The Asia-Pacific Journal | Japan Focus Volume 7 | Issue 8 | Number 8 | Article ID 3058 | Feb 17, 2009

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Commercial Appetite and Human Need: The Accidental andFated Revival of Kobayashi Takiji's Cannery Ship

Norma Field

Commercial Appetite and Human Need:The Accidental and Fated Revival ofKobayashi Takiji's Cannery Ship

Norma Field

Japan's best-known proletarian novel, KaniKosen (depicting conditions aboard a crab-canning factory ship operating off Sovietwaters)[2] [1] by Kobayashi Takiji (1903-1933),enjoyed an utterly unanticipated revival in thecourse of 2008.

Many attribute the revival of the novel to thedeepening impoverishment of the ranks of theirregularly employed, now widely said toaccount for one-third of the work force. Themajority of the latter earn less than two millionyen per year. It is their increasingly insistentpresence that has given such terms as "income-gap society" (kakusa shakai), "working poor"

(waakingu pua), and more recently, "lostgeneration" (rosu jene) widespread familiarity.

That said, it remains difficult to formulate astatement along the lines of "Because of amomentous socioeconomic shift, therefore therevival of a novel published in 1929.Why not acontemporary novel for grasping contemporaryconditions? How can a novel from eightdecades ago even be readable today, especiallyby those young readers whose circumstances itis said to elucidate? And finally, what meaningshould we f ind in the "boom" beyondamazement that it actually happened?

These questions entail each other. They canonly be answered provisionally, not onlybecause the process is ongoing, but alsobecause any meaning we might ascribe to it isitself an expression of our understanding of thepresent and of our obligations to the future, inother words, of our consciousness.

In order to make even rudimentary sense of the"boom," however, it is first necessary to takeaccount of its implausibility.

Why the "Boom" was Improbable

Let me speak briefly from personal experience.For approximately five years, I have beenstudying what is called Japanese proletarianliterature with a focus on Kobayashi Takiji. Ihave stayed at length in Otaru, the port city inHokkaido, Japan's northernmost island, wherethis writer grew up. Even there, where mostpeople had at least heard his name, if I toldpeople that I was studying Kobayashi Takiji, Iwas greeted with surprise. The surprise was

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often benign, but it could turn skeptical, andespecially with intellectuals, aggressively so. Why are you bothering with someone like himnow, was the accusation I read in people'sfaces even, or especially when they didn't voiceit.

In Japan, it is generally acknowledged that "theseason of politics" was over by the early 1970s,after both the popular struggle against therenewal of the U.S.-Japan Security Treaty in1960 had been crushed and the studentstruggle of 1968-70, which was an explosiveprotest against the bureaucrat ized,competitive, consumption-centered society thathad followed upon the "income-doubling" planannounced in 1960, ended in a widespreadsense of defeat. What did this mean for thelegacy of a writer like Kobayashi Takiji? At thetime of his death at age 29 by torture at thehands of the Special Higher Police, he was amember of the then illegal Japan CommunistParty. Leftist intellectuals from the 60s and70s movements, who might be thought to feelsome affinity for him, were alienated by thefact of his membership in a party that hadsought to control them. For others, saturatedin postmodernist ideology, a body of worksproduced in a class-based revolutionarymovement was simply laughable. But surelythere was more to the hostility of middle-agedleftists than party affiliation or intellectualcamp. Takiji's name awakened an all butforgotten reconciliation with a retreat frompolitics. It registered as a dull, irritatingreproach.

For the young, he was simply an unknownentity or at most, a name attached to a title in alist of modern Japanese writers.

The "Boom" was Manufactured and Real

To be sure, during the five years preceding theboom, several developments laid the ground forexpanding interest in Takiji beyond the tinycircles of devotees. A Takiji Library (foundhere, in Japanese) was established through the

remarkable initiative of Sano Chikara, a hugelysuccessful businessman and graduate of Takiji'salma mater, Otaru University of Commerce.The Library became a centralized source ofinformation; it also sponsored the publicationof ten books including a manga version of TheCannery Ship to attract a young readership to,and together with the University, co-sponsoreda series of international symposia. Adocumentary film, "Strike the Hour, Takiji"(found here, in Japanese) was released in 2005;screenings became occasions for new Takijigatherings. The film's foregrounding of Takiji'sopposition to imperialist war served to link it tothe national movement to preserve Article 9(the no-war clause) of the Constitution.

