A Red Sprout in a Gray Precinct: Takenaka Labor and the Genealogy of Postwar Rebellious Spirit (1945-1991)

A Red Sprout in a Gray Precinct: Takenaka Labor and the Genealogy of Postwar Rebellious Spirit (1945-1991)

Takenaka Rō was born in Nagano Prefecture in 1930. Although he was later called "the unreliable critic" and "the chronicler of outlaws," he himself disliked such titles. He himself disliked such titles, as if to say, "Don't give the name of thought to those who have no thought. For him, thought was not something to be adorned with academic credentials or authority, but was simply the result of a way of life that was accompanied by mud, hunger, and anger.

He dropped out of junior high school at the age of 15 or 16 and worked as a waiter at a police station in Kumamoto, where he had a very ironic encounter with the "ideology of the enemy" in the center of power. The socialist literature given to him by a special detective was not a theoretical book, but a "manual of poverty" and "a book to give a name to one's anger.

His style of writing often oversteps the boundaries between "reporting" and "literature. He was criticized by reporters and scholars at the time for being "too emotional" and "highly subjective" in his approach of going into the field, eating and sleeping with the people involved, and reproducing their voices on paper. For Takenaka, however, "records" were not calm and objective, but rather "barking voices" that spoke for the silence of others, and "scribbles" that were scribbled on history.

He was obsessed with the "underclass. He was obsessed with the "lower classes," the downtrodden, the Zainichi Koreans, comedians, bakuchis, radical students, and so on. In particular, his masterpieces such as "Introduction to the Criticism of the Japanese Romanists" and "From a Reportage Writer" are works in which the voices of these people seem to have been incarnated in his blood. His style of writing was never from the distance of an observer, but with the determination to live as an "informal people" himself.

Takenaka also harbored an intense aversion to the "cozy relationship" between power and ideology. He did not belong to any party or join any movement, but simply continued to record the breakdown of society. That is why he was lonely. He was ostracized by his peers, ridiculed by critics, and yet he never broke his pen.

The fundamental question for Takenaka was, "How can those who have nowhere else to go convey the pain they cannot talk about? Takenaka's answer to this question was to continue to be the one to tell the story. The memory of the cold floor of the police station in his youth always played like a bass note in his storytelling.

Takenaka, who battled illness in his later years and continued to write manuscripts even after losing his voice, was truly a man for whom writing was a way of life. He picked up countless lives that were never recorded in the official records of the state and used their dirty words to weave the backstory of Japan.

Takenaka Labor was the only man who stood alone against the muddy shore of the Showa era. He picked up his ideas at the police station, but always threw them at the "heartless center of society.