"A Warrior of Poetry": Hayashi Fumiko’s wartime writing

Beschreibung

Rising fascism in 1930s Japan was clearly visible in its publishing industry – not just in the ever-stricter censorship laws, but also in active collaboration of writers and artists with the government and their production of propaganda. One of the most active literary propagandists during the war years (1937-1945) was Hayashi Fumiko (1903-1951), one of the most prolific and popular writers of her time. Hayashi became famous in the early 1930s with her semi-autobiographical accounts of her life on the margins of society, and despite her insistence on being apolitical, was often linked to the burgeoning proletarian literature scene. After the outbreak of the Second Sino-Japanese War (1937), Hayashi travelled to the warzones in China and Japan’s colonies as an embedded journalist to the military for various newspapers and magazines – activities which have been sponsored by the government in order to stimulate support for the war effort among the Japanese public. In her wartime writings, the independent voice of Hayashi’s early writing is replaced by expressions of her intense love for Japan and its soldiers and recognition of the war’s righteousness. Her descriptions of China’s “backwardness” and the suffering of its civilians, her romanticized portrayal of colonialism in Manchuria, or the warm relationships with Indonesians who eagerly learn Japanese offered readers an image of Japan as a benign empire. Hayashi’s wartime writings are to be situated not only within her own, larger (and very diverse) body of work, with which it shares similarities but also diverges from; it is also a product of a specific brand of fascism and its publishing culture. This talk will show how Hayashi’s own voice and the voice of the Japanese imperial fascism of her time relate to each other, discussing a number of both fictional and non-fictional examples of her writings published between 1937 and 1943.

Zeitraum	27 Mai 2020
Gehalten am	Institut für Ostasienwissenschaften