New Japanese Literature Association
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
- Shin Nihon Bungakkai
| 新日本文学会 | |
| Pronunciation |
|
|---|---|
| Formation | 1945 |
| Dissolved | 2005 |
| Headquarters | New Japanese Literature Hall (新日本文学会館) |
| Fields | Japanese literature, literary criticism |
Key people | Yuriko Miyamoto Shigeharu Nakano Korehito Kurahara Teruo Takei |
| Affiliations | Japanese Communist Party (1945–1964) |
The New Japanese Literature Association (新日本文学会, Shin Nihon Bungakkai) was a professional association for Japanese writers, poets, and literary critics that existed from 1945 to 2005. For many years, the association was under the influence of the Japan Communist Party, before breaking away in the 1960s.[1] In the early postwar era, it counted large numbers of the most prominent Japanese writers and critics as members.
The New Japanese Literature Association was established in December 1945 by a group of Japanese writers and critics who hoped to revive the prewar "Proletarian literature" movement after years of state suppression during World War II.[2] Led by the prominent proletarian writers Korehito Kurahara, Yuriko Miyamoto, and Shigeharu Nakano, the new association's 173 founding members also included Ujaku Akita, Kan Eguchi, Seikichi Fujimori, Tsurujirō Kubokawa, Sunao Tokunaga, and Shigeji Tsuboi.[2] Most of these charter members had been members in the prewar Japan Proletarian Writers Federation (Nihon Puroretaria Sakka Dōmei), which had been coerced into disbanding in the face of government pressure in 1934.[3]
In March 1946, the Association launched its own literary journal New Japanese Literature (Shin Nihon Bungaku).[2] The first issue of the journal published Yuriko Miyamoto's essay "Utagoe yo, okore!" ("Singing voices, arise!"), which called for a new "democratic literature" to replace the staid, propagandistic Japanese literature of the wartime.[4] This new literature would be "democratic" because it would be written "for the people" rather than "for the state."[4] Miyamoto's appeal proved popular, and several other writers joined the organization over the next few years, including Kōbō Abe, Kiyoteru Hanada, Ichirō Hariu, Shūgo Honda, and Hiroshi Noma.
In the immediate aftermath of the war, almost all of these writers and critics had joined or rejoined the Japan Communist Party (JCP), which they viewed as the only group in Japanese society to have resisted wartime militarism.[5] This meant that in its early years, the New Japanese Literature Association and its journal were heavily under the sway of the policies and commandments of the Communist Party.[6]
Fostering "postwar literature"
The Association and its members played an active role in mentoring and promoting the works of the so-called "first," "second" and "third" generations of postwar Japanese writers who forged a new type of Japanese literature now remembered under the name "postwar literature" (sengo bungaku). Over the course of the 1940s and 1950s, members of the organization engaged in a series of so-called "politics and literature debates" (seiji to bungaku ronsō) about the appropriate role of politics in literature, that gradually created a space for avant-garde literature that did not slavishly follow the "cultural policy" of the Communist Party.