarian journals Kokusai tsūshin (International Correspondence, 1925-1927) and Kokusai bunka (International Culture; the covers had an Esperanto title Internacia Kulturo printed, 1928-1929). 66 It is interesting to note that montage (monter) and assemblage (assembler) are etymologically related in French, sharing a technical meaning of joining and connecting parts. Martino Stierli, Montage and the Metropolis: Architecture, Modernity, and the Representation of Space (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2015), 12. Montage also entered the lexicons of East Asian as a loanword (蒙太奇, モンタージュ, 몽타주).

30 particular-universal capitalist development,67 from which many other binaries such as the urban-rural divide emerged, proletarian artists and intellectuals explored montage not only as an artistic technique to counter bourgeois aesthetics but also as a mental exercise to understand the world through the juxtaposition and adjacency of fragments assembled in sequences of conflicting images.

By putting the focal point on how capitalism brought about a linear and universal world, they rendered visible a historicization of the spatio-temporal unevenness effaced by economic markets and (cultural) imperialism. However, it should be noted that montage equally risked reproducing and normalizing particular-universal binaries if the process of juxtaposition was concealed and the polyvalence of images eliminated.

The synthesizing force in montage, collage, and other modernist and avant-garde techniques was indispensable in shaping the internationalism of proletarian politics and arts. This study takes synthesis not as a dialectical process, or at least not its vulgar mode of oppositions and negations, diverging from many proletarian thinkers,68 but, informed by Deleuze and Guattari’s philosophy of connective, disjunctive, and conjunctive syntheses, as a practice where (in)animate and (in)organic entities connect their immanent differences and form relationships. This is to avoid a return to a binary understanding of monolithic theses and antitheses. Connections can be contingent or intentional and are made between partial objects not to assemble totalities nor act as fragments of presupposed totalities but as multiplicities. These multiplicities are non-numerical and non-metric

67 For a comparative study of the universal and particular in East Asia, see Travis Workman, Imperial Genus: The Formation and Limits of the Human in Modern Korea and Japan (Oakland: University of California Press, 2015). 68 This is not to say that all proletarian writers uncritically embraced dialectical materialism. For example, Tokunaga Sunao critiqued dialectical materialism as literary method, stating that it was too conformist and superficial and endangering artistic freedom. Tokunaga Sunao, “Sōsaku hōhōjō no shintenkan,” Chūō Kōron 48, no. 9 (1933): 217-227.

31 elements different in quality rather than in quantity within a binary division between one and multiple. The connective syntheses are not eternal or enduring but disjoin or break when relationships are suspended. The (dis)continuous processes of connecting and disjoining heterogenous and polyvocal energy flows create constellations from which a continuously changing subject(ivity) materializes as after-effect rather than an active synthesizing and a priori subject. This means that syntheses operate as passive processes of “habit” (expectation) and “memory”

(recollection), and an impassive one of “caesura” (experience), from which a series of enfolded sensorial contractions are unified to form a subject.69 Such synthesizing processes, then, were augmented and aided by technological innovations of montage and collage that allowed to record and group pieces of hitherto unknown external realities in random series, rendering visible new spatiotemporal constellations of the world.

Participating in these aforementioned “artistic contact nebulae” of the world as uneven global spatio-temporalities, proletarian writers started to theorize philosophies of internationalism informed by spatiotemporal syntheses found in the modernist and avant-garde techniques. These philosophies tried to address the national question in relation to proletarian internationalism quite different from national organizations of peoples in (nation-)states, which Samuel Perry has described as

“[p]roletarian literature did not subordinate class to nation, but rather expanded class analysis to encompass a fuller range of experiences.”70 As quoted in the epigram above, Miyamoto (née Chūjō)

Yuriko (1899-1951) explains that national struggles are important for proletarians but can never be a

69 Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, 70-128. 70 Samuel Perry, Recasting Red Culture in Proletarian Japan: Childhood, Korea, and the Historical Avant-Garde, 169.

32 teleology in itself as proletarian struggles are not contained in nations but interconnected internationally through imperial-capitalism. Preceding Miyamoto, Guo Moruo (1892-1978) argued in his essay “Geming yu Wenxue” (Revolution and Literature, 1926) that “along with the internationalization of capitalism and its development is the internationalization of the class struggle

(…), [making] the internal revolutionary activities simultaneous with the activities of the external world revolution.”71 Further, Nakano Shigeharu (1902-1979), discussing the internationalization of proletarian arts, writes that: “(…) similar to not being able to discuss the struggle in one country (for example Japan) while ignoring the international affairs, it is unacceptable to discuss [proletarian struggles] while ignoring the national affairs.”72 Understanding capitalism as an international economic system that encompasses numerous spaces into a synchronic temporality, the national and international are heavily intertwined, what Nakano called an “international ligament” (kokusaiteki jintai) and cannot be seen as separated.73 Proletarian intellectuals considered the national and international not as a binary opposing each other, but as different spatial layers of proletarian struggles.74 Entering the 1930s, however, this understanding in East Asia was jeopardized by Stalin’s theory of “socialism in one country,” gradually privileging and homogenizing the national.75

71 Guo Moruo, “Geming yu wenxue,” Chuangzao 1, no.3 (1926): 10. 72 Nakano Shigeharu, “Kaiketsu sareta mondai to atarashii shigoto,” Senki 1, no. 7 (1928): 91. 73 Nakano Shigeharu, “‘Bungei Sensen’ wa doko ni mon o hiraku ka,” Senki 1, no. 1 (1928): 12. 74 For more on the national question, see Germain A. Houston, The State, Identity, and the National Question in China and Japan (Princeton: Princeton University, 1994); Heather Bowen-Struyk, “Rival Imagined Communities: Class and Nation in Japanese Proletarian Literature,” positions: east asia cultures critique 14, no. 2 (2004): 373-404; Gavin Walker, The Sublime Perversion of Capital: Marxist Theory and the Politics of History in Modern Japan (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2016). 75 Workman, Imperial Genus: The Formation and Limits of the Human in Modern Korea and Japan, 122.

While proletarian intellectuals stressed an understanding of their literary production as inherently international, scholars of proletarian literature have mostly studied it as national movements within national literary histories mirroring nation-state trajectories in East Asia, either ignoring its internationalism or merely concluding it as a failed project.76 Following post-colonial and postmodern critiques, however, scholars have started to complicate national models and instead tried to study the proletarian cultural production more pluralistically and transnationally. In his foreword of the revised edition of Puroretaria bungaku to sono jidai (Proletarian Literature and Its Era, 2004),

Kurihara Yukio critiques the post-World War II Japanese language scholarship for studying Japanese proletarian literature merely within the framework of modern Japanese literature (Nihon kindai bungaku).77 Following his translation series edited with An U-sik entitled Shiryō sekai puroretaria bungaku undō (Materials of the World Proletarian Literature Movement, 1972-1975), Kurihara made available in Japanese the international intricacies of proletarian culture worldwide, therefore urging

(Japanese language) scholarship to study proletarian literature from a comparative perspective.78

Similarly, Yu Mun-sŏn acknowledges the importance of examining the internationalism of East Asian proletarian literature interconnected through a shared script and geographical proximity resulting in extensive exchange among proletarian writers and artists, while shifting the focus from internationalism in proletarian theory to its portrayals in poems and short stories.79 Other scholars

76 Rin Shūmei, Shōwa ideorogī: Shisō to shite no bungaku (Tokyo: Heibonsha, 2005). 77 Kurihara refers to Takeuchi Yoshimi’s “Kindaishugi to minzoku no mondai” (1951), Odagiri Hideo’s “Meiji bungaku no jinminteki dōkō” (1955), and Honda Shūgo’s Shirakaba-ha no bungaku (1955). Kurihara Yukio, Puroretaria bungaku to sono jidai (Tokyo: Inpakuto Shuppankai, 2004), 5. 78 Ibid., 6. 79 Yu Mun-sŏn, “K'ap'ŭ chakka wa p'ŭrollet'aria kukchejuŭi,” Minjok munhaksa yŏn’gu, no. 24 (2004): 331-356.

34 started to use similar modes of inquiry by creating transnational comparative frameworks to examine the numerous proletarian cultural movements in East Asia.80

While the above studies have recuperated invaluable international histories of proletarian literature in East Asia, the nation as a departure point of inquiry as well as a national teleology has often persisted. This persistence is not merely a problem of a continuing presence of nation-states and nation-state building, but also foregrounds the problem of comparison. Despite recent attempts of internationalizing, transnationalizing, or globalizing studies of literature, failing to historicize the specificity of the international, transnational, or global flows as well as accepting the world as ready- made produces a comparability, as Rebecca Karl has observed, that produces “the global [as] an ahistorical unity and neutral, inert space, open to all to beg for inclusion in ‘it’ on ostensibly equivalent (if not equal) terms (…), leav[ing] the explanatory and critical vantage of global capitalism

– tainted by association with Europe/Eurocentrism – untouched.”81 To compare literary texts and writers requires an acknowledgement of the production of unevenness immanent to capitalism, while resisting the rendering of these texts and writers into synecdoche of a nation-state. For a productive comparison, historian Harry Harootunian has suggested that the “sense of a dissonant temporal

80 For example, Li Honghua has examined proletarian literature from mainland China in relation to the cultural and theoretical production in the Soviet Union and Japan, underlining its internationalism. Li Honghua, Zhongguo zuoyi wenhua sichao yu xiandai zhuyi wenxue shanbian (Beijing: Zhongguo Shehui Kexue Chubanshe, 2012). Further, following the International Symposium on Proletarian Arts in 2002, English language scholarship has also begun to study proletarian literature and arts comparatively, redirecting the focus from its “failures” to “accomplishments.” Bowen-Struyk, “Introduction: Proletarian Arts in East Asia,” 269. Succeeding this symposium, a special issue of positions: east asia cultures critique was published in 2006 titled “Proletarian Arts in East Asia,” followed by Samuel Perry and Sun-young Park’s monographs, which foreground the importance of proletarian transnational networks in the which the cultural production occurred. Samuel Perry, Recasting Red Culture in Proletarian Japan: Childhood, Korea, and the Historical Avant- Garde (Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press, 2014); Sunyoung Park, The Proletarian Wave: Literature and Leftist Culture in Colonial Korea, 1910-1945 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2015). 81 Rebecca Karl, The Magic of Concepts: History and Economic in Twentieth-Century China (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2017), 33.

35 asymmetry as it is experienced in the everyday supplies (…) a comparative framework on global scale that might account for local differences without exceptionalizing the location of a space as an

‘alternative’ to a prior, original model.”82 For literature, literary scholar Emily Apter maintains, unevenness corresponds to translational difference found in “non-translation, mistranslation, incomparability, and untranslatability,” between literary texts.83 In order to approach a “literary comparatism,” Apter urges us to question “what it means to ‘have’ a literature or to lay claim to aesthetic property.”84 The global scale, the world in which literary texts circulate, is not a preexisting space, but occurs through constitutive processes of “worlding,” the inscription of a world through imperialism onto the colonized as coined by Gayatri Spivak,85 that make possible a reification of space as a global world. Literary texts are very much part of these acts of “worlding” and materialize in the production of unevenness. The act of comparing with the fulcrum on the boundaries of unevenness and historicizing processes of “worlding” could initiate, as Homi Bhabha argues, “the transmission of national traditions [as] the major theme of a world literature [to] transnational histories of migrants, the colonized, or political refugees – these border and frontier conditions (…),”86 of which proletarian literature arguably was a first attempt.

82 Harry Harootunian, “Some Thoughts on Comparability and the Space-Time Problem,” Boundary 2 32, no. 2 (2005): 26. Elsewhere, he further elaborates that “the experience of the interaction of ‘lateness’ and necessity of living through more intensively and consciously the spectacle of unevenness early persuaded societies like Japan to recognize that they were forced to live comparatively.” Harry Harootunian, Marx after Marx (New York: Columbia University Press, 2015), 17. 83 Emily Apter, Against World Literature: On the Politics of Untranslatability (London: Verso, 2013), 4. 84 Ibid., 15. 85 Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, “The Rani of Sirmur: An Essay in Reading the Archives,” History and Theory 24, no. 3 (1985): 247-272; Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, “Three Women's Texts and a Critique of Imperialism,” Critical Inquiry 12, no. 1, (1985): 243-261. 86 Homi Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London: Routledge, 1994), 17.

While attempts at deconstructing nations have proven fruitful in revealing the fabrication of national narratives and its complicity with capitalist production, nation-versus-nation narratives have been maintained in the study of literature where differences are frequently understood as national differences made comparable through the four characteristics coined by Deleuze - analogy, resemblance, identity, or representation - and thus deferring and expelling a myriad of immanent differences.87 National models often reinforce the nation-state as the only possible teleology and foreclose alternative narratives of literary history. Due to the advancing unevenness of global spatio- temporalities captured within the homogenizing capitalist markets, a similar incommensurability prevails in nation-state trajectories that continues to differentiate against one another, resisting anational narratives and preventing any exteriority to emerge from which post-statism and post- capitalism could become thinkable. Moreover, the limits and silences of colonial archives and imbalances among archives denied and still resist anational narratives, always already reproducing uneven narratives; an unevenness the nation-state narrative is capable of effacing by homogenizing differences through bordering an inside and outside. Restoring differences within the nation-state often maintains the very boundaries of homogeneity in national history, that is difference within sameness, while trying to go beyond the nation-state frequently results in reproducing comparisons between nation-states and comparing national differences. Neoliberal and post-socialist spatio- temporalities have further exacerbated the incongruent nation-state trajectories while maintaining the (de/re)territorializing forces of nation-state-capital at play and subsuming any potential that could undermine these trajectories.

87 Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, 1-27.

This study, then, has set itself the challenge to examine proletarian literature by questioning and problematizing geographical, ethno-national, and linguistic borders. Rather than comparing a national proletarian literature to another while also acknowledging that regional modifiers such as

East Asia (東洋//東亞) are equally problematic and constructed, it strives to examine proletarian literary texts as lived experiences of specific spatio-temporal forms and to analyze how proletarian texts present multifaceted and polyvocal responses to capitalist production within uneven global spatio- temporalities. Although such attempts are often arbitrary merely bracketing or supplanting ethno- national modifiers, this study considers the process of revealing the (im)possibilities of crafting alternative literary narratives to be benign to expose the very violence of nation-state-capitalist capture of animate entities. This study aims to create a multiform and multivalent narrative where we can uncover and observe nation-state-capital’s bordering and fissuring life while also scraping away the putative glue of capitalist flows that effaces these very borders. It does so by putting the focal point on solidarity, key to proletarian internationalism as intra-human relationships of hybridity that defy nation-state boundaries.

0.4 Assembling Proletarian Solidarity

While every attempt at defining solidarity will be a reductive endeavor, a point of departure for this dissertation is the lemma of “spirit of solidarity” (rentaishin), a neologism printed in

Puroretaria bungei jiten (Proletarian Arts Dictionary, 1930), which tells us:

Spirit of Solidarity (rentaishin) Refers to the attitude that is linked together by class, collective, and comrade feelings. The words (of the song In the Crucible of Hatred) “Arms of comrades join firmly, the vow of comrades, intense heartbeats” express our spirit of solidarity. The spirit of solidarity is the combination of our minds and actions that produces our daily and basic attitude.

連帯心（レンタイシン）階級的、集団的、同志的感情によつてつながれる精神をいふ。『同志の腕よ堅く結び、同志の誓よ、高く胸打ち』（憎しみのるつぼにの歌）といふ言葉は、我々の連帯心をいひ現はしたものである。連帯心は、我々の精神的及び、行動的結合の日常的な基本的精神をなすものである。88

This explanation remains vague and the word “rentaishin” was hardly used in proletarian texts written in East Asian languages.89 However, it reveals that proletarian intellectuals invested in their own notion of solidarity as opposed to existing definitions used for example in Durkheimian sociology by considering solidarity a practice that affects bodies through particular feelings and thoughts not unlike the proletarian feelings assembled in Kobayashi’s Crab Cannery Ship. What these feelings exactly are stays unclear, but we learn that theoretico-practical manifestations of proletarian solidarity occur through linking, joining, and combining, what this dissertation calls assembling solidarity. Among others, Nakano Shigeharu explicates such feelings of solidarity in relation to ideas.

For him, songs as Internationale or Red Flag Song have weaved feelings (kanjō) with ideas (kannen) of international solidarity. Nakano states in the “act of singing international thoughts (shisō) are being transmitted similar to the special feelings (jōcho), rhythms, and melodies of music.”90 For Nakano, art was a medium for the “socialization” and “contagion” of feelings, stressing the importance of artistic

88 Yamada Seizaburō and Kawaguchi Hiroshi (eds.), Puroretaria bungei jiten (Tokyo: Hakuyōsha, 1930), 286. 89 In her study of the "Korea question" in Japanese and Korean proletarian literature, Nikki Floyd understands solidarity, following O Yong-jin, as “sympathy” (同情) , which she describes as “the fruit of unequal power relations, where the sympathizer stands in superiority to the victim of oppression.” Nikki Floyd, “Bridging the Colonial Divide: Japanese-Korean Solidarity in the International Proletarian Literature Movement” (PhD diss., Yale University, 2011), 15. For O’s article, see O Yŏng-jin, “Ilbon kŭndaeshi e nat'anan Han'gukkwan (2),” Irŏ Ilmunhak yŏn'gu 14, no. 1 (1989): 109-144. While I agree that sympathy was an important component of proletarian solidarity, the emphasis on power and victimhood linked to identity forecloses any possibility beyond such relationships to materialize. 90 Nakano Shigeharu, “Puroretaria geijutsu to wa nani ka,” Sōgō puroretaria geijutsu kōza 1, ed. Akita Ujaku and Eguchi Kan (Tokyo: Naigaisha, 1931), 9-10.

39 praxis to conjoin emotions that differ for each person and by class, which became essential to acts of assembling solidarity.91

If proletarian movements strived to organize internationally, how did they envisage such social relations of solidarity at a grassroot level? From the founding of the First International, Marxists debated modes of political organization, but refrained from any direct in-depth theorization of solidarity.92 It often remained an implicit consensus that solidarity was a given among those invested to challenge imperial capitalist oppression. Preceding proletarian movements, anarchists invested in political strategies of solidarity, most notably Pjotr Kropotkin’s (1842-1921) theory of “mutual aid”

(vzaimopomoshch') considered to be a system of voluntary cooperation and exchange of services and goods, followed by sociologists, such as Émile Durkheim (1858-1917), who was among the first and few to theorize solidarity in his study De la division du travail social (The Division of Labor in Society,

1893). While the former’s ideas resonated with proletarian intellectuals, the latter became a target of criticism. Part of the concurrent debates on the functions of society and its relationship between individuals and masses, Durkheim discerned a dialectic in social solidarity between mechanical solidarity and organic solidarity. The former referred to simple societies, where solidarity was a result of relatively similar activities among members of one community, and the latter referred to the modern world of Durkheim’s own era, where solidarity appeared more spontaneous out a dependency between members participating in different activities caused by divisions in labor that

91 For more historical context on Nakano’s article see, Workman, Imperial Genus: The Formation and Limits of the Human in Modern Korea and Japan, 121-124. 92 In contrast to Marxists, anarchists explored and theorized various notions of solidarity. For a discussion of these notions, see Kristin Ross, Communal Luxury: The Political Imaginary of the Paris (New York: Verso, 2015), especially Chapter 5 “Solidarity,” 117-142.

40 would absolve mechanical solidarity.93 Arguing within a homogenous nation-state framework,

Durkheim was not interested in Marxism nor revolutionary politics, but in preventing societies from falling into decay and to examine social systems that could strike a balance between maintaining social order and individual freedom. Durkheim, however, failed to theorize how relations of solidarity are crafted, and together with many of his contemporary sociologists neglected to historicize global uneven spatio-temporalities that caused anomie and calls for solidarity beyond nation-states.

Although Durkheim’s thinking became the basis for twentieth-century sociology, his contemporaries worldwide critiqued him for his overdetermination of society. Most notably, sociologist and psychologist Gabriel Tarde (1843-1904), whose ideas also resonated among proletarian intellectuals, debated directly with Durkheim, rejecting the latter’s ill-defined notions of society and individual. For Tarde, “everything is a society,” both (in)animate and (in)organic entities.94 In other words, social relations operate on a monadological level where the concept of individual is always already interconnected to a network of individuals.95 As such, Tarde’s interest is neither in an individual nor its collective representation, but in the relational flows of beliefs and desires as well as

(infinitesimal) transformations of human association resulting in group minds woven through society.

To account for “the social group[s] of the future,” Tarde delineated “public” (public) from “crowd”

(foule) where the former emanates from the major transformations of printing, transportation, and

93 Émile Durkheim, The Division of Labor in Society, trans. Steven Lukes (New York: Free Press, 2014), xxviii-xxx. 94 Gabriel Tarde, Monadology and Sociology, trans. Theo Lorenc (Melbourne: Re-press, 2012), 28. 95 Tarde described this singular-plural relationship as: “Left to itself, a monad is powerless. This is the most important fact, and it leads immediately to explain another one: the tendency of monads to aggregate.” Quoted in Bruno Latour, “Tarde’s idea of quantification,” The Social after Gabriel Tarde: Debates and Assessments, ed. Matei Candea (London: Routledge, 2010), 155. Originally published as Gabriel Tarde, La psychologie économique (Paris: Félix Alcan, 1902).

41 communication technology of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century that mediated and interconnected innumerable dispersed flows, contributing to the aforementioned internationalization.96 According to Tarde, these different layers of heterogenous human association

(public and crowd) are not oppositional, but rather mutually constitutive operating at different velocities, intensities, spacetimes, and mimetics while both move toward homogenization and deindividuation, coagulating disperse desires and beliefs for the better or worse. A crucial difference, however, is their contagious extension where crowds are spatiotemporally and psychically limited as opposed to the mediated liminality of publics. Ultimately, Tarde considered public to produce virtual, incorporeal, and transversal groups where individuals are multiplied and reconfigured at vertiginous intervals through (infinitesimal) imitative flows.

One of Tarde’s international students at Collège de France in Paris, Yoneda Shōtarō (1873-

1945) established after completing his studies outside Japan a (Marxist) sociology discipline in Kyoto and cofounded the Ōhara shakai mondai kenkyūjo (Ōhara Research Institute for Social Problems) in

1919. Across East Asia, he and others, such as sociologist Ke Xiangfeng (1900-1983), translated sociology, psychology, and criminology studies from Tarde, Durkheim, Ferdinand Tönnies (1855-1936),

Pitirim Sorokin (1889-1968), and many other Euro-American sociologists in Japanese and Chinese, which included discussions of human association in relation to solidarity translated as 連帯.97 Informed

96 Gabriel Tarde, “The Public and the Crowd,” On Communication and Social Influence: Selected Papers, ed. Terry N. Clark (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010), 290. Originally published as Gabriel Tarde, L'Opinion et la foule (Paris: Félix Alcan, 1901). 97 Yoneda wrote extensively about solidarity in articles such as “Dentōha no shaikai rentai shisō” (Social Solidarity Though of The Conservative School, 1922) and “San Simon-ha no shakai kaizō tetsugaku oyobi rentai shisō” (Social Reconstruction Philosophy and Solidarity Thought of The Saint-Simon School, 1923). The compound 連帯 itself appeared already in the ancient Shuowen Jiezi (Dictionary of Explaining Graphs and Analyzing Characters) described as “to link two belts” (連接二物的帯子). Starting in the 1880s, this description was expanded with a political dimension by Tokutomi Sohō’s (1863-1957)

42 by Tardean microsociology, Yoneda added Saint-Simonian class theory and Marxist economics to unfold his synthetic sociology (sōgō shakaigaku) that allowed him to analyze and historicize the anomie and social problems in East Asia while converging formations of the “proletariat” (musansha) with “crowd” (gunshū) and public (kōshū). Rethinking Tarde’s concepts, Yoneda maintained a rather affirmative view of crowds, arguing that in the era of public crowds did not recede. According to

Yoneda, a “crowd psychology” (gunshū shinri) had a stronger “affective excitability” (kanjō kōfunsei) compared to public due to its psychical proximity. For Yoneda, debates mediated through communication technology in publics aggravated the intensity of sentiments, opinions, and thoughts that precipitated crowds, not unlike multiple interconnected local crowds celebrating May Day as a worldwide public as we shall see in Chapter 1. “Feelings (kanjō) have the power to express themselves,” writes Yoneda, “that expands its intensity through a contagious (densen) force across the social.”98 Yoneda’s ideas reverberated with proletarian literary theorists, such as Nakano and Pak

Yŏng-hŭi (1901-1950), who understood proletarian art to be a “means of affective contagion” (jōchoteki densen no shudan / chŏngsŏjŏk chŏnyŏm pangbŏp) that produces interhuman connectivity on various scales,99 and Guo Moruo as “contagious (chuanran) to our minds, which creates a chain (liansuo) of

as: “Persons who mutually contact and make together a movement of solidary unity” (互ニ相接シ相共ニ聯帯一致ノ運動ヲナス者ナレハ。). Tokutomi Sohō, Shōrai no Nihon (Tokyo: Keizai Zasshi-sha, 1886), 9. For more on Ke Xiangfeng, see Akiyama Arata, “Kindai Chūgoku no shakai seisaku shisō: Ka Zōhō [Ke Xiangfeng] no shakai kyūsairon to shakai rentai shugi,” Shakaigaku jānaru, no. 40 (2015): 113-130. 98 Quoted in Kodama Mikio, Shakaigaku shisō to fukushi mondai (Tokyo: Gakubunsha, 1985), 211. 99 Nakano, “Puroretaria geijutsu to wa nani ka,” 9. Pak is quoted in Pak Yŏng-hŭi, “Munhak pip'yŏng ŭi hyŏngshikp’a wa Maksŭjuŭi,” Han'guk kŭndae riŏllijŭm pip'yŏng sŏnjip: Charyo p'yŏn, ed. Kim Yun-sik (Sŏul: Sŏul Taehakkyo Ch'ulp'anbu, 1988), 66.

43 minds.”100 Proletarian intellectuals contended that through contagious linkages of “class consciousness” (階級意識) between crowds and publics proletarian “(self-)awareness” (自覚/覚醒) would spread among proletarians.101

Coinciding with nascent social and psychological theories, intellectuals in East Asia commenced debates on what solidarity is and how it could benefit to the various social problems.

“Social solidarity is frequently discussed these days,” writes Hech’am Chŏng Kyusŏn (dates unknown) in an essay published in the proletarian journal Kaebyŏk (Creation), which presents an extensive analysis of solidarity. 102 In a linear and evolutionary fashion and informed by recent biological research on animal groupings, Hech’am sums up solidarity in religious, consanguineal, and tribal groups based on “mutual aid” (sanghosangjo),103 which he compares to sworn brotherhood (結義, kyŏrŭi) from the historical novel Sanguo Yanyi (The Three Kingdoms). In contrast, modern forms of social solidarity, according to Hech’am’s humanist understanding, have expanded to “world comradery” (segye tongp'o chuŭi).104 However, nation-state formations from the nineteenth century

100 Mai Ke’ang [Guo Moruo], “Liushengjiqi de huiyin: Wenyi qingnian ying qu de taidu de kaocha,” Wenhua pipan, no. 3 (1928): 6. 101 The study of class consciousness was central to many debates on proletarians arts. Proletarian intellectuals such as Aono Suekichi (1890-1961), Pak Yŏng-hŭi, and Li Chuli, introduced the so-called “natural growth” (自然成長) and “purposeful consciousness” (目的意識), examining the relationship between a spontaneous proletarian awareness and the organization and production of such an awareness, especially in literature and art. See Aono Suekichi, “Shizen seichō to mokuteki ishiki,” Bungei sensen 3, no. 9 (1925): 3-5; Pak Yŏng-hŭi, “Munye ŭishik chojik kwa kyegŭp munhak ŭi chinch'ul,” Chosŏn chi kwang, no. 6 (1927): 16-35; Li Chuli, “Ziran shengchengxing yu mudi yishixing,” Sixiang, no. 2 (1928): 1-20. 102 Hech’am Chŏng Kyusŏn, “Kaejo munje e kwanyŏ hanŭn sahoe yŏndae ŭi chŏngshin,” Kaebyŏk, no. 27 (1922): 25. 103 Although not mentioned by name, the concept of “mutual aid” is mostly likely drawn from Pjotr Kropotkin’s (1842-1921) philosophy, which was widely read across East Asia, and envisioned an economic system of autonomous communes cooperating and exchanging services and goods. For more on the reception of the concept of “mutual aid” in East Asia, see for example Sunyoung Park, “Anarchism and Culture in Colonial Korea: Minjung Revolution, Mutual Aid, and the Appeal of Nature,” Cross-Currents: East Asian History and Culture Review, no. 28 (2018): 93–115. 104 Hech’am, “Kaejo munje e kwanyŏ hanŭn sahoe yŏndae ŭi chŏngshin,” 25.

44 onward, Hech’am writes, have organized peoples along ethno-national categories that resulted in mutual hatred and genocides, creating a serious lack of social solidarity. Following Marxist economics,

Hech’am stresses that the “capitalist problem” (chabon munje) has divided people into two classes, the capitalist and proletarian class, from which a “class solidarity” (kyegŭp ŭi yŏndae) emerged, blocking any possibility of “world comradery.”105 While Hech’am could only hope that through a “spirit of solidarity” (yŏndae chŏngshin) and “world spirit” (segyeshim) the human species would exceed gender, class, and racial differences creating equal societies, he maintained a Durkheimian understanding of solidarity by failing to grasp that the “capitalist problem” is centered around the necessity of human inequality and thus has to be completely eliminated for a “world comradery” to be possible.

Integrating critiques of capitalism and class struggles, proletarian intellectuals tried to reconfigure Durkheimian ideas of solidarity so that it could converge a Marxist’s understanding of society and political economy. Sano Manabu (1892-1953), for example, accepted several characteristics of Durkheim’s organic solidarity, but rejected his notion of a “new morale” (shin dōtoku) that the latter believed would emerge in particular “professional groups” (shokugyōteki dantai) to bridge the distance and act as intermediates between individuals and a nation. Critiquing Durkheim’s assertion that class was a result of labor division, Sano argued that “plunder” (ryakudatsu) had created a “plundering class” and a “plundered class,” which was the cause for dividing professions. According to Sano, it was impossible for relations and feelings of solidarity (rentai kankei, rentai kanjō) to emerge between these two classes due to unequal power relationships. Instead, solidarity appeared within each class as a relationship of support and interdependency. Attacking Durkheim’s nation-state framework, Sano

105 Ibid., 31.

45 asserted that class solidarity would expand from a national level to an international level and replace

“national unity” (kokumin danketsu) with “class unity” (kaikyū danketsu), of which such events as international assemblies and strikes of the proletarian class were proof.106

Enhancing and reconfiguring notions of proletarian class solidarity, proletarian writers and artists joined these debates by questioning how ideas of solidarity could be weaved into literary and artistic narrative to unfold a proletarian praxis of international solidarity. Miyamato addressed this question directly, highlighting ways to write about solidarity. For Miyamoto, political struggles are not divided by identities such as race as there are “no blacks and whites” among proletarian classes, but only delineated by “one land border” between the world proletariat and the world bourgeoisie.107

Literature, then, must account for such borders and how they affect various proletarian communities.

Miyamoto expressed her worry that if proletarian writers fail to do so, popular narratives of bourgeois exotic taste celebrating ethno-nationalism will gain the upper hand, dividing peoples in national camps. She warned proletarian writers not to reproduce the imperial and nation-state logic of categorizing and hierarchizing peoples that could be detrimental to the assembling of solidarity among proletarians. Instead, to account for the “colonial exploitation as a necessity of the capitalist ideology,”108 she proposes a proletarian literature that describes the mutual possibilities, contradictions, difficulties, and advances of various proletarian collectives while also accounting its

106 Sano Manabu, Shakai seido no shokenkyū (Tokyo: Dōjinsha, 1922), 391-392. First published as an article in Kaihō 2, no. 6 (1920): 49-56. 107 Chūjō [Miyamoto] Yuriko, “Puroretaria bungaku ni okeru kokusaiteki shudai ni tsuite 1,” Yomiuri Shinbun, 16 September, 1931, 4, Morning Edition. 108 Chūjō [Miyamoto] Yuriko, “Puroretaria bungaku ni okeru kokusaiteki shudai ni tsuite 2,” Yomiuri Shinbun, 17 September, 1931, 4, Morning Edition.

46 relation to domestic and international events.109 Although Miyamoto’s requirements might seem ambitious and perhaps difficult to realize in a single work, she hoped that such a writing style would diversify proletarian literature. Nonetheless, the problem that lingered in Miyamoto’s theorization is how to reconfigure these very ethno-national modifiers essentialized in bourgeois literature.

One of the major problems for proletarian solidarity amidst a shift of disappearing and repurposing of feudal relations, was how to couple an enormous number of diverse constituents as to form an assemblage of multiple practices of resistance. This assemblage consisted of both proletarians preserving former social relations, and proletarians uprooted from former social relations while both were captured in new identitarian bodies of race, gender, nationality, and language by state apparatuses. Therefore, practicing solidarity was first and foremost an attempt to deterritorialize these hierarchies inherent to capitalism so that proletarians could connect with each other free from

(nation-)state presuppositions.

Reading through proletarian theoretical texts and as we shall also read in the literary works, we learn that to understand 連帯 as merely an equivalent of solidarity would limit our analysis and fail to grasp ideas and practices of solidarity in proletarian cultural movements. In order to grasp the praxis of proletarian solidarity, this study is informed by a range of related terms taken from East

Asian languages surrounding solidarity and human association, which are frequently used in proletarian theory, criticism, media, and literature. These compounds, in addition to 連帯, are: 団結

(unite), 連携(攜) (cooperate/link), 提携(攜) (join/affiliate), 連合 (combine/ally), 結合 (couple), 統一

109 Chūjō [Miyamoto] Yuriko, “Puroretaria bungaku ni okeru kokusaiteki shudai ni tsuite 3,” Yomiuri Shinbun, 20 September, 1931, 4, Morning Edition.

(consolidate), 組織 (organize/weave), 相互 (mutual/reciprocal), 集団 (group), and 連鎖 (chain/link). Used to various degrees in East Asian languages, some of these words are redefinitions of existing words, while others are neologism through translingual practices. Taken together, these terms reveal that the praxis of proletarian solidarity was never a presupposed given based on some natural order, but rather a continuous process of assembling (連, 結, 組, 合) of proletarian struggles into synthesized configurations of solidarity through practice in and experience of contingent events.

Theoretically, this dissertation examines processes of assembling proletarian international solidarity manifested in art and praxis informed by Deleuze and Guattari’s understanding of political solidarity as a nomadism, which they define as a “mode of distribution (…) without division.”110 Their theory of nomadism is twofold. First, they state that nomadism should be understood as distribution rather than parcelling and allocating of land. For them, the nomos “distributes people (or animals) in an open space, one that is indefinite and noncommunicating.”111 (italics original) Second, informed by philosopher Ibn Khaldun (1332-1406), they take his concept of badiya asabiyah (nomadic solidarity) that describes how Bedouins are assembled not by ethnic, geographical, state, or familial genealogy, but rather as contingent and mobile groups without hierarchies. Regarding nomadic solidarity in relation to their own notion of “war machine,” they write:

The war machine entertains a relation to families that is very different from its relation to the State. In the war machine, the family is a band vector instead of a fundamental cell; a genealogy is transferred from one family to another according to the aptitude of a given family at a given time to realize the maximum of “agnatic solidarity.” Here, it is not the public eminence of a family that determines its place in a State organism but the reverse; it is the secret power (puissance), or strength of solidarity, and the corresponding genealogical mobility that determine its eminence in a war body.112

110 Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 380. 111 Ibid. See also Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, 309n6. 112 Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 366. See also note 31.

It is with these two notions of nomadism that Deleuze and Guattari describe political and revolutionary formations that enable us to examine political formations not as static but as mobile aggregates alloplastic to political events and environments.113 This dissertation locates such a nomadism in the praxis of syntheses and assembling (連, 結, 組, 合) solidarity found in the proletarian cultural and artistic production.

Methodologically, this project aims to move away from a conventional understanding of proletarian politics and arts as an arborescent party organization led vertically from the Soviet Union to national and local organizations, as an allegiance to the (communist) Party; a problem that Deleuze describes as: “How can one uphold the rights of micro-analysis (diffusion, heterogeneity, fragmentary character) and still allow for some kind of principle of unifications that will not turn out to be like the

State or the Party, a totalization or a representation?”114 This project does not reject such an arborescent understanding entirely nor dismiss its role,115 as we know the history of Stalinism and

113 Especially, research on the political philosophy Zapatismo of the Zapatista movement has further theorized political formations, actions, and artistic production in relation to nomadic solidarity informed by Deleuze and Guattari. For example, see Alex Khasnabish, Zapatismo Beyond Borders: New Imaginations of Political Possibility (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2008); Thomas Olesen, International Zapatismo: The Construction of Solidarity in the Age of Globalization (New York: Zed Books, 2014); Thomas Nail, Returning to Revolution: Deleuze, Guattari and Zapatismo (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2015); Anthony Faramelli, Resistance, Revolution and Fascism: Zapatismo and Assemblage Politics (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2018). Thomas Nail, for example, explicates nomadic solidarity as “a matter of belonging and unity among heterogenous relays” interlaced through “immanent, point-by-point connection[s] between at least two heterogenous evental sequences” as opposed to solidarity as “charity,” “altruism,” “a universal principle of duty,” or “allies fighting towards the same teleological objective.” Nail, Returning to Revolution: Deleuze, Guattari and Zapatismo, 160. 114 Gilles Deleuze, “Desire and Pleasure,” Two Regimes of Madness: Texts and Interviews, 1975-1995, ed. David Lapoujade, trans. Ames Hodges and Mike Taormina (New York: Semiotext(e), 2007), 132. 115 In East Asia during the 1920s, Marxist intellectuals debated the role of the party found in two contrastive theoretical positions, Yamakawa-ism (after Yamakawa Hiroshi, 1880-1958) and Fukumoto-ism (after Fukumoto Kazuo, 1894-1983). Whereas the former stressed a broad social movement together with political action of the working class and called for the dissolution of the Communist Party in Japan, the latter focused on the purification of the Communist Party by breaking with sympathizing non-members (fellow-travellers) and social democrats to remain close to a theoretical orthodoxy of Marxism.

Maoism, but rather excavates and reconstructs alternative narratives of proletarian international solidarity of what was once believed to be possible by examining proletarian solidarity as a process of assembling disparate components.

In contrast to neoliberal and neo-cosmopolitan notions of solidarity,116 studies of revolutionary formations and cultural production worldwide present an international theoretico-praxis of solidarity that is critical of nation-state capitalist territorializations while also striving to constantly renew and rethink a politics of solidarity to the everchanging and multifaceted social and material realities.

David Featherstone, for example, emphasizes that solidarity of the political left is both

“transformative” and “inventive,” emerging out of “uneven power relations and geographies” and practiced at a grassroot level, which refuses its “political activity to stay neatly contained within the nation-state” and “forged through political struggle which seeks to challenge forms of oppression.”117

As such, for Featherstone, solidarity not merely binds “together (…) pre-existing communities,” but also politicizes social realities and in doing so opens up possibilities for hitherto non-existing political aggregates to form. Rejecting nation-centred accounts, Featherstone, spatializes solidarity by presenting a “spatial logics of internationalism” that “positions solidarity as formed through the ongoing negotiation of different relations (…) of uneven geographies of power [where] connections

116 Scholars have tried to delineate various types of solidarity as well as to theorize solidarity within the confines of neoliberal and neo-cosmopolitan understandings of universal democracy and human rights while denouncing solidarity theories of revolutionary movements from the nineteenth century onwards for being violent, unidirectional, and adversary. However, these studies fail to question the nation-state-capital codification of social relations between (in)animate and (in)organic entities and thus merely reproduce and perpetuate the status quo. In short, they operate within the epistemologies that mirror the capitalist logic itself. See for example, Sally J. Scholz, Political Solidarity (Pennsylvania: Penn State University Press, 2008); Lawrence Wilde, Global Solidarity (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2013). 117 David Featherstone, Solidarity: Hidden Histories and Geographies of Internationalism (London: Zed Books, 2012), 5-6.

50 and links [are] made between diverse trajectories.”118 Featherstone locates such possibilities in cultural production, which are not “frozen snapshots of solidarity [but] (…) part of active makings of internationalist political activity.”119 Following Featherstone, this dissertation strives to elucidate the multifarious relations at play in the uneven spacetimes across East Asia from where proletarian movements tried to stitch dispersed trajectories into a cohesive international network of proletarian solidarity.

Recalling the various terms of proletarian thinkers that reflect the process of proletarian solidarity as practices of assembling free from hierarchal identities assigned by nation-state capitalism, this dissertation examines the creative processes of nomadic solidarities in proletarian literature and art in East Asia presented in the following chapters. While this dissertation is cautious not to turn a blind eye to existing hierarchies and oppressive reterritorializations within proletarian politics, it is through the concept of nomadic solidarity it can unfold an alternative narrative of proletarian literature and its aspired international solidarity.

0.5 Chapter Overview

Centered around theoretical concepts from Deleuze and Guattari related to deterritorialization, in the four chapters that follow this dissertation traces the proletarian imagination under imperial capitalism in the works of writers, artists, theorists, and translators to examine how they construed relations of solidarity. This study is neither a complete and exhaustive

118 Ibid., 59, 61. 119 Ibid., 64

51 history of proletarian literature and culture nor a detailed biographical account of writers. Instead, it strives to recuperate lost possibilities of literary practices invested in portraying modes of human association beyond nation-state identities. Chapter 1 begins probing praxes of assembling solidarity found in the intermedial cultural and literary production surrounding May Day, the International

Workers’ Day. Celebrating the intimate relationships between political struggles through mass strikes and demonstrations against imperial capitalist oppression worldwide, proletarian writers and artists aimed to weave together innumerable spatial experiences into cohesive proletarian spacetimes.

Proletarian artists stitched spatial gaps between proletarian sites of resistance through photographic collages and filmic montages, while simultaneously historicizing and critiquing the production of unevenness among these sites. May Day photographs, films, plays, and songs created through juxtaposition and adjacency a pastiche of proletarian resistance and struggles, synthesizing parts of social and material realties aimed to exceed the realm of artistic production by exercising among participants a mental perception and constitution of an interconnected and multifaceted world. Such attempts also found voice in literary practices. Murayama Tomoyoshi’s Shōri no kiroku (Record of

Victory) and Hayashi Fusao’s “Gokuchū no Mēdē” (May Day in Prison) present narratives showing how proletarians in Shanghai and an American prison try to form alliances for the celebration of May

Day to overcome divisions in their resistance against imperial capitalism. May Day was an annual proletarian festival where processes of synthesizing were essential for assembling singular components into pluralistic configurations of solidary resistance, whose techniques shall reoccur in the subsequent chapters.

Chapter 2 examines the artificial language Esperanto utilized by proletarian writers to assemble a linguistic solidarity among “striking tongues,” as playwright Akita Ujaku described it, against imperial languages and lingual hierarchies. Envisioned to become the proletarian international lingua franca, proletarian Esperanto movements invested in educational programs, publishing learning materials and writing manuals, and exchange networks of letter correspondences to uplift and interconnect the largely illiterate and low-literate proletariat. Creating platforms and venues for proletarian voices to emanate both in speech and writing, they hoped to establish non- centrist groups of Esperantists, who could autonomously explore the intimacies of solidarity with distant and nearby comrades. Moreover, proletarian Esperantists exploited a variety of practices, such as translation and radiobroadcasting, to explore the possibilities and limits of Esperanto as a proletarian language. Years of Esperanto education also engendered the first generation of proletarian

Esperanto writers. The chapter concludes with texts of Hong Hyŏng-ui (1911-1968), Hasegawa Teru

(Verda Majo, 1912-1947), and Ye Junjian (Cicio Mar, 1914-1991) that explore possibilities of writing solidarity in Esperanto and shaping an international canon of proletarian Esperanto literature.

In the vicissitudes of social organization, nation-state and imperial capitalism assigned and identified bodies hierarchically by races, genders, ethno-nationalities, languages, among others, to coordinate populations for commodity production. These corporal inscriptions seriously challenged possibilities of proletarian solidarity instilling and inculcating various forms of discrimination populations internalized through educational, military, labor, and health institutions. Chapter 3 explores how proletarian writers grappled with the assembling of proletarian gendered solidarity.

Targeted by governments to serve social reproduction necessary to ensure the flow of labor power,

53 writers directed their attention to the widespread natalist and postpartum suffering and futility of procreation among the proletariat, while questioning male comrades’ negligence toward gender discrimination of female peers. Following rapid population growth, restrictions on abortion and birth control, and expensive and inaccessible health care, proletarian women experienced heavy burdens of pregnancies, child rearing, and sexual violence. In response, proletarian movements established birth control associations and research groups to provide reproductive knowledge and promote contraception while the writers central to this chapter, Feng Keng (1902-1931), Kang Kyŏng-ae (1906-

1944), Matsuda Tokiko (1905-2004), and Xiao Hong (1911-1942), invested in narratives that rendered visible (post)natalist hardships and anti-natalist characters. In their texts, they constituted mutual strategies of both seizing and ceasing progeniture and explored ways of assembling solidarity beyond the oppositional female/male dyad by questioning presupposed gender norms.

The last chapter focuses on the cooperation among soldiers, workers, farmers, POW’s, and activists agitating against war and militarism narrated in proletarian literature. In tandem with imperial encroachment throughout East Asia and the expansion of the Japanese empire, military violence and modern warfare uprooted millions of proletarians, subjecting their habitats to strict regimes of surveillance and discipline. Coinciding with the nascent antiwar resistance and activism worldwide following the Great War as well as warring military cliques in mainland China and

Japanese colonialism in East Asia, proletarian cultural movements across East Asia set up alliances mobilizing proletarians to refuse conscription and soldiers to sabotage the army and militias from within. In response to the Jinan Incident (1928), Manchuria Incident (1931), Wanbaoshan (Manpōsan)

Incident (1932) indicating the growing military violence under imperialism that eventually resulted in

54 the second Sino-Japanese War (1937-1945) and Pacific War (1941-1945), proletarian artists organized cultural antiwar activities and produced artifacts opposing the omnipresent militaristic narratives disseminated throughout the Japanese empire. This chapter focuses on novels, reportage accounts, and a play written during this period, examining works by Kuroshima Denji (1898-1943), Li Huiying

(1911-1990), Kaji Wataru (1903-1982), and Xia Yan (1900-1995). Each writer sought to reverse the enmity among proletarians by exploring alternatives in literature and cultural activities to assemble intra-

East Asian solidary fronts needed to resist imperialism and fascism. For Kuroshima and Li, this entailed retelling historical events into alternative narratives that envisioned nomadic alliances assembled coeval in encounters. Entering the second Sino-Japanese war, Kaji and Xia tried to find ways to overcome the prevalent patriotism and redirect the animosity into cooperative alliances fighting at frontlines and attacking in guerilla groups. These visions foreground that international solidarity resilient to ethno-national divisions was essential in extreme times where fascism encapsulated the world in destruction and death.

Taken together, the four chapters assemble an amalgam of actors, artifacts, and events to illuminate how proletarian cultural movements negotiated the complex transformations of life under imperial capitalism and tried to recast divisive and hierarchal mechanisms into dynamic alliances of opposition. The texts that follow bear witness of efforts to present alternatives to the ever-increasing onslaught by imperial-capitalism and (nation-)state authoritarianism, which still repeats in different guises. This study aims to carve out a space where different constellations of international solidarity in proletarian literature can be reanimated and rethought through new angles.

Chapter 1 Celebrating the Proletariat: May Day Strikes and Syntheses of Solidarity

…the Day of Proletarian Solidarity should be at the same time a day of visible unity, of theatre performances with multicolor carnivals and grotesque pictures of the most odious figures of the capitalist world, a day of poetry with displays of posters, documentary movies and fireworks combined with musical aspects of the workers’ festival [and] was convinced that the synthesis of all kinds of art fully corresponds to the general international spirit of May Day.1 Anatoly Lunacharsky

I was standing in Shiba’ura Park. I was not just standing. The hearts of others were beating throbbingly through both of my elbows. The force of others’ lungs when they said something echoed through my spine. It moved by the vibrating and vigorous force of flesh of innumerable workers. Right in the middle, I pushed and was pushed back, moving passively. Then, “I,” who had come from Yamanote, with the affected face wrapped in a self-consciousness like having some kind of a fixed opinion in my head, returned to a bubble-sized being.2 Maedakō Hiroichirō, “A Certain May Day”

The author as producer discovers – even as he discovers his solidarity with the proletariat – his solidarity with certain other producers who earlier seemed scarcely to concern him.3 Walter Benjamin, “The Author as Producer”

Real revolutions have the atmosphere of fêtes. Contradiction is not the weapon of the proletariat but, rather, the manner in which the bourgeoisie defends and preserves itself, the shadow behind which it maintains its claim to decide what the problems are.4 Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition

1.1 Introduction

On May 1, 1921, 30 young socialists and a few local workers gathered in Kanazawa city,

Ishikawa prefecture in response to the post World War I recession to celebrate May Day. Among them was socialist Katsume Teru (1894-1984) who had eloped from her parents’ house in Kagoshima to marry socialist Shimeno Yoshisaburō (dates unknown) and join a socialist group affiliated with the

1 Quoted in Timur Timofeev, “May Day Studies in Russia (before and after the October Revolution of 1917),” May Day Celebration, ed. Andrea Panaccione, (Venezia: Marsilio, 1988), 30. Italics mine. 2 Maedakō Hiroichirō, “Aru Mēdē,” in Akkan to Fūkei (Tokyo: Kaizōsha, 1929), 27. 3 Walter Benjamin, “The Author as Producer,” The Work of Art in the Age of its Technological Reproducibility and other Writings on Media, ed. Michael W. Jennings, Brigid Doherty, and Thomas Y. Levin, trans. Edmund Jephcott and Harry Zohn (Cambridge; Massachusetts: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2008), 87. 4 Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, trans. Paul Patton (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), 1.

56 journal Ihōjin (Stranger) in Kanazawa.5 Inspired by the first May Day celebrated in Tokyo in 1920,

Katsume had invited some socialist members to prepare the demonstration. She lodged them in her room of a boarding house in Kanazawa to elude police officers vigilant over unlawful activities, whom she refers to as “spies.” She also asked local workers, including a pressman and a telephone operator, to join but many of them feared being arrested or jailed for participating in demonstrations, which were heavily restricted or prohibited. On the day of the celebration, however, the police learned about

Katsume and her friends’ intentions. They decided to leave her room quickly before the police arrived and ran to the main streets singing revolutionary songs, shouting: “The young from Moroe [town] have come, and everybody, even the dogs, join us!”6 They started a demonstration from Rokutobayashi square, walking for about a kilometer to Nomachi station while attracting much attention from bystanders. Katsume wrote in her memoir that “[t]his was the first time for us to experience a demonstration. Tears of intense emotion were rolling over my hot cheeks. I was determined to become a revolutionary.”7 Soon after, men in uniform appeared and arrested several of the demonstrators.8 Albeit in recollection, affected by collective action and singing, Katsume highlights

5 Katsume Teru, Mirai ni kaketa hibi: Meiji, Taishō, Shōwa o ikite (Tokyo: Heiwa Fujin Shinbunsha, 1961), 78-92. 6 Quoted in Ishikawa-ken Shakai Undōshi Kankōkai, Ishikawa-ken ni okeru senzen no mēdē no rekishi (Kanazawa: Ishikawa- ken Shakai Undōshi Kankōkai 1971), 10. Katsume’s memoires are published in two volumes as Katsume Teru, Mirai ni kaketa hibi: Meiji, Taishō, Shōwa o ikite (Tokyo: Heiwa Fujin Shinbunsha, 1961), and Katsume Teru, Mirai ni kaketa hibi: Senjichū kara Shinfujin kessei made (Tokyo: Shin-Nihon fujin no kai, 1975). 7 Ibid., 9-11. Italics mine. 8 In the years following the first May Day demonstration in Kanazawa, which was in the second year May Day was celebrated in Japan, May First celebrations expanded in numbers and spread across the prefecture reaching a zenith in the late 1920s with 20,000 people gathering in city centers and several hundreds of people in the countryside. Besides the demonstration, proletarian cultural groups started to organize events such as theater shows to inform the proletariat about May Day and to nurture class consciousness. Not only in Ishikawa prefecture, but across East Asia and beyond we see proletarian (cultural) movements organizing similar May Day demonstrations and events throughout the 1920s and early 1930s. Ishikawa-ken Shakai Undōshi Kankōkai, Ishikawa-ken ni okeru senzen no mēdē no rekishi, 15-17.

57 the “experience” (keiken) of celebrating May Day as coeval in the production of a revolutionary consciousness. This consciousness was crucial for proletarian artists who aimed to utilize May Day as an event that transformed persons into the proletariat.

Several years later, on May 1, 1927, the Taedong Ship Labor Union (Taedongsŏn undong chohap) gathered its members to prepare the May Day celebration in Pyŏngyang. Proletarians experimented with new ways of celebrating May Day, often dispersing in small groups to execute surprise appearances and thereby confuse the police because the colonial authorities had prohibited demonstrations and processions in public spaces. Rather than the usual May Day gatherings in squares or parks, they planned days before May Day to board ten company ships on the Taedong

River in order to hold an on-board demonstration, followed by a commemorative photo-shoot. To promote and build the atmosphere of May Day, the union members hung up May Day leaflets on company office walls with the following text: “May Day manse! [celebratory cheer] May First is the day when we show the strength of our comrades. Let’s commemorate this day meaningfully!

Proletarians of the world unite!”9 Elsewhere in colonial Korea, in places such as Kimje, Chŏnju, and

Pusan, proletarians participated in similar surprise appearances, distributing leaflets (kyŏngmun) with slogans like “Expel our main enemy the Japanese empire for ethnic and class liberation” (minjok haebanggwa kyegŭp haebang ŭi chujŏgin ilche rŭl moranaeja) (Fig. 1.1).10 It is these practices of preparing and (attempts at) celebrating May Day at numerous locales annually that assembled

9 Yŏksahak Yŏnʼguso Chiŭm, Meidei 100-yŏn ŭi yŏksa: Uri nŭn kkŏjiji annŭn tŭlpul ro irŏsŏrira, (Sŏul-si: Sŏhae Munchip, 2004), 63. Translations are mine unless noted otherwise. The historical sources do not mention if the plans by the Taedong Ship Labor Union were executed or not. Also, company names are not specified. 10 Ibid., 64.

58 proletarians in East Asia and elsewhere in shared moments of resistance against imperial capitalist oppression.

The anecdotes above are just two examples recorded of May Day in East Asia that demonstrate spatially disparate yet interconnected events part of a shared proletarian history and cultural production worldwide. In order to understand these anecdotes as part of a shared proletarian history and cultural production, the following question must be answered: How did proletarian cultural movements in East Asia use May Day art and artifacts to assemble numerous heterogenous groups and struggles into a coherent proletariat envisioned to forge international solidarity?11 In order to answer the primary question, an investigation of several sub-questions follows. What were the spatial-temporal implications of a worldwide proletarian festival such as May Day? How did proletarian movements organize May Day and circumvent government restrictions? How did cultural workers mobilize (industrial) workers, peasants, and the unemployed, to participate and transform proletarians into active producers, rather than passive attendees, of May Day celebrations? And most importantly, what role did various formats of media (film, music, theater, and literature) play in celebrating May Day and how were these utilized by proletarian artists?

To unpack these questions, the chapter starts with a brief historical overview of May Day in

East Asia. Rather than a complete history of May Day in East Asia, the overview will provide context for the literary and artistic works examined below. 12 The broader theoretical objectives of this chapter

11 May Day was translated into East Asian languages as follows: C. wuyuejie, (wuyi)laodongjie, wuyijie, J. gogatasusai, rōdōsai, mēdē, K. owŏlje, nodongje, meidei. 12 For general (inter)national histories of May Day see for example, Kuro Yŏksa Yŏn'guso, Uri nara meidei ŭi yŏksa (Sŏul: Kŏrŭm, 1990); Yŏksahak Yŏnʼguso Chiŭm, Meidei 100-yŏn ŭi yŏksa: Uri nŭn kkŏjiji annŭn tŭlpul ro irŏsŏrira, (Sŏul-si: Sŏhae Munchip, 2004); Itoya Toshio, Mēdē no hanashi (Tokyo: Rōdō Junopōsha, 1969); Sugiura Masao and Nishimura Naoki, Mēdē no rekishi: rōdōsha no tatakai no sokuseki (Tokyo: Gakushūnotomosha, 2010); Shi Ming, “Wuyi” guoji laodongjie

59 informed by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s concepts of territory and ritornello will conclude the first section. The next section will examine how proletarian cultural movements used a wide variety of media and methods to promote May Day. This variety allowed the congregation of thousands of cultural producers, and provided a touch point for alliances as a mode of proletarian solidarity. More specifically, it will examine how cultural production aimed to create artistic diagrams of international solidarity through notions of synthesis found in artistic and mechanical techniques of montage and linkage that its (proletarian) audience could help actualize, practice, and experiment with. A discussion of several literary works dealing with May Day will then be examined, showing how proletarian writers used May Day as trope in their stories. Central to this discussion are two works,

Shōri no kiroku (Record of Victory, 1931) by Muroyama Tomoyoshi (1901-1977) and “Rōgoku no gogatsusai” (May Day in Prison, 1927) by Hayashi Fusao (1903-1975). These two works epitomize the cultural production surrounding May Day. They attempt to foster an annual ritual in which proletarians display their commitment to the proletarian cause, deterritorialize identities, and synthesize struggles compartmentalized by capitalist production. Murayama and Hayashi wrote their stories about proletarians forging alliances and unifying heterogenous proletarian struggles during the organization and celebration of May Day in two different spaces, the city and the prison. All together, this chapter aims to show how proletarian artists created assemblages of solidarity in their May Day

(Beijing: Gongren Chubanshe, 1954); Anonymous, May Day: A Hundred-year History, (Moscow: Novosti Agency Pub. House, 1990); Philips S. Foner, May day: a short history of the international workers' holiday, 1886-1986 (New York: International Publishers, 1986); Abby Peterson and Herbert Reiter (eds.), The ritual of May Day in Western Europe: past, present and future (New York: Routledge, 2016); Donna T. Haverty-Stacke, America's forgotten holiday: May Day and nationalism, 1867-1960 (New York: New York University Press, 2009).

60 cultural production as attempts to concatenate proletarians spatially, whether in mediated publics or in localized crowds and small groups; practices that will be explored in subsequent chapters.13

1.2 Platforms of Solidarity: May Day and the Rise of Proletarian Activism in East Asia

Among the first texts that introduced May Day to a Chinese language audience are those by Li

Dazhao (1889-1927), co-founder of the Chinese Communist Party. They dealt with May Day, labor issues, and imperial oppression in 1920.14 A day before the first (official) May Day in East Asia, which was celebrated in the urban areas of Japan and coastal China, the industrial heartland, Li wrote a piece titled “Yaxiya qingnian de guangming yundong” (The Light Movement of Asian Youth). In it, he notes that Asian youth should not be misled by imposed and fabricated differences which nurture antagonistic feelings against one another, but should instead focus on what interests could bring them together.15 More concretely, he writes:

The Asian youth reform movement has a shared origin and moves [forward] in the same direction. The Asian youth must smash the boundaries of race and nation-state, and to abandon and clash with the hatred and barriers that the strong class produced among us, will display together the light. This allows our beloved comrades, under a bright light of truth, to show sincerity, spread justice, and to discuss a shared plan of reconstruction. A shared movement of reconstruction will rise. We can no longer be fooled, smashed, separated, and obstructed by the privileged classes. The youth of China needs to form a huge alliance together with the other youth of Asia and launch a united Asian movement in line with the entire Asian reconstruction policies.

13 For a detailed study on the emergence of crowds in modern Chinese literature see, Tie Xiao, Revolutionary waves: the crowd in modern China (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Asia Center, 2017). 14 In 1919, just three days before the anti-imperial May Fourth protests, Li already published a short article in the Beijing newspaper Chenbao. In this article, Li explained very briefly what May Day stands for and what its significance is. He stressed that May Day is the first celebration and the only weapon of the world proletariat, explaining weapon in the form of “direct action” (zhijie xingdong) through strikes disrupting capitalist production. See Shu Chang [Li Dazhao], “’Wuyijie’ zagan”, Chenbao May 1, (1919). Reprinted in Zhongguo gongyun shiliao 9, no.1 (1979), 27-28. 15 Some sources state that May Day was celebrated already in 1918 in Guangzhou. According to Aidi a small-scale “labor holy memorial” (laodong shengjie jinian) was held to commemorate May Day. See Aidi, “Zhongguo gongren diyici jinian “wuyi” laodongjie,” Gongui Bolan 9, (2004): 38. Arif Dirlik also mentions that anarchists celebrated May Day in Guangzhou in 1918. Arif Dirlik, Anarchism in the Chinese revolution, (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991), 15, 128, and 170.

亞細亞青年的改造運動，既有相同的淵源，又在同一的方向進行。亞細亞的青年，就該打破種族和國家的界限，把那強者階級給我們造下的嫌怨，隔閡，一概拋去，一概沖開，打出一道光明，使我們親愛的兄弟們，在真實的光輝之下，開誠心，佈公道，商量一個共同改造的方略，起一個共同改造的運動，斷不可再受那些特權階級的愚弄，挑破，隔閡，遮蔽。中華的青年應該和全亞細亞的青年聯成一大同盟，本著全亞細亞改造的方針，發起一聯合大運動. 16

Li urged the youth in Asia to cooperate and form a resistance against “privileged classes,” referring to, in what follows the quoted passage above, “Japanese militarism” (Riben de junguozhuyi) and “capitalist encroachment” (zhiben de qinlüezhuyi).17 He warns against the racial and ethnic division produced by

(capitalist) nation-states. If intellectuals and proletarians fail to nurture an awareness of these divisions, they will end up believing the propaganda of nation-states and nationalists thus producing a strong jingoism, which can only lead to hatred among peoples in Asia. Rather, according to Li, the youth in Asia must understand that the only observable real division produced by capitalism is class division.

Against this class division, Li proclaims that youth movements in Asia should be capable of finding common ground and establishing a “world mentality” (shijiezhuyi de qingshen) and initiating resistance against capitalism and imperialism as well as improving labor and human rights.18 Li’s

16 Li Dazhou, “Yaxiya qingnian de guangming yundong,” Xiaonian Zhongguo 2, no. 2 (1920): 1. The prominent journal Xinqingnian (New Youth) published Li’s essay as part of a special issue on May Day (Laodongjie jinianhao) on May, 1920. This special issue was one of the first serious attempts to examine the current labor situation in cities located in China proper such as Shanghai, Beijing, Tangshan, and Changsha, as well as articles dealing with labor unions and movements abroad such as Li Zezhang’s translation of the labor legal codes in the Soviet Union. The issue has calligraphy by Cai Yuanpei (1868-1940) and Sun Yat-sen (1866-1925), and opening remarks by Wu Zhihui (1865-1953). Besides New Youth, various media covered the first May Day or published a special volume dealing with labor issues during that period, such as Xingqi pinglun (Weekly Commentary), Xinshehui (New Society), Juewu (Awareness), and newspapers such as Chenbao in Beijing, Dagongbao in Tianjian and Shenbao and Mingguo Shibao in Shanghai. For a discussion of these May Day specials see Dong Chang, “1920 nian wuyi laodongjie de jinian huodong,” Wenshi Zazhi 3, (1996): 56-57, and Aidi, “Zhongguo gongren diyici jinian “wuyi” laodongjie, Gongui Bolan 9, (2004): 38-40. Also, Li Dazhao’s May Day history was published in several journals besides New Youth among them Dongfang zazhi (Eastern Journal) and Xingqi pinglun. For a collection of May Day texts from the Republican Era see the special issue of Zhongguo gongyun shiliao, no. 1 (1979). 17 Li Dazhou, “Yaxiya qingnian de guangming yundong,” 1. 18 Ibid., 1-2.

62 notably international view was imperative for proletarian movements emerging throughout the 1920s in general and for May Day celebrations in particular. He had already articulated a crucial challenge for proletarian solidarity, namely that fascistic manifestations of Japanese imperialism through the dispersal of national and racial identities could drive wedges among proletarians.

After the first May Day in Tokyo in 1920,19 articles similar to Li Dazhao’s appeared in Japanese as well. Among the first of such articles was Yamakawa Kikue’s “Mēdē no igi to rekishi” (The

Significance and History of May Day), written for the third celebration of May Day in Japan in 1922 and published in the communist journal Zen’ei (Vanguard).20 In her five-page (partially redacted) article, Yamakawa described May Day as a day all workers had celebrated worldwide since 1890. For her May Day was a day for, “the international union (kokusaiteki danketsu),” and “it is a day that we especially manifest that our class consciousness stands on top of internationalism.”21 She continues that:

19 The first May Day in Tokyo was actually celebrated on Sunday, May second, making it easier for proletarians to attend as workers were not able to take a day off. 20 Yamakawa had gained a leading position as supporting intellectual of the proletariat and she was a frontrunner in supporting proletarian women rights. Before the rise of proletarian movements in the 1920s, she already engaged with members of Seitō (Bluestockings) contributing to the debates with her sharp Marxist critique. From 1921 onwards, she acted as an adviser (komonkaku) of the newly established Sekirankai (Red Wave Society) by Kutsumi Fusako and Kondō (Sakai) Magara, among others. Sekirankai made fame by participating in the second May Day in 1921 as the first female participators among the demonstration in Japan. The police arrested most of the participating members. When preparing their participating, Yamakawa wrote the May Day leaflet for Sekirankai titled “Futatabi fujin ni gekisu” (To encourage women again). She summons (proletarian) women to join May Day and join the fight against capitalist. In this way together with the other members of Sekirankai, she managed to put women struggles on the May Day agenda. The journal Kaizō published a special on Sekirankai in June 1921 titled “Sekirankai no shinsō” (The Truth about the Red Wave Society) containing two heavily censored articles; Yamakawa Kikue “Shakaishugi fujin undō to Sekirankai,” 201-207, and Itō Noe, “Sekirankai ni tsuite,” 207-210. For more on Sekirankai and May Day see, Kondo Magara and Suzuki Yūko, “Senzen no rōdō sōgi 14: Kondo Magara-san ni kiku, josei to shite hajimete mēdē ni sanka shita Sekirankai no hitobito,” Gekkan sōhyō, no. 5 (1979): 49-59, and Esashi Akiko, Sameyo onnatachi: Sekirankai no hitobito (Tokyo: Ōtsuki Shoten, 1980), 8-28. 21 Yamakawa Kikue, "Mēdē no igi to rekishi." Zen'ei: Musansha kaikyū geijutsu zasshi, no. 5 (1922): 234. A short excerpt from Yamakawa’s pamphlet Mēdē (May Day, 1923), resembling the content of her article, was advertised in Korean in the journal Chosŏn chi Kwang, no. 6 (1927).

The fact that the Japanese proletariat recently commemorated a worldwide class festival is because among the Japanese workers an international spirit has arisen, and therefore the Japanese workers’ movement clearly and seriously shows in front of the world proletariat the fact that they are comrades divided by blood. And to participate in May Day is more than anything else proof of the fact that Japanese workers are instrumental to conventional policies of ruling classes and not contaminated by the evil vampire-like aggressors, and truly are warm-blooded colleagues, who share the same joy and sadness with the world proletariat.

日本の労働階級が最近に至つて此の世界的な階級的祝祭日を記念するようになったことは、とりも直さず、日本の労働者の間に国際的精神が目醒めて来たことを語るもので、此一事によつて、日本の労働運動は万国無産者の前に、その血を分けた兄弟である事実を、最も明白に、最も深刻に表示したのである。日本の労働者はその支配階級の伝統的政策の道具でもなく、血に渇した侵略主義の悪魔でもなく実に全世界の労働者と同じ悲しみ、同じ喜びを頒つ、温かい血の通ってゐる同僚であることを、何よりもよく證據立てる事実の一つは、このメーデーの運動に参加する一事である。22

Not unlike Li, Yamakawa stresses the fact that the interests of Japanese proletarians are different from

Japanese imperialists as she already anticipated that division based on identities produced by capitalism could hinder proletarian solidarity. Yamakawa’s article shows her intent to present May

Day as a proletarian festival that displays and reassures unity among proletarian constituents beyond capitalist functionalities.

It is not just the class awareness that sets the Japanese workers in motion. In her work,

Yamakawa perceives that the Japanese proletariat are part of a larger organic body, regardless of whether the worldwide proletariat differs in race, language, or country, “they are equal in class and therefore comrades around the world all shout the May Day banzai [celebratory cheer] with the same heart (kokoro).”23 Thus, while at first Yamakawa seemingly reproduces static identities as difference by using national denominators, risking similar modes of division in nation-states, she neutralizes those risks immediately by recognizing evolving class relations rather than static identities as the

22 Ibid. 23 Ibid.

64 connective force linking differences. Further, echoing concurrent understandings of the organic nature in social formations mentioned in the Introduction, Yamakawa conjoins spaces, in which the organic body of the proletariat acts in “a massive demonstration of worldwide alliance” (sekaiteki na rengō no daishii undō).24 In doing so, she presents May Day as the ultimate platform of synthesis between various proletarian struggles.

May Day celebrations in coastal China and urban Japan immediately resonated throughout the Japanese empire. Colonial proletarians joined May Day processions and strikes in industrial centers in Japan proper, and tried to celebrate May Day in the colonies Korea and Taiwan.25

Proletarian artists from Korea residing in Japan, such as Pulgŭn chumŏk (Red Fist), actively produced

Korean language materials which introduced May Day to proletarians who had migrated from the

Korean peninsula (Fig. 1.2). While proletarians were able to celebrate May Day in Japan and China proper to some extent, those living in Japanese colonies faced fierce restrictions and oppression by

24 Ibid. Other notably texts in Japanese introducing May Day are “Mēdē to musan kaikyū” (“May Day and the proletarian class”) published in the one of the first proletarian journals Tane maku hito (The Sower) in May 1921, and Mēdē no igi to rekishi (The Meaning and History of May Day) published by the National Labor Union Alliance in 1927. 25 Korean workers in Japan also actively participated in May Day. For an overview of articles dealing with Korean workers and May Day in Japan see the Senzen Nihon zaijū Chōsenjin kankei shinbun kiji kensaku 1868-1945 database at http://www.zinbun.kyoto-u.ac.jp/~mizna/. May Day celebrations in Japan were actively introduced to Korean-language audiences to promote May Day, including slogans and songs. See for example, Wŏn Hŏnmu, “Nodongje ŭi chapkam (Ilbon Tok’yo)” (Views on May Day [Japan, Tokyo]) Daejung sibo, no. 9 (1921): 40-45. The proletarian networks in East Asia also reached to those from East Asia residing in North America. For example, Chinese workers part of Pingshe (The Equality Society) in San Francisco published a Wuyi tekan (May Day Special) connecting their struggles as foreign immigrants to local and global struggles through the trope of May Day. In this publication, members of Pingshe clearly state their allegiance to anarchism and therefore feel a strong bond with the American anarchists who died during the Chicago Haymarket affair in 1886 what became the starting point for May Day. Further, the May Day Special contains articles on the history of May Day, anarchism, Pingshe and May Day, workers conditions in China proper, and a worker’s songs written by Albert Richard Parson, one of the anarchists who were hanged after the Haymarket affair. The bibliography of anarchist publications in Japanese, Chinese, and English (including America and Canada) shows the transnational networks that existed among proletarian groups around the world. Shu Yao et. al., Wuyi tekan: May Day 1927 (San Francisco: Meizhou Pingshe, 1927).

65 authorities. This did not mean, however, that colonial proletarians could not engage in May Day. For example, among the first articles dealing with May Day in Korean is Sŏ Pyŏngmu’s “Owŏlje (Meidei) wa yŏdŏlb sigan nodong ŭi yurae” (May Festival [May Day] and the origins of 8-hour work) published in Taejung sibo (The Masses Times) in May 1921, several weeks after the second May Day in East Asia.

After having discussed May Day’s origins in America and Europe, Sŏ states that his article will be useful as an “incentive reference” (chamgo-jŏg chagŭk chaeryo) for the working class in the peninsula

(Korea).26 Like Li and Yamakawa, Sŏ warns readers of the evils of patriotism and urges them to learn from the internationalism displayed by a small group of comrades.27

In colonial Taiwan, proletarians also attempted to celebrate May Day. In one of the few remaining sources on May Day, the 1931 June issue of Xin Taiwan dazhong shibao (New Taiwan Mass

Newspaper), half of the pages were dedicated to May Day.28 Similar to Korea, contributors argued that striking was of one few weapons the proletarians had in Taiwan. This issue gives a unique insight into the workers’ organizations and their activities across the island as well as a brief history of May Day in

Taiwan. In an article called “Taiwan laodongjie de qingshi” (Situation of Labor Day in Taiwan) the author, who is not mentioned by name, gives an overview of May Day in the various regions of

26 Sŏ Pyŏngmu, “Owolje (Meidei) wa yŏdŏlb sigan nodong-ŭi yurae,” Taejung sibo, no.5 (1921): 20-26. The pronunciation May Day is written next to the hanja meaning May festival. 27 The first attempt to celebrate May Day in colonial Korea was in 1923, when the Seoul Worker’s Federation together with several other worker groups planned a huge strike on May First, gathering more than two thousand workers at Changch'ungdan Park. However, the imperial authorities sent a large number of policemen to the park and arrested numerous participants blocking the May Day celebration. The organization responded quickly changing location to the Christion Youth Hall providing the participants speeches on May Day and labor conditions in colonial Korea. On the same day, proletarians in other cities and towns such as Masan, Chinju, and Daegu, gathered to commemorate and to celebrate May Day demanding eight-hour workdays and showing their sympathy with the world proletariat. Yŏksahak Yŏnʼguso Chiŭm, Meidei 100-yŏn ŭi yŏksa: Uri nŭn kkŏjiji annŭn tŭlpul ro irŏsŏrira (Sŏul: Sŏhae Munjip, 2004), 55. 28 Anonymous, “Taiwan laodongjie de qingshi,” Xin Taiwan dazhong shibao, no. 6 (1931): 44. Due to repressive measures by the colonial authorities, workers and intellectuals in Taiwan mostly celebrated May Day underground.

Taiwan. Among the slogans of May Day in each region, there are those speaking out for support of

China, calling for a retreat of foreign soldiers from China, support for the Soviet Union and the international proletariat, and gender labor equality among proletarians.29 Together, these slogans show that proletarian groups in Taiwan envisioned a multi-layered organization from the grassroot level to the regional and worldwide levels, debunking the idea that these groups were mere minor players in a larger national (Japanese) proletarian movement. A clear and well-articulated program of slogans and strikes by workers, peasants, and sympathizers assembled Taiwanese proletarians with overseas Chinese (huaqiao) and Japanese workers in Taiwan, stressing regional alliances among workers and reconfiguring imperial borders.30 May Day celebrations like these reveal that proletarian organizations in Taiwan were active participants in the international proletariat community.31

Taken together, these texts reveal that May Day in East Asia was not merely about reforming the capitalist working day (the initial May Day demand was the eight-hour working day). From its inception, proletarian intellectuals in East Asia rebaptized the festival into an annual commemoration against Japanese imperialism.32 Following cues from these texts, this chapter examines acts of deterritorialization – the reconfiguration of established systems of power and codified norms of control – presented in proletarian internationalism that will resonate throughout subsequent chapters. As mentioned in the Introduction, this study draws from the concept of

29 Ibid., 45-48. 30 Han Erde, “Riben “wuyi” laodongjie de lishi,” Xin Taiwan dazhong shibao, no. 6 (1931): 62-65. 31 “Taiwan laodongjie de qingshi,” 46. 32 During May Day celebrations in Europe, proletarian activists also made anti-imperialism and antiwar statements. See for example, Karl Liebknecht’s May Day manifesto presented at the 1916 Berlin May Day for which he was sentenced to jail. Karl Liebknecht, “Liebknecht's May Day Manifesto,” in The Future Belongs to the People: Speeches made since the Beginning of the War (New York: Macmillan, 1919), 126-127.

67 deterritorialization as described by Deleuze and Guattari. First, a discussion is needed of the fundamental problem precipitating the rise of proletarian movements and the invention of a people as the proletariat, namely the problem of territory.33 Through primitive accumulation, capitalism dispossessed and deterritorialized numerous people from their habitats, and reterritorialized them into new social relations through monetarization, (re)grouping and (re)organizing functions and forces of different milieus.34 Sympathizing with these impoverished and disenfranchised people, intellectuals strived to transform heterogenous components into a coagulated patchwork called the proletariat necessary for the proletariat’s fights against territorial intrusions. Before turning to the discussion of May Day’s cultural production, the concepts of territoriality will be examined. This will give clarity when trying to understand proletarian social formation and relations of solidarity in interwar East Asia as presented in May Day art.

In “1837: Of the Ritornello,”35 Deleuze and Guattari explain the creation of territories by

(in)organic and (in)animate beings through a range of interconnected concepts. This creation commences the organization of “forces of chaos,” a messy reality lacking any natural order, in which beings gather bits and pieces to consolidate space into a “milieu” and time into “rhythms.”36 Milieus

33 Gilles Deleuze and Claire Parnet, “G comme Gauche,” in Gilles Deleuze From A to Z, dir. Pierre-André Boutang and Michel Pamart, trans. Charles J. Stivale (Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2012), DVD. 34 Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), 320-321. 35 Recently, scholars of Deleuze and Guattari have switched to translate “ritournelle” as “ritornello” rather than “refrain.” Arjen Kleinherenbrink argues that “[a] refrain is a return of the same (a, R, b, R, c, R), but a ritornello is defined by variation.” Arjen Kleinherenbrink, “Territory and Ritornello: Deleuze and Guattari on Thinking Living Beings,” Deleuze Studies 9, no. 2 (2015): 225n1. See also Gilles Deleuze, “We Invented the Ritornello,” in Two Regimes of Madness: Texts and Interviews 1975-1995, ed. David Lapoujade, trans. Ames Hodges and Mike Taormina, (New York: Semiotext(e), 2007), 381- 385. 36 Brian Massumi suggests that “milieu” is a technical term. It combines all three of the regular meanings in French; “surroundings,” “medium” (as in chemistry), and “middle.” Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, xvii.

68 are never final and remain open to change either through internal reconfigurations or external threats. Turning chaos into semi-stability centers around a “synthesis of unification,”37 and milieus are constructed through “qualities, substances, powers and events.”38 Thus, a milieu is only possible when equilibrium is created among disparate and heterogenous components. Assembling such components, beings construct milieus which demarcate an interior, exterior, and “associated” milieu, the latter of which provides passages, interactions, and exits between the first two.39 In order for milieus to take up meaning, a rhythm emerges “whenever there is a transcoded passage from one milieu to another, a communication of milieus, coordination between heterogeneous space-time,” tying “together critical moments, or ties itself together in passing from milieu to another.”40 Rhythms, then, refer to the infinite differences produced by “periodic repetitions” between passages of milieus.

This allows beings a variation of movements within a milieu; a variation that beings try to control as best as they can. In short, “[r]hythm is the milieus’ answer to chaos.”41

Milieus and rhythms are not yet a territory, Deleuze and Guattari explain, but “[t]he territory is the product of a territorialization of milieus and rhythms.”42 In order for beings to mark and thus territorialize spatio-temporal flows, creating a distance between beings, they resort to “matters of

37 Gilles Deleuze, Logic of Sense, trans. Constantin V. Boundas, Mark Lester, and Charles J. Stivale, (London: Bloomsbury Academic, [1990] 2015), 105. 38 Gilles Deleuze, Essays Critical and Clinical, trans. Daniel W. Smith and Michael A. Greco (Minneapolis University of Minnesota Press,) 1997, 61. Deleuze provides an example of a street, “with its materials (paving stones), its noises (the cries of merchants), its animals (harnessed horses) or its dramas (a horse slips, a horse falls down, a horse is beaten). 39 Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 51. 40 Ibid., 313. 41 Ibid. 42 Ibid., 314.

69 expression” what Deleuze and Guattari call the “ritornello.”43 Ritornellos can be “optical, gestural, motor, [and marked by] materials, colors, odors, sounds, postures, etc. (…),”44 rendering visible, sonorous, tactile, and textual vibrations within chaos. Such renditions delineate borders of and between territories and determine codes within and among territories. Through signs,

“[t]erritorialization (…) lodges on the margins of the code of a single species and gives the separate representatives of that species the possibility of differentiating.”45 As an example, Deleuze and

Guattari consider the birdsong to be a ritornello which marks the bird’s territory, and, as we shall see, resonates with proletarians singing May Day songs to deterritorialize capitalist codes.

Art plays a crucial role as ritornellos express milieus and rhythms. Deleuze and Guattari describe this role as: “This is, precisely, the task of all art and, from colors and sounds, both music and painting similarly extract new harmonies, new plastic or melodic landscapes, and new rhythmic characters that raise them to the height of the earth's sound and the cry of humanity: that which constitutes tone, health, becoming, a visual and sonorous bloc.”46 Art bears the creative power to construct territories through a “becoming-expressive.” Deleuze and Guattari consider the artist as “the first person to set out a boundary stone, or to make a mark.”47 The expressive aspect of art territorializes a territory, “[n]ot in the sense that these qualities belong to a subject, but in the sense

43 Ibid., 323. 44 Ibid. 45 Ibid., 322. 46 Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, What is Philosophy?, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Graham Burchell (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), 176. 47 Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus., 316.

70 that they delineate a territory that will belong to the subject that carries or produces them.48 Within the context of May Day art, this chapter shall examine how proletarian artists invested in creating, consolidating, imbricating, and enfolding milieus of proletarian solidarity. They did this while synthesizing multiple spacetimes of proletarian struggles both in East Asia and worldwide, for which rhythms of May Day strikes, demonstrations, and processions were the ultimate clinamen.

1.3 Consolidating Proletarian Territories: Intermedial Syntheses of Solidarity and May Day

The 1920s witnessed an array of technological innovations in mass media that coincided with proletarian debates on the popularization (大衆化) of arts and politics among the masses. These innovations, especially the mechanical reproduction of art, fuelled proletarian artists to experiment with new media in response to the call of the popularization debates for new artistic forms that could reach the low-literate audience of proletarians. The preparation and celebration of May Day proved to be the ultimate platform for these forms of media. It tested how art could create and shape new perceptions of the world, synthesizing various milieus of class struggle into the international assemblage of a world proletariat.

Proletarian cultural movements in East Asia were divided in organizations along genres, such as film, photography, literature, music, and theater. Although separated in various subgroups, these disciplines often created art together, combining and mixing art forms and their media. This resulted in a “negotiation of the verbal-visual relation,” as Theodore Hughes argues, discussing proletarian arts

48 Ibid.

71 of KAPF, “[which] played a central role in producing ways of seeing, reading, and thinking (…).”49 In the case of May Day art, such negotiations ensured that through singing, viewing, listening, dancing, reading, and drawing penetrated all the senses of the audience. Organizing cinematic and theatrical shows as well as reading and singing groups for proletarians to prepare and celebrate May Day, these cultural producers amplified the corporeal and sensorial experience of participants as was seen in the case of Katsume. By affecting multiple senses, proletarian artists rendered expressive formerly invisible, inaudible, and intangible realities to mark proletarian territories during May Day strikes and demonstrations. In this way art was not so much representational as affective and sensational and instead invoked a synthesized longing among proletarians worldwide for a different society.

Moreover, proletarian artists strived to have proletarians actively engage in producing May Day art, transforming them into artists. This not only included the production of different art, but was also seen in the repurposing of everyday objects such as cloth or paper into flags, banners, badges, posters, or leaflets; these functioned expressively as ritornellos.50 In doing so, proletarian artists attempted to

49 Theodore Hughes, Literature and Film in Cold War South Korea: Freedom’s Frontier (New York: Columbia University Press, 2012), 24. 50 The attempt to include proletarians in the artistic production was part of the ongoing debates on massifying art across East Asia and elsewhere. Proletarian cultural movements valued more than anything direct experiences of proletarians. Proletarian journals often solicited proletarians to share their experience of their workplace, daily life and participation in (May Day) strikes and demonstrations. A new genre within proletarian literature, reportage was an accessible form of writing not requiring high levels of literacy and suited best to record these experiences. Professional proletarian writers had already explored and polished this genre for several years often in the form of depictions of foreign and local proletarian life. Among the articles explaining how to write (May Day) reportage, see for example Yamada Seizaburō, “Our Own Literature Course (1): A Guide to Writing Literary Reportage,” in For Dignity, Justice, and Revolution: An Anthology of Japanese Proletarian Literature, ed. Bowen-Struyk, Heather, and Norma Field (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016), 250. Originally published as Yamada Seizaburō, “Wareware no bungaku kōza (1): Hōkoku bungaku no kakikata,” Bungaku Shinbun, April 25, 1932, 5. According to Yamada, everyone can write reportage and writing a work of reportage on one’s own experience of May Day was the perfect form to have proletarians engaged in celebrating May Day and provided them the opportunity to convey their own thoughts as well as to record their own memories instead of those in power.

