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Embodied Memories, Emotional Geographies: Nakamoto Takako's Diary of the Anpo Struggle

2011; Taylor & Francis; Volume: 31; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1080/10371397.2011.619174

1469-9338

Vera Mackie,

Diaspora, migration, transnational identity

Abstract In this article I carry out a close reading of Nakamoto Takako's book, My Diary of the Anpo Struggle (1963). Nakamoto was a writer and activist who was active in leftwing politics, the labour movement and the proletarian literature movement in the 1920s and 1930s and returned to the movement after 1945. Her published diary recounts her participation in the struggle against the renewal of the US-Japan Security Treaty and her other political activities. The book is a mixture of personal memory and political history and provides us with a distinctive ‘map’ of one person's emotional geography of Tokyo. Notes 1Nakamoto, Watashi no Anpo tōsō nikki, 257–258. Translations are my own unless indicated otherwise. 2On the movement against the renewal of the US-Japan Security Treaty, see Sasaki-Uemura, Organizing the Spontaneous; Avenell, ‘From the “People” to the “Citizen”’, 711–742. 3There was, however, a similar feeling of mourning in some circles at the end of the Allied Occupation when Japan was placed in a subordinate position through the US-Japan Security Treaty. See Hasegawa, ‘Experiencing the 1952 Bloody May Day Incident’, 97–111. 4The Zengakuren (All Japan Federation of Student Self-Government Associations) was founded in 1948. 5See Kobayashi, ‘Rekishika sareru 1968nen’, 269–273; Kobayashi, ‘Where have all the flowers gone’; Esashi, Kanba Michiko: sei shōjo densetsu; Hirakawa, ‘Maiden Martyr for “New Japan”’, 92–109. 6Nakamoto Takako was born in Yamaguchi, graduated from a Girls' Higher School and became a teacher. She moved to Tokyo and became connected with the proletarian literary movement, contributing to various leftwing journals, including Nyonin Geijutsu (Women's Arts). She was involved in the underground communist movement in Japan and was arrested, imprisoned and incarcerated in a mental institution. She rejoined the Communist Party and resumed her writing career after 1945, contributing reportage and fiction to Shin Nihon Bungaku (New Japanese Literature) and other postwar leftist journals. Nakamoto produced two autobiographies: Ai wa rōgoku o koete: denki Nakamoto Takako, and Waga sei wa kunō ni yakarete: waga wakaki hi no ikigai. On her early fiction, see Bergstrom, ‘Revolutionary Flesh’, 311–343; for biographical details, see Schierbeck and Edelstein, Japanese Women Novelists in the 20th Century, 51–54. 7Nakamoto, Watashi no Anpo tōsō nikki. Shin Nihon Shuppansha launched the journal Shin Nihon Bungaku in December 1945 and it was published until November 2004. The journal was characterised by a combination of literary writings and reportage and reflection on contemporary political issues. See: Kamata, Shin Nihon Bungaku no 60nen. 8In the afterword, Nakamoto acknowledges the guidance of the members of the Central Committee of the Japan Communist Party in the publication of the book. Nakamoto, Watashi no Anpo tōsō nikki, 309. The years between 1960 and 1964 were years of conflict between the Shin Nihon Bungaku Kai (New Japanese Literature Association) and the Communist Party, resulting in the journal dissociating itself from the Party. It is tempting to speculate that these conflicts played some role in the relatively long lead time between the events of 1960 and the publication of Nakamoto's diary in 1963. 9Berlant, ‘Thinking about feeling historical’, 5. 10Nakamoto, Watashi no Anpo tōsō nikki, 4. 11The US bases and their effects on local communities were one focus of Nakamoto's political activities, and the bases feature in her journalism, reportage and fiction. Nakamoto, ‘Shin fūzokugai Fussa reporutāju’, 74–9; Nakamoto, ‘Kichi “Tachikawa” no yokogao’, 34–39; Nakamoto, ‘Kichi no onna’, 102–27; Nakamoto, Kassōro. The Sunagawa struggle was supported by the Japan Socialist Party, the Sōhyō trade union federation and members of the Zengakuren student federation. The Zengakuren students clashed with police in Sunagawa, in a possible precursor of their actions in 1960, which were criticised by the JCP. There was an extended court case around the plans to extend the Tachikawa air base into neighbouring Sunagawa-chō which overlapped with the Anpo struggle. On 17 June, Nakamoto meets some of her comrades from the Sunagawa struggle at the Diet Building, and makes explicit connections between the ‘Bloody May Day’ of 1952, the violent actions at Sunagawa, and the events of 15 June at the Diet Building: Nakamoto, Watashi no Anpo tōsō nikki, 281. On the Sunagawa struggle, see Hasegawa Kenji, ‘The Lost Half-Decade Revived and Reconfigured’, 117–134. 12Nakamoto, Watashi no Anpo tōsō nikki, 176. The Afro-Asian Women's Conference was held in Cairo in 1961, and can be connected with the Afro-Asian Peoples' Solidarity Organisation and a range of activities dating from the Bandung Conference of 1955 and the subsequent creation of the non-aligned movement. 13Nakamoto, Watashi no Anpo tōsō nikki, 155–160. 14Ibid., 241. 