Strike the Hour

These initiatives were significant achievementsin themselves and led to a new Internetpresence as well. It is striking, however, thatthe antiwar angle failed to spark a broadinterest in Kobayashi Takiji.

What was required for that to happen was notonly a widespread acknowledgement ofeconomic crisis, but the much more difficult

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recognition—for a society habituated toregarding itself as homogeneously middle-class—that the solutions being adopted werecreating dramatic disparities. The bursting ofthe bubble economy in the early 1990s led toan onslaught of structural readjustment.Suicide rates took a leap beginning in 1998.(The figure of 30,000 per year has not changedin ten years and places Japan second only toRussia in the G8.) Signs of economic"recovery" came around 2003 and wereheralded in the media without acknowledgmentof the cost, which was growing incomedisparity. Prime Minister Koizumi himselfprovided distractions from such recognition byplaying up his eccentricity as evidence ofindependence and by engaging in a hyperdisplay of patriotism in visits to YasukuniShrine, obscuring the real damage he wasdoing to the majority of Japanese citizens.Concurrently, a blame-the-victim approach wasprepared through government responses to thethree young hostages in Iraq (2004), capturedin the expression jiko sekinin, "personalresponsibility."

Perhaps the first sign of recognition that theeconomy, if indeed it was recovering, wasdoing so in a way that benefited the few andinjured the many came in the selection of thephrase "income-gap society" as one of the tenkeys expressions of the year 2006. Thealarming numbers of the irregularly employedand the concentration of unemployment amongthe young made it apparent that the emphasison "free" in the expression "freeters" (furiitaa)was no longer appropriate. If increasingnumbers of the young were to be found indispatch and other forms of irregularemployment, it was no longer because theypreferred to be unshackled to a regular job, butbecause they had no choice. The precariouslys i t u a t e d y o u n g ( y i e l d i n g t h e t e r m"purekariaato," said to derive from an Italiangra f i t t o combin ing "precar io " and"proletariato") found their champion in theerstwhile rightist punk-rock-band-singer-

turned-labor-activist-and-writer AmamiyaKarin. Amamiya, a conspicuous media figure inher "gosu rori" (Gothic Lolita) fashion.

It is one of her book titles that has provided aslogan for the anti-poverty movement: "ikisasero," or "make us live," a neologisminsofar as it is a demand and not a plea to "letus live."

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Amamiya was to play a key role in the CanneryShip revival.

Here, a brief chronology of the boom might beuseful. Two newspaper articles served as majorcatalysts. First, a conversation betweenAmamiya and established novelist TakahashiGenichiro in the nationally circulated dailyMainichi (January 9, 2008) in which Amamiyaobserved that reading Cannery Ship, she wasstruck by how the conditions depicted mirroredthe current desperate situation of youngworkers. (Why was Amamiya reading thiswork? She was preparing for a discussion onliterature and labor to be published on thepages of Minshu Bungaku (DemocraticLiterature), a formally independent journal withclose ties to the Japan Communist Party.Amamiya, in her early 30s, seems to effortlesslycross the boundaries between old and new leftand new new left, liberal, socialist, and

communist publications. (For her presence inthe Save Article 9 movement and otheractivities, see this website.) Amamiya'scomment was quoted widely and found its wayinto the second influential article, in the majorliberal daily Asahi on February 16. In thecourse of the article, senior editorial writerYuri Sachiko referred to an essay contest onCannery Ship in which she had been a judge.Cosponsored by the Takiji Library and OtaruUniversity for Commerce, the contest targeted(a) young readers (age limit of twenty-five) buta l s o ( b ) m a d e r o o m f o r o l d e r a n dunconventional readers (such as homelessreaders, through internet café submission) andoffered substantial prize money for responsesto Cannery Ship, or more precisely, the mangaversion published in 2006 by the Library. (Infact, the winning entrants went on to read thenovella, as evident from the collection ofsubmissions, which in turn sold well: Watashitachi wa ikani kani kosen o yonda ka,or How We Read the Cannery Ship).