72 undo hierarchies in the production of art and equip proletarians with expressive strategies and territorial markers to bolster support for resistance available whenever and wherever.51

Crucial to the cultural production of May Day was the artistic and machinic syntheses of multiple spaces in May Day celebrations in relation to the human perception of space and time. In other words, it is the mental exercise to synthesize singular spatio-temporal events into coherent multiplicities. In the case of May Day, these were, for example, the Haymarket Riot in 1886, the first

May Day in Paris in 1890, a May Day Tea Party in Tokyo (Mēdē no sawakai) by Heiminsha in 1905, and the first May Day in the Soviet Union in 1918. These events created a coherent unity of heterogenous elements that would become an annual proletarian festival celebrated worldwide. While celebrating

May Day on the same day worldwide created a sense of simultaneity and unison among various proletarian milieus, it was art, technology, and machinery that helped interlock the spatial gaps between the direct experience of local events and events elsewhere. National festivals were informed by the linearity of capitalist clock-time and a chronological sequence of past, present, and future. 52 In contrast, May Day countered such understandings of spacetime with a patchwork of disparate events

51 The Japanese imperial government made it virtually impossible for colonial subjects to celebrate May Day outside Japan proper. After several mass arrests of proletarian members in the late 1920s and early 1930s, for proletarian groups in Japan proper too it became harder to celebrate May Day. In similar vein, the Guomindang and warlords were eager to suppress May Day celebrations in China proper. While small May Day celebrations were still possible in free parts of China, right- wing groups in the Japanese empire transformed May Day from a proletarian festival into a fascist festival. As former prominent member of the communist party, Yamakawa Hitoshi recalls that from 1933 onwards right-wing labor unions decided to celebrate their own May Day opposing the May Day celebrated by the communists and anarchists. Yamakawa Hitoshi, "Omoide No Mēdē." Shakai Shugi 35 (1954): 72. The right-wing labor festival Aikoku Kinrōsai (Patriotic Labor Festival) called for destroying Bōkoku mēdē (Ruined Country May Day, referring to the proletarian May Day) and breaking ties with the international proletarian community. Instead the image attempts to connect with a national community with patriotic statements and by referring to Tenchōsetsu, the celebration of the Emperor as national holiday, coinciding with Japan’s withdrawal from the League of Nations. 52 For a discussion of how ceremonies and festivals served the production of nationalism in Japan see Takashi Fujitani, Splendid Monarchy: Power and Pageantry in Modern Japan (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998).

73 made possible by various technological innovations, such as montage. Proletarian movements created memories of proletarian struggles worldwide, where spacetimes are a contingent overlapping of pasts, presents, and futures happening simultaneously. Instead of chronological time alone, experiences, such as those in the anecdotes mentioned earlier, exist as events each of which produce a particular spacetime. By synthesizing or ostracizing events, proletarian movements joined memories together into their own spatio-temporal calendar.

In “You wuyi xiangqi si shi’er,” (May First recalls April Twelfth), for example, Chen Tao (dates unknown) wrote how May Day reminded the proletariat of all the suffering they have endured so far.

This included the recent April Twelfth incident, also known as the (second) Shanghai Massacre, a purge by the Guomingdang on communists in 1927.53 Concretely, the proletarian calendar in East Asia unfolded as a synthesis of events such as March 1, 1919 (Manse demonstrations in colonial Korea),54

March 15, 1928 and April 16, 1929 (Mass arrests leftist activists in Japan), May 30, 1925 (Shanghai

53 Chen Tao, “You wuyi xiangqi si shier,” Wuyi tekan, (Shanghai, 1930), 343. Chen’s article was published in a special May Day issues published by thirteen proletarian and left-wing leaning journals based in Shanghai. This publication showed the unity and shared concerns among various proletarian groups in Shanghai two months after the initiation of the League of Leftwing Writers. In the opening remarks the League explains that May Day is not an ordinary festive day, but instead a commemoration of the bloody struggles fought by the proletariat both in China as worldwide. They connect May Day with anti-imperial struggles going beyond the demands of better labor conditions and aim to organize a collective struggle against the imperial violence in East Asia. They transformed May Day into a much larger platform for proletarians to share their discontent as is seen in their end slogans consisting of anti-imperial, anti-white terror and anti-fascism rhetoric. 54 Kim In-dŏk writes that Korean workers and activists in Japan proper used the demonstration as one way to agitate, to sing revolutionary songs, and to distribute leaflets. Especially on commemorative days such as 3.1, May Day, Day of National Shame, Great Kantō Earthquake commemoration, and Anti-war Day, Korean proletarian groups mobilized to express their discontent with the imperial rule, which was also an opportunity to forge alliances between Korean and Japanese workers. Kim In-dŏk, “Zainichi Chōsenjin no minzoku undō ni okeru bunka tōsō to tōsō bunka: 1920 nendai chūban kara 1930 nendai hajime made,” Sekai no Nihon kenkyū, no. 12 (2005), 175-178.

74 massacre), 55 and June 17, 1895 (Annexation Taiwan)56 to name a few. These were all events linked

(in)directly to (Japanese) imperialism. While these events could easily be exploited to essentialize ethno-nationalism, proletarian movements strived to commemorate these events as a shared proletarian calendar combined with annual international days, like January 15, (Three L-Day, Lenin,

Luxemburg, and Liebknecht),57 March 8 (International Woman’s Day), May 1 (International Worker’s

Day), and August 1 (International Antiwar Day). In synthesizing proletarian memories and experiences worldwide, of which May Day was arguably the most compelling platform, proletarian movements coined a counter-memory which challenged the homogeneous and linear time of the ruling classes.

The calendar time in May Day and the proletarian calendar described by Chen Tao exemplify the critique of time by Walter Benjamin. For Benjamin, clock time as seen in the industrial era reduces time to fixed spaces; it voids space of its experiences by levelling it through metric articulations of time. In other words, clock time homogenizes and empties time, universalizing all events into a disconnected experience of happening (Erlebnis) and a successive line of time. Benjamin

55 In China proper, for example, the month May was known as “Red May” (hongwuyue or hongsewuyue). Besides May Day, “Red May” included the Jinan Incident on May 3, The May Fourth Movement on May 4, and the May Thirtieth Movement on May 30, among others. In a report titled Shunzhi shengwei wuyue gongzuo baogao (…), the author discusses in section 3 “Zong ‘wuyi’ dao ‘wusa’” (From May First until May Thirtieth) and section 4 “Hongse wuyue de jianyue” (A Review of Red May) the various activities in several Chinese cities concerning the commemorative days in May, 1930. For a general overview of commemoration days in China proper, see Yuasa Shōichi, Chūgoku no kakushu kinenbi no enkaku gaisetsu, (Tokyo: Teikoku Chihō Gyōsei Gakkai, 1941). 56 See for example the article by Xue Ling, “Women XX de ‘6.17’ you lai le!” in the May Day issue of Taiwan dazhong shibao, 4-7. 57 This day commemorated the assassination of revolutionary activists and socialist politicians Karl Liebknecht (1871-1919) and Rosa Luxemburg (1871-1919) on January 15, 1919, and the death on Vladimir Lenin on January 21, 1924. For an explanation of Three L-Day, see Matsui Keiko, “Rōza Rukusenburugu, Kāru Rībukunehito, Rēnin to wa donna hito hito ka: San L dē no kinen ni,” Hataraku fujin 1, no. 1 (1932): 20-23; Anonymous, “Sam L dē,” Uri tongmu / La uri dong mu, January 1, 1933, 1.

75 criticizes historicism, which he considered a tool of the ruling classes, for it merely records an endless stream of facts which are placed in an ideal history. This populates the homogenous empty time of clocks and “creates a causal nexus of moments of history.” In contrast, Benjamin, informed by Henri

Bergson’s notion of duration as a non-mathematical time of lived consciousness, approaches time as convoluted experiences (Erfahrung) in relation to the present. 58 He proposes linking the present with the past as a spacing of time which forms a mental map and resets time to zero. Benjamin contends that in doing so, a revolutionary chance arises for oppressed peoples, who are excluded from history by the victors. These peoples do not “recognize ‘how [the past] really was’ (but) appropriat[e] a memory” 59 (Erinnerung) to create their own traditions that can withstand the homogenous empty time and explode out of the temporal “continuum of history.” 60 As such, Benjamin establishes a concept of the present as that of “Jetztzeit” (now-time) that synthesizes one’s “own era (…) with a very specific earlier one.”61

Benjamin laments the decay of aura in modern media following mechanical reproduction.

However, he also acknowledges possibilities in new techniques, such as montage, that facilitate

58 Such an understanding echoed recent receptions of philosopher Henri Bergson (1859-1941) and his ideas on image, translated as “keizō” in Japanese and derived from Buddhist lexicon usually pronounced as gyōzō., Date Gen’ichirō (1874- 1961) described the Bergsonian image as “before the image (keizō) is received by the senses, it exists as a material image (butteki keizō), and when it is felt and perceived, it becomes a mental image (shinteki keizō). Date Gen’ichirō, Beruguson (Tokyo: 1915), 127. Henri Bergson was widely translated and discussed in East Asia during the 1910s and early 1920s. For a discussion of Bergson’s reception in East Asia see for example, Miyahama Masaharu, “Taishōki ni okeru Berukuson tetsugaku no juyō,” Jinbun, no. 4 (2005): 83-105; Miyahama Masaharu, “Shōwaki ni okeru Berukuson tetsugaku no juyō,” Jinbun, no. 5 (2006): 57-79; Weihong Bao, Fiery Cinema: The Emergence of an Affective Medium in China, 1915-1945 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2016), 75, 93-94; Tie Xiao, Revolutionary Waves: The Crowd in Modern China, 71-75. 59 Walter Benjamin, “On the Concept of History,” Selected Writings Volume 4: 1938-1940, eds. Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings, trans. Harry Zohn (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2006), 391. 60 Ibid., 395. 61 Ibid., 397.

76 creativity and produce artistic constellations of “now-time” and new forms of experience (Erfahrung).

In these modernist techniques, he hopes that a transformation of mental perception in the human sensorium could be realized, which would give rise to new collectives of resistance under industrial capitalism. With such a critique of time in mind, Benjamin, like proletarian intellectuals, discerns revolutionary calendar time from clock time. Calendars do not measure time like clocks, but spatialize time to the virtual as a collection of “monuments of a historical consciousness.” This produces a historical “short-cut” (Zeitraffer) where the starting day of a calendar is the “same day that keeps recurring in the guise of holidays, which are days of remembrance.”62 As such, Benjamin concludes:

“[t]o write history means giving calendar dates their physiognomy.”63 Seen in this light, May Day can be understood as a festive day that invokes memories of past struggles and allows the disentanglement of the present from homogenous empty time and charges it with “now-time.” As such, the May Day celebration synthesizes multiple spaces of proletarian resistance which creates a future different from the one mapped out by ruling classes.

Whereas Benjamin had already hinted at a repetitive variation found in the perpetual return of time, it was Deleuze who centered his critique of time around repetition as a differentiating force.

Because it is beyond the scope of this dissertation to explain Deleuze’s thought on repetition in detail, it must suffice to examine his notion of repetition with respect to the annual celebration of May Day, mainly that it generates possibilities to rethink the future anew. Deleuze, who was equally informed by Bergson, questioned the succession of time common in historicism and explored possibilities of

62 Ibid., 395. 63 Walter Benjamin, “Central Park,” Selected Writings Volume 4: 1938-1940, eds. Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings, trans. Edmund Jephcott and Howard Eiland (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2006)., 165.

77 breaking with linear progression. Deleuze also believed that successive time could be disrupted by caesura or “shreds of pure past” to put “time out of joint.”64 Unlike Benjamin’s dialectics, however,

Deleuze departed from pre-subjective and pre-individual passive syntheses, or binding forces, found in differentiating repetitions. These underlie the illusion and the superimposed nature of active syntheses in the habitual and recollecting experience that predicates a subject. For Deleuze, prior to the constitution of a subject, time is formed by two passive syntheses. The first contracts different present and past instances to create habits in the living present and includes both elements of past (as retention) and future (as expectation). The other is passive synthesis, which generates memories from a pure, non-representational past, resulting in a paradox where past is “contemporaneous” and

“coexist[s] with the present whose past it is.”65 In addition, there is an impassive synthesis of caesura that “allows the active and passive to be interchanged more easily, neither the [active] nor the

[passive].”66 In other words, it is a synthesis that cuts and interrupts the temporal flow of habit and memory from which an “empty form of time”67 (not be confused with the empty time of capitalism) emerges. This empty form presents the unknowable future as open to change and puts “time out of joint.”

While these habit-memories may appear as active synthesis and successive time to a subject, they are not static or fixed, but are changeable and variable through repetition. Repetition comes out

64 Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, 101, 89. 65 Gilles Deleuze, Bergsonism, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam (New York: Zone Books, 1991), 58-59. 66 Gilles Deleuze, Logic of Sense, trans. Constantin V. Boundas, Mark Lester, and Charles J. Stivale, (London: Bloomsbury Academic, [1990] 2015), 8. 67 Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, 88.

78 of difference, not out of semblance, representation, or mimesis; the reoccurrence of the same would not allow any separation between two or more things. When something is repeated it produces a difference. Repetition should therefore not be understood as “a historical fact, but rather the historical condition under which something new is effectively produced.”68 In the case of festivals, Deleuze wrote that “the apparent paradox of festivals: they repeat an 'unrepeatable.' They do not add a second and a third time to the first, but carry the first time to the 'nth' power.”69 Explained differently, within the affinity or association with past events and memories in the present, repetition gives way to new possibilities and pasts are able to be actualized anew and different in the living present. Memory, for

Deleuze, operated as a creative force that reconfigured the relationship between past and present, and described such a temporality of memory as a “synthesis [that] constitutes time as a living present, and the past and future as dimensions of this present.”70 In the case of May Day, this corresponded to the creation of memories in the act of celebration, what Deleuze considers “artificial signs” of a folded temporal tripartite of past, present, and future.71 The importance of these artificial signs, as Antonio

Faramelli argues, is that they “present a realm of virtual possibilities rather than a representational identity based on a historicized homogenous past.”72 We find such creation especially when examining various artistic techniques of synthesis used in the production of May Day art such as montage, which is crucial in forming and coupling various milieus through rhythms.

68 Ibid., 90. 69 Ibid., 1. 70 Ibid., 76. 71 Ibid., 77. 72 Anthony Faramelli, Resistance, Revolution and Fascism: Zapatismo and Assemblage Politics (London: Bloomsbury, 2018), 96.

Negatives of Solidarity and May Day Photography

Photography was one medium used on May Day to celebrate proletarian achievements and to inspire proletarians who did not participate to join the year after. Made possible by printing press, proletarian journals explored possibilities of photo montage. Although the lack of technological resources among some proletarian cultural movements did not always allow complicated compositions on the same page or successive pages, editors tried to create visual narratives by placing pictures together. They did so to tell a story of one May Day demonstration held at different locations

(Fig. 1.3) or combined pictures of multiple May Day processions, which created a sense of omnipresence and interconnection while downplaying distances between May Day events.

In a special May Day issue of Senki, there was a May Day photo montage printed over several pages immediately after the table of contents (Fig. 1.4). 73 The photographs, shot at various May Day celebrations in Tokyo in 1927 and 1929, are cut out of their frame and glued over each other, synthesizing disparate events. On the left, demonstrators liberated from their photographic frame march to the right side of the page. The static transforms into movement. This movement is further amplified by mixing several photographs and various perspectives. The moving demonstrators appear to march from afar gradually increasing in size as they move towards the viewer. Eventually, they merge with another group of demonstrators (right bottom) while all heading towards to the gathering

(left bottom) at Shiba’ura Park, which is the location the May Day procession commences. On the

73 The photography branch of the proletarian film movement held photo exhibitions to inform the proletariat about (news) events such as May Day. Proletarian journals such as NAPF published the opinions of proletarians about the exhibition. See for example, “Dai ikkai shashinten e no tōsho,” NAPF 2, no. 6 (1931): 72-76.

80 next page, May Day celebrations in Tokyo are linked with May Day celebrations worldwide through montage; it is as if the Tokyo demonstrators continue to march and merge with foreign comrades toward the Red Square in Moscow.

In Japanese colonies where May Day demonstrations were completely banned, editors had to find creative ways to show their readers May Day celebrations within the rules of the cultural policy

(bunka kōsaku). In the left-leaning journal, Samchŏlli (Three Thousand Li), the editors combined photos of May Day taken in Osaka together with photos from Children’s day in Kyŏngsŏng (Fig. 1.5).

The photomontage juxtaposes a May Day demonstration in Osaka, which included Korean female workers, with Children’s Day in Kyŏngsŏng, celebrated on the first Sunday of May close to May Day.

Children’s Day was also rebaptized into a proletarian festival resembling May Day where “worker and farmer children in Chosŏn march in lines with red flags in their hands (…) to intimidate the bourgeois children who normally act big.”74 Like the photomontage in Senki, it grouped photographs depicting spatially separated events in hopes of inventing a relationship between them, transcending geographical distances and national boundaries. Despite May Day being prohibited in colonial Korea, editors managed to interconnect colonial spaces to the resistance of the world proletariat and bring distant proletarian milieus into a relational unity of shared goals through photomontage.

Photomontage allowed photographs with various perspectives to be detached and rearranged in order to bring heterogenous milieus among the worldwide proletariat together into an assemblage.

As a result, raw material from the “living present” in multiple spacetimes is framed together and overlaps various pasts, presents, and futures to form a consolidated unity intended to show viewers

74 Anonymous, “Orininaru no hanashi.” Shōnen Senki 2, no. 7 (1929): 14.

81 how these events are related. While the photographs depict a repetition of annual May Day celebrations, it is the in-between of overlapping photographs where a relationality between different singularities emerge (Fig 1.6). The marriage of photographs was an artistic forging of solidarity among proletarians who were spatially apart. These montage techniques became crucial in various proletarian art forms to render visible relations between disparate proletarian struggles worldwide.

Combining text and photographs was one among many intermedial compositions used by proletarian cultural workers both in East Asia as elsewhere. By doing so, they were able to highlight

May Day celebrations and struggles from various perspectives and render May Day “legible” to diverse audiences with different levels of literacy. Literacy was low among proletarians and through non- textual art artists could reach illiterate or low-literate proletarians which avoided their exclusion from

May Day celebrations. Walter Benjamin asserted that to overcome the barrier between photographs and text, one requires from the photographer “the ability to put such a caption beneath his picture as will rescue it from the ravages of modishness and confer upon it a revolutionary use value.”75 However, one could also argue that without being able to (partially) read captions or (supplemental) texts, the affective impact of some intermedial compositions would be diminished. This is exactly what happens to a character in the May Day story written by proletarian writer Tokunaga Sunao (1899-

1958). The protagonist has a hard time understanding articles in the proletarian journal Senki, and instead, his attention is drawn to photos of May Day which allow him “to read” May Day (Fig. 1.7).

After looking at the photos several times, the worker Tetsu has an epiphany: “The May Day procession. When I see this, I awaken. The chinstraps of the police and wrestling comrades, and those

75 Walter Benjamin, “The Author as Producer,” 87.

82 eagerly holding onto flags which are about to be stolen. […] Certainly, this thing called May Day is what we are doing for sure,” concluded Tetsu in the end.76 The photograph in the proletarian journal renders May Day visible for Tetsu; through this sensorial recognition he experiences a sense of proletarianness. Tokunaga seems to suggest that even if written works are difficult to grasp for illiterate or persons with low-literacy levels, the photographic image itself is able to convey meaning and affect readers. Proletarian artists were able to use many different forms of art to inform proletarians about May Day.

Solidarity on the Silver Screen and May Day Movies

In addition to photographic montage, proletarian cultural workers experimented with new media such as film. Among the emerging proletarian film units in East Asia was Purokino (Proletarian

Filmmaker’s League, hereafter Prokino), founded in Tokyo in 1929, which commenced filming May

Day demonstrations or other topics suitable for May Day screenings.77 Each year, Prokino organized

May Day film events to show their movies to proletarians and supporters across Japan. Prokino was among the first in East Asia to experiment with new styles and cameras during 1929 to 1934. One of its

76 Tokunaga Sunao, “Mēdē made,” Senki 4, no. 5 (1931): 73-74. 77 Prokino emerged out of an earlier film group Sayoku gekijō eigabu (Left-wing Theater Film Division) affiliated with the theather group Sayoku gekijō (Left-wing Theater). In the rest of East Asia proletarian film movements also emerged, such as KAPF’s tendency films and its film units Seoul Kino and Chŏngbok Kino. Hyangjin Lee, Contemporary Korean cinema: identity, culture, and politics (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000), 27-29; Sunyoung Park, The proletarian wave: literature and leftist culture in colonial Korea, 1910-1945 (Cambridge, Mass.: The Harvard University Asia Center, 2015), 68-69. In contrast to the small number of films produced by proletarian film movements in the Japanese empire, the Left-wing Cinema Movement (Zuoyi dianying yundong) in Shanghai produced 74 movies, including many studio movies, making it the only substantial proletarian film movement in East Asia. For detailed studies see, Wu Haiyong, "Dianying xiaozu" yu zuoyi dianying yundong (Shanghai: Shanghai Renmin Chubanshe, 2014); Vivian Shen, The origins of left-wing cinema in China, 1932-37 (London: Routledge, 2012); Laikwan Pang, Building a New China in Cinema: the Chinese Left-Wing Cinema Movement, 1932-1937 (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2010).

83 members, Sasa Genjū (1900-1959) argued in his essay “Gangu, Buki – Satsueiki” (Toy, Weapon,

Camera) in favor of using the “bourgeois toy,” a 9.5mm Pathé Baby, as a weapon of class struggle. The size and mobility of the Pathé Baby allowed filmmakers, such as Sasa, to bring cameras “into daily life” to film demonstrations from nearby and even in the midst of crowds. This was a method for which

Soviet director Dziga Vertov’s Chelovek s kino-apparatom (Man with a Movie Camera, 1929) is most emblematic. Film could transform, Sasa explains, “[t]he unorganized masses (…) in conscious participants.”78 Sasa was convinced that film, especially when taken using portable cameras, had the expressive power to consolidate fragments of daily life captured separately into a cohesive whole, not unlike montage photography.

Sasa Genjū shot one of his first (amateur) films on May Day 1927, initiating a recurring theme of proletarian film movements.79 Among the extant films of proletarian film in East Asia there is only one incomplete May Day silent movie titled Dai Jūni-kai Tōkyō Mēdē (Twelfth Annual Tokyo May Day,

1931).80 Different from studio movies, Prokino shot the movie outside, documenting May Day participants from their starting point at Shiba’ura park and walking via Shōwa Road towards Ueno

Park. This route passes the imperial palace in Hibiya where two days earlier the annual celebration of

78 Sasa Genjū, “Gangu, Buki – Satsueiki,” Senki 1, no. 2 (1928): 33. English translation taken from Markus Nornes Abé, Japanese Documentary Film: The Meiji Era through Hiroshima (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 2003), 23-24. 79 Namiki Shinsaku summarizes in his study on Prokino the screenings by the local branches (Kyoto, Osaka, Kanazawa, Okayama, Kochi, Sapporo, except Kobe) including May Day movies. See Namiki Shinsaku, "Purokino" zenshi: Nihon puroretaria eiga dōmei (Tokyo: Gōdō Shuppan, 1986), 130-32, 212-213, and 232-239. 80 For a brief discussion of the film, see Abé Markus Nornes, “Prokino’s Obi,” in Purokino Sakuhinshū Bessatsu (Tokyo: Rikka Shuppan, 2013), 15-16. Besides the May Day, several stills from other May Day movies remain. See for example stills from May Day in Kōchi and Okayama by Purokino in NAPF 2, no. 6 (1931). Other May Day movies that are lost are: Dai Jūsan-kai Tōkyō mēdē, 1931 nen Kyōto-Ōsaka mēdē, 1932 nen Tōkyō-Ōsaka mēdē, 1932 nen Kyōto mēdē, 1932 nen Sapporo mēdē, Dai Jūik- kai Ōsaka mēdē, Dai Jūni-kai Ōsaka mēdē, Dai jūsan kai Ōsaka mēdē, 1933 mēdē nen, Kanazawa mēdē, Oira no haru, Hahiru kinrōsha, Namiki. "Purokino" zenshi: Nihon puroretaria eiga dōmei, 225-226. The scripts of the latter two films were published in Purokino, no. 1 (1932).

84 the emperor’s birthday (known as Tenchōsetsu) had taken place. This highlighted the stark contrast between Tenchōsetsu’s right-wing nationalism and May Day’s left-wing internationalism. The movie will not be discussed in its entirety; however, this section focuses on how divergent components

(shots) are organized within the filmic whole. It was a way for proletarian filmmakers to train, aide, and augment the mental perception of synthesizing fragmented realities. Of specific note is how

Prokino actively used filmic machinery to transform spectators’ viewpoints, aiding the human eye with the camera eye. This is not unlike Benjamin’s sentiment as he wrote: “with film a new realm of consciousness comes into being.”81 Granted, the seven-minute May Day movie itself is not spectacular for its montage as compared to other contemporary (proletarian) movies. Instead, it serves to expand the discussion of synthesis as a method of forging relations of solidarity within the proletarian cultural production of May Day.

Throughout Twelfth Annual Tokyo May Day, viewers are exposed to particular arrangements of fragments of the celebration. A recurrent arrangement is the dialectical framing between proletarians and police. There are sequential scenes depicting both groups in separate frames or in a hierarchal relation in which the police frisk the bodies of participants as they look for illegal items. In doing so, a clear opposition between the two is established, stressing that any alliance is impossible while milieus remain exterior to one another. More important to this discussion is how various proletarian groups relate to each other through sequences of film shots. For example, one particular shot shows a long procession of proletarians, holding banners with names of groups and slogans that convey demands.

81 Walter Benjamin, “Reply to Oscar A. H. Schmitz,” The Work of Art in the Age of its Technological Reproducibility and other Writings on Media, ed. Michael W. Jennings, Brigid Doherty, and Thomas Y. Levin, trans. Rodney Livingstone (Cambridge; Mass: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2008), 329. Italics in the original.

Among these groups, intertitles highlight groups such as the “Zennō no kyōdai” (All Farmer

Comrades), “Musansha shinryōsho” (Proletarian Medical Clinique) and “Fujin rōdōsha” (Female

Workers), and are then followed by shots of individuals giving speeches (enzetsu) (Fig. 1.8). Such sequences consolidate these heterogenous groups into cohesive milieu(s) within a filmic whole; the sequence itself reflects the relationship between and within proletarian groups. These shots highlight a political organization formed through equilibrium among proletarian milieus. The in-betweens

(transition) of shots become the passages, interactions, and exits between these milieus with shots of processions, distribution of lunchboxes and water, and applauding spectators as its rhythmic coordination of movement. The shots of banners, flags, and slogans together with intertitles such as

“singing voices are pushing the sky” (utagoe wa sore wo oshite iru) operate as expressive matters

(ritornellos) which delineate and codify the milieus and rhythms of the May Day parade. These shots together form the (de)territorialization of spatio-temporal flows within the film strip which is presented to spectators as a cinematic language able to shape their mental imagery and sensory- motor system. Grouping fragments into montage in Twelfth Annual Tokyo May Day forms what

Deleuze, discussing Bergson, described as a “chain of relations which constitutes the mental image, in opposition to the thread of actions, perceptions and affections.”82 Using movies such as Twelfth Annual

Tokyo May Day, proletarian directors strived to expose the contractions of bourgeoisie signs and referents by rearranging the detached spacetime, using what Deleuze called the “any-instant- whatever” and “any-space-whatever.” In other words, the “singular space, which has merely lost its

82 Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 1: The Movement Image (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986), 200.

86 homogeneity,” (…) to make linkages “in an infinite number of ways.”83 As such, proletarian filmmakers tried to create a filmic language using montage, resonating Dziga Vertov’s (1895-1954) aim to create

“an absolute international language of cinema,” and poet Xu Chi’s (1914-1996) search for a “cinematic

Esperanto.”84 The goal of this was to produce a relationality among various proletarian constituents in the cutting and suturing of the in-betweens of scenes in a film roll for which the polyvocal platform of

May Day lent itself well (Fig. 1.9).

Prokino frequently showed these movies during proletarian film nights. The first of such screenings was in 1930 in Tokyo, where Prokino showed a May Day movie along with several other short films. After the first success, Prokino decided to organize another movie screening in Tokyo a few weeks later.85 They booked Hōchi Auditorium, which had room for 800 people and then actively spread leaflets and posters to promote the screening (Fig. 1.10). The programme consisted of six movies supplemented with a short play performed by Sayoku Gekijō (Left-wing Theater) and music provided by Puroretaria ongakuka dōmei (Proletarian Musicians’ Alliance).86 These film screenings were rare events for proletarians to see themselves on the silver screen. By seeing themselves, much the same as Tokunaga’s protagonist, Prokino detached a living present out of a particular spacetime through the mechanical reproduction of film. Prokino’s filmmakers then coupled the content of the film with the audience’s own experiences, creating a link between a virtual and actual. In doing so,

83 Deleuze, Cinema 1, 4-7, 109. 84 Weihong Bao, Fiery Cinema: The Emergence of an Affective Medium in China, 1915-1945, 288-293. 85 The first proletarian movie screening was completely sold out, and there were even people who were not able to purchase a ticket. The police had set a quota of 225 people to enter the theater, but eventually a thousand people showed up. Between the short movies the audience sang May Day songs together with the proletarian musicians’ alliance. The last movie shown was titled May Day. Namiki, "Purokino" zenshi: Nihon puroretaria eiga dōmei, 85-87. 86 Isa Isao, “Kōkai tōsō kiroku: Dai nikai ha,” Puroretaria Eiga, no. 8 (1930): 54-57.

87 filmmakers created a register of recognition and enumerated singular experiences into a multiplicity of collective consciousness, resembling the sutured nature of film montage. They rendered the chaos of the living present visible on the silver screen, and in the merging of heterogenous components created a ritornello of unity, which merged into milieus of proletarians. Proletarian film directors tried to create strategic images of political formation in order to trigger viewers’ sensorimotor system, hopefully linking these images to thoughts, a method also recognized among proletarian playwrights in the next section.

Staging Linkages of Solidarity and May Day Theater

Similar to film screenings, proletarian theater groups organized special events around and on

May Day or performed plays about May Day throughout the year.87 Compared to movie screenings

87 Proletarian theater in East Asia started in the 1920s with groups such as Toranku Gekijō (Trunk Theater) and Zen’ei Gekijō (Vanguard Theater) performing at the Tsukiji Theater in Tokyo, which also attracted several exchange students from the East Asian mainland, the KAPF-linked Pulkaemi (Red Ant) in Seoul and another Korean-language theater KAPF branch in Tokyo, and the Shanghai Yishu Jushe (Shanghai Arts and Theater Company) and Nanguoshe (Southern Land Company) in Shanghai. Toranku Gekijō stood out for its innovation as a mobile theater group formed to join the strike by the Association of Printers (Kyōdō insatsu sōgi), in which the proletarian writer Tokunaga Sunao participated. He based his novel Taiyō no nai machi (The Sunless Street, 1929) on these experiences and Murayama Tomoyoshi prepared the script for a theater play. From 1929, proletarian theater groups in Japan started to organize independent May Day theater events, which lasted until 1933 totalling five shows. Also in 1929, theater groups in the Soviet Union, German and Czechoslovakia set up an international theater organization called the IATB (Internationaler Arbeitertheaterbund). A year later, theater groups in Japan (including the Korean language theater group), Switzerland, Belgium, France, Denmark, Norway and England were added. Later, theater groups in China, India, and South-America also engaged with the IATB. At the founding meeting, IATB stated the following message: “In contrast to the nationalistic bourgeois culture, proletarian culture, regardless if it developed in the womb of a capitalist society or if it were born in a proletarian XX, sticks to the spirit of internationalism. As a concrete manifestation, this ideological direction necessitates the unity with control of all national proletarian theater groups sticking to spirit of class struggle.” They decided to establish an “International Theater Day” each year on February 15 and to stage plays with international themes or perform the same play. See Purotto jōnin chūō shikkō iinkai, “Engeki undo no kokusaiteki XX teki kyōsō ni kansuru geki,” Purotto nigatsu tokubetsu zōkangō, (1932): 1-14. The only known May Day theater event in China was organized by the party committee of Fanan district which held a May Day event in 1933 to celebrate the fourth anti-Guomindang victory. After the event, the Leftwing League of Theater (julian) performed three plays. Cao Shudiao, “Julian” yu zuolian xiju yundong, (Shanghai: Shanghai Renmin Chubanshe, 2014), 288.

88 there was a crucial difference - the absence of mechanical reproduction in theater performances. Film or photography could record the performance, but the performance itself remained a unique moment and thus innovations were to be found elsewhere. While proletarian filmmakers reproduced raw material from living presents onto a film strip, which they could cut and rearrange, proletarian theater directors and actors experimented with different methods of synthesis. Informed by proletarian playwriter Bertolt Brecht (1898-1956) and theater director Erwin Piscator (1893-1966), techniques included breaking the invisible “fourth wall” between performers and audience or directly referencing the audience.88 In doing so, proletarian theater tried to, not unlike in photography and film, to create an art form that aided the mental perception of how to forge relations of solidarity among proletarians through techniques of synthesis. 89

While footage from theatrical performance is not extant and evidence exists only in photographs (Fig. 1.11), theater manuals written by proletarian playwrights containing discussions on intermedial and technological innovations have survived. Among the numerous proletarian

88 Murayama translated Erwin Piscator’s Das Politische Theater (The Political Theater, 1929). Piscator was known for his use of technology and mechanization in theater as well as film projections on stage. For a history of Brecht in Japan see, Akiba Hirokazu, “Nihon ni okeru Burehito juyō: Inou Hisashi no Yabaharu kentō kara,” Engeki eizōgaku, no. 5 (2010): 99-117. Sound movies became available in Japan in 1931, but Prokino produced only silent movies. The Left-wing Cinema Movement in Shanghai, however, produced several movies with sound. See Weihong Bao, Fiery Cinema: The Emergence of an Affective Medium in China, 1915-1945, 224-250, and Wu Haiyong, "Dianying xiaozu" yu zuoyi dianying yundong, 212-218. 89 Toranku Gekijō used a truck filled with equipment and drove around to perform plays and collect money to support the strike. Members from the proletarian art division such as Murayama and Yanase Masamu (1900-1945) drew sketches on the street and sold these to collect money for the strike fund. Proletarian theater groups used movable theater across East Asia to attend strikes, to agitate proletarians in remote areas, and to escape quickly when the police arrives. The director and actor Senda Koreya (1904-1994) introduced the concept of movable theater inspired by proletarian theater groups in Weimar Germany. See Senda Koreya, “Doitsu no ajipurotai no katsudō (1): Engeki ni yoru ajipuro hōhō no kakuritsu no tame ni,” Puroretaria engeki, no. 2-3 (1933): 13-23, and Senda Koreya, “Kigyōnai no geijutsuteki ajipuro katsudō no tame ni: shihonshugikoku ni okeru puroretaria engeki no mottomo sugureta kōkateki keitai ajipurotai de aru,” Puroretaria engeki [Tokushūgō dai 5 kai zenkoku taikai mēdē junbi], no. 4-5 (1933): 4-25.

89 playwrights, Murayama Tomoyoshi stands out for his numerous intermedial experiments.90 For the first May Day theater show, Leftwing Theater staged Murayama’s play Shōri no kiroku (Record of

Victory) on May first for two weeks at Tsukiji Theater in Tokyo.91 One of the innovations Murayama added to Record of Victory’s stage was film footage projected as part of the stage, which supplemented the décor and the actors’ performance. Although playwrights had used existing film footage in previous years, for Record of Victory, Murayama made a special request to Prokino to produce new footage. Mixing new footage with the actual play, Murayama aimed to produce “rensa” (linkage) in order to assemble dispersed events, which, not unlike montage, strongly reflects the attempts of proletarian artists to practice techniques of synthesis.92 Besides film footage, Murayama also asked the

90 One of the reasons for Shōri no kiroku’s success was Murayama’s continuous attempts to renew and improve his art. Due to his former experience as a MAVO artist and his year abroad studying various art styles in Weimar Germany, Murayama experimented with new methods and mixed different types of media. For more on Murayama and his work with MAVO, see Gennifer Weisenfeld, Mavo: Japanese artists and the avant-garde, 1905-1931 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002). Also, in terms of acting and production, Murayama tried new methods. The cast of Record of Victory consisted of well-known actors such as Sano Seki, Sugimoto Ryōkichi, and, Saigō Kenji. Sano writes in one of his articles that the acting and the collaborative production (kyōdō enshutsu) had significantly improved with Shōri no kiroku. Sano Seki, “Enshutsu kiroku. Atarashii enshutsu no tame ni: “Shōri no kiroku” o chūshin to shite,” Engeki (La Theatre) 3 (no. 4, 1931): 61-62. 91 Sayoku Gekijō, which had emerged from previous proletarian theater groups, often hosted these shows in their theater Tsukiji in Tokyo, choosing one or two plays together with several other activities such as film screenings or music concerts. Several leaflets suggest that the play was also staged in the Kansai area with the help of the Osaka Senkiza on September 16 and 17, 1931. The play was again an enormous success attracting thousands of people totalling 7143 and critics were enthusiastic. Murayama Tomoyoshi, Murayama Tomoyoshi gikyokushū Jō (Tokyo: Shin Nihon Shuppansha, 1971), 501. Proletarian writer Miyamoto (Chūjō) Yuriko, for example, recognized this story as part of a recent internationalist tendency within proletarian literature in Japan. She argues that proletarian stories, different from the deceiving international exoticism in bourgeois literature, need to depict their subject matter connected to political and economic events, both domestic and international, as well as to show the possibilities, contradictions, hardships, or progress of struggles. Chujō [Miyamoto] Yuriko, “Puroretaria bungaku ni okeru kokusaiteki shudai ni tsuite 3,” Yomiuri Shinbun, 20 September, 1931, 4, Morning Edition. The play was also staged at a farewell party in 1932, after the organizers did not obtain permission to stage the initial play Kita Karafuto yuden (Oil Fields in Northern Karafuto), for actors and theater groups who went to Moscow to participate at the International Theater Olympiad. See “Purotto sōbetsu geki totsujo jōen kinshi,” in Yomiuri Shinbun, September 18, 1932, 7, Morning Edition. 92 Tokioka Jō praises Murayama’s innovative use of film which is effective in supplementing the acting, but he states that “the transition between film and acting could be better.” “Shōri no kiroku,” Asahi Shinbun, May 10, 1931, 6. Examining the “fusion” (yūgō) in Murayama’s play, Lee Jungwook writes that “the footage itself consisted of images depicting (maps of) Shanghai,” Murayama used the black-and-white film footage to be projected on a screen connected to ceiling about the stage to supplement the play together with a red flag representing communism on stage to create a strong color contrast

Proletarian Music Alliance, which had a substantial repertoire (discussed below), to sing May Day songs live on stage,93 solving a problem in cinema, which “for now lacks color and sound.”94

In theoretical essays, which were written as instruction manuals designed to teach readers theater production, Murayama elaborated on other linkages than rensa significant for proletarian theater. These were links between dialogues, clothes, gestures (shigusa), movements (dōsa), stage settings, and the allotting (bawari) between acts (maku) and scenes (ba), all the while referring to May

Day examples from Record of Victory. For Murayama, these elements needed to be combined

(kumi’awase) according to slow and fast tempos (noroi temupo to hayai temupo), of which the variations are manifold (tashutayō).95 These elements operate as expressive markers and can be understood as ritornellos that consolidate and give expression to (parts of) milieus and rhythms that

Murayama skillfully weaved into his methodology of theater production. While it is beyond scope to discuss all components in depth, there will be a focus on Murayama’s idea of “juncture” (kugiri) between scenes and acts, which is similar to the cutting and pasting of filmstrip shots in montage. It focuses on the idea of how to con- and disjoin of components to create “a tight correlation between each scene” (kakuba wa kinmitsu ni sōkankei shiai).96

elevating the visual display.” Lee Jungwook [I Jon’uku], “Murayama Tomoyoshi ni okeru engeki to eizō no yūgō,” in Murayama gekiteki sentan, ed. Iwamoto Kenji, (Tokyo: Shinwasha, 2012), 303. Murayama was not the only proletarian playwright to experiment with linkages. Others, such as Hong Shen (1894-1955) member of the Left-wing League, stressed the importance of “lianhe” (to joint) “liandai” (to connect) in their plays (and films). Hong Shen, Xiju daoyan de chubu zhishi (Shanghai: Qingnian Wenku, 1943), 105, 108. 93 Although the song Internationale was banned, Lee mentions that during the play they sang Internationale in Chinese. Ibid., 301. 94 Murayama Tomoyoshi, Puroretaria eiga nyūmon (Tokyo: Zen’ei Shobō, 1928), 168. 95 Murayama Tomoyoshi, “Puroretaria gikyoku no kakikata,” in Puroretaria shōsetsu gikyoku sahō (Tokyo: Naigaisha, 1931), 175. 96 Ibid., 181.

Considering May Day the ultimate subject matter on which to practice syntheses, Murayama emphasized the length of scenes in his discussion of Record of Victory first and foremost. He stated that the length of scenes in proletarian theater is significantly shorter than that in bourgeois theater due to proletarian audiences having less time because of long working hours. This was, of course, contrasted with the bourgeoisie who have plenty of time to enjoy hours of theater. Murayama calculated that a play can be two hundred pages long at most, but was often shorter as proletarian theater shows usually stage multiple plays and mobile theater shows were short in general.97 Between acts, the curtains were dropped and the stage was brightened in the theater to provide a break for the audience, whereas scenes require a “theatrical blackout” (anten) to change the stage. These breaks and changes operated as spatio-temporal contractions (kinchō) and relaxants (shikan) to ensure the relation (kankei) between spectators and the performance.98 According to Murayama, this was quite different from cinema where “one cuts” (wan katto) make transitions between scenes unnecessary and camera angles can change perspective. This flexibility in cinema was opposed to the fixed distance in theater between spectators and the stage.99 If the playwright found it difficult to balance two scenes

(futatsu no bamen no tsuriai ga nakanaka muzukashii) and failed to make these transitions smoothly, spectators who have established an intimacy with a particular scene (bamen ni najinda) might lose attention (ki o nuku) and patience (ira ira shitari).100 In his methodology, Murayama emphasized that

97 Murayama Tomoyoshi, “Puroretaria gikyoku no kakikata,” 175-176. Murayama counts one page as the equivalent of 400 Japanese characters. 98 Ibid., 176. 99 Ibid., 178. 100 Ibid., 181.

92 when a transition between scenes remains unclear, the relation among its components would cease, making it difficult for spectators to understand. It then follows that it was important a playwright establishes a relation of rhythm and tempo between the allotting of scenes (bawari) and the content of the play. In the case of Record of Victory, Murayama did this by having all scenes take place in small rooms. He also created synthesis with the help of music, film, and décor between the characters on stage and in imagined crowds (gunshū) outside (kogai) during May Day celebrations. If the play failed to show the correlation between events played in successive scenes, then prior training on mental perception which helped spectators synthetize distant spaces of struggles would not succeed.

Ultimately, for Murayama and other proletarian playwrights, proletarian theater took up different worlds where various elements coagulate dialectically (benshōhōteki) into unity (hitotsu ni kataku musubituki) and decide their own future (mirai wo jibun no mono to suru).101

Singing Voices of Solidarity and May Day Songs

May Day movie screenings and theater shows included songs; songs became vital to participants in May Day demonstrations as they amplified a sense of collectivity and unison.

Proletarian musicians experimented with various forms of synthesis in music, such as chorus singing, touring performances, recording, voice training, and lyric and melody copy-pasting, some of which will be examined in detail below. Similar to montage and linkage, singing May Day songs was a vocal exercise used to form and consolidate various proletarian milieus.

101 Ibid., 182-183.

Proletarian musicians, such as the Puroretaria ongaku dōmei (Proletarian Musician’s Alliance or Proleta Muziko in Esperanto, hereafter P.M.) based in Tokyo, actively engaged in the production of songs, teaching proletarian singing and playing instruments, and live concerts.102 Among the main objects of P.M. was the production of May Day songs and participation in May Day cultural events and demonstrations in which they provided live concerts.103 Reflecting on these concerts, member Hara

Tarō decided to take their music “from the streets to the workplaces” and “from public performance to daily life,” resembling Sasa’s ideas on film.104 This resulted in the establishment of a “mobile music band” (idō ongakutai) that could perform guerilla performances. They were able to rapidly prepare a concert in locations not primarily intended for performance, such as factories, and were able leave quickly after the show to avoid arrest.105 This mobility was not unlike the dispersed (bunsan) May Day techniques developed in China and Korea to avoid arrest, described in Murayama’s Record of Victory,

102 Articles in Chinese and Korean also discussed the importance of music and the masses, showing that musical theories of the Proletarian Music Alliance in Japan were present in the rest of East Asia as well. See for example, Sin Gosong, “Ŭmak kwa daejung,” Ŭmak kwa si, no. 1 (1931): 21-23, and Xiong Mumin, “Yinyue yu xiju dazhonghua,” Jianghan sichao 3, no. 4-5 (1935): 71-74. From the beginning, proletarian cultural workers valued the benefits of songs and singing based on the positive effects of singing while working and the sense of collectivity it creates among workers and farmers. In his article, “Kōjō rōdōsha to ongaku” (Factory Workers and Music), for example, Shioiri Kamesuke states that in recent decades imperialism and militarism use patriotic songs to nurture love for one’s country. Further, Shioiri writes that although research has shown that the rhythm of singing can increase productivity of working, capitalists exploit their workers by using songs to increase productivity for their own profits instead of shortening the working day. Shioiri proposes that workers take control over the production of songs such as kōshinka (or kōshinkyoku, marching songs) and tōsōka (fight songs) to suit their needs and oppose the capitalist’s rule. Among these marching and fight songs, workers often sung May Day songs singing about strikes and the might of the proletariat. According to Shioiri, the ruling classes are so afraid of the proletarian struggle through music (ongaku tōsō) that they forbade worker music bands from participating in May Day. Shioiri Kamesuke, “Kōjō rōdōsha to ongaku,” in Sōgō puroretaria geijutsu kōza 2, eds. Akita Ujaku and Eguchi Kan (Tokyo: Naigaisha, 1931), 171-177. 103 Nishishima Kazuhiro, “Puroretaria ongakuka dōmei ni okeru idō ongakutai no jissen,” Seisongaku kenkyū sentā hōkoku 17, (2012): 285. 104 Haru Tarō, “Mēdē kanpa ongakukai,” Nappu 2, no. 6 (1931): 78. 105 Nishishima, “Puroretaria ongakuka dōmei ni okeru idō ongakutai no jissen,” 300.

94 and also resembled techniques of montage and linkage. They connected various spaces together in their nomadic movements and live performances.

P.M. frequently cooperated with theater and film artists to execute mobile performances. For example, together with the touring theater group Mezamashi-tai, P.M. was involved in several events that visited proletarians and performed a month before May Day. Most notable among their events was a visit to a picnic of (semi-)unemployed persons led by a Korean sports group. On April 25, 1931,

P.M., Mezamashi-tai, and the Korean theater group 3.1 – named after March First demonstrations – attended this picnic while performing and singing. The repertoire prepared by P.M. consisted of a shupurehikōru (from the German Sprechchor meaning Speech Choir),106 and dealt with Japanese imperial aggression against Koreans. In addition, together they sang Japanese and Korean language fight songs, May Day songs, as well as promoted May Day and supported the upcoming antiwar meeting in Shanghai.107 Reaching out to Korean workers in Japan was key to the internationalist spirit of proletarian art groups in general and of May Day in particular.108 By combining disparate voices

106 Proletarian theater groups in Weimar Germany had developed this new format Sprechchor as a part of proletarian theater. Sabine Hake describes the function of Sprechchor as “[t]he pronouncement of “we” by choral players speaking and moving in unison created an emotional community through highly ritualized performances of Gemeinschaft (community) and established the emotional regimes necessary for performers as well as audiences to proudly identify as “proletarian.” Sabine Hake, The Proletarian Dream: Socialism, Culture, and Emotion in Germany, 1863-1933 (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2017), 222. See also Richard Sheppard, “Proletarische Feierstunden and the Early History of the Sprechchor 1919- 1923,” in Literatur, Politik und Soziale Prozesse: Studien zur Deutschen Literatur von der Aufklärung bis zur Weimarer Republik, ed. Georg Jäger, Dieter Langewiesche, and Alberto Martino, (Tübingen: Max Niemeyer Verlag, 1997), 147-185. 107 During this event, they also sold the Korean proletarian journal Uri tongmu (Our Comrades), which was an important platform for Korean proletarian artists active in Japan. I discuss this journal in more detail in Chapter 4. 108 As a result of this event, Hara writes that a high number of unaffiliated proletarians participated in May Day. Hara Tarō, “Mezamashitai to idō ongakutai to wa donna ni kyōdō shita ka?,” Puroretaria engeki, no. 6 (1933): 58.

95 which were consolidated through the act of singing, whether one was a professional or amateur, P.M. aimed to merge proletarians with different backgrounds and struggles.109

May Day songs were published in proletarian song books and proletarian journals to make the lyrics available (Fig. 1.12). In addition to well-known songs such as Internationale that were part of the usual repertoire, special May Day songs were composed.110 The melody of May Day songs, was often taken from either dormitory songs (ryōka) or military songs (gunka), in what music scholar Saitō Kei

109 To train amateur voices, proletarian musician Seki Akiko (1899-1973) stressed several points necessary for singing fight songs, such as understanding the lyrics, clear pronunciation, how to use your voice, and learning the lyrics by heart.109 Seki also explained how songs can synchronize with the marching body during strikes and processions, such as May Day, by adding numbers to syllables in the lyrics that correspond to either the right or left foot. This way, proletarians synthesized their voices and body movements, amplifying the sense of unity. Seki Akiko, “Tōsōka no utaikata,” in Sōgō puroretaria geijutsu kōza 2, ed. Akita Ujaku and Eguchi Kan, (Tokyo: Naigaisha, 1931), 165-168. The word “march” or “marching song” became part of popular culture in Japan in the late 1920s with the publication of Kikuchi Kan’s Tōkyō kōshinkyoku (Tokyo March, 1928-1929). Mizoguchi Kenji made the story into a movie before Kikuchi published the last installments in the popular journal Kingu (King). The soundtrack Tōkyō kōshinkyoku sung by Satō Chiyako was the first tie-up in Japan and the record was ironically published on May First and became a bestseller. The lyrics were changed before publication out of fear for censorship. Initially, the first two lines of the fourth verse were: “Nagai kami shite Marukusu bōi, Kyō mo kakaeta akai koi” (Long-haired Marx boy, Today too holding red love) were changed into “Shinema mimasho ka ocha nomimasho ka, Isso Odakyū de nigemasho ka” (Shall we go to the cinema? Shall we drink tea? Or rather, shall we elope by the Odakyū?), removing the leftist references and replacing it with free advertisement for the Odakyū Railway. For more information, see for example, Isoda Kōichi, Shisō to shite no Tōkyō (Toyko: Kokubunsha, 1979), 85-101. Soon after Tōkyō kōshinkyoku, more songs used “march” in their title. This shows how capitalism appropriates and neutralizes its opposition through commodities and media for which the Marxist critics, such as Hirabayashi Hatsunosuke (1892-1931), already warned in the 1920s. 110 After Okamoto Kenichi’s first direct translation of Internationale, proletarian actor and Esperantist Sasaki Takamaru translated Internationale into Japanese completely with notes and melody for the first time in 1922. His fellow founder of proletarian journal Tane maku hito (The Sower), Komaki Ō had brought the lyrics and musical notes from France – written by Eugène Pottier during the Paris Commune - which Sasaki translated from the French in preparation for the celebration of the fifth anniversary of the Russian revolution. The police however entered the event and arrested several participants. Later, Sasaki edited the first version together with the help of Sano Seki, the actor of Shōri no kiroku. See Sakoguchi Sanae, Tate, uetaru mono yo: “Intānashonaru” wo yakushi shita kaiyū, Sasaki Takamaru (Tokyo: Gendai shokan, 2016), 59-64. For more on Sano’s contribution see Katō Tetsurō, “Kominterun to Sano Seki,” in Sano Seki: hito to sono shigoto 1905-1966, ed. Kan Takayuki, (Tokyo: Fujiwara Shoten, 2015), 133-139. Zheng Zengduo and Geng Jizhi translated the Russian version of Internationale into Chinese for the first time in 1921. Two years later, Qu Qiubai translated Internationale again and prepared it as a song in 1923. This version was published in the June issue of Xinqingnian. See Wang Fuhe, “’Guojige’ de zaoji zhongyizhe,” Zhonggong dangshi yanjiu, (no. 9, 2012): 120-123. For a proletarian history of Internationale, see Anonymous, “Oretachi no uta: ‘Intānashonaru’ no rekishi,” Ongaku Shinbun 3, April 30, 1932, 1. The Korean Communist Party also provided a Korean version of Internationale based on the Japanese translation.

96 calls “same sound different song” (dō-on-i-kyoku) or “parody of a song” (kae-uta).111 For example, the most popular song Mēdē-ka (May Day Song), also called Kike bankoku no rōdōsha (Listen, Workers of the World), was based on the dormitory song Amūru-gawa no ryūketsu ya (The Bloodshed of the Amur

River, 1901), which became popular during the Russo-Japanese War (1904-05).112 According to music scholar Itoya Toshio, the public knew the melodies and lyrics of these popular songs, so copying them made it easier to remember and sing along. Many members of proletarian movements were university students, who had often sung the dormitory songs; dormitory songs or military songs were easy to sing during parades.113 Further, as Saitō points out, proletarian song books often provided the original songs titles from which the melody was taken in brackets so that singers could teach each other orally the melody to sing without using music notes.114 As a result, proletarian musicians recoded military songs imbued with patriotism, reassigning their function to serve proletarian internationalism.

In addition to the melodies, the lyrics of May Day songs were composed to express solidarity among proletarians worldwide and to foster the spirit of collectivity. For example, May Day Song opens with a line addressing the world proletariat, “Kike bankoku no rōdōsha” (Listen Workers of the

World), repeating Marx’s famous line. This is a point of recognition and at the same time connects the group of singers to the international community.115 The singing voices of thousands of workers

111 Saitō Kei, 1933 nen o kiku: Senzen Nihon no oto fūkei (Tokyo: NTT Shuppan, 2017), 156, 159. 112 Itoya credits Ōba Isamu (dates unknown) as composer. Akamatsu Katsumaro’s Rōdōka-shū (Collection of Worker Songs) contains versions of the same May Day song composed by Akita Ujaku and Akamatsu himself. Akamatsu Katsumaro, Rōdōka-shū (Tokyo: 1927), 7-12. 113 Itoya Toshio, Ryūkōka (Kyoto: Sanichi Shobō, 1957), 165. 114 Saitō, 1933 nen o kiku: Senzen Nihon no oto fūkei, 161. 115 The first couplet is as follows: 聞け万国の労働者 – Listen, workers of the world とどろきわたるメーデーの – Roaring May Day 示威者に起る足どりと – Its steps by the demonstrators 未来をつぐる鬨の声 – The battle cry announcing the future. Quoted in Itoya, Ryūkōka, 162.

97 synthesized into coherent unity is not unlike Deleuze and Guattari’s idea of the bird song used in expressive acts of territorialization. Moreover, newspaper articles described how the singing voices of proletarians were joined by “the sounds of freight trains and horns of steamships,” which together resembled a “jazz” concert.116 Jazz music is the de/reterritorialization of numerous music styles and reflects the struggles of Black Americans against white oppression.117 Proletarian music overlaying the noise of production as a form of jazz which swept urban streets disrupted and undermined stratifications of the capitalist and imperial order. Similar to jazz, May Day processions are what

Deleuze and Guattari call a “nomad science,” having no “prepared and (…) homogenized matter,” where improvisation becomes the key to interaction between and among participants and bystanders in order to ward off hostile intrusions.118

Proletarian musicians, like filmmakers and playwrights, were active in May Day celebrations, while still updating and innovating their music. Using various techniques of synthesis to connect materials, music, and bodies, proletarian musicians strived to consolidate proletarian milieus and territories to resist the growing popularity of right-wing worker movements.119

116 Yomiuri Shinbun, May 2, 1933, 1, Evening Edition. Also quoted in Saitō, 1933 nen o kiku: Senzen Nihon no oto fūkei, 165. 117 Eugene Holland, “Studies in Applied Nomadology: Jazz Improvisation and Post-Capitalist Markets,” in Deleuze and Music, ed. Ian Buchanan and Marcel Swiboda (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press), 25-30. 118 Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 369. 119 From 1933, May Day celebrations were divided into right-wing and left-wing groups, which led to the name bunretsu Mēdē (split May Day). The May Day songs of the former were changed to aikoku (patriotic) songs and the gathering location to Yasukuni Shrine to serve the nationalistic character and pledge allegiance with the emperor by shouting bansai toward the imperial palace. Comparing the two, Saitō considers the right-wing May Day to be based on “order” (chitsujo) as the organizers created a list of restrictions for their participants, including prohibition of musical instruments, alcohol, odd clothes, restrictions on flags and songs, and no speeches during the processing. In contrast, left-wing May Day celebrations are characterized by “disorder” (muchitsujo), who like jazz, had no list of restrictions and stressed the importance of improvisation and self-expression by proletarians through music, slogans, songs, and banners. Saitō, 1933 nen o kiku: Senzen Nihon no oto fūkei, 163-175. See also note 51. During the 1920s and early 1930s, the Guomindang and

1.4 Writing Solidarity and May Day Literature

The previous section discussed how proletarian cultural movements used media and art to promote May Day strategies and unifying struggles among proletarians. Sata Ineko’s (1904-1998) short stories, for example, show how proletarians adapt these methods by singing May Day songs. We see this with female factory workers singing May Day Song (Mēdēka) on their way to the dormitory in

“Kanbu jokō no namida” (Tears of the Female Worker Management, 1931), or a worker transcribing a

May Day song from a May Day poster in “Hajimete no keiken kara” (From the First Experience, 1931).

Whether short stories, novellas, poems, screenplays, or even rakugo,120 literature formed the majority of May Day cultural production.

Similar to the proletarian visual and sonic art, proletarian literature focused on how to celebrate May Day powerfully and effectively by consolidating proletarians from various backgrounds into cohesive communities.121 Writers also included in their narratives the expressive matters of May

Day, such as songs, slogans, flags, and pamphlets, that bound proletarians together as they prepared for and celebrated May Day. Furthermore, proletarian May Day literature tried to synthesize, not unlike montage and linkage, the multiplicity of spaces among proletarian worldwide. Writers chose

CCP/left-wing affiliated groups organized May Day and other events in a similar manner, where the former stressed order and nationalism and the latter improvisation and internationalism. 120 See for example, Nagashima Hajime, “Rakugo: ‘Ganbare! Mēdē’,” Senki 3, no 7 (1931): 124-129. 121 Other May Day short stories and plays not mentioned here are: Hase Takuya, “Rōdōsai: Rōdōsha R no hanashi,” Jūgatsu, no 1 (1929): 67-78; Kitamura Hisao, “Gogatsusai (hitomaku),” Bungaku jidai 3, no. 5 (1931): 240-247; Tian Niu, “Shiwei guilai,” Bingliu, no. 4 (1933), pages unknown (likely not extant); Fei Bai, “Laodongjie,” Bingliu, no. 4 (1933), pages unknown (likely not extant); Murata Tatsuo, “Mēde made (Shupurehhikōru),” Puroretaria bungaku, no. 6 (1932): 20-28; Lu Fen, “May Day,” Jianrui, no. 1 (1932): 9-10; Hyōn Min, “Owŏlche-chŏn (sosŏl),” Shin'gyedan, no. 2 (1932): no page numbers.

99 settings other than their homes to introduce their readers to May Day celebrations elsewhere. Feng

Naichao (1901-1983) wrote about May Day in Japan in “Demonstration,”122 Murayama chose Shanghai in “Record of Victory,” and Hayashi set “Prison in May Day” in New York. In addition to location, writers narrated May Day from various perspectives to resonate with differing proletarian experiences. Besides Sata’s texts focusing on female factory workers, stories such as Onikoshima

Takeshi’s (dates unknown) “Rōdōsai no gaki-domo” (May Day of Damn Kids)123 depict how children learn about and participate in May Day, and Song Yŏng’s (1903-1977) “Uridŭl ŭi sarang” (Our Love)124 portrays colonial workers who were involved in May Day. Yŏng’s “Uridŭl ŭi sarang” is also interesting as, together with Nakamura Go’ichirō’s (dates unknown) short story “Gogatsusai” (May Day), it connects proletarian (heterosexual) love with May Day, while highlighting the problematics of proletarian gender inequality (see Chapter 3). Others, such as Gong Binglu’s (1908-1955) “Wuyue yiri”

(May First), and Kunihara Tatsuo’s (dates unknown) “Gogatsusai [Mēdē] Zen’ya” (The Night before

May Day), chose to switch the perspective from the proletarian to the capitalist, whose anxiety about

May Day demonstrations is palpable.125 Kunihara’s story is particularly intriguing as it depicts a capitalist who dreams he has changed bodies with a proletarian and in doing so experiences strict factory time and physical fatigue. Lastly, writers also experimented with cuts and linkages in their texts in order to bond various spacetimes. Yamada Seizaburō (1896-1987) for instance, in his novella

122 Feng Naichao, “Demonstration” (English title in original), Wenhua pipan, no. 2 (1928): 115-126. 123 Onikoshima Takeshi, “Rōdōsai no gaki-domo,” Wakakusa 7, no. 5 (1931): 128-131. 124 Song Yŏng, “Uridŭl ŭi sarang,” Chosŏn chi kwang, no. 1 (1929): For a discussion of this story, see Nikki Floyd, “Bridging the Colonial Divide Japanese-Korean Solidarity in the International Proletarian Literature Movement” (PhD diss. Yale University, 2011), 108-144. 125 Gong Binglu, “Wuyue yiri,” Dazhong Wenyi. 2, no. 5-6 (1930): 1354-1364, and Kunihara Tatsuo, “Gogatsusai [Mēdē] Zenya,” Shinkō Bungaku, no. 21 (1930): 22-40.

100

“Gogatsusai zengo” (Around May Day), wove three mini-stories into a larger narrative, which depicts three singular experiences of the same May Day. Taken together, these stories formed pieces of an infinite puzzle of proletarian life.126 Among these May Day stories, Murayama’s Record of Victory stands out for its meticulous description of the preparation and execution of a successful May Day based on the strength of proletariat through relations of solidarity.

Striking Shanghai: May Day and Murayama Tomoyoshi’s Record of Victory

After the armed May Day (busō mēdē) across Japan in 1930, which led to the murder of a police officer in Kawasaki and which was followed by criticism among various communist cells, the underground communist party in Japan decided to introduce a different strategy named “dispersed

May Day” (bunsan mēdē).127 The dispersed May Day tactics consisted of groups who would choose a secret location across cities or towns to gather, and then start an unannounced demonstration. This was inspired by tactics seen in colonial Korea and China proper.128 Essential to these tactics was that

126 In addition to literary texts, proletarian writers also published articles about their participation in May Day. See for example, Maedakō Hiroichirō, “Aru Mēdē,” in Akkan to Fūkei (Tokyo: Kaizōsha, 1929), 21-30; Ōtori Shōji, Matsumoto Junzō, and Ogawa Yūsaburō, “Mēdē zakki,” Daicihi sensen 1, no. 2 (1928): 32-37; Shimura Iwao, “Mēdē ni sanka shite,” Shūdan 2, no. 5 (1931): 17-22; Kurahara Korehito, “Mosukuwa no gogatsusai,” Bungei shijō 3, no. 5 (1927): 2-4. 127 For more on the armed May Day (busō mēdē) see, Itoya, Mēdē no hanashi, 94-96. Proletarian movements in Japan published books on strike strategies, including scattered strikes. See for example Sutoraiki senjutsu senryaku, ed. and trans. Intanashonaru (Tokyo: Senkisha, 1930) and the translation of Bolshevik revolutionary Solomon Lozovsky (1876-1952) by Hatano Toshio, Sutoraiki senjutsu (Tokyo: Taishūkōronsha, 1931). 128 The China Problem Research Group (Chūgoku mondai kenkyū) in Japan published an article about the 1930 May Day in Shanghai, resembling the story of Murayama’s Record of Victory. This article stressed the tension between the proletarian groups versus the Guomindang and how the latter tries to transform May Day into a more national holiday without strikes. Further, the article explains all the preparations and strategies used for May Day by the proletarian groups. The article states at the end, “We have to hold the hands of the Chinese proletariat firmly and move to forward to the bitter end,” expressing their solidarity and urging the Japanese proletariat May Day as an international day of struggle for the proletariat. See Chūgoku mondai kenkyū, “Sakunen no mēdē kara…. Shanhai no mēdē tōsō,” Puroretaria kagaku 3, no. 5 (1931): 35-45. Puroretaria kagaku was not the only Japanese-language proletarian journal writing about May Day in Shanghai. See for example, Nakayama Kōtarō, “Kyonen no Shanhai no mēdē,” Nyonin geijutsu 4, no. 5 (1931): 16-19.

101 the groups change location and start another demonstration before the police appeared, not unlike the guerilla performances of the mobile theater. The underground communist party wanted to inform as many proletarians as possible about this new strategy. They asked Murayama Tomoyoshi to write a play for the upcoming 1931 May Day Left-wing Theater 20th commemoration performance, which dealt with the new strategy used in the successful, dispersed, May Day in Shanghai (Fig. 1.15).129

Among many Japanese proletarian and bourgeois writers, China, and especially Shanghai, was a popular topic for their stories as discussed elsewhere.130 While bourgeois writers were fascinated by

Shanghai’s cosmopolitism and exhilarating nightlife, proletarian writers strived to write about the exploitation by imperialists and capitalists, both domestic and foreign. They also wrote about the revolutionary potential present in the city and beyond. Immediately after the Manchurian Incident in

1931, proletarian activists Hua Di (Ye Yiqun, 1911-1966) and Ren Jun (Lu Qixin, 1909-2003) interviewed

129 On May 21, 1930, three police officers visited Murayama Tomoyoshi’s house to ask him to come to the police office. They arrested him on charges of breaking the Peace Preservation Law and put him in detention followed by prison for a period of seven months. At that time, Murayama was a prominent member of various proletarian cultural movements, and he was one of the few all-rounders among members focusing on theater, film, stage design, and fiction. Murayama Tomoyoshi, Engekiteki jijoden Vol. 3 (Tokyo: Tōhō Shuppansha, 1974), 415. Murayama was an obvious choice as his previous plays were among the most successful proletarian plays, attracting thousands of people. His play Bōryoku Danki (A Record of a Group of Thugs), performed under the title Zensen (The Whole Line) due to censorship and previously published in the prominent proletarian journal Senki, was a tremendous success and prominent proletarian critics such as Kurahara Korehito described this play as having reached “the highest level among proletarian plays so far.” His collogue playwriter Kubo Sakae praised this work as “Murayama’s best work and an outstanding work of proletarian literature.” Murayama, Engekiteki jijoden Vol. 3, 499-501. When the story was published as a book in the series Nihon puroretaria kessakushū dai 5 kan (A Collection of Japanese Proletarian Masterpieces Volume 5) in 1930, it went through thirty versions within a month. The play deals with the “2.7 Can-an” incident in China proper in 1923, when hundreds of striking railroad workers were massacred by the Beiyang government. With the help of the China expert Fujieda Takeo, Murayama was able to depict the strike in detail as well as connecting it with his critique of Japanese imperial aggression in Korea and mainland China. This work together with Record of Victory were often called “sister works” (shimai-hen) due to the shared content. For more on Fujieda’s role in helping Murayama and a historical background of Murayama’s story Bōryokudanki, see Kamogawa Satomi, “Murayama Tomoyoshi ‘Bōryokudanki’ no rekishiteki igi: Sakushu no kōzō to puroretariāto no keishō,” Shakai bungaku, vol. 39 (2014): 129-141. 130 Edwin Michielsen, “The Marxists Sherlock Holmes: Itō Ken and the Proletarian Detective in Shanghai,” The Asia-Pacific Journal Japan Focus 17, no. 6 (2018): 1-16. For a history of late nineteenth and early twentieth century Shanghai, see Meng Yue, Shanghai and the Edges of Empires (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006).

102

Akita Ujaku (1883-1962), Kubokawa (Sata) Ineko, Fujieda Takeo (1903-1985), and Murayama

Tomoyoshi, whose works were translated and read in China (Fig. 1.16).131 By interviewing proletarian intellectuals and artists, Hua and Ren aimed to show that not all Japanese were their enemy and that many Japanese proletarian writers opposed the Japanese invasion in Manchuria.132 In the interview with Murayama, Hua Di asked him why he wrote two works (Bōryoku Danki and Shōri no Kiroku) about China. Murayama answered:

The first reason is because of the content of the Chinese factory workers and farmers’ struggles, the matters are very complicated, and all very heroic; the second reason is that there are so many similarities between China and Japan, that taking the Chinese events as the subject matter will generate to the Japanese proletarian masses feelings of immediate concern and of internationalism at the same time.

第一因為中國工農鬥爭的內容，事件都很複雜，而且都是英雄底；第二中日兩國的共同之點很多，以中國的事件為題材，可使日本勞動大眾同時發生切身底和國際的情感。133

Murayama stressed the cross-spatial relations between proletarians beyond national borders.

Moreover, he argued that certain subject matter of unique events can be made visible with the help of art and be made legible through writing to distant audiences. This could bring disparate proletarian milieus together into a shared consciousness, not unlike the methods of montage and linkage

131 Murayama was well-known in China and several of his works were translated in Chinese. See for example his introduction in Chinese Hua Di, “Guowai zuojia 5: Cunshan Zhiyi pingchuan,” Wenyi xinwen, no. 39 (1932): 3. Moreover, Murayama also engaged with proletarian artists from Korea. For more on these interactions, see Tonomura Masaru, “Murayama Tomoyoshi to Chōsen,” available online at http://www.sumquick.com/tonomura/note/200510/200510_03.html (accessed on 2019-11-27). 132 Fujieda was the China critic working for the “China Problem Research Group” (Chūgoku mondai kenkyū), which was part of the Proletarian Science Research Institute (Puroretaria kagaku kenkyujo). He had studied in China and translated works from prominent proletarian members active in China proper. For more on Fujieda Takeo, see Mitsuishi Zenkichi, “Kindai Nihon to Chūgoku (35): Yamakawa Hitoshi to Fujieda Takeo,” Asahi Jānaru 14, no. 42 (1972): 36-43. 133 Hua Di, “Cunshan Zhiyi Riben wenyijia fangwen: Duoyi Zhongguo shijian wei xiju ticai de,” Wenyi xinwen, no. 35 (1932), 3. Also published in the Chinese translation of Murayama’s Saisho no Yōroppa no hata (The Flag of the First Europe) as Cunshan Zhiyi [Murayama Tomoyoshi], Zuichu de Ouluoba zhi qi, trans. Yuan Shu, (Shanghai: Hufeng Shuju Chuban, 1931), 9-10. During the time of writing his China plays, Murayama had not visited China, but only stayed twice in Shanghai for a few days on his way to Europe and back to Japan. For a discussion of these interviews see Kotani Ichirō, 1930 nendai Chūgokujin Nihon ryūgakusei bungaku, geijutsu undōshi (Tokyo: Kyūko Shoin), 126-155.

103 discussed above. Murayama’s choice of writing a “record” (kiroku) of the May Day victory in Shanghai functioned as a mnemonic device, which increased common awareness and shared memories among

East Asian proletarians.

Divided over three acts and seven scenes and starting on April 19, 1930, the play Record of

Victory tells the story of proletarian couple Huang Aliu (Kō Aroku) and Zheng Guorui (Tei Kokuzui) who live in the workers’ district Zhabei, Shanghai. Aliu works as a train driver for the Shanghai Train

Company and acts as the head of a Zhabei Picket Faction, and Zheng is a conductor for a bus company and the captain of the New Park Depot Faction (Bunkai shinkōen shako). The two are actively involved in organizing and preparing for May Day, communicating with leaders of various unions and labor sectors as well as delegating tasks, such as handing out flyers and informing proletarians about the upcoming strikes. The first half of the play covers the organization of May Day while the second half deals with the execution of May Day strikes. Each scene of the play is set on a particular time before, during, or after May Day. Murayama aimed to show a full account of all that is involved surrounding May Day; the preparation, the actual strike, and the afterlife of May Day.

Ultimately, similar to artistic methods of montage and linkage seen in May Day artifacts, Murayama laid out a diagram of how to assemble distant struggles among proletarians into a shared agenda. This corresponds to the dispersed groups of demonstrators consolidated under the banner of May Day.

Aliu unfolds proletarian strategies for upcoming May Day celebrations in meetings and discussion with fellow proletarians. He meets his brother Awu, who has fled their rural hometown because of violent confrontations between GMD and CCP forces, and explains the current labor disputes to him. Murayama tactfully adds Awu to the cast of characters, allowing him to highlight the

104 fact that capitalist production is not only limited to urban Shanghai, but also exists in enmeshed rural areas. While rural areas are not directly relevant to the story, it shows how various proletarian milieus are interconnected by capitalist relations and creates an extradiegetic message of proletarian solidarity centered around shared struggles. Murayama further expands the connection between shared struggles by referencing proletarian struggles worldwide throughout the story. Similar to demands seen worldwide, Aliu tells his brother that rural workers demand better payment and working hours, termination of repression, and financial support for living standards.134 In order to enforce their demands, the plan to disrupt the working day refrains through numerous strikes stopping everything “from the ferries at Huangpu River to the sampan boats.”135

Aliu organizes a meeting with six members of the Zhabei Picket Faction of the Shanghai Labor

Union at his home eleven days before May Day. They gather to discuss the next day’s “picket examination” (kyūsatsutai ken’etsu). The Zhabei Picket Faction is one of many factions across

Shanghai. This reflects numerous proletarian urban milieus which consolidate heterogeneous components into a synthesized alliance. Different from hierarchal party politics and union leadership, and despite the vertical structure of the organizations on paper, these factions act rather autonomously without interference from above in the play. Together they aim to survey and map locations in Shanghai in order to create cartographies of capitalist territories and to decide where to infiltrate during May Day. Aliu describes the plan for the Zhabei picket examination as follows:

Aliu. Next, the arrangements of the picket for tomorrow. By 10 a.m. each district team will gather at the meeting place. The first district team led by team leader Mr. Guo will gather next to the farm of the milk company on

134 Murayama Tomoyoshi, Shōri no kiroku (Tokyo: Naigaisha, 1931). Reprinted as Murayama Tomoyoshi, Shōri no kiroku (Tokyo: Yumani Shobō, 2004), 18. 135 Ibid., 19.

105

Gonghexin Road. (Guo nods). The second district team led by team leader Mr. Dai will gather behind the Japanese cemetery. (Dai nods) The third district team led by Mr. Shen will gather near the north entrance of New Park. (Shen nods.) And then, at your discretion your teams will arrive at the venue by noon. The venue is the square behind Donghua Textile Factory in Yangshupu. Until the arrival, no one other than the team leaders should know the location of the venue. Messenger team leader Mr. Xiong, relief team leader Mr. Feng, and scouting team leader Mr. Hu will gather their members directly at the venue by noon. Okay? (Xiong, Feng, and Hu nod.) Everyone should carry a prescribed red little flag without showing it. Wear as discrete clothes as possible. Understood? When the picket is over, we disperse immediately and [each of us] go home. Each team leader will investigate at their discretion their team members. At 4 p.m. report to me, as I will be on the north shore of the pond behind the Japanese elementary school on North Sichuan Road—you know the pond, right? Understood? (All six nod). Well, that’s all.

黄阿六。そこで次に明日の糾察隊検閲の段取りだ。午前正十時迄に各地区分隊毎に集合場所へ集まる。第一地区分隊は分隊長郭君が共和新路のミルク会社の牧場の横に集まる。（郭うなづく。）第二地区分隊は分隊長戴君が日本人墓地裏に集める。（戴うなづく）第三地区分隊は分隊長沈君が新公園の北出入口附近に集める。（沈うなづく。）そして適宜の方法で正午迄に会場に到着する。会場は楊樹浦の東華紗廠の裏の広場だ。この会場は到着迄分隊長以外の人間に知らせちやアならねえ。伝令隊長の熊君と救護隊長の馮君と偵察隊長の胡君は正午迄に隊員をぢかに会場に集める。いゝな。（熊、馮、胡うなづく。）みんな規定の赤の小旗をかくして持つ。服装は出来るだけ眼につかぬやうにな服装する。わかつたな。検閲が終わったらすぐに解散して夫々帰つてしまふ。各分隊長は適宜な方法で自分の分隊の人員をしらべて、午後四時北四川路の日本小学校の裏に池があるな、あれの北の端の岸にゐる俺に報告する。わかつたな。（六人はうなづく。）ぢや、それだけだ。136

The many references to locations in Aliu’s strategy (senryaku senjutsu) form a mental map of the

Zhabei vicinity. Close to Hongkou district, where many Japanese immigrants and companies had settled, the abundance of proper nouns referring to the Japanese community reveals the dominance of Japanese capital, which Murayama does not eschew mentioning.137 Similar to the May Day routes mentioned in the previous section, Aliu choses public spaces, such as squares and parks, as entry points to infiltrate capitalist territory and explore potential threats. As the picket examination is

136 Ibid., 24. 137 Murayama was not the only proletarian writer in Japan who wrote about capitalist and imperialist exploitation in China. See for example, Maedakō Hiroichirō’s Shina (China, 1930) and Shina kara te wo hike (Get Your Hands off of China, 1930), Kuroshima Denji‘s Busō seru shigai (Militarized Streets, 1930), and Satomura Kinzō’s “Heiran” (War Disturbances, 1930).

106 meant to perlustrate the territory, Aliu urges the members to remain invisible and to use a small red flag to communicate, which is convenient for traversing significant distances without using words.

The picket examination functioned as the ultimate preparation for the May Day strikes, much different from the conventional May Day in that it was impossible because of restrictions from authorities.

Meanwhile, Aliu’s wife Guorui assembles the captains of bus, train, national railways, trolleybus, and transportation organizations to discuss the possibility of a general strike among all transport. This strike was planned to commence on May Day and aimed to seriously damage the flows of capitalist production. Consolidating the various labor units (shokuba tan’i), the spokesperson explains their approach as follows: “the May Day demonstration is the climax of the persistent class struggle and must be a unified climax from the bottom” that results in “seizing hegemony.”138 In order to seize hegemony, agitators must enter the masses and convince (unorganized) workers to join the strike. The spokesperson hangs a sheet of paper on the wall to map their strategy and divides

Shanghai into four areas based on compass directions. Different from previous May Days, the spokesperson explains, is that each area will have a special May Day preparation committee, which is useful “to connect the [general] strike and May Day” (kondo no suto wa zenbu, mēdē ni musubitsukete).139 In addition, the spokesperson emphasizes the need to mobilize the masses for the strikes and demonstrations in order to create an alliance of proletarians. To achieve a mass mobilization, he plans to organize labor units, such as depot groups (shako-han) and factory groups

138 Murayama Tomoyoshi, Shōri no kiroku, 31-32. 139 Ibid., 35.

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(kōjō-han). Their strategy displays how the proletarian organization of May Day codified singular entities. It selected various components, which were not naturally connected nor related, and assembled “all kinds of milieus [which] slide in relation to one another, over one another.140 As a result, by codifying “spacetime constituted by periodic repetition,” such as the work day, exterior, interior, and annexed milieus are formed.

Proletarian milieus, however, always risk dissolving because they are “open to chaos, which threatens them with exhaustion or intrusion.”141 Proletarian rhythms help to coordinate and communicate between milieus. Rhythms, such as picket examinations and meetings held by proletarians, function as temporal variations within milieus. These variations allow proletarians to create connections within and between milieus as well as to pass through various milieus. While rhythms are contingent encounters dependent on events and environment, they are vital for milieus to exist and subsist. How then is it possible to forge and maintain such milieus and rhythms when they are threatened by intruders, that is, the benefactors of proletarian exploitation?

Throughout the play, capitalists, police, and politicians led by the municipal council

(kōbukyoku) form their own milieus and rhythms that intrude and attack proletarian milieus. The play switches its perspective from proletarians to the “enemy” (teki) and is linked between acts to foreground the struggle over territory. The adversary camp uses various methods to infiltrate and threaten proletarian milieus. Corrupt union leaders (darakan) and workplace spies (shokuba supai) spread rumors vilifying captains, such as Aliu or Guorui, provide information to the opponent about

140 Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 313. 141 Ibid.

108 planned strikes, and reveal those involved in the strike organization.142 For example, one of the female conductors was marked as a “activist element” (katsudōteki na bunshi) by Spy Liu. He threatens her with dismissal from work in order to stop her activism, which would result in the loss of income needed to take care of her child. This threat reveals the conductor’s double burden – wage earning and unwaged childrearing, which is discussed in greater detail in Chapter 3.143 Similarly, the municipal council also learns about Aliu’s activities and reports him.144 Further, the (GMD) government orders right-wing labor unions (uyoku kumi’ai) to take a day off so that workers will not participate in the

May Day strikes,145 and distributes flyers to recruit new workers to replace striking workers. The unemployed Awu receives a flyer and plans to apply for a job, creating tension between him and his brother Aliu. These nefarious tactics exacerbate tensions which arise from encounters between oppositional milieus meant to access, disrupt, and destroy proletarian milieus and rhythms.

For these proletarian milieus and rhythms to become territorialized and create a territory, ritornellos mark (parts of) milieus with sounds, colors, gestures, and objects and rhythms with expressivity. Emerging and extracting snippets from proletarian milieus and rhythms, ritornellos express the spatio-temporality of such organizations and passages. They render visible, sonorous, and legible the codification of chaos in art. In Record of Victory, it becomes evident how proletarians, through art, consolidate alliances and to protect milieus from external threats.

142 Murayama Tomoyoshi, Shōri no kiroku, 16-17. 143 Ibid., 33. 144 Ibid., 39. 145 Ibid., 61.

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Proletarians use various tools to express milieus - flyers, flags, songs, and choreography, to acknowledging that art generates rhythms and makes milieus expressive. Songs, for example, play a crucial role. In the opening of the play, six-year-old Zhu’er (Shuji), the grandson of grandmother Li

Chao, a neighbor of Aliu and Guorui, is introduced as a member of the proletarian pioneers and prepares himself for a pioneers’ demonstration. At first, Zhu’er refuses to go because he feels sad –

Guorui suspects he had a fight with a friend – but he is quick to change his mood by singing a pioneer’s song.146 The song has a strong international character stressing “the little comrades of the world.” This song teaches children not to think of (racial) national boundaries as “enemy” territories,

146 The Chinese translation was provided by Fujieda Takeo. Proletarian media frequently highlighted child participants in May Day demonstrations. For example, the journal Shōnen Senki (Children’s Battle Flag) published an interview with a proletarian child describing the experience of May Day as follows: “We participated in May Day on May First. Carrying red flags and singing the Listen, Workers of the World, we walked toward Shinbashi where police showed up and tried to take our red flags. Pioneers linked their arms with each other to avoid our flag being taken. Eventually, the stick snapped, and the flag was taken. Because it was so troublesome, the old man beside us was arrested. We then took the train to Ueno and watched everyone’s demonstration. After that we went home.” Like Zhu’er, children follow similar rituals as adults singing songs, carrying flags, and using each other’s bodies to form a wall against the police. Quoted in Higuchi Eiko. "Shōwa shoki no puroretaria dōyō ni miru kaikyū tōsō to shite no kodomo no uta," Kankyō to keiei: Shizuoka sangyō daigaku ronshū 22, no. 2 (2016): 128. Shōnen senki not only focused on Japanese children in Japan proper, but also published many articles on Korean children in Japan proper and in colonial Korea “overcoming ethnic and national [boundaries] connecting the children through class,” resembling the lyrics of the song Zhu’er sings. As mentioned earlier, proletarians could not celebrate May Day on the peninsula and used instead Children’s Day (Ŏrini nal) as a venue to demonstrate using similar May Day rituals. The Japanese children were impressed by the courage and vigor of the Korean children on the peninsula. In a letter sent by worker children in Tokyo, they emphasize that “[b]cause all the workers and farmers in the world are brothers, and all the capitalists and landowners in the world are our enemies, we have to hold the hands of our Korean and Chinese brothers firmly.” Moreover, they praised the demonstrating Korean youth on Children’s day for their fearlessness of the police “making May Day look like a funeral.” Ōtake Kiyomi states that the exchange between proletarian movements in Japan and Korea as discussed above was unique and exceptional for its time and was only possible due to the feeling of “fellowship” and “solidarity” among. All quotes from Ōtake Kiyomi, Shokuminchi Chōsen to jidō bunka: Kindai Nikkan jidō bunka bungaku kankeishi kenkyū (Tokyo: Shakai Hyōronsha, 2008), 237, 241, 248. Besides Shōnen senki, proletarian children’s writers, such as Makimoto Kusurō (1898-1956), also invested in proletarian solidarity among East Asian children with his publication Akai hata: puroretaria dōyōshū (Red Flag: Collection of Proletarian Children’s Songs, 1930) which contained the word “proletarian” both in Japanese and Korean on the cover as well as one of his songs translated by proletarian cultural critic Im Hwa (1908-1953). For more on children’s literature and Korean-Japan exchange see, Samuel Perry, Recasting Red Culture in Proletarian Japan Childhood, Korea, and the Historical Avant-garde, (Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press, 2014), 44-47; and Dafna Zur, Figuring Korean Futures: Children’s Literature in Modern Korea (Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 2017), 102-105.

