Hayashi Fusao
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| Fusao Hayashi | |
|---|---|
 Hayashi Fusao |
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| Born | 30 May 1903 Oita Prefecture, Japan |
| Died | 9 October 1975 (aged 72) Kamakura, Japan |
| Occupation | Writer and literary critic |
| Genres | novels |
| Notable work(s) | Dai Toa Senso Kotei Ron |
- In this Japanese name, the family name is Hayashi.
Fusao Hayashi (林 房雄 Hayashi Fusao?, 30 May 1903 - 9 October 1975) was the pen-name of a Japanese novelist and literary critic in Showa period Japan. He is known for his early works in the proletarian literature movement, although he later became a strong ultranationalist. His real name was Goto Toshio, although he also used the alias "Shirai Akira".
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[edit] Early life
Hayashi Fusao was born in Oita prefecture in 1903.
[edit] Literary career
Hayashi was interested in leftist politics as a youth, and led Marxist seminars while a student at Tokyo Imperial University. His literary career began in 1926, when he published a short story, Ringo ("Apple") in Bungei Sensen ("Literary Battlefront"). This also marked his beginnings as a leading member of the Proletarian Literature Movement.
He was imprisoned in 1932 for his activities with the Japan Communist Party, and on his release, he wrote Seinen ("Youth"). This was quickly followed by Bungaku no Tame ni ("For Literature"), Sakka to shite ("As an Artist"), whose themes deny the subordination of literature to politics. Hayashi joined Kobayashi Hideo to publish the mainstream literary journal Bungakukai ("Literary World") in 1933. This more neutral stance was still not enough for the authorities, and Hayashi was imprisoned twice more in the 1930s by the Thought Police, and as a condition for release, was forced to publicly renounce his leftist political beliefs.
Hayashi moved to Kamakura, Kanagawa prefecture in 1932, and (aside from a brief stay in Izu), lived there all of his life.
Hayashi then wrote Roman Shugisha no Techo ("Notes of a Romanticist") in 1935, declaring his estrangement from Marxism. In 1936, he renounced his connections with proletarian movement.
In 1943, he toured Korea, Manchukuo and Japanese-occupied north China as a member of the Literary Home-Front Campaign (Bungei Jugo Undo), a speech-making troupe organized to promote patriotism and support for the war.
After World War II, he turned to apolitical popular novels with family themes, including Musuko no Seishun (My "Son's Youth") and Tsuma no Seishun ("My Wife's Youth"). However, in Dai Toa Senso Kotei Ron, ("The Great East Asia War was a Just War", 1963), Hayashi astounded his former Marxist colleagues with an apologia for Japanese militarism and the Pan-Asianism in World War II, and a stinging criticism of leftist pacifism. Controversy over the work continues, over 40 years since its publication.
Hayashi's grave is at the temple of Hokoku-ji in Kamakura.
Mishima Yukio regarded Hayashi Fusao as his tutor, although he was later highly critical of Hayashi in a critique published in 1971.
[edit] Dai Toa Senso Kotei Ron
Hayashi wrote this book in commemoration of the hundredth anniversary of the Meiji Restoration. It was immediately highly controversial on its release, and it has served as a model for later revisionist historians. Hayashi's premise can be summarized as follows:
- The Asia-Pacific War cannot be separated from the process of Japanese modernization beginning with the late Edo period.
- Japanese modernization was a defensive reaction against western aggression in the colonization of Asia.
- The Japanese annexation of Korea and invasion of China and Southeast Asia were necessary to contain western imperialism and became a catalyst for Asian national liberation.
- Japan was not an imperialist state in a Leninist sense.
- In the process of modernization, Japan did not adopt aggressive imperialism in the western European sense.
- The Japanese emperor system is not a fascist institution; it is based on an ethnic and cultural foundation.
To Hayashi the real enemy of the Asian nations is the United States, just as the United States has been a Japan's foe for the last one hundred years. Although Hayashi remains apologetic about the suffering caused by the Japanese invasion of Asia, he promotes the viewpoint that the war liberated not only Japan, but also the rest of Asia from Western domination.
[edit] See also
[edit] External links
[edit] References
- Buruma, Ian. Inventing Japan: 1853-1964. Modern Library. Reprint edition (2004) ISBN 0812972864
- Buruma, Ian. Occidentalism: The West in the Eyes of Its Enemies. Penguin Press (2004). ISBN 1594200084
- Dower, John. War Without Mercy: Race and Power in the Pacific War. Panteon (1987). ISBN 0394751728
- Dorsey, James. "From an Ideological Literature to a Literary Ideology: 'Conversion' in Wartime Japan," in Converting Cultures: Religion, Ideology and Transformations of Modernity, ed. by Dennis Washburn and A. Kevin Reinhart (Leiden & Boston: Brill, 2007), pp. 465~483.