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The Asahi article prompted a bookstore workerin charge of stocking paperbacks to read thenovel. Stunned by how it spoke to her ownexperience of three years as a "freeter," sheordered 150 copies from Shinchosha, thepublishers of a paperback edition, who werefrankly bewildered to receive such an order fora long-forgotten title. Once received, thecopies were stacked with a handwritten pop-upsign suggesting that the conditions of the"working poor" might constitute a veritable"cannery ship." "Working poor" was alreadyfamiliar as a phrase, and here it was effectivelypaired with the unfamiliar, but concretelysuggestive "cannery ship." Middle-aged malereaders, the first to notice, began to yield toyoung people in their twenties. Then, on May 2,during the slow-news period of "Golden Week,"

the top circulation conservative daily Yomiurimade the boom—which did not yet exist--itstopic article of the evening edition. Soon,television stations began vying with oneanother to take up the improbable hot topic ofthe day, their cameras going to bookstores, andfilming essay contest winners. By the end ofMay, Shinchosha had reprinted 200,000 copies.By December 2008, it is estimated that 600,000copies of this edition alone had made their wayto bookstores. Other publishers followed suit;one (Shukan Kin'yobi) produced a new hard-cover edition with an introduction by Amamiyain which she meticulously analyzed theparallels between labor conditions as depictedin the novel and those of the present-day. Thereare now four manga versions on the market.

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A documentary on Takiji's life by HokkaidoBroadcasting Corporation won the Agency forCultural Affairs Grand Prize, edging out majorproductions by NHK, the National BroadcastingCorporation (Inochi no kioku: Kobayashi TakijiNijukunen no jinsei; found here, in Japanese).Not only are more titles forthcoming in 2009,but a stage production and a feature filmscheduled as well. All of this would surely havebeen welcome to Takiji, an eager filmgoer,ardent yet critical fan of Charlie Chaplin,interested in all genres that would bring themovement to more people.

What can we make of this concatenation ofevents? It seems to be a miraculous meeting ofpure contingency and absolute necessity, ofcommercial appetite and human need. Withoutthe long investment in Takiji and his works(collecting, editing, reprinting, issuingnewsletters, observing his death anniversary)on the part of a few groups, many associatedwith the Japan Communist Party, the resourceswould not have been available for this historicmoment. Takiji could have lived on like this foranother decade, until the aging keepers of theflame died out. To be sure, there wereindividuals newly interested in him thanks tothe activities of the Takiji Library, but they did

not constitute a group; if they knew each other,it was through the Internet. For Takiji tosurvive beyond dusty l ibrary shelves,something utterly different needed to happen.That is, somehow, there had to be a meetingbetween his 1929 fiction and the political-socialorder of the present, a meeting that could onlytake place in the hearts and minds of thosecompelled to live under the strictures of thelatter.

Two liberal newspaper articles, an initial bookorder of 150 copies, then a conservativenewspaper article turned the trickle of interestinto a flood. Finding a story that sells is ofcourse a central preoccupation of the media,with the hoped-for outcome being a cascade ofsales. The aura of newsworthiness promptedpublishers to reprint more copies, bookstoresto provide more space, provoking further mediaattention, then more copies reprinted.

And in this largely commercial process,something began to happen. Kitamura Takashi,in a report at the 2008 Kobayashi TakijiMemorial Symposium at Oxford in October (see[2], below) observes a shift in the nature of thereporting, which began with the familiarobservation of similarities but then evolved toregistering and reproducing the novella's claimthat banding together in resistance can lead tosocial transformation. In other words,journalists following the story began torecognize themselves in it and to express theirown desires in print and on the airwaves.

Not That We Are Exploited, but Why andHow, and What We Must Do

The phrase "kani kosen" ended up among thetop ten key expressions of 2008. The phrase, inother words, had become a metaphor thatenabled many people to grasp their condition.It drew together terms such as "working poor,""lost generation," and "income-gap society" intoa coherent whole in its image of inescapableexploitation: a factory ship, subject neither tointernational maritime law nor factory

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regulation because of its hybrid nature,operating in frigid waters near the SovietUnion, with workers of diverse origin who weredriven to compete for marginal advantages inliterally deadly conditions of labor. In fact, itwas this condition—that workers were confinedon board ship and faced with a visible enemy inthe form of slave overseer-like bosses—that ledsome to question the applicability of the novellato present-day conditions, wherein temporaryworkers are scattered and the exploitationoften abstract and impersonal. Takiji makesclear in the work, however, (1) that it is a slow,difficult process for the hierarchicallyseparated, motley group of workers to reachthe understanding that only through solidaritydo they have any chance of survival and (2) thattheir real enemy is not the brutal overseerbefore them, but the structure comprised ofbankers in Tokyo, the imperial military, andglobal capital. (In fact, the workers' firstuprising fails because they expect the imperialnavy to defend them, loyal imperial subjects,against their unjust bosses. Having learnedtheir lesson, they must rise up "again…andagain.") About his next major work Fuzaijinushi (The Absentee Landlord, 1929), Takijiwrote his editor that his purpose was not toshow tenant farmers that they were wretched,which they knew all too well, but why and howthey were maintained in that condition, andthat the way forward was struggle throughsolidarity not only among themselves but withurban workers as well.

