Karl August Wittfogel’s Proletarian Drama in Japan

Zhou, Yufei

大阪大学大学院人間科学研究科社会学・人間学・人類学研究室

Karl August Wittfogel

Karl August Wittfogel (1896-1988) is notoriously among Japanese scholars and intellectuals as an anticommunist social scientist and Sinologist who articulated the prevailing backwardness and stagnancy of Asian societies. However, his name’s fi rst appearance in Japanese public life can be traced to his scriptwriting of a puppet play performed in Tokyo in 1926. Wittfogel's early contributions to proletarian dramaturgy and Marxist aesthetics have been largely translated and published in Japan’s leftwing literature magazines and have attracted a great deal of attention among Japan’s contemporary revolutionary literary circles. This article explores the reception of Karl August Wittfogel’s engagement with proletarian literature in Japan in the late 1920s and early 1930s. It analyzes the intentions, the criteria of selection and other objective circumstances of those introducing Wittfogel and refl ections of his Japanese readers. By shedding light on the process of recontextualization of Wittfogel's literary pursuits in Japan, this article fi rst tries to highlight the entanglements between Japan's early leftwing writers and the literary scene in Weimar Germany. Second, based on this case study of reception history, this article considers the general conditions that are indispensable for intellectuals to establish a legacy beyond their own cultural realms.