Paper short abstract:

This paper examines how proletarian cultural movements utilized the international language Esperanto through literary and cultural media to give voice to proletarian struggles and to circumvent imperial borders that curtailed communication among proletarians and leftist activists.

Paper long abstract:

Following the colonial expansion across East Asia by the Japanese empire, proletarian cultural movements were confronted with numerous borders that stymied transregional exchange and oppressed oppositional voices. Proletarian cultural movements considered the international auxiliary language Esperanto useful as a proletarian language that was easy to learn and to provide proletarians with the means to communicate beyond ethno-national, linguistic, and geographical borders. Proletarian writers and playwrights, such as Akita Ujaku (1883-1962) who considered the use of Esperanto as a “strike movement of the tongue” (shita no sutoraiki undō), organized language classes and study groups to teach and promote Esperanto among workers and farmers. For the more advanced learners, they created courses on creative writing and translation. A literary and cultural historical analysis of proletarian Esperanto may help us complicate our understanding of inter-imperial social activism beyond party and union politics. This paper considers how Esperanto could accommodate a linguistic space for proletarian voices both in speaking and writing to transverse the human body in a fixed geographical location and to connect with foreign peers for international exchange. My focus is on Esperanto correspondence groups affiliated with proletarian cultural movements, Esperanto teaching by proletarian writers, and international letter writing in Esperanto. Through an examination of the extant Esperanto letters written by proletarian language learners and the distribution networks in imperial Japan, I analyze how proletarian struggles were voiced in letters by colonial subjects, prisoners, and farmers. My study reveals how Esperanto undermined the dominant structures of linguistic power in the Japanese empire and formed aggregates of linguistic solidarity by empowering proletarians to actively participate in exercising international solidarity and connecting local struggles to the worldwide proletariat.