Japanese Workers’ Propaganda

Some proletarian propaganda from Imperial Japan

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.

Listen! Workers of All Nations! (1931)

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)!”

Poster from 1929 (source and translations)

Propagandists of the left also found space and time to denounce some of the communists’ typical go-to bogeymen (capitalists, of course):