Paper short abstract:

The fundamental question underlying this paper is how intellectuals of postwar Japan responded to the encounter with the Soviet Union, and in particular how their identity and beliefs were challenged by that experience, and to what extent such issues were embodied in their writings.

Paper long abstract:

The fundamental question underlying this paper is how intellectuals of postwar Japan responded to the encounter with the Soviet Union.

More than fifty travelogues to the USSR were published in Japan either as magazine articles or in book form between the 50s and the 60s, testifying to a thriving intercultural exchange as well as to a growing interest in Soviet Union by the Japanese public. To be sure, most of the travelogues were written by members of the Japanese political, economical and technical elite. Some of them, however, were authored by members of literary world. This paper will specifically focus on the latter by analyzing two such works by the renowned Japanese writers Tokunaga Sunao (1899-1958) and Ōoka Shōhei (1909-1988), who respectively visited the USSR in 1954 and 1962.

In his seminal book "Political Pilgrims" (1981), Paul Hollander examined the infatuation of Western intellectuals who traveled to the Soviet Union and the other communist countries, arguing that their perception and judgement was ultimately shaped both by personal self-deception and by carefully arranged "techniques of hospitality" that strongly influenced and limited their experience.

In Ōoka Shōhei's opinion, for people of his generation the Soviet Union was indeed the "country one longed for" (akogare no kuni), that is, an object of admiration, curiosity, and idealization, regardless of one's ideological belief.

Following Hollander's scholarship I will discuss the two travelogues in order to explore questions as to how did the authors confront with the myth of the Soviet Union as a socialist utopia, that is, how did their identities within Japanese society informed their beliefs about the Soviet Union and how were such beliefs negotiated with the actual experience.