| Novelist and literary critic Hayashi Fusao (1903--1975) was a leading member of the Japanese intelligentsia in the 1930s and early 40s. During this time he became known for his tenko, a term that has several layers of meaning, the most basic of which is the renunciation of one's ties to the political Left in Japan. Over time Hayashi came to embody the full meaning of tenko for many Japanese, not only the rejection of the left wing in the traditional sense of tenko but also the recanting of one's belief in Marxism and other leftist thought, and the positive display of one's patriotic feelings for the Japanese nation as Japan entered into war with the West.; This dissertation is an attempt to consider Hayashi's tenko especially as it developed during the 1930s, as a gradual evolution in his outlook on Japanese history, not as a sudden change in his thought process. As such, it initially reviews the formative influences on Hayashi's historical perspective: his experiences as a youth on the southern island of Kyushu and his days as a student radical and member of the left-wing literary movement in Tokyo before chronicling his tenko . Unlike previous studies that have focused on the institutional development of tenko as a means of reintegrating leftists into Japanese society or as a means of "thought control" employed by the Japanese state against its people, this study finds that internal conflict among the leftists themselves had as much to do with Hayashi's tenko as government suppression of the left-wing movement.; Hayashi endeavored to establish an intellectual position separate from both the views of the state and his former left-wing colleagues in the mid-1930s. However, the early Showa years (I have defined the early Showa years as the period between 1921 and 1942) were a time when the conservative undercurrent of national crisis began to overwhelm the intellectual and cultural cosmopolitanism in Japan. Hayashi grounded his new position in patriotic sentiment, a move that most perceived as capitulation to the state, as a turn to ultranationalism. |
