(Posted to FB by Jairus Banaji.)
Kobayashi Takiji (1903–1933), who was 29 when he was tortured to death
by the Tokkō, the “special” or political branch of the Tokyo police. His
1929 novel Kanikôsen became the classic exemplar of 1920s Japanese
“proletarian realism”. (The term was coined by Kurahara Korehito in a
seminal essay from 1928 called “The Road to Proletarian Realism”.)
Variously translated as The Cannery Boat (1933), The Factory Ship (1973)
and, most recently, as The Crab Cannery Ship (2013), and banned as soon
as it was published, Kobayashi’s novel described the brutality and
dehumanization typical of maritime wage labor in the Okhotsk Sea (crabs
were a major source of foreign exchange for Japan’s imperial economy)
and the resistance that Japanese seafarers mounted to their peculiarly
harsh subjection to capital. (The novel was based on events that had
occurred recently.) It also denounced the imperial system that sustained
this sector of industry.
In the aftermath of the 2007 financial crash the novel became a
bestseller, with close to 700,000 copies selling in a single year
(2008)! (See the first link below.)
In a direct response to Itagaki Takao’s more overtly modernist “machine
realism” (the machine as the true subject of modernity), Kobayashi would
claim in 1931, “Only from the class perspective of the proletariat, can
the machine reveal its true essence”. The crab ships were factories on
the sea, and Kobayashi saw them as microcosms of capitalism,
underscoring the despotic social relations at work in industrialized
fishing (as early as 1929!). But he also wished to underscore the
colonizing tendencies of capital, and used the example of Japan’s own
expansion in Sakhalin.
From 1930 on Kobayashi was repeatedly arrested and even charged with
treason. Officially, he became a member of the Japanese Communist Party
only in October 1931 after it had been outlawed and become a banned
organization. Wikipedia tells us that on 20 February, 1933, he went to
Akasaka “to meet with a fellow Communist Party member, who turned out to
be a Tokkō spy who had infiltrated the party. The Tokkō were lying in
wait for him, and although he tried to escape, he was captured,
arrested” and tortured to death.
You can also read:
https://apjjf.org/-norma-field/3058/article.html
<https://apjjf.org/-norma-field/3058/article.html?fbclid=IwAR24LXOvu1X4XpDuCyjFc56BmhOIB2NM2djsNifUWXDfZctaR655YUq-NS8>
https://www.jacobinmag.com/.../kobayashi-crab-cannery...
<https://www.jacobinmag.com/2015/05/kobayashi-crab-cannery-ship-japanese-communist-party?fbclid=IwAR1HGSJk-AaAM-jOjdrJZpNNhd6L9F5b0A5J9-k_Ab9tzXTHUJ-SJZ5BlMQ>
and be sure to watch out for Liam Campling and Alejandro Colás,
Capitalism and the Sea, to be published by Verso next year.
Image may contain: 1 person
<https://www.facebook.com/photo/?fbid=10158673683230489&set=a.352264660488&__cft__[0]=AZU6wpAyuuzMQ30VYwzrrnF3dc5oRVyN9vl3Q5sSdKp08Zl06g5grz0PltXuCHu7Pmr5e-kJwNYe-3ij_todhY9F1aHHOSq7gnGEXCWmNZJlk4kbnJffMnk4TP2QPnnqJIw&__tn__=EH-R>
11Tsao Mayur Chetia and10 others
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