15Sasaki-Uemura reports on how some academics attempted to use their authority as university professors in speaking to police. Sasaki, Organising the Spontaneous. Karube reports, by contrast, that political scientist Maruyama Masao (1914–1996) resisted being characterised as an intellectual rather than a citizen: ‘Kitagawa Takayoshi recalls that as the rally [of 20 May] made its way to the Diet, the sound truck at the head of the procession began broadcasting a speech that began something like “We intellectuals…” at which point Maruyama rushed up from behind, jumped on the truck, and insisted that they start over, using the phrase “We citizens” instead.’ Karube, Maruyama Masao, 144. I am indebted to an anonymous reader for this reference. 16Inaba Yoshikazu, ‘The Record’, cited and translated in Sasaki-Uemura, Organizing the Spontaneous, 103–106. ‘Since I lost the game of paper-rock-scissors,/ I had to go to the mobilization that night./I had no rain gear./ My body should have been toughened by work,/ but the May rain made me shiver./ But that's okay./ Look at that girl's hips./ They're so big./ They're soaked to the skin./ They shed the water./And so/ That girl demonstrating and shouting “down with the treaty” had surprising sex appeal./ “Hey girl! You do that and you won't be able to have kids!”/ I bantered as I strolled along/ That girl's round hips crossed my mind./….I had no feeling in my body for a while./ “I might get killed”./ With this awareness/ I suddenly thought of the round breasts of that girl to whom I couldn't say “I love you” yet./…’ 17Nakamoto, Watashi no Anpo tōsō nikki, 241; see also the comments on the physical after-effects of her imprisonment on p. 7. 18Nakamoto, Watashi no Anpo tōsō nikki, 251. 19Ibid., 255. On the newspapers' statement, see Sasaki-Uemura, Organising the Spontaneous, 50–52. 20Nakamoto, Watashi no Anpo tōsō nikki, 257. 21See Eng and Kazanjian's evocation of objects which ‘express multiple losses at once… with not only a multifaceted but also a certain palimpsest-like quality’. Eng and Kazanjian, ‘Introduction: Mourning Remains’, 5. 22Nakamoto, Watashi no Anpo tōsō nikki, 257–258. 23Yanaka, where she was arrested, is around seven kilometers north of the Diet Building, in the ‘downtown’, or working class area of Tokyo. 24I use the phrase Imperial Japan to describe the period from 1890 to 1945, under the political system shaped by the Constitution of the Empire of Japan (known colloquially as the Meiji Constitution) and the associated legal codes. 25Amin, ‘Collective Culture and Urban Public Space’, 16. 26The approval of the Bill in the Lower House on 19 May meant that it would automatically come into effect on 19 June. 27Karube, Maruyama Masao, 6. 28Hasegawa, ‘In Search of a New Radical Left’, 88. 29Nakamoto, Watashi no Anpo tōsō nikki. 30Gordon, Labor and Imperial Democracy in Prewar Japan, 26–62; Mackie, Creating Socialist Women in Japan, 102–4, 129, 160. 31The ‘Bloody May Day’ had occurred just eight years before the Anpo struggle, a few days after the official end of the Allied Occupation. The Japan Communist Party (JCP) rejected violent tactics after this incident, and this was one of the issues in the split of the Zengakuren student federation into pro-JCP and anti-JCP factions. 32Nakamoto, Watashi no Anpo tōsō nikki, 263. Here and elsewhere Nakamoto's diary provides evidence of the ways in which the ritual dimension of demonstrations ‘reactivate affective bonds, in part because of the co-ordinated action’. Goodwin and Jasper, ‘Emotions and Social Movements’, 623. 33Reynolds, ‘Japan's Imperial Diet Building: Debate over Construction of a National Identity’; Reynolds, ‘Japan's Imperial Diet Building in the Debate over Construction of a National Identity’. 34Representations of the Diet Building before 1945 are discussed in Mackie, ‘Picturing Political Space in 1920s and 1930s Japan’. 35See, for, example, the early postwar election posters held in the Gordon Prange Collection at the University of Maryland. 36Reynolds, ‘Japan's Imperial Diet Building: Debate over Construction of a National Identity’, 38. 37See Katsugarawa's dicussion of this painting in Linda Hoaglund's documentary on the art associated with the Anpo struggle. Linda Hoaglund, Anpo: Art X War. In other cultural representations of the Diet Building in the later 1960s and 1970s, it is often depicted as an abject space. It is shown being smashed, submerged, or drowning in polluted liquids. These fantasy representations of abjection reinforce the disillusion with the political system post-Anpo, later overlaid with concerns about political corruption and industrial pollution. Akasegawa Genpei's cartoons show the Diet Building being smashed. Akasegawa's poster for Kara Jūrō's play Maiden City shows Tokyo submerged in a blood-red liquid, the roof of the Diet Building peeping out. A cartoon from Asahi Jānaru represents pollution and corruption through the body of a woman vomiting and expelling fluids from every orifice – the city of Tokyo is floating in a noxious fluid, the roof of the Diet Building just visible above the fluid. 38Like Goodwin and Jasper, I argue that emotions have a ‘public, shared component and an interior, personal component’. Goodwin and Jasper, ‘Emotions and Social Movements’, 624. 39Freud, ‘Mourning and Melancholia’, 243, cited in Eng and Kazanjian, ‘Introduction: Mourning Remains’, 5.