110 but instead focuses on class solidarity and the fight between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat. The song calms Zhu’er, and expresses his own self in relation to others by rendering sonorous “beginnings of order in chaos” that articulates a shared milieu.147 In doing so, for Zhu’er the song becomes a territorial marker, consolidating himself with a proletarian rhythmic milieu. On a textual level, the consolidation happens between the song, which is printed in Japanese, but is followed by a Chinese translation (Fig. 1.17). Similarly, the picket examination concludes with a mass gathering of various proletarian milieus – parties, alliances, unions, anti-imperialist movements, Red Aid Society, and student groups (among others) – at the square behind Donghua Textile Factory. Numerous red communist flags unite all proletarian constituents, and together they sing the Internationale. Singing songs collectively marks, much like Zhu’er’s singing, a territory on a macro-scale and expresses “the relation of the territory they draw to the interior milieu of impulses and exterior milieu of circumstances.”148 It creates an equilibrium between disparate components through expression. It also codifies a milieu from which a territory is delineated and distributed that will belong to the proletarians it has produced, creating a distance between the proletariat and the “enemy.”

In scene four, before the start of the third and final act, four intertitles are lowered onto the stage as a countdown towards May Day.

Intertitle 1: April 27, the transportation industries in all of Shanghai have started the general strike. Intertitle 2: Same day, the Honey textile factory as first, 6 textile factories are on strike. Intertitle 3: A week of expanding the strike. Intertitle 4: And then, May Day has come!!! 149

タイトル。1「四月二十七日、全上海の交通産業はいよ〳〵ゼネ・ストに這入つた。」

147 Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 311. 148 Ibid., 319. 149 Murayama Tomoyoshi, Shōri no kiroku, 64-65.

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タイトル。2「同日、蜜蜂紡績工場を先頭に六つの紡績工場がストに這入つた。」タイトル。3「ストの拡大の一週間――」タイトル。4「そしてメーデーは来た!!!」

The intertitles show dispersed strikes preceding May Day which are happening at various moments and different locations across Shanghai. They seriously disrupt the chronological and metric time of continuously clicking factory clocks. Forming a web of interconnected and expanding (kakudai) nodes, striking workers sabotage the perpetuated commodity production. They replace the homogenous and articulated time of capitalism with the spasmodic and absorbing time of a general strike. Building up the climax through successive intertitles, the stage descriptions tell the reader how

“a great number of people” (ōzei no ningen), including the audience, sing the May Day song in “chorus”

(gasshō) from pianissimo and gradually changing into fortissimo.150 Murayama uses the ritornello not only on stage, but also invites spectators to become active participants in, and creators of, expressive matters. Breaking the Brechtian fourth wall, the play blurs the borders between art and quotidian life, and between author (producer) and audience (consumer). In doing so, the play allows proletarians to experiment with methods designed to express proletarian rhythmic milieus; markers of territory emerge and are needed to deterritorialize capitalist refrains such as the working day.

Thus far, the construction of proletarian milieus and rhythms as well as the role of ritornellos has been discussed. Now, ritornellos as producers of territory will be examined as acts of

(de)territorialization, found in the celebration of May Day. In the second half of the play, proletarians commence May Day activities, aiming to infiltrate capitalist territory and mark it as their own. In addition to songs, proletarians use speeches (enzetsu) (flags, leaflets, firecrackers) and various

150 Ibid., 65.

112 corporeal movements associated with strikes and demonstrations (marches, protests) to demarcate their presence.

Different from many May Day stories and plays, Record of Victory describes the celebration from the perspective of its nemesis. The first scene of the third act takes place in the deputy-inspector general’s room (fukusōkanshitsu) of the municipal council. Four members of the city council – each representing an imperial power (Japan, England, France, and Italy) – gather to follow May Day events.

Throughout the scene, a telephone operator continuously communicates with informants on the ground to brief the city council on the latest events. By switching perspectives, the scene puts the focus on the loss of (“enemy”) territory, and amplifies the impact of the dispersed demonstrations.

Various proletarian groups across Shanghai, from postal workers to soldiers, join processions, start strikes, or clash with the police. What follows is a neurotic back and forth between the telephonist and informants, who report all the May Day activities. The interruptive information coming from informants’ constant calling causes fear and unease among the capitalists and politicians and amplifies the strength of the proletariat. A fragmentation of slogans, the continuous addition of groups or companies who are participating in the strikes, and May Day speeches being reported by the informant suggest that workers are omnipresent in Shanghai. They are consolidating their power over public spaces, the adversary’s territory. This is partially done by space markers (street names and landmarks - all well-known spots of Shanghai) interlinking a network between single nodes and unifying striking proletarians throughout the city.

An intertitle states that a map of Shanghai and a red flag in front of Yong’an Company at

Nanjing Road is projected on a screen while dimming the lights. Following the telephone operator’s

113 report, a red line is drawn from the red flag to Zhejiang Road and Laolabo Road while a clock on stage changes time and the May Day song is heard in the background. Like the proletarian atlas discussed in the introduction, Shanghai turns red, which refers to proletarians symbolized as lines infiltrating

“enemy” territory.151 Eventually, the red lines across Shanghai solidify in a red star and “the territory groups all the forces of the different milieus together in a single sheaf.”152 Scattered proletarians managed to connect their lines as passages between milieus, increasing the intensity of their deterritorializations as they conquer capitalist-dominated space.

The day after May Day, Awu and Aliu reflect on the grouping of proletarian milieus.

Acknowledging the international importance of May Day for the worldwide proletariat, Awu reads a manifesto (geki) printed with drawings that was circulated in preparation for May Day.

Rise! Execute the general strike! Tens of thousands of textile workers under imperialism in the X [east] and hundreds of thousands of textile workers under imperialism in the west are already on strike. These strikes together with the recent unemployment struggles of American and German proletarians tells that the world proletariat has already risen up for the decisive battle against XX[imperial]ist domination. Suppressed by the iron shackles of XX[imperial]ism, Chinese proletarians, and especially Shanghainese proletarians are recently suffering all kinds of the same XX oppression and exploitation like wage cuts, increased labor, layoffs, and the like. Even so, you say it is too early for the Shanghainese proletarians to rise? Rise! Hold hands with the proletarians of countries that have already risen and together XXXXXXXX! For us and them, the goal of [our] struggles is just one! By XX[-ing] XX[imperial]ism, we as well as they will be able to liberate ourselves for the first time. Rise! Shanghainese proletarians! Let’s launch the general strike and liberate ourselves!

起て！ゼネ・ストを遂行しろ！X の帝国主義の紡績労働者数万と、西の帝国主義の紡績労働者数万とは既にストライキに這入ってゐるぞ！これらのストライキ及び最近に於ける米独労働者の失業闘争は、世界のプロレタリアートが既に XX 主義的支配に対する決定的闘争に奮起したことを物語つてゐる。XX 主義の鉄の鎖に押さえつけられた支那の労働者、特に上海の労働者は、最近同じく賃金の引下、労働の強化、首切り等の種々なる XX な圧迫と搾取を受けてゐる。これでも上海の労働者がまだ起ち上るには早いといふのか？起て！既に立つた各国の労働者と手を組んで共々に XXXXXXXX しろ！我等と彼等と、闘争の目標はたゞ一つだ！我等と彼等は XX 主義を

151 Ibid., 68-69. 152 Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 321.

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XX することに依つて始めて自分を解放し得るのだ！起て！上海の労働者諸君！ゼネ・ストを巻き起して自ら解放せよ！153

The manifesto notes the relationship between the strikes of various proletarian milieus in Shanghai and the unemployment struggles of proletarians elsewhere, namely in Germany and America. The interconnections between these proletarian milieus form the assemblage of the “world proletariat” that consolidates a “decisive battle” in the fight with imperial powers east and west of China. In joining hands and unifying distant components, proletarians aim to liberate themselves from the

“iron shackles” (tetsu no kusari) of imperial capitalism.

Celebrating May Day not only extends to “free” proletarians acting in public spaces, but also includes those imprisoned. Chen (first name not given), father of Zhu’er who is incarcerated in the

Hangzhou Prison is literally shackled (tetsu no wa to kusuri) by the GMD, but manages to send a letter to Aliu. Letter writing is one of the methods proletarians used to pass through milieus, which allowed their voices to traverse spatially and is discussed in greater detail in the next chapter. Chen’s presence is made known to the audience sonorously as they listen to his voice (Chen-san to iu koe o kiki) while

Aliu reads his letter, merging two separate spaces. He writes that news of the May Day victory has already reached the inmates of Hangzhou prison. Further, he asks Aliu to contact MORF, the

International Red Aid organization that accesses assistance for imprisoned proletarians worldwide.154

153 Murayama Tomoyoshi, Shōri no kiroku, 81. 154 MOPR (Mezhdunarodnaia Organizatsiia Pomoshchi Revoliutsioneram, literally International Organization for Aid to Revolutionaries, but abbreviated as the International Red Aid), was an organization founded by the Comintern in Moscow in 1922 to help captives considered political prisoners of capitalism. In East Asia, affiliations such as Zhongguo jinanhui (Chinese Society of Aid, later Zhongguo chise geming hujihui (Chinese Society of Red Revolutionary Mutual Aid)) and Nihon sekishoku kyūenkai (Japanese Society of Red Aid).

115

Murayama shows that the celebration of May Day is able to penetrate prison walls, between the milieus of “free” and incarcerated proletarians.

The introduction of this chapter recalls that territories are always open to change, regeneration, or even the risk of being drawn into a “black hole” of its own destruction.155 The proletarians in Record of Victory are well aware of the fragile center linking their semi-stable milieus and thus warn their constituents to be vigilant against “enemy” threats which would undermine their victories. Proletarians gather at the courtyard of Honey Textile Factory on May seventh to hold a disbandment ceremony (kaidanshiki). This disbandment demonstrates the proletariat’s understanding of the need for flexibility as they respond adequately to changes in their environment.

During the ceremony, the vice-president of Honey Textile Factory Yamamoto Shigemaro is forced to read aloud and promises to keep the demands of the striking proletarians in front of a crowd. Many of their demands are designed to ease struggles faced by proletarian women such as provision of a breastfeeding room and time to breastfeed, five days of paid leave for periods, and paid maternity leave of eight weeks before and after childbirth. These struggles will be further explored in Chapter 3.

After Yamamoto’s speech, Aliu throws hundreds of leaflets out of a window which are received by a shouting crowd. The leaflet praises the heroic fights of proletarians on May Day, but also urges proletarians to prepare for their next campaign -protesting war on August 1 (discussed in Chapter 4).156

Murayama’s Record of Victory urges readers to understand how in preparing and celebrating May Day

155 Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 334. 156 In a summary of Record of Victory, Murayama also stresses how the May Day victory prepares for the antiwar demonstration on August First, which shows how proletarian calendar days are interconnected. Murayama Tomoyoshi, “Shōri no kiroku no suji,” Engeki (La Theatre) 3, no. 4 (1931): 50.

116 the production of proletarian territories should never be finished nor final. They require vigilance and flexibility in order to make alloplastic changes and syntheses among milieus possible.

Destroying Prison Walls: Hayashi Fusao and “May Day in Prison”

I was in the middle of the May Day lines. I saw the clear blue sky above the tip of a union flag. I saw the hats reeking of machine oil and swinging under the sky. I saw the hair of the speaker dangling in the wind. I saw the marching crowd who joined their arms together pushing the police. I saw the fighting fists. I saw the flag swaying, tilting, and regaining [position] like a mast in a storm. I saw the collar of my clothes torn apart. I saw myself as a man between X and X of three policemen. And, I saw twenty comrades crammed in a cage of three tatami, and eighty comrades singing with loud voices. Hayashi Fusao, “The Sea and May Day”157

In Murayama’s Record of Victory, we saw Chen informing Aliu in his letter that news of May Day had reached prison. This scene raises the following question: If proletarian festivals are supposed to be celebrated in public spaces to vocalize struggles and show the strength of the proletariat, how can a proletarian in prison, who is cut off and subjected to an intense schedule of discipline, still celebrate

May Day and participate in its rituals? When asked about his experiences in prison in the aforementioned interview, Murayama notes that ruling classes try to sever “linkages” (lianxi) among proletarian activists by locking them in prison. These attempts are ineffective as activists will find ways to continue their activities in prison.158 Neither in his play nor in the interview, does Murayama specify any of these methods, likely to hide it from censors. This is in stark contrast to Hayashi Fusao’s early stories written in the late 1920s. In the final section of this chapter, Hayashi Fusao’s short story

“Rōgoku no gogatsusai” (May Day in Prison), will be examined to show how proletarians in prison

157 Hayashi Fusao, “Umi to gogatsusai to,” Shinchō 26, no. 5 (1929): 35. 158 Hua Di, “Cunshan Zhiyi Riben wenyijia fangwen: Duoyi Zhongguo shijian wei xiju ticai de,” 2.

117 made possible May Day celebrations and created linkages between free and incarcerated proletarians.159

From the 1920s onwards, May Day celebrations spread rapidly across East Asia. However, due to the colonial government’s strict control, it was often impossible to gather and celebrate May Day in large numbers or to hold mass strikes in Korea, Taiwan, and Manchuria.160 Nevertheless, many proletarian organizations, such as those in colonial Korea, held small gatherings or spread agitation leaflets. This transformed public spaces (like parks and squares) temporarily and informed bystanders

159 The publication of the collected short-story volume Rōgoku no gogatusai in 1927 was the beginning of a productive period for Hayashi. Proletarian critic Kurahara Korehito described the volume as “one among the most talented collections the proletarian arts movement had produced so far.” Kurahara Korehito, “‘Rōgoku no gogatsusai,’” Bungei sensen 4, no. 9 (1927): 52-53. In the collected volume, many stories, such as “N-kangokusho chōbatsu nisshi” (The Punishment Journal of the N-prison Official) and “Tessō no hana” (Flower of the Iron [Prison] Window), deal with prison, a central theme in Hayashi’s prewar works. Presumably, Hayashi’s arrest and imprisonment in 1926 for ten months were part of the inspiration for these works. After the arrest of many students involved in shaken (leftist study groups) in Kyoto, the so-called the Kyoto Student League Incident in 1925 and the first case under the new Peace Preservation Law enacted in 1925 to supress leftist activism, the authorities continued their crackdown on these shaken in the rest of Japan as well. Hayashi was a member of a shaken and the Shinjinkai (New Man Society) at the Tokyo Imperial University and was arrested together with four others. Eventually, the court sentenced him to two years in prison based on this and a second arrest together with several other incidents in 1930. Hayashi, however, seems to have enjoyed his period in detention, describing himself as a “jaunty prisoner” (sassō shūjin) who had the pleasure of reading all kinds of books and journals for which he finally had the time, such as the Comitern’s journals International and Imprecor and Marx’s Capital, as well as seeing his short stories written before his arrest being published. For Hayashi’s auto-biographical account of his early works see, Hayashi Fusao, Bungakuteki kaisō (Tokyo: Shinchōsha, 1955). For more on Hayashi’s early works and its relation to prison literature see, Soeda Kenji, Gokuchū no bungakushi: Musō suru kindai Nihon bungaku (Tokyo: Kasama Shoin, 2016), 279-316, and for a critical account of Hayashi’s entire prewar literary career see, Jeff E. Long, Stories from the Samurai Fringe: Hayashi Fusao's Proletarian Short Stories and the Turn to Ultranationalism in Early Showa Japan (Ithaca: Cornell University East Asia Program, 2018). Regarding Hayashi’s first participation in May Day, Long writes that Hayashi “wasted no time in immersing himself in the life of the university student radical. Soon after arriving in Tokyo, he borrowed a suit from a friend and participated in the 1923 May Day rally. Police officers detained him at the Kanda police station, but this detainment just marked the first of his many run-ins with the police as a New Man Society [Shinjinkai] activist.” Ibid., 73. Following Hayashi’s second incarceration, he committed tenkō (political conversion), breaking his relations with proletarian movements and renouncing Marxist thought, a stance he maintained until his death. For more on his tenkō, see besides Long, Mats Karlsson, “An Alternative View of tenkō: Hayashi Fusao's Popular Writings for Shinseinen,” Japanese Studies 32, no. 1 (2012): 61-76. 160 Residing in Harbin, proletarian writer Satomura Kinzō (1902-1945) observed a May Day celebration in the city in the mid-1920s. He wrote that under warlord Zhang Zuolin (1875-1928), proletarian activists were heavily persecuted, which made it impossible to celebrate May Day. Instead, activists distributed May Day pamphlets and hang posters on telephone poles as well as staging short gatherings, but many were arrested. Satomura Kinzō, “Harubin no Mēdē no omoide,” Bunsen 3, no. 5 (1934): 18-19.

118 of current proletarian struggles. By attending either these gatherings or any form of May Day celebration, participants risked arrest. In 1932 proletarian groups organized several May Day-related events and dispersed large numbers of propaganda leaflets across the country which was followed by numerous arrests. In Hamhŭng alone the police arrested more than three hundred proletarians.161

This did not mean the end of May Day in general or for those arrested in particular. Inmates continued to celebrate May Day in prison both on an individual and collective level. There are examples of juvenile delinquents in the Kaesŏng prison engaging in a hunger strike, an individual prisoner writing a support letter with his own blood, and a group of 64 prisoners in Hamhŭng jail singing May Day songs and disrupting the strict prison schedule despite increased prison guard surveillance.162 Elsewhere in East Asia, inmates held similar May Day celebrations in prison.163

In his May Day poem, “Kotae o matsu: Rōgoku no naka kara” (Waiting for the Answer: Inside the Prison, 1931), Kim Yong-je (Kin Ryūsai, 1909-1994) powerfully captures the atmosphere of May Day in prison and shows how prisoners connect to May Day demonstrations outside the prison.164 In a similar vocabulary to Hayashi Fusao’s work, Kim opens with abject images of prison, but immediately

161 Yŏksahak Yŏnʼguso Chiŭm, Meidei 100-yŏn ŭi yŏksa: Uri nŭn kkŏjiji annŭn tŭlpul ro irŏsŏrira, 77. 162 Ibid. 163 See for example “Liuzhichangnei Taizhong tongzhi de douzheng,” in the May Day issue of Dazhong shibao which discusses the May Day demonstrations of Taiwanese prisoners using methods such as the hunger strike. Dazhong shibao, 50-51. Many proletarian writers across East Asia were arrested and imprisoned either by the Japanese imperial government or the Guomindang. Further, proletarian journals in East Asia often published letters from imprisoned comrades or other articles related to prison. 164 Kim Yong-je wrote several poems on May Day and other commemorative days, such as March Independence demonstration, the Russian Revolution, and the Great Kantō Earthquake. The police arrested and imprisoned Kim multiple times. I would like to thank Professor Ōmura Masamu for drawing my attention to Kim Yong-je and his poems. For a detailed history of his life and work see, Ōmura Masamu, Ai suru tairiku yo: Shijin Kin Ryūsai kenkyū, (Tokyo: Yamato Shobō, 1992), and for analysis of his work see, Floyd, “Bridging the Colonial Divide Japanese-Korean Solidarity in the International Proletarian Literature Movement,” 229-286.

119 contrasts these with the hope of the coming May Day celebration. The rituals, such as May Day songs and marches, empower the prisoners to revolt against the prison system. Although the prisoners cannot hold a conventional May Day strike, their weapon becomes the hunger strike and is used to celebrate May Day. Kim emphasizes the relation between the “us” (ore-tachi) who are “inside” (naka) the prison with the “you” (kimi-tachi) who are “outside” (soto) the prison.165 By stressing the interconnectedness of proletarians in prison and the proletariat in the outside world, Kim renders futile attempts by the authorities to remove proletarians from the public space and confine them to cells. Likewise, proletarian writer Kobayashi Takiji (1903-1933) expresses similar ideas in

“Tōseikatsusha” (Life of a Party Member, 1933), which is based on his own experience as a fugitive. He writes: “Our various everyday lives are without change connected to the lives of our comrades inside

[prison]. Even though the inside (uchi) and outside (soto) are different, there is no gap between us when it comes to the struggle against the ruling classes.”166

Published in Bungei Jidai (Literary Age) in 1927 and followed by a translation in Chinese in

1928,167 Hayashi’s story “May Day in Prison,” is presented as a memorandum (shuki), another mnemonic device similar to Murayama’s record. The author of the memorandum is John Kennedy, an

American secretary of a (labor) union, who writes about “a minor incident” in 1914. The “I” (watashi) is

165 Ibid., 201-203. 166 Kobayashi Takiji, “Tōseikatsusha,” in Kobayashi Takiji Zenshū 4 (Tokyo: Shin-Nihon Shuppansha, 1982), 392. After Kobayashi was murdered by the police, a censored version of the story was published under the title “Tenkan jidai” in Chūō Kōron 48, no. 4 and 5 (1933). 167 Lin Boxiu translated Hayashi’s “Rōgoku no gogatsusai” as “Laoyu de wuyueji” in 1928 and he published the translation in Taiyang yuekan (The Sun Monthly). In 1939, Lin published several stories from Rōgoku no gogatsusai including “Rōgoku no gogatsusai” under the title Laoyu de wuyueji. From the late 1920s onwards, many of Hayashi’s were translated into Chinese and proletarian outlets reported several times about Hayashi’s arrest and imprisonment. One of Hayashi’s first stories “E no nai ehon” was even used to study Japanese as “Gaoji riyu jiangzuo: Mei you hua de huace” ed. and trans. Zhang Wojun, Riwen yu riyu 3, no. 1 (1935): 64-69.

120

John Kennedy who writes about his arrest and his time – five months so far – locked up in an isolation cell of S-prison in S-city. What follows are the memories of his childhood and his family and friends.

Eventually, when May Day approaches, the inmates, who are upset that fellow inmates who are ill are being taken away, prepare a hunger strike and disrupt prison time. During his imprisonment,

Kennedy describes how the inmates connect with proletarians outside prison by claiming May First as their memorial day. This is done to destroy the oppressive nature of capitalist time and to constellate a different type of time, the time of the proletariat. This proletarian time is a spatial temporality; it allows time to go beyond the linear chronology of past, present, and future, and instead unfolds a

“resistant time.”168 Anthony Faramelli describes this “resistant time” as “a topological plane folded over onto itself so that different events come into contact with each other. Within this understanding of time, movement becomes multidirectional and the different events and subjects that populate the space become immanent to one another.”169 The prisoners in Hayashi’s story understand time differently from empty prison time - topologically, where disjunctive temporalities and displaced spatialities are drawn into proximity through a unifying platform such as May Day. This destroys divisive prison walls between inside and outside and deterritorializes the capitalist world.

In the beginning of the story, the prison is revealed to the protagonist as a dark and dirty place, made of cold, hard materials such as iron, concrete, cement, and brass; these materials formed bars, shackles, and bricks. The protagonist recalls how he ended up in prison, recalling a cold day a week before Christmas when he was arrested. He is enjoying the sounds, smells, and the light coming

168 Antony Faramelli, Resistance, Revolution, and Fascism: Zapatismo and Assemblage Politics, 13. 169 Ibid.

121 through the window. In the next scene, he finds himself traveling to S-prison in a windowless car and is transformed into “baggage without [an] owner”, losing sense of time. There, the police strip off his clothes and his naked flesh exposed in the first attempt to make him a vulnerable, docile subject.

From here the protagonist will lose his own time and freedom and be subjugated to prison time. He is transformed into a number as no. 142 is stitched onto his prison clothes (goku’i). The wind coming from the window causes him chills. Interactions across windows, in particular his cell window, remains important throughout the story as it is his only way of communicating with the outside world. He learns he is not the only one who has been arrested today as the guard tells him he is number eighteen today. The police presumably have arrested Kennedy for his violation of the

“Wartime Preservation Law” (senji ijirei) and his refusal to participate in America’s war efforts in

Europe during the Great War, displaying his antiwar sentiment.170 Upon the moment he enters the detention prison wearing a number on his clothes, a new life, a new time, seems to start - the time of prison.

The protagonist finds it difficult adjusting to solitary life in isolation with merely five minutes of exercise per day, one shower a week, bad food, and bad air. The only way to ease his mind is to interact with space outside the window from which he can watch the changing of the seasons and listen to the sounds of playing children. Time weighs heavy on him and the daily ennui makes him feel forlorn.171 His perception of time changes in prison and the passing of time feels “oppressively slow” (appakuteki ni osokatta). Without any articulation of metric time, prison time dissolves into an

170 Hayashi Fusao, “Rōgoku no gogatsusai,” in Rōgoku no gogatsusai, (Tokyo: Shun’yōdō, 1927), 34-35. 171 Ibid., 34.

122 indistinguishable, void, repetitiveness and denies the protagonist access to heterogenous temporalities. The only sense of time is a restrictive temporal regime, converging all of time into a singular line of empty time, managed by the prison guards who control the schedule of weekly showers and daily mail.

The protagonist’s experience of time prefigures Hardt’s notion of prison time, which is described as “[t]ime stretches out and collapses in a kind of optical illusion.”172 In his discussion of writer and political activist Jean Genet (1910-1986) regarding prison time, Hardt examines how Genet transforms “empty time” into “new time” or “full time” during Genet’s incarceration. According to

Hardt, prison (confined space), takes away freedom (time) from mortals through punishment; this free time is replaced with prison time. He argues that Genet’s characters end up loving prison not because they desire it, but because it is a starting point which alters one’s world and destiny. This alteration consists of several steps. First, according to Genet, one must accept their exposure of existence rather than searching for “an essence elsewhere.”173 Genet chooses to confront existence as part of the world he inhabits. The first step is followed by what Hardt calls the “power of constitution” which accompanies the exposure of existence. Genet finds this power by activating exposure through things such as love between inmates who meet each other briefly in the corridor. He writes, “the walls crumbled, time turned to dust (…).”174 Genet manages to create ruptures in prison time by actively

172 Michael Hardt, “Prison Time,” Yale French Studies, no. 91 (1997): 65. 173 Ibid., 68. 174 Ibid., 70.

123 replacing it with events experienced by individuals or collectives. However, as Hardt argues, these events are all virtual. He writes:

The event never occurs in time. It ruptures time, defies destiny-time turns to dust. On the other hand, however, the event is the very potential that subtends time itself. It is at once the abolition of time and its condition of possibility. One might call the event transcendent, then, in the sense that it seems to fly above or outside our temporal existence. This transcendence, however, inheres within temporality itself, as its condition of possibility; it is an innermost exteriority. It may be more clear, then, to recognize the event as pure virtuality: real without being actual, ideal without being abstract. The event is the pure immanence of the virtual that is not actualized.175

Referencing Benjamin and Deleuze’s notions on time, Hardt foregrounds how one can regain the flow of time and disentangle it from oppressive systems of control. The final step is to bring the event into a new type of time using emotions, especially those of love, which are “infinite repetition of joyful encounters” creating destiny. It is important for Genet that this constituent power continues, because the moment this force becomes diluted it loses its liberating creativity. Constituent time has the power to create history itself. While similar to prison time, time of history appears to be homogeneous and empty, it actually conceals a possibility to open up; Hardt states that through events “the time of this history is always becoming, always unforeseeable, open to chance, and continuously formed by our desires, our joyful encounters.”176 What is at stake for Genet is maintaining constituent time

(revolutionary time), that is “defined by the continuous movement of a constituent power.” It resists being “closed down in a constituted power – a sovereign identity, a State, a nation – (…) mark[ing the] escape from prison time into a full mode of living,” as a never-ending project to supress the return of prison time.177

175 Ibid., 71. 176 Ibid., 77. 177 Ibid., 78.

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Returning to Hayashi’s story, the first rupture in prison time occurs when a prisoner next to the protagonist’s cell tries to communicate through tapping on the wall. This allows prisoners to bypass the laws of the prison, which prohibits any communication between prisoners. Depending on the intervals between taps, the receiver is able to distinguish which letter is being communicated, which acts as a “message of a comrade” (dōshi no tsūshin). The inmates use this method also to inform each other when someone falls ill; due to the lack of nutritious food and exercise, the number of inmates falling ill increases. Every time the protagonist learns of a sick inmate, he is reminded of the time spent he spent in an isolation hospital as a child. In a small room containing six patients in tiny beds, doctors examined patients, harkening images of prison interrogation. It is the confined space of the isolation hospital that overlaps with the severed space of prison. In both spaces, authorities isolate people from society to discipline and (re)educate them into modern subjects of the nation-state.

Following these reminiscences, the protagonist feels hopeless as he hears knocking on his wall informing him the thirty-eighth inmate has fallen ill.

As time progresses, prison life becomes tougher and tougher for the protagonist. He feels lonely and tries to ease his pain with memories of his family and friends.178 In a brief encounter with other inmates, the protagonist gradually learns how to cope with prison life. His senpai tells him that only the first week is tough, but then prison changes into a villa,179 which resembles Genet’s admonition “to love the prison,” which changes his attitude. He practices seeing prison as a hotel where one rings a bell and is served by the “garçon with sword,” referring guards who visit your room

178 Hayashi Fusao, “Rōgoku no gogatsusai,” 39-41. 179 Ibid., 41.

125 and bring you food three times a day.180 This is a turning point in the story and is the first step of the protagonist rebalancing power between prisoners, guards, and prison laws. This is done in order to sabotage and erode prison time, which is necessary to unfold multidirectional spacetimes and form prisoner milieus.

The protagonist still endures several challenges as he solidifies his belief in the power of his inmates. Prisoner after prisoner becomes ill, which seriously disturbs him and reminds him of his vulnerable position. Soon after, the protagonist takes his weekly bath, which eases his mind again. To access the bath, prisoners must walk pass the isolation cells, which acts as a warning to those who think of breaking the rules. The view from the prison bathroom is a yard full of flowers and vegetables, which are planted by the prisoners themselves. This image is juxtaposed with isolation cells to contrast two different worlds: one of solitary incarceration and one resembling life outside the prison as it used to be. The pleasant image of the prison yard seen through the bathroom window allows the protagonist to transgress life in prison and enter a state of ecstasy (kōkotsu). He forgets he is a prisoner and spontaneously starts to whistle the melody of a famous May Day song, “The Red Flag,” which we later see he learnt on a previous May Day. Unexpectedly, someone responds to his whistling and continues whistling the song.181 For a moment, the prisoners are interacting with each other, using their voices as an expressive tool to briefly transcend prison surveillance. However, as “the antenna- like ears of the guard” are everywhere, he stops whistling and leaves the bath, which is limited to five minutes only. As a consequence, whistling is forbidden in the prison to avoid communication among

180 Ibid. 181 The lyrics are printed in the text, when whistling not spoken but invites readers to sing along.

126 prisoners. From this point, the confidence of the protagonist grows, and he learns more and more ways to bypass the rules of the prison. As he leaves the bath, his eyes fall on a piece of paper floating around the drain like a small boat. He reads the message on the paper written in blood, which resembles the communication from the Korean juvenile in prison mentioned above. The message reads: “MAY DAY; HUNGER STRIKE!”

The protagonist learns through the note that the inmates have started preparations for May

Day. The same evening, he is eager to confirm with his neighbor through tapping on the wall of his cell. Filled with excitement, the protagonist’s perception of prison and the experience of his surroundings is completely changed. The prison is not a scary and dark space anymore, but instead is bright and filled with nice scent. The confined space has changed to a site of potential struggle.

A letter from afar has arrived. The beacon from the watchtower has ripped apart the dark mountain ridge at the border. The hearts of 48 comrades penetrate the wall, escape the surveillance window, and pass through the gutter of the shower room. [Their hearts] are joined together for one purpose.

遠い便りが着いたのだ。望楼の烽火が、国境の山嶺の暗を裂いて挙げられたのだ。四十八名の同志の心が、壁を貫き、監視窓を抜け、浴房の小溝をくぐって、一つの目的のために結びついたのだ！182

Through the belief that inmates have the power to intervene in the repetitious prison schedule they

“break through the walls of prison.” Using their voices and written messages, the inmates find another way to bypass the prison regime. In conjunction with the May Day strike, the prisoners couple their current struggle with images of past struggles. The past struggles are a driving force for the living

182 Hayashi Fusao, “Rōgoku no gogatsusai,” 46.

127 present to ignite their own struggle. The prisoners have familiarized themselves with the ceremony of

May Day in previous years, enabling them to re-enact May Day in any space or time.183

The next day, the protagonist himself becomes sick. He receives medicine wrapped in paper from the doctor, but disposes of it in a toilet and instead uses the paper to write on. He cuts his gums for blood, folds two pieces of paper in the shape of little boats and uses the straw from a broom to write: “MAY DAY; HUNGER STRIKE!” (English in original). He tears the rest of the paper into six pieces, cutting out the same message with his fingernail and sticks it with spit in the dustbin to spread the message. He holds the dustbin in front of the “meal window” (shokuji mado), which opens three times a day, to show the message stuck to the other inmates. The protagonist has learned how to circumvent prison surveillance. He realizes that even though “[t]he walls are thick” and “[t]he surveillance (kanshi) is strict” “the sounds of my nails are in the walls. (…) And I have my dustbin message board.”184 The protagonist strives to deterritorialize prison codes. He uses the objects at hand and his body to create expressive matters that sift through passages, such as windows or the gutter in the shower room. In doing so, the protagonist decodifies the prison, delineating an exterior space as a milieu where inmates connect and form into a cohesive resistance against the prison regime.

183 In her reading of proletarian writer Hu Lanqi’s Zai deguo nülao zhong (In a German Women’s Prison, 1937), Anup Grewal locates a similar strategy used by the protagonist to rupture prison time, in which “the women’s prison becomes a space of resistance against the fascist regime’s definition of womanhood as excluded from the political realm but in service to the national community based on a purely racial solidarity.” Anup Grewal, “A Revolutionary Women’s Culture: Rewriting Femininity and Women’s Experience in China, 1926-1949,” (PhD diss., The University of Chicago, 2012), 94. 184 Hayashi Fusao, “Rōgoku no gogatsusai,” 48.

128

The closer they get to May Day the more the prisoners experience of time changes from empty prison time to proletarian time. The protagonist describes this spatio-temporal transformation as follows:

The window is iron. But, it is not iron anymore. Our will has jumped over the iron! My nerves and thoughts are filled with plans for the coming May Day. The purpose adds sharp spurs to time. It [the purpose] can let the chains of the heavy time of the isolation cell fly like an arrow. With my back turned to the seasonal color of the full bloom outside windows, my whole body has become an arrow. It focused on one purpose.

窓は鉄だ。が、すでに鉄でない。吾等の意志は鉄をはね越したのだ！私の神経と思考は、近づく五月祭の計画で一杯だ。目的は時間に鋭い拍車を加える。独房の、重い時間の鎖を矢のように飛ばせる。咲きほこる窓の、季節の色に背をむけて、私の全身は一本の矢になった。一つの目的に向かって緊張した。185

The protagonist is completely preoccupied with preparations for May Day, which makes him forget all the misery in prison. He manages to throw off the “chains of heavy time,” replacing prison time with revolutionary time, the proletarian temporality of May Day. The cohesive force of May Day allows the protagonist to rupture prison time and to form a mental image of a topological plane. It is on such a plane that the protagonist is able to connect with different events in disjunctive temporalities and displaced spatialities. This plan moulds the inside and outside of prison into a fold where proletarians become joined. The protagonist becomes aware of a line of flight when he remembers participation in a previous May Day celebrations. This echoes concurrent theoretical understandings among Marxists, such as Tosaka Jun’s (1900-1945) Konfigurieren (configurate) and Benjamin’s Jetztzeit (now-time); these highlight the possibility of intervening in the putative continuum of historical spacetime.

Before May Day starts, the protagonist recalls a memory from May Day the year before. He remembers how he held the flag of his union, how he walked from K-square through the city until L-

185 Ibid., 49.

129 park, how they marched and sang songs, and how they blocked police intervention. This shows the reader that the narrator-protagonist is familiar with the rituals of May Day. He has rehearsed through protests, as the other inmates have also likely done, what songs to sing, what speeches to deliver, and how to cooperate with other participants to resist the police through a May Day protest.186 Recalling the earlier discussion of Benjamin and Deleuze, inmates actualize the celebration of a previous May

Days which are not added onto the present celebration, but synthesized to create the living present anew. These differentiating repetitions appropriate memories and create a force that constitutes new temporalities. Much like May Day montage and linkage, Hayashi’s story foregrounds how inmates synthesize mental images extracted from May Day art that help them assemble solidarity as a force of resistance.

Near the end of the of the story, the protagonist almost ruins the plan when he taps on the wall to communicate to his neighbor; the guard notices his tapping and asks him what he was talking about, but he lies. An hour later, the guards summon him to investigate what the tapping was about, but the protagonist is “as silen[t] as a fish.” The guards try to cut him off from communicating with the other cell mates by isolating him in a cell under the stairs. The narrative skips five days and continues to the actual day of May Day during, in which the protagonist is unable to communicate with others.

The prisoners use the time between when guards are changing shift to intervene. Whistling to each other, the prisoners start their May Day ceremony; the sounds of whistling travels through windows and moves throughout the prison. Soon after, a few prisoners start their concert, singing the May Day song, and the rest of the prisoners join the singing, which “merge[s] into a giant instrument.” Through

186 Ibid., 53.

130 the corporeal experience of voice, the protagonist is able to join the collective experience. A prisoner then uses his hands as a megaphone and starts to speak, calling for solidarity among the prisoners and the release of the sick prisoners. Before long, the guards beat him down to prevent him from speaking further; the other prisoners “penetrate their steel cell doors” with angry voices. The protagonist feels the urge to continue the speech and breaks the glass of his window with a dustpan. While he is bleeding from his cheeks, he shouts and requests the release of the sick inmates as well as announces a hunger strike. After applause by the prisoners, the guards finally reach his cell and drag him away; other inmates continue to yell until one of them announces the end of May Day. He states that they have accomplished their goal and the hunger strike will start tomorrow. The May Day celebration by the prisoners completely disrupted the prison order and replaced it with a proletarian time. By replacing prison time with proletarian time, the prisoners were able to subvert power and set themselves free in the virtual. Hayashi’s “May Day in Prison” shows that imprisoned proletarians were not disconnected from society, and through May Day rituals were able to fully participate in May Day.

1.5 Conclusion

This chapter demonstrated that May Day celebrations contributed to the consolidation of numerous proletarian milieus both in East Asia and worldwide. Crucial was the development of expressive matters found particularly in art. This expressivity in arts was able to synthesize and unify heterogenous components associated with the proletarian struggle and develop useful rituals for planned and spontaneous strikes other than May Day. Proletarian artists utilized various techniques such as montage, linking, and connecting to resist the homogenous spacetime of the imperialist-

131 capitalist order. They instead constructed multidirectional spacetimes of international proletarian solidarity. Through photography, film, theater, singing, and literature, proletarian cultural movements aimed to reach as wide an audience as possible, taking into account various levels of literacy among proletarians. They organized cultural May Day events not only to inform proletarians of how to celebrate and strike on May Day, but also to redefine the entire producer-consumer relation of art.

They did this by incorporating proletarians in the production of May Day art and artifacts. The commitment to proletarian solidarity was not merely an enterprise orchestrated by proletarian vanguards and intellectuals, but more importantly was forged with proletarians in the praxis, experience, and memory of May Day. Murayama and Hayashi affirm this praxis in May Day stories that display the emergence of proletarian solidarity in direct action and cooperation at the grassroots level. Altogether, the May Day festival and its cultural production strived for unity among proletarians in East Asia in order to overcome divisive identifications of the capitalist-imperial order. This effort is found not only in art, but also in the development of the proletarian language, Esperanto, which is the focus of the next chapter.

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Chapter 2 Tongues on Strike: Proletarian Esperanto and Linguistic Solidarity

I firmly convinced myself that I am in favor of Esperanto. My support started quite early, perhaps twenty years ago. But my reasons are very simple. I recall them as follows: 1. Because it can unite everyone in the world — especially the oppressed peoples; 2. For the sake of one’s work, because it can introduce literatures to each other; 3. Because after meeting with several Esperantists, all exceeded false-hearted egoism. Lu Xun, “Da Shijieshe xin”1

That inward connection of word and script – so powerful that we write when we speak…has long interested me. (…) Their original, and absolute, simultaneity was rooted in the fact that the organ of speech itself writes in order to speak. The letter alone, speaks, or rather: word and script are, at source, one, and neither is possible without the other….” Walter Benjamin quoting Johann Wilhelm Ritter, The Origin of German Tragic Drama2

Words are not tools, but we give children language, pens, and notebooks as we give workers shovels and pickaxes. A rule of grammar is a power marker before it is a syntactical marker. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus3

2.1 Introduction

In 1931, Taiwanese writer Lai Minghong (dates unknown) discussed the role of nativist literature in a newspaper article “Zuo ge xiangturen de ganxiang” (Thoughts of a Local), part of the

1Lu Xun, “Da shijieshe xin,” La Mondo 4, no. 9-10 (1936). Quoted from Lu Xun, “Da shijieshe xin,” Lu Xun xuanji: Jiwai jishi yibubian, vol. 8 (Beijing: Zhongguo Wenshi Chubanshe, 2002), 263. Lu Xun (1881-1936) also contributed to introducing literatures translating works of “oppressed peoples” collected in Yuwai xiaoshuo ji (Stort Stories from Abroad, 1909) with his brother Zhou Zuoren (1885-1967) and the collection Knabrakontoj de V. Eroshenko of Esperantist Vasili Eroshenko (1890-1952) published as Ailuoxianke tonghua ji (Collection of Eroshenko’s Fairy Tales) in 1922. For more on Lu Xun’s exchange with Eroshenko see Fujii Shōzo, Eroshenko no toshi monogatari: 1920 nendai Tōkyō, Shanhai, Pekin (Tokyo: Misuzu Shobō, 1989), 214-303, and Andrew F. Jones, Developmental Fairy Tales: Evolutionary Thinking and Modern Chinese Culture (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2011), 150-155. Lu Xun together with other intellectuals, such as Cai Yuanpei (1868-1940), Chen Duxiu (1879-1942), Zhou Zuoren (1885-1967), Hu Yuzhi (1896-1986), and Qian Xuantong (1887- 1939), introduced and discussed the pros and cons of Esperanto, either to replace the Chinese (written) language or as a second language to improve communication among the numerous Sinitic languages. Their debates were published in the prolific journal Xin Qingnian (New Youth) starting in 1916. 2 Walter Benjamin, The Origin of German Tragic Drama, trans. John Osborne (New York: Verso, 1998), 213-214. 3 Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), 76.

133 xiangtu wenxue (nativist literature) debates in Colonial Taiwan.4 Lai discussed how to develop a

Taiwanese vernacular literature informed by Chinese baihuawen (written vernacular) and Japanese genbun itchi (unification of speech and writing) to improve literacy among proletarians.5 Lai wrote that if nativist literature exists for the purpose of the Taiwanese proletariat, it was only able to be understood by the poor masses in Taiwan, as well as in Xiamen, and Zhangzhou on mainland China.

However, according to Lai, the goal of the Taiwanese proletariat is to cooperate with the worldwide proletariat in order to form “world solidarity” (datong tuanjie). Therefore, Taiwanese nativist literature blocks cooperation and exchange between the Taiwanese proletariat and the worldwide proletariat.

As a solution, Lai suggested Esperanto as the perfect intermediary language to fully optimize cooperation and exchange among proletarian class comrades and to create a “nativist literature of the world proletariat.”6

Sharing Lai’s vision, Pak Ho (dates unknown) noted how the ruling classes controlled modes of communication and what alternative methods were possible using Esperanto to undermine those restrictions. Not all leftist thinkers, however, believed Esperanto would overcome linguistic barriers among proletarians and some questioned the benefits of Esperanto being able to counter the

4 For more on the language debates in Taiwan see Chen Fangming, Taiwan Xinwenxueshi (Taibei: Lianjing Chuban shiye gufen youxian gongsi, 2011), 59-63, 98-102, Yu-lin Lee, Writing Taiwan: A Study of Taiwan's Nativist Literature (Saarbrücken: VDM Verlag Dr. Müller, 2013), and Lü Meiqin, “Nihon tōchika ni okeru Taiwan Esuperanto undō kenkyū” (PhD diss., Hitotsubashi University, 2016), especially the Introduction. 5 For more on baihua see, Yurou Zhong, Chinese Grammatology: Script Revolution and Literary Modernity, 1916–1958 (New York: Columbia University Press, 2019). For more on genbun itchi see, Karatani Kōjin, Origins of Modern Japanese Literature, trans. and ed. Brett de Bary (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1993), 45-54. 6 Lai Minghong, “Zuo ge xiangturen de ganxiang,” Taiwan Xinwen, December 24, 1931. The original is not extant, but parts are quoted in Fu Ren, “Taiwan huawen zabo (4): Yichuang tongmu de sige xiongdi (3),” Nanyin 1, no. 4 (1932): 9-13. Lai noticed that a direct transition to Esperanto was difficult to realize and suggested baihuawen as a temporary intermediary. For more on Lai’s article in relation to the Taiwan huawen debates see Kawahara Isao, Taiwan shinbungaku no tenkai: Nihon bungaku to no setten (Tokyo: Kenbun Shuppan, 1997), 188-189.

134 bourgeois hegemony. Marxist thinker Antonio Gramsci (1981-1937), for example, argued that most proletarians live and work in “fixed place[s]” and monolingual communities and therefore do not require an auxiliary language. He considered Esperanto merely a “cosmopolitan illusion” of the bourgeois class.7 Gramsci failed to take into consideration the existence of multi-ethnic and multilingual empires and socialist states, such as the Japanese empire and the Soviet Union, where

Esperanto could be useful to support interlingual communication. Moreover, he associated cosmopolitanism exclusively with the bourgeois class, ignoring the fact that many proletarians equally lived their lives in cosmopolitan metropoles. Living in the Japanese empire using a minority language, Pak was cognizant of these benefits and explored ways how to implement Esperanto as a proletarian language. In his article “Esŭp'erant'owa kŭllo taejung” (Esperanto and the Working

Masses, 1931) written in Korean and published in the proletarian journal Chiptan (Collective), Pak acknowledged that “the geographical conditions make it impossible to visit foreign comrades and attend important international conferences.”8 To overcome the spatial distances, Pak insisted that communication is only possible “with the language of correspondences, newspaper and magazines.”

7 Antonio Gramsci fiercely critiqued Esperanto writing that the desire for a single language used by proletarians and leftist activists merely mirrors “a cosmopolitan, not an international anxiety, that of bourgeois who travels for business or pleasure, of that of nomads more than of stable productive citizens. […] They would like artificially to create a definitively inflexible language which will not admit changes in space and time.” And he continues, “[a]nd the argument for auxiliary function of Esperanto collapses as well. When might Esperanto be auxiliary? And to whom? The majority of citizens carry out their activity stably in a fixed place and do not need to correspond too often by letter with other countries. Let us have no doubt about it: Esperanto, the single language, is nothing but a vain idea, an illusion of cosmopolitan, humanitarian, democratic mentalities which have not yet been made fertile and been shaken by historical critical thinking.” Italics in the original. Antonio Gramsci, “La lingua unica e l'Esperanto,” (A Single Language and Esperanto) Il Grido del Populo, 16 February, 1918. Quoted from Antonio Gramsci, Selections from Cultural Writings, trans. William Boelhower (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1991), 27, 30. 8 Pak Ho, “Esŭp'erant'owa kŭllo daejung,” Chiptan, no.2 (1932): 12. I like to thank my peer Sŏng-pil Jŏng for providing scans of Pak’s article.

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(t'ongshin'gwa shinmunjapchi eŭihan ŏnŏrossŏman ida), suggesting how writing in Esperanto through various media could be used for international solidarity.

Pak’s “geographical conditions” (chirijŏk chogŏn) not only imply geographical distance but also the restraints of mobility, financial, and linguistic barriers facing proletarians when trying to interact with foreign counterparts. He argued that the costs of learning foreign languages are too high for proletarians and are controlled by the bourgeois through educational institutions. Moreover, he condemned the “national bourgeoisie” (minjok ppurŭjoajī), also called the “school of foreign literature”

(haeoe munhakp'a), for using foreign bourgeois literature for translation exams as a way to boycott

(poik’otŭ) foreign leftist literature. Pak recommended proletarians use Esperanto as the ultimate class weapon. Specifically, Pak argued that the act of translating proletarian writings into Esperanto was an act of resistance against the ruling classes.9 Both Lai and Pak identify how language becomes codified to serve ruling classes and (nation-)state building. To counter such codification, they considered

Esperanto to be a language in which speech does not oppose writing, nor does the sonorous voice oppose the written voice. Rather, it had interchangeable components of linguistic resistance designed to thwart language restrictions.

This chapter explores how Esperanto in East Asia served to circumvent the in-person meetings needed to assemble solidarity between distant proletarians; this was accomplished through the written word, speech, and transnational media as suggested by Lai and Pak. Esperanto functioned as a site of (linguistic) resistance against the imperial language of Japanese. It empowered proletarians to actively participate in exercising international solidarity, connecting local struggles to the

9 Pak Ho, “Esŭp'erant'owa kŭllo daejung,” 12.

136 worldwide proletariat. 10 Examining Esperanto translation manuals, radio broadcasts, letter writing, and literature, this chapter locates such resistance in the deterritorializing potential of voice, both sonic and graphic, which aims to undermine the dominant structures of linguistic power and to form aggregates of linguistic solidarity. Put differently, in contrast to Gramsci’s preference for organic development of languages, which works best when native language speakers are present in the same place, Esperanto as a proletarian language enabled an organization across space beyond Gramsci’s

“fixed place[s]” in the desire for interaction among proletarians.

Proletarian Esperantists translated local struggles through literature, letters, textbooks and dictionaries across various parts of the world in a universal lexicon.11 But how could such putatively universal meanings be rendered in an artificial language?12 Was Esperanto capable of representing

10 General histories on Esperanto that have informed me are: Peter G. Forster, The Esperanto Movement (The Hague: Mouton, 1982); Pierre Janton, Esperanto: Language, Literature, and Community (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1993); Roberto Garvía, Esperanto and its Rivals: The Struggle for an International Language (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015); Esther Schor, Bridge of Words: Esperanto and the Dream of a Universal Language (New York: Metropolitan Books, Henry Holt and Company, 2016); Ulrich Lins, Dangerous Language — Esperanto under Hitler and Stalin (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), Ulrich Lins, Dangerous Language — Esperanto and the Decline of Stalinism (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018). For histories of Esperanto in East Asia see Hou Zhiping (ed.), Shijieyu zai Zhongguo yibainian (Beijing: Zhongguo Shijieyu Chubanshe, 1999); Hou Zhiping (ed.), Koncize Historio de la Ĉina Esperanto-Movado. Zhongguo shijieyu yundong jianzhi (Beijing: Xinxing Chubanshe, 2004); Sun Mingxiao (ed.), Riben shijieyu yundong shilüe. Pri la Historio de Japana Esperanto-Movado (Jinan: Shandong Daxue Chubanshe, 2015); Yi Chong-yŏng, La 80-jara historio de Korea Esperanto-movado / Han'guk Esŭp'erant'o undong 80-yŏnsa (Sŏul: Han'guk Esŭp'erant'o Hyŏphoe, 2003); Kim Sam-Su, Han'guk Esŭp'erant'o undongsa, 1906-1975: Segye p'yŏnghwa wa kukcheŏ palchŏn e taehan Han'gugin ŭi chŏkkŭkchŏk konghŏn (Sŏul: Sungmyŏng Yŏja Taehakkyo Ch'ulp'anbu, 1976); Hatsushiba Takemi, Nihon Esuperanto Undōshi. Historio de la Japana Esperanto-Movado (Tokyo: Nihon Esuperanto Gakkai, 1998); Lü Meiqin, “Nihon tōchika ni okeru Taiwan Esuperanto undō kenkyū” (PhD diss., Hitotsubashi University, 2016); Lü Meiqin, “Tan La Verda Ombro, La formoso, ji qita zhanqian zai Taiwan faxing de shijieyu kanwu,” in Kaojue, yanjiu, zaixian: Taiwan wenxue shiliao jikan diyiji, ed. Xu Sulan (Tainan: Taiwan Wenxueguan, 2011): 49-70. 11 Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. 2001), 57. Hardt and Negri do not specifically refer to Esperanto in their discussion of an absent common language to “translate” worldwide struggles as interconnected, but underline the importance of a “common language of struggles” in our current age. For them such a language is not purely linguistic, but also theoretical. 12 Travis Workman has shown how universal-particular binary thinking was prevalent in various “isms” including Marxism. See Travis Workman, Imperial Genus: The Formation and Limits of the Human in Modern Korea and Japan (Oakland: University of California Press, 2016). Moreover, Esperanto’s claimed universality was used as synecdoche for universalism as such. For example, film was presented as “visual” or “cinematic” Esperanto. For more on such discussions see Miriam

137 something that organic languages could not? How could an invented language missing a sonorous voice become a spoken language? Could it successfully transmit the diverse proletarian experiences into a single semantics? These questions warrant further investigation, especially when read aside theories on language and translation. Esperanto was based solely on translation and was developed artificially as a written language because it lacked native speakers in its infancy. In order to use written and spoken Esperanto, proletarian cultural movements had to come up with solutions how to teach the language to proletarians successfully.

Given these questions, this chapter starts by examining the writings of two prolific proletarian

Esperantists Akita Ujaku (1883-1962) and Lian Wenqing (Liân Un-kheng, 1894-1957). There will be a specific focus on their respective theoretical understandings of Esperanto as a linguistic “weapon” (武

器) read in concert with Deleuze and Guatarri’s critique of linguistics. Between Marxist (Esperanto) linguists, proletarian Esperantists, and Deleuze and Guatarri, there is a shared interest in pragmatics to critique hierarchies in language. Concretely, this chapter examines proletarian Esperanto together with Deleuze and Guattari’s notion of “order-word,” or immanent functions of language that operate twofold; it is a major mode of reterritorialization and a minor mode of deterritorialization. In general,

“order-words” are commands and presuppositions that compel obedience, creating constants within language that determine and enclose people’s thinking. In contrast, new “order-words” transmitted by language can also evade fixed meanings of words and create passages which liberate users from

Hansen, Babel and Babylon: Spectatorship in American Silent Film (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1991), 76-77, 186, and Weihong Bao’s discussion of Xu Chi’s search of a “cinematic Esperanto” attempting to integrate Esperanto in film. Weihong Bao, Fiery Cinema: The Emergence of an Affective Medium in China, 1915–1945 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2015), 288-293.

138 oppressive linguistic regimes. The notion of “order-word” helps to theorize a liberatory force present in Esperanto which creates ripples in imperial linguistic hegemony and unlocks possibilities of resistance and solidarity.

The first section will follow with a discussion of translation theories set forth by proletarian

Esperantists, especially Nakagaki Kojirō’s Esuperanto honyaku jikkenshitsu (Esperanto Translation

Laboratory, 1934), as acts of resistance to Pak’s “bourgeois hegemony of foreign translations.”

Subsequently, Akita Ujaku’s trip to the Soviet Union, culminating in the publication of Wakaki Souēto

Roshia (The Young Soviet Russia, 1929), a focus on his Esperanto radiobroadcasts and the mechanic voice as “striking tongue,” will be examined. As such, the first part of this discussion will focus on how proletarian Esperanto permeated various modes of (international) exchange which significantly challenged imperial linguistic restrictions imposed on proletarian spoken and written voices.

The second section of this chapter focuses on Esperanto correspondence, one of Pak’s suggested ways to overcome spatial distances. Specific attention will be given to the mechanics and logistics of proletarian Esperanto correspondence. The organization and activities of proletarian

Esperanto correspondence branches (PEK, Proleta Esperanto Korespondanto) in East Asia will be followed by an analysis of several Esperanto letters. In contrast to intellectuals such as Akita Ujaku who were afforded opportunities to travel abroad, most proletarians turned to Esperanto correspondence as a trans-spatial mode of writing to express solidarity. While most personal letters have been lost, letters published in proletarian Esperanto media will demonstrate how Esperanto helped formulate a vocabulary of proletarian friendship and a way to recognize each other’s struggles.

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Finally, a discussion on the emergence of proletarian Esperanto writers will be undertaken.

These individuals were those who acquired sufficient enough proficiency in Esperanto to write literary works and essays in Esperanto directly. Works by Hong Hyŏng-ŭi (1911-1968), Hasegawa Teru

(Verda Majo, 1912-1947), and Ye Junjian (Cicio Mar, 1914-1991), the latter two of whom resided in China during the war, will be analyzed. Their writings display how proletarian Esperantists were able to maintain their devotion to international solidarity and the (im)possibilities of narrating proletarian experiences in Esperanto literature “to unite (…) the oppressed peoples” as Lu Xun wrote quoted at the beginning of this chapter. As these writings are explored, the tensions surrounding proletarian

Esperanto and how it contributed to the politics of language and translation, as well as a return to usages of voice in literary Esperanto will be noted.

2.2 Reinventing Brushtalk: A Shared Language of Solidarity for the Proletariat

The problems that Lai and Pak identified focus on how Esperanto can serve, both in writing and speech, a transnational literary production and readership. They believed that various usages of

Esperanto could facilitate a mutual exchange beneficial in forging relations of solidarity among proletarians in East Asia at a scale hitherto unseen. Before Esperanto, such an auxiliary language already existed in East Asia, albeit on a smaller scale and within a Sino-centric and gendered hierarchy. Earlier generations of intellectuals in East Asia were skilled in classical Chinese which acted as a written means for exchange. While spoken languages were mutually unintelligible, these intellectuals conversed with the brush even in direct yet limited encounters for centuries, valuing the written word over speech. With the advent of modern languages, however, this validation was

140 reversed, shifting emphasis onto phonocentrism which matched the modernization and nationalism of European languages.13 Language reformers strove to standardize languages into national languages based on phonocentrism (genbun icchi and baihuawen), which could serve nation-state building and the literacy of a homogenized national people. As a result, the unity created by the classical Chinese of

East Asia was divided into separate linguistic communities. These new lexicons became incomprehensible to either group in both written and spoken form, effacing transnational interaction among East Asian intellectuals.

Classical Chinese did not disappear immediately following the Meiji Restoration in 1868. As

Atsuko Sakaki observed, a transitional period existed where Meiji literati continued to apply “classical

Chinese in the modern genre of prose fiction (shōsetsu) [which] facilitated communication among intellectuals across national boundaries and presented an alternative to hegemonic modern ideologies such as imperialism, nationalism, and ethnocentrism.”14 Besides literary production, some

East Asian intellectuals continued to interact with each other using brushtalk in classical Chinese, most notably such revolutionaries as Miyazaki Tōten (1871-1922) and Sun Yat-Sen (1866-1925). Their brush exchange displayed a desire to organize political formations transnationally succeeded by proletarian intellectuals like Lai and Pak. In both literature and brushtalk exchanges, East Asian intellectuals tried to “escape the constraints of national language, (and) oscillated between the sound

13 For more on phonocentrism in relation to literature and language reform in East Asia see, Karatani Kōjin, Origins of Modern Japanese Literature, 45-75; Seth Jacobowitz, Writing Technology in Meiji Japan: A Media History of Modern Japanese Literature and Visual Culture (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2015), 97-167; Kim Chul, Reading Colonial Korea through Fiction: The Ventriloquists, trans. Hye-Joon Yoon (Lanham, Maryland: Lexington Books, 2018); Yurou Zhong, Chinese Grammatology: Script Revolution and Literary Modernity, 1916–1958, 67-99; Gine A. Tam, Dialect and Nationalism in China, 1860-1960 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020). 14 Atsuko Sakaki, Obsessions with the Sino-Japanese Polarity in Japanese Literature (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2006), 145.

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(ethnic) and script (universal) of Chinese to defy the mutation of their voice/hand in the name of nationalism.”15

The standardization and nationalization of East Asian languages and the forced submission of written (classical Chinese) to vernacular languages in East Asia separated intellectuals into monolingual communities which led to the disappearance of brushtalk. Further, the rise of Japanese imperialism and the implementation of the Japanese language in Korea and Taiwan as lingua franca replaced the predominance of classical Chinese. This created a linguistic hierarchy of Japanese over other East Asian languages which was woven into the fabric of the empire. Moreover, the number of students from China studying in Japan increased significantly, which resulted in widespread proficiency in Japanese both in writing and speech. Regarding the linguistic shifts in East Asia,

Christopher Keaveney notes that exchanges between Sino-Japanese writers went “beyond the traditional brushtalk to communicate (…).”16 In return, Japanese subjects studied the Chinese and

Korean languages, albeit on a much smaller scale; this was done for business, diplomacy, and political transactions, which were often conducted verbally rather than in writing. Owing to the need to modernize, compete, and interact with Euro-American imperial powers, learning European languages also became extremely popular among students at universities in East Asia. Consequently, the study of East Asian and European languages emphasized the vernacular over the (literary) written language.

This suggests that the exchange between East Asians was changing from brush (writing) to tongue

(speech).

15 Ibid., 175-176. 16 Christopher Keaveney, Beyond Brushtalk: Sino-Japanese Exchange in the Interwar Period (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2009), 13.

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Amidst these linguistic shifts, interest among East Asian intellectuals grew with regards to

(re)constructing a space for transnational exchange of ideas free from linguistic hierarchy. This was to be achieved through the recently-invented auxiliary language Esperanto and its claimed universalism.

This universalism was touted especially by anarchists who experimented with Esperanto as a language that could accommodate transnational exchange and overcome spatial immobility.17 Not unlike classical Chinese, this exchange was frequently done in writing rather than by speaking as noted earlier. Different from classical Chinese, however, Esperanto posed a problem to its East Asian users due to the fact that its vocabulary was drawn exclusively from European languages. Given this fact, during a time of language reform and literacy education, East Asian intellectuals questioned the viability of Esperanto as lingua franca for both the East Asian and global communities. Would its

European-based vocabulary give speakers of European languages an advantage over their counterparts, thus perpetuating European imperialism? Notwithstanding this concern, Esperanto’s apparent universalism and anti-militaristic discourses, propagated by many Esperantists, resonated among East Asian intellectuals and their cosmopolitan aspirations to interact with intellectuals worldwide. While East Asian intellectuals often had studied European languages and were familiar with the European alphabet, which lowered the threshold to study Esperanto significantly, most proletarians had no knowledge of European languages nor of their writing systems. Because of this, they faced serious challenges in mastering Esperanto. The inventor of Esperanto, Ludwik Lejzer

Zamenhof (1859-1917) had constructed the language as an open system where users could add

17 Konishi Sho, Anarchist Modernity: Cooperatism and Japanese-Russian Intellectual Relations in Modern Japan (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center, 2013), 258-295.

143 neologisms, including those based on non-European languages. Moreover, he developed its grammar to be informed by agglutinative grammar, which was closer to Turkic and Altaic languages rather than

Indo-European languages.18 These features led to proletarian Esperantists eventually embracing the language and the subsequent effort to promote and teach Esperanto.

In 1931, many proletarian Esperanto movements such as the Japanese Proletarian Esperanto

Union (JPEU) in Tokyo, Leftwing Branch of Esperanto (Yulian) in Shanghai, and Proletarian

Esperantist Subcommittee (F.E.S) in Taipei, were formed in East Asia as national and regional branches within the larger international umbrella of proletarian movements.19 Informed by Marxist linguistic theories, proletarian Esperanto movements were first and foremost an educational movement focused on promoting the use of Esperanto among proletarians (Fig. 2.1). They published many textbooks and learning materials, such as the six-volume Purotaria Esuperanto Kōza: Proletata

Esperanto Kurso (Proletarian Esperanto Course), as well as organizing Esperanto exhibitions and

18 Proletarian Esperanto linguist, such as Takagi Hiroshi (Ōshima Yoshio, 1905-1992), understood Esperanto as a language with European vocabulary and “Eastern” (tōyō) agglutinative grammar (fuchakuteki hōhō), making Esperanto not a “European” (yōroppateki) but “international mutual” (kokusai kyōtsūteki) language. Quoted in Takeuchi Jirō, Puroretaria Esuperanto undō ni tsuite (Shihōshō Keijikyoku, 1939), 239, reprinted as Takeuchi Jirō and Kasamatsu Yoshisuke, Puroretaria Esuperanto undō ni tsuite; Yobō kōkin seidoni tsuite (Tokyo: Tōyō Bunkasha, 1978). Detective Takeuchi quoted Takagi to emphasis the possible danger of Esperanto in East Asia based on the agglutinative grammar believed to make the language accessible for East Asians. 19 Under colonial rule, it was impossible for Taiwanese Esperantists to establish a national Esperanto movement or associo (association) and instead were forced to establish a regional societo (society) within the umbrella of Japanese Esperanto groups. See Lü Meiqin, “Nihon tōchika ni okeru Taiwan Esuperanto undō kenkyū,” 38-39. A proletarian Esperanto movement was never founded in the Korean peninsula, but Esperantists frequently organized Esperanto-related activities to teach and promote Esperanto throughout the 1920s. Kim Sam-su’s data shows that between 1920 and 1930 a total of 120 Esperanto training sessions, four radiobroadcasts, and nine lectures were held across the peninsula as well as almost 60 Esperanto groups were formed. Participants varied from intellectuals, workers, students, railroad personnel, to peasants. Prominent figures involved were Kim Ōk, Nakagaki Kojirō, Shin Bongjo (1900-1992, who wrote the first Esperanto textbook in Korean Kursa legolibro de Esperanto), and Ōyama Tokio (1898-1946). The latter was the editors of the journal La Orienta Lumo (Eastern Light), the official outlet of the Korean Esperanto Institute, and La Revuo Korea (The Korean Revue) both published in Soūl. See Kim Sam-su, Han'guk Esŭp'erant'o undongsa, 1906-1975: segye p'yŏnghwa wa kukcheŏ palchŏn e taehan Han'gugin ŭi chŏkkŭkchŏk konghŏn, 114-117.

144 classes.20 Teaching Esperanto was aimed at radicalizing proletarian tongues; Pak and many other proletarian Esperantists considered Esperanto a (linguistic) weapon, which became a widespread metaphor used among proletarian Esperantists in East Asia and elsewhere.

Preceding Pak Ho’s article, prolific Esperanto teacher Akita Ujaku had identified Esperanto’s potential in contributing to class struggles in several articles.21 Akita responded to government policies - well underway since Meiji - aimed at homogenizing various patois into a standardized written and spoken national language. This was done to suppress the usage of colonial languages.22

20 The six-volume Proleta Kurso de Esperanto totaled 1,294 pages under editorial supervision of Akita Ujaku and edited by Nakagaki Kojirō, Mutō Marukusu (1906-1996), Takagi Hiroshi (1905-1992), among others. Proletarian Esperanto Course was an immediate success selling over ten thousand volumes and had widespread reach across East Asia. The first four volumes covered the basics of Esperanto gradually increasing in difficulty from beginner to intermediate. Each volume was divided in four parts with seven lessons to be completed in a week, which began with writing the alphabet and practicing pronunciation, combining both writing and speaking skills. Each lesson centered around a short story supplemented with exercises, grammar explanations, translations, and vocabulary lists. The themes of these lessons were based on proletarian daily life and culture as well as scientific topics deemed relevant for proletarian struggles echoing volume one’s opening “scienco estas potenco” (science is power). The last two volumes were for advanced learners capable of reading longer and more difficult literary and theoretical texts in Esperanto.The texts in volume 5 were predominantly translations of Marxists texts by Marx, Lenin, and Engels, as well as fables, anecdotes, and parables. Volume 6 contained translations of proletarian literature. Besides the Proletarian Esperanto Course, proletarian Esperantists published many journals (including those sympathetic to proletarian politics) in the early 1930s in East Asia, such as Kamarado (Comrade), Avangardo (Avant-garde), PEU (Proletarian Esperanto Union), PEK (Proletarian Esperanto Correspondence, Musansha Esuperantisuto (Proletarian Esperantist), Zhongguo puluo shijieyuzhe (China Proletarian Esperantist), Zhonguo puluo shijieyu tongxun xinwengao: Ĉina PEK-Bulteno (China Proletarian Esperanto Correspondence Bulletin), Informo de F.E.S (Information of the Formosian Esperanto Society), Mateniĝo (Dawn), La Espero (Hope). 21 For more on Akita’s activities during the 1910s, see Ōshima Yoshio and Miyamoto Masao, Hantaisei Esuperanto undōshi (Tokyo: Sanseidō, 1974), 124-130, and Konishi Sho, Anarchist Modernity: Cooperatism and Japanese-Russian Intellectual Relations in Modern Japan, 284-288. Konishi especially highlights Akita’s contact with Esperantist Vasily Eroshenko, who played a crucial role in promoting Esperanto across East Asia. After his two-year stay in Japan, Eroshenko was arrested for his participation in a May Day demonstration and other socialist activities. He moved to China for two years where he was welcomed by Lu Xun, Zhou Zuoren, and Cai Yuanpei, among others, who helped him obtaining an Esperanto teaching position at Beijing University. For more on Eroshenko besides Konishi’s chapter, see Fujii Shōzō, Eroshenko no toshi monogatari: 1920 nendai Tōkyō, Shanhai, Pekin; Ulrich Lins, “Esperanto as language and idea in China and Japan,” Language Problems & Language Planning 32, no. 1 (2008): 50-51; Gotelind Müller and Gregor Benton, “Esperanto and Chinese anarchism in the 1920s and 1930s,” Language Problems & Language Planning 30, no. 2 (2006), 174-180. While research on Akita Ujaku is scarce, his autobiography and diary provide useful insights in his Esperanto activities. See Akita Ujaku, Ujaku jiden (Tokyo: Tosho Sentā, 1987), and Akita Ujaku, Akita Ujaku nikki (Tokyo: Miraisha, 1965-67). 22 For studies on the formation of national languages, language debates and script reforms, see Yurou Zhong, Chinese Grammatology: Script Revolution and Literary Modernity, 1916–1958 (New York: Columbia University Press, 2019); Christina Yi, Colonizing Language: Cultural Production and Language Politics in Modern Japan and Korea (New York: Columbia

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Born in Kuroishi, Tōhoku, a region known for its linguistic distance from the Kantō region, whose diction was the basis for the standard language, Akita railed against what he considered to be bourgeois language policies used as another form of capitalist enslavement.23

In his article “Kaikyū bunka tōsō no buki to shite no Esperanto” (Esperanto as Weapon of the

Class Culture Struggle, 1931), Akita examined the tension between bourgeois and proletarian ideas of language. He exposed the weakness of Esperantists’ humanist intentions, incessantly preaching

Esperanto to be the language of peace. He accomplished this by providing a provocative example of the German Kaiser using Esperanto in a speech during the Great War to proclaim that not only

Germany, but each participating country carried a war responsibility.24 Akita shows how Esperanto,

“the apostle of peace,” can be used for militaristic purposes; the Kaiser made Esperanto into “an imperial weapon” (teikokushugi no buki), calling into question Zamenhof’s humanistic philosophy

Homaranismo (Humanitism).25

University Press, 2018); Seth Jacobowitz, Writing Technology in Meiji Japan: A Media History of Modern Japanese Literature and Visual Culture (Cambridge; Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2015), 97-167; Lee Yeounsuk, The Ideology of Kokugo: Nationalizing Language in Modern Japan, trans Maki Hirano Hubbard (Honolulu: University of Hawaiʻi Press, 2010); Daniel Pieper, “The Making of a Foreign National Language: Language Politics and the Impasse between Assimilationists and Language Nationalists in Colonial Korea,” Journal of Korean Studies 24, no. 1 (2019): 63-95. 23 For more on Esperanto in the Aomori prefecture see Ian Rapley, "When Global and Local Culture Meet: Esperanto in 1920s Rural Japan," Language Problems and Language Planning 37, no. 2 (2013): 179-96. In addition, research on local Esperanto groups has recently appeared such as Ikemoto Morio, Hagiwara Katsumi, and Kudō Takashi (eds.), Yamanashi to Esuperanto: Yamanashi-ken Esuperanto undōshi (Tokyo: Nihon Esuperanto Gakkai, 2009); Fukahori Yoshifumi, Katsuta Motohira, and Moriwaki Yasumasa (eds.), 117nenkan no raburetā: Nagasaki to Esuperanto (Tokyo: Nihon Esuperanto Gakkai, 2010); Hori Yasuo (ed.), Gunma no Esuperanto undō: 1906-2010. Esperanto-movado en Gunma: 1906-2010.Esperanto- movado en Gunma: 1906-2010 (Maebashi: Gunma Esuperantokai, 2010). 24 Akita Ujaku, “Kaikyū bunka tōsō no buki to shite no Esperanto,” Sōgō puroretaria geijutsu kōza 2, ed. Akita Ujaku and Eguchi Kan (Tokyo: Naigaisha, 1931), 52. 25 For more on Zamenhof’s religious and humanistic philosophy Homarismo, see L.L. Zamenhof, Deklaracio pri Homaranismo (Madrid: Homaro, 1913). Like Akita, Hasegawa Teru warns against a similar threat in her piece “Al la Tutmonda Esperantistaro” (To Esperantists in the Entire World) that fascists will use every method to achieve their goals including infiltrating Esperanto movements and using Esperanto. See Verda Majo [Hasegawa Teru], “Al la Tutmonda Esperantistaro,” in Verkoj de Verda Majo (Beijing: Ĉina Esperanto-Eldonejo, 1982), 392.

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A decade earlier, Akita had already examined the oppressive nature of national languages and their intricate relationship with bourgeois ideology. He did this in his article “‘Shita’ no hangyaku to shite no Esuperanto” (Esperanto as Rebellious ‘Tongue’”), which was part of a 1922 special issue on

Esperanto published in the prolific general-interest journal Kaizō (Reconstruction). Akita argued that in tandem with the cultural enslavement of humans, the spoken language or the “tongue” also became

“a slave of words.”26 He further critiqued the phonocentric homogenization of languages, which valued speech over writing for being a purer form of transcendental truth. According to Akita, complicit in this verbal enslavement were national languages designed to block any expression of the human will.27 Akita suggested that the Esperanto movement was a “strike movement of the tongue”

(shita no sutoraiki undō) focused on disentangling the tongue from linguistic domination.28 Similar to the corporeal strikes executed in May Day demonstrations discussed in Chapter 1, Akita envisioned

Esperanto acting as a linguistic strike, which would lead to a “liberation of [bourgeois] science”

(gakumon no kaihō) and a “shared language” (kotoba no kyōsan) of the proletariat.29

It is hardly surprising that Esperanto appealed to colonial subjects in the Japanese empire as a language that could be used to subvert the imperial language. Compared to Akita, Taipei-born proletarian Esperantist Lian Wenqing was directly confronted with linguistic violence and was forced to write and speak in Japanese. Akita enjoyed a certain linguistic freedom as someone who was ethnically Japanese and for whom kokugo (national language) was his mother tongue. In contrast, the

26 Akita Ujaku, “Shita no hangyaku to shite no Esuperanto,” Kaizō 4, no. 8 (1922): 99. 27 Ibid., 101. 28 Ibid., 100. 29 Ibid., 102.

147 empire deemed Lian’s Taiwanese ethnicity and native language as suspicious as it challenged the superiority of the imperial language, especially when spoken as hierarchal accents and intonations are noticeable.30 In his essay “Kia estas Esperantismo” (What is Esperantism?, Fig. 2.2) Lian, however, explained that tensions among peoples are not the result of differences in ethnicity/race (gento), nationality (nacieco), religion (religio), or language (lingvo), but rather by the social-economic system

(socia ekonomia sistemo) supported by a political ideology of divide-and-conquer, which causes a competitive unevenness among peoples.31 Living under Japanese imperial rule, Lian observed how

30 Lian’s colleague and Esperantist Yamaguchi Koshizu (1900-1923) expressed a similar concern in her essay “El la verkaĵoj de f-ino K. Jamaguĉi” (From de Writings of Sister K. Yamaguchi, 1923) published in the journal La Verda Ombro (The Green Shadow), the same journal Lian published many of his writings. In this partially redacted article written in a mix of Japanese and Esperanto, Yamaguchi writes: “Recently, I asked a few questions to a high-class detective from the Taiwanese authorities. He answered to my question what the authorities think of the fact that Esperanto is spreading among common Taiwanese, ‘It is quite different when Naichijin [Japanese] study [Esperanto] or Taiwanese. For example, when the year 1922 is written in the margin of a letter, if the writer is a Naichijin then it is solely considered to be a common global periodization, but if it is written by a Taiwanese then it not just means that, but it is seen as clearly a neglect and boycott of the periodization Taishō 11 used in Japan. Likewise, even if they study the same Esperanto, in the case of Naichijin they merely chose it as a symbolic language of world peace and an international common world language (…), but in the case of Taiwanese then it is a totally different case. They don’t merely study this language as a world citizen, but also to boycott Japanese. Thus, because language and ideology are closely related, boycotting the Japanese language must be a boycott of Japan itself. The Japanese colonial policies absolutely cannot permit such rebels.’” Yamaguchi Kozue, “El la verkaĵoj de f-ino K. Jamaguĉi,” La Verda Ombro 5, no. 3-4 (1923): 3-4. Similar rhetoric was used to critique Japanese language policies in Korea. For example, Kiyomi Rikurō critiqued in his article “Al Junaj Koreoj” (To Young Koreans) Japanese language education and suggested to use Esperanto for communication. Quoted in Miyake Eiji, Tatakau Esuperantisuto-tachi no kiseki: Puroretaria Esuperanto undō no kenkyū (Osaka: Ribēroisha, 1995), 38. Regarding accents, while Esperanto is not free from accents or intonations, the unequal power dynamics between the colonial and imperial language as in the case of Lian seem absent. As Futabatei Shimei wrote: “Esperanto is not the language of a particular country, and therefore it seems not the case that despite the same grammar and vocabulary, the style of each country is different. For example, English [speakers] take English, German [speakers] take German, and French [speakers] take French as reference to use Esperanto. Thus, the Esperanto of English [speakers] has traits from English, French [speakers] has French [traits], and German [speakers] have traits of German. Thus, the Esperanto of Japanese has traits of Japanese is not a problem.” Futabatei Shimei, “Esuperanto no hanashi,” in Futabatei Zenshū 4 Hyōron danwa (Tokyo: Chikuma Shobō, 1985), 188. 31 Lepismo [Lian Wenqing], “Kia estas Esperantismo?,” La Verda Ombro 5. No. 5 (1923): 1. Lian published a longer version of this article in Chinese “Zenme shi shijieyuzhuyi” (the title changed to “Shenme shi shijieyuzhuyi” from part 2) divided in four pieces and published in Taiwan ribao (Taiwan Newspaper) between October 14, 1926 and January 9, 1927. For more on Lian and Esperanto see Lü Meiqin, “Nihon tōchika ni okeru Taiwan Esuperanto undō kenkyū,” 177-210.

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(racial) capitalism in colonized Taiwan led to hierarchal differentiation among people living on the island.

Following the economic crisis of the late 1920s and early 1930s concomitant with a growing number of labor strikes in East Asia, Lian also considered Esperanto as a weapon able to be used against Japanese oppression. In his essay, “Wareware wa tōsō naki jinrui no heiwa ni ikin” (Let us live in human peace without struggles, Fig. 2.2), written in Japanese, Lian writes:

I believe that precisely because this language-as-weapon is obtained by the proletarian class, the mighty superiority of this language manifests itself for the first time. That is because this language is not used for hobbies or social mingling, but used to realize and to live in eternal human peace without any struggles. Therefore, it is natural that the Esperanto movement takes on a class essence.

実際この言語という武器が無産階級の手に収めているこそ、この言語の持つ偉大なる優秀性を初めて発揮しうると私は信じています。なぜならば、この言語を趣味や社交などのために使用するのではなく、永久の闘争なき人類の平和に生きんがために、それを実現するがために使用するか

らであります。であるから、エスペラント運動が階級的性質を帯びてくるのが当然である。32

For Lian, Esperanto facilitated exchanges among proletarians across the world by bridging the gap across spatial separation needed to counter imperial language (kokugo) used by the bourgeoisie, including the Taiwanese ruling classes, to suppress the masses. Lian wrote his essay in Japanese which contravened his aspirations to critique Japanese as the imperial language. In so doing, it is possible he may have drawn less attention from imperial censors, maintaining a degree of anonymity. Lian’s choice, however, also reveals a complication of promoting Esperanto, which must be discussed in the imperial language. There was a tension between imperial language and minor languages that surfaced frequently among proletarian Esperantists throughout the 1920s and 1930s.

32 Lian Wenqing, “Wareware wa tōsō naki jinrui no heiwa ni ikin,” Informo de F.E.S, no. 1 (1931): 6-7.

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Esperanto, even the proletarian variant used by Akita and Lian, was not completely free of the risks of standardized language. This risk recalls Deleuze and Guattari’s warning that “the dangers of a minority struggle [are] to reterritorialize, to redo the photos, to remake power and law, to also remake a ‘great literature.’”33 Indeed, through the production of textbooks and dictionaries, the development of (proletarian) Esperanto mirrored that of national languages. One notable difference, however, was that because Esperanto lacked a nation-state (and native speakers), it provided proletarian

Esperantists flexibility to experiment and use it to undermine oppressive national languages. As

“‘[m]ajor’ and ‘minor’ do not qualify two different languages but rather two usages or functions of language,”34 proletarian Esperanto can be understood as minorizing major languages through translation either in its vocabulary or between Esperanto and native language of its users. Thus, the various usages of proletarian Esperanto can be considered – translation, letter-writing, or any form of spoken or written usage – as acts of resistance which “place(d) the major language in a state of continuous variation.”35

To execute linguistic strikes, Akita and Lian attempted to militarize the proletarian tongue as a linguistic weapon using a new lexicon of ammunition which incorporated Esperanto into the domain class struggle.36 Similar to the emphasis placed on education by Soviet Esperantists, Akita and

33 Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986), 86. 34 Ibid., 104. 35 Ibid., 105. 36 For example, Pak Ho discusses several Esperanto textbooks including the Purotaria Esuperanto Kōza: Proleta Kurso de Esperanto (Proletarian Esperanto Course) and two co-authored books by Akita, Shotō Esuperanto (Beginner Esperanto) and Mohan Esuperanto (Introduction to Esperanto) in his article “Esŭp'erant'o e taehan chilmun e taedam ham” (Answers to Questions about Esperanto), Chipdan, no.6 (1932): 46-47. Pak’s article also suggests that proletarian Esperanto textbooks were available in Korea.

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Lian believed that teaching proletarians Esperanto was essential to challenge the bourgeois ideology taught at state schools.37 Akita, for example, praised the Soviet Union for its pedagogical efforts providing learning exercises in newspapers, integrating Esperanto in new technological systems such as the telegram, telegraph, telephone and radio, and establishing an international organization of workers’ correspondence (Proleta Esperanto-Korespondanto, Proletarian Esperanto Correspondent).38

Akita and Lian considered such efforts effective in circumventing the spatial boundaries imposed by the ruling classes and useful to adapt for proletarian Esperanto movements in East Asia.39

Akita and Lian’s understanding of Esperanto was part of a broader concurrent debate among

(Marxist) linguists on the role language played in capitalist suppression of peoples worldwide.

Proletarian Esperantists and Marxist linguists emphasized the importance of studying pragmatics in relation to language to find ways of challenging linguistic appropriation. Most notable was the

37 For a historical overview of the various international Esperanto movements such as Internacio de Proleta Esperantistaro (Proletarian Esperantist International), Sennacieca Asocio Tutmonda (Worldwide Non-national Association), Universala Esperanto-Asocio (Universal Esperanto Association), among others, and their debates and schisms see Ulrich Lins, Dangerous Language: Esperanto under Hitler and Stalin (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016). Originally published in German as Ulrich Lins, Die gefährliche Sprache. Die Verfolgung der Esperantisten unter Hitler und Stalin (Gerlingen: Bleicher, 1988). 38 Akita, “Kaikyū bunka tōsō no buki to shite no Esperanto,” 118-119. In East Asia, (proletarian) Esperantists also use new media to promote Esperanto. For example, the Esperantist and poet Kim Ŏk (1893-195?) serialized an Esperanto course in the newspaper Dong-A Ilbo lasting 115 times, starting in February 1924, and wrote a weekly column about Esperanto for over year between May 1924 and August 1925. In addition, Kim Ŏk organized a virtual self-study room (Esŭp'erant'o chasŭpshil) in the proletarian journal Kaebyŏk (Creation) for several months and published one of the Esperanto textbooks in Korean titled Esŭp'erant'o tok'ak (Esperanto Self-Study, 1923). Besides learning materials, he was a cofounder of the Chosŏn Esŭp'erant'o yŏnmaeng (Korean Esperanto Association) and translated Korean stories into Esperanto such as Kim Dong-in’s “Batato” (Gamja, Potato, 1930) and Hyŏn Jin-gŏn’s “Piano” (P’iano, 1930) and “Fotografaĵo” (Sajin, Photograph, 1930). For more on Kim Ŏk and Esperanto see Kim U-sŏn (ed.), Sŏn’guja Kim Ŏk (Soŭl: Han’guk Esŭp'erant'o Hyŏp'oe, 2002) and Kim Sam-su, Han'guk Esŭp'erant'o undongsa, 1906-1975: segye p'yŏnghwa wa kukcheŏ palchŏn e taehan Han'gugin ŭi chŏkkŭkchŏk konghŏn (Sŏul: Sungmyŏng Yŏja Taehakkyo Ch'ulp'anbu, 1976), 61-72. Recently, Kim Ŏk’s Esperanto activities have drawn the attention of scholars. See for example, Yim Su-kyung, “Kim Ŏk ŭi Esŭp'erant'o insik yŏn'gu,” Ŏmunhak, no. 122 (2013): 575-597. 39 For more on proletarian activism and education, see for example Ikeda Taneo and Kyōiku Undōshi Kenkyūkai, Puroretaria kyōiku no ashiato (Tokyo: Shinju Shuppan, 1972).

