Japanese Workers’ Propaganda
Some proletarian propaganda from Imperial Japan
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For all the fascist-communist drama in Europe and beyond through the 1930s, Japan isn’t a country we tend to associate with workers’ movements or uprisings. There was never any violence comparable to the clashes and bloodshed in Russia and Germany, nor ever any communist icons of an stature comparable to a Lenin or Gramsci, but Japan certainly had its proletarian politics, proletarian literature and, as I recently discovered, proletarian propaganda.
As with most European countries, socialism and communism emerged in Japan in tandem with industrialisation, blossoming as working conditions deteriorated. In 1918, Sen Katayama, one of the founding fathers of Japanese communism, wrote with glee that the ‘working classes in Japan have lately awakened’.
Katayama’s hopes, it turned out, were a bit ambitious: socialism, when it did come, came tepidly, but it brought with it a new, inimitable propaganda aesthetic that was at once similar and radically divergent from contemporary leftist propaganda in Russia and elsewhere. Much of the aesthetic and style that came to characterise Japanese communist propaganda before Tenkō (a mass abandonment of the communist movement, discussed below) grew out of the avant-garde movement that flourished in the comparatively liberal 1920s, a decade in which artists, by virtue of a sickly emperor, were permitted a greater degree of artistic liberty.
Nor was the Japanese propaganda insular: it engaged with and wove itself into the international communist movement. The poster below, for example, gives us a portrait of a slightly devious-looking Lenin amid various pro-Bolshevik injunctions: “Protect Russia, country of workers and farmers! … Make Musansha-Shinbun Nikkan (Daily Proletariat Newspaper) a reality! … Long-live (banzai) the protection of the Musansha-Shinbun (Proletariat Newspaper)!”
Propagandists of the left also found space and time to denounce some of the communists’ typical go-to bogeymen (capitalists, of course):
The first image with the spidery capitalist was published in 1931 and denounces the Jiji Shimpō newspaper for firing over 100 workers and enforcing the sackings with hired muscle. It implores viewers: “Stop purchasing and reading the reactionary Jiji Shimpo, the enemy of the proletarian class.” In the second a Japanese soldier stands menacingly over a caricature of a British industrialist and the third poster, with the cyclist and axeman, has its own hefty caption:
‘Heavy taxes amounting to 40 million yen are attached to the legs of farmers, laborers, government functionaries, and petty merchants. More than four million riders all over the country are suffering from this unfair tax. Let’s push to abolish the bicycle tax. The tax on bicycles was but one of many onerous burdens imposed on the lower classes.’
Promotional posters for workers’ events — theatres, art exhibitions and so forth — were also produced abundantly. Here are a few posters published throughout the 1920s up the to the early 30s promoting a sundry mix of theatrical productions, from original workers’ plays, glorifying the proletariat Soviet-style, to adaptations of Robin Hood (source):
The Proletarian Arts League was founded in 1925 and gave a boost to an already burgeoning arts scene among revolutionaries. Such was the fervour that an interesting clash arose among artists, between the avant-gardistes and the more conservative artists who preferred the socialist realist style that was growing predominant in Europe.
Repression, of course, increased considerably as Japanese politics took a sudden and sharp turn to the reactionary right. Under increasingly violent pressure many socialists and communists began to renounce their revolutionary politics en masse — a phenomenon the Japanese call Tenkō, “changing direction”. The transformations could be dramatic, a case in point being the writer Fusao Hayashi whose transformation saw him renounce revolutionary communism and embrace ultranationalism.
Despite its relative brevity (compare it with, say, the Soviets’ eight or so decades of propagandising), the wave of creativity that swept Japan’s proletarian movements through the 20s and early 30s produced a staggering amount of fantastic propaganda. Here are links to some of the best articles if you’d like to read/see some more:
