A Thesis entitled Yoshimoto Taka’aki, Communal Illusion, and the Japanese New Left by Manuel Yang Submitted as partial fulfillment for requirements for The Master of Arts Degree in History ________________________ Adviser: Dr. William D. Hoover ________________________ Adviser: Dr. Peter Linebaugh ________________________ Dr. Alfred Cave ________________________ Graduate School The University of Toledo (July 2005) ACKNOWLEDGMENTS It is customary in a note of acknowledgments to make the usual mea culpa concerning the impossibility of enumerating all the people to whom the author has incurred a debt in writing his or her work, but, in my case, this is far truer than I can ever say. This note is, therefore, a necessarily abbreviated one and I ask for a small jubilee, cancellation of all debts, from those that I fail to mention here due to lack of space and invidiously ungrateful forgetfulness. Prof. Peter Linebaugh, sage of the trans-Atlantic commons, who, as peerless mentor and comrade, kept me on the straight and narrow with infinite "grandmotherly kindness" when my temptation was always to break the keisaku and wander off into apostate digressions; conversations with him never failed to recharge the fiery voltage of necessity and desire of historical imagination in my thinking. The generously patient and supportive free rein that Prof. William D. Hoover, the co-chair of my thesis committee, gave me in exploring subjects and interests of my liking at my own preferred pace were nothing short of an ideal that all academic apprentices would find exceedingly enviable; his meticulous comments have time and again mercifully saved me from committing a number of elementary factual and stylistic errors. Prof. Al Cave, my third reader, encouraged me immensely with his antinomian enthusiasm and capacious understanding of Native American history; although I'm not sure if I can ever do i i justice to his provocative suggestion that I write a "book of ideology" with twentieth-century Japan as its pivot, I hope to keep it as a talisman to catalyze the alchemy of my future work. There are colleagues and comrades with whom I have had enjoyably useful bull sessions over the years, sober and intoxicated, often past the meridian of the midnight hour. Cheers to the regulars of the Gruppe Grundrisse and the later reconstituted Marx Study Group: Tom Chisholm has turned on the searchlight of the Native American commons upon Marx next to me and is, besides, a fellow conspirator of unedited journals, unwritten pamphlets, unmade films, and other megalomaniacal projects laced in cigarette smokes and delirious laughter; Al Hart whose lived proletarian language and experience as a UE organizer constantly reminded me to keep my feet on actually existing grundrisse of the working class at all times; Brian Matuszewski whose anarchist deracination of industrial time-discipline I've found convivial on more than one occasion; Prof. Carter Wilson who enlivened my understanding of political science with a morally committed, anti-racist, revolutionary humanism from below; George Windau whose decades of industrial factory experience showed me first-handedly how surplus value is made locally at our City of Glass in the age of millenarian late capitalism. I've also had long, innumerable conversations with Dr. Jason Hribal, an animal liberationist with distinctly Maughamian manner of thought; he came to Toledo at the same time I did and we both drank at the fountain of the Hydra. Dr. Arslan Razmi of the University of Massachusetts at Amherst is an intimate confrere from my days in Austin and we have always shared a moral outrage at ii i hypocritical prerogatives of privilege and power, to say nothing of an idiosyncratically irreverent sense of humor and love of arguments, and I thank him and Geert Dhondt for inviting me to give an impromptu talk based on a part of this mss. to the graduate students' Marxist study group at the Economics Dept. at the U of Mass. Amherst. A number of academic conferences offered me other important venues in airing out my thoughts stemming from the earlier drafts of this mss: a session on "Disciplinary Practice, Political Reform, and the Left in Historical Context," Western Political Science Association: Search for a Method, Long Beach, California, March 23, 2002; 9th Annual Human Sciences Conference: Academic Labor and the New Politics of Consensus, George Washington University, February 28, 2003; Seventh Annual Conference on Holidays, Rituals, Festivals, Celebrations, and Public Display, Bowling Green State University, May 29, 2003; a panel on "Early and Late Marxism," "Marxism and the World Stage": Fifth Rethinking Marxism Conference, University of Massachusetts at Amherst, November 6-8, 2003; First Annual UMass/Five Colleges History Conference: Spheres of Power, University of Massachusetts at Amherst, October 16, 2004; a panel on "The Cold War in Asia," The Cold War and Its Contexts: The 2005 UCSB-GWU-LSE Graduate Student Conference on the Cold War, University of California at Santa Barbara, April 29-30, 2005. I give heartfelt thanks to the organizers of these gatherings and commentators on my papers. Both the History Dept. and the Graduate School at the University of Toledo have made my research, to say nothing of subsistence, possible with iv their financial assistance, in the form of T.A.ship and fellowship, respectively; I thank them greatly. The librarians at the Carlson, particularly those working in the circulation desk and the inter-library loan department, were a godsend, promptly processing all my requests with enormous patience and good humor; without these veritable guiding angels of the Borgesian labyrinth, no scholar-- particularly someone as hopelessly directionless and wayward as the author-- could initiate, let alone complete, his or her work. Let me also thank Prof. Harry Cleaver of the University of Texas at Austin. He had no hand in my research on Yoshimoto, but I forever commemorate him as the man who taught me how to read Marx politically and prompted me to pursue graduate study in Toledo. If I hadn't met him, I would now be doing something very different at a different place. Last but certainly not least of all, unexcelled gratitude and honor go to my parents, Shih-Lin Yang and Mitsuko Minami Yang, both of whom unconditionally supported me in more ways than I can imagine from birth to delinquent adolescence to what appears now as degeneracy of mounting age. My father Shih-Lin has offered me an unequal model of moral rectitude and equanimity while my mother Mitsuko Minami's vivacious energy and expeditious thoroughness in all her duties embarrasses my gargantuan lack thereof. Knowing I can never match their examples, I offer them a humble Confucian bow of depthless thankfulness that only a prodigal son is capable of. None named above, of course, is responsible for the mess I have made of their redoubtable help. The defects are mine alone and the merits theirs. v TABLE OF CONTENTS Acknowledgments ii Table of Contents vi Preface vii I. Introduction 1 II. War, Language, and the Pan-Asian Struggle 45 III. Communal Illusion: Peculiarities of the Japanese Commons 109 IV. Between Tenk and Default: Ontology of Commitment 161 V. Autonomy and “Myth of the Vanguard”: Origin of the First Japanese New Left 196 Bibliography 229 v i PREFACE Is our revolution in July or December? The road saturated with dews of the valley lilies quietly goes bald The clear blue sky on top of patched houses Is like an eye of freight When the bell rings once, we shall go down Inside the earthen wall where the noonday stars look in So that we can kneel down at the fragrance of aged pickles Of lovers upon whom the skin-colored wind blows. What is revolution? The choicest dusk with plenty of free time A tiny gold bug that enters into their fucking ears It is a sudden afternoon shower that appears a little like ice honey In the far distance where the bones of the workers sleep Kicking away the pot of cactus and cage of white-eye The sky burns that intensely… We still graffiti sad dialects On each gate with chalk-white spittle of Death ¢¡¤£¦¥¢§©¨ £ (Those who survive are the lucky ones). Tanigawa Gan, "Revolution"1 Writing the draft of this manuscript coincided with the death of the French philosopher Jacques Derrida, who passed away on October 8, 2004. One of the characteristic achievements of Derrida's deconstruction was to critically problematize the preface, to argue--rather perversely in the minds of some--that the marginal discursive space of the preface "already always" unhinges, even subverts, the foundational assumptions of the main text that follows it even as it erases the possibility of ever becoming an alternative main text in its turn: vi i "Prefaces, along with forewords, introductions, preludes, preliminaries, preambles, prologues and prolegomena, have always been written, it seems, in view of their own self-effacement...But this subtraction leaves a mark of erasure, a remainder which is added to the subsequent text and which cannot be completely summed up within it."2 Literary theorists and philosophers who came under Derrida's influence more often than not treated this deconstructive "method" as an ahistorical strategy of reading texts, yet another tool of marketing post-structuralist and postmodern literary theory in the neoliberal academia. Long silent on the subject of Marxism, Derrida in his later years, on the other hand, conjured up through a deconstructive reading of the Communist Manifesto a critical, unabashedly historical specter of Marx against the neoliberal world order: Upon rereading the Manifesto and a few other great works of Marx, I said to myself that I know of few texts in the philosophical tradition, perhaps none, whose lesson seemed more urgent today, provided that one take into account what Marx and Engels themselves say (for example, in Engels' "Preface" to the 1888 re-edition) about their own possible "aging" and their intrinsically irreducible historicity.