151 pragmatics proposed by Marxist linguist Valentin Voloshinov’s (1895-1936) study Marksizm i Filosofiya

Yazyka (Marxism and the Philosophy of Language, 1929). Voloshinov’s work was the Marxist response to the bourgeois linguistics of Ferdinand de Saussure (1857-1913). Where the latter stressed the importance of langue (the rules of language based on a signifier and signified), over parole (the use of langue), Voloshinov critiqued langue as a system of “normatively identical forms” which standardizes parole through arbitrary and synchronic rules separated from social and individual usage.40 Instead of

Saussure’s objective and unmediated language, Voloshinov proposed studying indirect discourse and utterances as dynamic social signs in contemporary languages that were always subject to change depending on context. For Voloshinov, it was crucial to understand language as a medium of ideology that shapes human consciousness in a particular social construct. Voloshinov’s pragmatics played a key role in formulating proletarian and post-World War II critiques of language.

Informed by Voloshinov’s pragmatics, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari continue and enhance the Marxist critique of Saussurean linguistics in their plateau “November 20, 1923: Postulates of

Linguistics.” They question the field of linguistics for its complicity in erasing political resistance by homogenizing languages and becoming isolated from social realities for the sake of scientific study.

Deleuze and Guattari write that “[e]very language is an essentially heterogeneous reality,”41 and all attempts at standardizing languages will cause that for its users, as such, “[l]anguage is made not to be believed but to be obeyed, and to compel obedience.”42 Like Voloshinov, they emphasize the

40 Valentin N. Voloshinov, Marxism and the Philosophy of Language, trans. Ladislav Matejka and I.R. Titunik (Cambridge; Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1986), 65. 41 Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), 93. 42 Ibid., 76.

152 historicity and socially constructed nature of statements, both written and spoken, to undermine any attempt at standardizing language. They reject the individuality of enunciations in language, and instead assert that enunciations or utterances are a force on their own, which form a “collective assemblage of enunciation.”43 In such an assemblage, language does not mean to inform or communicate, but rather to transform bodies through subjectification and individuation - what

Deleuze and Guattari call “incorporeal transformations.” Through commands, language transforms the social functions of bodies as epitomized in the verdict of a judge changing the accused into a convict.

In commands, Deleuze and Guattari locate the “order-word” (le mot d’ordre), words and phrases that discipline its users through events or “incorporeal transformations.” For Deleuze and

Guattari, however, order-words are not only limitative but also creative. They suggest that the creative force in order-words are “pass-words” (le mot de passe) which they describe as: “[w]ords that pass, words that are components of passage, whereas order-words mark stoppages or organized, stratified compositions. A single thing or word undoubtedly has this twofold nature: it is necessary to extract one from the other – to transform the compositions of order into components.”44 They provide the example of slogans as order-words in Lenin’s “On Slogans” (1917). These slogans initiated incorporeal transformations that “extracted from the masses a proletarian class as an assemblage of enunciation before the conditions were present for the proletariat to exist as a body” not unlike May Day slogans.45

43 Ibid., 80. 44 Ibid., 110. 45 Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 83. Italics in the original.

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Enunciation deterritorializes the order-word through pass-words, thus resisting the standardization of language in “events [which] make language possible.”46 Not unlike the milieus discussed in the previous chapter, languages remain open fields, interconnected with other non-linguistic fields through semi-stable equilibria ,which are in constant variation “in relation to the aggregate of circumstances.”47 The following two sections will discuss how proletarian Esperantists employed strategies in translation and radio broadcasting in order to resist linguistic suppression and create networks of international exchange.

2.3 Translating the Proletariat in Esperanto: Nakagaki Kojirō and (Un)translatability

Reading through Nakagaki Kojirō’s Esuperanto hon’yaku jikkenshitsu (Esperanto Translation

Laboratory, 1934), this section explores what problems proletarian Esperanto translators encountered and what solutions they offered. Esperantists frequently translated linguistic theories and literary works and included these translations in textbooks.48 However, as finished products these materials often obscured and erased the labor of translation. Nakagaki’s Esperanto Translation Laboratory is one of the few extant books that walks the reader step by step through the pitfalls and (im)possibilities of translation. 49

46 Gilles Deleuze, The Logic of Sense, trans. Constantin V. Boundas, Mark Lester and Charles J. Stivale (London: Bloomsbury, 2015), 187. 47 Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 83. 48 In La Mondo, Ye Jun [Ye Junjian] discussed similar translation problems and techniques under the rubric “Fanyi yanjiu” (Translation Research). Other prominent proletarian Esperanto translators in addition to those already mentioned were Lou Shiyi, Zhang Qicheng (1913-), Sun Yong (1902-1983), Wang Yanlu (1901-1944), Hu Yuzhi (1896-1986). 49 Nakagaki was a prolific translator and teacher of Esperanto and active member in the proletarian Esperanto movement. He started learning Esperanto at the Kyŏngsŏng/Keijō Esperanto Society in Seoul where he lived as the son of an elementary school teacher. Observing the colonial violence in Korea while reading through many leftist works, Nakagaki was determined to use Esperanto as “weapon” in favor of the class and ethnic conflicts. Nakagaki became an Esperanto

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Esperanto Translation Laboratory consists of eight “experiments” (jikken) each of which center around an excerpt of a literary text first written in Japanese and one supplemental text to practice translating from Japanese into Esperanto.50 Besides the quotes in Japanese, each experiment was divided in several subsections which provided explanations of the text, a vocabulary list, translation notes and an Esperanto translation. Users were supposed to read through the Japanese excerpt first and then work through the translation notes while translating it. Finally, users could compare their translation with Nakagaki’s. More than half of the excerpts were taken from proletarian writers, such as Hayashi Fusao (Ringo, Apple), Murayama Tomoyoshi (Bōryokudanki, Record of Gang Violence),

Kobayashi Takiji (Kanikōsen, Crab Cannery Ship), and Tokunaga Sunao (Hōnen kikin, Bumper Harvest,

Famine). In addition to quotations taken from novels and short stories, other excerpts were taken from plays and setsuwa to challenge the user’s translation skills, which also demonstrated that

Esperanto was compatible with various literary forms.

In the prologue of Esperanto Translation Laboratory, Nakagaki reflects on his career as an

Esperanto translator. While all the selected texts are considered literature, for Nakagaki the purpose of this project went beyond literature. He writes that his purpose was:

(…) to investigate experimentally the relation between Esperanto and Japanese and to solve [problems] technically. More specifically, I aim to solve the following problems: how would one say in Esperanto this and that Japanese word? How would one express in Esperanto particular ways of expressing in Japanese? To what extent is it possible to translate from Japanese in Esperanto?

teacher and toured together with Ōyama Tokio through Korea teaching hundreds of locals in Pyongyang, Chinnanp’o, and Sunch’eon. Moving to Pyongyang, Nakagaki attracted the attention of the police for his leftist aspirations and soon afterward returned to Japan in 1924. There he continued to publish Esperanto learning materials and was among the founding members of the proletarian Esperanto movement. After years of experience teaching and translating Esperanto, he published Esperanto Translation Laboratory. Shibata Iwao, Nakagaki Kojirō: Nicchū Esuperanchisuto no shi (Osaka: Ribēroisha, 2010), 19-21. 50 First published in the journal Esperanta Literaturo (Esperanto Literature) between 1933 and 1934.

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(…) 日本語とエスペラントの関係を実験的に究明し技術的に解決するといふ事にある。具体的にいへば日本語のこれこれの単語はエスペラントで何といふか、かういふ日本語の表現法をエスペラントではどう表はすか、日本語からエスペラントへの翻訳はどの程度まで可能であるか (…)51

For Nakagaki, it was literally an experiment to verify the translatability of both languages, prefiguring what Lydia Liu later called “translingual practice,” referring to “the process by which new words, meanings, discourses, and modes of representation arose (and) circulated” between languages.52

To illustrate some of the translation issues Nakagaki encountered, the opening passage from

Kobayashi’s Kanikōsen (Crab Cannery Ship) is useful not only for its challenging title, but also for its use of patois or non-standardized language used by proletarians. Nakagaki provides two unaccredited translations as well as his own from the first two pages in Japanese together with 60 translation notes.53 Among the problems Nakagaki highlighted is the opening sentence “Oi, Jigoku sa egu n dade!”

54 (おい、地獄さ行(え)ぐんだで！, Hey, we’re off to hell!) written in what is considered Tōhoku dialect.

Although not mentioned by Nakagaki, this sentence itself is a translation of “All right, then, I'll go to hell” in Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. However, the fact that it is a translation is relevant because it suggests that the racial hardships of late nineteenth-century America can be made comparable to the proletarian hardships of the early twentieth-century Japanese through translation.

51 Nagakaki Kojirō, Esuperanto honyaku jikkenshitsu (Tokyo: Asake Shobō, 1934 [1952]), IV. 52 Lydia H. Liu, Translingual Practice: Literature, National Culture, and Translated Modernity—China, 1900-1937 (Stanford: Stanford Univ. Press, 1995), 26. 53 One of the translations is most likely from Hasegawa Teru. In Hasegawa’s collected works, the editor Miyamoto Masao states that Hasegawa published a partial translation in Esperanta Literaturo no. 10 (1933) anonymously followed by her submission to Nakagaki’s Esuperanto honyaku jikkenshitsu responding to his call for Esperanto translations. Miyamoto Misao, Hansen Esuperanchisuto Hasegawa Teru Sakuhinshū. Elektitaj Verkoj de Verda Majo (Tokyo: Aki Shobō, 1979), no. 4, 345. 54 Translation from Zeljko Cipris, The Crab Cannery Ship and Other Novels of Struggle (Honolulu: University of Hawaiʻi Press, 2013), 15.

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This compatibility overlaps with Nakagaki’s efforts to translate proletarian literature from Japanese into Esperanto. The Esperanto translations of Kobayashi’s opening sentence are as follows:

“He, ni iru en la inferon!” (Translation 1) -He, ni iros al infero! (Translation 2) “He, ni iros inferon!” (Nakagaki’s tentative translation)

While the kanji together with furigana can mediate meaning and dialect, Esperanto (and most other languages) cannot imitate this use of dialect. Nakagaki interprets the sentence as an “emotional expression regarding the reality that they need to go to a place like hell.” Therefore, he renders the u- ending (iru) of the Esperanto verb, expressing the volitive modality, in the first translation incorrect and chooses the os-ending (iros) of Esperanto verb which expresses a future tense, changing the meaning “let’s go” into “we will go.” Furthermore, for “jigoku sa” the translation “en inferon” implies “in hell” instead of direction like “al infero” (to hell). While Nakagaki considers “al infero” correct, he chooses “inferon” (hell), a singular accusative case, to emphasize the fact that the comment is “in plain speech by a fisher” (gyofu no soboku na kotoba).55

Nakagaki’s grappling with translation and translatability resonates with contemporaries such as Walter Benjamin.56 However, while Benjamin focused on temporality in his analysis of translatability as found in Fortleben (afterlife, literally to live on), for Nakagaki, spatializing translation is the focus of his “kokusaisei” (internationalness). Although one does not exclude the other, Nakagaki privileged space to articulate (linguistic) solidarity with proletarian Esperantists and proletarian

55 Nakagaki, Esuperanto honyaku jikkenshitsu, 47. 56 See Walter Benjamin, “The Task of the Translator,” in Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings Volume 1, 1913-1926, trans. Harry Zohn (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard Univ. Press, 2004), 253-263.

157 struggles worldwide. Read with the pragmatics of Deleuze and Guattari, it highlights spatial interconnectedness. While Deleuze and Guattari’s variations in language share Benjamin’s notion of

“stetem Wandel” (constant state of flux), it is the act of the order-word becoming pass-word, which spatializes a “collective assemblage of enunciation.” Nakagaki’s translations are not individual but a

“joined act” (kyōdō no shigoto) that enables (un)translatability passing for order-words.57 He put writing in variation to deterritorialize language, “provide[ing] an intimate and immediate connection between the individual and the political,” where everything is expressed in collective terms and

“everything takes on a collective value.”58 As a result, the subject dissolves – a common feature in proletarian literature – and is replaced with a collectivity.

In the epilogue Esperanto Translation Laboratory, Nakagaki explores solutions for untranslatables in his “translation theory.” While it is beyond the scope of this section to analyze each subsection at length, issues that resonate with proletarian politics of language identified above will be discussed. Despite various Esperanto dictionaries being available for purchase, many words, such as neologisms, gendered and children’s words, dialect, and polite language had no Esperanto equivalent.

These had to be invented in Esperanto by combining each word’s various prefixes and suffixes.

Esperanto was linguistically flexible as an open system and allowed its users to add new words.59

57 Deleuze and Guattari write that “[h]ence, when Kafka writes, he does so neither as an isolated individual, nor as the magical, unmediated voice of a ‘collectivity that is not yet constituted’; rather, Kafka, as actual writer, and ‘the virtual community – both of them real – are the components of a collective assemblage’,” Deleuze and Guattari, Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature, 84. 58 Ibid., 17. 59 The poet, Esperantist, and editor of the prolific Esperanto magazine Literatura Mondo (Literary World), Kálmán Kalocsay (1891-1976), for example, invented many Esperanto words in his poetry, such as his collection Sekretaj sonetoj (Secret Sonnets, 1932), which contained many erotic neologisms.

158

Nakagaki, however, acknowledged opposition to neologisms as many of these new words were taken from European languages, which already had a shared lexicon with Esperanto. Nakagaki concluded that such Eurocentric neologisms would undermine the internationality of Esperanto and were difficult for peoples from Asia to learn.60

In his translation manual, Nakagaki discusses the difficulties of translation, especially the problem of equivalence and accuracy between meanings of words from different languages. Through translation, Nagakaki explores possibilities to open up the Esperanto lexicon to non-European words to alter the Eurocentric vocabulary of Esperanto into a more international language. For example,

Nakagaki explains that certain Japanese words such as shōgi could be translated as ŝako (chess), with an annotation how it differs from chess. While Esperanto fails to show the difference between shōgi and chess when using the word ŝako, Nakagaki insisted what was important is that users be able to grasp the “internationalness” (kokusaisei) of the object being referred to, in this case a strategic boardgame. This example shows what many Esperantists, including those beyond proletarian

Esperanto movements, worried that Esperanto was too Eurocentric instead of international.

Therefore, he urges Esperantists to invest in “esprimo” (expressions) aimed to stretch Esperanto’s sayings beyond European boundaries, which would put Esperanto in a “continuum of variation.”

While Nakagaki might have failed to completely resolve the issue, he states that Esperanto is a simple language, a required condition for an international language. However, in avoiding complication, it encounters limitations in its ability to translate foreign languages. Nakagaki concludes that:

60 Nakagaki, Esuperanto honyaku jikkenshitsu, 167.

159

(…) untranslatables are not necessary for international life. When one translates into Esperanto, you often see that nebula [nebulous] things become klara [clear], delikata [delicate] things become kruda [crude], and multkoreco [multicoloredness] disappears. However, I think that is okay. Literature, that loses its merit because of that, does not have any merit as world literature.

(…) しかし訳せないものは国際生活に必要のないものだ。エスペラントに訳すると nebula なことが klara になつたり delikata なものが kruda なつたり、multkoloreco が失われたりする事が多々ある。しかしそれでいいと思う。それで価値が無くなる文学は世界文学として価値がないのだ。61

At first, Nakagaki’s conclusion could be considered problematic, running the risk of arguing in favor of cosmopolitan universality where the local/colonized becomes subordinate to the global/imperial, thus erasing difference and diversity. Moreover, the Esperanto vocabulary used in the above quote clearly reveals a certain Eurocentrism as demonstrated by affinity with the European lexicon. This shared lexicon presented proletarians in East Asia specific challenges in mastering Esperanto, an experience quite different from bourgeois learners who were familiar with European languages.

Understood within the context of translation as act of resistance, Esperanto resists categorization and filiation by maintaining multiplicities within singularities (n-boardgames contained in ŝako rather that X, Y, and Z as part of category of boardgame). For Nakagaki, the meaning of words cannot merely be reduced to the semantic (defining) meaning. They must also have a processual aspect that carries a surplus of (undefined) meaning which enable transformative movements of words as they reveal what they could potentially become. In other words, by denying definite forms in “internationalness,” translation unlocks the ability to resist the isomorphism (sameness in difference) stemming from

(nation-state) capitalism and its money-form, where the latter operates as a translation between the value of two commodities to universalize and homogenize its differences. Using this logic, Nakagaki

61 Ibid., 172.

160 demonstrates that the practice of translation is always already both a process of (re)territorialization and deterritorialization, in which meaning has the power to either oppress or liberate.

Perhaps not unlike Meiji-period translators changing the meanings of Sino-centric words by including foreign concepts as they translated European words into Japanese, Nakagaki’s aspirations seemed to be to undermine what Guattari proposed as the semiotic triangle in capitalism: “reference, signification, representation.”62 The capitalist order by its nature aims to erase polyvocality and polyvalence of languages; instead it demands standardization and univocality in order to deterritorialize and equalize the flows of value and production. Deleuze and Guattari state that “[a] rule of grammar is a power marker before it is a syntactical marker.”63 This is why both proletarian linguists, Esperantists, and Deleuze and Guattari critique Saussurean linguistics as closure between signifier and signified, mirroring capitalist closure. Saussure thought of language as chess, writing that

“[i]n both instances we are confronted with a system of values and their observable modifications. A game of chess is like an artificial realization of what language offers natural form.”64 For Saussure, each position of a chess piece had “the unique characteristic of being freed from all antecedent positions,” which displayed his static and ahistorical understanding of words and language.65 In contrast, for

Nakagaki words could transform their unique qualities, and as an example, ŝako is able to be both

62 Félix Guattari, Molecular Revolution: Psychiatry and Politics, trans. Rosemary Sheed (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1984), 101. 63 Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 76. 64 Ferdinand de Saussure, Course in General Linguistics, trans. Wade Baskin (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011), 88. It is interesting to note that Saussure’s brother René de Saussure (1868-1943) was a prominent Esperantist and active member in the Esperanto movement around the turn of the century. For more on René de Saussure and Esperanto, see Javier Alcalde, “The other Saussure,” Babel, no. 16 (2016): 22-24. 65 Ibid., 89.

161 chess and shōgi, or Go or any other strategic boardgame. Seemingly not bothered by fixed linguistic rules, Nakagaki leaves the meaning of ŝako undecided and open to resist capitalist codification as well as to undermine the Eurocentrism contained in the word ŝako. Whereas Saussurean linguistics disciplines language, Nakagaki’s Esperanto linguistics aim to liberate language.

2.4 Broadcasting Esperanto Voices: Akita Ujaka and Collective Radio

During Akita Ujaku’s seven-month trip through the Soviet Union, he penned in his travelogue

Wakaki Souēto Roshia (Young Soviet Russia, 1929).66 Departing in October, 1927, Akita’s trip to the

Soviet Union was a unique opportunity to engage with foreign Esperantists and to observe a wide range of Soviet everyday life. While Akita’s travelogue provides us with numerous moments of solidarity (Fig. 2.3), his few brief descriptions of radiobroadcasts in Esperanto and encounters with

Esperantists will be examined as another praxis of the “striking tongue.” Reading these descriptions brings into focus the solidarity seen spatially as suggested by Pak, but also as mediated corporeally and technologically as an amplified voice. In addition to publications of his activities written in

Japanese and translated in Chinese and Esperanto, Akita interacted with other Esperantists, speaking in Esperanto through radiobroadcasts. In doing so, Akita’s “striking tongue” strived to deterritorialize

66 Akita’s travelogue was translated in its entirety Chinese as Xin E youji in 1930, and several sections were translated in Esperanto and used as intermediate Esperanto learning material in the journal La Mondo. Founder of the proletarian Esperanto movement in Shanghai, Hu Yuzhi paid homage to Akita by starting his book with a quotation from Akita in Chinese that reads: “Knowing the future of the Soviet Russia is knowing the future of all human-kind.” Hu Yuzhi, Mosike yinxiang (Shanghai: Xinshengming Shuju, 1933), V. Hu Yuzhi also traveled through the Soviet Union but only for seven days, departing from France on his way back home to Shanghai. Like Akita, Hu benefited from his Esperanto skills when he encounters Soviet Esperantists as discussed at length in his travelogue.

162 the imperial borders preventing proletarian intellectuals from interacting, while his voice also ran the risk of being reterritorialized again into new structures of standardization. 67

Early in Akita’s stay in Moscow, a Soviet Esperantist invited Akita and his travel companion

Narumi Kanzō (1899-1974) to visit broadcast stations in the city. Throughout the travelogue, Akita praises the technological facilities in the Soviet comparing the radio and telegram network as well as the postal system telegraph poles with a “nervous system” (shinkei keitō, Akita takes this expression from the Soviets). It extended beyond the Soviet Union and had the ability to communicate with the entire world (Fig. 2.4). For Akita, these technological systems reminded him of the “human nervous system.”68 Akita describes the sensorial intimacy made possible by electric waves that affects and interconnects humans with what cultural historian Yoshimi Shun’ya described as “electronic media

[as] an extension of our central nervous systems; it nullifies distance on a global scale, and brings about a state of multisensory coexistence.”69 Akita identifies such a “multisensory coexistence” in how

“the voice of those with leadership positions like Stalin, Bukharin, and Lunacharsky can be intimate with the ears of the masses through the radio almost everyday.”70 For Akita, Esperanto held the similar possibility of intimacy.

67 Tsuboi Hideo has examined the disembodied voice in wartime Japanese poetry and the use of radio to erase the sense of disembodiment what he considers a shift from “visualism” (shikakushugi) in earlier modernist and avant-garde poetry to “auditorism” (chōkakushugi) in wartime poetry. Tsuboi Hideto, Koe no shukusai: Nihon kindaishi to sensō (Nagoya: Nagoya Daigaku Shuppankai, 1997). For more on the multifarious nature of voice in Japan media and culture see a special issue dedicated to voice by Japan Forum titled: The voice in modern Japan: translations from the history of the senses, Japan Forum 30, no. 3 (2018).

68 Akita Ujaku, Wakaki Souēto Roshia (Tokyo: Sōbunkaku, 1929), 272. 69 Yoshimi Shun’ya, Koe no shihonshugi: Denwa, rajio, chikuonki no shakaishi (Tokyo: Kawade Shobō Shinsha, 2012), 20. Translation taken from Yoshimi Shun’ya, “Preface to Yoshimi Shun'ya's Voice Capitalism,” trans Helen Elizabeth O'Horan, Japan Forum 30, no. 3 (2018): 385. 70 Ibid., 275.

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Although Akita asked his readers to compare Soviet and Japanese radiobroadcasting, he did not question the possible abuse in relation between speakers and listeners as Murayama Tomoyoshi did. Observing radio broadcasts in Japan, Murayama foresaw that the (state) owners of radio waves would block competing and contesting amateur radio stations.71 Likewise, Benjamin worried that radio, like film, could change “not only the function of the professional actor but, equally, the function of those who, like the politician, present themselves before these media.” This would result “in a new form of selection – selection before an apparatus – from which the champion, the star, and the director emerge as victors.”72 Failing to recognize the lack of access to radio among the “non-radio class” (hi-rajio kaikyū),73 Akita’s optimism is likely based on his observations of how voices from political leaders were broadcasted alongside popular entertainment and talks by (academic) specialists which made radio broadcasts in the Soviet “educational,” “self-reflexive,” and “encouraging, healthy entertainment.”74 Akita refrains, however, from questioning the state apparatus

Narkompochtel (People’s Commissariat of Post and Telegraph), which was in charge of radio broadcasting, and which operated as a mediating authority on behalf of the socialist state. 75 Although

Akita writes that the one of the goals of Soviet broadcasting was “education on ideology,” he neglected

71 For a discussion on Murayama and radio, see Yoshimi, Koe no shihonshugi: Denwa, rajio, chikuonki no shakaishi, 216-217. 72 Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of its Technological Reproducibility: Second Version,” 49n24. In his radiobroadcast Much Ado About Kasper: A Radio Play, Benjamin already highlighted the potential ubiquitous surveillance of radio microphones penetrating private and domestic spaces. In the radio play, Herr Maulschmidt tells Kasper: “While you were out in the city perpetrating your scandalous deeds, we secretly installed a microphone in your room, under your bed, and now we have everything you said, on a record, and I just happened to bring one along for you.” Walter Benjamin, “Much Ado About Kasper: A Radio Play,” in Radio Benjamin (New York: Verso, 2014), 219. 73 Yoshimi, Koe no shihonshugi: Denwa, rajio, chikuonki no shakaishi, 214. 74 Akita, Wakaki Souēto Roshia, 275. 75 For more on Narkompochtel and in the institutionalization of radio in the Soviet Union, Stephen Lovell, Russia in the Microphone Age: A History of Soviet Radio, 1919-1970 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 13-42.

164 to account for the possibility of it controlling the masses, strongly resembling broadcasting in capitalist empires.

While Akita refrained from any detailed description of his first Esperanto radiobroadcast, near the end of the travelogue he included a section on “Mosukuwa rajio” (Moscow Radio). In this section, he disagrees with colleague Murayama Tomoyoshi, who (according to Akita) believed that radio only served reactionary politics and light entertainment.76 In contrast to Murayama, who based his ideas on radio as it was developing in Japan, Akita, following his observations in Moscow, became convinced that radio could be effectively used for socialist politics. He writes that “in Moscow the radio has been completely socialized” (Mosukuwa dewa rajio wa kanzen ni shakaika shita).77 He was fascinated by the collective use of radio with radios being mounted to poles in squares where passersby could enjoy “public broadcasting” (kōkai hōsō).78 Listening to public radios in public spaces collectively presented a stark contrast with the development of radio as an individualized commodity in the Japanese empire. Yoshimi shows how in Japan after a brief experimental period of amateur networks, radio became organized and centralized under state auspices. Within these state confines, radio developed as mass entertainment and as a bourgeois product. Radios were sold as box-sized sets with additional parts such as a headset, receiver, and speaker. This was done at affordable prices for the middle class and were intended to be owned individually and kept in private spaces, which

76 Akita, Wakaki Souēto Roshia, 271. 77 Ibid. 78 In his study on radio in the Soviet Union, Stephen Lovell also describes a collective use of radio contrasting it with a domesticated use of radio by middle-class families in the USA and Western Europe. Lovell, Russia in the Microphone Age: A History of Soviet Radio, 1919-1970, 51.

165 further contributed to atomizing listeners.79 These radiobroadcasts were sent out using standard language and were under the strict scrutiny of censors. These censors aimed to submit their listeners to a national consciousness of sameness. In contrast, Akita’s observations on radiobroadcasting in

Moscow presented opportunities to consider how sonic voices travelling in the air could establish new relationships between human beings beyond national borders.80

Akita himself engaged in radio combining technological intimacy (radio) and linguistic intimacy (Esperanto) during one of his three Esperanto radio broadcasts (Fig. 2.4). In his diary, Akita wrote of practicing with Esperantist Viktor Zhavoronkov (1885-1938), who initiated and led Esperanto radiobroadcasts in the Soviet Union, to prepare for his broadcast. Akita had his Esperanto script checked by Zhavoronkov and together they rehearsed recitation in Esperanto.81 Using the “Soviet microphone” (Souēto maikurohon), Akita was able to execute the “striking tongue” through radio-

79 Yoshimi, Koe no shihonshugi: Denwa, rajio, chikuonki no shakaishi, 198-222. Besides Yoshimi, Tsuboi Hideto, Takeyama Akiko, and more recently Yasar Kerim also examine how radio was used in Japan for more collective purposes, such as live sports broadcasting, and group calisthenics. However, as they all show, these broadcast programmes were tied to the production of a national consciousness among its listeners. Takeyama Akiko, Rajio no jidai: Rajio wa chanoma no shuyaku datta (Kyoto: Sekai Shisōsha, 2002), 163-267, Yasar Kerim, Electrified Voices: How the Telephone, Phonograph, and Radio Shaped Modern Japan, 1868-1945 (New York: Columbia University Press, 2018), 114-153. In East Asia, Esperantists also broadcast radio programs, mostly Esperanto courses. The first of such broadcasts was done in Dalian in 1922 by Esperanto instructor Obana Yoshio from the Dalian Esperanto Movement at the Dalian Broadcast Station (JQAK) followed by broadcasts in Fengtian, Seoul, Nagoya, Taipei, Tokyo, and Osaka. For more on Esperanto radiobroadcasts see Hatsushiba Takemi, Nihon Esuperanto Undōshi. Historio de la Japana Esperanto-Movado (Tokyo: Nihon Esuperanto Gakkai, 1998), 76- 80; Lü Meiqin, “Nihon tōchika ni okeru Taiwan Esuperanto undō kenkyū,” 52-58, 96; the program booklet of the Esuperanto no yū (Esperanto Evening) performed at the Taihoku (Taipei) Broadcast Station on 15 December, 1929 (Zamenhof’s birthday) is still extant. The program consisted of songs and dialogues in Esperanto as well as lectures on Esperanto related topics in Japanese. See Taihoku Esuperantokai, Esuperanto no yū (Taihoku: Taihoku Esuperantokai, 1929). 80 Benjamin foregrounded a similar problem vocalized by Murayama and Akita. Walter Benjamin, “Reflections on Radio,” in Radio Benjamin (New York: Verso, 2014), 363-364. 81 Akita Ujaku, Akita Ujaku nikki (Tokyo: Miraisha, 1965), 67-68.

166 waves, which created a moment of solidarity by breaking down spatial boundaries. He describes the broadcast as:

When we broadcast [in Esperanto] for the first time, immediately there was a response from Austria and Scandinavia. They sent us detailed commentary which made us very happy. For example, they provided their candid criticism about our manner of speaking, pronunciation, when to pause and even about our argumentation. Moreover, they are completely unknown to us, we had neither seen their faces nor known their occupation or age. Only through this new mechanism were we able to communicate.

私達の一回目に放送した時は、オーストリアとスカンジナビアからすぐに反応があつて、一々批評を送つて呉れたので愉快に思いました。例えば私達の講演ぶりについて、発音の仕方や、ポーズの置き方や、更に講演の論旨などについても正直に批評してよこすのです。然もその人達は全く未知の人々で、顔を見たこともなければ、その人の職業も年齢も知つていないのです。ただこ

の新しいメカニズムを通じて私達は交通することが出来たのです。82

Immediately after the broadcast, Akita received responses from comrades far away. Very different from the direct communication Akita had encountered with Soviet Esperantists during his stay, his voice disembodied through the mechanical “nerve system” traveled across space instantaneously. By transforming his voice into a political instrument, Akita creates a “striking tongue,” used against imperialist radio voices in Japan. Different from radiobroadcasts in Japan clearly delineating speaker and listener, Akita uses the broadcast as a tool of exchange, sharing the relationship with others, both as sender/receiver and speaker/listener. In this way, Akita is able to communicate in Esperanto across space and connect with a proletarian assemblage.

How Esperanto functions as pass-words for order-words was applied in translation. Akita used his amplified voice to deterritorialize the voice, allowing him to assemble solidarity with unknown nomadic voices circling the ether. Despite Akita’s enthusiasm, the comments Akita received in the quoted passage above reveal a desire to reterritorialize the format of radiobroadcast. This resembles

82 Akita, Wakaki Souēto Roshia, 275.

167 the bourgeois format which maintained a clear hierarchy between speaker and listener as discussed by Benjamin. Although Esperanto had no official standard seen in national languages, the urge to standardize and authenticate a certain type of speech put Akita on a lower position than his European peers, revealing an embedded Eurocentrism in Esperanto toward non-European Esperantists. As such, the comments tried to control Akita’s tongue, undermining Esperanto’s claimed immunity from speech hierarchies.

Akita’s trip was a unique opportunity among East Asian Esperantists as only a handful were able to enjoy such physical mobility. Direct encounters with foreign Esperantists were rare among

East Asians, the only exception being Esperantists from across East Asia who flocked into China during the Second Sino-Japanese War. These individuals teamed up to establish an anti-war resistance which will be discussed in the final part of this chapter. Akita also used radiobroadcasting to explore new methods of mediated contact with his Esperantist peers. Several years after his return to Japan,

Akita discussed radio in the Soviet Union in a series of newspaper articles written for the Asahi

Shinbun in 1932, stressing that this medium had the potential to unite (ketsugō) the world proletariat by “reducing the space of the planet significantly.”83 Now that proletarians were able to create programming, the next battle with capitalism, according to Akita, would be over the control of radio waves. Although Akita failed to critically assess the potential dangers of radiobroadcasting in a socialist state, he underlined the media’s deterritorializing potential. Akita writes, “radio needs to be owned completely by the masses themselves” and the Soviet Union should adapt the “right policies.”84

83 Akita Ujaku, “Nōto no naka kara: Soveto no rajio no hanashi 3,” Asahi Shinbun, 20 January, 1932, 5, Morning Edition. 84 Ibid.

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Still, many proletarians did not own a radio and were not able to meet in person, which, as stated earlier by Pak, resulted in proletarian Esperantists writing correspondence. This was done to suture the geographical distance between them, and will be the next topic of discussion.

2.5 Epistolary Solidarity: Proletarian Esperanto and International Correspondence

With the rise of proletarian movements and a brand of internationalism which envisioned a community of the world proletariat, these movements set up correspondence branches to improve and increase exchange among them, using mail, telegram, and telegraph.85 These correspondence branches added Esperanto as a lingua franca to expedite and improve social interaction among proletarians.86 Esperanto learners could either search for a (foreign) individual pen pal in an address

85 A modern postal system in East Asia started in Japan immediately after the Meiji Restoration (1868) with Maejima Hisoka (1835-1919) who was the head of communications in the Ministry of Civil Affairs. Maejima established a state-run courier service, Nippon tsū’un in 1871, and led the construction of infrastructure and post offices. Maejima expanded the postal system to the Ryūkyūs and Hokkaidō followed by China, Taiwan, Korea in tandem with Japanese imperial expansion and modernization. In 1930, there were around 10,000 Post Offices in Japan. Fujii Nobuyuki, Tsūshin to chiiki shakai (Tokyo: Nihon Keizai Hyōronsha, 2005), 9-69; Jacobowitz, Writing Technology in Meiji Japan: A Media History of Modern Japanese Literature and Visual Culture, 43-64; Patricia L. Maclachlan, The People’s Post Office: The History and Politics of the Japanese Postal System, 1871-2010 (Cambridge, Mass., Harvard University Press, 2011), 35-67. For more on postal systems in the rest of East Asia see Yan Xing (ed.), Zhonghua youzheng fazhanshi (Taibei: Taiwan Shangwu Yinshuguan, 1994); Yi Ki-yŏl, Irhwa ro ponŭn up'yŏn 130-yŏn (Sŏul: Chŏngbo Em aen Pi, 2013); John Mosher, Japanese Post Offices in China and Manchuria (Lawrence, Mass., Quarterman Publications, 1978). Fujii Nobuyuki speaks of a “tsūshin kakumei” (communication revolution) in the nineteenth century. He uses the term tsūshin not only to refer to correspondence (which is also tsūshin) but also includes various technologies of communication such as the mail service (yūbin), telegraph (denshin), and telephone (denwa). In the case of Japan, Fujii argues that a conventional understanding of a strict separation between rural and urban development fails to represent the wide and rapid construction of communication networks (tsūshinmō) across Japan. Fujji correctly shows how these technologies were serving the military expansion, but we need to keep in mind that oppositional forces such as proletarian movements also eagerly utilized these new communications methods for their own purposes of which the Esperanto correspondence is one example. Such correspondences were not only a common feature within proletarian Esperanto movements but among proletarian movements in general. Many proletarian journals devoted a section to correspondences most notably the journal Intanashonaru tsūshin (International Correspondence), a supplement of Sangyō rōdō jihō (Industry Worker Newsletter). 86 Proletarian Esperanto correspondence was not the first time for proletarians to engage in letter writing. In her study on script reform in China, Yurou Zhong examines letter writing and writing in general among Chinese illiterate laborers stationed in Europe during World War I. Script and language reformers strived to create a compatible writing system for illiterate proletarians that would help them to communicate with the home front. Different from Esperanto, however, was

169 column printed in proletarian (Esperanto) journals, send their (translated) letter directly to an

Esperanto journal for publication in a special correspondence section, or participate in group correspondence organized by proletarian Esperanto associations.

Earlier, it was stated that Esperanto seemed to have followed a different trajectory as compared to the development of “organic” languages. Zamenhof invented Esperanto as a written language in the absence of native speakers.87 Akita’s radiobroadcast was one example of how

Esperanto was vocalized sonorously. However, for sonic voices to emerge, intensive writing practice was necessary to develop competency in Esperanto. In addition, achieving the phonocentricity needed to put Esperanto on par with “organic” languages seemed unlikely; from its inception,

Zamenhof considered Esperanto to be an international auxiliary language and had no intention of it replacing any other language. In contrast to native languages, in which modern language reformers stressed the importance of the spoken word, Esperanto followed the opposite track, emphasizing the written word. This is not to say, however, that Esperantists saw spoken Esperanto as irrelevant. If

Esperantists had the chance to talk in Esperanto, they would most certainly do so. Due to lack of mobility as argued by Pak, Esperantists rarely had a chance to speak in Esperanto with others possessing a different native language; diverse mother tongues would have resulted in different understandings and executions of Esperanto.

the emphasis on phonocentrism that informed reformers to create a “colloquialized written language.” Zhong, Chinese Grammatology: Script Revolution, Literary Modernity, 1916-1958, 100-125. 87 Humphrey Tonkin’s writes that “[u]nlike most other languages, it was written Esperanto that informed spoken Esperanto, rather than the other way around. Humphrey Tonkin, “The Semantics of Invention: Translation into Esperanto” in The Translator as Mediator of Cultures, ed. Humphrey Tonkin and Maria Esposito Frank, (Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing Company,2010), 174.

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Esperantists in the Soviet Union and elsewhere acknowledged similar problems missing the opportunities to converse with foreign Esperantists. Given this, the role of correspondence was indispensable for Esperantists to communicate with foreign comrades. The main objective of such epistolary exchanges was to learn about working conditions and the daily lives of proletarians in the

Soviet Union and capitalist states rather than “the discourse of high politics.”88 Esperantists felt that through their letters they could express solidarity with foreign counterparts. They could use the information gleaned from the letters to dismiss national media which vilified the Soviet Union; it could also be used to introduce the hardships of proletarians endured in capitalist states to the uninformed. Esperantists translated the letters and published them in national-language proletarian journals in order to reach a domestic audience beyond themselves. They also challenged those who preferred translation between national languages, stressing benefits such as the lower cost and the higher speed of circulating information using Esperanto networks. Moreover, they deemed their writing as “more authentic than that received from abroad by way of ‘mediating authorities.’”89 Among

Esperantists, letter-writing flourished and hundreds of letters were sent to each other across the globe during the late 1920s and early 1930s.90

88 Lins, Dangerous Language — Esperanto under Hitler and Stalin, 191. 89 Ibid., 192. 90 About the number of letters between Soviet and foreign Esperantists Lins writes: “The letter-writing relations between Soviet and foreign Esperantists reached impressive numbers. In eight months, the Esperantists of Sebastopol received 500 letters from 20 countries, their colleagues in Kurgan in 17 months received 696 letters from 23 countries and themselves dispatched 938 pieces of correspondence. In Irkutsk, where the young communists’ committee recommended that its branches learn foreign languages for the purpose of international education and mentioned primarily Esperanto, foreign correspondence amounted to around 500 items a year. A growing readiness on the part of editors to publish material received through such correspondence was apparent. Such material appeared regularly in 10% of Soviet periodicals. In 29 Moscow periodicals a total of 82 letters, translated from Esperanto, were published, and in Kurgan, of 481 letters received in a single year, 86 appeared in newspapers or wall newspapers. Ibid., 191.

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While the Soviet Union had initially approved and encouraged international correspondence, the increasing volume of letters caused concern among authorities about their content. Eventually, growing nationalism, anti-Semitism (Zamenhof was from Jewish decent), and anti-bourgeois sentiment in the Soviet Union under Stalin saw Esperanto branded as a “dangerous language” and

Esperantists purged by Soviet authorities. This is not unlike Nazi Germany when Hitler suppressed

Esperanto and its users because of its perceived Jewish origin and affiliation with communism.91

Preceding persecution, Soviet authorities began controlling the rich and diverse content of Esperanto letters in order to avoid any “misrepresentations” of socialist life in the Soviet Union. During this time, authorities intervened and replaced correspondence between individuals with group correspondence under state surveillance.92 It established a system of Proletarian Esperanto Correspondents (PEK) in

1929 to centralize the international communication between Esperantists. Such centralization meant that the content of letters from local groups were screened for any deviation from the official Soviet ideology. This resulted in a list of prescribed topics Esperantists were allowed to write about as well as provided “trustworthy addresses” from foreign Esperanto correspondents which were deemed safe for letter exchange.93 Despite these interventions seriously threatening the epistolary solidarity between

91 Lins, Dangerous Language — Esperanto under Hitler and Stalin, 87-156, and Lins, Dangerous Language — Esperanto and the Decline of Stalinism, 3-68. 92 Regarding letter mail in various languages sent throughout the Japanese empire, Seth Jacobowitz describes how the implementation and standardization of a national and imperial postal network coincided with strict state surveillance controlling the circulation of mail, stating that “(…) writing that knows no boundaries within the confines of the nation it serves, yet that may also be intercepted and confiscated by that same authorizing body.” Seth Jacobowitz, Writing Technology in Meiji Japan: A Media History of Modern Japanese Literature and Visual Culture, 59. 93 Lins, Dangerous Language — Esperanto and the Decline of Stalinism, 40.

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Esperantists in the Soviet Union and the rest of the world, international Esperanto correspondence continued.

Proletarian Esperantists in East Asia invested eagerly in letter writing with counterparts in the

Soviet Union, Europe, North America, and Oceania as this correspondence, also including photographs and other items, provided them with “great joy.”94 Proletarian Esperanto movements understood the value of establishing and solidifying international proletarian networks as they were useful for introducing the idea of foreign class struggles and the socialist life. They devoted much of their time and space in journals towards developing and applying writing skills and in learning how to be a correspondent. In the first issue of proletarian Esperanto journal Kamarado (Comrade), the editors published an article about the structure and operation of proletarian Esperanto correspondence branches PEK or Proleta Esperanto korespondanto (Proletarian Esperanto

Correspondence).95 According to the editors, the correspondence office had three major objectives to fulfill:

A. The international correspondence movement of workers and farmers in Esperanto; to allow groups such as sports groups, literary circles, theater circles, anti-religious groups, consumer unions, and association branches in factories, workplaces, farm villages, and schools, among others, to have international mutual contact and to provoke unique correspondence activities, B. To provide accurate, immediate, and concise articles from the perspective of workers and farmers for proletarian newspapers and journals from all over the world. C. To support each proletarian organization with translation from and correspondence in Esperanto.

94 Ōsaka ichi shibuin (One branch member in Osaka), “Kaigai no kyōdai kara no shashin ya tsūshinbun de Kamārado o umeyō!,” Kamarado 2, no. 1, (1932): 13. 95 The neutral Esperanto association in Tokyo published several manuals teaching how to write international correspondences such as Ishiguro Osamu’s Kokusai tsūshin no jōshiki (Common practices of International Correspondence) published in 1934. While these publications refrain from critiquing the Japanese empire, they could still be useful to proletarian Esperantists. In the preface, Ishiguro expresses his gratitude to Miyake Shihei for his help. The latter was a known figure in the proletarian Esperanto movement. Ishiguro’s manual was published in the series as Nakagaki’s Translation Laboratory and Takaki’s translation of Ernest Drezen’s History of Esperanto.

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In order to have the above activities run smoothly, the PEK’s have international (Internacia Centro), national (Landa Centro) and local branches (Distrikta PEK-filio).

A. エスペラントに依る国際労働通信運動――工場、職場、農村、学校等の中にある団体例へばスポーツ団、文学サークル、演劇サークル、反宗の班、消費組合、組合分会等々を国際的に相互に連絡させその独自の通信活動を巻き起させる。 B. 全世界のプロレタリア新聞雑誌に正確、敏速、簡潔に労働者農民の立場からの記事を提供する。 C. 翻訳、通信等エスペラントを以つてする各無産団体への援助。以上の活動を統制するために PEK には国際本部（Internacia Centro）各国支部（Landa Centro）、各地方支部（Distrikta PEK-filio）の組織がある。96

Esperanto letter writing held the possibility of generating infinite strings of connections between individuals and groups. Eliminating spatial boundaries, correspondents of all backgrounds were capable of participating actively in an emancipating form of knowledge production. The article concludes with a thorough explanation of the three layers of non-centrist and non-hierarchical organization comprising PEK. These three layers formed multidirectional and interconnected networks among proletarian Esperantists worldwide as well as interlocutors with other proletarian organizations. The international journal Internaciisto (Internationalist) acted as an exchange platform for what Nakagaki earlier called “international life.” This international exchange platform coagulated the various strands of local struggles and activities as facilitated by national Esperanto movements.97

These letters resembled technologies like radio or telegram in that voices were mechanicalized or disembodied and traversed space to other eyes and ears. In doing so a new territoriality with other voices was created, not sonic but silent, yet interacting and enabling virtual encounters.

96 Anonymous, “PEK no katsudō,” Kamarado 1, no. 1 (1931): 38. 97 Ibid., 38-40.

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Proletarian Esperanto unions in East Asia in the early 1930s followed the abovementioned structure of PEK. They established national and local PEKs under the umbrella of the Internacio de

Proleta Esperantistaro (IPE, International of Proletarian Esperantists), such as Ĉina Proleta Esperanto

Korespondanto (CPEK, Chinese Proletarian Esperanto Correspondence) and Japana Proleta

Esperanto Korespondanto (JPEK, Japanese Proletarian Esperanto Correspondence), which again branched out in numerous local PEKs.98 Despite the monitoring and interference by authorities worldwide, PEKs formed a huge international web of correspondents across the globe who were able to share information rapidly,.

Proletarian Esperanto journals and textbooks became invested in providing education on how to write correspondence and as such published articles on and samples of letter writing in

Esperanto. For example, M.T., using initials likely to remain anonymous for the censors, explains in a

Kamarado article titled “Kokusai tsūshin no hajimekata” (How to start an international correspondence), the various steps on how to write a beginner-level correspondence for those who lack the skills to do so (Fig. 2.5). According to M.T., the process consists of five main steps, each of which are divided into sub-steps. These main steps are:

A. Finding a pen-friend […] (…if people from the same work place or rural village gather, then it is okay to send a correspondence collectively). B. When a correspondent is found, then write a letter. C. The address on the envelope. D. Next is the stamp. E. Until now I wrote about sealed letters, but for postcards there is a six-sen postcard, which is especially used for foreign [correspondence].”

98 While Esperantists in Taiwan and Korea actively participated in letter writing based on the address columns printed in journals such as Kamarado and La Mondo, establishing proletarian Esperanto correspondence branches was virtually impossible due to strict colonial rule. For example, an article in Kamarado titled “Chōsen PEU no tame ni” (For the sake of a Korean Proletarian Esperanto movement) states that the “situation is extremely difficult in Korea, where one gets arrested for merely carrying the Proletarian Esperanto Course,” and “correspondences are frequently lost.” “Chōsen PEU no tame ni” Kamarado 2, no. 3 (1932): 39.

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By explaining each step, M.T. offers a uniform template for correspondence between the readers of

Comrade and foreign correspondents. He suggests, (and thus reterritorializes) writing formats such as the opening and closing of a letter as well as tips on logistics such as what paper and how much postage to use. M.T. recommended greetings such as “Kara Kamarado” (abbreviated as K-do) for men and “Kara Kamaradino” for women, both meaning “dear comrade,” and closings such as “Kun

Kamaradeca saluto” (with comradely greeting), “Saluton” (greetings), or “Ĉion Bone (all well). M.T. explains that the address is written in “European style” (Yōroppa-shiki), horizontally and from left to right, starting with the street name followed by the district, city, and country name. For the postage,

M.T. recommends a six-sen postcard that is in particularly designed for sending mail abroad, an

“official government postcard” (kansei hagaki) with four sen and 5 rin, or a “privately-made postcard”

(shisei hagaki) of six sen. The uniformity with which M.T. instructs the readers confirms the lack of organic development envisioned by Gramsci and is derivative of previous systems of writing (in particular the European system), but without it “many people cannot write [letters].”100 In his instruction, however, M.T. neglects to discuss how to circumvent censorship of letters by the

99 M.T., “Kokusai tsūshin no hajimekata,” Kamarado 2, no. 4 (1932): 20-21. 100 Ibid.

176 authorities. Such strategies would have been crucial when assuring letters arrived and without redaction, because, according to concurrent police reports, censorship seriously curtailed the circulation of Esperanto letters.101

To instruct on and promote letter writing, proletarian Esperanto movements used not only articles such as M.T.’s, but also to organize special gatherings and to set up advisory branches.

Recognizing a low motivation for letter writing among some Esperanto learners due to absence of adequate guidance and writing skills, postage expense, or the probability of failed delivery, the advisory branch aimed to guide letter-writing as well as to help connect foreign and domestic correspondents.102

Gatherings organized by the advisory branch focused on learning group letter writing demonstrated that exchanging correspondence with foreign counterparts was not only an individual activity but could also be a collective one. While resembling the shift from individual to group correspondence in the Soviet Union, the reasons for Esperantists in East Asia were different. In an issue of the Shanghai-based proletarian Esperanto La Mondo (The World), Ji Ping published an article

“Geren tongxin yu jiti tongxin” (Individual Correspondence and Group Correspondence), to share with the readers his own experiences of letter writing in Esperanto. He sent his “virgin correspondence” (chunü tongxin) to a comrade in Japan who it would also appear was receiving their first letter. Ji Ping confessed he lacked confidence in the quality of his Esperanto composition.

However, upon seeing his foreign correspondents from Vietnam, Korea, England, and the Netherlands

101 Takeuchi, Puroretaria Esuperanto undō ni tsuite; Yobō kōkin seidoni tsuite, 156. 102 “Shijie chuangshe ‘Tongxin guwenbu’ yuanqi,” La Mondo 2, no. 6-7 (1935): 32.

177 also make mistakes, he realized establishing global contacts was more important that writing perfectly. Challenging Gramsci’s understanding of Esperanto as an inorganic top-down language and

M.T.’s adherence to uniformity, Ji Ping noticed the enormous variety and flexibility correspondents used in their style (stilo or wenti), lexicon (zihui), and expressions (biaoxianfa), and thus denounced the standardization of Esperanto.103 On the one hand proletarian Esperanto movements invested in the production of a homogenous proletarian language. On the other, Esperanto developed heterogeneous usages among Esperantists, which for Ji Ping added a “richness” (fengfu) to writing.

Therefore, Ji Ping urged readers to experiment freely when writing their letters to foreign counterparts.104

Both M.T. and Ji Ping noted how difficult it was for Esperanto learners to find foreign correspondents. This was due to an awareness of the dangers associated with the language such as arrest. In order to connect domestic and foreign learners, journals in East Asia provided

“correspondence columns,” a feature common in many (proletarian) journals, with addresses where readers could find foreign comrades to correspond with despite the risk of drawing the attention of police. These addresses often also included the occupation and interests of the correspondents to further help readers find like-minded individuals. In addition, readers also requested their own addresses and preferences be printed by the editors in this section. Looking at the various

103 Ji Ping, “Geren tongxin yu jiti tongxin,” La Mondo 2, no. 2-3 (1934): 14. 104 Ibid. Ji Ping suggested group writing as a convenient alternative if the threshold was still too high for Esperanto learners to engage in individual letter writing. Whereas the Soviet Union gradually supported group writing to control its content, Ji Ping considers group writing as a practical way to ease the burden for novice learners and reduce economic cost such as postage. He recommends readers to pick a “guide” (gvidanto) and divide the tasks among the group members and to publish in Esperanto or translate their received letters in journals. For Ji Ping, international letter writing, both individual or collective, was a unique way to exchange interests and experiences of daily life with fellow comrades from all over the world which he considered a “privilege” (privilegio) for Esperanto writers.

178 correspondence columns in proletarian Esperanto journals, we catch glimpses of the numerous networks that existed connecting thousands of Esperantists worldwide.

While the majority of the correspondents were located in the Soviet Union and Weimar

Germany, inter-East Asian letter writing among proletarian Esperantists gradually increased throughout the late 1920s and early 1930s. Letters circulated throughout East Asia which connected rural villages in Tōhoku and Taiwan as well as metropoles such as Seoul and Shanghai, thus developing centerless and rhizomatic networks. All writers engaged in (in)direct conversation through the pen, and in East Asia shared stories of local manners and customs as well as grim topics such as imperial oppression and violence were discussed. Although it is difficult to locate extant letters, they are most likely lost or hidden in private collections; proletarian (Esperanto) journals frequently published (translated) letters. For example, Kim Saeng, an Esperantist from Korea, had his letter published in Japanese in the section “Esperanton al fabrikoj kaj kamparo” (Esperanto at the

Factories and Countryside). The editors describe this section as a “place of exchange of debate and experience” between readers.105 Kim sent his letter (whether it was written in Japanese, Korean, or

Esperanto remains unclear) to share the language struggles he had experienced since childhood. As a child, Kim and his classmates were fined by the teacher for speaking Korean, but Kim had difficulty understanding why adults were imposing such language restrictions on school children. After moving to Japan to work as a day laborer he attended night classes at a middle school and English school only to learn that the “bourgeois insincere words” (burujoa no teisai no yoi kotoba) were similar to the

105 Henshūbu, “Esperanton al fabrikoj kaj kamparo! Kōjō nōson kara,” Kamarado 1, no. 1 (1931): 9.

179 language restrictions at his elementary school in Korea.106 As an adult, Kim began to understand power imbalances better, and as such, linked suppression of the Korean language with oppression by the bourgeois class. Soon afterward, he heard about Esperanto from friends who were imprisoned.

Kim immediately felt that “Esperanto was our language and not [just] words the bourgeoisie could arrange for their own use” and “as long as we have this [language] we can talk freely with our comrades from all over the world.”107 Rather than indulging directly in physical violence or military action, Kim perceived Esperanto to be a “weapon of international solidarity” that could subvert, circumvent, and replace the imperial language.

Likewise, Lin Wenqin, in his letter “Diguo zhuyi tieti xia: Taiwan shijieyu tongzhi de fendou,

Taiwan tongxin” (Under the Imperialist Hoofs: The struggle of Taiwanese Esperanto Comrades, a

Letter from Taiwan), informs readers about hardships experienced by Taiwanese Esperantists.

Sketching the development of the Taiwan Esperanto Alliance, Lin draws into focus the divide between bourgeois Esperantists, whose membership consisted of many Japanese colonial government officials, and proletarian Esperantists. Having faced several setbacks, he writes, the Taiwanese

Esperanto Alliance is gradually growing in membership, as reflected in large turnouts by members at general Esperanto meetings and exhibitions held in Taipei. According to Lin, this is how proletarian

Esperantists “strenuously show the masses the importance of Esperanto of the oppressed.”108 Despite surveillance by police and military police (kenpei), the alliance managed to send 26 letters and one

106 Ibid. 107 Kim Saeng, “Donna toki demo ganbaru zo!,” Kamarado 1, no. 1 (1931): 9. 108 Lin Wenqin, “Diguo zhuyi tieti xia: Taiwan shijieyu tongzhi de fendou, Taiwan tongxin,” La Mondo 2, no. 2 (1933): 8.

180 telegram and received 19 telegrams from left-wing groups in Taiwan, Japan and China. They used the postal network to their advantage to overcome large geographical distances across East Asia.109 Both

Kim and Lin’s letters exemplify colonial linguistic struggles and reveal how colonial Esperantists could have their voices heard in Shanghai and Tokyo. This was done by assembling spatialities in unison which could challenge (in)visible imperial borders. At the same time, Kim’s letter in Japanese and

Lin’s letter in Chinese reveal a limit of Esperanto by reinforcing Japanophone and Sinophone intimacies and repressing colonial languages by major languages. As a result, the equalizing potential of Esperanto is eroded.

Readers of proletarian Esperanto journals also requested editors publish letters from foreign

Esperantists, ideally in the original Esperanto, to inform readers about events abroad and as a way to practice reading skills.110 The content of these letters varied from industrial and agricultural work experiences, imperialism and colonialism, discussions on marriage and raising children, and specific topics such as nudist culture. For example, the editors of Kamarado published a letter translated in

Japanese under the rubric “El la Lando de Socialismo” (From the Land of Socialism, Fig. 2.6) sent by a comrade from Leningrad. It was a response to an earlier letter sent by proletarian Esperantists from

Japan, which contained questions about proletarian sanatoria in the Soviet Union. The author opened the letter by stating that “because of Esperanto I am able to hold hands firmly with [my] Japanese comrades through the correspondence,” which is reminiscent of an image printed by PEK in the same

109 Ibid. 110 Occasionally, editors of proletarian Esperanto journals apologized to the readers not being able to publish letters both in the original and translation due to lack of space in the issue.

181 issue (Fig. 2.7).111 Such statements reveal how intimately international correspondence was experienced and how these letter exchanges created a virtual, special proximity. The rest of the letter is a response to the question about proletarian sanatoria, describing the health benefits workers enjoy at proletarian sanatoria in the Soviet Union. The letter concludes with a question about the health conditions of workers written in Japanese which continues the correspondence.

Likely redacted by the editors themselves, who were conscious of possible trouble with the police who strictly monitored proletarian journals, the second letter is sent by a worker from Berlin and discusses the celebration of Antiwar Day. This was also celebrated in East Asia (briefly discussed in Chapter 4) with an accompanying demonstration. The author discusses the difficulty in organizing their demonstration as the authorities prohibited them from gathering in large squares. He or she informs readers about slogans written in leaflets which were glued on walls and that expressed solidarity with the Soviet in China as well as their opposition to imperialism. This letter exemplifies not only shared language but also shared celebrations expressed in Esperanto, strengthening the bond between distant proletarians.

Aside from Esperanto journals, proletarian Esperanto correspondence branches published separate bulletins featuring letters from foreign comrades. Although few of these bulletins are extant, the PEK published by the PPEU, gives an example of what these bulletins looked like; a one-page bulletin containing two letters from Soviet Esperantists published both in Esperanto and in Chinese translation (Fig. 2.8). On top of the letter Marx’s aphorism “Proletarians around the world, unite!” is written in both in Esperanto and Chinese, expressing its allegiance with proletarian internationalism.

111 Kamarado 1, no. 1 (1931): 6.

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The first letter is from a Ukrainian teacher who writes about the fifteenth anniversary of the 1917

Russian Revolution. The second letter is from a Russian worker who writes how s/he recently started learning Esperanto. The fact that the worker has just begun to learn Esperanto and is already able to write a letter demonstrates the accessibility of Esperanto in provide the basic literacy.

Inmates actively engaged in letter writing in using Esperanto, taking advantage of pre-existing imperial infrastructure such as the postal system. Similar to celebrating May Day in prison, Esperanto correspondence facilitated modes of intimacy and correspondence between prisoners and their comrades. Esperanto was already widespread in prisons before the advent of proletarian movements, most notably among anarchists such as Ōsugi Sakae (1885-1923). This continued throughout the 1920s and early 1930s to the extent that, as Esperantist Hong Hyŏng-ui stated, “all prisons in Chosŏn had become Esperanto schools.”112 Similar to Ōsugi, many proletarian activists encountered Esperanto for the first time after incarceration. Usually, two to three months in prison was enough for them to acquire basic proficiency and they left prison ready to participate in Esperanto networks. Moreover, many inmates had already started to engage in Esperanto correspondence during their time in prison.

For example, a prisoner named Ŝou had his letter “Qiutu dushuji” (Study Record of a Prisoner), subtitled “Xuexi de dongji” (Motivation for Studying), published in La Mondo. It remains unclear how he sent his letter to the journal and in which language his letter was written. After obtaining an

Esperanto journal Shijieyu zhi guang (Light of Esperanto) sent by a friend, Ŝou writes:

The prisoners deprived of their freedom are restricted by the rules of the prison. Always ruthlessly and trembling with fear, like a petty thief I read with a low voice in secret, a bo co… [The Esperanto alphabet]. The [Esperanto] lecture in [the journal] Shiguang [World Light] feels really easy with clear writing. I face the question how to

112 Quoted in Miyamoto Masao, Miyamoto Masao sakuhinshū 2, Verkoj de Miyamoto Masao 2 (Toyonaka: Nihon Esuperanto tosho kankōkai, 1993), 101. For more on Ōsugi Sakae and Esperanto see Miyamoto Masao, Ōsugi Sakae to Esuperanto undō. Oosugi Sakae kaj lia Esperanto-movado (Tokyo: Kokushoku Sensensha, 1988).

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continue to study. Being stripped of my freedom and civil rights, I have tried every method and strived hard to overcome this hardship. I asked someone to send a letter to the correspondence society on my behalf, and half a month later a textbook and La Mondo were mailed. I used many ways and I finally got it. Again, with a low voice like before, I began to study diligently. In four months until now, I have finished nine tenths of the textbook. I can understand short sentences in La Mondo and Shieyu zhi guang [Light of Esperanto] and I can write short sentences and correspondences in Esperanto. I am so inspired!

被剝奪了自由的囚徒，受着監獄規則的限制，常是毛手毛腳，戰戰兢兢，像小偷一樣地低着聲秘密的念，a bo co.... 把所得的「世光」講義學院，的確感到它是容易而精細的文字。怎樣繼續學習的問題，又擺在我的面前，被剝自由遞奪了公権的我，設盡了方法，努力的衝破這種因苦的重圍，才託人替我發了一封給函授學社的信，果然半月後課本和「世界」源源的寄到，又想了許多方法才把它拿在我的手裏，又低着聲如前一樣，孜孜不倦的學習起來，迄今四月之久了，課本已學完十分之九，「世界」和世界語之光，上的短文，可以了解，也可用世界語作短文和通信了，我該怎樣鼓舞喲！113

Likewise, the inmate KishiX ShigeX (two of the four characters are redacted likely to protect his privacy) was sent by an unspecified relief organization (kyūenkai) the Esperanto textbook Mohan

Esuperanto dokushū (Self-Study Model Esperanto, 1923) edited by Akita Ujaku and Osaka Kenji (1888-

1968), which did not contain any political discussions. KishiX quickly finished all his textbooks but had trouble finding more material. He requested permission from the prison administration to receive the general Esperanto journal Orienta (Oriental), but he acknowledged that most Esperanto materials were not allowed in prison. Presumably to avoid repercussions, KishiX did not elaborate on a possible circulation of illicit materials nor did he mention how he was able to send a letter to the editors of

Kamarado. In his letter “Ondoku shitsutsu” (Keep reading aloud), he wrote:

Now, we use a dictionary when we read, but we hardly make improvements on speaking and writing. Of course, this is due to our living conditions: we are not free [to have] speaking partners, let alone the use of pencil and paper. For reading it is said that it is very good to read aloud (ondoku), but in prison silence and cultivation are enforced. Because people are bound by regulations like machines, we are scolded when we read aloud enthusiastically. Today too, I repeat reading aloud.

現在の私達は、読む事は字引を友としてやつて居りますが、話す事や書く事は少しも渉らないのです。それは吾々の生活条件がしからしむる所で、話し相手は無論、鉛筆や紙の使用はもつての外で、かゝる方面では少しも自由がりません。読書にしても音読は非常によいとの事ですが、刑

113 Ŝou, “Qiutu dushuji,” La Mondo 3, no. 3-4 (1935): 28.

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務所は専ら静粛と修養と云ふ事を強制されて、人間は機械の様に規則によつて縛されて居る有様ですから、僕達は盛に音読をして叱られたものです。今日も尚音読を繰返します。114

Similar to the protagonist in Hayashi’s “May Day in Prison” in Chapter 1, both Ŝou and KishiX find ways to circumvent prison surveillance, allowing them to remain in contact with the outside world.

While their physical voices were suppressed, by studying Esperanto, they were able to deterritorialize their voices, undoing them from imperial restrictions. In Esperanto, they locate passages in the order- words which enable them to transcend prison restrictions and to feel intimately and virtually connected with their comrades.115

2.6 Writing Voices: Proletarian Esperanto and Literature

We have seen how proletarian Esperantists used various modes of communication to interact with their comrades beyond imperial and national borders. Proletarian Esperantists had to learn the language from scratch and through trial-and-error discovered linguistic (im)possibilities. Different from letter writing, which only required basic skills in Esperanto, proletarian Esperantists needed years to achieve a level sufficient to write literary works in Esperanto or to create “nativist literature of the world proletariat” as Lai stated. Hasegawa emphasized the need to teach Esperanto literary skills

114 KishiX ShigeX, “Ondoku shitsutsu,” Kamarado 1, no. 1 (1931): 10. 115 Letter writing continued throughout the 1930s, emphasizing direct critiques of Japanese imperialism and expressions of solidarity with the Chinese proletariat on the eve of the Second Sino-Japanese War. For example, during the preparations of the “Far-East Antiwar Conference” held in Shanghai in 1933 (see Chapter 4) proletarian Esperantists residing in the Japanese empire sent letters to their Esperanto correspondents in Shanghai. The latter translated these letters into Chinese for publication in domestic media such as Fanzhan Xinwen (Antiwar Newspaper). For the publication of such letters see an individual letter by a Korean worker see, Chaoxian gongren M, “Zai Dongjing de Chaoxian gongren lai xin,” Fanzhan Xinwen, no. 1 (1933): 4, and a group letter by Ogawa Tokusaburō, Chŏng Mun-ch'ŏl, Fujimoto Kazuo, Yamamura Masao, Kim Yŏng-in, Kim Yŏng-hwa, XX Masao, Aoki Shigeru, Chŏng Chŏng-mal, Inoue Hiroshi, Hasegawa Satoshi, Okamura, “Riben gongren shijieyuban gei Shanghai fanzhan dahui de xin,” Fanzhan Xinwen, no. 1 (1933): 4.

185 by asking rhetorically “(…) are there trees that bear fruit and let flowers suddenly bloom without starting from seeds?”116

Similar to Nazi Germany and the Stalinist Soviet Union, the Japanese empire considered

Esperanto to be a “dangerous language,” targeting proletarian Esperantists in particular. Esperantists internationally circulated damning information regarding Japanese military activities in East Asia which could undermine public support. By 1934, under government pressure, proletarian Esperanto movements had completely dissolved and Esperantists were frequently intimidated or arrested across the empire.117 Without movements and networks to inform members of increasing Japanese violence and lacking a way to organize anti-imperial resistance, proletarian Esperantists struggled to maintain contact with comrades across East Asia and worldwide. Nevertheless, under a new banner of

“progressive” (shinpoteki) Esperanto, several proletarian Esperantists based in the Kansai area who managed to continue their activities.118 In their journals, discussions about Esperanto in relation to

116 Verda Majo [Hasegawa Teru], “Esperante aŭ nacilingve?: Esu bungaku ni kansuru ransō no naka yori,” Esperanta Literaturo, no. 16 (1935): 31. For a general overview of literature written in Esperanto see Geoffrey Sutton, Concise Encyclopedia of the Original Literature of Esperanto, 1887-2007 (New York: Mondial, 2008). And for a bibliography or discussion of Esperanto literature (including translations) in East Asia see Nihon Esuperanto undō 50 shūnen kinen gyōji iinkai, Bibliografio de Japana Literaturo tradukita en Esperanto: Esuperanto-yaku Nihon bungaku sakuhin mokuroku (Tokyo: Nihon Esuperanto Gakkai, 1956); Miyamoto Masao, Nihon bungaku ni arawareta Esuperanto (Toyonaka: Nihon Esuperanto tosho kankōkai, 1999); Hou Zhiping (ed.), Shijieyu zai Zhongguo yibainian (Beijing: Zhongguo Shijieyu Chubanshe, 1999), 197-240; Cho Sung-ho, Korea antologio de noveloj (Soŭl: Esperanto-Asocio, 1999); Yi Chong-yŏng, La 80-jara historio de Korea Esperanto-movado / Han'guk Esŭp'erant'o undong 80-yŏnsa (Sŏul: Han'guk Esŭp'erant'o Hyŏphoe, 2003), 225-358; Yi Chae-hyon, Koreaj eseoj noveloj kaj popolrakontoj, 1932-1967 (Seulo: Korea Esperanto-Asocio, Libera Biblioteko, 1987). 117 For the extensive surveillance of proletarian Esperantists in the Japanese empire, see the aforementioned police report Puroretaria esuperanto undō ni tsuite. 118 For more on progressive Esperanto, see Miyake Eiji, Tatakau Esuperantisuto-tachi no kiseki, 82-90. Miyake writes that one of the goals of progressive Esperantists was to establish a united or popular front against fascism and imperialism following the call for an anti-fascist front by the Soviet Union. Among their major achievements is the Esperanto translation of the 1935 Dimitrov Thesis that provides the outlines of such a united front. Through various channels including correspondence, proletarian activists managed to smuggle the report into East Asia. At least three separate Esperanto translations were circulating among Esperantists worldwide. Miyake, 88-89. In Chapter 4, I shall return to united fronts in my discussion of Kaji Waturu who was also inspired by the Dimitrov Report.

186 class struggles continued as well as letter exchanges with comrades in China.119 Another strategy to continue Esperanto activities was to cooperate with apolitical Esperanto movements publishing journals like Esperanta Literaturo (Esperanto Literature).120 This journal was one of the last places for proletarian Esperantists to experiment with Esperanto literature. The Japanese government arrested most proletarian Esperantists and banned their publications. The police deported arrestees who were not considered imperial subjects, such as Chinese exchange students like Ye Junjian, who will be discussed below. These students returned to Shanghai where Esperanto had continued to flourish in

Esperanto journals such as La Mondo. Shanghai was a safe haven for Esperantists and existed without political persecution, especially in international settlements. Many proletarian movements were also based in this city, attracting Esperantists who had escaped the Japanese empire and were looking to

119 Newly established Esperanto journals during the mid-1930s in the Kansai area were Amiko (Friend), Marŝu (March), Mayo (May), Saluton (Greetings), and La Frato (Brother). See for example the letter exchange between Proletarian Esperantist (and scholar of Czech literature) Kurisu Kei (1910-2009) and Ye Laishi. Kurisu sent a letter to Ye representing the Japanese readers to express their condolences following the death of Lu Xun, which Ye translated into Chinese and published in the prominent newspaper Shenbao. In return, Ye sent Kurisu several photographs of Lu Xun’s funeral together with a letter about their plans to publish a memorial issue titled Zhongguo yiri (One Day in China). Kurisu translated this letter and together with the photographs published in Bungaku Annai (Literary Guide). Kurisu Kei, “Esuperanto mo Chūgoku to no buntsū yōgo no hitotsu,” Shinika 2, no. 4.13 (1991): 2. For more on Kurisu Kei, Kajto de Esperanto (Huhhot: Esp-Asocio de Interna Mongolio, 2010). Ulrich Lins also mentions Kurisu Kei, with whom he was acquainted, and his letter writing with Soviet Esperantists. Lins writes that: “He [Kurisu Kei] had written a letter to the SEU in which he expressed admiration for the building of socialism in the Soviet Union, described his difficult life under the attentive eye of the Japanese police and asked that SEU find for him suitable Soviet Esperantists as correspondents. SEU circulated Kurisu’s letter and as a result he received several letters—and also a packet containing an old French- language Esperanto grammar. Opening the book, Kurisu found that a Soviet Esperantist had written a message in it— namely, that throughout the entire 165-page book every odd-numbered page contained, in the margin next to the binding, handwritten sentences.” Lins, Dangerous Language — Esperanto and the Decline of Stalinism, 46-47. The secret message, partially quoted in Lins, revealed the terrible situation in the Soviet Union. For Kurisu’s own discussion of this letter and the quote in full see Kurisu, Kajto de Esperanto, 100-103. 120 In an article titled “Kokusai tsūshin wa kiken dewa nai” (International Correspondence is not Dangerous) introduces new strategies to readers how to circumvent censorship by for example not writing “comrade” on the envelop. The article aims to convince readers not to quite international correspondence because it is considered dangerous and with sufficient precautions Esperantists should continue to contact counterparts abroad. “Kokusai tsūshin wa kiken dewa nai,” Marŝu, no. 3-4 (1935): 13.

187 join the resistance against imperialism and fascism. However, with the outbreak of the second Sino-

Japanese War, Esperantists had to flee Shanghai and moved to the southern regions of China.121

The three Esperantists discussed in this section (Hong Hyŏng-ui, Hasegawa Teru (Verda

Majo), and Ye Junjian (Cicio Mar)), were all experienced writers and translators of Esperanto literature. The latter two resided in Southern China and contributed to the resistance against Japanese imperialism using their Esperanto writings for antiwar propaganda. Before turning to their works, a theoretical essay by Hasegawa on Esperanto written to outline the broader theoretical implications of proletarian Esperanto literature will be discussed.

One of the few remaining theoretical pieces on writing in Esperanto is Hasegawa’s essay

“Esperante aŭ nacilingve?” (Writing in Esperanto or Writing in the National Language?).122 In this essay, she discusses two interrelated problems; in what language should an Esperantist write

(Esperanto or their national language) and if using a national language, why should an Esperantist write for a national audience? In discussing the first question Hasegawa divides Esperantists into three groups: 1) national language writers who cannot write in Esperanto, 2) bilingual writers whose native and Esperanto works are mediocre, and 3) writers who only write in Esperanto. Regarding the last group, Hasegawa encourages focus on producing literary works in Esperanto.123 It is this group of

121 After the outbreak of the second Sino-Japanese War, only a handful of journals continued publication, mostly in China as part of the War of Resistance. These journals are Vocoj el Oriento (Voices from the East), Orienta Kuriero (Oriental Courier) and Ĉinio Hurlas (Roaring China). 122 In the Japanese collected works of Hasegawa, the word for national language is translated as minzokugo (民族語) while Hasegawa uses kokugo (国語) in her article “Esperante aŭ nacilingve?” The editor explains that kokugo might cause misunderstandings and neglect the existence of a multiethnic state, but perhaps Hasegawa chose kokugo to reflect the oppressive nature of imperial languages such as Japanese during her time, rather than accept it uncritically. 123 Verda Majo [Hasegawa Teru], “Esperante aŭ nacilingve?: Esu bungaku ni kansuru ransō no naka yori,” 28-30. Hasegawa responds to an essay by Takeuchi Jirō [Kurisu Kei] titled “Esuperanto bungaku o megutte,” published in Marŝu, no. 2

188 writers who debuted in Esperanto and were able to use Esperanto proficiently enough to produce sophisticated literature. They were at the forefront of proletarian Esperanto movements and oversaw the promotion of Esperanto among the proletariat. Hasegawa realized that Esperanto literature was nascent, lacked a wide readership, as well as appropriate outlets; however, it could anticipate a potential worldwide readership as the number of Esperantists was growing across the globe.

Related to readership, the second question Hasegawa raised dealt with language and affiliation. She wondered why Japanese Esperanto writers (or Esperanto writers of any other nationality) also needed to write for a Japanese audience in their native language. This writing in

Japanese was especially suspect as Esperantists had ceased translating due to increasing suppression of Esperanto publications which made (clandestine) Esperanto writings all the more important. For

Hasegawa, “the literary circles operating in national languages have already plenty of talent.”124 As such, she considered Esperanto writers a welcome addition to, and mediators between, literary circles. Their works could circulate through the international channels of proletarian movements because “even though all proletarian movements are separated domestically, they are all connected through international solidarity.”125 However, members of proletarian movements lamented to

Hasegawa that “Japanese, Chinese, and Korean workers and peasants cannot read Esperanto.”126 In return, Hasegawa rebukes them for implying that colonial subjects in the Japanese empire are familiar

(1935): 24-25. In this article Takeuchi discusses the question if it is more effective to write in Esperanto or translate a world literature through Esperanto into Japanese. 124 Ibid., 32. 125 Ibid. 126 Ibid.

189 with Japanophone works. Hasegawa questions her opposers who believe that proletarian (linguistic) struggles can be resolved by national languages. Instead, she suggests that Esperantists should continue to write literature, which is able to mobilize broad support for proletarian politics. It disseminates narratives of shared struggles through its international reach and in doing so was believed to foster solidarity among activists worldwide.

Hasegawa’s theoretical questions with regards to proletarian Esperanto complicate Deleuze and Guattari’s understanding of minor language. Minor language is a linguistic usage that deterritorializes within a major language; it is completely political and defines the “revolutionary conditions for every literature.”127 The language of minor literature disrupts major language transforming the constant (of order-words) through variation of pass-words. While it is often literally a “paper language or an artificial language,”128 Although lacking a major language, Esperanto can be considered a minoritarian use of major languages through translation. This is especially true as the translation itself could be considered an act of deterritorialization. In the case of Hasegawa,

Shimamura Teru has observed this as being “transmission through Japanese as Esperanto” (kokusaigo to shite no Nihongo ni yoru dentatsu),129 showing how she undermines the imperial codification of words such as “patriotism,” “nation,” and “ethno-nationality,” which function as order-words.130 Put

127 Deleuze and Guatarri, Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature, 16-18. 128 Ibid., 16. 129 Shimamura Teru, “‘Watashi no mune niwa chishio no bara ga saita’: Hansen Esuperanchisuto Hasegawa Teru no ‘bungaku’,” Shōwa bungaku kenkyū 56, no. 3 (2008): 15. 130 For example, Hasegawa uses Esperanto words such as samnaciano and patriotismo, usually translated as “compatriot” (同国民) and “patriotism” (愛国主義) respectively. In Hasegawa’s text samnaciano is juxtaposed with alias landon (other people’s lands) and rejects the understanding of nation-state and a homogenous people, but rather refers to a geographical and physical understanding of land as soil where human beings happen to reside. Likewise, pariotismo refers to the land of one’s father rather than the devotion to a nation. See ibid., 22-23. Hasegawa herself writes that “[f]or us Esperantists nationality [nationeco is translated in the Japanese edition as 民族] is not absolute. It only means a difference in language,

190 differently, following Hasegawa’s concept of internal translation between native language and

Esperanto which occurs while writing in Esperanto, the latter is a translated variation which enables the possibility of becoming-minor, deterritorializing the major language. As they were no longer permitted to write in their own language, colonial subjects in the Japanese empire wrote in the major language (Japanese) as minor practice reworking it from within. This practice is what Janet Poole has called “taking possession of the emperor’s language,” which reveals that “language is never fully possessable, neither by the colonized nor by the colonial powers.”131 Before the ban of colonial languages and Esperanto there was a brief window of opportunity for writers to use Esperanto and search for the linguistic escape found in the Hong Hyŏng-ui’s work.

Bringing Letters to the Village in Hong Hyŏng-ui’s “The Pioneers in the Village”

Among the few extant proletarian stories written in Esperanto is Hong’s story “La Pioniroj en

Vilaĝo” (The Pioneers in the Village). This story is his only story in Esperanto, and describes a struggle centered around who should possess a voice to access public debate through speech and writing.

Echoing Akita’s “striking tongue,” the protagonist Junsu Kim (Kim Chunsu) also believed that the sonic and graphic voice could be used as a weapon against oppressive forces. Proletarian Esperanto literature is often short and unfinished like Hong’s story, written in haste, destroyed, or never printed

custom, culture, skin color etcetera. We think of each other as siblings of one large family [called] ‘humanity’ (homaro). For us this is not a theory, but a feeling. Moreover, we are connected on the outside through the same language, and on the inside by the same feeling. We love our own father’s land (patrio). However, that love is not something that cannot be combined with the love and respect for other nations.” Verda Majo [Hasegawa Teru], “Adiaŭo en Malfrau Printempo, in Verkoj de Verda Majo (Beijing: Ĉino Esperanto-Eldonejo, 1982), 28. 131 Janet Poole, When the Future Disappears: The Modernist Imagination in Late Colonial Korea (New York: Columbia University Press, 2015), 197.

191 due to publishing restrictions and censorship. This poses a challenge for scholars as they attempt to discuss these works. The following Esperanto works focus on voice in various genres, such as poems, reportage, and short stories, which together form a minor literature that deterritorializes major language through order-words.

Hong wrote “La Pioniroj en Vilaĝo” and published it in Aganto (Agent) during his studies in

Japan in 1934.132 As Korean-language publications were heavily restricted, the choice to use Esperanto was overtly political and challenged the imperial language of Japanese. For Hong, writing in Esperanto functioned as a transmission between Korean and Japanese in an attempt to escape censorship and find a literary space to articulate resistance.

The story “The Pioneers in the Village” covers a short period in the life of intellectual Junsu

Kim who leaves Tokyo and returns to Seoul. It opens with Junsu sitting in a train compartment as he heads toward Shimonoseki station. Whereas the compartment for Akita was a space from which he observed colonial violence in Korea and Manchuria as a spectator, for Junsu colonial violence is not experienced as external but absorbed within the imperial space. Whether he is in Tokyo, Busan, Seoul, or simply in the train compartment, imperial space is always already political. Among the quiet passengers, Junsu struggles to fall asleep, tortured by various images. He remembers how he wished to

132 Born in Yongho-ri, South Hamgyŏng province, Hong received most of his college education in Tokyo. Here, he joined the Hŭgu yŏnmaeng / Kokuyū renmei (Black Friends Alliance) and began studying Esperanto. Due to his involvement in leftist groups, the police arrested him and deported him to the Korea peninsula. Back in Korea, he found a job as an editor of the journal Samchŏlli and started his own Esperanto journal Korea Esperantisto (Korean Esperantist) and the Josŏn eseupelanto munhwasa (Esperanto Cultural Association). However, after publishing one issue, the police arrested him again making further Esperanto publication impossible. For more on Hong see Yi Jung-yŏng, Esŭp'erant'isŭt'o Hong Hyŏng- ŭi: Hong Heng-Wi la Esperantisto (Soŭl: Hanguk Esŭp'erant’o Hyŏp'oe, 2000); Hong Hyŏng-ŭi Sŏnsaeng munsŏn kanhaeng wiwŏnhoe, Hong Hyŏng-ŭi Sŏnsaeng munsŏn: Verkaro de Hengwi Hong (Daegu: Hong Hyŏng-ŭi Sŏnsaeng munsŏn kanhaeng wiwŏnhoe, 1969); Kim Sam-su, Han'guk Esŭp'erant'o undongsa, 1906-1975: segye p'yŏnghwa wa kukcheŏ palchŏn e taehan Han'gugin ŭi chŏkkŭkchŏk konghŏn (Sŏul: Sungmyŏng Yŏja Taehakkyo Ch'ulp'anbu, 1976), 151-168.

192 become a great politician seizing power in Korea (mi fariĝu grandioza politiksto, kaj mi prenu en la mano la tutan hegemonion de koreaj).133 He has abandoned those desires and replaced them with the desire to side with illiterate peasants in the countryside; he brings them letters (Esperanto or Korean is not specified), which he believes will create phonic and graphic voices to oppose the imperial regime. However, such attempts also reveal the desire among intellectuals to shape peasants in their own image. Philosopher Jacques Rancière has described these as intellectuals who were “not people who carried the word of the masses, but just people who carried the word (…) [and took] speech to the masses.”134 In light of this, Junsu aims to deterritorialize proletarian tongues by teaching peasants how to write; this simultaneously reterritorializes peasants through new (Marxist) modes of speech and writing.

As he changes trains in Pusan, the express train for Mukden is described as having a

“monstrous appearance” (monstra aspekto) to Junsu, who is confined to the borders of and forced to remain within the empire. Akita felt a communication gap with the other passengers, an impasse which was eventually resolved through the spirit of Esperanto.135 Junsu, on the other hand, refrains from talking to passengers because they look so unhappy in comparison to the passengers in Japan

(kaj feliĉe pasaĝeroj estis malmultaj kompare). Later, the reader learns that Junsu speaks Korean with less confidence than before because he spent several years in Japan and lacked opportunity to speak

133 Hong Hyŏng-ŭi, “La Pioniroj en Vilaĝo,” in Esŭp'erant'isŭt'o Hong Hyŏng-ŭi, 42. 134 Jacques Rancière, Staging the People: The Proletarian and his Double (New York: Verso, 2011), 28. Italics in the original. 135 Akita, Wakaki Souēto Roshia, 15.

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Korean. Esperanto, as the language of narration, must bridge this gap and offer Junsu a way to express his thoughts.

Once he arrives in Seoul, he meets with his school friend Pack (Pak) and other friends who have arranged a welcome meeting for him. At the meeting, Junsu gives a speech about his plans to revolutionize the countryside. With an occasional stutter (li iom balbutis), Junsu prioritizes “direct action” (rektan agadon) over theory inciting the crowd with his “sharp voice” (akra voĉe). He is sick of intellectuals with “fox heads” (vulpan kapon) and “honeysweet tongues” (mielan langon) who pretend to represent “the voices of the proletariat” (la voĉoj de l’proletaroj) in order to acquire seats in the national parliament. Junsu hopes that his voice is able to defeat the corrupt voices of intellectuals by providing “blind illiterates” (blindoj analfabetoj) the language needed to establish a “true liberation movement” (vera liberiga movado). Junsu tries to deterritorialize the language of intellectuals for the

“miserable poor” (mizeraj malriĉuloj) and reconfigure it to formulate resistance. A mediation of language between Junsu and proletarians within the context of a top-down relationship is still needed. In other words, Junsu still requires linguistic letters which already have been codified by

Marxist intellectuals and that cause an immediate reterritorialization of language; the narrative leaves unanswered the question how to resist reterritorialization. The next morning Junsu leaves Seoul by train and heads to his hometown, presumably to put his plans into practice. But here the narrative stops “unfinished” (nefinita).

