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- Convenor:
-
George T. Sipos
(West University of Timisoara)
Send message to Convenor
- Section:
- Modern Literature
- Sessions:
- Thursday 26 August, -
Time zone: Europe/Brussels
Short Abstract:
While well-known and researched in Japan, tenkō (political conversion) remains largely under-studied in Western languages. This panel will revisit the concept itself, as well as the corpus of narratives usually identified as tenkō literature.
Long Abstract:
The concept of tenkō incorporates expressions of ideological conversion performed by members of the Japanese Communist Party, starting in 1933, whereby they renounced Marxism, either willingly or fearing for their health and life, and expressed support for Japan's imperial expansion on the continent.
The debate is still open as to whether Japan's tenko of anti-kokutai activists was a unique phenomenon in Japan and elsewhere, a social experiment in oppression in which state authorities, and societal and personal pressures alike, led to a public mass ideological conversion of almost all of Japan's leftist organizations' members and to their declarative "re-integration" in the "family state." This panel proposes not only a re-positioning of tenkō within its historical context and beyond, but also a re-opening of the discussion about tenkō through literary narratives produced by the "converted" writers of the time.
The presentations in the panel focus on conceptual reassessments of the larger phenomena of tenkō and tenkō literature, while also adding a fresh reading of the literary works of Takami Jun (1907-1965), as a tenkō writer. Iterations of the presentations in the panel are part of a brand new book project focused on interwar Japan: Tenkō: Cultures of Political Conversion in Transwar Japan (Routledge, 2021).
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Thursday 26 August, 2021, -Max Ward (Middlebury College)
Paper short abstract:
This paper proposes a new approach to the conceptual history of tenkō in modern Japan, one that can account for all the diverse practices, political positions and theoretical investments the term accrued across Japan's transwar history.
Paper long abstract:
No other term has come to symbolize the vexed decades of interwar Japan—if not also the myriad contradictions of Japanese modernity— more than tenkō. The combination of the term’s two Chinese characters—転向—innocuously means a “change of direction,” but in the political history of interwar Japan, tenkō assumed on a much more insidious significance. There the term referred to the “ideological conversion” of thousands of political activists and intellectuals, beginning with incarcerated Japanese Communist Party (JCP) members who publicly defected from the party in 1933-1934, to later in the decade, leftist thinkers, academics as well as anti-colonial nationalists in colonial Korea who either abandoned political activism or began to proactively support the imperial state. Then, in the early postwar period, Japanese scholars returned to the question of tenkō in order to pursue a variety of problems related to Japanese intellectual history, including: theories of modern subjectivity, the paradigmatic shifts in modern Japanese intellectual history, the politics of writing, or, as revealing the constitutive dynamics of Japanese modernity or modernity more generally. As we see here, scholars expanded the meaning of tenkō far beyond the political defections of interwar political activists and, in doing so, opened the term to a variety of analytical and theoretical investments.
In this paper, I consider how we might construct a conceptual history tenkō that can account for all the diverse practices, political positions and theoretical investments the term accrued across the twentieth century. I begin by questioning the basic assumptions that have informed our received understanding of tenkō. Then I will propose the idea of “historical catachresis” theorized by Tani Barlow as providing a way to account for the many articulations of tenkō across a variety of ideological, historical and institutional domains.
George T. Sipos (West University of Timisoara)
Paper short abstract:
The identity of tenkō literature, narratives produced by former proletarian writers forced to undergo a political conversion, remains contested today and glossed over as an offshoot of proletarian literature. Is there more that research can reveal about commonalities between the tenkō narratives?
Paper long abstract:
Although identified as a distinct literary category by critics of Japan's transwar period, tenkō bungaku (tenkō literature) remains very much contested today, and glossed over as a mere offshoot of proletarian literature. While most of the writers who produced texts of tenkō literature were members of the proletarian literary movement, everything in their writing, from the themes to the style, was considerably different in their post-conversion literature.
The current presentation offers a new interpretation and explores new common tropes and themes across most of the prose texts of the tenkō literature category, through a fresh in-depth, close-reading look at the texts themselves. The tenkō narratives are defined and classified based on the writers’ political experience and their subject matter. While it is customary for tenkō literature works to be classified on whether the authors had truly committed to the ideological “conversion” or had done so declaratively in order to be freed from prison, this presentation takes a different approach. The focus is switched from the authors as historical individuals to the content and style of their literary pieces. As a result, two major thematic/narrative style groups are identified within the category: family-centered stories and stories employing the shishōsetsu (I-novel) literary convention.
Irena Hayter (University of Leeds)
Paper short abstract:
The paper explores Takami Jun's 1935 novel Kokyū wasureubeki (Should Auld Acquaintance Be Forgot) and its formal inventions as symptoms of the aporias of tenkō and their effects on the structures of narrativity, subjectivity and psychic temporality.
Paper long abstract:
In a seminal study the critic Honda Shūgo referred to Takami Jun’s Akutagawa-prize shortlisted novel Kokyū wasureubeki (Let Auld Acquaintance Be Forgot, 1935) as one of the high peaks of tenkō literature. Most tenkō writing tends to conform to the rhetorical structures of the shishōsetsu (I-novel), narrating the author’s own experiences in a thinly disguised autobiographical form. Takami’s work, however, features multiple points of view, distortions of linear temporality and an eccentric narrator who openly manipulates the narrative and interferes with his characters. Despite those, critical discourse has insisted on treating it as a shishōsetsu, either ignoring its idiosyncratic formal structures or bringing in extra-textual – biographical – explanations for them.
Rather that rely on the organic, self-evident unity between author and writing, my reading aims to push to the foreground other, less obvious and less naturalized convergences between the text and the larger material and discursive contexts around it. The unravelling of linear plot and the deconstruction of narrative authority performed by the text betray a concern with broader issues of representation and subjectivity. I argue that the formal structures of the work are symptomatic of the historical aporias of the 1930s. To grasp their meanings, we need to situate the text in its field of discourse, namely the crisis of subjectivity brought on by tenkō and the reactionary politics of representation embraced by the so-called cultural revival (bungei fukkō).