After decades of depoliticized emphasis onconsumer pleasures, accompanied byatomization masquerading as individualism andfostered by educational and workplacecompetition—decades in which the word"labor" was all but forgotten despite the risingphenomenon of death-from-overwork(karoshi)—it should, in fact, not surprise us thatthere was no contemporary literary work thatcould provide such an intuitively compellingimage of both exploitation and resistance.Indeed, now that we have been thrust in a

worldwide depression, the image of the"cannery ship" is more comprehensive thanever, coinciding with that image of "spaceshipearth" from a time when astronauts stillprovided us heady excitement and hope.

The aspect of the "cannery ship" image thatcontinues to be under-recognized is that of themilitary. Acutely attuned to the imbrications ofthe class system, colonialism and imperialism,Takiji argued for the need to join the classstruggle with anti-imperialist struggle. In hispenultimate work of fiction, Toseikatsusha (TheLife of a Party Member), published after hismurder in 1933, the protagonist, together withcomrades, is organizing in a factory that hassuddenly been ordered to produce gas masksfor use on the continent. The goal is topersuade regular and temporary workers tostand together for their rights and to opposethe use of their labor for an imperialist war. Since permanent workers were inclined tosafeguard their privileges from encroachmentby cheaper temp labor, and temp workers weregrateful for a war that was providing at leastshort-term wage labor, we can imagine howdaunting this organizing task was.

Daunting, but correct in terms of principle andanalysis. If Japanese activists today, oftensecurely middle-class, well educated, andmiddle-aged and older, who are dedicated toproblems of historical consciousness, theformer military comfort women or Article9,have not seemed engaged by the antipovertymovement of the young, then the latter havenot taken up the antiwar cause. Given thelimitations of time and resources, this isaltogether understandable. But in order tocatch up with the consciousness of Takiji andhis comrades of the late 1920s and early 30s, inorder, therefore, to be adequate to thedemands of the present, it is necessary to jointhe antipoverty and antiwar struggles. Thatentails overcoming the sectarian residues fromthe 1960s and 70s as well as generationaldivides.

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Two new journals give a hint of the discussionsand actions that are underway: POSSE, run byan NPO membership in their early twenties anddedicated to labor issues, and Losgene, whichbills itself as a "Pan-left Journal.”

The New Bearers of Solidarity andStruggle

The Cannery Ship boom issued from and feedsa hunger for collectivity and activism amid theloneliness and cynicism produced by neo-liberalcallousness. Communist Party membership hasbeen increasing at the rate of 1000 per monthover the past year and has attractedmainstream media attention. New kinds ofunions are springing up around the country,welcoming single members, providing legaladvice and support, demonstrating thatcollective bargaining is possible even fordispatch workers. From December 31st toJanuary 5 th, twenty some organizations,including these unions as well as mainstreamlabor confederations, came together as part ofthe Anti-poverty Campaign (found here, inJapanese) to establish a "New Year's Village forTemp Workers" ("Toshi-koshi haken mura" inJapanese) for those who had been summarilyterminated and rendered homeless just asadministrative offices closed for the new yearholidays. Tents went up in the heart of Tokyo inHibiya Park, under the nose of the LaborMinistry; food and legal advice were provided,and most importantly, the New Year wasgreeted in the company of others and beforethe eyes of the nation.

No doubt Takiji would have rejoiced in thesedevelopments, too. Committed as he was to thecause of poor women—often depicting theirskills as organizers in his fiction--he might havebeen especially intrigued by the case ofIwagami Ai, who was unlawfully fired by a shopspecializing in the BABY line of Lolita fashions(her website can be found here, in Japanese).

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Photo Credit: Akahata

Clad in her long black Gothic Lolita dress,surrounded by customers in pink and whiteruffled dresses, Iwagami speaks at May Dayrallies and labor-rights' study groups. She haswon broad support from the new unions and istaking her case to court: "Workers have theright to stand in unity, to engage in collectivebargaining, and to take collective action."