Disembodied Voices against the Fascist Voice

Nun antaŭ megafono vi dis-interpretas Now you stand in front of the megaphone al viaj samlandanoj veron – vi profetas. to your fellow [wo]men the truth - you predict. Ke via voĉo, kvankam milda, jam sufiĉas Your voice, although gentle, is sufficient

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por krei tondron. Kaj sentencojn vi dediĉas to create thunder. And proverbs you vow al animoj, kies konscienco restas sana. to spirits, whose conscience remains well. Ke via voĉo ja ne povas esti vana, Your voice certainly cannot be in vain, ĉar certe ĝi efike ŝirus dise l’ koron because surely it effectively tears the heart into pieces ebrian sange, kio kaŭzus ja doloron. intoxicated with blood, which causes pain.136

In 1937, Hasegawa Teru left Tokyo with her typewriter to follow her Esperantist husband Liu

Ren (1909-1947), who had left Japan a few months earlier. She headed for Shanghai where she joined the anti-Japanese resistance movement.137 After her arrival in Shanghai, and unable to speak in

Chinese adequately, she joined the Esperanto community, including Ye Laishi whom she knew from earlier correspondence. With the outbreak of the second Sino-Japanese War in 1937 she was forced to move south to Hong Kong and later to Chongqing. Upon joining the Esperanto branch of the Chinese resistance, she came in contact with other Esperantists such as An U-saeng, Ye Laishi, and Ye Junjian.

136 One stanza from Elpin’s poem dedicated to Hasegawa. Elpin, “Paca Kolombo,” Orienta Kuriero 2, no. 1 (1939): 23. For more on An U-saeng’s literary works, see Yi Yŏng-gu, An U-saeng ŭi Esŭp'erant'o munhak segye: La Literatura Mondo de Elpin (Soŭl: Hanguk Esŭp'erant’o Hyŏp'oe, 2007). Following the assassination on Itō Hirobumi (1841-1909) by his uncle An Jung-gŭn (1879-1910), An’s family moved to Russia and later to China. After a brief period in Shanghai, An roamed the Guangzhou and Guangdong areas while learning Esperanto and participating in local Esperanto communities. An had many correspondence contacts with Esperantists such as Ye Junjian and Stanisław Zygmunt Braun (1893-1956) while he was also an active translator of plays, poems, and stories, most notably Lu Xun’s stories published as Elektitaj Noveloj de Lusin (Selected Short Stories of Lu Xun, 1939) as well as in his journal Orienta Kuriero (The Oriental Courier). Residing in Hong Kong, An was part of an extensive Esperanto network present in the southern regions of China participating in the War of Resistance. In addition to Orienta Kuriero, other Esperanto journals such as Heroldo Ĉinio and Voĉoj el Oriento facilitated contact with Esperantists like Hasegawa Teru and Ye Laishi. An also worked together with Hong Hyŏng-ui, who had returned to the peninsula to maintain his Esperanto network, to prepare a Korea Antologio (Korean Anthology) of literary works. Besides translations, An wrote two short stories in Esperanto under his Esperanto name Elpin, “Onklino kaj gekuzoj” (Aunt and Cousins) in Oriento Kuriero 2, no. 14, (1939): 35-41, and “Facila veto” (Easy Bet) in Oriento Kuriero 2, no.15, (1939): 32-37. 137 Hasegawa had passed the first NHK announcer exam and studied typewriting; skills that proved useful during her exile in wartime China. For more on Hasegawa Teru, see Hasegawa Teru Henshū Iinkai (ed.), Hasegawa Teru: Nitchū Sensōka de hansen hōsō o shita Nihon josei (Osaka: Seseragi Shuppan, 2007); Takasugi Ichirō, Chūgoku no midori no hosh : Hasegawa Teru hansen no shōgai (Tokyo: Asahi Shinbunsha, 1980); Erik Esselstrom, “The Life and Memory of Hasegawa Teru: Contextualizing Human Rights, Trans/Nationalism, and the Antiwar Movement in Modern Japan,” Radical History Review, no. 101 (2008): 145-159; Gotelind Müller, “Hasegawa Teru alias Verda Majo (1912-1947). Eine japanische Esperantistin im chinesischen anti-japanischen Widerstand,” in Cheng - All in Sincerity. Festschrift in Honour of Monika Übelhör (Hamburg: Hamburger Sinologische Gesellschaft, 2001), 259-274; Gong Peikang, Lüse de wuyue: Jinian lüchuan Yingzi (Beijing: Sanlian Shudian, 1981); Wang Zhongxu, Lü shijie: Liu Ren yu Lüchuan Yingzi de Zhongri qingyuan (Shenyang: Liaoning Renmin Chubanshe, 2017).

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In addition, she communicated with the Japanese Antiwar Movement led by Kaji Wataru, which is discussed in Chapter 4. During her decade in China, Hasegawa published many of her Esperanto writings in Esperanto and Chinese journals and newspapers, many of which were eventually bundled in two collections - Flustr’ el uragano (Whisper from the Hurricane, 1941) and En Ĉinio batalanta

(Fighting in China, 1945).

In line with earlier discussions of the voice as a deterritorializing instrument, the various manifestations of voice in Hasegawa’s Whisper from the Hurricane will be discussed. This colorful collection of essays, reportage, translations, letters, and fiction written between 1937 and 1941 centers around clashing voices. On the one hand, the Japanese imperial government constantly controlled and silenced opposing voices in order to homogenize public opinion. On the other, Hasegawa deterritorializes the imperial discourse through spoken, mechanical, and written voices. It is no surprise that the government declared her voice the “coquettish voice [of a] national traitor” (kyōsei baikokudo), which was essentially a declaration of war against proletarian voices.

Hasegawa foregrounds this war between voices as an irreconcilable difference between the ideology of international language and fascism. She argues that through various language policies, fascism attempts to transform its own national language into a world language,138 and that linguistic violence manifests most palpably in colonies such as Korea and Taiwan. Recalling Lian’s arguments,

Hasegawa highlights how colonial education has damaged the ability of indigenous people to speak in mother tongues to the extent that the current generation is barely able to use its native language.139

138 Verda Majo, “Malfeliĉo de l’ demokrata mondo,” in Verkoj de Verda, 499. Originally published in Esperanta Revuo, no.1 (1945). 139 Ibid., 498.

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Following Hasegawa, we could consider fascist language acts as constant and homogeneous language, eliminating any linguistic variation within its sphere of influence.

Throughout Whisper from the Hurricane, Hasegawa provides numerous instances of the imperial voice silencing or stealing counter-voices. She observes how “replaceable human beings”

(anstataŭhomoj), referring to members of parliament, are turned into aphasics (afaziigis) and are trained to further the imperial by constantly shouting “no objection” (prave, prave).140 She also describes two Chinese POWs from Manchuria are injected with a substance by imperialists causing a serious speech impediment and rendering the tongue inarticulate (strangan parolkapablon kvazaŭ ĉe paraliza malsanulo)141 The empire melts iron mailboxes into bullets to disrupt the circulation of letters between the battle front and home front142 and these strategies to reterritorialize oppositional voices in all its manifestations.

Through letters, translations, reportage, and poetry as well as through speeches, broadcasts, and conversation, Hasegawa elevates the language of Esperanto (nian lingvo, literally “our language”) to an “international weapon” (internacian armilon).143 In doing so, she creates a space to express solidarity with the oppressed and resists submission of her voice. This contributes, as she explains in a letter addressed to Esperantists in Japan, to the “liberation of China using Esperanto” (Per Esperanto por la liberigo de Ĉinio), echoing the slogan of Esperantists in Shanghai a decade earlier. For Hasegawa

140 Verda Majo, “Tempo de Anstataŭaĵoi: Ĝenroj pri la milittempa Japanio,” in Verkoj de Verda, 407. 141 Verda Majo, “Al la Tutmonda Esperantistaro,” in Verkoj de Verda Majo, 390. Hasegawa writes: “Ili estas nenio alia ol ĉinoj, kvankam nomataj de l’invadistoj “manĉurianoj”, kaj sekve parolas la saman lingvon. 142 Verda Majo, “Tempo de Anstataŭaĵoi: Ĝenroj pri la milittempa Japanio,” 406-407. 143 Verda Majo, “Venko de Ĉino estas ŝlosilo al la morgaŭo de la tuto Asio: Letero al japanaj esperantistoj,” in Verkoj de Verda, 377.

197 this liberation not only includes the Chinese; the victory of China will also liberate all oppressed peoples in Asia from imperialist and fascist ideologies. She suggests that anyone can join the Chinese resistance assemblage.

Hasegawa not only turned toward comrades in Japan but also to Esperantists worldwide threatened by fascism. She warns her fellow Esperantists of fascists infiltrating Esperanto movements in an attempt to subvert the language. She writes (as if speaking) to them on the day of Zamenhof’s birthday:

Esperanto is becoming the language of Romain Rolland, the language of Gorky, the language of Marx. Comrades, can we give our language to the fascists, the executioners? Comrades, we should unite, attack them, and unmask them. For the anti-fascist struggle, let’s combine all forces. Esperanto is the international weapon against barbaric destructors of human culture and peace, and let’s not forget that without a strong international solidarity we cannot achieve actual results. Let’s remember that our weapon overcomes all national boundaries, our comrades are present worldwide, and our voices reach all corners of the globe. Moreover, we Esperantists are essentially the vanguards of peace, so we must expand our united front around us more and more to a truly international scale that encompasses the vast community beyond Esperanto.

Nia Esperanto jam fariĝis lingvo de Romain Rolland, lingvo de Gorkii, kaj lingvo de Marks. K-doj, ĉu nian lingvon ni povus doni al la agentoj de faŝistoj, al tiuj ekzekutistoj? Kamaradoj, ni devas unuoĝi, ni devas ataki ilin, kaj forŝiri ilian maskon. Kunigu ĉiujn niajn fortojn kontraŭ faŝismo. Ne forgesu ke Esperanto estas internacia batalilo kontraŭ la Barbara detruanto de l’ homara kulturo kaji paco, kaji ke sen internacia firma kunligo ni ne povas akiri nian efektivan rezulton. Rekonu, ke nia batalilo estas super ĉiaj landlimoj, ke niaj kamaradoj estas ĉie en la mondo, kaj nia voĉo povas atingi ajnan anguleton de l’ terglobo. Krom tio, ni esperantistoj estas esence avangardo por paco, sekve ni havas devon pligrandigi ĉirkaŭ ni nian unuecfronton pli kaj pli ĝis vere internacia skalo ampleksanta la vastan eksteresperantion. 144

Above, the voice is dismantled from subjectifying forces by Hasegawa, who, through her use of

Esperanto that functions as a polyvalent assemblage carrying a multitude of enunciations, challenges the individual subject in the humanist sense of an enunciating “I.” In undoing the subject-object

144 Verda Majo, “Al la Tutmonda Esperantistaro,” 392-393. Hasegawa uses the word “eskteresperantion,” literally meaning “outside the Esperanto-land.” The Esperanto-land refers to places and (virtual) spaces where Esperantists gather, mingle, and interact.

198 binary, voice is placed in a state of flux and is linked to various assemblages “in all corners of the world.” In doing so, the unbound voice can launch attacks ad infinitum.

Hasegawa continues to undo binaries imposed by empires. Above, she calls for a united front corresponding to the strategies of antifascist resistance. This united front is not specific to the Sino-

Japanese War, but is also connected with antifascist struggles in Europe. Influenced by Spanish Civil

War (1936-1939), in a piece titled “Venas la vintro, ne foras do l’ printemp’ – dediĉe al kamarado

Mangada” – (When winter comes spring isn't far behind – dedicated to Comrade Mangada) she turns her voice directly to army officer and Esperantist Julio Mangada (1877-1946). She plans to send him a telegram, but the Spanish government has forbidden telegrams in foreign languages as it severs

Spanish people from contact with foreigners and potential revolutionary ideologies. Hasegawa undermines the entire binary between domestic and foreign languages by acknowledging Esperanto as neither.145 Rejecting the domestic-foreign binary, she then unties the imperial binaries of us/them, naichi/gaichi, creating pure exteriority. This exteriority envisions a virtual space to share a moment of solidarity with Mangada. In resisting and dismantling the (fascist) subjectification of voice, Hasegawa demonstrates how voice fluidifies forced boundaries. In this way, the collective assemblage of proletarian (Esperanto) voices will be set free to transverse all the corners of the world with “all voices present within a single voice.”146

Hearing Voices of Forgotten People

145 Verda Majo, “Venas la vintro, ne foras do l’ printemp’ – dediĉe al kamarado Mangada,” in Verkoj de Verda, 410. 146 Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 80.

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This chapter concludes with polyglot Ye Junjian and his short story collection Forgesitaj

Homoj (Forgotten People, 1937), which he wrote in college during his late teens and early twenties.147

Ye recalls his Esperanto writing as an attempt to “hear their [proletarian] voices (tingdao tamen de husheng),148 similar to how Hong’s protagonist Junsu Kim planned to bring voices to illiterate and impoverished peasants. However, these voices needed to speak in Esperanto – a language proletarians often did not speak – to be heard was encumbering for Ye and his narrators as they interacted with the forgotten people. If Hasegawa focused on deterritorializing and desubjectifying voice, Ye explores what a liminal (Esperanto) voice is (in)capable of for proletarians. He did this by adding and translating culturally specific words (Fig. 2.9). Ye describes the forgotten people in the postscript as

“people I have been living with when I was young, but have mostly passed away by now;” however,

147 Ye began learning Esperanto in middle school in Wuhan. Reading through Esperanto journals such as those published by the proletarian Esperanto movement in Shanghai, Ye came to view Esperanto as a transmitter (chuanbo), vehicle (meijie) and a writing medium (xiezuo de meiti) understanding it as another technology mode of communication like the radio, telegraph and telegram highlighting its ability to “exchange ideas and feelings with readers of ‘weak and small nations’” travelling across space at high speed. While intellectuals like Lin Yutang (1895-1976) wrote in English about Chinese ancient history including the lives of aristocrats, Ye felt that such writings neglected the lowest strata of society despite being a significant force in history. Before moving to Tokyo, Ye had already a strong interest in learning foreign languages which helped him building a broad network of Esperantists and other (revolutionary) artists around the world. Already in Wuhan, Ye acquainted with the poet Julian Bell, whose network helped him later during his five-year stay in England, and assisted Christopher Isherwood and Wysten Hugh Auden during their stay in China. Following his studies in Wuhan and Shanghai, Ye moved to Japan where he met with Esperanto penfriends Nakagaki, Takagi, and Hasegawa. They introduced him to Akita and proletarian manga artist Yanase Masamu (1900-1945), and he participated in the proletarian Esperanto activities. His involvement led to an arrest in 1936 and the police designated him to be an “extreme threat” aiming “to overthrow the Japanese empire.” After two months in detention, they deported him back to Shanghai where he joined the resistance. During the war years, Ye was a member of the international propaganda division in the Disanting (Third Department) where he might have cooperated with other Esperantists like Hasegawa. Following the publication of La Nova Epoko (The New Era, 1939), which contain translations of War of Resistance literary works, he moved to England in 1944 where he continued his work as a propogandist. In England, he switched to English as his writing language. His first stories, however, still resembled his earlier Esperanto works revealing the significant formative impact Esperanto had on his works. One of the first collections Ye published in English was titled The Ignorant and the Forgotten in 1946. Ye Junjian, Ye Junjian juan (Beijing: Huawen Chubanshe, 1999), 21-26. 148 Cicio Mar [Ye Junjian], Forgesitaj Homoj (Chongqing: Eldonis, 1985), 2. First published by Shanghai Yelü Shudian in 1937.

200 these people are "still alive and strive to live,” as they are eternalized through fictional depictions.149 Ye considered Esperanto the ideal tool (gongju) to record these voices in his fictional world so that he could have exchanges (jiaoliu) through literature with “weak and small peoples” of the world. His intention is not unlike Lu Xun’s support for Esperanto as quoted at the beginning of this chapter. For

Ye, Esperanto allowed him to overcome geographical conditions (Pak) and share proletarian solidarity with Esperantists around the world. But, could these forgotten people speak and be heard?

Ye’s attempt to listen to proletarian voices and to recreate those voices in literature brings back to the core problem of proletarian literature - the representability of proletarian figures by intellectuals. Proletarian writers debated frequently whether it was possible to write on behalf of proletarians despite having a different (class) background and world view as discussed in the

Introduction. As Yurou Zhong observes, there was a strong belief among proletarian intellectuals that forging a language of the masses (dazhongyu) would allow proletarians to speak and be heard, “no matter their dialect groups, literacy levels, and social strata.”150 Proletarian Esperanto was no exception to that belief; however, it was often complicated by proletarians who were largely illiterate as well as unfamiliar with Esperanto. Yet, Ye’s understanding of forgotten people as those “who still live and strive to live” hints at a notion of voice as desubjectified and polyvocal rather than as an individuated collective. This may have helped Ye to create literary space for these voices to be heard.

This section explores how Ye attempted to have “forgotten people” speak in Esperanto.

Reading through his collection of short stories, the voices of forgotten people often resist or fail to

149 Ibid., 213. 150 Yurou Zhong, Chinese Grammatology: Script Revolution and Literary Modernity, 1916–1958, 87.

201 speak, and instead mumble, stutter, whisper, or remain silent (murmuri, balbuti, flustri, senparola).

Deterritorializing the proletarian voice and reconfiguring order-words through passage-words often resulted in another restrictive reterritoralization by proletarian intellectuals. Proletarians resisted such reterritoralization by refraining from using Esperanto; a contradiction which is discussed below.

During the first half of the 1930s, Ye wrote his stories of forgotten people. The narrators in these stories present a world of peasants, travel companions, floaters, and a little band of vagabonds who together form a forgotten people struggling to make a living. Meanwhile, warlord wars are raging and foreign imperialists are encroaching. The short stories depict a slice of life from the characters and are narrated in the present but without any clear markers of time. While the narration occasionally includes first-person speech by characters, it is the narrator that dominates each story as the actions and thoughts of characters are described. These characters often resist the narrator’s mediation by remaining silent, lost in unknown thoughts, or speak only briefly. It almost seems as if the characters refuse to be captured in language and choose to remain in oblivion. This silence is perhaps the ultimate resistance to attempts of reterritorialization by remaining off the radar. They are to be observed only briefly by the narrator and lack proper names.

Such resistance to subjectification by the narrator is found throughout the stories. For instance, “Vojkamaradoj” (Road Comrades), presents a moment from the lives of two peddlers who run into each other every so often on the mountain roads. This time they meet at a guesthouse. The narrator can hear one “initiating a conversation” (ekparolis), but immediately the other is “without reply” (senrespondis).151 Talking to the owner of the guesthouse, the peddlers use only the necessary

151 Cicio Mar (Ye Junjian), Forgesitaj Homoj, 126.

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“mild and friendly voice” (kun voĉo milda kaj amikeca) to remain “in silence” (kaj aŭdiĝis ne plu parolo).152 The narrator can only describe the appearance of the peddlers or listen to the few words they speak occasionally. Between the “long silences” (longa silento), the peddlers say a sentence or two before they fall asleep.

By the same token, in “Vaganta Bandeto” (Roaming Group), three characters Boy, Older, and

Brown Face (knabo, maljuno, brunvizagulo) wander in the mountains without purpose. The narrator shares their appearances and their activities with the reader, until it is interrupted by a brief utterance of one of the characters. While crawling through the mountains, the group stumbles upon a dead dog.

Cooking the dog for dinner, the hungry three are so eager to eat they are hardly able “to restrain their saliva” (deteni de salivo).153 After they have devoured the meat, they resume walking in the twilight

“without shadows” (ne donante ombrojn), with only stepping sounds heard. When they reach the ruins of a temple, they decide to spend the night there and the story ends.

The recurring silences and fragments of speech coupled with the superficial descriptions of characters by narrators seem to resist meaning and refuse metaphors. Instead, they appear as flows of movements, fast and slow, the purposes of which remain largely imperceptible to the narrator. The narrator makes a futile attempt to record the fragmented voices as they mumble and stammer. Rather than “an affect of language and not an affectation of speech,” as Deleuze put its, stuttering minorizes language, by making “language itself scream, stutter, stammer, or murmur” to the extent that

“language is so strained (…) then language in its entirety reaches the limit that marks its outside and

152 Ibid., 127. 153 Ibid., 147.

203 makes it confront silence.”154 While for Deleuze minor language is not a mixing of two languages that maintains “a homogenous system in equilibrium” but rather is an invention of “minor use of the major language,” putting it in “perpetual disequilibrium.”155 Esperanto complicates the boundaries of one language. As a transmission of a major language through translation, Esperanto operates still within one language rather than two, minorizing the language, which it translates. Most (modern) literature could be considered as attempting to subjectify and individuate its characters based on humanist ideas of subject-object relations by preserving an equilibrium of the major language. In contrast, the forgotten voices in Ye’s stories escape a degree of legibility or representation and thus

(re)territorialization in their silence, making them all the more heard.

2.7 Conclusion

Faced with numerous (in)visible linguistic, geographical, and social borders across and beyond East Asia, Esperanto proved to be an effective medium for proletarian cultural movements to bridge and mitigate divisions among proletarians. In contrast to imperial and national languages and their native-foreign hierarchies, the stateless Esperanto was considered ideal by proletarian intellectuals to create linguistic equality and facilitate intra-East Asian and worldwide exchange.

While intellectuals initially accused Esperanto of Eurocentrism due to its lexicon and script being derived from European languages, (proletarian) Esperantists countered these allegations, considering

154 Gilles Deleuze, “He Stuttered,” Essays Critical and Clinical, trans. Daniel W. Smith and Michael A. Greco (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 109-110, 113. 155 Ibid., 109.

204 its grammar closer to Asian languages. It also demonstrated the flexibility to create non-Eurocentric neologisms.

Convinced by a linguistic universality and Marxist linguistics, proletarian Esperantists created various teaching materials and offered classes to proletarians needed to precipitate the emergence of a unified proletarian language. This language was needed to conjoin proletarian struggles internationally and construct international networks of proletarian activists. Moreover, Esperantists explored the (im)possibilities of spoken and written Esperanto through translation and radiobroadcasting. International correspondence through letter writing allowed intimate exchanges between individuals as well as collective interaction among proletarian groups at the grassroots level.

Eventually, following years of language training and practice, a group of proletarian Esperantists became proficient enough to write literary works directly in Esperanto. These works were aimed at contrasting local proletarian struggles with imperial oppression in East Asia and promoted solidarity within a worldwide proletarian readership.

In these linguistic modes, Esperanto functioned as pass-words in order-words, which aimed to rupture and dismantle imperial and (nation-)state restrictions and codifications of language use across East Asia. These order-words were never used without the risk of reterritorialization present when organizing and popularizing Esperanto among the proletariat. It could easily reproduce linguistic hierarchies and codifications. To use Esperanto when assembling deterritorialized relations of solidarity, proletarian Esperantists had to avoid state censorship and internal disputes over the use of national language. This problem was brought in by the regime of translation which resulted in

Esperanto itself becoming a contested medium that continuously had to be deterritorialized. Through

205 transmissions between Esperanto and other languages, proletarian Esperantists strived to create exterior passages which were able to deterritorialize sonic and graphic voices as well as redirect language as a weapon against oppressors. As such, proletarian voices were liberated from subjectification and individuation thus allowing them to traverse across dispersed spatialities.

Esperantists did this through various forms of media, such as translation, radiobroadcasts, letter writing, and literature, creating links between workers, artists, activists, and intellectuals. Similar to how May Day assembling solidarity between proletarian spaces in and beyond East Asia, proletarian

Esperantists assembled proletarian heteroglossia and polyvocality worldwide through linguistic solidarity. The next chapter centers around corporeal solidarity and birth control politics as related to assembling of polymorphous bodies and experiences of (post-)parturient suffering.

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Chapter 3 Seizing/Ceasing Reproduction: Proletarian Birth Control Politics, Parturient Bodies, and (In)Corporeal Solidarity

March 8! This day is the international proletarian women’s commemoration day. Like the commemoration day of the world proletariat on May 1 and Proletarian Adolescent’s Day on the first Sunday of September, March 8 is the world proletarian women’s day. These commemoration days are not limited to (nation-)states or provinces, and it has meaning, inspiration, and purpose in the fact that it is an international commemoration day widely exceeding national borders and races. Therefore, this [day] is the shared interests of the international proletariat, and a meaningful expression and a demonstration of forging struggles to liberate [proletarian women] from the oppression of the international capitalist class. It leads to a unity of feelings of solidarity among humankind for a new society of the future. SY, “Commemoration of Proletarian Women’s Day”1

The moment he was brutally arrested during May Day, his wife gave birth to their fourth daughter while holding the yarn of her domestic job. Itō Ken, “Childbirth”2

Remember, we are all comrade siblings of the red army, Comrades! At this time, we woman have to take the responsibility to cease [re]production. You guys don’t understand this, and I cannot simply see who you are. […] Really, now I simply forgot that I am a woman myself. I have already spent the meaningful life of a red soldier together with my comrades for a year and five months! Feng Keng, “Red Diary”3

3.1 Introduction

In 1931, a member of the recently established Proletarian Birth Control Alliance (Musansha sanji seigen dōmei, often abbreviated as ProBC) visited Ōshima, Town located on an island south of

Tokyo to interview Miss Yagi about her use of contraceptives. During the interview, Miss Yagi praised birth control, saying: “If I get pregnant [again], I would die. “Now, it’s fine. It [birth control] really saved me.”4 ProBC published the interview in PuroBC nyūsu taishūban (ProBC News Mass Edition) titled “Jitsuwa: Tasan jigoku kara sukuwareta Yagi-san ikka no hanashi” (True Story: Story of the Yagi

1 SY, “Musanbuin’il ŭi kinyŏm,” Kaebyŏk, no. 57 (1925): 23. 2 Itō Ken, Itō Ken shishū (Tokyo: Sōjinsha, 1927), 12.

3 Feng Keng, “Hongde riji,” Qianshao, no. 1 (1931): 23. 4 Anonymous, “Jitsuwa: Tasan jigoku kara sukuwareta Yagi-san ikka no hanashi,” PuroBC nyūsu taishūban, no 4 (1933): 3.

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Family saved from Fecund Hell). It presents a rather positive account of birth control performed by

Miss Yagi (40 years old) and her husband (41), who together have seven children. In the interview,

Miss Yagi explains that after six children she really wanted to avoid another pregnancy as she believed it would kill her, not to speak of the economic and mental hardships. However, after Miss Yagi conceived again the couple grew desperate. Then, they met a member of ProBC, who informed them about various contraceptive methods. Miss Yagi chose to purchase a pessary from ProBC, which she had been using for more than a year.5 While uncomfortable at first, the couple managed to avoid any new pregnancies.

A few months earlier in 1932, an article published in the proletarian journal Hataraku fujin

(Working Women) was about immigrant worker Pak Chongsun and her experiences in the aftermath of the 1923 Great Kantō Earthquake. In this article, titled “Chōsen fujin kugatsu tsuitachi” (Korean

Women September 1; the date refers to the day of the earthquake), which is written in first person, Pak recounts how she moved from Korea to Japan to reunite with her husband and support their newborn. She found a job at a dormitory kitchen for Korean workers. Soon afterward, the earthquake occurred and rumors vilifying Koreans led vigilant groups to hunt Koreans to maim or kill them. Such groups killed Pak’s husband and child, grabbed her by her hair, and slit her belly open. An elderly

5 The article does not mention how Miss Yagi was able to afford a pessary as the contraceptive items were expensive and beyond purchase power of proletarians. In his study on birth control in prewar Japan, Ōta Tenrei mentions that the Dutch pessary was among the popular models promoted by birth control activists such as Majima Kan (1893-1969) and Ishimoto Shizue (1897-2004) in the late 1920s and early 1930s, coinciding with the 1930 World Malthussian Birth Control Convention where activists concluded that the Dutch pessary was the most effective contraceptive. Ōta Tenrei, Nihon sanji chōsetsushi: Meiji, Taishō, Shōwa shoki made (Tokyo: Nihon Kazoku Keikaku Kyōkai, 1969), 178-181. Advertisements of the Dutch Pessary in the Yomiuri Shinbun show a price of 1.5 yen compared to the average wage of 1 to 2.5 yen for Japanese day- laborers and as low as 20 sen for Korean female workers. For more on wages of workers in interwar Japan see Ken Kawashima, The Proletarian Gamble: Korean Workers in Interwar Japan (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2009).

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Japanese woman in the neighborhood nursed her, saving her life. While Pak is still confronted by racist slurs on a daily basis, she states that: “even though Japanese imperialism instills ethnic sentiment, we comrades are the world proletariat.”6 The contingent encounter between the two women displays a moment of assembling gendered solidarity that challenged ethnic divisions. In her statement, Park foregrounds how she tried to resist an ethnic and gendered rendering of her body while maintaining a heterogenous subjectivity based on proletarianness.7

How are Yagi and Park’s experiences to be reconciled? While Yagi and Park seemingly tell unrelated stories of pregnancy and childrearing, their tragedies are interconnected through reproduction and capitalist mechanisms of population control worldwide. From class to gender to race, proletarian women experienced multiple forms of (male) colonial and sexual violence.

Moreover, what a comparison between Yagi’s story and Park’s foregrounds is a divisive mechanism between wombs, imperial versus colonial in this case. Whereas Park’s belly was sliced with a knife rendering her colonial reproductive organs as disposable to the empire, Yagi’s imperial reproductive organs were maintained until reproduction quotas have been achieved. Such divisions among proletarian women stymied proletarian solidary amongst East Asian women.

This chapter discusses several short stories and novellas by proletarian women writers to examine proletarian solidarity with respect to the reproductive body and parturient suffering.

Following the capitalist production and regulation of human bodies, a patriarchal hierarchy emerged

6 Pak Chongsun, “Chōsen fujin kugatsu tsuitachi,” Hataraku fujin 1, no. 8 (1932): 24. At the end of the article, the reader is informed that “this [article] is written without change as an account of a Korean woman who lives in Shibaura.” 7 In the editorial remarks, the editors write that they published Pak’s story to counter the racist attempts of “the bourgeoisie purposefully relating the antiwar activism by the Communist Party and the proletariat only to Koreans.” “Henshūbu kara,” Hataraku fujin 1, no. 8 (1932): 86.

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(and was renewed) between sexed bodies that seriously impeded solidarity among proletarian women and men. Informed by birth control politics, the literary works discussed below highlight the predicament of proletarian gender solidarity through the trope of parturient bodies. Similar to the synthesizing force of protest and language examined in the previous chapters, this chapter will argue that the writers under examination articulated an assembling of corporeal experiences by deterritorializing proletarian bodies from capitalist gendered codification. Specifically, several stories center around the disparate views of breast milk, which produces, questions, ruptures, and reconfigures proletarian gendered subjectivity. In rendering such conflicts visible, they tried to make parturient suffering an issue shared among proletarians and create a different understanding of female bodies. The reconfiguring of proletarian female bodies as mutually comparable was an attempt to overcome the proletarian gender inequality and to establish new alliances of solidarity within proletarian assemblages. As such, a proletarian body was not rooted in nation-state categories of ethnicity or national language, but rather in international intimacies of gendered and classed parturient suffering.

As May Day and Esperanto linguistic strikes were attempts to deterritorialize labor and language of proletarian life, proletarian activists provoked what Yamakawa Kikue called “birth strikes”

(shussan sutoraiki).8 These “birth strikes” expanded the struggle against the imperial and capitalist order, attacking the capitalist lifeline by including reproduction. Kikue coined her notion of “birth strikes” to promote birth control in East Asia during a period that witnessed a decrease in birthrates in

Europe and America; social policy advocate Ernst Kahn (1884-1959) described this trend of falling

8 Yamagawa Kikue, “Sanji chōsetsu to shakai shugi,” Josei no hangyaku (Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 1982), 283.

210 birth rates as the “international birth strike” (der internationale Geburtenstreik).9 Two proletarian intellectuals and colleagues of Kikue highlighted the swift change among topics in proletarian literature during the 1920s and 1930s to cover child birth, parturient suffering, and contraceptives.

Whereas Akita Ujaku wrote in 1919 that “many women give birth but (…) I have not once heard of writings about childbirth,”10 just a decade later Kurahara Korehito acknowledged a recent diversification of proletarian literary topics and urged writers to continue to expand by writing “birth control stories” (sanji seigen shōsetsu).11 Coinciding with Kurahara and Kikue’s appeal, proletarian writers strived to account not only for the shifting attitudes toward reproduction like Miss Yagi, but also negotiated the harsh and complex realities of proletarian women experiencing rape, unwanted pregnancy, and premature death of newborns, by crafting storylines where proletarian women tried to assemble solidary alliances against sexual violence and reproductive suffering. Taken together, these writings predicted the futile nature of social reproduction under capitalism and called for “birth strikes” as the ultimate strategy to sever the lifeline of capitalism.

9 Ernst Kahn, Der Internationale Geburtenstreik: Umfang, Ursachen, Wirkungen, Gegenmaßnahmen? (Frankfurt am Main: Societäts-Verlag, 1930). Ernst Kahn was a banker and journalist and was involved in local politics in Frankfurt am Main, holding an honorary position for the Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands (Social-democratic Party Germany). Following the Great War (1914-1918) and a decade of improved contraceptives, the birth rate in Weimar Germany plummeted from 4.5 in the 1870s to 1.9 in 1929. Kahn stated that a similar trend was present in Euro-America, concluding that in the case of Italy, “Malthus is stronger than Mussolini.” Regarding the Far-East, Kahn noted that populations in China, Japan, British-India, and Dutch-Indonesia, still increase significantly. The population increase remained a mystery for Kahn unaware of pro-natal policies in East Asia. For a biography of Yamakawa Kikue in English see, Mikiso Hane, Reflections on the Way to the Gallows: Rebel Women in Prewar Japan (Berkeley: California University Press), 160-164; and for a more detailed discussion of Yamakawa’s birth control politics see, Sujin Lee, “Differing Conceptions of ‘Voluntary Motherhood’: Yamakawa Kikue Birth Strike and Ishimoto Shizue's Eugenic Feminism,” U.S.-Japan Women's Journal 52, no. 1 (2017): 3-22. 10 Akita Ujaku, “Fujimori Seikichi-kun no geijutsu,” Zenki puroretaria bungaku hyōronshū (Tokyo: Shin Nihon Shuppansha, 1985), 105. 11 Tanimoto Kiyoshi [Kurahara Korehito], “Geijutsuteki hōhō ni tsuite no kansō (zenhen),” Nappu 2, no. 9 (1931): 18.

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The shifting focus on reproduction among proletarian intellectuals emerged at a moment of ebullient interest in female reproductive organs and scientific research on contraception. By the

1920s, governments in East Asia had implemented a wide array of laws and policies to encourage the sanitization of life and sexual reproduction, prohibiting and criminalizing abortion and severely limiting contraception.12 Following the colonization of Taiwan (1895) and Korea (1910) and the overthrow of the Qing (1911), the Japanese and Chinese governments continued the sanitization of life, including the expansion of pronatalist policies. Under such slogans as ryōsai kenbo (good wives and wise mothers) and guomin zhi mu (mothers of national citizens) these governments unfolded biopolitical systems to control the lives of its populations deemed necessary to ensure the construction of a strong nation-state and improving the genetic quality of national subjects through eugenics.13 These biopolitical systems permeated numerous dimensions of life, including hygiene, medicine, physical and mental health, family planning, and were incorporated into various

12 One of the first laws the new Meiji government promulgated was the Dataizai (Illegal Abortion Law) to prohibit induced abortion and the midwife medicine in 1868. The Qing empire promulgated the Daqing xin xinglu (The New Criminal Code of the Great Qing) of 1910, which was the first legalisation to prohibit induced abortion. In colonial Korea, the Government General implemented the Criminal Code of 1912 making abortion a crime. See Fujime Yuki, Sei no rekishigaku: Kōshō seido, dataizai taisei kara baishun bōshihō, yūsei hogohō taisei e (Tokyo: Fuji Shuppan, 1997), especially chapter 3; Chen Yongsheng, Zhongguo jindai jiezhi shengyu shiyao (Suzhou: Suzhou Daxue Chubanshe, 2013), 50-80; Sonja Kim, “‘Limiting Birth’: Birth Control in Colonial Korea (1910-1945),” East Asian Science, Technology and Society: An International Journal 2, no. 3 (2008): 335-359. Scholarship has also widely examined postwar policies regarding birth planning. See for example, Susan Greenhalgh and Edwin A. Winckler, Governing China's Population: From Leninist to Neoliberal Biopolitics (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005); Tyrene White, China's Longest Campaign: Birth Planning in the People's Republic, 1949-2005 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2009); Tiana Norgren, Abortion Before Birth Control: The Politics of Reproduction in Postwar Japan (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001); Hiroko Takeda, The Political Economy of Reproduction in Japan (New York: Routledge, 2014); Aiko Takeuchi-Demirci, Contraceptive Diplomacy: Reproductive Politics and Imperial Ambitions in the United States and Japan (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2018). 13 While eugenics is interlaced in the debates of birth control politics, it is of less importance for my discussion. For more on eugenics in East Asia, see besides Ōta and Chen, Yuehtsen Juliette Chung, Struggle for National Survival: Eugenics in Sino-Japanese Contexts, 1896-1945 (New York: Routledge, 2002), and Eunjung Kim, Curative Violence: Rehabilitating Disability, Gender, and Sexuality in Modern Korea (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2017). The influential birth control activist Margaret Sanger is also often linked to eugenics.

212 institutions, such as education, (medical) science, and the military. Ruth Rogaski has described these shifts surrounding hygiene (衛生) as a process of “hygienic modernity” that “encompass[es] state power, scientific standards of progress, the cleanliness of bodies, and the fitness of races.”14

The medicalization and scientification of life across East Asia significantly changed the daily lives of its peoples. As Sabine Frühstück has argued in her study of sexual knowledge in Japan, within new heteronormative gender divisions between men and women, a shift of medical interest occurred from the male to the female body. Whereas in the late nineteenth century, the individual body as “a miniature of the social, the national, and imperial body” was predominantly a male body, starting in the 1910s, the focus shifted to the female body.15 This shift translated to a “preoccupation with the womb, the uterus, fertility, and race.”16 In short, the woman’s reproductive organs were colonized for nation and empire building.17 Elsewhere in East Asia, we see similar preoccupations with female reproduction organs. Sonja Kim has observed in the case of colonial Korea that there was “a disproportionate attention to women’s reproductive system” and an “absence of male reproductive system in boy’s high school textbooks.”18 As a result, women were integrated in society “primarily

14 Ruth Rogaski, Hygienic Modernity: Meanings of Health and Disease in Treaty-port China (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2014), 1. 15 Sabine Frühstück, Colonizing Sex: Sexology and Social Control in Modern Japan (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003), 3. Nicolas Schillinger locates a similar emphasis on governing the physical male body, especially the masculinity of soldiers in late Qing and early Republican China. Nicolas Schillinger, The Body and Military Masculinity in Late Qing and Early Republican China: The Art of Governing Soldiers (Lanham: Lexington Books, 2016). 16 Ibid., 4. 17 Ibid. 18 Sonja M. Kim, Imperatives of Care: Women and Medicine in Colonial Korea (Honolulu: University of Hawaiʻi Press, 2019), 10, 46. See also Theodore Jun Yoo, The Politics of Gender in Colonial Korea: Education, Labor, and Health, 1910-1945 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008), 161-192.

213 through their reproductive activities as mothers.”19 In addition, Tina Johnson has shown how

Republican China in general adapted the notion of xiangqi lianmu (virtuous wives and good mothers),20 resembling ryōsai kenbo in Japan, particularly during the Nanjing decade under the

Guomindang. Furthermore, pronatalist literature became “imbued with fascist German and Italian pro-motherhood arguments that called for women’s reproduction for nationalistic purposes.”21

The above is far from an encompassing history and serves as a historical sketch to situate the emergence of proletarian gender struggles and birth control politics in relation to the cultural production to be discussed below. While scholars of Anglo-American literature have examined the relationship between birth control politics and literature, scholars of East Asian literatures have paid less attention to this relationship.22 In their studies of Anglo-American fiction, Widmaier Capo has shown that literature played an important role in shaping the debates of birth control politics,23 and

19 Ibid., 9. 20 The notion of “good wives, wise mothers” also spread across the Japanese empire, such as colonial Korea translated as hyŏnmo yangch’ŏ. For more on the Korean context, see for example Hyaeweol Choi, “‘Wise Mother, Good Wife’: A Transcultural Discursive Construct in Modern Korea,” The Journal of Korean Studies 14, no. 1 (2009): 1-33. For more on “good wives, wise mothers” as modern construct see Shizuko Koyama, Ryōsai Kenbo: The Educational Ideal of ‘Good Wife, Wise Mother’ in Modern Japan (Leiden: Brill, 2015). 21 Tina Philips Johnson, Childbirth in Republican China: Delivering Modernity (Lanham: Lexington Books, 2011), 35. See also Frank Dikötter, Sex, Culture, and Modernity in China: Medical Science and the Construction of Sexual Identities in the Early Republican Period (London: Hurst & Co., 1995). 22 An exception is Saitō Minako, Ninshin Shōsetsu (Tokyo: Chikuma Shobō, 1997). However, Saitō only focuses on male writers and their fear regarding unwanted pregnancies in their literary works. Besides Saitō, scholarship on postwar literature in East Asia has started to examine the relation between literature and birth control politics. See for example, Amanda C. Seaman, Writing Pregnancy in Low-Fertility Japan (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2017), Sharalyn Orbaugh, Japanese Fiction of the Allied Occupation Vision, Embodiment, Identity (Leiden: Brill, 2006), especially chapter 8 “Production and Reproduction Women Writing Women,” and Julia C. Bullock, The Other Women’s Lib: Gender and Body in Japanese Women’s Fiction (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2010), 19-21. Atsuko Sakaki has highlighted the relationship of photography and pregnancy as corporeal reproduction in the work of Kanai Mieko. Atsuko Sakaki, The Rhetoric of Photography in Modern Japanese Literature: Materiality in the Visual Register as Narrated by Tanizaki Jun'ichirō, Abe Kōbō, Horie Toshiyuki and Kanai Mieko (Leiden: Brill, 2016), 188-207. 23 Beth Widmaier Capo, Textual Contraception: Birth Control and Modern American fiction (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2007), 5.

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Layne Parish Craig has argued that “[p]ost-birth control era texts depicting unplanned pregnancy have to account for why contraception was not used or failed in order to be accepted as realistic by their audiences.”24 Together, they reveal a cross-pollination between contraceptive politics and literature, which is also found in proletarian literature in East Asia during the 1920s and 1930s.

Acknowledging this mutuality, Aimee Wilson has highlighted how the aesthetics of literary modernism shaped the narratives of birth control activism. Birth control politics significantly impacted modernism’s aesthetics, particularly the “rejection of subjectivity as stable and self- determining.”25 In other words, the selfhood of human beings is neither presupposed nor fixed but emerges as an after-effect out of set of social relations and processes. In the analysis below we shall see how proletarian writers in East Asia further complicated notions of reproduction in relation to the fixed nature of subjectivity, especially female writers who challenged the gendered politics of subjectivity.26

Building off the abovementioned scholarship, this chapter suggests that the parturient stories by proletarian writers discussed below cannot be fully grasped without considering the international birth control politics of proletarian movements and activists. The distribution of contraceptives made possible by birth control politics worldwide rendered visible the parturient struggles endured by

24 Layne Parish Craig, When Sex Changed: Birth Control Politics and Literature between the World Wars (New Brunswick, New Jersey: Rutgers University Press, 2013), 2. 25 Aimee Armande Wilson, Conceived in Modernism: The Aesthetics and Politics of Birth Control (New York: Bloomsbury, 2016), 4. 26 These activists and writers formed intricate transnational birth control networks connecting Asia, Europe, North America, and Oceania For more on the transnational feminist movements and East Asia, see for example Taeko Shibahara, Japanese Women and the Transnational Feminist Movement before World War II (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2014).

215 proletarian women and the inaccessibility of contraceptives. With this in mind, this chapter will start below with a brief outline of proletarian gender struggles and birth control activism to help illuminate the correlation with proletarian narratives surrounding childbirth. Then, divided over two sections, this chapter will analyse four short stories and novellas by proletarian women writers from East Asia,

Feng Keng (1902-1931), Kang Kyŏng-ae (1906-1944), Matsuda Tokiko (1905-2004), and Xiao Hong (1911-

1942), focusing on (post-)natal scenes in relation to attempts of assembling proletarian gendered solidarity. These short stories and novellas articulate a twofold shared strategy of seizing and ceasing sexual reproduction, where women both regain control over their reproductive organs and reject conception. In the following, this chapter will examine how proletarian female protagonists aim to dismantle presupposed gendered subjectivities and try to establish nomadic alliances to explore new possibilities of life beyond patriarchy under imperial capitalism.

3.2 Bodies, Birth Strikes, and Becomings

In the early twentieth century, nascent resistance to the oedipalization of societies, Freudian psychoanalysis of sexuality, and Darwinian evolution gradually took hold of proletarian intellectuals.27

In the philosophy of Deleuze and Guattari, oedipalization refers to the social repression of political and libidinal desire, which reduces social identities to a monolithic triangle of father-mother-child

27 For more on the reception of Sigmund Freud and psychoanalysis in East Asia, see Yasuhiko Taketomo, “Cultural Adaptation to Psychoanalysis in Japan, 1912-52,” Social Research 57, no. 4 (1990), 951-991; Wendy Larson, From Ah Q to Lei Feng: Freud and Revolutionary Spirit in 20th Century China (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2009); Nina Cornyetz and Keith Vincent (eds.), Perversion and Modern Japan: Psychoanalysis, Literature, Culture (London: Routledge, 2010). For more on Darwinian evolution in East Asia, see James Reeve Pusey, Lu Xun and Evolution (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1998); Andrew F. Jones, Developmental Fairy Tales: Evolutionary Thinking and Modern Chinese Culture (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 2011); G. Clinton Godart, Darwin, Dharma, and the Divine: Evolutionary Theory and Religion in Modern (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2017).

216 and heteronormative sexualities.28 Starting in the 1880s, East Asia witnessed an inchoate activism that questioned the familial triangle and imposed gender roles which seriously disadvantaged women. It was not until the 1920s with the advent of proletarian movements that large-scale feminist resistance emerged. This emergence coincided with new scientific fields like hentai shinrigaku (abnormal psychology) and the burgeoning popular culture surrounding ero-guro-nansensu (erotic-grotesque- nonsense) in Japan, and later the rest of East Asia, which explored various subjectivities and behaviors beyond normativity.29 Many proletarian female activists organized movements and coteries with

International Women’s Day (IDW) as the ultimate display of proletarian gender solidarity in the resistance against gendered repression (Fig. 3.1).30 Yamakawa Kikue (1890-1980) described the annual event as for “proletarian women worldwide to rise and protest against capitalism, (…) the source of woman’s submission” that turned women into “birthing machines” (ko o umu kikai).31 It was amidst such events that the call for proletarian gender solidarity focusing on reproductive rights grew louder.

In response to growing resistance against gender exploitation, proletarian activists initiated debates regarding the oppressive nature of widespread patriarchies.32 They discussed, among other

28 Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (New York: Penguin, 2009), 265. 29 For more on abnormal psychology and its relation with proletarian literature in Japan see, Takeuchi Mizuho, Hentai to iu bunka: Kindai Nihon no “chiisana kakumei” (Tokyo: Hitsuji Shobō, 2014); for a general history on hentai see, Takeuchi Mizuho and Metamo kenkyūkai (eds.), Hentai nijūmensō: Mō hitotsu no kindai Nihon seishinshi (Tokyo: Rikka Shuppan, 2016); for a study on ero-guro-nansensu see, Miriam Silverberg, Erotic Grotesque Nonsense: The Mass Culture of Japanese Modern Times (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006). 30 For the significance of IDW within proletarian culture see Choi Chatterjee, Celebrating Women: Gender, Festival Culture and Bolshevik Ideology, 1910-1939 (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2002), 10-36. For more on the history of IDW in East Asia, see Wan Nina, “Minguo shiqi guoji funüjie gongneng tanxi,” Zhonghua nüzi xueyuan xuebao 22, no. 5 (2010): 105- 109; Vera Mackie, Creating Socialist Women in Japan (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), 102-105. 31 Yamakawa Kikue, “Kokusai fujin dē,” in Yamakawa Kikue josei kaihō ronshū 2 (Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 1984), 41-42. Originally published as five installments in Tokyo Asahi Shinbun between March 7 and 11, 1923. 32 For a discussion of such debates see Ayako Kano, Japanese Feminist Debates: A Century of Contention on Sex, Love, and Labor (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2016). Particularly relevant to my discussion is chapter 2 “Beyond Choice and

217 subjects, the gendered repression within society and questioned the very nature of bourgeois familialism, especially the unequal roles assigned to women. While previous forms of patriarchy had existed and limited women’s freedom, oedipalized patriarchy produced an individualized female subjectivity “freed” from feudalism while remaining heavily restrained with burdens of self- responsibility. For (mostly privileged) women to vocalize their discontent and express solidarity with each other, print media proved an effective medium to launch a series of debates and agitate against unequal gender divisions, amalgamating numerous spacetimes worldwide into a cohesive aggregate of resistance.33

Feminist debates provided a place for topics such as birth control politics and reproductive rights.34 Debaters in East Asia introduced topics such as these in relation to mediascape of psychoanalysis and psychology which explored sex and sexuality, in the aftermath of the First World

Fate: Debates on Reproduction,”; Chen Wenlian, “Lun wusi shiqi xianjin zhishi fenzi de shengyu jiezhi sixiang,” Zhonghua Keji Daxue xuebao (shehui kexueban) 17, no. 1 (2003): 113-117; Chen Wenlian, “Jindai Zhongguo ‘shengyu jiezhi’ sixiang de lishi kaocha,” Zhongnan Daxue xuebao (shehui kexueban) 13, no. 2 (2007): 174-180; Lu Fangshang, “Geren jueze huo guojia zhengce: jindai Zhongguo jieyu de fansi – cong 1920 niandai Funü Zazhi chuban chan’er zhixian zhuanghao shuoqi,” Jindai Zhongguo funüshi yanjiu, no. 12 (2004): 195-230; Lee Young-Ah, “1920-30 nyŏndae shingminji chosŏn ŭi ‘nakt'ae’ tamnon mit shilche yŏn'gu,” Korean Journal of Medical History 22, no. 1 (2013): 133-178. 33 Megan Ferry argues that “[p]rint media in early twentieth-century China was the primary vehicle that told the collective stories of China’s modernity and women’s emancipation, and print media was the central medium for promulgating the new cultural values and beliefs of an emerging republic.” Megan M. Ferry, Chinese Women Writers and Modern Print Culture (Amherst: Cambria Press, 2018), 2. Other studies on print media in relation to gender that have informed me are Joan Judge, Republican Lens: Gender, Visuality, and Experience in the Early Chinese Periodical Press (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2015), Michel Hockx, Joan Judge, Barbara Mittler (eds.), Women and the Periodical Press in China's Long Twentieth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018), Barbara Sato, The New Japanese Woman: Modernity, Media, and Women in Interwar Japan (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2003). 34 Not only in East Asia but also in Europe, North America, and Soviet Union similar debates existed. For example, Paula Rabinowitz states that debates between feminists and Communists also discussed “the importance of free abortion and birth control for working-class women.” Paula Rabinowitz, Labor & Desire: Women's Revolutionary Fiction in Depression America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1991), 5.

218

War, the Russian Revolution, and the founding of the Weimar government in Germany.35 These events were followed by the legalization of abortion in the Soviet Union, pronatalist policies in Weimar

Germany, which were devised to curb the declining birth rate, and the appearance of birth control activists worldwide. Most notable among these was Margaret Sanger (1879-1966), who lectured frequently in East Asia during her visits in 1922.36 Further, through translations, news outlets,

35 The Soviet Union was among the first governments to legalize abortion, which played a significant role in the debates on birth control politics among East Asian activists. For more on these debates, see Susan Gross Solomon, “The Demographic Argument in Soviet Debates over the Legalization of Abortion in the 1920s,” Cahiers du Monde russe et soviétique XXXIII, no. 1 (1992): 59-82. Beside abortion debates in the Soviet Union, birth control activists frequently referenced to the newly established Weimar Government in Germany. In contrast to East Asia, Germany had one of the lowest birthrates in the world, which informed debates among birth control activists in East Asia. Further, the physiologist and sexologist Magnus Hirschfield (1868-1935) and founder of the Institut für Sexualwissenschaft (Institute for Sexology) organized the First Congress for Sexual Reform in 1921, from which the World League for Sex Reform emerged. Several congresses followed gathering sex reformers, including birth control activists, from East Asia, Europe, and North America. For more on Weimar Germany and birth control, see Atina Grossman, Reforming Sex: The German Movement for Birth Control and Abortion Reform, 1920-1950 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), and for the relation between birth control politics and cultural production in Weimar Germany see Cornelie Osborne, Cultures of Abortion in Weimar German (New York: Berghahn Books, 2007), especially chapter 2 “Cultural Representation: Abortion on Stage, Screen and in Fiction.” For more on the World League for Sex Reform, see Ralf Dose, “The World League for Sexual Reform: Some Possible Approaches,” Journal of the History of Sexuality 12, no. 1 (2003): 1-15. 36 While direct encounters between activists were rare due to geographic and gendered constraints, scholarship has paid ample attention to Sanger’s visits to Asia, arguing that her visits were an important catalyst to usher debates on birth control politics in East Asia. For more on Margaret Sanger and her reception in and her trips to East Asia, see for example, Chen Yongsheng, Zhongguo jindai jiezhi shengyu shiyao, 83-100; Kaneko Sachiko, “Kindai Nihon ni okeru Seiyō joseiron juyō no hōhō: Māgaretto Sangā no seiji sangenron o chūshin ni,” Shakai kagaku jānaru 26, no. 2 (1988): 61-80. In emphasizing Sanger’s contribution, however, scholars have often neglected other networks of feminist solidarity, especially those between Marxist feminist activists, such as Alexandra Kollontai (1872-1952), Clara Zetkin (1857-1933), Rosa Luxembourg (1871-1919), as well as trips to the Soviet Union by proletarian intellectuals like Akita Ujaku and Miyamoto Yuriko (1899- 1951), who highlighted communist birth control and natal politics in their travelogues. For a discussion of the reception of Alexandra Kollontai, see Ruth Barraclough, Heather Bowen-Struyk, and Paula Rabinowitz (eds.), Red Love Across the Pacific: Political and Sexual Revolutions of the Twentieth Century (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), and Sugiyama Hideko, Korontai to Nihon (Tokyo: Shinjusha, 2001). For more on Clara Zetkin and her reception in China, see Anup Grewal, “A Revolutionary Women’s Culture: Rewriting Femininity and Women’s Experience in China, 1926-1949,” (PhD diss., The University of Chicago, 2012). Akita’s travelogue, discussed in chapter 1, also includes descriptions of proletarian women, daycares, and gender equality-oriented policies. Besides his travelogue, Akita also published for the inaugural issue of ProBC’s Sanji seigen undō. Akita Ujaku, “Sovēto dōmei ni okeru sanji seigen sono ta ni tsuite,” Sanji seigen undō, no 1 (1931): 3-5. Miyamoto Yuriko, who met Akita Ujaku in Moscow, published a book about her experiences in the Soviet Union titled Atarashiki Shiberia o yokogiru (Crossing the New Siberia, 1931). In her book, she describes her observations of communist family planning. For scholarship on her trip to the Soviet Union, see Jill Dobson, “A 'Fully Bloomed' Existence for Women: Miyamoto [Chūjō] Yuriko in the Soviet Union, 1927-1930,” Women's History Review 26, no. 6 (2017): 799-821, and “Yoshiko & Yuriko: Love Texts, and Camaraderie,” Ruth Barraclough, Heather Bowen-Struyk, and Paul Rabinowitz

219 correspondences, and meetings, feminist activists stirred up lively debates about birth control in East

Asia.

Among proletarian feminists in East Asia, Yamakawa Kikue was particularly prolific and her work was widely read.37 Already active during the 1910s when she debated with Seitō (Bluestocking) members, Yamakawa not only fiercely condemned the patriarchy of her time, but also critiqued many of her colleagues for their ignorance regarding proletarian women’s struggles.38 She frequently questioned the purpose of female education, which, according to her, only served to teach women childrearing and to be a good conversation partner of one’s husband.39 Further, she critiqued the forced dependency of women on men’s income, which to her was a result of the unequal “double burden” of women. The double burden refers to the two tasks capitalism has coded onto female bodies: social reproduction (unwaged and only mediated through the man’s wage) and the often unwaged (if waged less than men) production.40 Yamakawa concluded that under capitalism women

(eds.), Red Love across The Pacific: Political and Sexual Revolutions of the Twentieth Century (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), 123-139. 37 Sunyoung Park mentions that Yamakawa supported the Korean women society Samwŏrhoe (March Society) in Tokyo and this society published translations of her work in their journal. Sunyoung Park, The Proletarian Wave: Literature and Leftist Culture in Colonial Korea, 1910-1945 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Asia Center, 2015), 203. Theodore Jun Yoo writes that Yamakawa supported feminist socialist Hwang Sindŏk (1898-1983) in her calls for women’s rights and her understanding of the relationship between women’s liberation, proletarian class, and the capitalist system. Theodore Jun Yoo, The Politics of Gender in Colonial Korea: Education, Labor, and Health, 1910-1945, 154. On the reception of Yamakawa Kikue in China, see Du Ruosong and Liu Yu, “Funü zazhi yu Riben xuezhe de jindai nüxingguan,” Waiguo wenti yanjiu 32, no. 4 (2012): 49-53. Yamakawa’s older sister Sasaki Matsue (1886-1938) was an Esperantist and translated some of Yamakawa’s essays collected in Sasaki Matsue, Vortoj de Macue Sasaki (Tokyo: Japana Esperanto-Instituto, 1933). 38 For more on Yamakawa and Bluestocking, see Jan Bardsley, The Bluestockings of Japan: New Woman Essays and Fiction from Seitō, 1911-16 (Ann Arbor: Center for Japanese Studies, The University of Michigan, 2007). 39 Yamakawa Kikue, “Iwayuru shin-ryōsai kenboshugi,” in Yamakawa Kikue josei kaihō ronshū 1 (Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 1984), 104-105. Originally published in Chūgai, no. 2 (1918). 40 Leopoldina Fortunati uses the term “double burden” to refer to the reproduction that does not appear as exchange formally, but appears as an exchange between male workers and women. In fact, it is an exchange between capital and women where male workers act as intermediaries. It is then labor power and money which both function as capital. The positing of reproduction as non-value enables production and reproduction to create value. The result is that two workers

220 were merely tools for reproduction and machines for population policies.41 Yamakawa centered much of her critique around the exploitation of women’s reproductive organs, while also noting that reproduction was the Achilles heel of capitalism, a place where proletarian resistance could take hold.

Observing firsthand how many proletarian males had copied the bourgeoisie’s negative attitude toward women,42 Yamakawa understood that such an attitude was obstructing gender solidarity among the proletariat. She went to great lengths to show how gender inequality was not a result of biology, but rather sexual opposition constructed from “social and a posteriori reasoning.”43

Analyzing the animal world, she contended that the gender discrimination seen in humans is absent among animals, and matriarchies are more prevalent.44 She continued by stating that many living beings have biological traits such as differing reproductive organs, but only human patriarchies have demonized these female traits. Female traits were considered defiled and inferior, revealing a shift among humans from sexual difference to sexual opposition.45 Yamakawa identified in these specific

are exploited for one wage. Leopoldina Fortunati, The Arcane of Reproduction: Housework, Prostitution, Labor, and Capital (New York: Autonomedia, 1995), 9. 41 Yamakawa takes the comparison of women as reproductive tools from Napoleon and applies it to 1920s Japan. Yamakawa Kikue, “Fujin kaihō to sanji chōsetsu mondai,” in Yamakawa Kikue josei kaihō ronshū 1 (Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 1984), 292. Originally published in Kaihō, no. 1 (1921), under the title “Josei no hangyaku: Seishinteki oyobi busshitsuteki hōmen yori mitaru sanji seigen mondai.” 42 Yamakawa Kikue, “Puroretaria to fujin mondai,” in Yamakawa Kikue josei kaihō ronshū 2 (Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 1984), 31. Originally published in Tane maku hito 3, no. 17 (1923). 43 Yamakawa Kikue, “Dansei yūetsu no rekishiteki hattatsu,” in Yamakawa Kikue josei kaihō ronshū 2 (Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 1984), 46. Originally published in Fujin kōron, no. 4 (1923). 44 Yamakawa Kikue, “Dansei yūetsu no rekishiteki hattatsu,” 43. 45 Ibid., 46. Regarding the shift from sexual difference to opposition, I am informed here by Elisabeth Grosz, The Nick of Time: Politics, Evolution, and the Untimely (Durkham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2004), 161. In the context of Republican China, for example, Frank Dikötter shows how anatomical and gynaecological treatises created gender hierarchies by stressing “how the male was wai, or exterior, in opposition to the female, who was nei, or interior.” Frank Dikötter, Sex, Culture, and Modernity in China: Medical Science and the Construction of Sexual Identities in the Early Republican Period, 23.

221 biological traits a gendered and classed subjectivity, and therefore, to alter such a subjectivity, one must question the power dynamics assigned to these traits. In the formation of biological

(anatomical) sex, Yamakawa considered bodies as elastic and flexible, capable of learning and nurturing an infinite number of skills, regardless of male or female sex.46 Ultimately, Yamakawa rendered kinships, affiliations, and the division of labor as malleable and contingent, and concluded that social and gender roles under capitalism can also be subject to change.47

Yamakawa’s theorization of gender is among many attempts by leftist thinkers of the twentieth century to untangle the female/male dyad and question presupposed gendered subjectivity and bourgeois familism.48 This chapter theorizes Yamakawa’s gender critique through Deleuze and

Guattari’s concept of “becoming” to further enhance the problem of what Deleuze and Guattari call

“anthropomorphic representation of sex.”49 Understanding the resistance against presupposed gender roles by the protagonists discussed below through their becomings will help in examining their attempts to deterritorialize capitalist molarizations of female reproductive organs and to assemble solidarity based on proletarian molecularizations of bodies. Like Yamakawa, Deleuze and Guattari note a radical shift in social reproduction precipitated by capitalism. They state that capitalism “needs

46 Yamakawa Kikue, “Dansei yūetsu no rekishiteki hattatsu,” 47. 47 Ibid., 52. 48 It should be noted that in the case of East Asian languages, the male/female distinction did not exist in words such as pronouns in contrast to he/she in European languages and he/she pronouns (J. 彼/彼女, C. 他/她, K. 그/그녀) were invented as a gendered opposition following language reforms in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. For a history on the formation of the subject of women in modern China, see Tani E. Barlow, The question of women in Chinese feminism (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2004), especially Chapter 2, “Theorizing Women,” 37-63. The gendered binary usage of third-person pronouns in colonial Korean, however, was not yet fully solidified. The pronoun “kŭ” could be used interchangeably for he, she, and it. For more on pronouns in colonial Korean see, Lee So-heun, “Inch'ingdaemyŏngsa rŭl t'onghae pon i, kŭ, chŏ ŭi ŭimi yŏngyŏk,” Ŏmun nonch'ong, no. 29 (2016): 5-41. 49 Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, 296.

222 a displaced interior limit (…) to neutralize or repel the absolute exterior limit (…) by restricting [the limit] (…) causing it to pass no longer between social reproduction and the desire-production that breaks away from social production, but inside social production, between the form of social reproduction and the form of a familial reproduction to which social production is reduced.”50 In other words, capitalism codes flows of familial reproduction to restrain desire-production within confines of social reproduction. Consequently, under capitalism the role of family is reversed, serving rather than determining economic reproduction.51 In this shift, capitalism requires fixed social and gender roles to ensure reproduction of labor power, making “[f]ather, mother, and child (…) the simulacrum of the images of capital (‘Mister Capital, Madame Earth,’ and their child the Worker).”52

In their plateau, “1730: Becoming-Intense, Becoming-Animal, Becoming-Imperceptible,”

Deleuze and Guattari further examine social functions of male and female roles as they relate to anatomical sex, but also question the boundaries of sexed bodies, how gender is produced, and for what reasons. They start by disputing aspects of (Darwinian) evolution and its understanding of relations between beings based on “genealogy, kinship, descent, and filiation.” For them, evolution conceives these relationships following series, structures, and analogies to create hierarchal and arborescent pedigrees of the natural world. In contrast to such artificial presupposed relationships,

Deleuze and Guattari apprehend relationality through becoming. Becoming differs significantly from evolutionary understandings in that they are not “a correspondence between relations, (…) neither is

50 Ibid., 266. 51 Ibid., 263. 52 Ibid., 264.

223 it a resemblance, an imitation, or, at the limit, identification.”53 Instead, becoming is closer to the

“domain of symbioses” and “lacks a subject distinct from itself.”54 They describe the process of becoming as “[s]tarting from the forms one has, the subject one is, the organs one has, or the functions one fulfills, becoming is to extract particles between which one establishes the relations of movement and rest, speed and slowness, that are closest to what one is becoming, and through which one becomes.”55 In becoming, then, components are deterritorialized in order to configure new territorialities of affinity and offer opportunities to assemble nomadic alliances.

Deleuze and Guattari’s notion of becoming has serious implications for our understanding of the body. Rather than an anthropocentric approach based on the body/mind binary, they consider a body (with emphasis on the indefinite article) as always already engaged in flows, energies, and processes intertwined in heterogeneous assemblages with other bodies, both (in)human and

(in)animate. Capitalism tries to “steal” bodies to prevent their becoming and assigns bodies an identity, a sex, a body, a nationality, and so on, “in order to fabricate opposable organisms.”56 In doing so, capitalism produces a subjectivity for each individuated and atomized body charged with desires of lack. To resist this corporeal capture and the hierarchal organization of bodies, Deleuze and

Guattari propose a body of becoming, deterritorializing its assigned properties and subjectivity. Such a body acts on affirmative desires to produce nomadic alliances with other bodies that do not follow

53 Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 237. 54 Ibid., 238. Italics in the original. 55 Ibid., 272. 56 Ibid., 276.

224 evolutionary series, structures, or analogies. Becoming frees a body from capitalist constraints in order to experiment what it is capable of.57

It is with such an understanding of body that this chapter reads through proletarian stories by

Feng Keng, Matsuda Tokiko, Kang Kyŏng-ae, and Xiao Hong. Focusing on stories dealing with proletarian gender struggles surrounding reproduction not only provides opportunity to examine resistance against capitalist regulation of bodies, but also, as Yamakawa states, to complicate tensions of proletarian solidarity among proletarian movements and its activists. How could proletarian women assemble gender solidarity when their oedipalized male counterparts were actively working against them? In addition to deterritorializing bodies from capitalist subjectification, proletarian women also had to reclaim their bodies from the oedipal father, husband, doctor, and comrade. In their stories, proletarian women writers tried through the trope of reproduction informed by birth control politics to portray women who, in moments of cenesthesia, exposed oedipal territorializations and explored becomings through attempts of assembling solidary alliances.

3.3 Proletarian Literature and Birth Control Politics: Feng Keng’s “Child Pedlar” and Matsuda Tokiko’s “Selling Breast Milk”

57 Among n-becomings, Deleuze and Guattari highlight the “becoming-woman,” albeit not without controversy. They explicate becoming-woman as “emitting particles that enter the relation of movement and rest, or the zone of proximity, of a microfemininity, in other words, that produce in us a molecular woman, create the molecular woman.” Both men and women can enter this state of becoming-woman in order to question and complicate their molar entities, which are defined as “form, endowed with organs and functions as a subject.” This becoming-woman is then especially important for men to understand their being majoritarian, “a state of domination.” Deleuze and Guattari mention Virginia Woolf (1882- 1941) as a writer who questioned “writing ‘as a woman’” and produced a “becoming-woman as atoms of womanhood capable of crossing and impregnating an entire social field, and of contaminating men, of sweeping them up in that becoming.” Ibid., 275-276. For a discussion of Deleuze and Guattari with respect to feminist critiques, see Elisabeth Grosz, Volatile Bodies toward a Corporeal Feminism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994), 161-164; Rosi Braidotti, Nomadic Subjects: Embodiment and Sexual Difference in Contemporary Feminist Theory (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011), especially Chapter 5, “Discontinuous Becomings: Deleuze on the Becoming-Woman of Philosophy,” 111-123.

225

Different from large proletarian sub-branches such as the Esperanto and antiwar movements

(Chapter 4) and the widespread participation in proletarian festivals, such as May Day (Chapter 1, proletarian birth control promotion either remained unorganized or was gathered in small research groups and alliances.58 An early exception was the Ōsaka sanji seigen undō (Osaka Birth Control

League) led by birth control activist Yamamoto Senji (1889-1929).59 Established in 1923 and preceding the proletarian wave beginning in the late 1920s, this movement had a strong affiliation with worker communities in the Kansai area. Many of its leading members were doctors who gave lectures on birth control, sold contraceptive tools, distributed pamphlets, and published journals like Sanji chōsetsu hyōron (Birth Control Review) and Sei to shakai (Sex and Society). The movement widely spread their pamphlets and membership application forms across the empire including Manchuria,

Korea, and Taiwan.60 Similar to proletarian Esperantists publishing dictionaries and textbooks, proletarian birth control activists tried to disentangle proletarian bodies from capitalist codification by producing knowledge on contraception. However, they also often engendered these bodies with similar codes (Fig. 3.2, 3.3, and 3.4). Even in the progressive Soviet Union a tension existed between birth control politics and reproductive autonomy. Julia Chan states that in the case of British proletarian writers and their observations of birth control politics in the Soviet Union, reproductive

58 For a history of birth control politics in interwar East Asia, see Chapters 6, 7, and 8 in Fujime, Sei no rekishigaku: kōshō seido, dataizai taisei kara baishun bōshihō, yūsei hogohō taisei e and Chen, Zhongguo jindai jiezhi shengyu shiyao. 59 For more on Yamamoto Senji, see for example Honjō Yutaka, Yamamoto Senji: Hito ga kagayaku toki (Tokyo: Gakushū no tomo sha, 2009), and Frühstuck, 83-115. Yamamoto met with Margaret Sanger during her stay in Japan and translated some of her writings published as Sanga joshi kazoku seigenhō hihan (Tokyo: Unknown, 1923). For more on ProBC, see Ōta, 302- 307, and Sujin Lee, “Birth Control and Eugenics for the Proletarian Class: A Genealogy of the Proletarian Birth Control Movement in Interwar Japan,” Asian Society for the History of Medicine, (2016): 1-20. 60 Ōta, 126-128. Ōta writes that they received tens of applications daily from across the empire.

226 autonomy is a double-edged sword of both utopian and dystopian visions. This dual effect is caused by the freedom over reproduction facilitated by the Soviet authorities; it not only results in women’s emancipation but also “subsumes the female body under a raison d’état regulating the relationship between production and reproduction.”61 While reproductive autonomy was absent for most women in East Asia, there was a similar tension between the various stances on corporeal codifications of the female body among proletarian constituents and the state. Whether fascist or communist, regulating sexual reproduction continued to highlight challenges associated with assembling gendered solidarity among proletarians.

Elsewhere in East Asia in cities such as Beijing and Suzhou, birth control activists founded the

Beijing chan’er zhixian yanjiuhui (Beijing Birth Control Research Association) and Zhonghua jieyu yanjiushe (China Birth Control Research Society). Members of these groups included proletarian sympathizers.62 However, it was not until 1931 that the first and only proletarian birth control league

PuroBC (hereafter ProBC) was founded in Tokyo as a sub-branch of Nippona Artista Proletaria

Federacio (NAPF, Federation of Japanese Proletarian Artists). Among the two hundred members were such proletarian writers as Akita Ujaku, Eguchi Kan (1887-1975), and Matsuda Tokiko, both of whom delivered speeches at the inauguration. Soon afterward, ProBC began publishing several short-lasting

61 Julia Chan, “The Brave New Worlds of Birth Control: Women's Travel in Soviet Russia and Naomi Mitchison's We Have Been Warned,” Journal of Modern Literature 42, no. 2 (2019): 40. 62 Chen, Zhongguo jindai jiezhi shengyu shiyao, 101-105.

227 magazines, pamphlets, and birth control manuals,63 as well as setting up proletarian hospitals, obstetrical clinics, and daycares.64

Reading through remaining available pamphlets and news bulletins of ProBC, an argument recurs in proletarian birth control politics that was informed by a mix of Marxist and Neo-Malthusian thought. A revival of economist Thomas Malthus’ (1766-1834) view, which stressed the correlation between exponential population growth and linear growth of economic and natural resources, Neo-

Malthusian thought advocated population planning to curb poverty. Following Neo-Malthusian arguments, ProBC urged proletarians to follow the twofold strategy of seizing and ceasing reproduction, which was considered to seriously disrupt the flow of human life essential to the production of surplus value.65 ProBC not only discussed social reproduction in a vacuum, but connected it to war, which required human capital to fight for the imperial cause (discussed in

Chapter 4), and resulted in unequal division of labor between genders. ProBC believed that going on a

“birth strike” would aid the struggle against capitalism and eventually solve gender issues.66

Informed by Neo-Malthusianist birth control politics, Marxism, and eugenics, proletarian writers aimed to disclose women’s struggles with pregnancy and birth. These literary narratives often

63 See for example, Shinkō Ishi Renmei, Musansha eisei hikkei (Tokyo: Sōbunkaku, 1932), and Musansha Sanji Seigen Dōmei, Puroretaria sanji seigenhō (Tokyo: Kōshinsha, 1933). 64 For more on proletarian clinics see Nakakōji Jun, Chiba-ken hokubu musansha shinryōjo monogatari (Tokyo: Hon no izumi sha, 2012). For more on (proletarian) daycares and orphanages see for example, Muraoka Etsuko, “Shōwa shoki no musansha takujisho: Fukushi undō to rōdō undō to no saisho no ketsugō,” Mita gakkai zasshi 77, no. 3 (1984): 389(73)- 408(92); Sugita Naho, “1930 nendai ni okeru ‘nōson’ shakai seisaku no ichi danmen: Nōhanki takujisho o megutte,” Kikan keizai kenkyū 35, no. 4 (2013): 71-92. 65 Musansha sanji seigen dōmei, Musansha sanjiseigen to wa nani ka: Donna hinin hōhō ga aru ka, (PuroBC rifuretto 1, 1932), 3-5. The cover also includes the title in Esperanto, Ki Estas Proleta Naskiĝ-Kontrolo. 66 Ibid., 6-8.

228 depict women enduring physical constraints due to their (repeated) pregnancies, leading to isolation and mental hardship, or to painful scenes of childbirth, which was not unlikely to end with premature death of both newborn and mother. However, as Widmaier Capo has observed “fiction still rarely describes the ritual act of birth control.”67 Proletarian literature never portrayed the use of contraceptives. Different from Miss Yagi using a pessary, most proletarian women could not afford or access contraceptives. Instead of focusing on the implausibility of how access to contraceptives would change the social realities of proletarian women, writers instead explored “the conditions that necessitate birth control,”68 in order to reveal the intricacies and ambiguities surrounding proletarian gender struggles.

Despite ProBC being the only established birth control movement in East Asia, numerous proletarian literary works focusing on woman’s reproductive hardships constructed a network of readership across East Asia and beyond. As Yamakawa argued, proletarian male writers often reproduced bourgeois views of gender roles, thereby rendering proletarian female agency invisible which relegated proletarian gender struggles to domestic and private spaces. The bias among male writers frequently resulted in depicting proletarian women as desperate and powerless victims of capitalist exploitation, neglecting sexist attitudes among proletarian men.69

67 Capo, Textual Contraception: Birth Control and Modern American fiction, 7. 68 Ibid., 8. 69 For example, the story “Nanzan” (Obstructed Labor, 1934-35) written in Japanese by Yang Kui (1905-1985) compares the struggle of a male protagonist writing a literary work with the hardships of child delivery experienced by his wife, exaggerating the former’s trivial distress with the latter’s physical agony. Others, such as Rou Shi (1902-1931), in a love relation with Feng Keng, had a strong sympathy for proletarian women’s struggles, but failed to empower them with agency. His short story “Wei nuli de muqin” (A Slave Mother, 1930), for example, depicts the hardships of a bereaved mother, who is sold by her husband to a rich man in order to provide for their own child as well as to give to birth another child for her new husband. While the narrator sympathizes with the mother’s pain, it also reproduces as Sally Lieberman argues, “idealizations of mother love,” echoing May Fourth’s and the wider ideology of good wives, wise mothers. Sally

229

To challenge such narratives, proletarian women writers could not resort to storylines of bourgeois individualism and romance nor those of proletarian victimization, and had to invent new settings “around the development of collective solidarity and militancy.”70 In her study of women’s revolutionary fiction in 1930s America, Paula Rabinowitz points out that “[t]he generic code of class solidarity provided women writers one device with which to undermine the restrictions on female characters imposed by dominant narrative forms, but additional strategies were essential if their work was to inscribe a female, class-conscious subjectivity.”71 Proletarian women writers in East Asia could also not solely rely on class solidarity; they articulated a gendered class-consciousness by turning to female sites of capitalist alienation, such as “the family, maternity, and sexuality in addition to factory or farm.”72 This is not to say that female empowerment only existed in domesticity. In the literary works discussed below, the arbitrariness of demarcating space into public and private/domestic shows how flows of capital exploit proletarian life and interlock in the various spaces from which the protagonists try to escape.

Babies for Sale: Unproductive Reproduction and Feng Keng’s “Child Pedlar”

Taylor Lieberman, The Mother and Narrative Politics in Modern China (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1998), 208. However, this is not to say that female proletarian writers completely denounced the fixed gender role in their literary works. For example, in Sata (Kubokawa) Ineko’s “Tabako kōjo” (Tobacco Female Factory Workers), in her dream a female character rejects the idea that proletarian activists should not reproduce and that “if all left-wing people give birth to children, then left-wing people will increase a lot,” encouraging women to conceive more, while neglecting the physical burden of social reproduction for women and diametrically opposing proletarian birth control politics. Kubokawa Ineko, “Tabako kōjo,” Senki 2, no. 2 (1929): 66. 70 Rabinowitz, Labor & Desire: Women's Revolutionary Fiction in Depression America, 70. 71 Ibid., 71. 72 Ibid.

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In her short-lived career as a proletarian writer which ended with her execution by the GMD,

Feng Keng (1907-1930) produced a significant amount of writing. Many of her stories dealt with the social position of women as well as questioning the very category of women.73 Like many of her female colleagues, Feng critiqued the male-centered organization of proletarian culture movements for neglecting proletarian gender struggles.74 Quoted at the beginning of this chapter, the protagonist of

Feng’s short story “Hong de riji” (Red Diary, 1931) suggests “ceasing [re]production” (tingzhi shengchan) to ease the burden of women and to strengthen the revolutionary struggle. Moreover, she suggests that becoming a (revolutionary) soldier is not gender specific or related to a sexed body, which resembles Yamakawa’s understanding of bodies as flexible and fluid. She writes that “I am a human and a top-notch X-soldier! Who cares to differentiate men and women!”75 She exposes the arbitrary nature of gender differentiation, not only revealing the gendered logic of capitalism, but also how that very logic operates within and divides the resistance.76

It is Feng’s “Fanmai ying’er de furen” (Child Pedlar, 1931) that is most emblematic of her oeuvre focusing on gendered struggles of proletarian women in relation to birth control politics. In contrast to her other publications, “Child Pedlar” was published in the general interest journal Funü

73 Chang Bin, “‘Wangji ziji shi nüxing’: Cong Xie Bingying, Feng Keng chuangzuo kan 1930 niandai zuoyi nüxing de congjun xiangxiang,” Jilin Daxue shehui kexue xuebao 48, no. 2 (2008): 63-64. 74 See for example Feng Lingmei [Feng Keng], “Funü yundong de wojian,” Youlian qikan, no. 5 (1925): 16-17. 75 Feng Keng, “Hongde riji,” Qianshao, no. 1 (1931): 23. 76 The topic of social reproduction returns in Feng’s play Taier (Fetus, 1928) where the 23-year-old teacher Xu Xiaoxia and her unemployed literatus husband Chen Wenru discuss an abortion. In response to Xiaoxia’s lamenting the “malformed society” (jixing shehui) making it impossible for them to have a child, Wenru shows little compassion for Xiaoxia’s worries and counters her wish for an abortion by telling her it is too expensive. While the conversation shows that access to illegal abortion was still possible despite high costs, Wenru is completely apathic to Xiaoxia’s feelings and distress. Such a blind spot among (proletarian) men for the struggles of their female counterparts succinctly captures the crux of the difficulty of proletarian gender solidarity. Feng Keng, “Taier,” in Hongde riji (Beijing: Zhongguo Shehui Chubanshe, 1998), 318.

231 zazhi (Ladies’ Magazine) and was tailored to a broad female audience. Risking the chance that the call for solidarity with proletarian women would drown amongst numerous advertisements and topics focusing on the concerns of bourgeois women, the story could also be read by an audience less likely to read proletarian literary magazines and opened up new links for solidarity.

“Child Pedlar” tells the story of single mother and widow Li Ximei who needs a paid job to take care of her newborn. Women like Ximei gather at the employment agency where employers come to hire maids and wet nurses.77 The agent recommends Ximei to a middle-aged male employer

(guzhu) as she is still young and already carrying an infant, meaning that her breasts are full of milk.

“Like a merchant,” the employer examines Ximei, telling her he “need[s] her milk” (wo shi yao ni de nai) for his pregnant wife but he will only hire her on the condition that she will not bring her child along.78 The agent proposes to test Ximei’s milk to assure the customer it is not contaminated. Were

Ximei’s milk to be contaminated, then her use-value would instantly be nullified. Ximei is confronted with an impossible choice caused by the market exchange, either accepting paid work and leaving her newborn alone or rejecting the job offer and having no money to take care of her baby.

She frantically thought it through. She needed work, but then she would have to abandon her baby; if she kept him then there was no work. Any decision must mean the loss of one or the other! She could not see any way to have both. She looked at the baby wriggling like a worm in her arms. His eyes were red and shut tights. Her own dry wrinkled breasts would soon be empty of milk – her child continued to drink while she never had enough to eat – and the recent feeling that her milk was flowing less freely terrified her. The child often cried now because he could never take his fill. She thought, “If I don’t take this job then I can only fear that in a month or maybe just two weeks my baby and I will be starving wraiths. I can still save myself! The child is a darling, but if his poverty- stricken mother has already reached the stage where she can no longer produce milk for nourishment, then she must give him away…”

77 For more on wet nurses in Chinese literature see Lieberman, The Mother and Narrative Politics in Modern China, 156-162; Johanna Ransmeier, “Inside the Home, Outside the Family: Wet Nurses in Republican China,” Nan Nü 17, no. 2 (2015): 276- 308. 78 Ling Mei Nüshi [Feng Keng], “Fanmai ying’er de furen,” Funü zazhi 17, no. 1 (1931): 103-104. Translation taken from Jennifer Anderson and Theresa Munford (trans.), Chinese Women Writers: A Collection of Short Stories by Chinese Women Writers of the 1920s and 30s (Hong Kong: Joint Publishing Co., 1985), 130-131.

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接著心裡匆忙得不堪，想需要職業，使得不得拋棄嬰兒；要嬰兒便沒有職業。結局總要失掉一件！兩全的方法，在眼前是沒有了！她看著懷裡的嬰兒，紅紅的閉著眼，像蟲一般在蠕動，自己的干皺兩個乳房看看內面的乳汁已快要完了——一面嬰兒在吃乳，一面沒有充分的食物的她，近來覺乳汁稀少的可怕，嬰兒常常哭著，是因為吃不飽。她想，如果沒有職業，一月半月之後，不怕自己和嬰兒都不化成了餓鬼！還是自己救自己吧！嬰兒雖然可愛，但貧窮的母親已經到了沒有乳汁餵養的地步了，不得不拋棄了…….! 79

The choice is a clash between Ximei’s labor and reproductive power both allegorically connected to her breast milk. As she runs out of milk, the value of her as a “commodity” will soon evaporate.

Throughout Keng’s story –as well as in several other stories below – we notice the frequent appearance of and reference to breast milk. Feminist scholars have discussed female corporeal flows and fluids, including breast milk, as they relate to arbitrary constructions of a woman’s sexuality, anatomical differences, and cultural representations of defilement. Elisabeth Grosz, for example, suggests that representations of “women’s corporeality [are] inscribed as a mode of seepage” through which bodily flows biologically different from men are constructed “as a leaking, uncontrollable, seeping liquid; as formless flow; as viscosity, entrapping, secreting,” and therefore threatening the patriarchal order.80 To neutralize these threats, the male gaze othered and objectified the female body and her fluids, echoed in Keng’s portrayal of the man considering Ximei’s milk as a commodity. In doing so, the man attempts to control Ximei’s fluids to solidify male domination.

For Ximei, however, breast milk also makes her question boundaries of female subjectivity.

This is not to say that female bodies are fluid as opposed to solid male bodies, as the latter too can

79 Ling Mei Nüshi [Feng Keng], “Fanmai ying’er de furen,” 104. Translation from Anderson and Munford, Chinese Women Writers: A Collection of Short Stories by Chinese Women Writers of the 1920s and 30s, 131. 80 Elisabeth Grosz, Volatile Bodies: Toward a Corporeal Feminism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994), 201.

