Oguma Hideo: A Versatile Proletarian Poet Who Illuminates Society with Humor and a Focus on the Weak, 1920s-1940s

Oguma Hideo: A Versatile Proletarian Poet Who Illuminates Society with Humor and a Focus on the Weak, 1920s-1940s
Hideo Oguma (1901-1940) was a proletarian poet who developed a unique style of poetry that combines humor and lyricism by focusing on the downtrodden, such as workers and lower-class urbanites, amid the social turmoil of the 1920s and 1930s. The Great Depression plunged Japanese society into a deep recession, and class conflicts intensified as rural poverty and the number of day laborers increased. Oguma not only denounced the social contradictions, but also sharply grasped the sorrow and hope latent in life itself, and sublimated them into poetry.

His poems, including his masterpiece "The Migrant Worker," are marked by a deep empathy for the weak, and while they depict the absurdities of capitalist society, they also use humor to illuminate the reality of the situation. The power of laughter liberated him from the rigid politics of proletarian literature, and his poems reach a wide range of readers.

In addition, as an author of picture books and a painter, Oguma developed a wide variety of creative works in response to the development of the children's picture movement and urban culture. His works depicting animals and children symbolize a vitality that has not been lost in the midst of severe social conditions.

Even in the late 1930s, when the war system was tightening and cultural restrictions were being imposed, he maintained his focus on the weak and used humor and metaphors to depict human dignity in a situation where political language was being suppressed.