| The Delayed Cold War in Postwar Japan and Its Literary Symptoms：A Report from the Shin Nihon Bungaku Reading Group |
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| Sua CHO1, Buil HONG2, Selki NOH3 |
1PhD Student, Department of Korean Language and Literature, Korea University
2PhD Student, Department of Korean Language and Literature, Korea University
3PhD Student, Department of Comparative Literature, Yonsei University |
戦後日本の遅延した冷戦とその文学的徴候 ―― 新日本文学 勉強会の報告 |
| 曺秀娥1, 洪富日2, 盧スルギ3 |
1高麗大学国語国文学科現代文学専攻博士後期課程
2高麗大学国語国文学科現代文学専攻博士後期課程
3延世大学校比較文学協同課程博士後期課程 |
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Published online: 30 December 2025. |
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Copyright ©2025 The Global Institute for Japanese Studies, Korea University |
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This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial License ( http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
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| ABSTRACT |
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This paper introduces an ongoing reading project of the work of Shin Nihon Bungaku being conducted by scholars of Korean and comparative literature, and examines the intersections of postwar Japan and the Cold War in East Asia through the prism of three themes：“war responsibility,” “Kobayashi Takiji,” and “democratic literature.” (1) Shin Nihon Bungaku interpreted Japan’s defeat as exposing its imperial contradictions, and it pursued writers’ self-reflection as a means of addressing war responsibility and as a way of envisioning a literature for the people. Even under Occupation constraints, this effort reopened questions of ethics and political commitment in the space between defeat and liberation. (2) The proletarian writer Kobayashi Takiji, killed by the Special Higher Police, was quickly elevated to martyr status, with his work seen as a model of democratic literature. Yet during the Politics and Literature Debate, his legacy and leftist heroism were criticized, revealing the magazine’s failure to maintain Kobayashi’s significance amid Cold War pressures. (3) As Uchiumi Shigeru argued, the discourse of “democratic literature” within Shin Nihon Bungaku ultimately reproduced the hegemony of proletarian literary ideology and remained abstracted from the masses. These contradictions reflect the limits of Communist-affiliated reformism under the Occupation’s “distributed democracy,” while also marking a point from which to reconsider the unfinished possibilities of the postwar literary revolution. |
Keywords:
Shin Nihon Bungaku, Post-war Japan, War Responsibility, Kobayashi Takiji, Democratic Literature
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| キ―ワ―ド:
新日本文学, 戦後日本, 戦争責任, 小林多喜二, 民主主義文学 |
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