233 question such borders through its fluids.81 Rather, through the production of fixed gendered subjectivities within capitalism and nation-state, biological fluids such as breast milk also become gendered. Crucial to the case of Ximei is that her breast milk enables a rupture in the gendered codes as it is presented for sale. While the results of the milk test are never revealed, Ximei’s breast milk as a potential commodity forces her to contemplate her being at its core. Through commodification of her breast milk capitalist flows could integrate her into the production process and have her contribute to reproduction of labor power; whether that is Ximei’s own child or someone else’s is irrelevant for capitalism. If Ximei rejects the sale of her breast milk, she could potentially disrupt the chain of capitalist production. She is at a crossroads where she could either maintain the parameters of gendered expectations under imperial capitalism, or try to create a line of flight and move in a direction of “becoming.” This would take her beyond molarized, gendered subjectivity, notwithstanding that the choice is already unequal due to the very gendered codes restricting her mobility and limiting her possibilities.

Ximei is pressured to make a decision that will have a significant impact not only on herself but also her baby, which causes her to experience a state of anxiety (jiaoji). This anxiety, however, provides Ximei an opportunity to destroy the (capitalist) gendered individuations that have solidified, closed, and inhibited her being. Severed from participation in any form of political organization on

81 Male fluids have often been reduced to the solid to establish boundaries from which to dominate female fluids. For example, Grosz writes that: “[s]eminal fluid is understood primarily as what it makes, what it achieves, a causal agent and thus a thing, a solid: its fluidity, its potential seepage, the element in it that is uncontrollable, its spread, its formlessness, is perpetually displaced in discourse onto its properties, its capacity to fertilize, to father, to produce an object. Man sees that his “function” is to create, and own, at a (temporal and spatial) distance, and thus to extend bodily interests beyond the male body’s skin through its proprietorial role, its “extended corporeality” in the mother whom he has impregnated and the child thereby produced, making them his products, possessions, responsibilities.” Grosz, Volatile Bodies: Toward a Corporeal Feminism, 199.

234 which she could have relied for support, she must articulate a way out for herself. Moreover, Ximei has difficulty finding others to assemble solidary relations as social and economic restrictions prevent proletarians like her from investing in any meaningful social interaction. She must search for the limits of her social function as they are tied to the gendered codification, trying to deterritorialize these limits and redefining what her body is capable of. Considering the financial resources that she would need to cover herself and her baby’s expenses, she can only foresee “death”; therefore she agrees to go to the employer’s house alone and leave her newborn at an orphanage.

Ximei decides that taking the job as wet nurse will increase the chances of survival for both herself and her baby. The employer suggests that she brings her child to the Foundling Hospital

(yuyingtang). The Foundling Hospital was one of the newly established daycares and orphanages in the 1920s created to rescue babies like Ximei’s from starvation. Ximei’s anxiety is only eased briefly, as her neighbor Zhu Ma whom she meets on the way to the Foundling Hospital informs her about the dreadful conditions children there reside in. The encounter with Zhu Ma bears the possibility of opening up a moment of solidarity between the two, but fails to come to fruition as Zhu Ma merely provides advice how to capitalize on her baby. Zhu Ma tells Ximei about her niece’s child who died from starvation at the hospital. After demanding an explanation from the hospital, they told Zhu Ma that “[p]oor people like you are reckless enough to go and have children when it is pure luck that you don’t die of starvation yourselves.”82 The medical staff fails to understand the proletarian lack of access to contraceptives and blame proletarian women for conceiving, revealing a eugenic preference for strong and healthy babies informed by contemporaneous notions of Darwinism. The response of the

82 Feng, “Fanmai yinger de furen,” 105. Translation from Anderson and Munford, 133.

235 doctor shows that sexual reproduction among proletarians not only provides labor power to capitalism but also that rapid and frequent reproduction leads to starvation as a result of limited resources, echoing a Neo-Malthusian standpoint. While proletarian birth control activism strived to provide accessible health care and family facilities, the response reveals how medical institutions are complicit in perpetuating capitalist gendered codifications of proletarian bodies. By denying Ximei any hope for a better life of her child, her possibilities beyond an oedipalized life are limited.

Zhu Ma recommends Ximei to sell her child, instead of bringing her child to the Foundling

Hospital. This way, Ximei will have some money and her baby might live a bright and happy life with another family. Ximei grows desperate and walks to the market (caichang) crying. Among the sellers and buyers (maimai de ren) exchanging commodities, Ximei tries to sell her baby now commodified and not differing from other products sold at the market. Approaching people at the market, Ximei asks if anyone is interested in buying her baby only to be ridiculed by them thinking she is mad.

Anxiety (jiaoji) overcomes Ximei again. Finally, she finds a man “look[ing] like a laborer” (gongren moyang de) who is interested and even “moved” (xinli yidong) at Ximei’s sight. The man and his wife have recently lost their newborn and he mentions that his wife’s “breasts were swollen and firm with milk, and very painful,” stressing the fact that she is still capable of nursing a baby.83 Again, we see an opportunity to establish solidarity undermined by the need to sell breast milk. Selling breastmilk becomes divisive and is a means of competition between proletarian women.

83 Ibid. Translation from Anderson and Munford, Chinese Women Writers: A Collection of Short Stories by Chinese Women Writers of the 1920s and 30s, 134.

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The man’s sympathy with Ximei is only brief and he begins “to talk business” (jieqia) quickly.

Not knowing the market value of her baby as “commodity” (huowu), Ximei starts at two dollars. The man, however, “out of the habit of bargaining for vegetables” lowers the price immediately to one dollar. Feeling she has no choice, Ximei accepts his offer. Then, an Indian policeman followed by a

Chinese detective, drawn to the commotion, appear and arrest Ximei. The latter vents at Ximei: “Bold as brass, aren’t you, to be making such a deal! Peddling a human being! You’ve got a nerve, selling a human being.”84 While trying to liberate herself from the burdens of motherhood, the State acted as the local and colonial police –exposing the cooperation between domestic and foreign capital – who intervene and re-oedipalize Ximei. The people Ximei runs into are of little help in establishing a community of solidarity that would allow her to resist the vicious circle of capitalist exploitation. Her arrest by the police completely ends Ximei’s quest, transforming the market into a space of surveillance. The unfulfilled encounters result from the fact that others, such as Zhu Ma or the male worker, are equally restrained by capitalist production, leading to a foreclosure of finding solidarity.

This story exposes how fixed gender codes are created; it concludes with the arrest, which is a quick and simple way of blocking becoming and maintaining oedipal territorializations of Ximei as mother, woman, and widowed wife.

Breasts for Sale: Resisting the Bourgeois Milk Machine and Matsuda Tokiko’s “Selling Breast Milk”

乳房 Breasts

84 Ibid., 106. Translation from Anderson and Munford, Chinese Women Writers: A Collection of Short Stories by Chinese Women Writers of the 1920s and 30s, 135. I translated “renkou” as human being rather than “one of the population” or “citizen,” as I believe the former better captures the sale of human life necessary for the supply of labor power for capitalism.

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生まれながらにプロ Born proletariat, 生まれながらに栄養不良 born with malnutrition 生まれながらに父は留置場 born with father in jail だが、吾子よ！but, my child, 飢をうつたえるお前の声に in your voice crying with hunger 私は新らしい力を知る I discern new strength お前の運命にしてお前の糧 Your destiny and your food 今こそ now 復讐の意志にたぎるよ boiling with a vengeful will, ひからびた二つの乳房は these bone-dry breasts (Fig. 3.5).85

If Ximei was blocked from creating becoming beyond fixed gender norms and from exploring networks of solidarity, Mitsue in Matsuda Tokiko’s “Chichi o uru” (Selling Breast Milk, 1929) finds herself in a position where she is able to transgress social functions of the natalist body and assemble a network of solidarity in contingent encounters which allow her to articulate a strategy of resistance.

In doing so, Mitsue questions her imposed subjectivity, albeit temporarily, and contemplates what possibilities life has to offer her and what bodies can do beyond reproduction. Below, this section will examine how Mitsue initiates deterritorializations of the codified body and seeks in emanated interstices ways to create new social constellations beyond capitalist relations of production.

“Selling Breast Milk” is one of the earliest stories Matsuda Tokiko penned and published in the journal Nyonin Geijutsu (Women’s Arts), a platform where women intellectuals could find common ground and articulate shared gender issues.86 Until then, Matsuda had written only a couple of poems

85 Matsuda Tokiko, “Chibusa,” Bungei Kōron 2, no. 4 (1928): 76. English translation taken from Hiroaki Sato, Japanese Women Poets: An Anthology (Armonk: M.E. Sharpe, 2008), 307. 86 For Matsuda Tokiko’s contribution to Nyonin Geijutsu see Okada Takako, Kaze ni mukatta onnatachi: kikigaki: Mochizuki Yuriko, Hirabayashi Eiko, Matsuda Tokiko (Tokyo: Chūsekisha, 2001); for recent general studies on Nyonin Geijutsu see Sreedevi Reddy, Zasshi "Nyonin geijutsu" ni okeru jendā, gensetsu, media (Tokyo: Gakujutsu Shuppankai, 2010), Iida Yūko, Nakaya Izumi, and Kayo Sasao (eds.), Josei to tōsō: zasshi nyonin geijutsu to senkyūhyakusanjūnen zengo no bunka seisan (Tokyo: Seikyūsha, 2019). In English, see a special issue on Nyonin Geijutsu in Japan Forum 25, no. 3 (2013): 307-413. Especially, Mats Karlsson, “Thirst for knowledge: women's proletarian literature in Nyonin geijutsu,” 346-361. Also, Matsuda has written many autobiographical pieces such as the collected volume Kaisō no mori (Forest of memories, 1979) that includes discussions of her work as a wet nurse and as a writer for Nyonin Geijutsu.

238 and short stories such as “Umu” (Giving Birth), which won her the first prize of Yomiuri Shinbun’s short story contest.87 This story depicts a pregnant woman struggling to decide whether to keep her baby as a result of the need to find a paid job because of her husband’s imprisonment. Challenging the celebration of motherhood and pregnancy, the protagonist imagines how a mother “tramples her baby [lying] under the futon,”88 and brings attention to the burden of pregnancy for proletarian women.

Besides writing, Matsuda was an active member in proletarian arts and cultural movements as well as labor unions. Following her participation in the 1926 May Day demonstration and her arrest in

1928 after police officers discovered transcriptions of Communist Manifesto at her home, Matsuda joined NAPF in 1929, becoming a household name in such proletarian journals as Senki. Her proletarian activism also led to her direct involvement in the aforementioned proletarian birth control league ProBC. As a member of ProBC, she lectured on birth control-related topics and helped establish and organize proletarian daycares and health clinics. Her birth control activism inspired her to write Joseisen (Woman’s Front) based on the life of proletarian birth control activist Yamamoto

Kotoko (dates unknown).89

87 For a biography of Matsuda Tokiko see Watanabe Sumiko, “Matsuda Tokiko: Hito to bungaku,” Daitō bunka daigaku kiyō, no. 45 (2007): 121-134, and Watanabe Sumiko, “Matsuda Tokiko: Hito to bungaku 2,” Daitō bunka daigaku kiyō, no. 46 (2008): 245-259. 88 Matsuda Tokiko, Chichi o uru, Asa no kiri (Tokyo: Kōdansha, 2005), 20. 89 Besides Matsuda, Miyamoto Yuriko’s “Chibusa” (Breast, 1935) is also a story that deals with ProBC activism and narrates the events of activist Hiroko who works at a proletarian daycare; a story that made an impression on Matsuda, which she describes in her biography. Matasuda Tokiko, Kaisō no mori (Tokyo: Shin Nihon Shuppansha, 1979), 154-155. In addition to her works focusing on birth control politics, Matsuda displayed a strong international orientation in works such as “Aru sensen” (Another Battlefront, 1932), a story with a strong antiwar message as well as foregrounding connection between war, pregnancy, and capitalism; “Kōshinzu” (Scene of a March, 1934), dealing with hardships of Korean workers; Chitei no hitobito (People of the Underground, 1951), covering the Hanaoka Incident and the massacre of Chinese workers in 1945.

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The poem Chibusa (Breasts, 1928) quoted above captures succinctly the plot of the third- person narrative “Selling Breast Milk,” connecting childrearing, malnutrition, a jailed husband, and the commodification of breast milk as a web of hardships in which proletarian women are entrapped.90 The plot follows Mitsue, a mother of a newborn whose husband is imprisoned, and her preparations to become a wet nurse for the rich bourgeois Katano family. Selling her breast milk to feed the young master Shigeru, she risks her own health and the health of her newborn. Stressed and worried about how to mitigate the double burden, Mitsue is helped with the contingent encounter with female servants and wet nurses at the Katano residence, where she temporally resides to feed

Shigeru after he is discharged from the hospital, as well as letter writing with comrades, forming moments of solidarity. New relationships help Mitsue to articulate lines of flight from imposed gendered subjectivity.

The first rift in her gendered subjectivity unfolds when Mitsue observes a wet nurse whose breast milk is squeezed out of her breast at the hospital. The wet nurse is hired by the same bourgeois family Katano, who hires Mitsue to replace her. Unlike Ximei, Mitsue is allowed to remain together with her newborn, granted she passes the blood test to prove both her body and milk are clean. The wet nurse struggles to provide the required 140 grams of milk seven times a day despite the nurse squeezing her breasts like “commodities” (shinamono). Calling her breasts “grandma breast” (obāsan

Moreover, she also participated in events expressing solidarity with East Asian proletarians, such as her involvement in the kome-yokose movement in 1932, protesting against the food shortages among Korean and Japanese women. 90 Hirabayashi Taiko is the only one who mentions Matsuda’s “Selling Breast Milk” in her review of the latest works by proletarian women writers. She writes that the story has several flaws, but portrays a strong vigor of proletarian women. Hirabayashi Taiko, “Bungei hōmen ni okeru fujin saikin no katsuyaku,” Tokyo Asahi Shinbun, August 27, 1929, Morning edition, 5.

240 no o’chichi), the wet nurse’s milk is “dried up” (karehatete shimatta) as a result of overproduction.

Mitsue witnesses the painful process of extracting milk from the first wet nurse and after being introduced as the new wet nurse, the hospital staff ask Mitsue to show her breasts to the first wet nurse. While eating the same food from the cafeteria and sharing their struggles of childrearing,

Mitsue feels connected with the current wet nurse, initiating a relationship between their breasts

(otagai no mune ni isshu dōzoku no kanjō ga wakihajimeta).91 In this shared moment of proletarian suffering, Mitsue realizes that she must be determined so that “her own child cannot be killed in this enemy land” (kono tekikoku de jibun no ko o koroshite wa naranai to iu koto o).92

Mitsue begins her job as a wet nurse and commutes between the hospital and the Katano residence. Lady Katano has ordered her not to eat the cafeteria food in the hospital and eat at the residence in order to protect the milk’s quality, and Mitsue is not allowed to suckle her child before preparing milk for Shigeru. Mitsue’s movement is confined to the hospital and the residence leaving her with little spatial mobility. Further, the Katano family keeps her to a strict medical regime.

Throughout the story, Mitsue and the other wet nurses are exposed to the latest medical and science technology, revealing the medicalization of life mentioned earlier necessary to maintain healthy bodies. The directors, medical staff, and nurses all guard the patients at the hospital, while executing regular medical visits. Using needles, glass tubes, disinfectants, a “breast-squeezer like device” (chichi shiboriki rashii kigu), and “pumps” (pomupu), the breasts of the wet nurses are commodified and allegorically reference the assembly lines and production machines of capitalism.

91 Matsuda Tokiko, “Chichi o uru,” Nyonin geijutsu 2, no. 8 (1929): 15. 92 Ibid., 16.

241

The mammary gland appears lushly on the outer layer of the pink breast. When she pressed the painfully and swollen [breast], over ten streaks of milk gushed out like a delicate pomp from the nipple no more than half a centimeter. During that time, there is a strange [feeling of] pleasure. Most likely, this is the happiness of “duty fulfilment” ingrained by bourgeois society. But, when she filled one glass with 50 gram, and another one stopped at 30 gram, her body remembered a fatigue like suddenly being sucked into a bottomless cave. She would rather collapse theatrically, yet her consciousness was clear enough to be able to think so.

乳腺が、薄紅色を呈した乳房の上皮に蒼々と浮かび上がつて、苦しく張つて来るのをギユツと押しつけると、直径半糎を超えない乳首から十数本の乳条が、精巧なポムプの様に噴出する。その間は不思議な快味があつた。恐らくブルジヨア社会から思い込まされた『義務遂行』の喜びであつたらう。が、一つのグラスを五十瓦で満し、もう一つに三十瓦溜まつた時、彼女の身体は急激に底知れぬ洞穴に吸い込まれて行く様な疲労を覚えた。一層のこと大袈裟にブツ倒れて了ひたかつたが、そう思へる程、意識のほうがハツキリしてゐた。93

Reading this passage, Nakagawa Shigemi writes that “the corporeal pleasure is without a doubt a contradiction derived from capitalism, but the explanation about why a pleasant feeling tantalizes her deeply is made impossible.”94 Considering the fact that Mitsue is affiliated with proletarian activism, it is unlikely she is completely unfamiliar with the workings of capitalism in relation to what Nakagawa calls “corporeal perception” (shintai chikaku). Rather, she presents the paradox between “pleasure” and “fatigue” as a cynical observation embedded with a critique of capitalism. Mitsue brings attention to the torsion in the contradictory nature of the production of subjectivity within industrial capitalism. Deleuze and Guattari have explained this torsion in capitalism as apparatuses (dispotifs) of social subjection and machinic enslavement, or processes of re- and de-territorializations within capitalism. Social subjection assigns psychic beings with an identity, gender, body, nationality, among other things, while machinic enslavement dismantles these social markers to desubjectify psychic beings. This apparent paradox in capitalism is actually the very logic it uses to reinvent itself and

93 Ibid., 18-19. 94 Nakagawa Shigemi, “Bungaku to jōdō: Hakken to shite to no puroretaria bungaku,” Ritsumeikan bungaku, no 652 (2017): 1175-1176.

242 displace its limits ad infinitum. Through conjunctions and disjunctions, capitalism mimics the movements of psychic beings, throwing them in a limbo from which it is increasingly difficult to escape. The “pleasure” and “happiness” Mitsue refers to are the standards capitalism provides subjects with during processes of desubjectification. This process allows beings a way to forget the burden of their assigned social functions, only to be resocialized again. However, if capitalism mirrors the oppositional movements of de- and reterritorializations, then how is it possible to articulate a resistance?

Mitsue’s corporeal “pleasure” is immediately replaced with “fatigue,” feeling like being “sucked into a bottomless cave” (soko shirenu dōketsu ni suikomarete yuku), akin to capitalist limbo. Her milk flows are interrupted as a result of overproduction, echoing social death experienced by the other wet nurse. Nursing two newborns, her own son and Shigeru, Mitsue fails to supply enough breast milk for the latter during the milk extraction at the hospital. Mitsue is overcome by feelings of anxiety and anger. She reflects on her actions and starts looking for options to solve the problems she is confronted with. She finds two possible lines of flight. First, she connects with the other female servants in the Katano residence and one wet nurse, whom she happens to know from the proletarian hospital where they gave birth. Having reached the level of intimacy without reservations (mina ha ni mono ki senu aidagara ni natte ita),95 the women exchange experiences of hardships and complaints about the Katano family, strengthening their relationship. Whereas Ximei missed support from others, Mitsue is able to establish an alliance of resistance against their bourgeois exploiters. Through such corporeal moments of solidarity, Mitsue sets a becoming in motion and reconfigures who she is

95 Matsuda changed the expression 歯に衣着せぬ (ha ni kinu ki senu) into 歯にモノ着せぬ (ha ni mono ki senu).

243 on her own terms. Second, the literate Mitsue writes letters to comrades – not unlike the Esperanto letter writing discussed in the previous chapter. In doing so, she traverses the spatial boundaries of the hospital and Katano’s residence. Mitsue articulates her hardships not only as her own but also those of “men and women of the exploited class” (yattsukerareta kaikyū no otoko to onna), synthesizing proletarian corporeal suffering. Her letters function as a way to have her voice travel beyond the physical body, establishing a moment of incorporeal solidarity in the virtual. In one of her letters addressed to Kinu, the wife of her husband’s friend, she unfolds the following strategy:

First, don’t give birth to children. Once you conceive, (I believe) there are only two ways: kill it legally, or raise the child thoroughly. I chose the latter, and my current life is nothing but painful. The bourgeois son has begun to consume my son. This is no exaggeration. All the proletarian kids are born under these conditions and are prey to their (bourgeois) fangs. “Why not raise them? Let’s raise them as our kids.” While the pregnant women of Soviet Russia can say so and laugh brightly, our kids are born while even their mother milk is stolen. They are crammed into the charity of bourgeois second-hand undershorts, or a dirty creche. Or worse, they are starved to death in jail. I foolishly lined up all reasons, but ultimately, we want a community childrearing center for our comrade kids. Someone is going to protect and raise several kids. By class (not by family). In that way, mothers can return to work as often [as they like].

子供は先づ産まぬこと。出来て了つたら、合法的に殺すか、でなければ徹底的育て上げるかの二途しかないとすれば、（私はそう信じてゐますが）後のを選んでゐる私として、現在の生活は全っきり苦痛です。ブルジヨアの息子が私の子を食ひ始めてゐる。これは誇張じやないです。プロレタリヤの子は皆、此の儘の状態では生れ乍らに彼等の牙の餌食です。『育てたらいゝじやないの。私達の子供として育てゝ行きませうよ。』ソビエツト、ロシヤの孕み女はそう云つて晴やかに笑ふ事も出来ると云ふのに、私達の子供は生れ乍らに母乳さへ奪ひ取られて了つて、ブルジヨヤの使ひ古したサルマタの慈善の中か、不衛生な託児所に押し込められて了ふ。それ所か留置場で餓死することさへあるんだものーバカに理屈を並べた様ですが、結局、私は吾々同志の子供の共同養育場を欲してゐるのです。誰かゞ幾人かの子供を衛り育てる。階級的に（家庭的にではなく）です。それに依つて、母親達が、幾度でもしごとに帰る事が出来る様にです。96

Mitsue reveals the tactics she will use to attack capitalism and the bourgeois exploiters. Women will seize their reproductive rights, deciding whether they reproduce with the right to raise the child properly or cease reproduction completely. In case a pregnancy happens without access to abortion,

96 Matsuda Tokiko, “Chichi o uru,” 23.

244 then proletarians should raise the child together “by class” (kaikyūteki). Mitsue undermines the bourgeois ideology of familialism and replaces it with a proletarian notion of relationality based on nomadic alliances. Mitsue’s answer to curtail the capitalist re/deterritorialization is to cease and seize

(re)production, that is, to deterritorialize (cease) the capitalist production of subjectivity and to reterritorialize (seize) the machinic enslavement.

After nursing Shigeru for a period of time, the amount of Mitsue’s breast milk further decreases. With her breasts dried up she can no longer continue to work as a wet nurse and the narrator concludes that “her breasts have become useless, Mitsue has become useless” (chichi ga fuyō ni nari, Mitsue ga fuyō ni natta).97 While not explicitly mentioned, Mitsue has either been fired or has choses to quit as a wet nurse. On her way back home feeling “like waking up from a nightmare,” she is overcome with joy confident enough to confront “the anxiety of her life” (seikatsu ni taisuru fuan).98

She is determined “to raise her child, strongly, even if her family is exposed to the bourgeois fangs.”99

Although paradoxical, Mitsue’s affirmative stance to raising children will supply capitalism with potential labor power. However, she is convinced that proletarians can raise their children strong enough to resist capitalist exploitation and eventually build an alternative society.

Mitsue and Ximei questioned presupposed gender roles of motherhood and womanhood by exposing the gendered codifications as they relate to reproduction. Both protagonists were confronted with postnatal suffering and exploitation in relation to the commodification of breast

97 Ibid., 24. 98 Ibid. 99 Ibid.

245 milk. This suffering forced them to contemplate the parameters of their social functions. In doing so, they opened up possibilities of becoming to varying degrees; this led them to the conclusion that living under the restraints of patriarchy and capitalist production renders reproduction futile. The next section will explore how proletarian women grapple with gendered exploitation and natalist suffering as well as how various lines of flight are designed to dismantle imposed gender norms and form nomadic alliances as seen in the colonial landscape of Manchuria.

3.4 Manchuria and Lines of Flight: Cartographies of Becomings in Kang Kyŏng-ae’s “Salt” and Xiao Hong’s Field of Life and Death

The ProBC publication “Iwayuru Manshū jiken to sanji seigen” (The So-Called Manchurian

Incident and Birth Control) tried to enlighten readers regarding the connection between Japan’s pronatalist policies and its imperialist expansion, accomplished through capitalist markets and militaristic interventions (Fig. 3.6).100 The editors of this publication considered Japan’s penetration into Manchuria for over a decade, culminating in the Manchuria Incident (1931), as a direct result of the forced population increase of East Asian proletarians.101 They argued that capitalist expansion is one of the main reasons the Japanese empire obstructed and censored ProBC movement and its birth

100 Musansha sanji seigen dōmei, “Iwayuru Manshū jiken to sanji seigen,” Puroretaria sanji seigen undō, no. 2 (1931): 1. In April 1932, Nyonin Geijutsu held a roundtable talk titled ‘Shin-manshūkoku to hadonna tokoro ka’ (What kind of place is the new Manchuria?) to discuss the colonization of Manchuria. Among its participants were Tokuda Shūsei (1872-1943), Hirabayashi Taiko (1905-1972), Yoshiya Nobuko (1896-1973), Shimomura Chiaki (1893-1955), Hirano Reiji (1897-1961), Muramatsu Shōfū (1889-1961), and Fujieda Takeo (1903-1985). In their talk, they reveal contrasting opinions concerning Japan’s colonialization. Especially, figures such as Hirabayashi were critical of the empire’s endeavors. For more on the content of this roundtable talk, see Roman Rosenbaum, “What Kind of Place is the New Nation of Manchuria? Roundtable Talk in Nyonin geijutsu,” Japan Forum 25, no. 3 (2013): 379-394. 101 For more on the biopolitical policies implemented in Manchuria by the Japanese empire, see Mark Driscoll, Absolute Erotic, Absolute Grotesque: The Living, Dead, and Undead in Japan's Imperialism, 1895-1945 (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2010).

246 control activities. Based on these obstructions, they concluded that these policies took proletarians from “forcefully reproduction” (kyōseiteki ni kodomo o umashita), to “overproduction of workers and farmers” (rōdō, nōmin o ranzō shita), who were destined to be killed by imperialism (rōdō, nōmin o korosu teikokushugi).102

In the context of “forceful reproduction” and imperialism, this section turns to the colonial landscape of rural Manchuria/Northeast China (Dongbei, hereafter Northeast). Here, the absence of contraceptives and family planning clinics caused widespread (post-)parturient suffering. The two writers discussed below both resided in Manchuria either as an immigrant or a local during the 1920s and 1930s. Having witnessed classed, gendered, and racialized exploitation linked to “overproduction” and regulation of proletarian birth rates, as well as having experienced unwanted pregnancies and stillbirths in their own lives, they created female protagonists, whose bodies were exposed to various forms of sexual violence such as rape and violation as well as parturient suffering. To process and recover from the violence, female protagonists endure what Deleuze and Guattari call

“schizoanalysis.” This analysis refers to a nonsequential process that “tries to make nuclei of virtual autopoiesis discernible” and works toward “ontological heterogeneity” as a way to deterritorialize the molar entity of being-woman and initiate becomings traversing familial aggregates.103

The first task of schizoanalysis is to recognize the capture of one’s body, Deleuze and Guattari explain, which causes a state of fear and anxiety and exposes molar demarcations of one’s subjectivity. Subsequently, a person undergoes delirium, which for minoritarians is the attempt to

102 Musansha sanji seigen dōmei, “Iwayuru Manshū jiken to sanji seigen,” 1. 103 Félix Guattari, Chaosmosis: An Ethico-Aesthetic Paradigm, trans. Paul Bains and Julian Pefanis (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995), 61.

247 find an exteriority that provides a different way of seeing one’s environment and reveals the production of desire in one’s unconscious. During a delirium, one passes through various states on one’s “body without organs” – a plane of consistency where heterogenous and disparate elements are reconfigured for becoming – that provide a chance to dismantle (“breakthrough”) one’s molar entity, albeit always with a risk of “breakdown,” seriously damaging one’s body.104 In this section, how female protagonists manage to de/reterritorialize their subjectivities as well as how they attempt to enable n- becomings into what Deleuze calls “a life,” or transforming into a pre-subjectified state of being necessary to launch new becomings, will be discussed.

Impersonal Packs of Solidarity: Antiproduction and Becoming in Kang Kyŏng-ae’s Salt

Kang Kyŏng-ae’s stories focus on the hardships of a multitude of peasants - factory workers, servants, and migrants on the Korean peninsula and in Manchuria under Japanese colonialism. Many of her stories depict impoverished women burdened with childbirth, childcare, and unequal division of labor. For example, in Kang’s novella Chihach’on (The Underground Village, 1936), the protagonist

“Mother” and her son Ch’ilsŏng question sexual reproduction in response to a villager’s newborn, who immediately dies after birth, by asking, “Why would a baby get born, nearly killing its mother, if it didn't mean to live?”105 and “Oh, what's so good about living that we have to keep alive? (…) Oh, why do babies get born to poor folks like us?”106 It is such questions on the futility of reproduction and

104 Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, 135. 105 Kang Kyŏng-ae, “Chihach’on,” Chosŏn Ilbo, 21 March, 1936, 4. Translation taken from Suh-Ji Moon, “The Underground Village,” The Rainy Spell and Other Korean Stories (London; New York: Routledge, 2015), 90. 106 Ibid. Translation Ibid.

248 parturient suffering experienced by the female characters recurring in Kang’s works together that form, as Carolyn So has put it, an “ambiguous or even antagonistic relationship to the patriarchal ideology.”107 Discussing the recently discovered sources concerning Kang’s stay in Hailin, Manchuria during the late 1920s, Lee Sang-Kyung argues that Kang’s observations of tensions between various political activist groups – especially between the class ideology of the Korean Communist Party and ethno-nationalism of the provincial government – resulted in a complex “class-ism” (kyegŭpchuŭi) and “proletarian internationalism” (p'ŭrollet'aria kukchejuŭi).108 Moreover, Lee suggests that Kang’s complex depictions of motherhood could be related to uterine issues which caused infertility.109

Reading Ingan munje (The Human Predicament, 1934), Travis Workman examines how Kang convolutes not only race and gender, but also notions of class as cited in mainstream proletarian literature. This is done by “situating the human being as a set of ‘human problems’ to which the

‘human being’ itself cannot be an adequate answer.”110 In doing so, Kang redefines the category of class from the prerequisite of solidarity between proletarians into a complex set of interhuman relations which requires assembling and negotiating in encounters. Moreover, she challenges the idea that class

107 Carolyn So, ‘‘Reading a Modern Woman Writer: Kang Kyŏng-ae and Double Allegiances,’’ in Between Tradition and Modernity: Select Papers from the Fourth Pacific and Asian Conference on Korean Studies, ed. Chang Yun-Shik, Donald L. Baker, Hur Nam-lin, and Ross King (Vancouver: Institute of Asian Research, University of British Columbia, 2000), 339. See for example Kang’s short story “Mayak” (Opium, 1937) where the protagonist Podŭk’s mother is sold by her opium- addicted husband to a Chinese storeowner – showing that ethnic and class solidarity is overruled by a male covenant to consume the female body not unlike Rou Shi’s “A Slave Mother” mentioned earlier in note 69. Violently raped by the storeowner and still in disbelief of her husband’s act, Podŭk’s mother feels a “joy that wracks her body” in relation to references to her or Podŭk fluids exiting bodily orifices, such as urine, breast milk, blood, tears. Without resentment for her husband, she cries “Baby, I have breast milk for you,” followed by her last breath. 108 Lee Sang-Kyung, “Kang Kyŏng-ae munhak ŭi kukchejuŭi ŭi wŏnch'ŏnŭrosŏ ŭi Manju ch'ehŏm: Pungman Haerim ch'ehŏm ŭl chungshimŭro,” Hyŏndae sosŏl yŏn'gu, no. 66 (2017): 371. 109 Ibid., 374. Lee states that it remains unclear what disease might have caused Kang’s infertility. 110 Travis Workman, Imperial Genus the Formation and Limits in Modern of the Human in Modern Korea and Japan (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2016), 147.

249 struggles are merely a male enterprise by bringing to light the problems and challenges surrounding gendered labor among all proletarian figures. Ultimately, Kang tried to move beyond divisive labels such as gender and race to liberate people from any presupposed stigma and to imagine interhuman relations beyond bourgeois familialism and its nuclear family.

Kang Kyŏng-ae spent most of the 1930s in Manchuria.111 During those years, Kang wrote the majority of her literary works. She occasionally returned to Korea by train, which she described in one of her essays on Manchuria.112 Observing the Manchurian landscape after departure through the train window, Kang compares the blooming flowers and sprouting millet shoots to the innocence of “a baby seeking the milk-giving breast of the mother!” (mach'i ŏrinaega ŏmŏni chŏtkasŭmŭl hech'idŭshi kŭrŏk'e ch'ŏnjinsŭrŏpke kwiyŏpke).113 From this passage we can see that not even a year after the Manchurian incident, Kang still seemingly considered there to be benefit in reproduction which differs from the exploitation of human life quoted in the opening of this section. Shortly after, however, she looks again through the train window, but the landscape has changed into empty fields without enough farmers to plough the lands, suggesting that population control under colonialism has significantly disrupted the food chain. She concludes: “I guess we’ll starve to death this year.”114

111 Lee’s recent research has shown that she also lived in Manchuria between 1927-29. 112 Other essays Kang wrote about Manchuria are: “Kando ŭi pom: shimgŭmŭl ullin munin ŭi pom,” Dong’a Ilbo April 23, 1933, and “Iyŏg ŭi talbam,” Sin-Dong’a, December, 1933. 113 Kang Kyŏng-ae, “Kando rŭl tŭngjimyŏngsŏ, Kando ya chal ikkŏra,” in Kang Kyŏng-ae Chŏnchip (Sŏul-si: Somyŏng Ch'ulp'an, 1999), 717. Translation taken from Sonja M. Kim, “On Leaving Kando, a Farewell to Kando,” in Imperatives of Culture: Selected Essays on Korean History, Literature, and Society from the Japanese Colonial Era, eds. Christopher P. Hanscom, Walter K. Lew, and Youngju Ryu (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2013), 145. This essay consists of two separated essays but are published in the collected works as a single work. 114 Kang, 718. Translation from Kim, “On Leaving Kando, a Farewell to Kando,” 145.

250

What follows are encounters with other East Asians onboard trains and in train stations – the nodes of the empire – which resemble the experiences of Akita, Miyamoto, Junsu, and Xia Yan to be explored in Chapter 4.115 Kang resists the division of people by nationality, and instead focuses on the shared suffering of proletarian folks in East Asia. These include soldiers from the Hunchun front,

Kando refugees returning to China’s mainland, construction workers, and orphaned children, which together form the “impoverished multitude displaced by the war and wandering as if lost!,” and to which “men in suits, students, or well-bred ladies” were indifferent.116 Upon departure from the station, Kang observes the GMD and Manchukuo flags and during her transfer sees Japanese flags in the hands of “young, innocent students” looking at a soldiers’ procession. Kang understands clearly how imperialism and nationalism implement (in)visible borders among commoners to wedge them apart and turn them against each other. She foresees a grim future, as she stares at the “blackened smoke spewing from the large factories,” under “the encroachment of big capitalists.”117 However, she ends the essay on a positive note: “(…) Kando, be strong! Fight on with determination!”118 echoing the spirit of the protagonist in Salt.

115 Among Kang’s works, only “Chōzankan” (Cape Changsan or Changsan'got in Korean) appeared in Japanese. This story was published three times: Ōsaka Mainichi Shinbun April-June, 1936; Bungaku Annai 3, no. 2 (1937): 57-66, and in a collected volume with works by Korean writers titled Chōsen bungaku senshū 1 (Tokyo: Akatsuka Shobō, 1940), 111-133. Akita Ujaku wrote the introduction to this volume. While in 1940 Akita could not openly condemn colonialism as he did a decade earlier, he recognized the “special traits of the continent” (tairikuteki na tokusei) and compared Chosŏn literature with contemporary Irish and Hebrew literature arguably referring to the colonial and diasporic hardships implicitly. Scholars have not yet been able to verify if Kang’s story is written directly in Japanese or translated from the Korean. Akita, however, refers to all texts in collected volume as translations (hantō no bungaku wa, kore hodo migoto ni Nihongo ni honyaku sareta rei mo sukunai de arō). I would like to thank Cao Shumin for providing scans of these works. 116 Kang Kyŏng-ae, “Kando rŭl tŭngjimyŏngsŏ, Kando ya chal ikkŏra,” 722, 724. Translation from Kim, “On Leaving Kando, a Farewell to Kando,” 148-149. 117 Kang, 724. Translation from Kim, “On Leaving Kando, a Farewell to Kando,” 149. 118 Kang, 725. Translation from Kim, “On Leaving Kando, a Farewell to Kando,” 150.

251

Salt narrates in third person the tragic events surrounding the nameless protagonist often referred to as “Pong-yŏm’s Mother” (Pongyŏm i ŏmŏni) or simply “she” (kŭ). Living as Korean immigrants in Yongjŏng (Longjing), Manchuria together with her husband and two children Pong-sik and Pong-yŏm, Mother is confronted with a series of misfortunes. Her husband is killed by communist guerillas, which is immediately followed by her son Pong-sik’s execution for his involvement in a communist resistance group. Mother now faces the double burden of securing an income and child rearing. Landlord P’andung, who is proficient in Korean, offers to have Mother to move in with him and his wife in return for menial work. Shortly afterward, Mother becomes pregnant after P’andung rapes her, and is evicted from P’andung’s house because of Pong-sik’s alleged communist ties. After a clandestine birth, her friend Yong-ae’s mother introduces Mother to a Korean family and she becomes a wet nurse for their baby Myŏng-su. Mother’s stable life is short as both her daughter Pong-yŏm and her newborn Pong-hŭi die of typhoid fever. With nowhere to go, Mother decides to follow her friend’s advice and joins salt smugglers going between Korea and Manchuria. During her first peregrination, the smugglers are stopped by communist guerillas who speak about joining forces to supposedly challenge the oppressors and seemingly drawing mother’s interest. While Mother manages to transfer the salt to Yongjing, the story ends with the police noticing the illegal salt at her house.119

Initially, when scholars read Salt, their focus was on the story’s ending as a formulaic proletarian story depicting the communist epiphany of an ignorant peasant. More recently, scholars have challenged such assessments by complicating superficial binaries of national resistance and

119 Han Man-su recovered the censored ending of Salt. Han Man-su, “Kang Kyŏng-ae ‘Sŏgum ŭi pokcha pogwŏn kwa kŏmyŏl uhoe rosŏ ŭi ‘nanwŏssŭgi’,” Han’gŭk munhak yŏn’gu 31, no. 2 (2006): 169-191.

252 colonial collaboration and undoing stereotypical images of motherly love.120 Following recent contextual shifts, this section aims to add depth to these readings with respect to the production of subjectivity and the analysis of Mother’s trajectory to her becoming as affirmative, unfolding contingently through encounters. Placing Salt within the context of proletarian birth control politics makes sense of Mother as she attempts to endure and process her rape, the death of her children, and to liberate herself from gendered subjectivity, resisting allegorical or symbolic readings. In doing so, focus is shifted to the concept discussed by Deleuze; it changes from “What does it mean?” to “How does it mean”? 121 This shift gives understanding to the production of meaning as coeval in the actions of Mother as they unfold throughout the narrative, rather than taking events as representations of extratextual symbols such as the nation.

After the death of her husband, allegedly murdered by communists for his connection with landlord P’andong and the Self Defence Force,122 and the departure of her son Pong-sik, Mother is confronted with a double burden. Mother accepts P’andong’s offer for her and her daughter Pong-yŏm to move into his house. Despite his Chinese accent, P’andong’s Korean skills are sufficient to

120 For example, in her study of colonial intimacies, Nayoung Aimee Kwon has defied prevailing binary readings by examining “the anxieties of imperial borderline encounters [which] raise complex questions about the triangulated position of Korea in between Japan and China” in several stories of Kang. Nayoung Aimee Kwon, Intimate Empire: Collaboration and Colonial Modernity in Korea and Japan (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2015), 178. Sunyoung Park, instead, focuses on the feminist intervention Kang presents in Salt, challenging the “patriarchal cult of motherhood,” which “elevated a motherly love into a source of salvific power.” Park, The Proletarian Wave: Literature and Leftist Culture in Colonial Korea, 1910-1945, 218. Lastly, Jeehyun Choi has probed into the subject formation of mother, tracing how mother’s “seemingly incongruous and confused moments operate as the very mode of registering deeper historical predicaments.” Jeehyun Choi, “Writing Manchukuo: Peripheral Realism and Awareness in Kang Kyŏngae's Salt,” Cross- Currents: East Asian History and Culture Review 7, no. 2 (2018): 459. 121 Gilles Deleuze, Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation, trans. Daniel W. Smith (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005), xii. See also “Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari on Anti-Oedipus,” in Gilles Deleuze, Negotiations: 1972-1990, trans. Martin Joughin (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997), 21-23. 122 A paramilitary group under Japanese authorities to fight anti-Japanese resistance.

253 communicate with Mother, allowing them to create new relationships and new territorialities that take “the form of an invisible bond” (poijian nŭn chul ŭl t'ago) between the two.123 P’andong’s house provides Mother with increased spatial mobility compared to her former house where she could not accustom herself to the layout of Kando’s farmhouses.124 The spatial limitations, which Mother exclaims have “no district division of kitchen and living space,” and the high price of condiments such as the salt needed to prepare tasteful food for her husband cause Mother to question her role as wife.125 Such questioning reveals how Mother has internalized the oedipalized gender roles. After moving in with P’andong, Mother starts to learn new things such as how to use a sewing machine.

While such skills serve P’andong’s interest, it does allow Mother to explore new dimensions of her body and its capabilities.

During the absence of his wife, P’angdung rapes and impregnates Mother, bringing her back into the chain of reproduction; rape being the crudest form of primitive accumulation. Chapter 3

“Haesan” (Birth), becomes a critical turning point for Mother. In addition to extracting Mother’s labor power through unwaged household work, P’angdung exploits her potential by reproducing his own labor power through rape and thus burdens Mother doubly, increasing her dependency on him.

Initially, Mother remains ambiguous toward P’andong, feeling both resentment and affection; the

123 Kang Kyŏng-ae, “Sogŭm: chesamhoe haesan,” Sin Kajŏng 2, no. 7 (1934): 182. Translation taken from Kang Kyŏng-ae, “Salt,” translated by Jin-Kyung Lee in Rat Fire: Korean Stories from the Japanese Empire (Ithaca: Cornell University East Asia Program, 2013), 230-231. 124 Park writes about domesticity that it was important for socialist writers to “the reclaim […] the household as a site of women’s everyday. If liberal feminist heroines such as Ibsen’s Nora had rejected domesticity and all its implications, Kang and other Korean writers appeared, rather, to reimagine the sphere of the household by representing it in its rawness and physicality as a place of hard labor for bare survival.” Park, The Proletarian Wave: Literature and Leftist Culture in Colonial Korea, 1910-1945, 220. 125 Kang Kyŏng-ae, “Sogŭm: che’ilhoe nongga,” Sin Kajŏng 2, no. 5 (1934): 226. Translation taken from Jin-Kyung Lee, “Salt,” 218-219.

254 affection she describes as a “bond that pulled her ever close to him.”126 The conflicting nature of

Mother’s feelings arguably stems from an attempt to restore a degree of subjective autonomy and taking back personal agency through the act of love.

The concatenation of Mother’s thoughts and her subsequent anxiety draw her into a delirious state, recalling the aforementioned notion of delirium by Deleuze and Guattari, which allows her to undertake a voyage in her “body without organs” where new becomings are configured. After

P’andung’s attitude had become “undeniably (…) cold,” Mother wavers between love and resentment for him. Rather than rendering Mother’s stream of thoughts as inconsistent and confused, perhaps

Mother’s reflection on her feelings could be seen as a therapeutic way to reconfigure the oedipal territorializations. Examining feelings and thoughts is the first task of schizoanalysis; Mother attempts to overcome her fear and anxiety and reach the point where the “Symbolic” dissolves and “desire is shifted into the order of production, related to its molecular elements (…).”127 Burdened with an unwanted pregnancy, Mother tries various ways induce miscarriage, all of which are unsuccessful. Her failure to abort the fetus is coupled with news of her son’s execution, as relayed by P’andung who then evicted Mother and her daughter. Mother contemplates suicide as it seems to be the only solution to liberate herself. In her delirium Mother struggles to go beyond her fear, risking a “breakdown.”

Mother’s anxious state is caused by the impossibility of creating new relations of solidarity.

Mother tries to connect with P’andong’s wife, but she responds to Mother with suspicion and disgust.

Mother, in turn, can only think of killing everyone including herself. However, after mother gives birth

126 Kang Kyŏng-ae, “Sogŭm: chesamhoe haesan,” 182. Translation taken from Jin-Kyung Lee, “Salt,” 231. 127 Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, 311.

255 she abandons death and her desire to avenge Pong-sik’s, facilitating new opportunities for relationships with strangers. After giving birth in a shed, Mother hesitates about whether to kill the baby immediately, but similar to Mitsue, she has an epiphanic moment that strengthens her to choose life.

She held her baby next to her beating heart, resolving to live no matter what. “Why should I die? I must live. For you two, I must live,” she mumbled to herself. Before she gave birth, or rather before she experienced this pain, the talk of dying never left her lips and indeed often wanted to kill herself. But now that she had found herself on the precarious borderline between life and death and survived, she did not want to die. Instead she felt the ecstasy of living. Of course this wasn’t the first time that she had been in this situation. But when her husband was alive, she had never really thought about death much and thus had no desire to die at all. She had never really given serious considerations to dying.

그는 아기를 그의 뛰는 가슴속에 꼭 대며 자기가 아무렇게서라도 살아야 할 것 같았다. 내가 왜 죽어, 꼭 산다. 너희들을 위하여 꼭 산다 하고 중얼거렸다. 애를 낳기 전에는 아니 보다도 이 아픔을 겪기 전에는 죽는다는 말이 그의 입에서 떠나지 않았고 또 진심으로 죽었으면 하고 생각도 많이 하였다. 그러나 마침 죽음과 삶의 경계선에서 아차아차한 고비를 넘기고 겨우 소생한 그는 어쩐지 죽고 싶지는 않았다. 오히려 삶의 환희를 느꼈다. 그가 하필 이번뿐만이 아니라 이러한 경우를 여러 번 당하였으나 그러나 남편의 생전에는 죽음에 대하여 한 번도 생각해 보지도 않았으며 역시 죽고 싶지도 않았다. 그래서 죽음이란 아무 생각 없이 대하였을 뿐이었다. 128

While scholars have often focused on the story’s ending, either by considering it as an awareness of class consciousness or the ambiguous relationship between the protagonist and ideology, the passage quoted above shows that Mother unfolds new affirmative avenues in her life much earlier in the narrative. Following her decision to live, Mother explores new possibilities of what motherhood and womanhood can be beyond the oedipal family structure. Centered around a similar paradox of maintaining human life and risking to merely fulfill the capitalist agenda as in Mitsue’s case, Mother seizes reproductive control that she also experiences as “ecstasy” (hwanhŭi). Whereas Mitsue’s story ends at the ecstasy (kanki), Mother’s ecstasy, then, clarifies her decision to no longer subjugate herself

128 Kang Kyŏng-ae, “Sogŭm: chesahoe yumo,” Sin Kajŏng 2, no. 8 (1934): 201. Translation from Jin-Kyung Lee, “Salt,” 238. Translation slightly modified.

256 to the oedipal order and enables a line of flight allowing her to derritorialize her imposed subjectivity, which releases possibilities for a new trajectory.

What follows the reclamation of her autonomy is a string of contingent events and ordeals through which Mother explores her becoming. Mother’s friend, Yong-ae’s Mother gets her work as a wet nurse for baby Myŏng-su; a job extending the (re)productive chain which is doomed to block her desire-production again. Like Mitsue, Mother raises the question: “How can I have raised someone else’s child while killing my own?”129 However, for Mother it is too late as the question comes only after her two children have died of typhoid fever. It is through her breasts and breast milk that her value is questioned again. She remembers how Myŏng-su “used to gaze up at her as he squeezed her breast,” and “[a]s she called Myŏng-su by name in her mind, she unconsciously squeezed her nipples.”

Mother questions the consanguineal filiation of mother and child central to the bourgeois ideology of familism, yelling at Myŏng-su’s mother: “All you did was give birth, and I am the one who has been raising him. […] Who would he be more attached to, you or me?”130 However, with her breasts useless after her newborn’s death and termination of her job as wet nurse, Mother continues her search for a new home, a place where she can slow down and further reflect on what to do with her life.

Struggling with overwhelming feelings of loneliness and anxiety (puran), Mother leaves her old life behind and joins a group of salt smugglers. Despite all the tragedies she has encountered,

Mother refuses to succumb to suicide and to participate in wage labor any longer. As the only woman among the smugglers, Mother challenges the gender roles within resistance against imperial

129 Kang Kyŏng-ae, “Sogŭm: che’ohoe ŏmŏni ŭi ma’ŭm,” Sin Kajŏng 2, no. 9 (1934): 215. Translation from Jin-Kyung Lee, “Salt,” 246. 130 Kang, 216. Translation from Jin-Kyung Lee, 249.

257 capitalism. Mother enters a zone of becoming with the smugglers, a symbiotic relationship that creates an alliance among these nomadic subjects beyond the oedipal family. Rather than proletarian masses congregating on May Day or International Women’s Day, Mother and the smugglers form a

“pack,” amongst themselves while “each takes care of himself at the same time as participating in the band.”131 However, for Mother it is less in terms of proletarian revolution than a deterritorialization of her as a reproduction machine. Listening to the speech of communist guerillas who they encounter along the way, Mother is not inspired by their ideological message, but rather in their attitude of resistance against oppressive forces.

Mother realizes that resistance to or refusal of capitalist codification will allow her subject to transition into what Deleuze calls “a life,” or “pure immanence,” in which “[t]he life of the individual gives way to an impersonal and yet singular life that releases a pure event freed from the accidents of internal and external life, that is, from the subjectivity and objectivity of what happens.”132 While the loss of her children and husband remain a painful wound, Mother also grasps the futility of the capitalist economy. She disavows her earlier work as housemaid and wet nurse from which smuggling radically differed. In her becoming, she frees her body from constraints and creates an alliance with the smugglers, leading her away from oedipal structures and allow her to reclaim her reproductivity.

Different from signifying individuations under capitalism, Mother de/reterritorializes her being through impersonal individuations, which “consist entirely of relations of moment and rest between

131 Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 33. 132 Gilles Deleuze, Pure Immanence: Essays of A Life, trans. Anne Boyman (New York: Zone Books, 2005), 27-28.

258 the molecules or particles, capacities to affect and be affected.”133 In other words, Mother refuses to be categorized according to gender, race, and class at the molar level and instead becomes imperceptible, leaving her actions undefined as pure events (Fig. 3.7).134 In the end when the police arrive at her place, Mother “bolted up” (pŏlttŏk irŏnatta) against forces that try to convict her of rejecting domination of her body.

Nomadic Alliances against Sexual Violence: Reproductive Autonomy in Xiao Hong’s Field of Life and Death

Whereas Kang travelled by train to Manchuria as immigrant, Xiao Hong (1911-1942) was born and raised in the Hulan area near Harbin, Manchuria/Northeast. In contrast to Kang’s experience,

Manchuria/Northeast was for Xiao not a place of escape but rather a place of imprisonment. After her father pledging her to a man who eventually abandons her in a hotel while pregnant, exposing her to the risk of being sold into prostitution, Xiao escapes to Beijing.135 Unable to take care of her newborn, she gives her son to an orphanage. These tragic events characterize her early works.136 In these works,

Xiao draws attention to the burdens women experience as they deal with (unwanted) pregnancy, questions the oedipalized family, and also explores what Yan Haiping describes as “a site of mobile

133 Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 261. 134 Ibid., see 280-285. 135 Xiao Hong, Xiao Hong quanji xia (Harbin: Haerbin Chubanshe, 1991), 1322. 136 See for example her early short stories Qi’er” (Abandoned Child, 1933) and “Wang asao de si” (Death of Aunt Wang, 1933) that both deal with (post)natal suffering.

259 kinship,” which refers to “the precarious yet tangible link among those in their life and death struggles.”137

Compared to Kang, Xiao arguably enjoyed greater spatial mobility which contributed to developing her internationalist views. For example, in Shanghai, Xiao studied Esperanto and interacted with the local Esperanto community.138 After her relationship with writer Xiao Jun (1907-

1988) deteriorated, she moved to Tokyo in 1936 where she took Japanese classes at Tōa Gakkō. She might have encountered Takeuchi Yoshimi (1910-1977) and Takeda Taijun (1912-1976), who were teaching Japanese to Chinese students at Tōa Gakkō; they were to become two prolific postwar specialists of China.139 While in Shanghai in 1937, she met antiwar activists Ikeda Yukiko and Kaji

Wataru, and together with Xia Yan helped them escape Shanghai.140 Xiao Hong also provided shelter for Esperantist Hasegawa Teru soon after she escaped Japan and arrived in Shanghai.141 They all reunited in Chongqing. The intra-East Asian encounters between these activist-writers demonstrate the existence of intricate transnational networks which became indispensable in the practice of proletarian internationalism. Finally, Xiao moved to Hong Kong together with her writer, and her second husband, Duanmu Hongliang (1912-1996), when her life ended abruptly in 1942.

137 Haiping Yan, Chinese women writers and the feminist imagination, 1905-1948 (London: Routledge, 2006), 139. 138 Xiao Hong, however, struggled with the pronunciation and thought Esperanto more difficult than she initially expected. Xiao Hong, “Wo zhi du Shijieyu,” in Xiao Hong wenji xia (Harbin: Haerbin Chubanshe, 1991), 1097-1098. 139 Xiao Hong, “Zai Dongjing,” Qiyue, no. 1 (1937): 29-30. For more on her period in Tokyo, see for example Pingshi Shuzi [Hiraishi Yoshiko], “Xiao Hong zai Dongijng,” Beifang wenxue, no. 6 (2011): 32-42. For more on Takeuchi Yoshimi, see Richard F. Calichman, Takeuchi Yoshimi: Displacing the West (Ithaca: Cornell University East Asia Program, 2004). Takeda translated Xiao’s “Jiazu yiwai de ren” (Other People than Family Members) into Japanese. 140 Xiao Hong, “Ji Luodi Fufu,” Wenyi zhendi 1, no. 2 (1938): 33-44. See also Kaji Wataru, Shanhai sen’eki no naka (Tokyo: Tōhō Shuppansha, 1974), 197-251. Chapter 4 returns to Kaji and Xia. 141 Wang Zhongxu, “Lüchuan Yingzi yu Xiao Hong,” Dangshi zongheng, no. 2 (2016): 30-32.

260

This last section will examine Xiao Hong’s Shengsichang (Field of Life and Death, 1934).

Different from the stories discussed above, Field of Life and Death does not have a clear protagonist.

Instead, the third-person narrative forms an interconnected web of characters trying to survive in a village in Manchuria/Northeast. Of particular focus is Jinzhi’s (Golden Bough), who is one of the female villagers frequently exposed to male sexual violence and is eventually is betrothed to a man from the same village who has raped her. Following a troubling pregnancy and the murder of her newborn by her husband, Jinzhi leaves her village and roams within a nearby city, where brief encounters unfold forming her nomadic trajectory of becoming. This allows her to assemble solidarity while resisting oedipal (re)territorialization.

Xiao’s male contemporaries were eager to present an allegorical reading of the novel to serve the patriotic fervor of the resistance war against the Japanese army. For instance, literary critic Hu

Feng (1902-1985) turned his attention to the colonization of Manchuria by the Japanese, even though it only plays a marginal role in Xiao’s story. He described the resistance of the villagers against the

Japanese army as if they “stood on the front line of the sacred national war,” celebrating them as patriotic heroes. At the same time, he turned a blind eye to Xiao’s gendered critique of both Japanese and Chinese men and belittled proletarians for their “stupid reproduction” (huhututu de shengzhi), ignoring the crucial issue of birth control politics and its relation to warfare.142

142 Hu Feng, “Shengsichang du houji,” Manhua he shenghuo 1, no. 2 (1935): 34.

261

Allegorical readings continued to persist until scholars started to challenge nationalist (and class) interpretations, redirecting focus onto the female body, reproduction, and the patriarchy.143

Examining Hong’s work in light of new interpretations, the events surrounding Jinzhi can be shown to demonstrate that bodies are not predetermined entities on which meaning is produced,144 but rather metastable and coeval in producing meaning through movement and affect. This fluidity allows Jinzhi to be presented not solely as another “female body [that] signifies a women’s lack of control over her destiny,”145 but as someone who, in response to her rape and the punishment of pregnancy, is able to proactively deterritorialize her body and reproductive organs, exploring new becomings beyond the oedipal triangle.

The narrative of Field of Life and Death is permeated with scenes of (sexual) violence, infanticide, pregnancy, miscarriage, and abortion which occur in an unnamed village. It explores various forms of exploitation of female bodies with respect to (re)production. Akin to Mother in Salt, the women are worn out by their struggle to survive and they grapple for meaning in life. The incessant male (sexual) violence imposed on female bodies which often results in pregnancy significantly limits the women’s mobility. In addition, frequent references to animals and their relatively peaceful procreation are in stark contrast with the pain and violence endured by the village women. This reveals how (oedipal) patriarchies – male villagers, urbanites, and Japanese soldiers – abuse females’ reproductive organs. While most women merely struggle to resist such physical

143 Meng Yue and Dai Jinhua, Fuchu lisho dibiao: Zhongguo xiandai nüxing wenxue yanjiu (Taibei: Shibao Wenhua Chuban, 1993), 256-271; Lydia Liu, Translingual practice Literature, national culture and translated modernity - China, 1900-1937 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999), 199-213. 144 Liu, Translingual practice Literature, national culture and translated modernity - China, 1900-1937, 201. 145 Ibid., 205.

262 violence, Jinzhi stands out for her courage as she challenges male oppression radically by creating lines of flight.

The majority of Field of Life and Death’s chapters seem to narrate a cycle of seasons of an unspecified year followed by a leap of ten years, and then to depict the start of the Second Sino-

Japanese war in 1937 in the last third of the story. Jinzhi first appears in the story dominated by villager Chengye’s desire “like a piece of iron to a magnet.”

Five minutes later, the young girl was pinned to the ground, like a helpless chicken in the grasp of a wild animal. Mad with passion, the man’s large hands clutched savagely at her body, as if he wanted to swallow it, to destroy the warm flesh. His veins gorged with blood, he cavorted on top of what had become for him a white cadaver. The naked, round legs of the girl sought to coil around him, but could not. A chorus of sound erupted from these two greedy monsters.

五分鐘過後，姑娘仍和小雞一般，被野獸壓在那裡。男人著了瘋了！他的大手敵意一般地捉緊另一塊肉體，想要吞食那塊肉體，想要破壞那塊熱的肉。盡量的充漲了血管，彷彿他是在一條白的死屍上面跳動，女人赤白的圓形的腿子，不能盤結住他。於是一切音響從兩個貪婪著的怪物身上創造出來。146

Similar to Pongyŏm mother’s response to P’andung’s rape, the narrator remains ambiguous about

Chengye raping Jinzhi. Phrases such as a “wild animal” capturing a “small chicken” and turning it into a “white cadaver” are immediately juxtaposed with a shared “greed” without revealing how Jinzhi experiences Chengye’s assault. Raping Jinzhi, Chengye reproduces and normalizes male desire which results from oedipal pathology that has been weaved into the social structure of the village. The narrator also seems complicit with Chengye’s violent behavior as they describe Jinzhi as a “greedy monster,” suggesting she is responsible and even enjoys the “savagery.” The challenge that awaits

Jinzhi is one of setting in motion becomings among men and women which will enable her to recode

146 Xiao Hong, Shengsichang (Shanghai: Nulishe, 1935), 28. Translation taken from Howard Goldblatt, The Field of Life and Death and Tales of Hulan River (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1979), 18.

263 and reconfigure masculine desire. This could potentially transform men’s demeaning attitudes and violent behavior toward women and consequently liberate the women from archetypal roles.

Having conceived, Jinzhi tries to hide her belly from her mother as she “was suddenly thrown into a panic as she realized that she might be with child.”147 The idea of pregnancy scares her and confuses her daily routine. Instead of celebrating the pregnancy, Jinzhi appears like “a chicken stricken with a contagious disease”148 and her stomach gradually changes into “a hideous monstrosity.”149 Ridiculed by others, the pregnancy transforms Jinzhi’s body into a “scarecrow,” causing “time […] to spin out as long as the spider’s silken web.”150 She wants to remove her growing child from her belly and in response angrily squishes tomatoes under her feet “like a stepped on-toad.”

Her mother is angry at Jinzhi for bringing home only green tomatoes and aims to subjugate, or re- oedipalize, Jinzhi into a docile daughter. She does this not with love, but with violence, kicking and beating her. Only when Jinzhi asks her mother to accept, likely out of fear of Chengye, mother agrees with his matchmaker and betroths Jinzhi. She does this in order to avoid the shame of an illicit relationship outside the nuclear family.

The next time Jinzhi appears in the narrative is as she prepares for childbirth. The pregnancy has significantly altered her body, giving her a “bloated abdomen” and a belly that is “swelled up.”151

This chapter focuses on “women’s punishment” (furenmen de xingfa) as demonstrated by one of the

147 Xiao, 34. Translation from Goldblatt, The Field of Life and Death and Tales of Hulan River, 21. 148 Xiao., 39. Translation from Goldblatt, The Field of Life and Death and Tales of Hulan River, 24. 149 Xiao, 41. Translation from Goldblatt., The Field of Life and Death and Tales of Hulan River, 25. 150 Xiao., 42. Translation from Goldblatt, The Field of Life and Death and Tales of Hulan River, 24. 151 Xiao, 100. Translation from Goldblatt., The Field of Life and Death and Tales of Hulan River, 54.

264 women in the Jinzhi’s village giving birth only to have her baby die, and another woman dealing with an unwanted pregnancy ending in miscarriage. Meanwhile, the reproductive pain of dogs, pigs, and birds proceeds without any mention of miscarriage, stillbirth, or (post)natal suffering. In stark contrast to other organisms, human patriarchal systems of territorialization are implied to destroy female bodies, endangering reproduction rather than letting it flourish. However, the women, while cursing their husbands, refuse to resist. As one of the pregnant women states - “like the child of a patriarchal society, she lived in dread of her man.”152

Frustrated by economic difficulties, Chengye continues to rape Jinzhi during her pregnancy, endangering both her and the baby. Observing the baby “suckling at Jinzhi’s breast,” Chengye feels his sexual desires are not being fulfilled and out of frustration kills the baby. Even the narrator wonders

“[w]hy had the baby been brought into the world?”153 This event exposes the absurdness of male desire; Jinzhi reaches a limit of how much violence she is able to handle before completely collapsing.

The reader might wonder how Jinzhi has endured such extreme violence during the unnarrated ten years. Jinzhi undergoes a metamorphosis after the death of her husband and the outbreak of the Sino-

Japanese War.

Now a widow, Jinzhi begins her transformation by cutting “her dead baby’s diapers into shreds.”154 “Without ever looking back,” she walks endlessly on the roads toward the city. She begins to deterritorialize earlier negative individuations exploring unknown paths to new becomings. While

152 Xiao, 98. Translation from Goldblatt, The Field of Life and Death and Tales of Hulan River, 53. 153 Xiao, 118. Translation from Goldblatt, The Field of Life and Death and Tales of Hulan River, 64. 154 Xiao, 167. Translation from Goldblatt, The Field of Life and Death and Tales of Hulan River, 88.

265 danger always lurks – whether it be Japanese soldiers, Chinese police, or random lustful men – Jinzhi maintains a certain anonymity, or imperceptibility. Not unlike Pongyŏm’s mother, she wanders among the vagrants, prostitutes, and workers in the city and has no one “pay attention to the ragged- looking Jinzhi.”155 Having rewritten her history and with a feeling of “pass[ing] through countless worlds,” the city offers Jinzhi new territorialities of solidarity. Deleuze and Guattari refer to this as

“alliances,” a “[b]ecoming [which] is always of a different order than filiation. It concerns alliance. If evolution includes any veritable becomings, it is in the domain of symbioses that bring into play beings of totally different scales and kingdoms, with no possible filiation.”156 Jinzhi finds such an alliance with Old Auntie who is willing to help her “earn a few pennies.” The kindness of Old Auntie is unfamiliar and fills Jinzhi with “such great warmth that she felt like crying.”157 Jinzhi’s life in the city, however, is not without adversities and makes her sometimes wish “she could die then and there.”158

Especially, when another man, whose clothes Jinzhi mends, locks the door and “what followed was inevitable.”159 Male desire once more violently dominates Jinzhi’s body.

Confronted with the violence of another rapist, Jinzhi tries to make sense of her situation and lapses into a delirium. She contemplates what to do and longs for her mother, but after a visit with her mother Jinzhi is affronted as “mother could not see why she was so unhappy,” being blinded by the

155 Xiao, 171. Translation from Goldblatt, The Field of Life and Death and Tales of Hulan River, 91. 156 Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 238. 157 Xiao Hong, Shengsichang, 175. Translation taken from Howard Goldblatt, The Field of Life and Death and Tales of Hulan River, 93. 158 Xiao, 174. Translation from Goldblatt, The Field of Life and Death and Tales of Hulan River, 92. 159 Xiao, 186. Translation from Goldblatt, The Field of Life and Death and Tales of Hulan River, 99.

266 money Jinzhi brings back from the city.160 Differing from how the village women responded to

Chengye’s rape, they now console and support Jinzhi in a way her biological mother does not. The narrator describes such moments of solidarity as “[t]he women around Jinzhi were witness to her distress, for her suffering was also their suffering” (pangbian naxie nurong kanjian Jinzhi de tongku, jiu shi ziji de tongku).161 A feeling of solidarity emerges out of an assembling of corporeal suffering among proletarian women as they share the brutalization they have all experienced. These alliances strengthen Jinzhi’s desire to affirm life even during its hardships and help her dismantle subjugation to male desire.

Her nomadic existence and subsequent encounters with shows of affection help Jinzhi to contextualize the male violence as follows: “I used to hate only men; now I hate the Japanese. She finally reached the nadir of personal grief: ‘Do I hate the Chinese as well? Then there is nothing else for me to hate.’”162 She realizes that regardless of which men she has met, be it “belly slicing” Japanese soldiers or Chinese rapists, all have tried to violate her. As she resists male domination, Jinzhi manages to seize and cease her reproductive capacity. Jinzhi had initially planned on becoming a nun, but when she finds the temple abandoned, the narrator wonders where Jinzhi should go, contrasting her with a pregnant woman she meets in front of the temple who can only return home (da duzi de nüren huijia qu le!).163 Although far from being safe, Jinzhi has now left the oedipal home and unknown paths await her that will offer her ways to explore further lines of flight. Following contingent and

160 Xiao, 188. Translation from Goldblatt, The Field of Life and Death and Tales of Hulan River, 100. 161 Xiao, 187. Translation from Goldblatt, The Field of Life and Death and Tales of Hulan River, 99. 162 Xiao, 189. Translation from Goldblatt, The Field of Life and Death and Tales of Hulan River, 100. 163 Xiao, 200. Translation from Goldblatt, The Field of Life and Death and Tales of Hulan River, 106.

267 temporary relations of solidarity, Jinzhi has begun to liberate herself from negative individuations that constrain her, and in doing so she dismantles oedipal coding, and dissolves her subject into a haecceity of singularization, “a singular essence, a life,”164 not as glorification but as therapeutic affirmation of life.

3.5 Conclusion

Previous chapters discussed how May Day and Esperanto were effective in assembling heterogenous and polyvocal constituents into cohesive alliances. Gendered struggles, however, experienced volatile opposition not only through state intervention but also within proletarian movements. Specifically, social and sexual reproduction formed the core where gender inequality was produced, articulated, and perpetuated in the female/male dyad. Proletarian intellectuals such as

Yamakawa Kikue showed that women were more than “birth machines” by questioning the arbitrary distinctions between females and males. Informed by these discussions, proletarian birth control initiatives promoted contraception and provided health care as a way of disseminating a twofold strategy focused on regaining control over and terminating reproduction. The goal of this strategy was the eventual liberation of women from gendered constraints. Concurrently, proletarian writers expanded their storylines by including natalist hardships often informed by their own experiences.

Portraying sexual violence, unwanted pregnancy, and (post-)parturient suffering, the stories discussed in this chapter highlight the imperative of assembling solidarity between proletarian women and men in order to overcome the gender divide. Restrained by (post-)parturient ordeals and excluded from

164 Gilles Deleuze, Pure Immanence: Essays on a Life, 29.

268 political participation, the female protagonists experience difficulties in finding counterparts with which to organize forms of resistance against exploitation. In moments of solitude and anxiety, they contemplate each in their own way the futility of reproduction and imposed gender roles, resulting in their decision to seize and cease reproduction. Transgressing gender roles through becomings, they find comfort and strength in contingent and temporary encounters. Feelings of solidarity between bodies in pain and a shared embodied subjectivity of parturient experiences are established. While

Ximei was unfortunate enough to be arrested before she could find a solution for her double burden,

Mitsue, Mother, and Jinzhi de/reterritorialize gendered, codified bodies in order to liberate themselves from male dominance. They explore new possibilities of life, albeit blemished with lifelong scars of sexual violence and natal trauma.

Gender inequality remained as an impediment for proletarian solidarity throughout the 1930s and early 1940s. As late as 1942 during the Yan’an Talks, prolific proletarian writer Ding Ling (1904-

1986) lamented on how female comrades still suffer ridicule from male counterparts, writing:

Before marrying, they were inspired by the desire to soar in the heavenly heights and lead a life of bitter struggle. They got married partly due to physiological necessity and partly as a response to sweet talk about ‘mutual help.’ Thereupon they are forced to toil away and become ‘Noras returned home.’ Afraid of being thought ‘backward’, those who are a bit more daring rush around begging nurseries to take their children. They ask for abortions, and risk punishment and even death by secretly swallowing potions to produce abortions. But the answer comes back: ‘Isn’t giving birth to children also work? You’re just after an easy life, you want to be in the limelight. After all, what indispensable political work have you performed? Since you are so frightened of having children, and are not willing to take responsibility once you have had them, why did you get married in the first place? No-one forced you to.’ Under these conditions it is impossible for women to escape this destiny of ‘backwardness.’

她們在沒有結婚前都抱著有凌雲的志向，和刻苦的鬥爭生活，她們在生理的要求和“彼此幫助”的蜜語之下結婚了，於是她們被逼著做了操勞的回到家庭的娜拉。她們也唯恐有“落後”的危險，她們四方奔走，厚顏的要求托兒所收留她們的孩子，要求刮子宮，寧肯受一切處分而不得不冒著生命的危險悄悄的去吃著墜胎的藥。而她們聽著這樣的回答：“帶孩子不是工作嗎？你們只貪圖舒服，好高

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騖遠，你們到底做過一些什麼了不起的政治工作？既然這樣怕生孩子，生了又不肯負責，誰叫你們結婚呢？”於是她們不能免除“落後”的命運。165

Ding Ling succinctly described the conundrum of a proletarian gendered solidarity not only as a problem between the proletariat and bourgeoisie, but also within the proletariat and its sympathizing intellectuals. While the writers and protagonists discussed above tried to overcome the gender opposition detrimental to revolutionary action, Ding Ling’s essay proves that gender issues within proletarian movements were extremely persistent and frequently resurfaced.

Gendered tensions also surfaced during attempts to assemble resistance against military violence and to denounce imperial warfare. As the ProBC pamphlet mentioned at the beginning of the previous section argued, birth control was not only meant to alleviate and prevent natal suffering, but was also believed to hinder the army and undermine imperial warfare for which proletarian bodies were (ab)used. Besides the antiwar agitations described in current and previous chapters, the next chapter will examine antiwar solidarity within intra East-Asian alliances assembled in opposition to the Japanese empire and its imperial army.

165 Ding Ling, “Sanbajie yougan,” Jiefang ribao, March 9, 1942. Translation taken from Ding Ling, “Thoughts on March 8,” I Myself am a Woman: Selected Writings of Ding Ling, trans. George Benton (Boston: Beacon Press, 1989), 318-319.

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Chapter 4 War against War: Proletarian War-Machines, Smooth Spaces, and Antiwar Solidarity

The proletariat’s attitude toward war differs in principle from that of the bourgeois pacifists, anarchists, and antiwar writers who set out from similar ideas. We believe the struggle that the subjected classes wage against the ruling class is necessary, and has progressive value. The struggle of slaves against slave owners, serfs against lords, and workers against capitalists is necessary. Wars are accompanied by cruelty, bestial acts, privation, and distress, and yet there have been wars in history that have served to abolish harmful, reactionary, evil systems. They should be considered to have contributed to humanity’s advance, and approved of. Concerning present-day wars too, it is necessary for the proletariat to analyze their specific historical nature to see whether they lead us toward liberation, or oppress us even more. Kuroshima Denji, “Treatise on Antiwar Literature”1

(…) we define “war machines” as linear arrangements constructed along lines of flight. Thus understood, the aim of war machines isn’t war at all but a very special kind of space, smooth space, which they establish, occupy, and extend. Nomadism is precisely this combination of war-machine and smooth space. We try to show how and in what circumstances war-machines aim at war (when state apparatuses take over a war-machine that’s initially no part of them). War-machines tend much more to be revolutionary, or artistic, rather than military. Gilles Deleuze, “On A Thousand Plateaus”2

4.1 Introduction

Fellow worker-comrades! You must know [by now] that the Japanese Army recently invaded Manchuria and Shanghai engaging in a war with the Chinese army and shooting to death innocent Chinese workers and farmers. We also believe you have heard of the ruthless killing of Manchurian workers and farmers while building a nation […] emperor. As we hear such reports, it is difficult for us to understand the real intentions [of the Japanese government]: why the Japanese government is toiling to help others by sending its own troops for what sake to fight and die in war. However, everyone, can you think of a country in this world that sacrifices its own life to […] another country? We’re sure there shouldn’t be one. The Japanese government as expected is seemingly helping to build a Manchuria State but in fact is having other ambitions. If you ask what their intentions are, it is clear that they are scheming to […] a Manchuria State similar to [what they did with] Korea.

諸労働者同志等―諸君ハ今日本軍隊ガ先般満州或イハ上海ニ渡ツテ行ツテ中国軍隊ト戦闘ニヨツテ罪ナキ中国労働トカ百姓等ヲ銃殺シタ事実ヲシル筈デアリ満州ニ行ツテハ満州ニ在ル満州労働者百姓ヲ無茶苦茶殺シテ一方満州ニ新イ国家ヲ建テ[…] 皇帝デアツタソノ[…] 話モ聞イタコトト思ウ。斯シテ話ヲ聞ク時ニ[…] 吾々ハ日本政府ガ何ノタメニ自国ノ軍隊ヲシテ満州ニヤツテ戦争ヲシテ死シテマデ人ノタメニヤツテヤロウト骨ヲ折ツテイルノカ本当ノ心腹ガ解シ難イモノガアル。然シ諸君！世ノ中ニ自分ノ命ヲ捧ゲテ他国ノ[…] シテヤロウトスルソンナ国ガドコニアルダロウカ。決シテナイ筈ダ。日本政府モヤハリ、満州国ヲ建テヤルカ如クシナガラ事実腹デハ他ノ野心ガアルモノデアル。ドンナ心腹デアルカトセ

1 Kuroshima Denji, “Hansen bungakuron,” Puroretaria geijutsu kyōtei 1 (Tokyo: Sekaisha, 1929), 65. Translation taken from Kuroshima Denji, “On Antiwar Literature (excerpt),” For Dignity, Justice, and Revolution: An Anthology of Japanese Proletarian Literature, ed. Heather Bowen-Struyk and Norma Field, trans. Željko Cipriš (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2016), 325. 2 Gilles Deleuze, “On A Thousand Plateaus,” Negotiations 1972-1990, trans. Martin Joughin (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995), 33.

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ハ普 […]朝鮮ノゴトク満州国ヲ建設シテヤロウトイツテ結局ハ[…] ヤルヨウニツイニハ満州を[…]スル算段デアル。3

This is how the editorial article “Hachigatsu tsuitachi hansen dē taishūteki demo de tatake”

(Fight with a Mass Strike on 8.1 Antiwar Day) opens the special antiwar issue of Uri tongmu (Our

Comrades) published by the Korean proletarian organization Tongjisa, a KAPF branch in Tokyo (Fig.

4.1).4 The article continues to explain oppression by Japanese imperialism and the background of

International Antiwar Day. It finishes by summoning readers to join a mass demonstration against

Japanese imperialism and war violence, similar to the May Day demonstrations discussed in Chapter

1. In presenting the imperial violence enacted to colonize Manchuria as commensurable to the colonization of the Korean peninsula, a recognition of one’s struggle in relation to other is established.

The article epitomizes how East Asian proletarians articulated a shared battle against Japanese

Imperialism and a call for solidarity among the proletariat linking the various geographical areas in

East Asia. The antiwar stance of Tongjisa corresponds to the general understanding of antiwar thought among proletarian movements most astutely described by Kuroshima Denji (1898-1943) as:

“The proletariat (…) does not oppose war in general. (…) [T]he proletariat opposes imperial wars.”5

Thus, antiwar thought in proletarian movements such as Tongjisa did not endorse indiscriminate violence. Instead, they encouraged (militant) resistance against imperial wars and militarism; wars for

3 Uri Tongmu Editorial, “Hachigatsu tsuitachi hansen dē taishūteki demo de tatake,” Uri tongmu, (inaugural preparatory issue no. 2, 1932): 1. The journal also published a Korean language edition distributed to the peninsula. The […] refers to illegible parts as a result of the pencil marks added by censors under the American Occupation. 4 For more on Tongjisa and Uri tongmu see Kida Emiko, “Japanese-Korean Exchange within the Proletarian Visual Arts Movement,” positions: east asia cultures critique 14, (no. 2, 2006): 495-525; Ōmura Masao, Chōsen kindai bungaku to Nihon (Tokyo: Ryokuin Shobō, 2003), 23-43. 5 Kuroshima Denji, “Hansen bungakuron,” Puroretaria geijutsu kyōtei 1 (Tokyo: Sekaisha, 1929), 48-49.

272 which proletarians were used not only through reproduction as we saw in the previous chapter, but also on the battlefields.

Uri tongmu was just one example of the many proletarian publications in East Asia meant to agitate citizens against increasing imperial military violence by the Japanese empire in China proper and Manchuria. Its editor, Kim Tu-yong (1903-?),6 was among the many individuals who formed proletarian networks connecting metropoles, colonies, and imperial peripheries in the East Asian region. Proletarian activists utilized these networks to foster solidarity for the various struggles present in East Asia. A particular challenge, however, was to problematize the propaganda7 of an apparent imperial community, celebrating multi-ethnic and inter-East Asian harmony.8 This imperial discourse aimed to organize populations of the empire with general claims of unity while simultaneously incorporating (in)visible borders of segregation.9 Such descriptions of imperial unity

6 For more on Kim Tu-yong see Lee Su-Kyeong, “Kim Tu-yong no shisō keisei to hanteikokushugi shakai undō,” Nihongo bungaku, no. 38 (2007): 361-380; Cheong Yeong-Hwan, “Kim Tu-yong to puroretaria kokusaishugi,” Zainichi Chōsenjinshi kenkyū, no. 33 (2003): 5-20. Cooperating with Kim Tu-yong, Kim Hŭi-myŏng (1903-1977) was another proletarian writer and prolific antiwar activist based in Tokyo. For more on his activism, see Yi Su-gyŏng, “Kin Kimei [Kim Hŭi-myŏng] no hanteikokushugi shisō to shakai undō,” Nihongo bungaku, no. 36 (2007): 255-288; Kim Chŏng-hye, Kin Kimei [Kim Hŭi- myŏng] no hanteikokushugi bungaku undō kenkyū: Shōsetsu to gikyoku o chūshin ni,” Nihongo bungaku, no. 37 (2007): 219-236. For a history of Korean, Japanese, and Zainichi antiwar activism, see Yi Su-gyŏng, Teikoku no hazama ni ikita Nikkan bungakusha (Tokyo: Ryokuin Shobō, 2005).

7 In prewar East Asia understandings of propaganda (宣傳) were manifold. In relation to proletarian literature and art in China, Weihong Bao states that propaganda was considered polemic, an observation that applies to proletarian culture in the rest of East Asia as well. She writes that entering the War of Resistance, propaganda develops as either “a vehicle of sensory stimuli” or “as an instrument of information control.” Weihong Bao, Fiery Cinema: The Emergence of an Affective Medium in China, 1915-1945 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 2015), 299. For a discussion of propaganda by the Japanese empire see Barak Kushner, Thought War: Japanese Imperial Propaganda (Honolulu: U of Hawaiʽi, 2006), and for the use of art as propaganda by the Japanese empire in Manchuria see, Annika A. Culver, Glorify the Empire: Japanese Avant-Garde Propaganda in Manchukuo (Vancouver: UBC Press, 2014). 8 For a broad discussion on racial discourses in the Japanese Empire see Christopher Hanscom, and Dennis Washburn, eds., The Affect of Difference: Representations of Race in East Asian Empire (Honolulu: University of Hawaiʻi Press, 2016). 9 I borrow the concept of “border” from Étienne Balibar discussed in his essay “What is a Border” in Politics and the Other Scene (London: Verso, 2011), 75-86. Balibar states that “border” is indefinable as “[t]he idea of a simple definition of what constitutes a border is, by definition, absurd: to mark out a border is, precisely, to define a territory, or confer one upon it.” (76). Balibar, however, distinguishes three major aspects of “border” namely “overdetermination,” “polysemic,” and

273 often resulted in either a seduction to comply with collaboration or resistance in forms of patriotism, both of which were incommensurable with visions of proletarian internationalism. Proletarian activists and artists had to go to great lengths to expose and contest imperial deceptions and concealed mechanisms of racism and discrimination in its discourse on Pan-Asianism. The imperial version of Pan-Asianism adapted revolutionary ideas borrowed from the Soviet model of “command economy” for its economic governance over Manchuria.10 It also rebaptized racial harmony from Sun

Zhongshan’s founding principle wuzu gonghe (harmony of five peoples) to promote peace among the multiethnic population.11 Proletarian writers turned their attention toward “contact zones” where these deceptive mechanisms of racism and discrimination were most visible in spaces such as colonies and peripheries, both urban and rural, and expanded to POW camps and battlefields after the advent of the second Sino-Japanese War (1937-1945). Writers turned to these liminal spaces because multi-ethnic populations provided opportunities to create discourse surrounding mutual resistance against military and imperial violence beyond patriotic sentiment.

In the late 1920s coinciding with an increasing international awareness, a group of writers emerged who aimed to expose the international implications of war and imperial violence. They promoted proletarian solidarity among the various peoples inhabiting the East Asian region.12 This

“heterogeneity” (78-79). Further, Sandro Mezzadra and Brett Nelson’s research on “border” is relevant to our discussion, in particular to understand the double bind of borders in the Japanese empire acting both as mechanisms of differentiating living bodies and division of labor, and as fertile ground to articulate struggles against those borders. Sandro Mezzadra and Brett Neilson, Border as Method, Or, The Multiplication of Labor (Durham, NC: Duke UP, 2013), 23. 10 Louise Young, Japan's Total Empire: Manchuria and the Culture of Wartime Imperialism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), 43. 11 Torsten Weber, Embracing 'Asia' in China and Japan: Asianism Discourse and the Contest for Hegemony, 1912-1933 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018), 301. 12 See for example Quillon Arkenstone’s article on proletarian writer Nakanishi Inosuke (1887-1958) and his novels on the imperial violence in the Japanese colonies. Nakanishi moved at young age from Japan proper to Manchuria and Korea

274 chapter will examine two novels, Kuroshima Denji’s Busō seru shigai (Militarized Streets, 1930) and Li

Huiying’s Wanbaoshan (Mount Wanbao, 1933), a reportage work Warera Shichinin (We, Seven, 1940) by Kaji Wataru and Lilicao (Lush Grass, 1944), a play by Xia Yan.13 This chapter will argue that these works highlight possibilities of proletarian international solidarity by portraying how East Asian proletarians overcome language barriers, recognize the immiseration of proletarian others, and execute strategies of cooperation sharing concurrent antiwar and anti-imperial sentiment. By exploring such possibilities, these works challenge proletarian constituencies as fixed and instead propose proletarian subjectivities to be dynamic and continuously shifting in the process of establishing counter-hegemonic groups through spatial relations of solidarity.

While the Japanese empire tried to suture spatial differentiations among proletarians through the illusion of imperial unity, East Asian proletarian writers countered with a vision of solidarity through direct experiences of shared suffering and a common fight against Japanese militaristic violence. Whereas in previous chapters international solidarity is assembled across spatial distance through shared festivals (May Day), language (Esperanto), and ideas of family planning (birth control), the works in this chapter present international solidarity as it relates to spatial proximity

where he worked many different manual labor jobs and wrote about his observations in novels such as, Shado ni megumu nono (Spouts from Red Earth, 1922), Futei Senjin (Unruly Koreans, 1923), and Nanji no haigo yori (Behind You, 1923). Quillon Arkenstone, “Nakanishi Inosuke and Chungsŏ Ijijo: Realism and Authenticity in Early Proletarian Literature,” Cross-Currents: East Asian History and Culture Review 6, no. 1 (2017): 236-261. 13 Following the end of the second Sino-Japanese War, literary scholars have either ignored or dismissed these works because the proletarian internationalism and solidarity presented in these works were considered unsophisticated and incommensurable with postwar national histories of East Asian literatures due to civil wars, militarism, regional antagonisms, and Cold War politics, or scholars could not access these works due to censorship. While national histories of Japanese, Chinese, Korean, and Taiwanese literature have studied in different time periods and to various degrees proletarian literature, these studies tended to ignore the possibility of an East Asian proletarian literature and the spirit of proletarian internationalism. See for example the anthologies of East Asian national literatures published by Columbia and Norton.

