In the 1920s, the Japanese proletarian movement brought together a diverse coalition of leftwing artists, intellectuals, and activists — including Communist Party members, Marxists, and anarchists — which sought to politicize workers and farmers. These cultural groups agitated against capitalism and imperialism while drawing on modern media forms, thus working both within and against Japan’s bourgeoning commercial mass culture. Middle-class intellectuals formed the core of the movement, but under the umbrella of the groups NAPF (1928–1931, Nippona Artista Proleta Feracio in Esperanto, Zen Nihon Musansha Geijutsu Renmei in Japanese) and its successor KOPF (1931–1934, Federacio de Proletaj Kultur Organizoj Japanaj in Esperanto, Nihon Puroretaria Bunka Renmei in Japanese), proletarian organizations sought to spur the participation of workers and farmers, as well as build solidarity with organizations in Korea.1
The Proletarian Film League of Japan (Nihon Puroretaria Eiga Dōmei) or Prokino was established as the filmmaking branch of NAPF in 1929. After the 1923 Great Kanto Earthquake, proletarian film criticism developed in leftist journals such as Eiga ōrai (Film traffic, 1925–1933), Eiga no eiga (Film of films, 1927–1928), Eiga kaihō (Film emancipation, 1928), and Eiga kōjō (Film factory, 1927–1928), leading to the short-lived Proletarian Film Federation of Japan (1928). The creation of Prokino marked an important new development for the movement. As in previous organizations, Prokino members documented their activities, produced film theory and criticism, and published news of international developments in political filmmaking. However, in contrast to earlier leftist film groups, Prokino put particular emphasis on the group’s own activist filmmaking and exhibition activities. In Nihon Puroretaria Dōmei (Purokino) zenshi (A complete history of the Proletarian Film League of Japan [Prokino], 1986), Namiki Shinsaku suggests that Prokino was the first workers’ film organization in the world to shoot on small-gauge stock — a claim corroborated by more recent research on leftist filmmaking in the 1920s and 1930s.2
Founding Prokino member Sasa Genjū began making newsreels as a member of the Trunk Theater (Toranku Gekijō), the theater division of the Japan Proletarian Literary Arts League (Nihon Puroretaria Bungei Renmei or Puroren). The Trunk Theater established a film unit in March 1927. Sasa filmed 1927 May Day events in Tokyo (1927-nen Tokyo Mēdē), as well as the films Gaitō (On the street), Teidai nyūsu (Tokyo University news), and Sutoraiki (Strike) in the second half of 1927, and Noda sōgi (Noda strike) in 1928. These films were all shot using a 9.5mm Pathé Baby camera. Sasa’s manifesto, “Gangu・buki — satsueiki” (Toy・weapon — camera), published in the journal Senki (Battle flag) in June 1928, notes the rise of class-based film criticism, but urges “pencil pushers” to pick up small-gauge cameras and make works that “raise class consciousness, probe aspects of everyday society, and thoroughly expose social contradictions.”3 Sasa points out the portability and affordability of small gauge cameras — such as the Filmo, Ciné-Kodak, and Pathé Baby —observing that the relatively cheap pricing for the Pathé Baby camera (65 yen), camera motor (35 yen), and projector (80 yen).4 He proclaims:
And so we, the Sayoku Gekijō (Leftwing Theater) film unit, have already started making films, as well as bringing films into the ordinary lives of the proletariat (nichijōteki mochikomi). Like other class-based cineastes, we critique and surmount the film art of the propertied classes and oppose the rise of increasingly authoritarian, oppressive films — but in addition, we hope that taking our work into ordinary communities (nichijōteki mochikomi) will also lead to the organized production of films with a unified message for the emancipation of the proletariat.5
