This book approaches the concept of tenkō (political conversion) as a response to the global crisis of interwar modernity, as opposed to a distinctly Japanese experience in postwar debates.
Tenkō connotes the expressions of ideological conversion performed by members of the Japanese Communist Party, starting in 1933, whereby they renounced Marxism and expressed support for Japan’s imperial expansion on the continent. Although tenkō has a significant presence in Japan’s postwar intellectual and literary histories, this contributed volume is one of the first in Englishm language scholarship to approach the phenomenon. International perspectives from both established and early career scholars show tenkō as inseparable from the global politics of empire, deeply marked by an age of mechanical reproduction, mediatization and the manipulation of language. Chapters draw on a wide range of interdisciplinary methodologies, from political theory and intellectual history to literary studies. In this way, tenkō is explored through new conceptual and analytical frameworks, including questions of gender and the role of affect in politics, implications that render the phenomenon distinctly relevant to the contemporary moment.
Tenkō: Cultures of Political Conversion in Transwar Japan will prove a valuable resource to students and scholars of Japanese and East Asian history, literature and politics.
Author(s): Irena Hayter, George T. Sipos and Mark Williams
Series: The Nissan Institute/Routledge Japanese Studies Series
Publisher: Routledge
Year: 2021
Cover
Half Title
Series
Title
Copyright
Contents
List of illustrations
Acknowledgements
Contributor biographies
Foreword
Introduction: Tenkō – modernity, empire, Japan
Part I Conceptual excursions
1 Ideological conversion as historical catachresis: coming to terms with tenkō
2 The historical origins of tenkō as an intellectual and social issue: Marxism – thought control – media
3 Tenkō in Korea: revealing the critical threshold of colonial empire
4 Takeuchi Yoshimi and the problem of tenkō
Part II Literary possibilities
5 Literature and affect: proletarian literature as discovery
6 Common tropes and themes in Japan’s tenkō literature
7 ‘Doublethink’ in production literature theory
8 The problem of literary truth: the tenkō of Nakano Shigeharu and Hayashi Fusao
9 The disjointed narratives and fractured subjects of Takami Jun
10 Crossing the void: Shimaki Kensaku’s search for meaning in ‘Leprosy’ and ‘Blindness’
11 The tenkō of anarchist poets: agrarian and cinematic latencies
12 A proletarian writer in the showcase window: the shifting representation of ‘the masses’ in Sata Ineko’s Kurenai
13 Mythic reality, battlefield survival and psychosocial conversion in Yoshida Mitsuru’s The End of Battleship Yamato
Index
