The Crab Cannery Ship: and Other Novels of Struggle

by Takiji Kobayashi

In 2008—the year Takiji’s novel skyrocketed to fame—over thirty thousand Japanese people killed themselves, tens of thousands were homeless, some three million were unemployed, twenty million were living in poverty, and more than a third of the active labor force comprised irregular workers who were poorly paid and could easily be fired.

Suddenly, the infernal atmosphere of The Crab Cannery Ship struck millions as a fitting metaphor for their own predicament—that of human beings trapped within a soulless system totally dedicated to the accumulation of profit, a system that deems them valuable only so long as they can be utilized to help maximize that profit, but otherwise considers them disposable.

in 1925, a young writer named Hayama Yoshiki published a story called “The Prostitute” (Inbaifu), which became a virtual manifesto of the proletarian—i.e., working-class—literature in Japan: it made possible the linkage of prostitution with the growing class-consciousness of workers that labor power entailed the coerced transformation of their bodies into commodities.

Under wretched conditions of employment, wage laborers cannot even have a love life. This fact exposes the exploitation and plunder that characterize the class relations between landlords and tenant farmers.

(Hakodate’s labor unions were desperately trying to place organizers on crab cannery ships and among the fishermen who were heading to Kamchatka. The Hakodate unions were connected with the Aomori and Akita unions. This sort of thing worried bosses the most.)

There they could mistreat people to their hearts’ content, ride them as brutally as they did in their colonies of Korea and Taiwan.