Why Literature?

In Cannery Ship as well as in other works,Takiji makes frequent reference to the coloniesand to the "semi-colonial" brutality of thepolice. He understood the periphery torepresent both backwardness and possibility.Looking to the Scandinavian writers who raisedkey i ssues in modern l i terature , he

acknowledged a similar aspiration for himself,an "absentee writer," absent, that is, from thecenter in Tokyo, situated as he was in the semi-colonial periphery of Hokkaido. But heexpected truly great "absentee writers" toemerge from the colonies, from Korea andTaiwan.

No doubt, again, that he would have beengratified to see a new Korean translation ofCannery Ship appear in 2008. But he wouldalso have been thrilled with the rediscovery ofan earlier translation and the journey of thetranslator Yi Kwi-wðn and publisher Yi Sang-kyðng to speak at his birthplace in AkitaPrefecture in February of 2008.

Photo Credit: Kitamura Takashi, Akahata

Yi KwÄ«-wðn recounted how, as he translatedthe works of Marx or Lenin from Japanesetranslations in the course of undergroundactivities in Pusan, he began to yearn for worksof literature. Encountering Takiji's works forthe first time, and feeling a strong affinity forthe portrayal of state violence (in "March 15,1928") and underground struggle ("The Life ofa Party Member") as well as the narrative ofthe Cannery Ship, he translated the three, andhis friend published them under the title of TheCannery Ship as soon as the Chun Doo-hwanregime came to an end.

Why did Yi Kwi-wðn feel the need for works ofliterature? Why, for that matter, did Takiji and

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his comrades feel the need to produceliterature during their busy, danger-riddenpursuit of social transformation? And howimportant is the fact of its being a work ofliterature to the revival of the Cannery Ship? We know that the title has provided aninvaluable metaphor enabling people to grasptheir current condition, but what about thework as a whole?

It remains to be seen if, and how, in thesestrange and familiar times, the experience ofnovelistic ways of seeing, feeling, and thinkingwill serve people seeking to redefine theirworld: from a collection of atomized consumersto a collectivity of citizens who, by forgingsolidarity around the necessity of work, haveonce gain begun to dream of a societydedicated to the flourishing of all.

Notes

[1] Anonymously translated as "The CanneryShip" in the 1933 collection, The Cannery ShipAnd Other Japanese Stories from InternationalPublishers and as "The Factory Ship" in FrankMotofuji's 1973"The Factory Ship" and "TheAbsentee Landlord" from the University ofWashington Press.

[2] The 2009 books, in order of publication, todate:

Norma Field, Kobayashi Takiji: 21seiki ni doyomu ka [Reading Kobayashi Takiji for the 21st

Century] Iwanami Shinsho.

Ogino Fujio, Takiji no jidai kara miete kurumono: Chian taisei ni koshite [What the age ofTakiji reveals: In protest of the public peaceand security regime] Shinnihon Shuppan.

2008 Okkusufodo Kobayashi Takiji kinenshinpojiumu ronbunshu: Takiji no shiten karamita shintai chiiki kyoiku [Report of the 2008Kobayashi Takiji memorial symposium atOxford: Body, region, and education] OtaruUniversity of Commerce and Kinokuniya.

Hamabayashi Masao, "Kani kosen" noshakaishi: Kobayashi Takiji to sono jidai [Asocial history of Cannery Ship: Kobayashi Takijiand his age] Gakuyu no To mosha.

A trailer of the feature film with MatsudaRyuhei, to be released this summer, may beseen here.

The Haiyuza Theater, marking its 65th year, willstage a new production of Kani kosen in May.

Norma Field teaches in the Department of EastAsian Languages & Civilizations at theUniversity of Chicago and is a Japan Focusassociate. She is the author of In the Realm of aDying Emperor: Japan at Century’s End.

Her most recent book is Kobayashi Takiji:21seiki ni do yomu ka (Iwanami Shinsho 2009).

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This article was written for Quarterly Changbi(Spring 2009) and is reprinted in slightlyrevised form with the addition of notes andp h o t o g r a p h s , a n d w i t h g r a t e f u lacknowledgement to its editors and publishers.

Posted at The Asia-Pacific Journal on February22, 2009.

Recommended citation: Norma Field,“Commercial Appetite and Human Need: TheAccidental and Fated Revival of KobayashiTakiji's Cannery Ship” The Asia-Pacific JournalVol. 8-8-09, February 22, 2009