275 articulated in direct encounters among cohabiting proletarians from across East Asia in “contact zones.”

This chapter examines fictional and reportage texts chronologically, not to suggest a linear progression, but rather to show how proletarian writers located international solidarity in contested spaces during the period when Japanese imperialism encroached on Manchuria and the east coast of

China proper. These texts are novels, plays and reportage works — formats deemed suitable to promote solidarity. The four writers presented their work in vernacular languages either in writing to a sympathetic readership of (proletarian) intellectuals or on stage to illiterate audiences. Facing censorship or other restrictions, they published their works as books or articles in original or in translation. This chapter aims to illustrate how proletarian writers disseminated ideas of international solidarity and antiwar and anti-imperialism both in content and format to various audiences. It will focus on scenes that foster solidarity among East Asians and in doing so examines the following issues: how East Asian proletarian activists and artists were able to assemble or imagine international solidarity; what methods or modes they used; what role space played in forming such solidarity. The notion of antiwar used in this chapter departs from Kuroshima Denji’s “Hansen bungaku ron”

(Treatise on Antiwar Literature, 1929), which is one of the most striking examples of proletarian antiwar discourse differing from bourgeois and humanist antiwar writings, namely the militant class- based response to expose and fight against crimes committed by Japanese imperialism against East

Asian proletarians.14

14 From the mid-1920s onward, proletarian writers and activists in East Asia began to question bourgeois discourse in general and antiwar writings in particular, arguing that the latter merely depicted the horrors of war but ignored questioning the causes of war. See my discussion of Kuroshima’s essay below. However, the relation between the

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4.2 Kuroshima Denji’s Treatise of Antiwar Literature and Proletarian War Machines

After Kuroshima reached the status of “antiwar writer” among colleagues, he continued to polish his antiwar literature and theory. Resonating with George Sorel’s Réflexions sur la violence

(Reflections on Violence, 1908),15 Vladimir Lenin’s Imperializm kak vysshaya stadiya kapitalizma

(Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism, 1917),16 and Walter Benjamin’s “Zur Kritik der Gewalt”

(Critique of Violence, 1921), Kuroshima’s “Hansen bungaku ron” (Treatise of Antiwar Literature) published in Puroretaria geijutsu kyōtei 1 (Proletarian Arts Textbook 1, 1929)17 epitomizes the theoretical framework of the antiwar stance and the question of violence in proletarian arts in the late

1920s and early 1930s.18 In this essay, Kuroshima’s notion of antiwar differed from earlier antiwar works, including his own works based on his experiences as a soldier in the Siberian Intervention

(1917-1922).19 Earlier antiwar works written by proletarian writers aimed to critique war in terms of the

bourgeoisie and proletarian intellectuals was a complicated one especially for colonial subjects who also valued united fronts fighting Japanese imperialism as a shared enemy. 15 George Sorel’s works on violence were translated into Japanese as Bōryoku no Rinri (Ethics of Violence, 1928) and Bōryokuron (Treatise on Violence, 1933). 16 Vladimir Lenin’s publication on imperialism was translated into Japanese as Teikokushugiron: Kaiyaku. Genmei: Shihonshugi saigo no dankai to shite no teikokushugi in 1925 and into Chinese as Diguozhuyilun in 1929. 17 Puroretaria geijutsu kyōtei was a series of 4 volumes published between 1929 and 1930 introducing proletarian art theory and manuals. Besides “Hansen bungakuron,” Kuroshima published several essays on war and war literature, such as “Sensō ni tsuite” (On War), Bungei sensen 4, no. 4 (1927): 58-59; “Sensō to bungaku nit suite” (On War and Literature), Fukuoka nichinichi shinbun (1931); “Nyū’ei suru seinen-tachi wa nani wo nasu beki ka” (What should the youth do when they enter the army?) Senki 4, no. 21 (1931): 82-85; “Meiji no sensō bungaku” (Meiji War Literature), Meiji bungaku kōza 4 (Tokyo: Mokuseisha, 1932). 18 This coincided with the united front of several proletarian (cultural) groups merging into an umbrella organization NAPF in 1928 that actively promoted proletarian internationalism. As a result, hostilities against the remaining and prominent group Bungei Sensensha (Literary Arts Front Association) exacerbated due to a growing critique accusing the group of right-wing socialism. Kuroshima was a member but left Bungei sensensha for this reason and joined the Bunsen datō dōmei (Overthrow Literary Arts Front Alliance). 19 Kuroshima was conscripted as a medic-soldier in the Siberian Intervention in 1919 for two years. Upon his return, he wrote many antiwar stories based on his Siberian experiences, such as “Sori” (Sleigh) and “Uzu makeru karasu no mure” (A

277 exploitation of soldiers or the pointless destruction. Kuroshima’s essay presented a novel critique of war and a militant stance in favor of fighting imperialism. Following this essay, he transformed his literary writing from anti-militaristic Siberian works to a pro-militant and anti-imperial voice in his novel Busō seru shigai (Militant Streets).20 Kuroshima argued that in order to defeat imperial violence supported by the bourgeois and capitalist classes, the proletariat must militarize itself.21 Ultimately,

Kuroshima sought to articulate a space of exteriority vis-à-vis state violence justified by its laws where a revolutionary violence could emerge.

Kuroshima elaborates on what a class critique entails and what it means to write proletarian antiwar literature. While bourgeois antiwar literature displays the horrors of war, Kuroshima writes, their critique stays at the individual level of the author him- or herself. That is, bourgeois authors, such as Tayama Katai (1872-1930),22 Yosano Akiko (1878-1942), and Mushanokōji Saneatsu (1885-1978), as well as Leo Tolstoy (1828-1910) and Romain Rolland (1866-1944), depict war through the sorrow and hardships of an individual soldier or his family members, and neglect to portray the larger context, causes and consequences of war.23 According to Kuroshima, their “bourgeois worldview” (burujoa

Flock of Swirling Crows). These works earned him the description antiwar writer. After the Sino-Japanese War, Kuroshima’s war diary Guntai nikki: hoshi no shita wo (Army Diary: Under the Star) was published in 1955. 20 Shimamura Teru, “‘Hansen’ kara ‘hanshokuminchi’ e,” in Kuroshima Denji zenshū 4 (Tokyo: Bensei Shuppan, 2001), 307- 314. 21 Étienne Balibar locates a similar idea in European Marxism. He writes: “For some Marxists, war became the privileged revolutionary way to classless society: but which war? Or war used in which manner? Two tendencies emerged, conceptually opposed if not always historically separated: the revolutionary war of the masses (including the ‘guerrilla’ war, rural or urban), and the mass resistance to war, a revolutionary ‘war against war’ as it were, waged from inside.” Étienne Balibar, “War and Marxism,” Radical Philosophy 160, (March/April, 2010): 14. 22 For more on Tayama Katai’s war experiences, see my forthcoming paper “Confessing the Unrepresentable: Depiction and Photographic Panorama in Tayama Katai’s Russo-Japanese War Journal.” 23 Kuroshima Denji, “Hansen bungakuron,” Puroretaria geijutsu kyōtei 1(Tokyo: Sekaisha, 1929),53-54. Republished in Kuroshima Denji, “Hansen bungakuron,” in Kuroshima Denji zenshū 4 (Tokyo: Bensei Shuppan, 2001), 88-102. Although

278 sekaikan), as in the case of Mushanokōji’s “perspective of humanity” (jinrui no tachiba), fails to acknowledge that wars between nation-states are based on national self-interest. For convincing antiwar literature to be possible, Kuroshima continues, a focus on socio-economic relationships between classes is necessary.24

Halfway through the essay, Kuroshima explains what a proletarian antiwar literature should be through the works of writers, such as Henri Barbusse (1873-1935), Upton Sinclair (1878-1968), and

Marcel Martinet (1887-1944), who invested in a constructive and all-encompassing critical depiction of war. Their works reveal “why war occurs'' and illuminate those responsible. Further, they “promote an international spirit” to resist imperial wars because “capitalism develops as an international power” that can only be resisted if proletarians too organize internationally. Thus, Kuroshima defines proletarian antiwar literature as “opposing imperial wars while simultaneously advocating the ideology of international solidarity (kokusaiteki danketsu no shisō) of the proletariat.”25

Kuroshima accuses Romain Rolland of a bourgeois worldview, the latter was a respected figure among antiwar (proletarian) movements and attended the antiwar conference in Shanghai in 1933, which I discuss in the last section. 24 Ibid., 74. Proletarian writers in China critiqued May Fourth writers for similar reasons. Preceding proletarian movement and their antiwar (反戦) critique, the notion of non-war (非戦) circulated across East Asia. During the Russo-Japanese War (1904-1905), an anarchist Nonwar Movement emerged that critiqued the war as a retrogression from human progress. Together with this critique, anarchists rethought the notion of people as commoners (平民) disconnected from nation- states rather than national-subjects (国民). This shift aimed to create a new sense of international relations that including a strong opposition to war. Konishi, Anarchist Modernity: Cooperatism and Japanese-Russian Intellectual Relations in Modern Japan, 210. Following the Great War (1914-1918) and coinciding with a decade of warlord violence, May Fourth intellectuals also used the notion of non-war (非戦) to condemn the useless killing of human life, unfolding a humanistic critique of war. Zhang Quanzhi describes the May Fourth war novels as “three no’s” (sanwu); “no -ism,” “no hero,” and “no war events.” Huo yu ge: Zhongguo xiandai wenxue, wenren yu zhanzheng (Beijing: Xinxing Chubanshe, 2006), 110. From the mid 1920s onward, however, proletarian intellectuals, such as Qu Qiubai and Jiang Guangci, among others, responded to the betrayal by the GMD and expansion of Japanese imperialism by denouncing what they considered the humanists views of May Fourth writers and introduced a critique of war in relation to capitalism informed by Marxists theory similar to Kuroshima. Zhang, Huo yu ge: Zhongguo xiandai wenxue, wenren yu zhanzheng, 148-150. 25 Kuroshima Denji, “Hansen bungakuron,” 62.

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According to Kuroshima, proletarian antiwar literature is not only needed during war time

(senji) to convince the public of the irrationality of imperial wars, but also during peace time (heiji) as capitalism is always preparing for war driven by its market expansion. In peace time, capitalists exploit workers’ bodies for profits, but when the market is saturated during a crisis and market boundaries need to expand, capitalists easily shift their production to war materials. Kuroshima calls this focus on the spatiotemporal relation between capitalism and war “the consistency of antiwar literature” (hansen bungaku no kōjōsei).26 As long as there is capitalism, there will be war even in times of peace - “capitalist peace is only the preparation for the next war.”27 Thus, while more East Asian proletarian artists anticipated a war between Japan and China, Kuroshima stressed the importance of publishing antiwar literature and art to remind readers of the ever-lingering possibility of war.

Kuroshima’s antiwar theory is situated amongst many leftist theories, both pre- and post

World War II, who tried to theorize violence and question the presupposed laws legitimizing state violence. This section reads his antiwar theory in conjunction with Deleuze and Guattari’s “1227:

Treatise on Nomadology – The War Machine,” who also examine the relationship between inter-state war and capitalism28 by understanding its resistance to state violence as a “war machine.” This concept helps to rethink the formation of proletarian antiwar agitation and resistance found in the texts. These ideas are condensed in this chapter to highlight them as a mode of nomadic solidarity

26 Ibid., 72-73. 27 Ibid. 28 Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 1987), 421. They write that: “The factors that make State war total war are closely connected to capitalism: it has to do with the investment of constant capital in equipment, industry, and the war economy, and the investment of variable capital in the population in its physical and mental aspects (both as warmaker and as victim of war).”

280 that was assembled in encounters between East Asian proletarians who were not engaged in party-led hierarchical top-down political institutions. Like Kuroshima’s antiwar resistance, the war machine does not have war as its object necessarily, but rather is a nomadic configuration to avert state formation and preserve a smooth space. It serves to “construct revolutionary connections in opposition to the conjugations of the [capitalist] axiomatic.”29 War only becomes the object of the war machine when the smooth space of nomadic groups is under threat of state stratifications. How the war machine materializes depends on adversary stratifications. Deleuze and Guattari write that “[i]f guerrilla warfare, minority warfare, revolutionary and popular war are in conformity with the essence, it is because they take war as an object all the more necessary for being merely ‘supplementary’: they can make war only on the condition that they simultaneously create something else, if only new nonorganic social relations.”30 While the state apparatus tries to integrate war into its military institutions to neutralize war machines, and simultaneously presenting its own violence as natural and preestablished, it never succeeds to fully absorb war and thus the latter remains exterior to the state.31 As such, the war machine “in itself (…) seems to be irreducible to the State apparatus, to be outside its sovereignty and prior to its law: it comes from elsewhere.”32 Recalling the proletarian resistance discussed in the preceding chapters, we can consider workday, linguistic, and birth strikes as war machines for proletarians to evade assimilation into the state apparatus. Antiwar resistance as

29 Ibid., 473. 30 Ibid., 423. Italics in the original. 31 Ibid., 447-448. 32 Ibid., 352.

281 described by proletarian writers, such as Kuroshima, are a fourth way of deterritorialization, opposing militarism and state violence and defending smooth spaces of proletarians.

In the texts discussed below, we shall see how proletarians invested in creating war machines to resist infiltrations of Japanese imperialism. Crucial to the formation of a war machine is to retain a smooth space vis-à-vis striated space. Smooth space is a social field that desires free movement, where striated space partitions social fields to block free movement. We have to bear in mind that the smooth/striated always exist in mixture together with passages to move between the two. “Smooth space is constantly being translated, traversed into a striated space; striated space is constantly being reversed, returned to a smooth.”33 The Japanese imperial and the Chinese national governments went to great lengths to striate the movements of proletarians through laws that control migration, reproduction, conscription, political activism, and so forth in order to prevent the crystallization of war machines. The question in this chapter is how did proletarians and sympathizing activists smooth striated spaces in the Japanese empire and GMD-controlled areas in order for proletarian solidarity to emerge?

4.3 East Asian Trajectories of Antiwar Solidarity: Kuroshima Denji’s Militarized Streets and Li Huiying’s Wanbaoshan

Proletarian cultural movements emerged in the aftermath of the Great War (1914-1918) as a response to growing Japanese imperial expansion, most notably the widespread demonstrations on

March 1 and May 4, 1919 in Korea and China respectively, and to civil war among warlords in China

33 Ibid., 474.

282

(1916-1928). These movements inextricably connected proletarian culture to critiques of war and imperialism.34 Together with the rise of proletarian cultural movements, antiwar stances eventually crystalized into the first antiwar alliances, such as the Sensō hantai dōmei (Opposition to War

Alliance).35 These movements, including Esperantists and birth control activists as discussed earlier, popularized antiwar thought by spreading leaflets and posters at factories, publishing newspapers such as the Hantei Nyūsu (The Anti-Imperial News), Hantei Gurafu (The Anti-Imperial Graph, 1931), and the Hantei Shinbun (The Anti-Imperial Newspaper, 1930-1934), and organizing rallies to foster an international antiwar sentiment among the masses (Fig. 4.2).36 Proletarian artists in East Asia also translated and staged numerous foreign antiwar and anti-imperial novels and plays. Among these, Im

Westen Nicht Neues (All Quiet on the Western Front, 1929) by Erich Maria Remarque (1898-1970) and

Rychi, Kitay! (Roar, China!, 1926) by Sergei Tretyakov (1892-1937) were immensely popular in East Asia

(Fig. 4.3). Around the same period, a group of soldier-writers such as Guo Moruo (1892-1978),

Kuroshima Denji, Ecchūya Riichi (1901-1970), Sun Xizhen (1906-1984), Hei Yan (dates unknown), and

34 For example, Komaki Ōmi (1894-1978) and Kim Kijin (1903-1985) were invested in introducing the antiwar movement Clarté and translating writings by its founder Henri Barbusse in Japanese and Korean. They founded the first proletarian journals, Tane maku hito (The Sower) and Kaebyŏk (Creation), respectively, which published many antiwar oriented stories, essays, and translations. See Anzai Ikurō and Sūgyon I, eds., Kurarute undō to Tane maku hito: Hansen bungaku undō Kurarute no Nihon to Chōsen deno tenkai (Tokyo: Ochanomizu Shobō, 2000); Jean-Jacques Tschudin, Tanemakuhito: La Première Revue De Littérature Prolétarienne Japonaise (Paris: L'Asiatèque, 1979); Quillon Arkenstone, “The Clarté Movement in Japan and Korea, 1919-1925” (PhD Diss., University of Hawaiʽi, 2017). Proletarian antiwar discourse was preceded by anarchist critiques of war. For a discussion of such critiques see for example see Konishi Sho, Anarchist Modernity: Cooperatism and Japanese-Russian Intellectual Relations in Modern Japan, 142-208; Pak Chin-su et al., Panjŏn ŭro pon Tong Asia: sasang, undong, munhwajŏk silchʻŏn (Sŏul-si: Hyean, 2008), especially part 1; Matsushita Yoshio, Sandai hansen undōshi Meiji Taishō Shōwa (Tokyo: Kōjinsha, 1973), 41-150. 35 For more on the Sensō hantei dōmei see Inoue Manabu, Nihon hantei dōmeishi kenkyū: senzenki hansen, hantei undō no kiseki (Tokyo, Fuji Shuppan, 2008), 51-75. It is important to note that this alliance was not directly part of the proletarian umbrella, but most members were affiliated with proletarian movements or leftist political parties. 36 Ibid., 73-74.

283

Xie Bingying (1906-2000), who were often sympathetic to leftist politics, began publishing works based on their experiences of war, commencing a body of proletarian antiwar literature.

Following several violent incidents of Japanese imperial expansion in China proper and

Northeast China/Manchuria in the late 1920s, war in East Asia was a looming possibility. While proletarian antiwar movements already had included a strong anti-imperial sentiment, the changing geopolitical situation caused a stronger agitation against imperialism expressed in newly established anti-imperial movements, which corresponded to a similar shift in proletarian politics elsewhere.37 In

Japan proper, political activists founded the Hantei dōmei (Anti-imperial Alliance) in 1929, continuing the activities of the Opposition to War Alliance. This alliance invested strongly in forging ties with activists, workers, and students from the rest of East Asia. 38

To strengthen international solidarity linked to resistance against war and imperial military violence, the production of literature and arts were indispensable for proletarian cultural

37 In 1927, 174 delegates, including 29 from East Asia, from 34 countries founded the League against Imperialism in Brussels. Bringing together representatives from the communist and colonial world, the league attempted to establish a strong front against imperialism and colonialism. The Japanese secret intelligence closely monitored the league’s activities. Fredrik Petersson, “We are Neither Visionaries nor Utopian Dreamers: Willi Münzenberg, the League against Imperialism and the Comintern, 1925-1933” (PhD diss. Abo Akademi University Turku, 2013); Shakai mondai shiryō kenkyūkai, Nihon hantei dōmei shiryō, (Kyoto: Tōyō Bunkasha, 1980). 38 For example, in 1929, the Opposition to War Alliance organized a demonstration in Ginza, a main commercial street of Tokyo, joined by Koreans and Chinese to commemorate the annexation of the Korean peninsula by the Japanese empire. Shakai mondai shiryō kenkyūkai, Nihon hantei dōmei shiryō, 97. Similar anti-imperial alliances were founded in the rest of East Asia. For example, activists founded an anti-imperial alliance in Korea, but they were forced to remain underground. Further, colonial subjects often founded or joined alliances in Japan proper and China proper such as the Shanghai Taiwan fandi tongmeng (The Taiwanese Anti-Imperial Alliance in Shanghai). See Inoue, Nihon hantei dōmeishi kenkyū: senzenki hansen, hantei undō no kiseki, 225-252, 327-416; Li Li, “Zhonggong waiwei zuzhi “Shanghai Taiwan fandi tongmeng” lishi tanyuan,” Taihai yanjiu, no. 3 (2017): 78-86; Taiwan Sōtokufu Keimukyoku, Taiwan shakai undōshi (Tokyo: Ryokuin Shobō, 1986), 813-857.

284 movements.39 To convey their message of international solidarity, proletarian cultural movements used various types of media and strategies for massifying art to reach a wide audience, a crucial difference from previous leftist movements. The Japanese language anthology of antiwar stories exemplifies this attempt (Fig. 4.4). This anthology, titled Sensō ni taisuru sensō (War against War,

1928), echoing one of the first May Day slogans,40 was published after the merger of several proletarian cultural groups into Nippona Proleta Artista Federacio (Japanese Proletarian Artist Federation).41

Bringing together a number of prolific proletarian writers, the stories are introduced to depict “various angles and various subject matters” of war. The wide range of geographic locations represented in the works include China, Arabia, USA, Russia, and Japan, displaying the internationalization of proletarian literature and the attempt to multiply spacetimes of proletarian struggles. A year after the publication of the book, proletarian movements both in East Asia and elsewhere decided to add

International Antiwar Day to the proletarian calendar. Each year, on August 1, the official start of

World War I, proletarian movements gathered to commemorate the horrors of the Great War and demonstrate against war and imperial violence worldwide (Fig. 4.5).42 Similar to May Day and

International Woman’s Day, writers and artists invested in the cultural production to mobilize

39 Zhang Quanzhi notes that around 1930 was the most thriving period for antiwar literature in Chinese literature reflecting both the tumultuous domestic and international situation. Zhang Quanzhi, Huo yu ge: Zhongguo xiandai wenxue, wenren yu zhanzheng, 129-130. 40 Yamakawa Kikue, "Mēdē No Igi to Rekishi." Zen'ei: Musansha Kaikyū Geijutsu Zasshi 5, (1922): 236. 41 The title of this anthology shares the same title as the quadrilingual book Krieg dem Kriege! Guerre à la Guerre! War against War! Oorlog aan den Oorlog! by antiwar activist Ernst Friedrich (1894-1967) published in 1924. The book contains many horrendous photographs of mutilated and maimed bodies and faces of soldiers. 42 In 1929, the Comintern decided to celebrate the first international proletarian Antiwar Day on August 1 – the date commemorates the start of World War I following German’s declaration of war on Russia on August 1, 1914 – as a response against bourgeois pacifism, which proletarian movements considered to lack a critique of imperialism and capitalism. For more on the history of Antiwar Day, see for example Saijō Isamu, “‘Hachi ichi” o mae ni shite no sekai jōsei,” Senki 3, no. 13 (1930), 10-15.

285 proletarians and sympathizers. The last section of this chapter will return briefly to see how these endeavors shifted to popular fronts against fascism and imperialism, forming literary genres like guofang wenxue (literature of national defense) and kangri wenxue (anti-Japanese literature).

Amidst this social context proletarian writers Kuroshima Denji and Li Huiying (1911-1990) emerged. They wrote their novels to expose crimes of the empire by exploring the possibilities of international proletarian solidarity in the form of an East Asian collective resistance. While they followed quite different literary trajectories and wrote their novels in distinct places, they both explored how direct encounters among East Asia proletarians could lead to a mutual recognition of each other’s struggles. Kuroshima and Li wrote their works around the time of the Manchurian incident in 1931 amidst increasing military and imperial violence by the Japanese government and fears of a war in East Asia. Both authors set their stories in local spaces, occupied urban Jinan and rural Changchun, which allowed them to depict proletarian alliances across different ethnic and linguistic backgrounds resisting these spaces to become divided along ethno-national camps.

Kuroshima and Li presented such distinct spaces, interconnected through the literary imagination, that revealed the tension between imperial capitalism and proletarian struggles across East Asia.

Proletarian Suffering and Solidarity in Kuroshima Denji’s Militarized Streets

After the first split between the GMD and the CCP in 1927, Kuroshima and many other proletarian artists in East Asia followed the situation regarding the new power vacuum in China

286 proper with interest.43 The war between the two camps unleashed enormous sympathy and support for the CCP among proletarian movements, and was further exacerbated when the Japanese armies started their interventions into Shandong province in 1927 to protect Japanese capital.44 Proletarian artists in Japan proper founded the Tai-Shina hishōgai dōmei (Opposition to Intervention with China

Alliance), preceding the abovementioned Opposition to War Alliance, in order to expose and agitate against violent acts of Japanese imperialism (Fig. 4.6).45 Representatives of the China Anti-

Intervention Alliance even prepared a “China observation group” (Shina shisatsudan) to visit China, but were stopped by the police halfway into Fukuoka (Fig. 4.7).46 The interest in China proper, especially the revolutionary potential, inspired writers and poets to translate this energy into their works as we have seen in Murayama Tomoyoshi’s Record of Victory discussed in Chapter 1. The

Japanese military interventions escalated in a violent clash with the GMD armies in what is known as the Jinan Incident (1928), where thousands of civilians and soldiers were massacred. This event

43 Much of the biographical information included below is based upon Yamaguchi Morikuni, Bungaku undō to Kuroshima Denji (Fukuoka: Kaichōsha), 2004. In English see the introduction of Kuroshima Denji, A Flock of Swirling Crows and Other Proletarian Writings, trans. Zeljko Cipris, (Honolulu: U of Hawaiʽi, 2005), 1-13. For a comparative reading between Kobayashi Takiji’s Crab Cannery Ship and Kuroshima’s Militarized Streets, see Heather Bowen-Struyk, “Rival Imagined Communities: Class and Nation in Japanese Proletarian Literature,” positions: east asia cultures critique 14, no. 2 (2006): 373-404. 44 For more on the Shandong Intervention see Ōno Setsuko, “Kindai Nihon no sōten: Santō shuppei (taishi kanshō ka, higanshō ka: Santō shuppei to taishi hikanshō undō),” Ekonomisuto 46, no. 30 (1968): 82-87.” 45 For more on the China Anti-Intervention Alliance see Inoue Manabu, Nihon hantei dōmeishi kenkyū: Senzenki hansen, hantei undō no kiseki (Tokyo: Fuji Shuppan, 2008), 11-48; Heiwa undō 20 nen undōshi, ed. Nihon heiwa iinkai (Tokyo: Ōtsuki shoten, 1969), 10-15. Most noteworthy is the attempt of the alliance to send a delegation to meet with their counterparts in Shanghai. The delegation toured from Tokyo to Fukuoka stopping in several major cities to hold gatherings and rallies. The police arrested the delegation before they boarded the boat to Shanghai. 46 For more on the China Observation Group see, Inoue Manabu, Nihon hantei dōmeishi kenkyū: Senzenki hansen, hantei undō no kiseki, 19-29.

287 motivated Kuroshima to rewrite the historical outcome, imagining solidarity among Chinese workers and Japanese soldiers in his novel Militarized Streets.47

A year after the publication of his “Treatise on Antiwar Literature,” Kuroshima made the first attempt to integrate his antiwar stance into his literary work. This action resulted in his first and only novel, Militarized Streets, published in 1930.48 In this novel, Kuroshima chose to center his story

47 Writers such as Kuroshima established their position as war writers based on their war experience as soldiers. After his return from the Siberian Intervention, Kuroshima published several short stories depicting this war from various angles. Before he published his “Siberian works,” he wrote a short piece titled “Sensō ni tsuite” (About War) to organize and situate his war stories. In this essay, he explains his reasons for writing about the Japanese intervention in Siberia. He explicitly mentioned that “war seen from afar, or to overlook from above,” is different from what “I want to write [which is] war from the perspective of a soldier holding a weapon and participating in battle.” Kuroshima Denji, “Sensō ni tsuite,” Bungei sensen 4, no. 4 (1927): 58. While previous generations of writers observed wars embedded as journalists such as Kunikida Doppo and Tayama Katai, Kuroshima and others like Sun Xizhen, Ecchuya Riichi, Guo Muruo, Xie Bingying, participated in the war as a soldier rather than a writer. This changed the way how the stories by these soldier-writers were advertised and how readers perceived these writings. Whereas embedded journalist-writers did not receive a military training and often were only allowed to observe the war from a distance to avoid them interfering with military actions, soldier-writers such as Kuroshima participated in battle directly. Readers, publishers and proletarian art movements valued these first-hand experiences and considered these writers to be more capable to convey “the truth” of war. However, we need to keep in mind that Kuroshima wrote these stories several years after his return from Siberia creating a significant temporal gap between his time as a medic-soldier in Siberia and his literary activities in Tokyo. 48 Hyōronsha published Kuroshima’s Miltarized Streets as number 10 in their Shinsaku chōhen shōsetsu senshū (Selection of Recent Masterpiece Novels). After publication, the police confiscated the manuscript and collected around 1500 copies of the published 4500. The censors instructed what passages had to be removed or made invisible for republication. However, the police deemed this revised version not in line with the publication laws and again confiscated 2005 copies of 4500 and banned the book entirely. The censored considered the book “to promote anti-militaristic thought” and “to expose the aggressive exploitation and violence by Japanese imperialism and capitalism.” Maki Yoshiyuki, Fuseji no bunkashi (Tokyo: Shinwasha, 2014), 349, 352-353. Nowadays, several versions are available of Kuroshima’s Militarized Streets such as Kuroshima self-edited manuscripts, the two 1930 editions, a censored version published during the American occupation, and a post-occupation restored version. Upon publication of Militarized Streets in 1930, Ikeda Hisao (1906-1944) was the only proletarian literary critic who reviewed the novel. In his essay “Kako no Hansen bungaku no hihan to kongo no hōkō” (A criticism of past antiwar literature and the direction hereafter, 1932), he writes that among antiwar literature Militarized Streets “has reached the highest level.” He praises the novel for presenting an antiwar critique from a class point of view that is connected to the larger historical context as well as for exposing the drive behind war. Ikeda includes the interaction between Japanese soldiers and Chinese workers as one the novel’s strong points, but he neglects to elaborate. Ikeda Toshio, Nihon puroretaria bungaku undo no saininshiki (Tokyo: San'ichi Shobō, 1971), 304-305. Originally published in Puroretaria bungaku, no. 4 (1932): 88-103. Postwar critics have continued to emphasize Kuroshima’s strength in depicting colonial and peripheral spaces connecting the global and local. At the same time, they criticized his depiction of international solidarity among proletarians as either forced or diverging from the historical facts and the sophisticated explanations about the workings of imperialism and war by proletarian characters as unnatural. Such readings, however, fail to acknowledge the idealist aspirations writers like Kuroshima included in their realist fiction to envision hopeful futures and to inform readers of the possibilities of proletarian solidarity. Yuchi Asao, Puroretaria

288 around the Japanese expeditions in Shandong. This topic allowed him to expand the perspective of his story to include the invasion of the Japanese capital into China proper, the cooperation between the Japanese state and capitalists, and the burden imposed on Japanese soldiers and Chinese factory workers. Juxtaposing the larger historical context, Kuroshima also created a space in his story where

Chinese workers and Japanese soldiers could meet and communicate in each other’s languages. The exchange and visible struggles between the two groups made it possible to expose the larger structure behind war, as well as to imagine an internationalist cooperation against war. By doing so, Chinese and Japanese proletarians tried to reconfigure the urban space of Jinan from a national warzone to a class one.49 Creating such a narrative, Kuroshima was able to present the Chinese and Japanese revolution as a shared international struggle against Japanese imperialism.50 He chose to write of the

Jinan Incident rather than events in other urban spaces, such as Shanghai or other cities in Manchuria

bungaku undō: sono risō to genjitsu (Tokyo: Banseisha, 1991), 310-316 and Shimamura, “‘Hansen’ kara ‘hanshokuminchi’ e,” 314. 49 Yuchi Asao argues that Kuroshima’s Militarized Streets differs from Yokomitsu Riichi’s Shanhai (Shanghai, 1931) and Maedakō Hiroichirō’s Shina (China, 1929) in terms of situating his story at the core of the evils of Japanese imperialism. Whereas Yokomitsu “distorts reality by placing the responsibility for the killing of Chinese workers with the Indian police” rather than Japanese imperialism and Maedakō focuses on the violence inflicted by English and French soldiers in Hong Kong ignoring the complicit role of Japanese imperialism, Kuroshima was willing to directly depict the violence of Japanese imperialism present in China proper. Yuchi Asao, Puroretaria bungaku undō: sono risō to genjitsu, 324-328. 50 In preparing his novel, Kuroshima, despite bad health, traveled to Manchuria and the east coast of China proper in late 1929 visiting Jinan, Tianjin, Fengtian (Shenyang) and Harbin. Besides what a few memos and a short article tell us, not much is known about this trip. In these memo’s Kuroshima jotted down some of his impressions of impoverished Chinese proletarians inhabiting the urban spaces including Jinan. Kuroshima Denji, “Hōtenshi wo aruku,” Senki Roshia kakumei kinen tokubetsugō (1931), 4. In a memo, titled Shina kenbunki (Record of observations in China), Kuroshima writes that he “forgets easily” and he mostly relies on “what has remained in his memory.” The photos taken by a Bungei Sensensha photographer failed to show much due to too much light and exposure. Without photographs or notes, Kuroshima mostly relied on his undocumented recollections of Jinan. He explored the city and its outskirts while occasionally interacting with locals with the help of his guide Shimada Seijirō (dates unknown), who spoke fluent Chinese. He observed the ruins after the Jinan Incident such as the destroyed Leyuan Gate. Kuroshima Denji, “Shina kenbunki,” in Kuroshima Denji zenshū 4 (Tokyo: Bensei Shuppan, 2001), 287.

289 as “the Jinan Incident encompasses much” (Sainan jiken ha iroiro na mono wo fukunde iru).51

Presumably, Kuroshima referred to clashing interests between capitalists and proletarians in a colonial space, while the interaction between various proletarians allowed for the possibility of solidarity and cooperation, echoing his emphasis on the need of international organization against imperialism mentioned in his “Treatise on Antiwar Literature.”

Departing from his own Siberian works, Kuroshima aimed to provide a wider view of the causes and effects of Japanese imperialism in Militarized Streets. Taking the city Jinan as its center, the third-person narrative divided into 33 chapters presents the individual perspectives of numerous characters, allowing Kuroshima to describe the diverse interests in play behind war. These characters all possess abject characteristics, such as drug addiction, disability, and disease, that are deemed unfit as a contribution to the building of the Japanese empire.52 They are involved in illegal activities, such as drugs and weapons trade, murder, torture, and rape, and do not show any hesitation to cooperate with Japanese imperialists for personal gain. However, an exception is the protagonist Inokawa

Kantarō, a lower ranking staff member at the Japanese match factory, who due to his father’s opium addiction has to take care of his mother and two sisters. His situation mirrors that of many Chinese

51 Kuroshima Denji, “Rainen wa nani wo suru ka: 1930nen ni taisuru watashi no kibō, hōfu, keikaku,” in Kuroshima Denji zenshū 5 (Tokyo: Bensei Shuppan, 2001), 42. Originally published as a questionnaire together with the answers of many (proletarian) writers in Bungaku jidai (Literary Era), December 1929, 44-49. Kuroshima’s complete answer reads: “I want to write about Jinan. In order to do that, I am going to Jinan, and now I am in Fengtian after I passed Tianjin. Because the Jinan Incident encompasses so much, [the novel] might become quite long. I want to do my best to finish it.” Shimamura argues that most likely “Kuroshima exaggerated his ignorance. Although it is unknown how much Chinese Kuroshima could understand at least with kanbun-style readings he must have been able to read Chinese to some extent. Militarized Streets contains many Chinese words and readings and with help of his guide Shimada Seijirō, who was fluent in Chinese, it is likely Kuroshima was able to gather plenty of information for his novel.” Shimamura, “‘Hansen’ kara ‘hanshokuminchi’ e,” 311. 52 For a historical discussion of surplus populations in peripheries of the Japanese empire see Mark Driscoll, Absolute Erotic, Absolute Grotesque: The Living, Dead, and Undead in Japan’s Imperialism, 1895-1945 (Durham: Duke University Press, 2010).

290 families in the region, creating empathy and a connection between the Japanese and Chinese proletariat. Living in poverty, Kantarō expresses a sympathy for the exploited Chinese workers, including children, at the factory and urges his superiors to treat their employees better and pay their wages. He tries to communicate with a “Chinese language course style pronunciation” (Shinago kōzaryū no hatsuon), but the factory superiors sabotage his attempts. Finally, the Japanese soldier

Takatori, who enters the narrative halfway, continues Kantarō’s attempts to interact with the Chinese workers. He understands that the treatment of Japanese soldiers and Chinese workers have a lot in common within the larger context to Japanese imperialism. Kantarō tries to find ways to subvert the military leadership and convince his fellow soldiers to stop fighting on behalf of the Japanese military as part of its imperial expansion. The stories of these characters combined tell the complex web of colliding actions as undercurrents eventually culminating in war.

Throughout the story, the narrator indirectly informs readers of events concerning Chiang

Kai-shek’s Second Northern Punitive Army, the Southern Army, and the various warlords in the region. The fighting is nearing Jinan and Kantarō’s superior at the factory Koyama refuses to pay the

Chinese workers to prevent them from either escaping or joining one of the oppositional parties.

Workers approach the sympathetic Kantarō to ask him in broken Japanese if he can help, but the strict surveillance in the factory hinders Kantarō from helping and block any interaction between

Japanese and Chinese proletarians. His superiors know Kantarō’s sympathies for Chinese workers, and as a result, often question his loyalty. Further, the factory pays a Chinese foreman a little extra to spy on and to beat workers if they refuse to obey the rules. Suspense increases when fighting and looting soldiers are closing in on Jinan and rumors of war spread. The Japanese government threatens

291 to send soldiers to protect its citizens. The turmoil causes the economy in the city to stagnate and currencies devaluate. The people are trapped in the city while the number of Japanese soldiers rapidly increases.

Fearing solidarity among soldiers and workers made possible through the direct encounter, the Japanese military commanders aim to disconnect the factory from the outside world through barricades. Within the space of the factory, the Chinese are removed to their dormitory and hospitals are emptied to make room for Japanese soldiers. Strict discipline is maintained as a continuation of military life (guntai seikatsu) in Japan proper to keep soldiers in line. The military leaders instruct the soldiers that any interaction with Chinese workers is strictly forbidden, restricting their movement throughout the factory. The tension present in the contested urban space of Jinan between imperial capital and exploited proletarians rises to the surface in the novel.

The spatial tension in Militarized Streets seems to resonate with Deleuze and Guattari’s notion of the war machine discussed earlier. They write that the state aims to striate the smooth space, that is the free movement of the nomadic war machine through institutions such as the military. Obedience, discipline, and homogeneity need to assure state dominance over the war machine. The military leaders in Militarized Streets order their soldiers not to talk to the Chinese soldiers as a means to striate their movement and neutralize the war machine. The soldiers in Militarized Streets are “caught in this alternative: either to be nothing more than the disciplined military organ of the State, or to turn against itself.”53 The soldiers choose the latter, which means they must undo the overcodification of

53 Deleuze and Guattari, Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, 356. Italics in the original.

292 their being-soldier to reconfigure the assemblage, initiating a new passage between the soldiers and workers.

The arrival of the soldiers forms a turning point in the story presenting a possibility of resistance against Japanese imperialism embodied in the character Takatori. Despite the restrictions, soldier Takatori starts questioning the military expedition and investigating the labor conditions of the Chinese workers. Soon after, he notices that the factory exploits its workers and even tortures them after hearing the agonizing screams of a worker being abused.

“They are doing something. Hey, the factory people are doing something.” The soldiers had been resting a while following their meal. A man noticed a disturbance in the drying area. A worker was being tortured. “Torture, it’s torture!” Kakimoto spoke in a hushed voice as though confiding a secret. “It’s torture, they’re torturing someone!” “The supervisor’s sticking needles under his fingernails.” Fingernails adhere tightly to the flesh of the fingertips. They were inserting cotton-thread needles into the gaps between flesh and nails. Starting with the worker’s little fingers, they thrust the needles into his ring fingers, middle fingers, and index fingers. To immobilize his arms the overseers coiled their own arms around them. The agonizing groans cut through the din of the factory. The soldiers shuddered as though their own nails were being torn. [Yu Liling] had always been hated by the company staff. He was disobedient. Even if a supervisor or overseer cautioned him, he reacted with contempt. Such is the man he was, Koyama hated him the most.

「何かやつてるぞ、おい、工場の奴が、何がやつてるぞ。」飯を食つて暫く休んでゐた。一人が、削つた軸木を乾してある付近の騒ぎに目をとめた。工人が、思ひきつたいぢめ方をされてゐた。「リンチだ、リンチだ！」内所ごとのやうに柿本が声をひくめた。「なに？」「リンチだ、リンチだよ！」于立嶺といふ、肩の怒つた、皮肉な顔つきの工人が、二人の把頭の腕の下で、頸をしめられた雄鶏のやうに、ねぢられて、片足は、しきりに空を蹴つてゐた。「監督が、爪の裏へ針をつきつ刺してゐるんだ。」貝形の爪が、指さきの肉と、しつかり謬着してゐた。その肉と爪の間へ、木綿針をつきさしてゐる。小指からはじめて、薬指、中指。人さし指に針をつきさゝれてゐた。二本の手は動かせないやうに、二人の把頭によつて、しつかりと脇の下にからみつけられてゐた。工場の騒音を、つんざいて、う――うツと唸る声がする。兵士達は、自分の生爪をもがれるやうに身慄ひした。

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于立嶺は、平生から社員に睨まれてゐた。頭のさげツぷりが悪かった。監督や、把頭が何か云っても、ふゝん、とうそぶいてゐる。そんな男だった。それで殊に小山から睨まれてゐた。54

Observing the violence inflicted on Yu Liling’s body through torture, the soldiers recognize a shared proletarian suffering of exploitation between the Japanese soldiers and Chinese workers. They are reminded of similar violence imposed on their bodies while working in factories or during police interrogations in Japan proper. The surrounding Chinese workers, too, experience a collective pain witnessing the torture. The workers avert “their faces as though themselves were being jabbed” knowing “that the torture was not directed at Yu alone but was meant to intimidate all of them.”55 At this stage, the workers still fear repercussions from the soldiers if they dare to protest. Takatori and

Kakimoto, however, yell and curse at Koyama, commanding him to stop the torture, and subsequently, revealing their solidarity with the Chinese workers.

“How about giving it a rest,” said Kakimoto. The workers stared at the wet leather whip gripped in Koyama’s bony hand and pictured bare muscles being ripped to shreds in sprays of blood. It was a frequent sight at police interrogations. Yu’s screams merged with Koyama’s snarls. The wet leather whip wound itself round the body. The lashes slapped with a cutting sound. Then a tough, bighearted soldier sprang forward. “Cut it out! You son of a bitch! Scum!” The soldier smacked Koyama’s sickly face. His powerful arm twisted the rawboned hand holding the whip. “If you think you can torture the workers just because we’re here, you’re dead wrong! You damned clown!” Koyama was stunned. “I’ll beat the life out of you, you damned clown!” The soldier was Taketori.

「どうです、もう、いいかげんでよしてはどうです。」と、見てゐる兵士の柿本が云つた。工人達は、小山の骨ばつた手に握られた濡皮鞭を見て、裸体にひンむかれて、筋肉がぼろぼろにちぎれるほどしぶきあげられる、場面を眼の裏に描いた。

54 Kuroshima Denji, “Busō seru shigai,” in Kuroshima Denji Zenshū 3 (Tokyo: Bensei Shuppan, 2001), 187. The Japanese version from the Zenshū 3 (Collected Works Volume 3) is the self-edited manuscript of Kuroshima Denji. Translation taken from Kuroshima Denji, “Militarized Streets,” in A Flock of Swirling Crows and Other Proletarian Writings, trans. Zeljko Cipris (Honolulu: University of Hawaiʻi Press, 2005), 199. Italics mine. I changed the romanization of the Chinese name Yui Li-song into Yu Liling. 55 Ibid., 189. Translation Cipris, 200.

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警察の拷問によくある場面だ。于の悲鳴と、小山の嚙みつける声がも一度した。濡皮鞭が、物体に巻きついた。ピシリ。ピシリ。切れるやうな音だ。その時、豪放な、荒つぽい兵士がとび出した。「よしやがれ！コン畜生！出来そこなひめ！」兵士は、小山の病的な横ツ面を張りとばした。濡皮鞭を持つた小山の骨ばかりの手は、たくましい兵士の腕で、さかさまに、ねぢ曲げられた。「俺達が来とると思つて、工人をひどいめにあはしやがつたくらゐにや、承知しねえぞ！ヒヨツトコ野郎奴！」小山は、あつけにとられた。「叩き殺して呉れるぞ。ヒヨツトコ野郎奴！」兵士は高取だつた。56

This is the first time that privates Takatori and Kakimoto show disobedience and challenge the factory management. Gradually, they plan their resistance and try to convince other soldiers to join them. Moreover, the Chinese workers too notice the soldiers’ sympathy and try to approach them.

One of the workers Shi Yili speaks a bit of “broken Japanese,” but it is sufficient to inform the soldiers first-hand about the factory’s terrible treatment of its employees and the tough lives of Chinese workers and peasants.

The soldiers were drawn to [Shi Yili’s] story and had gathered around him. The lodgings were always dark. The walls were crumbling. The place felt like a cave where none but the oppressed and tormented gathered. Were the soldiers and the workers not twins with the same destiny? The harrowing daily labor drove them both to utter exhaustion. […] “What fools soldiers are,” Takatori said with profound emotion. “Though we’re poor farmers and workers ourselves, just because we’re wearing uniforms with stand-up collars we’re trying to break the workers’ and farmers’ resistance. We’ve been sent into a colony and we’re risking our lives to make the bourgeoisie richer and richer. We’re so blind we don’t understand what on earth we’re doing! We’re actually strangling ourselves with our own hands!” All grew serious and thoughtful. “Perseverance!” Kitani thought to himself. “We’ve got to duck the whip and rise up from below.” Life here seems just as painful as life in the factories and farming villages back home, maybe worse.

兵士たちは、時以礼の話に心を引かれた。そして、その周囲に集つたのだ。宿舎はいつも暗かつた。壁は、ボロ〳〵と剥げ落ちて来そうだ。そこは、虐げられ、苛まれた人間ばかりが集まってくる洞窟のやうに感じられた。

56 Ibid., 188-189. Translation taken from Cipris, “Militarized Streets,” 199-200.

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兵士と工人、これは同一運命を荷つてゐる双生児ではないだらうか？昼間の憔ゝしい労働は、二人を共に極度の疲憊へ追ひこんでゐた。 (…) 「兵タイて、何て馬鹿な奴だらうね。」と高取は、感慨深かげに云つた。「自分が貧乏な百姓や、労働者出身でありながら、詰襟の服を着とるといふんで工人や百姓の反抗を押さへつけてゐるんだ。植民地へよこされては、ブルジョアをますます富ませるために命がけで働いてやつてゐるんだ。一体、なんのために生きてゐるのか、訳が分らない盲目的とは俺れらのコツたなア！全く自分で、自分の頸をくくってゐるんだ！」皆んな、しみじみした、考へずにゐられない気持ちになつた。「忍耐だ！」と木谷は心のうちで云つてゐた。「苔の下をくぐり、くぐって底からやつて行かなきゃならないんだ。」ここにも彼等が、内地の工場や農村で生活をした、それと同じやうな、――もつとひどい、苦るしい生活があつた。57

In the exchange between Japanese soldiers and Chinese workers, both learn from each other’s sorrow and nurture a feeling of empathy for one another. Listening to the story of Chinese Shi Yili, soldiers recall their lives back in Japan. Comparing it to their Chinese counterparts, they recognize how much they have in common. Shi Yili continues to explain the hardships of his colleague Wang Hong-ji, who is standing nearby and unable to speak Japanese. Staring at the soldiers, “he realized from the soldiers’ expressions and Shi’s strained expressions what Shi Yili was telling them.” Even without the ability to communicate in each other’s language, the facial expressions are sufficient for Wang to understand that the soldiers express their compassion. Through direct encounters and exchange of ideas, East

Asia proletarians created a space where they could assemble their struggles into a cohesive praxis of solidarity.

After several war scenes between Japanese and Chinese troops filling the city streets with corpses, Takatori and others attempt to organize a revolt among the Japanese soldiers. However, his

57 Ibid., 197-198. Translation taken from Cipris, “Militarized Streets,” 208-209. I changed the romanization of Shih I-li into Shi Yili.

296 superiors soon learn of his intentions. After a leaflet is found in the soldiers’ dormitory, the leadership starts an investigation, but without success. The leaflet – redacted by Japanese government censors in full in the revised version showing the censors’ unease with the passage – calls for class solidarity between Chinese and Japanese proletarians: “Join hands with the Chinese workers, peasants, and soldiers, and spare no sacrifice to attain an unbreakable union of revolutionary cooperation

(kakumeiteki renkei).”58 The narrative does not reveal the writer or supplier of the leaflet. Soon after, however, Takatori and four others disappear without a trace. Only near the end of the story, their fellow soldiers and the reader learn that they have been killed by their lieutenant. The authorities use print media to misinform the home front about the Jinan Incident and the military leadership lies to the family members of the murdered soldiers by telling they have been killed in action and died a heroic death in service of the Japanese empire.

Kuroshima’s novel aims to present international proletarian solidarity by imagining an alternative historical ending of the Jinan incident in his fiction through the direct encounters between

Chinese workers and Japanese soldiers. In doing so, he transformed a contested space into the possibility of proletarian cooperation and resistance. The death of Taketori; therefore, does not invoke defeatism, but a call for continue resistance. The soldiers supporting Takatori decide to use their weapons not against the Chinese, but against their superiors. The soldier Kitani announces this call at

58 Ibid., 204. Translation taken from Cipris, “Militarized Streets,” 214-215. Kuroshima wrote 革命的連携 (kakumeiteki renkei), but in the text from the collected works this word has been changed to 革命的連帯 (kakumeitkei rentai) for unknown reasons. However, Kuroshima’s manuscripts also has 革命的連帯 where Taketori rereads this sentence aloud to other soldiers, so most likely is it a spelling mistake.

297 the end of the narrative by shouting, “They’re afraid of us. But next time, the day we pick up the sword, we won’t let them fire the first shot. We’ll skewer their hearts before we let that happen!”59

Solidarity among Strangers and Li Huiying’s Wanbaoshan Village

Li Huiying was completely new to the literary establishment of early 1930s Shanghai.60 Making his debut immediately after the Manchurian Incident, Li published his short story “Zuihou yike” (Final

Lesson, 1932) in the prominent proletarian journal Beidou (Northern Dipper) edited by Ding Ling

(1904-1986).61 Following the publication of this story, Ding Ling asked Li to write a novel about the

Northeastern region and anti-Japan (kangri) resistance which resulted in the novel Wanbaoshan

(Wanbaoshan Village); the same year he joined the League of Left-wing Writers. With this work Li established himself as one of the first resistance writers together with others from Manchuria such as

Xiao Hong, Xiao Jun (1907-1988), and Duanmu Hongliang (1912-1996), forming the so-called Group of

Northeast Writers (Dongbei zuojiajun). The works of these writers published in the mid 1930s depict imperial violence inflicted on Chinese farmers living in Manchuria under the Japanese puppet regime, which initiated the War of Resistance literature (kangri wenxue). While these writers astutely portray violence and resistance against Japanese imperialism through a national lens as part of larger anti- imperial and antiwar discourses within proletarian culture, Li’s novel Mount Wanbao stands out for its

59 Ibid., 244. Translation taken from Cipris, “Militarized Streets,” 253. 60 For more biographical information see Li Huiying, Li Huiying daibiaozuo, ed. Sun Jinjian (Beijing: Huaxia Chubanshe, 1998), 379-380, and Cai Zongjuan and Lü Zongzheng, “Li Huiying he ta de kangzhan wenxue changzuo,” Shehui kexue zhanxian, no. 5 (1995): 96-100. 61 Li Huiying, “Zuihou yike,” Beidou 2, no. 1 (1932): 32-50.

298 rendering of solidarity among Korean and Chinese proletarians shifting the lens to an international one.62

In Wanbaoshan Village, Manchuria, Korean migrants started to dig an irrigation ditch on leased marshy land from a Chinese broker. When the ditch reached a considerable length, Chinese peasants complained that it disrupted the waterflow to their land and protested to local authorities.

The authorities dispatched police to investigate the construction, which resulted in a response by the imperial Japanese consul in Changchun sending military troops. While Chinese police and Japanese troops agreed to execute a joint investigation, they could not prevent a brief clash between Chinese peasants and Korean immigrants that became known as the Wanbaoshan Incident (July 1, 1931).

Following coverage in East Asian media, the incident led to anti-Korean and anti-Chinese riots across

East Asia leaving many dead or injured.

The incident also sparked outrage among East Asian proletarian movements over the alleged excessive use of violence by the Japanese authorities and racial vilifying of Korean and Chinese proletarians in state and bourgeois media (Fig. 4.8).63 Besides Itō Einosuke’s (1903-1959) fictional account “Manpōzan” (Wanbaoshan Village, 1931), published in Kaizō just three weeks after the incident,64 China specialist Fujieda Takeo penned a detailed analysis under the description “news

62 This is not to say that proletarian writers in East Asia neglected ethnic tensions in their stories. Besides the works of Kang Kyŏng-ae mentioned in the previous chapter, see for example Han Sŏl-ya’s “Kwadogi” (Transition, 1929) and Ch’oe So-hae’s “T'alch'ulgi” (Escape, 1925), which both mention conflicts between Chinese and Koreans in Kando (Jiandao). 63 For an extensive study of the Mountain Manpō Incident, see Pak Yŏng-sŏk, Manpōzan Jiken kenkyū: Nihon teikoku shugi no tairiku shinryaku seisaku no ikkan to shite (Tokyo: Daiichi Shobō, 1981). See also, Park Hyun Ok, Two Dreams in One Bed: Empire, Social Life, and the Origins of the North Korean Revolution in Manchuria (Durham: Duke University Press, 2015), 94- 95. 64 Besides Itō and Li, Kim Dong’in’s “Pulkun san,” (1932), Yi Taejun’s Nonggun (1939) and Chang Hyŏkju’s Kaikon (1943) also wrote about the Wanbao Incident, but they did not focus on inter-East Asian proletarian struggles. For more on Yi and Chang’s novels see Ren Xiubun, “‘Manshū’ Manpōsan jiken (1931nen) to Chūgoku, Nihon, Kankoku bungaku: Ri Ki’ei [Li

299 commentary” in order to expose the intentions of Japanese imperialism in Manchuria. In his article

“Nihon teikoku shugi no ‘Mansen seisaku ichigenka’ to Manpōzan jiken” (The ‘unification policies of

Manchuria and Korea’ by Japanese Imperialism and the Wanbaoshan Village Incident) published in a special antiwar issue of Puroretaria kagaku (Proletarian Science), Fujieda writes that the economic, political, and military activities by Japanese authorities are masked as “peaceful co-existence and coprosperity” to ease the economic crisis. However, according to Fujieda, these activities attempted to colonize Manchuria in a way similar to Korea, echoing the opinion expressed in Uri Tongmu discussed earlier.65 To protect its interests, Japanese authorities actively attempt to create ethnic rifts among

Korean, Chinese and Japanese workers to prevent them from organizing a “transnational united front”

(kokkyō wo chōetsu shita kyōdō sensen).66 A few months later, Li Huiying started the draft of

Wanbaoshan Village to warn readers about the divisive strategies of Japanese imperialism and to appeal for transnational solidarity.67

Huiying], Itō Einosuke, Ri Taishun [Yi Tae-jun], Chō Kakuchū [Chang Hyŏk-ju],” Tōkyō Daigaku Chūgokugo Chūgoku bungaku kenkyūshitsu kiyō 7, (2004):148-178. 65 Fujieda Takeo, “Nihon teikoku shugi no ‘Mansen seisaku ichigenka’ to Manpōsan jiken,” Puroretaria Kagaku 3, no. 8, (1931): 134-135. 66 Ibid., 143. 67 A year after the Wanbaoshan Incident and several months before the publication of Wanbaoshan Village, Li travelled to Manchuria to visit the “new land” (xinguo), referring to the colonization of Manchuria by Japan, and his hometown. Taking the boat from Shanghai, Li observed the coastal lines of Qingdao and Dalian, noticing how much the spaces had transformed by Japanese imperialism. After he entered the Japanese customs in Dalian, the city appeared to Li as no different from Japan proper. During his two months in Manchuria, Li examined how the rural region suffered from Japanese imperialism, which became the main content of his stories upon returning to Shanghai. Although Li hardly shared his observations of the Jilin countryside in his personal account, his critique of the imperial violence and exploitation is captured as follows: “Occasionally, I looked at a few peasants, and I saw their kindness, and [their] love and sadness, if I believed in karma for good retribution, then I definitely believe their offspring should not suffer from the imperial oppression again.” Li Huiying, “Huanxiangji,” in Li Huiying daibiaozuo, ed. Sun Jinjian, (Beijing: Huaxia Chubanshe, 1998), 342-343. Li had finished the manuscript of Mount Wanbao two months before his trip to Manchuria, but it is unclear if he edited the manuscripts after he returned to Shanghai. Cai Zongjuan and Lü Zongzheng, “Li Huiying he ta de kangzhan wenxue changzuo,” Shehui kexue zhanxian, no. 5, (1995): 98.

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Li’s Wanbaoshan Village is told from the perspective of an omniscient third-person narrator and chronicles the struggles of Chinese farmers and Korean workers in the rural village Wanbaoshan close to Changchun. This is an important city for Japanese capital. Shanghai Hufeng Shuju published

Wanbaoshan Village together with Tie Dihan’s (Zhang Tianyi, 1906-1985) Chilun (Cogwheel, 1932), and

Lin Jing’s (Yang Hansheng, 1902-1993) Yiyoujun (Volunteer Army, 1933) as the Kangzhan chuangzuo congshu (Antiwar Creative Works Series). The prominent proletarian writer and critic Mao Dun (1896-

1981) was among the first to review these works. He regarded these three works as among the few which reflected the “tempest times” (shidai de baofeng yu) since the advent of the Manchurian

Incident two years earlier. About Li’s Wanbaoshan Village, he wrote that “despite Li being a native of the region who has skillfully depicted the local color (difang secai), the work lacks any reference to the larger context of Japanese violence and economic control of Manchuria.”68 Ignoring this context, Mao states that Li’s depiction of Wanbaoshan Village resembles a “paradise of The Peach Spring” (sewai taoyuan de letu) and its “villagers used to live happy days” (nongmin benlai guo de shi kuaile rizi) before the cultivation of land by Japanese imperialism.69 He continues to criticize Li’s work for its disparity between historical facts and his fictive misrepresentation of the incident.70

68 Dongfang Weiming (Mao Dun), “Shuping: “9.18” yihou de fanri wenxue, sanbu changbian xiaoshuo,” Wenxue 1, no. 2, (1933):345. 69 Ibid. 70 Postwar scholars have reiterated this point by showing where and how Li diverged from the historical facts failing to acknowledge a tension between idealist aspiration and realist representations similar to Kuroshima’s Militarized Streets. Ren Xiubun, “‘Manshū’ Manpōsan jiken (1931nen) to Chūgoku, Nihon, Kankoku bungaku: Ri Ki’ei [Li Huiying], Itō Einosuke, Ri Taishun [Yi Tae-jun], Chō Kakuchū [Chang Hyeok-ju],” 148-178, and Okada Hideki, “Ri Ki’ei [Li Huiying] ‘Manpōsan’: jijitsu to kyokō no hazama,” Ritsumeikan bungaku 620, (February, 2011): 939-932.

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Mao concludes with discussing the interaction between Korean and Chinese proletarians creating “a class consciousness superseding an ethnic consciousness” (jieji ishi gefu minzu ishi). While

Mao acknowledges the “class sympathy” (jieji de tongqing) present in the story, he fails to recognize and value the importance of international proletarian solidarity and focuses on historical accuracy.

Critics after Mao Dun have continued to further erase this possibility of proletarian internationalism by reading Li’s Wanbaoshan Village within a nation-centered framework of Anti-Japanese War of

Resistance literature (kangri wenxue). As such, the work came to represent the literary start of the national and patriotic struggle against Japanese imperialism.

Yet, such a reading overlooks the proletarian international solidarity possible in literary worlds. While one cannot deny that the narrative stresses the hardships of Chinese farmers resembling a primordial community as Mao Dun suggested, the story gradually unfolds from the anxiety among Chinese farmers over the arrival of Korean workers to a mutual recognition of each other’s struggles. This recognition eventually leads to a united front against Japanese and Chinese police as well as Korean exploiters. By foregrounding the necessity of class-based cooperation that relies on solidarity as opposed to ethno-national division, Li attempts to challenge divisive racial categories imposed by Japanese imperialism. He does so by describing how Chinese farmers and

Korean immigrants smooth the striations of Japanese imperialism to create lines of flights, allowing

East Asian proletarians to connect with each other from which proletarian war machines of solidarity emerge.

Opening with the arrival of Korean workers, the first part of the novel focuses on the distress and anxiety experienced by Chinese farmers towards the abject “strangers” (moshengren). Soon the

302 local villagers learned that these “strangers” are “Goyrŏ people” (Gaoliren, old word for Koreans) from the city (chengli) who are assumed to be “the root of trouble” (huogen), changing Wanbaoshan into

Wanbaozao (using 糟 [zao] to refer to the decay). The broker Hao Yongde leased Korean workers the land of absentee landlords in Changchun. To cultivate the land, the Korean workers needed to dig a large irrigation canal which the local villagers fear will cause floods and destroy their fields. The villagers protested but without results. Ironically, while the empire treated Korean subjects as second- class citizens or often worse, on the periphery of the empire when brought together with Chinese farmers not belonging to the empire, the Japanese authorities protected the Koreans as its own subjects. The narrator explains this logic as follows:

He [Hao Yongde] and his company had experience doing business with the police and the consul because he shared the same interest with police officer Nakagawa. Within ten years, he plans to hire large groups of Goryŏs all registered in the paddy field [business] to cultivate the land of Changchun Nong’an region under the auspices of the Japanese empire. After ten years, the Goryŏs will gradually have left their native country and grown in numbers in Changchun Nong’an. The Goryŏs will have become Japanese nationals and they can be used for aggression policies of imperialism. This is also one method of the Japanese invasion of China.

他做經歷，是因為同中川警部要好的原故，這公司，是警部和領事商議好開辦，打算十年之內，把長春農安一帶地方，都籍著水田的名義，僱大批高麗人來種，收到日本帝國的勢力之下。十年之後，高麗人在本土漸漸減少，在長春農安一帶卻正正加多，以高麗人是日本的國民關係，就可以從事實行發展帝國主義的侵略政策了，這也是日本人侵略中國的一種手段。71

With this explanation, the narrator aims to elucidate the disparate economic development and the discriminatory underpinnings of capitalism. The recognition of these underpinnings is necessary to vindicate the initial distrust among Chinese farmers towards the “strangers.” The word Gaoliren

(Goryŏ people) used by the Chinese farmers and the narrator to refer to Koreans destabilizes divisive racial categories from the beginning. Both in speech and text, Japanese authorities use terms such as

71 Li Huiying, Wangbaoshan (Shanghai: Hufeng Shuju, 1933), 27.

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Chaoxianren, Hanguoren, Hanmin, and Xianren. Contrastingly, “Goryŏ people” reinvokes relationships prior to Japanese imperialism and normalizes the presence of Koreans in Wanbaoshan Village and puts locals on par with the Chinese farmers inhabiting the region for generations.72 In addition, the absence of any linguistic tension smoothens the communication among Koreans and Chinese, albeit favoring the Chinese language including many local words, whose meanings are provided in footnotes for readers unfamiliar with the local dialect. Whereas in Kang Kyŏng-ae’s “Salt” and Kuroshima’s

Militarized Streets East Asians speak with accents when talking a foreign language, which we will also see later in Kaji Wataru and Xia Yan’s works, where characters struggle with or learn the other’s language reflecting the actual linguistic barriers, the Koreans in Wanbaoshan Village speak Chinese as if they are native to area.73

Halfway through the story, the narrative reaches a turning point. The local villagers observe tens of Goryŏ families together with their luggage and animals moving into the region. The Korean foremen are instructed by the Japanese authorities to prevent any interaction between the Korean coolies and Chinese villagers (zhaolie de jingguo zhequn kulimen buzhun tong zhongguoren jiejin).74

Similar to censorship strategies preventing any reference to international solidarity among proletarians in writing, the authorities also tried to block direct interaction among Korean and

72 During a speech of a student explaining the evils of Japanese imperialism, he refers to the area west of Harbin close to Changchun and Jilin as “Fuyu” (扶餘) or Buyŏ in Korean, the pre-Goguryŏ and Baekje kingdom, invoking ancient relationships similar to Gaoliren (Goryŏ). Li Huiying, Wanbaoshan, 126. Also, many Han were recent immigrants to Manchuria often attracted by Japanese capital as opposed to Manchus. In the story Chinese are referred to as Zhongguoren rather than term Manzhouren used by Japanese authorities to refer to both Han and Manchus. Later, the Korean Kim Bok calls the Korean capital Hansŏng instead of Keijō (present-day Seoul) refusing to comply with the Japanese imperial terminology. 73 The story mentions that Koreans come from the Korean peninsula, but scholars have shown that the Koreans in the case of the Wanbaoshan Incident were often drifting workers within Manchuria. 74 Li Huiying, Wanbaoshan, 100.

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Chinese proletarians that could lead to solidarity and eventually to united revolt. If they do so, the foremen will fire them.

The description of coolies, villagers, farmers and other characters remains flat. Dialogues lack clear reference to an individual speaker, turning the sentences into a collective sequence. No detailed background information is provided, and characters appear and disappear throughout the story without explanation. The narrator introduces characters often in groups or merely by their occupation and none of the characters acts as protagonist. This makes it difficult for readers to relate to proletarian struggles. The narrator tries to solve this by providing short interventions clarifying the necessary background information for the story to progress. That is also the case with the octogenarian Goryŏ worker Kim Bok (Ch: Jin Fu) who lives close to the Zhang family, of which Zhang

Fu is the husband. These two figures, sharing the same first name (福), suddenly appear to initiate a conversation about Kim’s struggles that the narrative uses to exemplify Korean struggles in general.

Telling about the loss of several sons killed by Japanese soldiers and the exploitation of Koreans by the

Japanese empire, neighbors Kim and Zhang show how, despite regulations to block interaction, proletarians can create space to talk to each other and to learn about each other’s struggle.75

After Kim’s story provides the reader with an example of the hardships experienced by

Koreans, the Chinese villagers are still described as lacking any understanding of them. Another crucial character, the student Li Jingping suddenly appears to act as an interlocutor. Presented as the urban intellectual capable of grasping historical totality, Li Jingping attempts to enlighten the sceptical and ignorant villagers presumably leading to class consciousness. In his speech, the student

75 Ibid., 105-118.

305 explains that “the root of evil” is not Korean workers, but Japanese authorities, Chinese police, and

Korean foremen, who all work together to exploit the Chinese and Korean proletarians.76 This exploitation serves the larger plan designed by the Japanese authorities and Chinese nationalists to transform Manchuria into a buffer zone against the “big noses” (Russians) and their “XXland”

(censored in the original).

The student explains the situation to the villagers and the terrible fate faced by Korean workers under Japanese colonialism. This is not to say, however, that the student’s speech has immediately enlightened proletarians with means to practice solidarity. Rather than a top-down hierarchical relationship, where vanguard intellectuals lead proletarians to their liberation, it is the actual encounter between Chinese farmers and Korean immigrants and their direct experience of each other’s livelihood that is crucial in producing proletarian solidarity. The Chinese proletarians show their sympathy when they see the bodies of hard-working Korean immigrants fatigued and malnourished. They recognize that Korean struggles are mutual and decide to “unite as masses, preparing an armed resistance (tuanjie qi qunzhong de liliang, zhunbei hao wuli),”77 or a war against war, an international war machine against imperial violence. Solidarity among the Korean and

Chinese proletarians is solidified as tobacco is gifted by a Korean worker to a Chinese farmer.

They are all the same class and they sympathize with each other. Then, a Chinese farmer rests his plow in his hands and reaches to the tobacco pipe from the stranger. “Here, have a puff of tobacco.” The man took the tobacco pipe from the tobacco purse hanging on his belt and handed it over without hesitation. While doing the exploitative work he smiled and said, “Try your tobacco.” The tobacco pipe was full and orderly and after fully filled returned back to the owner. For a while the two blew out smoke from their mouths.

76 Ibid., 123-128. 77 Ibid., 129.

306

“They too are poor and suffer. It’s the same. When the poor unite together, they can rely on each other’s strength and live together, eat together. They don’t need to rely on officials and the wealthy. Isn’t that great? Both sides were thinking the same. For coolies, to have such thoughts in their hearts is the most precious that has not yet been stripped away.

都是同一階級的人, 彼此是很同情的，這時，那中國農人會歇下手的鋤，要那異國人的煙袋。「來，抽一袋。」那人從掛在褲帶上的煙荷包裡掏出煙袋，毫不答氣的遞過去，一面做著自己被剝削的工，一面笑著說，「嘗嘗你們的煙。」煙裝好，點好，全由那人代辦，然後送還本主，過一會兩個人的口中都有煙往外冒。「他們也是窮人，苦人，一個樣，窮人同窮人連在一起，大家靠自己力量共同做活，共同吃飯，不求管家，不靠財主，不是很好一件事情嗎？」兩方面同樣的想，惟有這裡在內心裡的想頭，在他們苦力中是最難得，尚末被剝奪的東西。78

The Korean and Chinese workers have recognized each other's suffering, which establishes a social bond. During the exchange of the tobacco something peculiar occurs. Supposedly, the Korean worker offers his tobacco to the Chinese farmer, but he says literally “your tobacco” (nimen de yan), suggesting that the tobacco does not belong merely to him, but is supposed to be shared among proletarians just like they work the (tobacco) fields together. The Koreans are no longer completely unknown

“strangers” (moshengren), but familiar “peregrines” (yiguoren) with whom they share living space. This transformation is necessary for both sides to overcome mechanisms of division between workers. By doing so, the proletarians have subverted the divisive racial categories imposed by the imperial apparatus, acknowledging their belonging to the same class which cuts across ethnicity (and gender) and formulates a new subjectivity. The villagers and workers organized themselves based on their own terms as the international proletariat prepared to fight the oppressors. Despite numerous attempts of the authorities to block interaction between Korean and Chinese workers, they cannot control their “precious thoughts” (zuinande), that is like the war machine, exterior to the state apparatus.

78 Ibid., 156-157.

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The encounter between the Chinese farmers and Korean immigrants illustrates a fold of a subject/object relation. Informed by the Baroque, Deleuze describes the fold as: “The Baroque (…) endlessly produces folds. (…) twists and turns its folds, pushing them into infinity, fold over fold, one upon the other. The Baroque fold unfurls all the way to infinity.”79 Similar to a Möbius strip, the interior is enfolded into the exterior and vice versa of a spacetime continuum, undoing dualities from their separation. For Deleuze, a body “has a degree of hardness as well as a degree of fluidity,”80 as we have seen in the becomings of the previous chapter. Likewise, the Chinese farmers and Korean immigrants deterritorialize the overcoding of their bodies by the state apparatus in order to initiate a becoming between them. As such, the attempt is to overcome imperial divisions of an us-versus-them and acknowledge that alterity is already folded into a self. For the encounter to be possible, however, a smoothing of striated space is necessary.

While in Militarized Streets soldiers smoothened the striated space of the military state apparatus, the proletarians in Wanbaoshan Village act from what Deleuze and Guattari call the

“exteriority of the war machine.”81 They describe this exteriority as “a form irreducible to the State,” which “escapes States or stands against States.”82 As non-Japanese imperial subjects, the Chinese villagers are nomadic and exist outside the state. They utilize their war machine to detach the Korean migrants from the state, forming a new pack in the assemblage as a formation of “a common

79 Gilles Deleuze, The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), 3. 80 Ibid., 6. 81 Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 354. 82 Ibid., 360-361.

308 aggregate.”83 In other words, as tobacco is gifted between two groups who were previously in opposition to one another, the migrants undo their being-imperial subject and being-migrant. They move from the striated space to the smooth space, changing their position into becoming-nomadic and entering the war machine. Together, they form a war machine, smoothing striated and sedentary space to launch their guerilla attacks on the state apparatus.

With the assembled front between farmers and migrants, tensions arise between the authorities and proletarians. Broker Hao is beaten by proletarians and there is a clash with Japanese and Chinese armed police forces after a labor stoppage. The authorities send reinforcements to crush the potential revolt and try in vain to prohibit proletarians from gathering in groups (buzhun renqun jihe). The Japanese consulate in Changchun stresses that the Korean workers are subjects of the

Japanese empire (Hanmin shi dariben diguo de shumin) as a last attempt to divide the proletarians.

The proletarians establish a self-defence force (ziweijun), a war machine of both men and women to protect their lands and to prepare for a war against Japanese imperialism. The narrative unfolds towards the climax of the story; the start of the war against (imperial) war. Kim Bok reappears to mobilize the proletarians for war against Japanese imperialism. In his final speech, he informs them that “the suffering farmers from various places must unite and attack them [Japanese imperialists] all with one heart not fearing death and fight with all our might, then we can obtain the final victory and take back our freedom!”84 In his speech, Kim Bok connects the current struggle in Wanbaoshan Village to other struggles in the East Asia region and elsewhere, showing an understanding of the intricate

83 Ibid., 380. 84 Li Huiying, Wanbaoshan, 219.

309 relationships between various spaces. He stresses that they “should not be divided along national borders, not restricted to any space (buxian difang), united all together.”85 Kim Bok thus highlights that proletarian solidarity requires to smoothen counterproductive striations, such as national borders, for a nomadic space to be possible.

Through a sequence of enunciated slogans, the international proletarian solidarity reaches a zenith after the proletarians win the battle against the oppressors. Regarding how the proletarians can maintain their solidarity is left open ended, as milieus always remain open and subject to change.

Instead, the last two chapters show the surprise among Japanese and Chinese authorities about the media reporting the proletarian victory. The news stirs the population of Changchun to join the

Wanbaoshan Village revolt. As a response, the authorities decide to dispatch hundreds of armed forces. Moreover, the police officer Nakagawa orders a journalist Kim Yi-saeng from the Chosŏn Ilbo

(Chosŏn Daily) to manipulate the events in favor of the Japanese imperial regime, blaming the

Chinese for the massacre of Koreans. These fake news articles aim to arouse animosity among Chinese and Koreans. The narrator hopes to expose how the authorities use the mass media to influence public opinion and create rifts among proletarians, not unlike Kuroshima’s depiction of the military misinforming the media and home front.

Li’s novel is not only the start of resistance literature, but also embodies this fragile yet important possibility of proletarian solidarity at a crucial moment in history immediately after the

Manchurian incident and on the eve of Sino-Japanese war. If many resistance writers chose to follow the polarizing environment by depicting the struggle against Japanese imperialism within a national

85 Ibid., 219-220.

310 framework, Li was among the few proletarian writers who located the strength of the proletariat in international solidarity.

4.4 Reconfiguring Spaces of Solidarity in Wartime East Asia: Kaji Wataru’s We, Seven and Xia Yan’s Lilicao

On September 30, 1933, the prominent political figure Song Qinglin (1893-1981) opens the meeting in Shanghai officially titled “The Second International Meeting against Imperialist Wars”

(Guoji fandui diguozhuyi zhanzheng huiyi di erci dahui) attended by representatives such as Henri

Barbusse, Mao Zedong (1893-1976), and Maxim Gorky (1868-1936), among many others. In her speech,

Song stresses the need to respond to imperial violence with equal measures. She tells the guests that:

“It makes complete sense that the revolutionary class uses armed force to oppose suppression. It is completely correct that the suppressed peoples use armed force striving for national liberation (minzu jiefang). Under these two circumstances an armed struggle is necessary because the reactionary forces will never voluntarily give up their power.”86 Song’s message resonates with the strategy proposed by

Kuroshima in his “Treatise on Antiwar Literature” four years earlier, and highlights recurring concern among proletarian antiwar and anti-imperial discourse in East Asia.

Although many activists and artists in East Asia, especially those residing in the Japanese

Empire could not attend, Song sent telegrams (hedian) immediately after the meeting to representatives in Japan, Korea, Vietnam as well as various places in China proper. These telegrams

86 Song Qingling, “Zhongguo de ziyou yu fanzhan douzheng – zai Shanghai fanzhan dahuishang de yanci,” Zhongguo luntan 2, no. 11 (1933). Reprinted in Fandong fanzhan huiyi jinianji, 214.

311 shared the content of the meeting and was a way to show solidarity with them.87 Proletarian groups in the Japanese empire used similar ways of communication to express their solidarity with the Antiwar

Meeting in Shanghai. For example, Korean and Japanese workers sent letters written in Esperanto to

Shanghai which were translated and published in Fanzhan Xinwen.88

Growing imperial violence across East Asia had significant implications in the realm of proletarian cultural production. Around the mid-1930s, all proletarian movements within the

Japanese empire had dissolved, which seriously affected distribution channels and publishing means.

Those in China proper soon followed as a result of GMD suppression or opted to create united and bipartisan fronts against Japanese imperialism. To continue proletarian activism, proletarian movements joined hands with humanists, nationalists, and pacifists, under the banner of a united or popular front (人民戦線) against imperialism and fascism, including proletarian writers Kaji Wataru and

Xia Yan. In addition to changes in infrastructure, the format and storylines of proletarian art had to adjust to the new realities of wartime East Asia. The Japanese imperial government tightened censorship and (often forcefully) had proletarian writers undergo political conversion (tenkō) to silence any opposition against the imperial enterprise and undermine proletarian activism.89 As a

87 Fandong fanzhan huiyi jinianji, 819. While it was difficult to communicate between China and the Japanese empire, information about Korean and Taiwanese antiwar movements active both in Korea and Taiwan as well as in China circulated across the mainland. See for example the publication Huang Shoupeng (ed.), Diguo de fanzhan yundong (Chongqing, Duli Chu banshe, 1940), 45-47. In addition, Chinese activists translated Korean and Taiwanese (proletarian) writers, such as Yang Kui (1905-1985), Lü Heruo (1914-1951), and Li Pungmyŏng (1908-?), whose works written in Japanese considered to present anti-imperial and anti-colonial struggles. See for example, Hu Feng (trans.), Shanling: Chaoxian Taiwan duanpianji (Shanghai: Wenhua Shenghuo Chubanshe, 1936). 88 See Fanzhan Xinwen, no. 1 (1933): 3-4. See also Chapter 2, n134. 89 For more on political conversion in prewar Japan see, Richard H. Mitchell, Thought Control in Prewar Japan (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1976); Max M. Ward, Thought Crime: Ideology and State Power in Interwar Japan (Durham: Duke University Press, 2019).

312 result, many proletarian writers residing in the Japanese empire turned toward either more

(self-)reflective and historical narratives or quit writing, often abandoning proletarian activism entirely. Others, especially those active in China proper, searched for new vocabulary and settings to continue the proletarian international project following the dissolvement of the League of Left-Wing

Writers in 1936 and debates on National Defense Literature.90 Examining the gradual shift in representation of proletarian struggles in War of Resistance literature from 1937 onward, literary scholar Zhang Quanzhi observes that “national problems” become the focal point and deferred “class problems.”91 This resulted in a new type of “antiwar hero” (kangzhan yingxiong) and a “brave Chinese people” (Zhongguo renmin yingyong) emerges, forcing proletarian writers to be careful when balancing patriotic praise and government critique.92 Thus, class critiques such as Kuroshima and Li’s moved to the background to comply with GMD policies and the patriotic apotheosis of ethnic nationalism. Moreover, with urban spaces under siege and occupied, rural and interior spaces remained the last valid sites to imagine resistance and solidarity.93

90 Around the dissolvement of the League of Left-wing Writers in 1936 and the start of War of Resistance literature in 1937, intellectuals and writers discussed the so-called National Defence literature (Guofang wenxue) between 1935 and 1936. Literary theorist Zhou Yang (1908-1989) had propagated the slogan “National defense Literature,” supporting the renewed united front between the CCP and GMD against Japanese aggression and calling for a literature that could contribute to the rescue of the nation. The slogan was countered by Hu Feng’s (1902-1985) “Minzu geming zhanzheng de dazhong wenxue” (popular literature on the national revolutionary war) and supported by many League of Left-Wing writers, which called for a literature that continued proletarian literature’s class critique while also contributing to the national resistance against Japanese imperialism. 91 Zhang Quanzhi, Huo yu ge: Zhongguo xiandai wenxue, wenren yu zhanzheng, 188-209. 92 Ibid., 202-203. 93 Zhang Quanzhi argues that since the “novel of rural problems” (nongcun wenti xiaoshuo) initiated by Lu Xun, Chinese writers have predominantly focused on farmers instead of soldiers quite different from Soviet writers. In my following discussion of Li Huiying and Xia Yan we also see that farmers and rural villagers play a key role in revolutionary aspirations and proletarian solidarity. Ibid., 192-193.

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After the outbreak of the Sino-Japanese War, Kaji Wataru, who had fled a year earlier from

Tokyo to Shanghai to avoid arrest for his political activism, moved to the central and southern interiors of China proper together with other (proletarian) writers to find a safe-haven. Once he arrived, he continued his literary and journalistic production, and started planning and organizing antiwar activities while joining the popular front. Despite frequent opposition by the GMD, Kaji received permission from the authorities to initiate his antiwar project first in a POW camp educating prisoners, followed by the founding of his antiwar alliance which had the purpose of persuading

Japanese soldiers to stop fighting. Until 1941, Kaji was actively involved with the Chinese resistance learning how to reach Japanese soldiers, publish and distribute antiwar materials, and to introduce the antiwar alliance to Chinese locals. Once the GMD canceled Kaji’s antiwar activities and dismantled the Antiwar Alliance out of fear of “red” contamination, he no longer had the freedom to execute large-scale antiwar projects. He kept a low-profile until 1945 when he returned to Japan.94

If Kaji focused mostly on antiwar activities through direct physical agitation, Xia Yan continued to invest in his literary production serving the resistance. With the outbreak of the war, Xia followed a similar trajectory as Kaji, heading towards GMD-occupied interiors via Hong Kong to join the Third Branch (Disanting), a gathering place for proletarian artists within the GMD umbrella of resistance organizations. Xia created publishing opportunities as an editor of Jiuwang Ribao (Salvation

Daily) for proletarian writers such as Kaji. Further, Xia was actively involved as a translator and

94 For a detailed biographical overview of Kaji Wataru see Inoue Keiko, Chūgoku de hansen heiwa katsudō o shita Nihonjin: Kaji Wataru no shisō to shōgai (Tokyo: Yachiyo Shuppan, 2012), and for Kaji’s postwar activities see Erik Esselstrom, “From Wartime Friend to Cold War Fiend: The Abduction of Kaji Wataru and U.S.-Japan Relations at Occupation’s End,” Journal of Cold War Studies 17, no. 3 (2015): 159-183.

314 interpreter for Kaji’s Antiwar Alliance, publishing several Chinese editions of his reportage works and plays. Besides translating, Xia wrote several plays and essays analysing Sino-Japanese relations during the war and exploring his own positionality regarding his interactions with the Japanese Antiwar

Alliance.

Kaji Wataru and POW Solidarity in Peace Village

After leaving Japan for China proper in 1936, Kaji soon realized that cooperating with the

Chinese resistance created opportunities to continue proletarian international solidarity. Locating such opportunities, Kaji aimed to educate Japanese POWs and to help them understand the causes and implications of war, which was necessary to organize an international collective against Japanese imperialism. After the first successful attempts, Kaji founded the Nihon hansen dōmei (Japanese

Antiwar Alliance) together with former POWs and with the help of the Chinese resistance. This alliance visited the frontlines to persuade Japanese soldiers to stop fighting and join the resistance.

Earlier proletarian writers including Kuroshima and Li imagined solidarity in their fiction; Kaij practiced it directly with resistance and volunteer armies capturing these moments in his reportage works. He organized an East Asia antiwar front and countered ethnic hostilities among East Asians reproducing the racism of the empire.

Based on his observations of and conversations with POWs, Kaji wrote his first reportage work after his arrival in China titled Heiwamura-ki (Record of Peace Village),95 of which about half was

95 Kaji Wataru, Heiwamura-ki (Tokyo: Chūō Kōronsha, 1947). For a more detailed analysis of Kaji’s Record of Peace Village see my forthcoming paper, “Fighting Fascism with ‘Verbal Bullets’: Kaji Wataru and the Antifascist Struggle in Wartime East Asia,” Fascism: Journal of Comparative Fascist Studies.

315 translated into Chinese and published in installments in Jiuwang Ribao and edited by Xia Yan. Record of Peace Village was the first of several reportage works Kaji wrote during his years in China proper.

