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- Convenors:
-
Hans Martin Krämer
(Heidelberg University)
Till Knaudt (Kyoto University)
Bruce Grover (University of Heidelberg)
Send message to Convenors
- Discussant:
-
Shoya Unoda
(Osaka University)
- Stream:
- History
- Location:
- Bloco 1, Piso 0, Sala 0.06
- Start time:
- 31 August, 2017 at
Time zone: Europe/Lisbon
- Session slots:
- 1
Short Abstract:
Between 1923 and 1938, professors and students from Tōkyō University operated a settlement house in the industrial Honjo ward. This panel will investigate how they sought to transcend social work and rather initiated an autonomous worker's movement through providing knowledge and self-awareness.
Long Abstract:
In 1923, progressive professors and student activists from Tōkyō University joined to build the Tōkyō University Settlement House in the impoverished industrial Honjo ward. In operation until 1938, the settlement sought to transcend mere social work and initiate an autonomous worker's movement through providing the knowledge and self-awareness among the proletariat necessary to "eliminate social flaws through their own initiative" and "combat exploitation independently" (Suehiro Izutarō). The founding members of the settlement believed that traditional efforts sponsored by the state to alleviate poverty simply placated class conflict and served to protect capitalism. The mission of the settlement was the development of independent institutions for social education which did not inculcate bourgeois values but facilitated the emergence of an autonomous proletarian culture.
Although the settlement's powerful financial supporters included the Imperial Household and it was considered a model of social work by the Home Ministry, many of its members were in fact Marxist-influenced students. The ambitious activities of the settlement were carried out through a broad program which included a labor school for factory workers providing night classes taught by professors and students and agitating for labor union participation. The labor school produced several prominent labor leaders and future Diet members. The settlement program further provided classes for adults and children, child care, a consumer cooperative, legal counseling from law professors and a free medical clinic. The settlement house also contained rooms for students to live among the proletariat and realize the ideal of "entering into the masses."
Our project seeks to explore this effort to enlighten and mobilize the urban poor through independent social education by first analyzing the settlement's specific approach to worker's education. Furthermore, we seek to place the Tōkyō University Settlement within the broader social and intellectual context of social work and concepts of social reform. Finally, an analysis of the ideological evolution of the settlers, many of whom became prominent converts to the right during the 1930's, can provide insights into the continuity of their thought as well their embrace of state power and the allure of ethnic nationalism as powerful tools of rapid social reform.
Accepted papers:
Session 1Hans Martin Krämer (Heidelberg University)
Paper short abstract:
Prewar left-wing activists are usually thought to have been primarily interested in discussing Marxist theory. How did the progressive elite of the 1920s and 30s come to be immersed in concrete welfare activities in the context of the Tōkyō Imperial University Settlement House?
Paper long abstract:
Henry D. Smith, in his seminal work on prewar student radicalism, has opined that "the claim of the elitist students that they represented 'one wing of the proletarian movement' was little more than a fiction of their romantic populism." The dominant image of the prewar left-wing activist is that he was immersed in his books and preferred discussing arcana of Marxist theory with his peers. Yet, under the influence of communist leader Yamakawa Hitoshi, whose watershed article "A Change of Course" appealed for practical social mobilization to cultivate a proletarian movement, we find in the Tōkyō University Settlement many of the progressive elite absorbed in the kind of welfare activities normally denounced by staunch Marxist as social democratic reformism.
This presentation will contextualize the activities of the Tōkyō University Settlement by situating them within the expansion of public (national and municipal level) and private welfare in 1920s Japan. It will ascertain the extent and character of the activities of the Settlement, mainly through reports issued by the settlers during the 1920s and 1930s and memoirs written in the postwar period, focusing on the child care program, the provision of legal and medical services, and the afternoon classes offered to school children.
The effort to balance social relief activities on the one hand and and radically progressive goals on the other is also instrumental in explaining why the Settlement could exist until 1938, a point in time at which any overt left-wing political groups had long since been disbanded by the Japanese state authorities. In addition to the sources mentioned above, media accounts and reports by the secret police will also be taken into consideration. Overall, this presentation will conclude that radical activists were genuinely interested in social reform, while at the same time the Settlement also represented a form of coalition between different groups and individuals interested in social change in prewar Japan.
