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Paper short abstract

Using the case of the proletarian writer Kobayashi Takiji, this paper examines how mourning rituals functioned in mass mobilization and political representation within proletarian culture in early 1930s Japan, focusing on funerals and commemorative drama as mechanisms for ideological dissemination.

Paper long abstract

This paper examines how mourning rituals functioned as instruments of mass mobilization and political representation within proletarian culture in early 1930s Japan, with a particular focus on the funeral of Kobayashi Takiji. While Kobayashi’s literary imagination—particularly following the publication of Kani Kōsen (1929)—has been extensively discussed, far less attention has been paid to how his death was politically depicted and represented as “victim” and “comrade” through mourning rituals.

On 20 February 1933, Kobayashi was arrested in Tokyo by the Special Higher Police while he was engaging in activities related to the Japanese Communist Party (JCP) and subsequently died as a result of torture. In response, the JCP planned a Rōnō-sō (Funeral by the Workers’ and Peasants’) at the Tsukiji Little Theatre, which was prohibited by the police on public security grounds. Despite the ban, more than one thousand mourners gathered at the theatre on 15 March to commemorate him.

I argue that the funeral transformed Kobayashi’s body into an emblematic “comrade,” a discursive process that in turn enabled it to function as a key instrument of leftist political mobilization through party flyers and newspapers, while simultaneously becoming an object of surveillance and repression by state authorities. By analyzing both proletarian cultural discourse and administrative records, this paper demonstrates how mourning rituals became contested spaces in which political solidarity and state power directly confronted one another.

Rather than treating the March 15 incident as an isolated episode, this study situates Kobayashi’s funeral within a broader process of memorialization that contributed to subsequent crackdowns on socialist and communist movements. In doing so, it highlights the role of mourning rituals in shaping proletarian culture in tension with the dominant national culture of prewar Japan.