His choice for reportage as the format to convey the situation of the POWs to his audience corresponds to a trend within proletarian literature both in East Asia and elsewhere originating in the

1920s. Literary scholar Charles Laughlin describes reportage literature as “any deliberately literary nonfiction text that narrates or describes a current event, person, or social phenomenon,” used by international proletarian cultural movements as “agitational investigative reports on the labor movement.”96 According to Laughlin, the claim of veracity “creates new possibilities for imaginative literary expressions” as opposed to literary fiction, such as “modes of consciousness and identity other than individuality and a shift of focus in the production of meaning from characters to places and events.”97 Exploring these new possibilities, proletarian writers like Kaji preferred reportage over literary fiction when writing agitational reports about places and events during the Sino-Japanese

War. In Record of Peace Village, Kaji explores POW camps as spaces where opposing ideological groups mingle, presenting encounters of exchange and opportunities for a proletarian vision of solidarity to emerge. Not without adversities and obstacles, Kaji aimed to educate the POWs about the causes and dangers of the current imperial war and to nurture mutual understanding among the

POWs by laying bare their conflicting positionalities.98

96 Charles A. Laughlin, Chinese Reportage: The Aesthetics of Historical Experience (Durham: Duke University Press, 2002), 2. 97 Ibid., 3. 98 In his study of the aforementioned Nonwar Movement, Konishi described similar tactics among anarchist, such as Kōtoku Shūsui (1871-1911), “facilitating ties between Russian POW’s in Japan and Russian revolutionaries abroad and educating Russian POWs in socialist ideas.” Konishi Sho, Anarchist Modernity: Cooperatism and Japanese-Russian Intellectual Relations in Modern Japan, 197-203.

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Record of Peace Village offers a glimpse of the challenges faced by antiwar activists such as Kaji

Wataru. During his two-week stay in Peace Village, Kaji met with many “villagers” learning about their worldviews and how they experienced the war. He portrayed a rich account of various individuals trying to make sense of their realities during wartime. The stories of mentally broken soldiers forced into war and Korean refugees continuously harassed by the empire urge readers to complicate their views of war, distinguishing the actual enemy from the apparent enemy. Repeatedly, Kaji portrayed his narrative of Korean and Japanese common folks as victims of the war to convey to the Chinese resistance that bridges needed to be built among peoples across East Asia in order to defeat Japanese imperialism. Ultimately, Record of Peace Village laid the foundation for Kaji’s antiwar activities during his years in China proper, most notably an antiwar branch in Guilin from where he and the other members directly sought contact with Japanese soldiers to convert them using “verbal bullets” (kotoba no dangan).

Firing “Verbal Bullets” at the Enemy: Frontline Solidarity

If Record of Peace Village presented a contained space, namely the POW camp, where Kaji could experiment with assembling solidarity among the villagers, the reportage work Warera shichinin (We, Seven) and Kotoba no dangan (Verbal Bullets), a collection of correspondences sent by

Kaji, focus predominantly on antiwar activities at the battlefield.99 Both are first-person narratives fulfilling the role of reporter and depicting open spaces where soldiers were in direct opposition to

99 Kaji could not publish his Japanese manuscripts during the war and only the Chinese translations by Shen Qiyu were published as Women qigeren (1943) and Jizi huoxianshang de xin (1945). After the war Kaji published most of his wartime writings in Japanese. We Seven and Verbal Bullets were both published in 1947.

317 each other on the battlefield. Moreover, teaming with the Chinese resistance, Kaji’s Antiwar Alliance also had to assure the Chinese resistance and local communities that “Japanese military cliques are the enemy and the Japanese people are friends.”100 Kaji returned to Wuhan where he started his preparations for the establishment of an antiwar alliance. Helped by Guilin general Wu You (dates unknown), Kaji managed to convince Chiang Kai-shek of the importance of a Japanese antiwar alliance to help the Chinese resistance. He founded the alliance in Guilin in December 1939 together with eleven members selected from the POW camp Sosei Gakuen.101 After relocating the eleven members from Sosei Gakuen to a different facility, Kaji began a thorough training to prepare the members for antiwar activities on the battlefield. Part of this training was a daily two-hour Chinese language class for all members which was considered crucial for communication with Chinese resistance and locals. After a month, the antiwar alliance moved to one of the battlefields to launch an antiwar front, the purpose of which was to confront Japanese soldiers with the realities of war and persuading them to desert.

On their way to the battlefield crossing the Chinese military defense line, Kaji is baffled by the farmers working in the field seemingly not aware of the war. Kaji’s surprise at the lack of awareness of war in the apparently peaceful landscape is juxtaposed immediately by the sight of Chinese soldiers at the military defense line. Surrounded by Chinese soldiers, Kaji communicates with them by writing in

Chinese on the ground.

When we arrived at the Chinese military defense line, we were surrounded by twenty to thirty Chinese soldiers, but when they saw me write on the ground [in Chinese] “I am an anti-imperialist. We are brothers,” immediately a feeling of affection appeared in their eyes. They asked me with gestures if I was hungry and gave me rice, eggs

100 Kaji Wataru, Warera shichinin (Tokyo: Chūō kōronsha, 1947), 4. 101 Inoue, Chūgoku de hansen heiwa katsudō o shita Nihonjin: Kaji Wataru no shisō to shōgai, 93.

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and hot water. The chief in everyday clothes was a man who looked like a typical revolutionary soldier, but he took my hand and patted my back as if he were saying “don’t worry.” I received a preferential treatment at the division’s headquarters, but the kindness of the young brothers (comrades) who welcomed me warmly at the frontline with rice, eggs and hot water has left a stronger impact on me.

中国軍防備線に達した時、二三十人の中国兵に囲まれましたが、私が地面に我是反帝国主義者。我們是兄弟也と書くのを見て、彼らの眼にすぐさま親愛の情が浮んで来て、手まねで私に飢ゑてゐるかと問ひ、飯と卵と湯とをくれました。そこの連長は便衣で、いかにも革命戦士といふ風貌の男でしたが、私の手を握り、背を叩き、心配するなといふやうなことを言つてゐるやうでした。師団司令部では頗る優待されましたが、しかし私は、最前線で飯と卵と湯とで歓待してくれた若い兄弟らの好意の方が強く印象に残つてゐます。102

Whereas previous generations of literati in Asia used their brushes to write in classical Chinese to communicate, as mentioned in Chapter 2, Kaji wrote in contemporary Chinese which was quite uncommon.103 While not able to speak Chinese well, he was able to avoid any misunderstandings with proficiency in written Chinese. Moreover, shared terms such as “anti-imperialist” or “comrades” allowed Kaji to overcome any tension by changing the tone of the encounter from hostile to amicable.

A sense of sympathy is immediate as the soldiers offer Kaji food and water as a gift as well as shaking hands as ways to solidify their bond. This bond is further strengthened when general Wu expresses his friendship to Kaji by writing on the ground in Chinese that “you are a true friend of China.”104

Throughout the narrative, Kaji’s group continuously invests in establishing friendships with locals and members of the Chinese resistance. Besides Kaji, Nanbu can also speak and write a little

102 Kaji Wataru, Warera shichinin (Tokyo: Chūō Kōronsha, 1947), 20. 103 Christopher T. Keaveney describes brushtalk (筆談) as “[t]raditionally, the ink brush had served as the chief tool of literary expression in East Asia and […] written literary Chinese was the medium for intercultural exchange among intellectuals throughout East Asia. […] Brushtalk refers specifically to the practice of communication in East Asia among literate individuals, incapable of speaking one another's language, by means of written classical Chinese.” Christopher T. Keaveney, Beyond brushtalk: Sino-Japanese literary exchange in the interwar period (imprint Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2009), 2-3. 104 Kaji Wataru, Warera shichinin, 20.

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Chinese which he learned during his training. Not shy at all, Nanbu often tries to break the ice with locals and soldiers.

In the evening we refuelled at CC. When the comrades got off the car and smoked cigarettes, peasant children approached us. Suddenly, one of them noticed the cap badge of our alliance members and shouted while running away. Chinese soldiers gathered. They stared at us seemingly amazed. An impolite one looked at the alliance badge on Sakamoto’s chest reading “Japanese People in China…,” “Japanese!” he informed his buddies. “POW?” “Apparently not.” Apparently, the driver explained it to them. On their faces appeared feelings of amazement and affection. Immediately Nanbu got close with the locals. He caught one of the Chinese soldiers without minding his surprise and stared at his insignia reading aloud, “Qiche…bingtuan…xiashi.” “Your surname is Li? That’s good.” The other was taken aback and laughed. Nanbu was in a good mood, “You’re still young but already a non- commissioned officer. Chinese soldiers promote so quickly. Even though they look like children they are often already private first-rank soldiers. Good, good. Do a proper job!” He patted his shoulder and greeted him. Everyone laughed. Then [Nanbu] suddenly took out his cigarettes and foisted one to him. “Let’s smoke.” “I don’t smoke. Thank you.” “No need to be so polite. You tell me Chinese soldiers don’t smoke!” The young soldier who endured Nanbu’s pushy questions ran away looking embarrassed.

夕刻 CC にて給油。車をおりて同志らが煙草を吸つてゐると、百姓の小供らが私たちに近づいてきた。ふとその一人が同盟員の帽章に気がついて、駆け去りながら大声をあげた。中国兵たちが集まつて来た。不思議そうにじろじろ眺めてゐる。ぶしつけなのが坂本の胸の同盟員章をのぞき込み、「在華日本人民…」と読み、「日本人だ！」と仲間たちに告げた。「俘虜か？」「違うらしい。」運転手が説明したものらしい。兵士らの顔に驚きと親愛の情が表はれてゐた。すぐさま南部は土地の者と仲よしになる。一人の中国兵をつかまへて、びつくりしてゐるのを構はずに、彼の胸章をのぞき込み、「汽車兵団…下士…」と読み上げた。「姓李？很好啊。」相手は面くらつて笑つてゐる。南部はすつかり上機嫌で、「若いのに、これがもう下士だ！中国兵は進級が早いからなあ。子供のやうなので、上等兵てのがよくあるぜ。好好！しっかりやれよ！」肩を叩いて、あいさつしてゐる。皆笑つてゐる。いきなり煙草を出して、一本相手押しつけた。「喫煙吧」「不喫煙、謝々。」「不要客気！不要客気！中国兵士不喫煙嗎！」とうとう南部から襲撃をくらつた若い兵は、すつかり照れながら逃げ出した。105

105 Kaji, Warera shichinin, 29-30. The parts in italics are written in Chinese.

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The Japanese and Chinese badges on uniforms and hats worn by soldiers are mutually intelligible due to the shared script, especially as formal Japanese often used only kanji. As Kaji’s antiwar alliance is still unknown to the locals and military in the region, an interpreter explains their position which immediately evokes sympathy. Furthermore, Nanbu also speaks a few words of Chinese which helps him to communicate with the locals. He offers cigarettes as a symbol to express his friendship, not unlike how the Korean immigrant and Chinese farmer in Li’s novel exchange tobacco. After the shy soldier runs away, the Vehicle Corps Leader Zheng welcomes Kaji, who informs bystanders that “the

Chinese government sees the Japanese people (jinmin) as our friends.” The encounter represents another moment of solidarity. After a direct interaction interpreting the symbols worn on their uniforms, the initial hostility has changed into comradeship. The scene ends with Chinese locals and soldiers offering tea in a display of gratitude to the Antiwar Alliance for joining the resistance against

Japanese imperialism.

Besides engaging in friendly encounters with locals and resistance soldiers, Kaji’s antiwar alliance also visits the frontlines directly to talk to Japanese soldiers in an attempt to convince them to stop fighting and join the resistance. Among their activities are translating documents and Japanese radio broadcasts, preparing leaflets, and collecting war diaries and letters from dead soldiers. Another activity of note is the Antiwar Alliance’s antiwar messages and lectures in the direction of the

Japanese bases transmitted via an electronic megaphone (hasseiki). This required the cooperation with the Chinese military to coordinate their activities. After the group had tested earlier how far their microphone could reach, they hid in the mountains 400 metres from the Japanese military base. The

Chinese officer informed the Chinese soldiers first in Chinese of the identity of the speaker. Kaji had

321 to overcome these national and linguistic borders, which resembled the problems Kuroshima and Li dealt with in their literature, in order to connect various groups into an East Asia anti-imperial front.

This was made even more difficult due to continuous efforts by the Japanese imperial government and military to solidify a homogenous national and linguistic unity for which the voice was a perfect medium. As Tsuboi Hideto observes in his study of the voice in war poetry, poets in service of the empire wrote poetry “in beautiful Japanese to embody the sense of community among Japanese.”106

These poets not only disseminated their voice in print but also through radio broadcasts and public recitations.107 Through an extensive information network of telecommunications across East Asia, the

Japanese empire broadcasted these poetic voices to battlefields in order to elevate the spirits of imperial soldiers. Kaji had to find ways to infiltrate the sonic fascism to have his own antiwar voice reach the ears of the same soldiers. In previous chapters, we saw how Akita Ujaku and Hasegawa Teru experimented with broadcasting their voices to undermine the voices of the empire. Likewise, Kaji tried to penetrate the sonic walls of the enemy with his speeches amplified by the megaphone.108

However, whereas Hasegawa could use Esperanto to overcome linguistic and national borders, Kaji had to bring the Japanese language into variation through passage words in order to deterritorialize the fascist overcoding.

The speeches by the Antiwar Alliance were in Japanese and were preceded by the officer warning the Chinese not to mistake the alliance for enemies. They stressed the friendship between

106 Tsuboi Hideto, Koe no shukusai: Nihon kindaishi to sensō (Nagoya: Nagoya Daigaku Shuppankai, 1997), 203. 107 Ibid., 233-248. 108 For a discussion of Chinese and Japanese propaganda, including megaphones and amplifiers, see, Barak Kushner, The Thought War: Japanese Imperial Propaganda (Honolulu: University of Hawaiʽi Press, 2006).

322 the Chinese and Japanese resistance and that they were fighting a shared enemy. Then Kaij would start his antiwar speech. In his speech, Kaji explained the wrongs of the current war and insisted that the Chinese resistance treat all POWs with respect, thus debunking any rumor to the contrary. He asked the soldiers to stop fighting or surrender as it was the only way to create “peace in the East”

(Tōyō heiwa) and prevent further bloodshed.

Fellow comrades! Fellow comrades! We are actually Japanese. We are your comrades! Comrades! We are Japanese who pray for comrades and (our) ancestral land that face unhappy and horrifying depths, and are fighting to rescue them. We are the Japanese People’s Antiwar Alliance. Today, I will tell you the shocking truth. Here are many Japanese comrades among the Chinese soldiers. Among these Japanese, many are soldiers like you. They have been deceived like you have to fight for the Japanese military cliques. Unfortunately, they were severely wounded and made into POWs. They have been cordially treated and cared for, and liberated by the Chinese army. Now, everyone has restored good health. Further, learning that this war is actually an aggressor war planned by the military authorities and that the peoples of both countries are victims of that [war], we have established here the Antiwar Alliance in order to fight the military authorities that have dragged Japan into such an unfortunate war, are disturbing peace in the East and are perishing the peoples of both countries, and in order to liberate the Japanese people. (…) The resistance war is a resistance against the invaders who crush the Eastern peoples and sacrifice the Japanese people and is all the more a friendly bond between the people of both countries against a shared enemy (…).

同胞諸君！同胞諸君！実は我々は日本人である。諸君の同胞だ！同胞だ！…怖るべき不幸の淵に臨んでゐる祖国と同胞とを念じ、その救ひのため戦つてゐる日本人だ！僕らは日本人民反戦同盟である。本日私はここに、諸君が肝をつぶすやうな事実をお報らせする。当方、中国軍中に多数の日本人同胞がゐるといふことだ。この日本人の中には、多数の、諸君と同じやうな軍人がゐる。彼らは諸君と同様日本軍閥のため戦争に駆り出され、不幸、重傷を負つて俘虜になつた。彼らは中国軍から手厚くかいほうされ、治療をうけて、今は皆丈夫になつた。そして、この戦争が、実は、軍部のたくらむ侵略戦争であり、両国人民はその犠牲であることを知り、日本をこんな不幸な戦争中にひき入れ、東洋平和をみだし、両国人民を亡す軍部と闘ふため、日本人民の解放のため、ここに反戦同盟を結んだのだ。 (…) …抗日とは実に、東亜諸民族を踏みにじり日本人民を犠牲にする侵略者に抵抗することであり、却つて両国人民の間には共同の敵に対する親しい結び合ひがあり(…)。109

109 Kaji, Warera shichinin, 82-83.

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Kaji opens his speech with a declaration of his nationality and ancestral land (sokoku) which resembles the rhetoric used by the empire to attract the attention of Japanese soldiers. He then shifts focus from this rhetoric and exposes the actual intentions of the aggressors to the demoralized soldiers. Although Kaji avoids any reference to proletarian internationalism, his final words, which call for a shared front of East Asians against Japanese imperialism, echo the same message of solidarity heard from writers such as Kuroshima and Li. Kaji refers to his microphone utterances as

“verbal bullets” (kotoba no dangan) or “voice bullets” (koe no dangan) in that they “fire at the hearts of the soldiers.” However, Kaji's Bullets are not lethal, and instead are used to encourage the Japanese soldiers to revolt against the military leadership.

The Antiwar Alliance expanded their program gradually.110 They included domestic and international news not available in the Japanese media. They also increased their number of antiwar speeches which had titles such as “Dare no tame no sensō ka” (The War for Whom?) and “Tōyō heiwa to wa nani ka” (What is Peace in the East?). Other members prepared manzai (comic acts),111 read passages from diaries and letters collected from soldiers killed in action, and sang folklore and local

Japanese songs. Other activities included dropping leaflets from airplanes, sending gifts such as baskets of tangerines with antiwar leaflets hidden underneath, and teaching Japanese slogans to

Chinese resistance fighters so that they could be used as a form of Kaji’s “verbal bullets.” In this way,

110 An example of their program is as follows: 1. Welcome by Kaji. 2. Entertainment program by Nakamura and Takano. 3. End of the year agitation speech by Sasaki. 4. Manzai titled “People’s revolution” by Kishimoto and Niida (新井田) 5. Entertainment broadcast. 6. Concluding remarks by Kaji, Kotoba no dangan, 121-123. 111 An example of a manzai presented to the Japanese soldiers using the microphone: If the war was over, I would like to go to my hometown. / How can you go home? How? / If I knew how then there would be nothing to worry about. (もしも戦争がすんだなら, 僕は故郷に帰りたい――どうして帰れる？どうしてよ？そいつがわかれば苦労がない…) Kaji, Kotoba no dangan, 93.

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Kaji developed a wide range of methods to communicate with locals, resistance activists, and soldiers.

He succeeded in assembling international antiwar and anti-imperial networks of solidarity among these groups which lasted until the end of the war.

Returning to Rural Manchuria/Northeast: Clashing Visions of Solidarity in Xia Yan’s Lush Grass

In the previous section, we saw that Xia Yan played a key role in supporting the Antiwar

Alliance led by Kaji Wataru. Xia was also an active translator of several Japanese (antiwar) works including Kuroshima Denji’s “Sori” (Sleigh), Hirabayashi Taiko’s “Hōki” (Abandonment) and

“Seryōshitsu ni te” (In the charity ward), Kaji’s writings, and Ishikawa Tatsuzō’s Ikite iru heitai (Living soldiers). The latter was especially significant as it was one of the few war accounts of the violence inflicted by the Japanese imperial army, the Nanjing Massacre (1937), that antiwar activists managed to circulate during the war.112 Besides translating, Xia wrote several plays during the War of Resistance which contributed to the body of antiwar and anti-imperial writings. Xia’s plays, however, differ from the bulk of War of Resistance literature by giving a more complicated portrayal of the enemy. Instead of duplicating the image of “riben guizi” (Japanese devils), Xia attempted to show that Japanese soldiers were also victims of Japanese imperialism and belong to the East Asian proletariat.

112 Kaji Wataru wrote the introduction for Xia’s translation of Ishikawa Tatsuzō’s Living Soldiers. For more on the various Chinese translations of Living Soldiers see Karen L. Thornber, Empire of texts in motion: Chinese, Korean, and Taiwanese transculturations of Japanese literature (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Asia Center, 2009) 189-192. For a discussion of Ishikawa Tatsuzō’s Living Soldiers see, David Askew, “Living Soldiers/Dying Soldiers: War and Decivilization in Ishikawa Tatsuzo's Soldiers Alive,” The Asia-Pacific Journal Japan Focus 3, no. 9 (2005): 1-9. Onishi Yasumitsu believes that Xia Yan might have received a copy of Living Soldiers through the Japanese bookstore Uchiyama in Shanghai provided by Ozaki Hideo (1901-1944), a journalist for Asahi Shinbun and spy for the Soviets, who established connections with members from the Left-wing League including Xia during his stay in Shanghai. Onishi Yasumitsu, Sensō o egaku riarizumu: Ishikawa Tatsuzō, Niwa Fumio, Tamura Taijirō o chūshin ni (Tokyo: Ōtsuki Shoten, 2014), 88-89.

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Furthermore, he introduced dilemmas faced by Japanese soldiers. They could either kill people they were forced to believe were their enemies or refuse to do so and face severe punishment. This is not unlike Ishikawa’s account in Living Soldiers.113 In doing so, Xia challenged the nationalistic and patriotic nature of War of Resistance literature while remaining loyal to proletarian internationalism.

This final section examines Xia’s play Lilicao (Lush Grass, 1944), focusing on how Xia depicted possibilities and limitations of solidarity that fit the larger themes of proletarian internationalism central to this chapter.114 Returning to the colonial space of rural Manchuria where the Japanese empire had brought colonized and colonizing East Asians together, Xia explored possibilities for proletarian solidarity across national boundaries to challenge the imperial narrative of “harmony among the five ethnic groups” (gozoku kyōwa). Like Kaji, Xia does not present international solidarity as untroubled and successful but instead brings to the foreground tensions between groups as they attempt to assemble solidarity during wartime.

Xia Yan finished Lush Grass in December 1944 and chose the title based on a poem by Bai Juyi,

“Grass on Ancient Plain: A Song of Farewell” (Fu de guyuan cao songbie).115 The poem, quoted partially

113 Earlier works such as his collaboration with Tian Han Dibing zhenzhong riji (Diaries from Enemy Troops) containing translations of diaries writing by fallen Japanese soldiers, his collection of essays titled Beiju de Riben (Japanese Tragedy) and another play Fasixi xijun (Fascist Bacteria) all express Xia’s sympathy toward Japanese commoners emphasizing that they are victims of war too. Moreover, Xia Yan had a brief correspondence with proletarian playwriter Hisaita Eijirō published in and organized by the journal Bungei (Literary Arts) as part of an exchange project between Chinese and Japanese writers, but the project was soon after terminated with the outbreak of the Sino-Japanese War. Ka En [Xia Yan], “Ka En kara Hisaita Eijirō he,” Bungei 5, no. 9 (1937): 231-235; Hitaita Eijirō, “Hisaita Eijirō kara Ka En he,” Bungei 5, no. 9 (1937): 235-239. 114 Chinese scholarship has mostly neglected Xia’s resistance works, including his plays, translations, and essays, considered inappropriate for the national narrative most likely as they deviate from the conventional and flat image of Japanese as “devils.” Only recently, scholars began to re-evaluate Xia Yan’s War of Resistance works. See for example chapters 4-7 in Zhongguo liuri zuojia guanzhao Riben de kangzhan wenxue, ed. Jin Mingquan (Chengdu: Bashu Shushe, 2013), 47-105. 115 Wu-chi Liu and Irving Yucheng Lo (eds.), Sunflower Splendor: Three Thousand Years of Chinese Poetry (Garden City: Anchor Books, 1975).

326 in Xia’s introduction, deals with the withering and rebirth of nature and supposedly symbolises the incessant effort of the resistance soldiers fighting Japanese fascism.116 A second quote is taken from

Carl von Clausewitz’s Vom Kriege (On War, 1832) about the importance of a solid defense to ward off invaders; this implies that as long as resistance soldiers and volunteers stand their ground, they can ward off the enemy.117

Xia quoting Von Clausewitz is of particular interest when read in conjunction with Deleuze and Guattari’s notion of the war machine and their reading of Von Clausewitz. As we recall, Deleuze and Guattari argue that war for nomadic warriors is a means to ward off state formation and to prevent centralization of power. For them, it is not nomadic wars in and of themselves, but rather the forms of movement and disposition that accompany such nomadic wars, that they connect to the notion of a war machine. Thus, the war machine does not necessarily wage war, but is able to take various forms against a state apparatus to which it attempts to remain exterior. With such an understanding they read Von Clausewitz, examining his concept of “absolute war” and “real war.”118

According to Deleuze and Guattari, the “real war” refers to the state’s effort to subjugate war to politics through the military, whereas “absolute war” refers to “a pure concept of war as absolute,

116 See Tian Qin, “Ping ‘Lilicao’,” Xinzhanshi, no.3 (1945): 46; Kikuchi Mitsugi, “Ka En, ‘Ririsō’ ni tsuite,” Chūgoku bungaku, no. 104 (1948): 508. 117 The quote reads: “Imagine a country where not only the large and prosperous town, but every sizable one is fortified and defended by its citizens and the farmers of the surrounding areas. The speed of military operations would be so reduced, and so much weight thrown into the scale by the defending inhabitants, that the skill and determination of the enemy commander would dwindle almost to insignificance.” Xia Yan, Lilicao (Kunming: Jinxiu Chuban Jiaoyushe, 1945), no page number given (second page). English translation taken from Carl von Clausewitz, On War, ed. and trans. Michael Howard and Peter Paret (Princeton; New Jersey: Prince University Press, 1989), 395. 118 Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 419-421.

327 unconditioned war, an Idea not given in experience.”119 They present their nomad war machine as absolute war with its “content adequate to the Idea, the invention of the Idea, with its own objects, space, and composition of the nomos.”120 The essence of war machines is their continuous struggle against the appropriation by the state apparatus rather than “the realization of war.”121 In previous sections, we saw how proletarian war machines used scattering, guerrilla, and nomadic strategies to resist imperial appropriation. Likewise, Xia Yan’s Lush Grass presents a form of war- guerilla warfare- different from the ‘real wars’ conducted by the state. It is a war machine aimed to ward off incorporation by the state apparatus.

Not a native to northeastern China, Xia conducted research on the area and consulted several

Chinese and Japanese sources before writing Lush Grass. An overview of sources in the introduction to Lush Grass includes articles such as “Manshū imin to bunson bunkyō keikaku” (Manchurian

Immigrants and Plans of Splitting Village and Townships, 1939)122 and Yang Jueyou’s “Riben Dongbei imin zhi jiantou” (Investigation of Japanese Immigrants in the Northeast, date unknown). It also includes works of fiction such as Yuasa Katsuei’s (1910-1982) “Senku imin” (Vanguard Immigrants,

1939) and the proletarian writer Shimaki Kensaku’s (1903-1945) Saiken (Reconstruction, 1937 but publication banned).123 Besides these sources, Xia also used his trip through the Korean peninsula and

Manchuria twenty years earlier as a student as reference. In the postscript of Lush Grass, Xia shares

119 Ibid., 420. 120 Ibid. Italics in the original. 121 Ibid. 122 Kaitakushō (The Bureau of Development), “Manshū imin to bunson bunkyō keikaku” Shūhō, no. 143 (1939): 17-22. 123 This work was banned upon publication and one wonders how Xia obtained a copy. Perhaps, like Living Soldiers, through his connections with Ozaki.

328 several anecdotes of his time in Korea and Manchuria all of which were centered around the problem of language. Xia writes how people lack “an expression of sadness” and “a language of resistance” when observing Japanese police mistreating a coolie or how local peasants are forced to use Japanese words to sell their products such as nappa (baicai, cabbage), and kyūri (huanggua, cucumber). Most striking, however, is Xia’s encounter with a Korean student on the train from Pusan to Pyongyang, which resemble the train trips made by Akita Ujaku and Kang Kyŏng-ae. During his trip, Xia Yan wore his Japanese school uniform from Meiji Senmon Gakkō and spoke Japanese as the lingua franca in the region. Initially, he experienced the encounter “as an unsurpassable wall between him and fellow comrades (xiongdi) as well as kindred neighboring ethnic groups (qinru gurou de jinlin minzu) leading many times to a hateful atmosphere in daily life.”124 The Korean student initially refused to talk to him, but when she saw his Chinese name on his name card, her attitude changed immediately. She suggested a lodging address in Pyongyang and the two exchanged a friendly conversation. Xia experienced directly the imperial (in)visible borders, complicating communication among East

Asians. Xia’s encounter with the Korean student reveals the initial hostility that results from imperial borders and undermining alliances. Lush Grass is centered around similar problems the characters grapple with while overcoming their prejudices and as they find the common ground needed to create solidarity. Resembling Kuroshima’s antiwar stance, Xia explored the strength of guerilla warfare in his play because “only the armed resistance by the people can paralyze the army of the aggressors.”

124 Xia Yan, “Ji ‘Lilicao’,” Yiwenzhi, no. 1 (1945): 92. Also included in the book publication of Lilicao.

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Critics reviewed Lush Grass overall quite positively.125 They praised the story for being able to move both readers and viewers.126 The critics who based their reviews on the book version were more likely to critique the characters as “stereotypical” (zhangxian and shiwen changjian), while critics reviewing the stage performance of the play underscored that these “stereotypical” characters had to be identifiable and accessible characters for (an illiterate) audience.127 Critics valued Xia’s Lush Grass for commemorating the Manchurian Incident vividly. In addition, it was praised for reminding the audience, mostly based in the Chongqing area, of the hardships “Northeasterners” (Dongbeiren) had endured living under Japanese rule for fourteen years.128

Xia’s choice of Manchuria as the location is an effective one. It juxtaposes resistance and proletarian transnational cooperation among East Asians and envisions ethnic harmony in northeast

China as the symbol of the Greater East Asian Coprosperity Sphere. Operating at the periphery of the

Japanese empire, Chinese and Korean guerilla fighters achieve resistance by folding the inside and outside of the empire, not unlike the encounters we saw in Li’s novel.

Turning to Lush Grass’ plot, in four, single-scene acts, the play tells the story of a village and a few of its inhabitants in occupied Manchuria near the Songhua River 150 li southeast of Jiamusi city.

125 Several of the reviews were published after the Sino-Japanese War. 126 Tian, Qin, “Ping ‘Lilicao’,” 46; Jiu, Quang, “Kan ‘Lilicao’ hou,” Wenlian 1, no. 2 (1946): 22. 127 Jiu, Quang, “Kan ‘Lilicao’,” 22. 128 Zhi Cheng, “’Lilicao’ jinian ‘9.18’ de wenyi zuopin, Kaiming shaonian, no. 3 (1945): 7; Su Fang, “Du ‘Lilicao’ hou, Wenzong (Rugao), no. 3 (1946): 22. The characters in Xia’s play gradually lost their credibility when postwar critics and scholars expressed their dissatisfaction with the characters. They expanded their criticism also to the representation of Manchuria, noting that Xia’s lack of experience with the region and the resistance war in the occupied areas caused the depiction to be superficial and hardly as authentic as that by local writers such as Xiao Hong and Duanmu Honglian. Lang Yanli, “’Lilicao’ Zhong de Ribenren xingxiang,” in Zhongguo liuri zuojia guanzhao Riben de kangzhan wenxue, ed. Jin Mingquan (Chengdu: Bashu Shushe, 2013), 64.

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Since the winter of 1932, settlers belonging to the Japanese empire had started to develop the area but met continuously with fierce opposition by armed farmers and volunteer soldiers. Nevertheless, the

Japanese empire continued to send thousands of people to Manchuria, often impoverished households, which created rifts between them and the Chinese and Korean farmers who were often immigrants themselves.

Ma Shun, a former member of a guerilla group, has settled in one of the courtyards of the village and is now the caretaker of his niece, the nineteen-year-old Su Jia, whose father, also a member of the same guerilla group, is currently missing in action. Nearby lives the Korean family Cui, consisting of the fifteen-year-old son Taeg’il (Daji in Chinese) and his father Songbu (Chengfu in

Chinese). The newly arrived Japanese pioneers, conducting research – leader Kuroda Genzō, Musaka

Shunkichi, and Murayama Kazuo – are eager to resolve hostilities and build friendships. Critics have stated that these three Japanese characters are especially stereotypical, merely representing contrasting qualities.129 Kuroda fully believes in the imperial project but is eager to blend in with the rest of the community. He wears “Manchurian” clothes and speaks “Manchurian,” not referring to the language of the Manchus but to the (Han-)Chinese language, even to the other Japanese settlers.

Calling Manchuria his second home (di’er guxiang), Kuroda is familiar with the local customs and visits all houses in the neighbourhood to introduce his team of settlers. Murayama shares his belief in the imperial project but maintains his “Japaneseness,” wearing settler clothes (yiminfu) and often speaking Japanese to everyone, for which Kuroda scolds him. Murayama has no intention of adjusting to the local customs and maintains a feeling of superiority and distance towards the locals. Musaka is

129 Ibid., 65.

331 a proletarian figure who has joined the settlers out of poverty and sympathizes with the locals. He speaks “Manchurian” but refrains from giving orders to the locals and gradually grows suspicious of the imperial rhetoric of “ethnic harmony.” Xia uses these three contrasting Japanese pioneers to reveal the disparity amongst them as well as to complicate the stereotype of the Japanese as universally evil.

Behind this is Xia’s rationale that alliances with Japanese who sympathize with the proletarian cause are still possible.

Similar to the works discussed above, language and naming are central to Lush Grass and are used to display structures of power and to distinguish two sides. Two language systems are operational. Pioneers use imperial terminology and refer to Koreans as “Chaoxianren” or use derogatory terms “Xianren” and “yobo,” and to Chinese as “Manzhouguoren” and their language as

“Manzhouhua.” In contrast, the locals use the word “Hanguoren” for Koreans and “Zhongguo” for anything related to Han-Chinese. Kuroda, for example, switches from Chinese to Japanese and uses more derogatory terms to express his anger at the locals when they refuse to cooperate, revealing his sense of hierarchy. After the locals start to resist him and his colleagues, he stops wearing his Chinese clothes and instead wears settler clothes. He scolds others when they use ‘wrong’ terminology such as when Ma says “Zhongguo guize” (Chinese regulation) instead of “Manzhouguo guize” (Manchurian regulation).

Moreover, Xia’s usage of Korean sentences in alphabetic script, transcribing the language exchange between Su Jia and Daeg’il, exemplifies a challenge of Japanese as the lingua franca in the empire. In addition, Daeg’il speaks the local language fluently, using many dialect expressions as if he were a local (bendiren). Learning each others’ language fosters communication and strengthens the

332 bond among proletarians – an exchange we also saw in Kuroshima and Kaji’s works. Lastly, Xia also uses a number of “secret words” (yinyu) as part of the communication among resistance soldiers in order to circumvent surveillance by the Japanese authorities.

In the stage directions, a support for proletarian internationalism is mentioned in several scenes throughout the story. Despite Xia writing Lush Grass in haste and lacking the resources to polish the storyline and characters, the attentive reader can interpret the lines of Daeg’il’s father

Songbu as a call for solidarity among proletarians and their sympathizers. Xia chose Songbu to be a religious (Christian) character rather than a Marxist intellectual to avoid the censorship in GMD- controlled areas. Taking the GMD censorship in consideration, the focus on religion was presumably

Xia’s way to implement a class critique in his stories. This is similar to Zhang’s argument, which was mentioned earlier, especially because these “humanistic” attributes are only common in his exploited characters and not in the exploiters. This would include ruling classes, fascists and imperialists.

While the characters in Lush Grass frequently express their hatred towards the Japanese in general, it is Songbu who complicates the image of Japanese. When Daeg’il gives Su Jia a cross-shaped bracelet, which his father received from Kuroda, Ma Shun tells Su not to accept a gift belonging to the

Japanese “devils.” Songbu calms Ma, telling him that “we are all children of the Lord, Chinese,

Japanese, Koreans, we are all neighbors, we are all siblings (xiongdi). The Bible states: ‘If you speak the same, then nothing can separate you, it is just complete harmony among each other.’”130 The term xiongdi (siblings or comrades) is also used by proletarian movements to refer to each other as family, which is quite different from the bourgeois notion of consanguineal family, and creates a sense of

130 Xia Yan, Lilicao (Kunming: Jinxiu Chuban Jiaoyushe, 1945), 15.

333 unity and solidarity as discussed in the previous chapter. Despite a certain degree of naivety towards

Kuroda, Songbu’s vision embodies the spirit of proletarian internationalism disguised in religious rhetoric.

Throughout the story, Songbu intervenes in others’ conversations when they talk hatefully about the Japanese and reminds them of the importance of solidarity with those “siblings” (comrades)

“who speak the same” language (of the Bible). When Su Jia again expresses her dislike for the

Japanese, Songbu uses Musaka as an example to explain the difficult situation imperialism has put them in. He tells her:

Cui Chengfu [Songbu]: My memory is really bad. I forgot something. A Japanese is to see you. Su Jia: (Surprised) To see me? Why? Cui Chengfu: (He enters again and sits down slowly) Listen to me, don’t worry. Ai, seeing you like this, hearing you say that you’re afraid of Japanese. To tell you the truth, there are also Japanese who are pitiful. Sit down, sit down. (Slowly, he squeezed some tobacco in his pipe). Su Jia: (Anxious) Tell me. Cui Chengfu: (Quiet and relaxed) I tell you a story about a Japanese who has a girlfriend at home. (Smokes) Su Jia: (Impatient) Uncle Cui, just skip it and go have a look. Perhaps something might be happening. Cui Chengfu: No, no. It’s simple. Just listen. He had a girlfriend, and then because he is poor, they couldn’t get married. The father of the girl sold her to a brothel. That boy was devastated and he couldn’t stand to stay at home. He hardened his heart and decided to emigrate. Su Jia: (Directly) What has this to do with me? Cui Chengfu: The important stuff comes at the end. By the way, Daeg’il, go and have a look to see what’s going on. Cui Daji [Daeg’il]: No, I want to listen. Cui Chengfu: All right. Go when I’m finished talking. This person was very broken-hearted. No one understands the pain in his heart and everyone looks down upon him. When he arrived here the situation changed. Now everyone is afraid of him. Everyone hates him. Are you not very afraid of him? Su Jia: (Resolutely) Uncle Cui, don’t mention me. I,…despise Japanese. Cui Chengfu: Easy, listen till I finish. Last time, this Japanese looked at you as if he was enchanted. He told me that you look very much like his girlfriend. He simply could not believe it. Su Jia: (Seemingly insulted and suddenly stands up) No, no, Uncle Cui, Stop talking. I… (She walks toward the window) don’t want to listen to stories like this. Cui Chengfu: (Steps forward) Su, listen to me, everyone is very pitiful. Why can’t you show some mercy? Why? He says that he just wants to talk to you, look at you, and listen to your voice, and let him dream a little. Su, respond to him, why not? Su Jia: (Resolutely) Uncle Cui, I told you. I hate Japanese, I hate every one of them.

崔承富 […] 我的記性真壞，忘了一事件，有一個日本人，要見見—— 蘇嘉（意外）見見我？為什麼？崔承富（又回進來坐下了，慢慢地）聽我說呀，別急，唉，瞧你這樣子，聽說日本人就害怕，說

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實話，有些日本人也是很可憐的，坐下，坐下。（慢慢地，在煙頭里塞著煙——）蘇嘉（著急）說呀，你—— 崔承富（始終平靜而悠閒）我告訴你一個故事，一個日本人，從前在他國內有女朋友。（抽煙）蘇嘉（不耐）崔大叔，過一會說吧，你去看看大叔，也許會鬧出什麼事來。崔承富不，不，很簡單，你聽，他有一個女朋友，後來，為了窮，不能結婚，那女孩子的爸爸，把她賣給院子裡去了——那男的傷心得很，國內待不住了，橫了心，當了移民—— 蘇嘉（直率地）這跟我什麼相干？崔承富巧的事情在後面，對啦，大吉，你去看看，有什麼事。崔大吉不，我要聽。崔承富好好，我講完了去。這個人傷心的很，誰也不懂得他心裡的苦處，誰也瞧不起他，到了這兒，情形一變，變了大家怕他，大家討厭他，你，不就是很怕他嗎？蘇嘉（決然）崔大叔，別提我，我——討厭日本人—— 崔承富慢慢，聽我講完。上次著給日本人見到了你，他像遭了魔，他跟我說，他的那個女朋友，跟你長得一模一樣，他簡直不相信—— 蘇嘉（像受了一種侮辱，忽地站了起來）不，不，崔大叔，別講了，我——（走到窗口）不愛聽這樣的話。崔承富（趕上一步）蘇姑娘，聽我說。大家都是可憐的人呀，為什麼不能可憐他？為什麼？他說，只希望跟你講一句話，看看你，聽聽你的聲音，讓他做一個夢——蘇姑娘，答應他把，為什麼不呀？蘇嘉（斷然）崔大叔，我跟你說了，我討厭日本人，討厭每一個日本人——131

Songbu describes Musaka not as a “Japanese devil” but as a victim of the imperial system and capitalist economy, which exploited and impoverished him, forcing him to leave for Manchuria to try to make a living. Heartbroken and futureless, men like Musaka left Japan proper, migrating to places such as Manchuria. Despite the gendered tension reflected in Musaka’s interest in Su Jia, Songbu concludes after the above scene that “Japanese are also people'' (Ribenren ye shi yige ren ya) and

Musaka “is not a bad person” (bu shi ge huairen). Su Jia, however, is not convinced by Songbu’s speech and remains full of hatred towards the Japanese. Understood merely as class solidarity between proletarians and disregarding the gendered tension, Songbu’s words of sympathy for Musaka are an attempt to teach Su Jia that ethnic overcoding by the Japanese empire operates as a divisive mechanism among proletarians. As such, Su Jia’s hatred toward Japanese and her refusal to see

131 Ibid., 29-30.

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Musaka as a fellow comrade interfere with possibilities of solidarity among East Asian proletarians. In such scenes, stereotypical images of the Japanese as devils are challenged, questioning the patriotism that formed the core of War of Resistance literature. Be that as it may, Songbu also epitomizes male ignorance toward the problem of gendered solidarity discussed in the previous chapter. In that way,

Su Jia’s refusal is a protest against the male covenant between Songbu and Musaka and that they are not taking her seriously as a revolutionary subject rather, they banally conflate her physical appearance with that of Musaka’s ex-girlfriend. In Kuroshima and Kaji’s stories, international proletarian solidarity was predominantly presented as an affair among men. In Li’s story, tensions between female and male proletarians were entirely absent; Xia’s Lush Grass highlights gender in addition to national and linguistic borders as another challenge for proletarians to overcome as they forge solidarity.

Immediately after the scene noted above, Musaka visits the house. Su Jia is sitting at a table still with “hatred, fear, and determination mixed together in her expression.”132 The moment Musaka enters and stares at Su Jia the stage directions describe his appearance to her as “[h]e did not wear his black glasses, and his trembling lips, deathly pale (facial color), absent-minded eyes, (she) could see a kind of intensely depressed, miserable, and mournful appearance.”133 However, Musaka’s terrible appearance cannot ease Su Jia’s anger as “he can see her irreconcilable hostility.”134 While Su Jia remains in her hatred, their physical proximity enables a direct encounter and an exchange of words.

132 Ibid., 31. 133 Ibid., 31-32. 134 Ibid., 32.

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Using this opportunity, Musaka initiates a conversation using Japanese (sumimasen) but immediately switches to Chinese (duibuqi). He tries to avoid worsening her hostility by using the imperial language. Songbu eases the situation and apologizes for Su Jia’s demeanor, explaining to Musaka that she is afraid. Startled, Musaka wants to explain his situation to her:

Musaka Shunkichi: (Using a crying low voice) Sumimasen…. (He corrects himself using the same low voice as before). Excuse me. Cui Chengfu: (Steps forward, softly) Musaka-san, She’s afraid. She’s afraid. Musaka Shunkichi: (Absent-mindedly, he wipes the cold sweat from his forehead using a low voice as before) Afraid, afraid of what? I’m not scary at all. Cui Chengfu: Relax, you’re too excited. You will scare her. Musaka Shunkichi: (As if he is sleep walking like before, seemingly he has not heard what Cui Songbu told him). I’m not a bad person. Don’t be afraid. Don’t be afraid. I want to see you and listen to you, miss. (He moves forward). Let me hear your voice. (Su Jia’s eyes changed from hatred to wrath, beside herself steps back.) Musaka Shunkichi: (He eased his voice a little.) I had a (girl)friend before, a lovely lady, and because I was poor I went to war. She… Su Jia: (As if she exploded.) Stop! Musaka Shunkichi: (Startled and then) This is your speech, your voice? (sounding sad and shrill) You, can’t you pity me, can’t you? Su Jia: (Agitated) Get out! Musaka Shunkichi: (Repeating her word beside himself) Get out? Su Jia: I hate, hate Japanese. Hate you evil dogs. Pity? (Pointing at him) Do you [plural] understand pity? What are you doing here every day? You only understand killing people, you…. (coughing and choking).

六平俊吉（用一帶哭的低聲）Sumimasen……（改口，依舊低聲地）對不起。崔承富（上前一步，柔和地）Musaka-san，她怕，她怕。六平俊吉（失神似的揩了一下額上的冷汗，依舊用低聲沉的聲音）怕，怕什麼，我，可怕的沒有 —— 崔承富你靜靜，你太興奮，你——會嚇壞她—— 六平俊吉（依然夢遊似的，好像沒有聽到崔承富的話）我不是一個壞人，不怕不怕的。我想看看你，聽你講一句話——姑娘——（向前移動）讓我聽聽你的聲音—— [蘇嘉的眼睛，從憎惡轉成憤怒，不自覺地退後了一步。六平俊吉（若干鎮定了的口吻）以前我有個朋友，一個可憐的女人，為了窮，打仗打仗的，他— — 蘇嘉（爆發似的）站住！六平俊吉（一怔，然後）這是你的話，你的聲音？（淒厲地）你，你不能可憐我，可憐我嗎? 蘇嘉（激動）出去！六平俊吉（忘我地反复) 出去？蘇嘉我討厭，討厭日本人，討厭你們這批惡狗。可憐？（指著他）你們懂得可憐？你們每天在這兒乾的是什麼？你們只懂得殺人，你們——（咳嗽噎住）135

135 Ibid.

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While Su Jia still refuses to trust Musaka, the narrator repeatedly portrays Musaka’s intentions as in line with proletarian solidarity, asking readers to sympathize with Japanese soldiers such as him. In doing so, the story remains within the boundaries of War of Resistance literature while simultaneously weaving in the possibility of a broader East Asian alliance of proletarians against imperialism. This is notwithstanding the fact that Su Jia rightfully chooses to make a bellicose declaration instead of an armistice. After Kuroda kills Daeg’il for helping a fugitive Zhang Wenxi, a guerilla fighter sought by Kuroda, Su Jia’s hatred toward the Japanese only grows; she is not willing to see Kuroda and Musaka as any different. Musaka continues to help Su Jia, warning her when Kuroda comes looking for her, but Su Jia smacks him in the face. Soon afterward Kuroda learns that Musaka has “deserted” (xiaochai) and shoots him. Kuroda’s “peaceful intentions'' of protecting every inhabitant in Manchuria in the name of Japan’s benevolent liberation of Asia fall apart, revealing imperial violence against anyone who resists. The stage directions, albeit quite problematic given the gendered class solidarity discussed earlier, suggest a missed opportunity for forging proletarian solidarity due to Su Jia’s refusal to embrace Musaka’s help. Nevertheless, she decides to continue her resistance.

Despite the restrictions, Xia Yan achieved proletarian solidarity not by writing about successful encounters between East Asian proletarians; instead, he strategically critiqued the delimiting persistence of anti-Japan sentiment common in War of Resistance literature. Returning the literary focus in antiwar literature to the rural space of Manchuria, Xia identified similar shared struggles as Li Huiying did a decade earlier. While Li focused mainly on the solidarity between Korean and Chinese proletarians, Xia shifted his focus to include Japanese proletarians living in Manchuria.

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However, at the height of the War of Resistance literature constantly demonizing the Japanese

(including proletarians), Xia could merely present rural Manchuria as a space where characters such as Su Jia are provided a chance to liberate themselves from social limitations and racial prejudice. This was the only narrative option for Xia to promote proletarian internationalism in addition to presenting challenges for the postwar period to come.

4.5 Conclusion

This chapter has examined proletarian novels, a reportage, and a play that agitated sentiment against growing imperial and military violence by the Japanese state in East Asia. These writings, however, differed from the majority of National Defense and War of Resistance literature by complicating its patriotism and ethnic hatred. They did so by writing about inter-East Asian proletarian solidarity. Declaring war against war, the writers examined here went to great lengths to expose the imperialist and nationalist deceptions of homogenous harmony that mobilized state violence and presented strategies to undermine these deceptions.

Following his theoretical treatise on the production of antiwar literature which urged armed resistance against state violence, epitomizing proletarian antiwar discourse worldwide, Kuroshima penned his novel Militarized Streets to create a different perspective of the Jinan Incident. In his novel, solidarity among Chinese workers and Japanese soldiers forms a crucial war machine against Japanese military violence in China. This solidarity is far from a presupposed and a pre-established relationship among proletarians, and instead needed to be experimented with and assembled by proletarians through encounters. Several years later, Li Huiying, like Kuroshima, portrayed Chinese farmers and

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Korean immigrants, who initially where posited in opposition to each other by the Japanese empire.

Gradually, as they overcame the empire’s hurdles, they gained mutual trust and sympathized with each other’s struggles. This led to the formation of a unified resistance against the empire. Following the outbreak of the Sino-Japanese War, proletarian solidarity became a dangerous enterprise and was often made impossible within Japan proper and its colonies. Therefore, East Asian proletarian writers turned their attention to China, hoping to continue and renew united fronts against imperialism and fascism. Both Kaji and Xia strived to promote proletarian class solidarity amidst an increasingly hostile environment of patriotism and nationalism. Persistently, they published reportage works and plays aimed at disseminating models of how to interlace various proletarian struggles and fight together.

These writers, and the writers examined in preceding chapters, were exceptional in their endeavors to explore spaces exterior to state apparatuses. These spaces allowed proletarian activists to congregate and coagulated in war machines both to defend their livelihoods and launch attacks on the imperial capitalist overcoding of their territories. Returning to Deleuze’s question on forging solidarity, formulated as: “(…) how can one envision the relationships, conjugations, conjunctions, and processes of unification?,”136 the practices brought forward in these writers’ works elucidate that such a unification is able to be constructed through continuous efforts in negotiating and assembling numerous proletarian struggles. These efforts resulted in nomadic solidarity and defied the general assumption of vertically structured and party-dominated solidarity, notwithstanding the difficulty of

136 Gilles Deleuze, “Desire and Pleasure,” in Two Regimes of Madness: Texts and Interviews 1975-1995, ed. David Lapoujade, trans. Ames Hodges and Mike Taormina (Los Angeles; California: Semiotext(e), 2007), 132.

340 expelling animosity in proletarian political formations. As Hasegawa Teru and others observed, the resistance war for liberation of China was both a national and international affair, aimed at rooting out fascism and imperialism. As Kuroshima reminds us, as long as there is capitalism there will be war; war machines transformed and altered their configurations to resist state (re)territorializations in the postwar and postliberation period.

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[W]e must learn to think ‘transversally.’ (…) International solidarity, once the primary concern of trade unions and leftist parties, is now the sole responsibility of humanitarian organizations. Although Marx's own writings still have great value, Marxist discourse has lost its value. It is up to the protagonists of social liberation to remodel the theoretical references so as to illuminate a possible escape route out of contemporary history, which is more nightmarish than ever. It is not only species that are becoming extinct but also the words, phrases, and gestures of human solidarity. A stifling cloak of silence has been thrown over the emancipatory struggles of women, and of the new proletariat: the unemployed, the ‘marginalized,’ immigrants. Félix Guattari, The Three Ecologies1

Epilogue Proletarian Specters of Assembling Solidarity

Immediately after the end of World War II resulting in the defeat of Japanese fascism and the liberation of Asia, resurged the question of how to (re)shape alliances against the reviving attempts at imperial capitalism to de/reterritorialize proletarian lives by new webs of oppression. With the bans lifted on political activism, laboring masses launched initiatives to assemble their resistance into cohesive constituencies in which May Day celebrations returned as a unifying force, addressing labor, racial, gender, and linguistic struggles, among others. The international festival of proletarian solidarity found its way again in the literary production to reinvigorate possibilities of post-fascist futures. Among the postwar/liberation

May Day stories, Kim Yŏng-sŏk’s (dates unknown) short story “Chŏnch’a unjŏnsu” (Trolley Driver, 1946) stands out, especially if read together with its prequel “Hyŏngje” (Brothers, 1941)2 written during the war. Both stories follow the laborer Yi U-sik while he lives through the end of war and the succeeding liberation contemporaneous with Kim’s own moment of writing. In “Brothers,” U-sik could only critique the oppression and exploitation of proletarians with family and friends in private conversations as all forms of proletarian activism, including May Day, were prohibited by the colonial government. In contrast, “Trolley Driver” shows

U-sik exploring how May Day can contribute to unifying the disparate interests of proletarians into a

1 Félix Guattari, The Three Ecologies, trans. Ian Pindar and Paul Sutton (London: Bloomsbury, 2014), 29. 2 Kim Yŏng-sŏk, Hyŏngje,” Munjang 3, no. 2 (1941): 257-269. 342 nomadic alliance against usurpers of political power and highlights how the end of the war allowed the return and repurposing of May Day.

On April 28, 1946, U-sik executes his daily routine driving passengers through the liberated streets of

Seoul. Three days before the first May Day since the end of the colonial occupation under Japanese imperialism, U-sik helps where he can with the preparations for the upcoming festival. While U-sik distances himself from communism and stresses that he is neither union leader nor has the talent to guide multiple trolley drivers and conductors, he is eager to contribute to assembling his fellow workers into a cohesive alliance of solidarity (ilch'idan'gyŏl). U-sik distributed leaflets with May Day slogans such as “All workers join

May Day.”3 Later, U-sik found one of the May Day posters glued on a trolley with the slogan “All workers of

Chosŏn, unite!”4 torn apart on the ground most likely by another worker. This scene reveals the tensions between workers sympathizing or opposing the proletarian internationalism of May Day amidst times where proletarians could start imagining new visions for a future of a liberated Korea. Throughout the story, U-sik monitors a group of trolley drivers, who attempt to undermine the May Day celebration by paying workers not to join. Based on his investigation, U-sik concludes that “we are not at all unified like steel.”5 These tensions of how to assemble proletarians like U-sik and his colleagues against right-wing reactionary groups form the focus of “Trolley Driver.” Celebrating May Day to imagine a future that once disappeared, U-sik tries to resist hierarchal forms of organization and to connect proletarians nomadically, while grappling with

3 Kim Yŏng-sŏk, “Chŏnch’a unjŏnsu,” Hanguk hyŏndae taep'yo sosŏlsŏn 7: Haebang chikhu, ed. Im Hyŏng-t'aek (Sŏul: Ch'angjak kwa Pip'yŏngsa, 1996), 54. Originally published in Sinmunhak, no. 3 (1946): 60-73. 4 Ibid., 50. 5 Ibid., 58. 343 conflicting interests among them. It is this problem of forging unity in the resistance against repression that resurfaces in the immediate postwar/liberation years not only on the Korean peninsula but across East Asia.6

While witnessing political maps being (re)drawn under Soviet and American occupation as well as growing hostility between nationalists and communists, the attempts of configuring revolutionary activism and resistance in postwar/liberation East Asia fuelled the urge among proletarian intellectuals to rethink proletarian international solidarity. In the immediate postwar/liberation years, Miyamoto Yuriko, whose prewar notions of internationalism were discussed in the Introduction, started her search for new meanings of internationalism. In her essay “Sorera no kuniguni demo: Atarashii kokusaisei o motomete” (Even in those

Countries: Seeking a New Internationality, 1948), Miyamoto revisits the hurdles of proletarian international solidarity in East Asia during the interwar years and the ensuing ban of proletarian activism under Japanese fascism. While reflecting on the horrors of fifteen years of war, Miyamoto is also eager to look for new ways of solidarity among proletarians worldwide; proletarians were being renamed as “the people” (人民) to suit the changed political landscape, which started during the war when united fronts across classes were formed.

Arguing how the expansion drift of capitalism resulted in colonialism and total war and lamenting how fascism severed all lines of international interaction, she warns that the end of the war is no guarantee that oppression and exploitation will not return. Writing under the American Occupation (1945-1952), Miyamoto articulates a critique of postwar internationalization, that is, free-market globalization, to refer to new supranational organizations and international agreements led by capitalist powers, prefiguring a neoliberal

6 See for example the so-called “shokuryō mēdē” (Food May Day) in Japan in 1946. The first May Day in eleven years gathered over a million of participants, protesting against food prices, the American occupation, and the newly formed cabinet of prime minister Yoshida Shigeru (1878-1967). These protests eventually mounted into the “Hanmai kakutoku jinmin taikai” (Rise Acquisition People’s Rally), also nicknamed “shokuryō mēdē,” on May 19, 1946, which attracted hundreds of thousands of laborers assembling in front of the imperial palace to protest the delay of rise distribution. Itoya Toshio, Mēdē no hanashi (Tokyo: Rōdōjunpōsha, 1969), 115-126. 344 economic system endemic to the decades that followed. To counter these forms of de/reterritorialization, she proposes that laboring peoples, which, she writes, are almost all people of the current population, should invest in the “international relationship” (kokusaiteki tsunagari) that will lay “the basis of international relations for tomorrow” (ashita no kokusai kankei no kiso).7 For Miyamoto, these international relations among toiling peoples should rely on “democratic” (minshuteki) internationality and the independence of millions of peoples around the world invested in building peace through assembling international cooperation among women leagues, anti-fascist organizations, and labor unions.

The attempts of Kim and Miyamoto are just two of many examples in the literary and intellectual realms of the immediate postwar/liberation years to forge nomadic alliances among the numerous artists, activists, and laborers in East Asia. Following the outcome of the Chinese (1945-1949) and Korean civil wars

(1950-1953) together with the solidifying of Cold War fault lines, the political organizations of East Asia chose either a pro- or an anti-capitalist position under which separate universes of socialist and liberal world literatures unfolded. Within each universe, new alliances of international exchange were forged that often went beyond the scope of proletarian internationalism. At the same time, while these universes were far from monolithic, their oppositional trajectories presented incommensurable ideological differences, making it difficult for cultural producers to find venues for international exchange beyond the socialist/capitalist dichotomy.8 In postwar/liberation literature of East Asia across the Cold War divide, articulations of labor, linguistic, gender, and racial struggles are not necessarily to suggest any (dis)continuities with the proletarian

7 Miyamoto Yuriko, “Sorera no kuniguni demo: Atarashii kokusaisei o motomete,” Miyamoto Yuriko Zenshū 16: Bunka, shakai hyōron 1945-1951 (Tokyo: Shin Nihon Shuppansha, 1980), 165. Originally published in Joseisen 3, no. 7 (1948). 8 For recent studies on socialist literature in China and its relation to internationalism see, Paola Iovene, Tales of Futures Past: Anticipation and the Ends of Literature in Contemporary China (Berkeley: Stanford University Press, 2014), especially Chapter 2 “Translation Zones: Anticipating World Literature in Socialist China,” 51-79; Nikolai Volland, Socialist Cosmopolitanism: The Chinese Literary Universe, 1945-1965 (New York: Columbia University Press, 2017). 345 assemblage of the 1920s and 30s, but rather to foreground the equally empowering de/reterritorializing desires and forces in revolutionary formations found in the myriad of expressions and experiences of international solidarity characteristic of anti-capitalist resistance in the twentieth and early twenty-first century. Indeed, while political environments change continuously, pre-1945 proletarian resistance and postwar/liberation activism share a desire to be autonomous from capitalist production and imperial repression for which inventing a people through art embodying those desires was crucial.

From the start, this dissertation had no aim in revalidating the successes or failures of proletarian activism and its cultural production. Rather than its historical outcome, it has tried to approach the proletarian ethos, following Gilles Deleuze, for the “people’s revolutionary becoming.”9 Deleuze states that this revolutionary becoming of people sets in motion absolute deterritorializations of our societies, which makes it “the only way of casting off their shame or responding to what is intolerable.”10 Extending this, this dissertation contends, that the international solidarity promoted by proletarian literature, art, and culture of the 1920s and 1930s has enabled this revolutionary becoming on the molecular level that is not a continuity or discontinuity with succeeding revolutionary formations per se, but rather a nomadic process repeating while generating differences to the extent that “[t]here’s no longer any image of proletarians around of which it’s just a matter of becoming conscious.”11

This dissertation has aimed to shed new light on the tremendous scale and breath of the cultural production of proletarian movements in East Asia through the lens of international solidarity. Examining the

9 Gilles Deleuze, “Control and Becoming,” Negotiations: 1972-1990, trans. Martin Joughin (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997), 171. 10 Ibid. 11 Ibid., 173. 346 attempts to create worldwide links of proletarian solidarity within the parameters of top-down structures of political organizations found in parties and unions and under the auspices of Soviet communism and orthodox Marxism cannot describe accurately or account completely for the intimate relationships between thousands of intellectuals, activists, artists, laborers, and peasants. Instead, this dissertation has argued that the literary narratives and cultural activities reveal how the assembling of proletarian solidarity was a far more contingent and multifaceted process unfolding in (mediated) encounters quite different from the organization in communist and socialist parties. The nomadic alliances found in short stories, plays, films, songs, and paintings strived to recount the lives of millions of peoples, molding them into a coherent and interconnected proletariat of multiplicities. While some writers and artists were equally invested in arborescent forms of politics, constructing awkward proletarian characters alien to the multifold and heterogenous “living people” and “living realities” to recall Kurahara from the Introduction, many writers and artists, such as those discussed in this dissertation, focused on the forging of interpersonal relations coeval in

(mediated) encounters and shared experiences between distant and different peoples. At the same time, this assembling of singularities was also the continuous challenge of how to conjoin and consolidate the numerous struggles into solidary alliances of resistance against their oppressors and exploiters; a problem that is not coped with an one-size-fits-all solution, but is constantly questioned, negotiated, and disputed within nomadic processes.

Assembling solidarity was thus a nomadic process of synthesizing the multiplicities of immanent differences among proletarians into semi-stable unity invented as the proletariat. International festivals and commemorations contributed significantly to adhere innumerable proletarians experiencing oppression, exploitation, and impoverishment worldwide. Among these festivals, May Day, discussed in Chapter 1, acted as a heterogenous and polyvocal platform to concatenate proletarian experiences into milieus of shared 347 memories. Celebrated annually, participants invoked past proletarian struggles and resistance to sunder the status quo of capitalist production, regardless of residing in the city or the countryside or being incarcerated, that found their voice in the cultural production. Proletarian artists contributed by using a wide variety of media and art forms to render visible, sonorous, and tactic through expressive matters (ritornello) the interrelationality between proletarians both in East Asia and worldwide. By synthesizing the fragmented realities of proletarians through modernist and avant-garde techniques, they created a technologically aided and augmented perception of social and material realities that reconfigured the readers and spectators’ perception into a critical understanding of the world as uneven and unstable spacetimes under global capitalism.12

Whereas May Day was the overarching platform to include the numerous struggles of proletarians, the subsequent chapters examined more specific concerns among proletarians, activists, artists, and intellectuals in East Asia and how such disparate and contrasting concerns were interconnected to one another. Chapter 2 looked at linguistic challenges with respect to international interaction/exchange among the proletariat. Proletarian cultural movements turned to the artificial language Esperanto, considered free from linguistic hierarchies, to create phonographic voices that could traverse imperial and nation-state boundaries interlinking proletarians worldwide through letter writing, radio broadcasting, translation, and literature. Akin to the linguistic solidarity of Esperanto, Chapter 3 investigated proletarian writers and activists invested in corporeal solidarity between proletarians against the gendered codification of capitalism. Informed by international birth control politics and questioning the normativity of bourgeois familialism and sexual reproduction, proletarian writers concentrated on (post-)parturient suffering and the

12 These techniques of multimedial synthesis remained important to address social issues and were discussed by postwar and postliberation art critics, such as Hanada Kiyoteru (1909-1974), in their debates on the notion of 綜合芸術 (synthetic art). 348 double burden experienced by proletarian women while also articulating strategies of seizing and ceasing reproduction. Frequently ousted from proletarian politics and downplayed by proletarian men, these women explored possibilities of assembling solidarity with strangers in short-lived and contingent encounters that led them to rethink and surmount predetermined gendered subjectivities. Lastly, Chapter 4 examined how nomadic alliances between proletarians were assembled in regions exposed to military violence inflicted by

Japanese imperialism across East Asia. Whether short skirmishes by the Japanese military during the Jinan

Incident and Wanbaoshan Incident or total war mobilization during the second Sino-Japanese War, proletarians explored ways to overcome linguistic barriers and racial and gender prejudices as an attempt to unite against the military violence. All chapters together, this dissertation has tried to illuminate the intricate relationships between disparate struggles among proletarians and the exercise of thinking immanent differences weaved through diverse topics that were brought together in proletarian art and activism.

Proletarian cultural movements were among the first mass political and art movements that nomadically assembled unprecedented numbers of people into revolutionary formations that has been pursued in different settings throughout the twentieth and twenty-first century.

The exercise of creating relationships between immanent differences, which are often imperceptible differences operating at the level of intensities and gradients that are beyond representation and quantity, is not only relevant for a historical analysis of literary works, but is also crucial for theoretico-practical questions. The latter lies at the heart of how revolutionary formations have tried and are trying to assemble nomadic alliances of resistance against capitalism and its interconnected web of various forms of discrimination and repression. A visual abstraction of this exercise is perhaps most emblematic in Vasily

Vasilyevich Kuptsov’s (1899-1935) abstract painting Pervoye maya (May Day, 1929) that discerns immanent differences of proletarians participating in a May Day procession solely through colors and geometric shapes. 349

A recurrent challenge of revolutionary formations, however, is to relate and relay disparate and often oppositional interests into semi-stable equilibria needed to strengthen and solidify resistance against the totalizing power of capitalist flows. Entrapped in the logic of capitalism and its dispersal of identities, that is the production of sameness among differences in kind and degree based on resemblances and representations, revolutionary formations often follow(ed) suit by organizing their components along similar metric categorizations and taxonomies. In so doing, these formations enclose and reduce living beings into fixed subjects, leaving no room for fluid motions through lines of flights and impeding any nomadic configuration between entities quite different from predetermined subjectivities. While rejecting verticality, horizontal political organization in compartments equally risk to reproduce homogenous and monolithic identities found in capitalist societies. Instead, what, for example, the Esperanto letter correspondents in

Chapter 2 and the collectives against imperial violence in Chapter 4 have foregrounded is, what Guattari calls, a “transversality” of interhuman connectivity that “tries to overcome both the impasse of pure verticality and that of mere horizontality” and act diagonally “where it tends to be achieved when there is maximum communication among different levels, and above all, in different meanings.”13 While the population ever-growing at increasing speeds together with mass-migration of the disenfranchised are merely serving capitalist’s hunger for labor power and complexifying the assembling of revolutionary alliances, not in the least because of the sophisticated modes of division that exacerbate the differences in kind and degree of identities, the transversal could be a way to evade capitalist individuation and subjectification and create modes of non-identitarian resistance not unlike the proletarian assemblage.

13 Félix Guattari, “Transversality,” Psychoanalysis and Transversality: Texts and Interviews 1955-1971, trans. Ames Hodges (Pasadena: Semiotext(e), 2015), 113. 350

To animate the nomadic alliances found in proletarian literature, art, and culture, this dissertation could not return to the orthodox theoretico-praxes of many proletarian intellectuals, which would turn our attention to arborescent constructions of proletarian politics and activism. Instead, this dissertation has chosen to borrow from the theoretico-practical concepts found in the works of philosopher-cum-activists

Deleuze and Guattari, most notably de/reterritorialization and nomadism. These concepts provided me with the necessary tools to illuminate the processes of assembling solidarity otherwise invisible and often neglected by scholars. These scholars continued to focus predominantly on the vertical and horizontal relations in proletarian politics, while studying the literary works within the boundaries of national literature.

Informed by Deleuze and Guattari’s question of how to create political unity of difference, it has examined how proletarian cultural movements explored platforms and methods to unfold exterior spaces where nomadic encounters and exchange between proletarians, activists, and artists were made possible to circumvent the divisive totalizing power of imperial capitalism. These proletarian multiplicities were dealing with the question of unity that would be constantly reformulated and rethought throughout the twentieth and twenty-first century to “find a way to create lateral connections, a system of networks, a grass roots base.”14

By having investigated the assembling of proletarian international solidarity, this dissertation hopes it has contributed to the study of proletarian literature and art of East Asia during the 1920s and 1930s.

Specifically, it presents a literary history of the proletarian cultural production in East Asia by examining international solidarity not by way of a comparison between China, Korea, Taiwan, and Japan but through a thematic study across national and linguistic borders. Such an approach is not limited to proletarian

14 Gilles Deleuze, “Intellectuals and Power,” Deserts Islands and Other Texts: 1953-1974, ed. David Lapoujade, trans. Michael Taormina (Pasadena: Semiotext(e), 2004), 210. 351 literature but could also be an approach to the study of literature and art of other regions and different time periods. The difficulty of this approach, however, is not only the size of archival materials, but more importantly, to shape an alternative narrative that challenges and questions all sorts of (in)visible borders without reproducing the logic of these borders. Furthermore, by examining the intricate practices of nomadic solidarity, this study has aimed to enrich the theoretical arguments in the growing field of international solidarity studies.15 While many activists, intellectuals, artists, and laborers have perished from the 1920s until the defeat and liberation in 1945, others have survived and revived their agitation against forms of repressions and created new lines of solidarity. Either way, none of their singular lives are easily reduced or essentialized through national histories or other denominators of resemblance or identity. Postwar and postcolonial revolutionary and anti-capitalist formations are invoking these proletarian specters in novel conjoined assemblages not unlike a Benjaminian Jetztzeit to blast the “continuum of history,” trying to de/reterritorialize their desires to an absolute and summoning a post-capital and post-nation-state future.

15 In addition to the studies on solidarity and internationalism mentioned in the Introduction, see for example, Chandra Talpade Mohanty, Feminism without Borders: Decolonizing Theory, Practicing Solidarity (Longueuil, Québec: Point Par Point, 2007); Yuichiro Onishi, Transpacific Antiracism: Afro-Asian Solidarity in 20th-Century Black America, Japan, and Okinawa (New York: New York University Press, 2013); Monica Popescu, Cedric Tolliver and Julie Tolliver (eds.), “Alternative Solidarities: Black Diasporas and Cultural Alliances during the Cold War,” Journal of Postcolonial Writing 50, no. 4 (2014): 379-491; Margaret Randall, Exporting Revolution: Cuba's Global Solidarity (Durham: Duke University Press, 2017); Anne Garland Mahler, From the Tricontinental to the Global South: Race, Radicalism, and Transnational Solidarity (Durham: Duke University Press, 2018); Lee Misook, Nikkan rentai undō no jidai: 1970-80 nendai no toransunashonaru na kōkyōken to media (Tokyo: Tōkyō Daigaku Shuppankai, 2018); Quynh Nhu Le, Unsettled Solidarities: Asian and Indigenous Cross-Representations in the Américas (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2019); Timothy Morton, Humankind: Solidarity with Non-Human People (London: Verso, 2019); Kim Christiaens, International Solidarity in the Low Countries During the Twentieth Century: New Perspectives and Themes (Berlin: De Gruyter Oldenbourg, 2019); Pamela B. June, Solidarity with the Other Beings on the Planet: Alice Walker, Ecofeminism, and Animals in Literature (Northwestern University Press, 2020); Helle Krunke, Hanne Petersen, and Ian Manners (eds.), Transnational Solidarity: Concept, Challenges and Opportunities (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020); Madhumita Lahiri, Imperfect Solidarities: Tagore, Gandhi, Du Bois, and the Global Anglophone (Evanston; Illinois: Northwestern University Press, 2020 Darryl Li, The Universal Enemy: Jihad, Empire, and the Challenge of Solidarity (Stanford: California Stanford University Press, 2020). 352

Appendix Illustrations

Image not available for copyright reasons.

Figure 0.1 “Die Zweite Aufteiling Der Welt, 1919-1929” (The Second Division of the World, 1919-1929). Alex Radó, Atlas für Politik Wirtschaft Arbeiterbewegung 1. Der Imperialismus (Wien: Verlag fur Literatur und Politik, 1930 [1980]), 19.

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Image not available for copyright reasons.

Figure 0.2 “Der Kampf um die Rohstoffe” (The Fight for Raw Materials). Alex Radó, Atlas für Politik Wirtschaft Arbeiterbewegung 1. Der Imperialismus (Wien: Verlag fur Literatur und Politik, 1930 [1980]), 61.

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Image not available for copyright reasons.

Figure 0.3 “Der Ferne Osten” (The Far East). Alex Radó, Atlas für Politik Wirtschaft Arbeiterbewegung 1. Der Imperialismus (Wien: Verlag fur Literatur und Politik, 1930 [1980]), 99.

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Image not available for copyright reasons.

Figure 0.4 “Mandschurei: Die Aufteilung Chinas unter die Generale” (Manchuria: The Division of China among the Generals"). Alex Radó, Atlas für Politik Wirtschaft Arbeiterbewegung 1. Der Imperialismus (Wien: Verlag fur Literatur und Politik, 1930 [1980]), 101.

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Figure 0.5 “Die Unterdrückten Völker der Welt” (The Oppressed Peoples of the World). Alex Radó, Atlas für Politik Wirtschaft Arbeiterbewegung 1. Der Imperialismus (Wien: Verlag fur Literatur und Politik, 1930 [1980]), 163.

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Laborers, farmers and all oppressed working masses !

The world proletariat is against exploitation and oppression, and the day of demonstration, May Day, for general mobilization of the fighting power and will to strive towards the construction of socialism, has come. Oppressed masses of Korea suffering under Japanese imperialism, rise! Oppose and fight the reactionary elements cooperating with the Japanese imperialists and Korean indigenous exploiting class.

Thousand Green Gang Brother!

The Japanese and Korean capitalists have joined forces attacking the government of workers and farmers built by our Korean comrades and Chinese brothers in Gando. The Japanese government squeezes all the blood and sweat out of the Japanese and Korean workers, and with that money they kill our comrades in Gando and Manchuria. We cannot live if we don’t crush Japanese imperialism. Stop the war and withdraw the soldiers from Korea and Manchuria! Protect the Russian and Chinese Soviets! Crush Japanese Imperialism!

Figure 1.1 The upper leaflet was distributed across the Seoul region in 1934. The lower leaflet dates from 1935 and was distributed across textile factories in Chŏngjin, North Hamgyŏng Province. Quoted in Song Chʻan-sŏp, Hanʼguk ŭi kyŏngmun (Sŏul: Tarŭn Saenggak, 2007), 290-291.

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Figure 1.2 Two leaflets made by the Korean Proletarian Arts Movement in Tokyo, depicting and describing May Day celebrations. DPRO 2107 “Yesul Sinmun”and DPRO 2074 “Pulgŭnjumŏk” taken from Shōwa Senzenki Puroretaria Bunka Undō Shiryō Kenkyūkai, Shōwa senzenki puroretaria bunka undō shiryōshū (Tokyo: Maruzen Yūshōdō, 2017), DVD.

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2. 1.

4. 3.

6. 5.

8. 7. Figure 1.3 Shinkō eiga 2, no. 5 (1930): 56-64. Nine photographs of May Day in Tokyo spread over five pages and accompanied by captions are placed in a particular order to create a relational narrative among the participants.

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Figure 1.4 Senki 3, no. 7 (1930): 2-5.

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Figure 1.5 Samchŏlli, no. 6 (1929): 54-55.

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Figure 1.6 Above the cover of Mēdē: Gogatsu tsuitachi kokusai rōdōsai no igi to rekishi (May Day : The History and Meaning of May 1 International Workers’ Festival) showing a montage of May Day photographs from across the world and below photographs of May Day celebrations in Japan brought together into one picture. Zenkoku rōdō kumiai dōmei, Mēdē: Gogatsu tsuitachi kokusai rōdōsai no igi to rekishi (Tokyo: Zenkoku rōdō kumiai dōmei, 1933), no page number.

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Figure 1.7 Tokunaga Sunao, “Mēdē made,” Senki 4, no. 5 (1931): 73.

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Images not available for copyright reasons.

Figure 1.8 Film stills from Twelfth Annual Tokyo May Day, 1931. Nihon Puroretaria Eiga Dōmei, Purokino sakuhinshū, ed. Mamoru Makino, Markus Nornes, Kōmei Amemiya (Tokyo: Rikka Shuppan, 2013), DVD.

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Figure 1.9 Film strips of proletarian movies. Each shot is connected to the next one through a black line. Takida Izuru, “Tokushu eiga no hanasi,” in Sōgō puroretaria geijutsu kōza 1, eds. Akita Ujaku and Eguchi Kan, (Tokyo: Naigasha, 1931), 342.

Figure 1.10 Pictures from the first May Day screening in Tokyo, 1930. Puroretaria Eiga, no. 8 (1930): 54, 56.

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2. 3. Figure 1.11 Photos of the play Record of Victory. Picture 3 was published in a Korean proletarian journal, that shows that Murayama’s play was likely also known in colonial Korea. Eiga to Engei 8, no. 6 (1931): 43; Yŏn’gŭk undong 1-2, no. 7 (1932).

Images not available for copyright reasons.

(Cover Shōri no Kiroku, Two Poster Advertisements Shōri no kiroku, and an admission ticket.) Cover taken from Murayama Tomoyoshi, Shōri no kiroku (Tokyo: Naigaisha, 1931). Poster second from the left taken from Umeda Toshihide and Ōhara Shakai Mondai Kenkyūjo (ed), Posutā no shakaishi: Ōhara Shaken korekushon (Tokyo: Hitsuji Shobō, 2001) CD-ROM. Poster third from the left and admission ticket taken from DPRO 907, 910. Shōwa Senzenki Puroretaria Bunka Undō Shiryō Kenkyūkai, Shōwa senzenki puroretaria bunka undō shiryōshū (Tokyo: Maruzen Yūshōdō, 2017), DVD.

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Figure 1.12 May Songs in Japanese and Chinese with notes and numbers to indicate the melody. Taken from Puroretaria Kashū (Collection of Proletarian Songs) and Puroretaria kakyokushū (Collection of Proletarian Songs) and various proletarian journals from China available in the database Minguo shiqi qikan quanwen shujuku, 1911-1949 (Database of Republican Era Journals).

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Image not available for copyright reasons.

Figure 1.13 Advertisement flyer of the May Day record. DPRO 2118 from Shōwa Senzenki Puroretaria Bunka Undō Shiryō Kenkyūkai, Shōwa senzenki puroretaria bunka undō shiryōshū (Tokyo: Maruzen Yūshōdō, 2017), DVD.

Figure 1.14 Picture 1 and 2 show how one has to use tools to make tracings and cuts. Picture 3 shows examples of May Day tracings. Taken from Puroretaria katto manga-shū: Tōsō nyūsu-yō, 1930, 19, 29-32.

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Figure. 1.15 May Day in Shanghai introduced to a Japanese audience. Puroretaria kagaku 3, no. 5 (1931): 38.

Figure 1.16 Murayama introduced in the Chinese newspaper Wenxi Xinwen, December 7, 1931, 3.

Figure 1.17 The song sang by Zhu’er given in Japanese and Chinese. Murayama Tomoyoshi, “Shōri no kiroku,” 12-13.

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Image not available for copyright reasons.

Figure 2.1 On the left, a flyer promoting the Esperanto courses, and on the right, a flyer with directions and an explanation of an Esperanto beginner evening course taught by Akita Ujaku in Tokyo. The course promised students that “upon completing this course, one can freely exchange letters with comrades in the Soviet Union, Germany, China, and America, among other countries, and discuss daily life and struggles.” DPRO 2794 “Puroretaria Esuperanto kōshūkai (chirashi)” (Proletarian Esperanto Course (leaflet)) and DPRO 2797 “Shotō Esuperanto yakan kōshūkai annai, mōshikomisho” (Beginner Esperanto Evening Course, Information and Application From) taken from Shōwa Senzenki Puroretaria Bunka Undō Shiryō Kenkyūkai, Shōwa senzenki puroretaria bunka undō shiryōshū (Tokyo: Maruzen Yūshōdō, 2017), DVD.

Figure 2.2 Lian’s writings in Esperanto and Japanese. On the left, Lepismo [Lian Wenqing], “Kia estas Esperantismo?,” La Verda Ombro 5, no. 5 (1923): 1. On the right, Lian Wenqing, “Wareware wa tōsō naki jinrui no heiwa ni ikin,” Informo de F.E.S., no. 1 (1931): 6-7.

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Figure 2.3 The left shows Akita meeting Esperantists at their homes and right shows his attendance of May Day, in which Esperantists also participated. Akita Ujaku, Wakaki Souēto Roshia, unnumbered.

Figure 2.4 On the left, the Comintern Broadcasting Station from which “human voices are transmitted across the world,” and on the right, Akita broadcasting in Esperanto at the Moscow Broadcasting Station. Puroretaria kagaku kenkyūjo Esuperanto kenkyūkai, Puroretaria Esuperanto Kōza 1, (Tokyo: Tettō Shoin, 1930), 86 and 130.

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Figure 2.5 M.T. “Kokusai tsūshin no hajimekata,” Kamarado 2, no. 4 (1932): 20-21.

Figure 2.6 Letters from Soviet and German comrades in Kamarado, no. 1 (1931): 6-7.

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Figure 2.7 Picture of Proletarian Esperanto Correspondence with Marx’s slogan “Proletarians of the World, Unite!” written in Esperanto on top. The handshake, here between a peasant (left) and an industrial worker (right), was a frequent gesture appearing in Esperanto letters to emphasize a spatial proximity and amical feelings among proletarians worldwide. Kamarado, no. 1 (1931): 38.

Figure 2.8 Letters from Soviet Comrades in P.P.E.U., Puluo shijieyu tongxin / Proleta Esperanto Korespondado, no. 1 (1932 December).

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Figure 2.9 Vocabulary list of Esperanto neologisms created by Ye Laishi. Cicio Mar [Ye Laishi], Forgesitaj Homoj (Chongping: Eldonis LDE, 1985), 214.

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Figure 3.1 International Woman’s Day in China. Third picture on the left shows Esperantist and antiwar activist Hasegawa Teru giving a lecture. “Jinian sanba funüjie,” Liangyou, no. 153 (1940): 12.

Figure 3.2 Illustration of male and female reproductive organs in a manual on hygiene for proletarians. Shinkō Ishi Renmei, Musansha eisei hikkei (Tokyo: Sōbunkaku, 1932), 134-135.

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Figure 3.3 Illustration of female pregnancy cycle in a manual on hygiene for proletarians. Shinkō Ishi Renmei, Musansha eisei hikkei (Tokyo: Sōbunkaku, 1932), 139.

Figure 3.4 Illustration of female pregnancy cycle in a manual on hygiene for proletarians. Shinkō Ishi Renmei, Musansha eisei hikkei (Tokyo: Sōbunkaku, 1932), 171.

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Figure 3.5 Illustration of “bone-dry breasts” in an essay by Matsuda Tokiko titled “Shakai Chibusa” (Society’s Breasts) in Bungaku Jidai 4, no. 4 (1932): 77.

Figure 3.6 Front cover Puroretaria sanji seigen undō, no. 2 (1931): 1.

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Figure 3.7 Illustration of the salt smugglers in the sixth installment of “Salt.” Kang Kyŏng-ae, “Sogŭm: cheyuk’hoe milsu’ip,” Sin Kajŏng 2, no. 10 (1934): 204-205.

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Figure 4.1 Uri Tongmu Editorial, “Hachigatsu tsuitachi hansen dē taishūteki demo de tatake,” Uri tongmu, (inaugural preparatory issue no. 2, 1932): 1

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Figure 4.2 An article in the Anti-Imperial Graph calling for support with the independence movements in Korea and Taiwan. Hantei Gurafu, May 25, 1931, 2.

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An article in the Anti-Imperial Graph explaining the imperial exploitation of Korea through graphs. The photo shows the Wonsan Strike in Korea in 1929. These graphs and photos were sent to be displayed at the International Anti-Imperial Exhibition in Paris and Berlin. Hantei Gurafu, May 25, 1931, 4.

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Figure 4.3 Covers of Erich Maria Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front translated in East Asian languages.

Figure 4.4. Cover of War against War anthology. Nihon sayoku bungeika sōrengō (ed.), Sensō ni taisuru sensō: Anchi-miritarizumu shōsetsushū (Tokyo: Nansō Shoin, 1928).

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Figure 4.5 Various materials used for Antiwar Day and agitation against war.

Image not available for copyright reasons.

Antiwar Leaflet that was distributed to promote International Antiwar Day. Photo taken at Ohara Institute for Social Research.

Similar to the May Day tracings mentioned in Chapter 1, the Proletarian Arts Movement in Japan provided tracings for antiwar propaganda. Nihon puroretaria bijutsuka dōmei Kansai chihō hyōgikai, 8-1 kinen nyūsu: Katto shū (Osaka: P.P. Kansai Hyōgikai, 1931), no page number.

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Image not available for copyright reasons.

Figure 4.6 Materials from the China Anti-Intervention Alliance Art. Umeda Toshihide and Ōhara Shakai Mondai Kenkyūjo (ed), Posutā no shakaishi: Ōhara Shaken korekushon (Tokyo: Hitsuji Shobō, 2001) CD-ROM.

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Images not available for copyright reasons.

Figure 4.7 Above a manifest that supports the China Observation Group and below the planned schedule of the tour through Japan and the visit to China. Photo taken at the Ohara Institute for Social Research.

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Figure 4.8. A call for solidarity among proletarians in East Asia following the Mount Wanbao Incident. Sekki, July 29, 1931, 5.

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