Bruce Grover (University of Heidelberg)
Paper short abstract:
Despite the progressive activism of their youths, many former Tōkyō University Settlement members fully embraced ethnic nationalism and state power in the 1930's as policy advisers to the wartime state. This paper reveals the surprising degree of continuity of reformist ideals among these thinkers.
Paper long abstract:
'Once bathed in the inspiration of the just rule of the Emperor, the various regions of Asia must absolutely not be spiritually, materially or economically divided… As Japan's classical culture is broadly embraced, Asia is for the first time united.'
The poet Asano Akira, who had once devoted himself to teaching Marxist economics to factory workers at the Tōkyō University Settlement labor school, wrote this passage as a member of a military propaganda unit stationed in Indonesia during the Pacific War. Like many Communist Party members arrested for their political activism, Asano renounced communism and evolved towards a romantic idealism emblematic of an ideological sea-change which left few progressive thinkers untouched. This project will examine the astonishing phenomena of tenkō, or ideological conversion, through two aspects which allowed droves of former professors and students associated with the settlement to contribute to imperialist and militarist policy; namely, the embrace of ethnic nationalism and state power. This project will analyze the process of reorientation but will also expose striking elements of continuity of thought as many thinkers/activists discovered new tools to implement long-held ideals of social reform.
Former Tōkyō University Settlement members reached the highest levels of many policy organs such as the Cabinet Planning Board and its colonial research institute the Tōa Kenkyūjo, which sought to recruit leftists through the influence of communist sympathizer Ozaki Hotsumi. The Tōa Kenkyūjo, in fact, employed the research expertise of three of the central professors of the settlement, Suehiro Izutarō, Hirano Yoshitarō, and Yamada Moritarō, with former students, who utilized many of the same fieldwork methods undertaken at the settlement to understand the 'living law' of Chinese villagers. By placing the later nationalist and statist policies in the social and intellectual context of the guiding ideas of the settlement, this project will show the often conflicted nature and divergent paths and motivations of progressives collaborating with a repressive regime they once sought to confront.
Till Knaudt (Kyoto University)
Paper short abstract:
Between 1924 and 1932 students at University of Tōkyō's Settlement ran a labor school to educate the urban proletariat, creating opportunities for labor emancipation and political change in Japan.
Paper long abstract:
Between 1924 and 1932, students at the University of Tōkyō ran a project of proletarian education which was based around the Settlement's "Labor school" (rōdō gakkō). Under the slogan "After Factory to the Labor school!" the young Marxist activists distributed pamphlets in and around the proletarian quarters in Tōkyō Honjo, inviting hundreds of young workers, male and female, Korean and Japanese, into the evening classes of the school. These classes where run by teachers (e.g. Suehiro Izutarō) and by senior students or junior professors, many of whom were to become famous for their political conversions (Hirano Yoshitarō, Asano Akira) or for their participation in the theory struggles of the 1930s on the formation of Japanese capitalism (Hattori Shisō, Ōmori Yoshitarō). While the senior activists were holding lectures on political economy, labor law, or history of the Japanese labor movement, the activities of the younger students were focused around the daily experiences and political practices of the workers of Honjo, trying to form a proletarian cultural consciousness.
By looking closely at the reminiscences of the former activists and reports of the University Settlement, this presentation will show how the young student intellectuals at Tōkyō University tried to apply their knowledge of Marxist theory to the practice of putting the concept of a proletarian class culture into the hearts and minds of the workers of Honjo ward by "entering into the masses". Special attention will be paid to the question whether proletarian education in the Labor School was limited to the attempt to spread Marxist theory, or if the interaction between elite students and intellectuals and young workers created actual opportunities for political change.
The presentation will argue that the latter is the case. Several of the workers that went to the Labor School became members of the Communist Party, others joined the ranks of trade unions or even became high-level functionaries in the post-war Socialist Party of Japan. Although it is less clear in the case of women and ethnic minorities, the Labor School played its part in social emancipation in prewar Japan.