Composed a decade after Japan’s defeat in World War II, the following five poems appeared in the mid-1950s when their author, Yoshimoto Taka’aki resigned from his workplace at Toyo Ink after the labor union struggle he led against the company was defeated. For Yoshimoto, who would emerge in the early 1960s as an intellectual and literary inspiration to the New Left students who opposed both the conservative capitalist regime of the Liberal Democrats and the anti-democratic Stalinist vanguardism of the Japanese Communist Party, these poems were written on the occasion of his second greatest defeat (the first was the war and the third was the anti-Ampo -- Japan-U.S. Mutual Security Pact -- movement of 1960).
Manuel Yang is an adjunct faculty at Lourdes College. His writings have appeared in Cultural Logic, Bad Subject, CounterPunch, Forum, Kyoto Journal, and Encyclopedia of Slave Resistance and Rebellion. He is currently working on his dissertation, which deals -- among other things -- with whales, monastic communism, joy of apathy, the New Left, Henry Miller, E.P. Thompson, and polymorphously perverse uses of historical materialism (Yoshimoto also makes a cameo apperance throughout, throwing into question the very conception of a "cameo").