Prokino was established one year after this essay was published, with branches in Tokyo, Kanezawa, and Kyoto. Before its demise in 1934, Prokino created close to fifty films, including newsreels, fiction films, docudramas, and animation.6 In mid-1929 Prokino launched the film journal Shinkō eiga (Rising film), which not only reported on international proletarian filmmaking initiatives and on developments in the Soviet film industry, but also documented working conditions in movie theaters and film studios in Japan. Murayama Tomoyoshi, an avant-garde artist and fellow traveler in the proletarian culture movement, published his scenarios for 16mm filmmaking in Shinkō eiga. With the rapid rise of the so-called “tendency film” (keikō eiga) in Japan in the years 1929 and 1930, many Shinkō eiga columns and roundtables were dedicated to these socially minded, commercial film productions, which were often regarded with suspicion by Prokino members.7
News of Prokino spread to the Workers Film and Photo League and the John Reed Club through Harry Alan Potamkin, who learned about Prokino from an item that the actor and dramatist Senda Koreya had published in 1931 in Arbeiter Bühne und Film, the official magazine of the German Workers’ Theater Union, during Senda’s time in Berlin.8 In the early 1930s, under the auspices of the KOPF, Prokino increased its efforts to give workers and farmers a more active role in film criticism, production, and exhibition.9 Increasingly, Prokino emphasized forms of engaging with cinema that were easy for workers and farmers to adopt and eventually lead. One major goal in this period was the creation of self-organized film clubs known as kino leagues and film circles. Additionally, Prokino began to pay more attention to the problem of worker-farmer correspondents (rōnō tsūshinsha) who could report directly on local conditions, and to the organization of worker-farmer film groups (rōnō eiga dantai) to independently produce films.
As Japan expanded its military operations on the continent in the early 1930s, government suppression of proletarian politics became increasingly violent. Many in the proletarian culture movement were arrested, tortured, and forced to recant their political beliefs. In February 1933, the writer Kobayashi Takiji (author of Kanikōsen / The Crab Cannery Ship) was tortured to death by the police. Before the end of 1934, KOPF and Prokino were dissolved, and the proletarian culture movement disbanded.
1. For more on the colonial Korean proletarian movement, see Sunyoung Park, The Proletarian Wave: Literature and Leftist Culture in Colonial Korea, 1910–1945 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center, 2015). For more on connections between the Japanese and Korean proletarian movements, see Samuel Perry, Recasting Red Culture in Proletarian Japan: Childhood, Korea, and the Historical Avant-Garde (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2014). For an introduction to proletarian literature in Japan, see For Dignity, Justice, and Revolution: An Anthology of Japanese Proletarian Literature, edited by Heather Bowen-Struyk and Norma Field (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016).↩
2. Namiki Shinsaku, Nihon Puroretaria Eiga Dōmei (Purokino) zenshi (A complete history of the Proletarian Film League of Japan [Prokino]) (Tokyo: Gōdō Shuppan, 1986), 35–6. On the (sometimes limited) use of small-gauge film by leftist organizations in the 1930s, see for instance, Enrique Fibla-Gutiérrez, “Film Called into Action: Juan Piqueras, Léon Moussinac, Harry Alan Potamkin and the Internationale of Film Pedagogy,” Screen 58, no. 4 (Winter 2017): 412–436; Vance Kepley, Jr. “The Workers’ International Relief and the Cinema of the Left 1921 –1935,” Cinema Journal 23, no. 1 (Autumn 1983): 7–23; and Fred Sweet, Eugene Rosow, Allan Francovich, and Tom Brandon, “Pioneers: An Interview with Tom Brandon,” Film Quarterly 27, no. 1 (Autumn 1973): 12–24. The use of small-gauge film is not discussed in studies such as William Alexander, Film on the Left: American Documentary Film from 1931 to 1942 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1981), and Russell Campbell, Cinema Strikes Back: Radical Filmmaking in the United States, 1930–1942 (Ann Arbor, MI: UMI Research Press, 1982), except briefly as a means to distribute films to nontheatrical organizations (Alexander 158).↩
3. Sasa Genjū, “Gangu・buki—satsueiki” (Toy・weapon—camera), in Nihon senzen eiga ronshū: eiga riron no saihakken / Rediscovering Classical Japanese Film Theory: An Anthology, edited by Aaron Gerow, Iwamoto Kenji, and Mark Nornes (Tokyo: Yumani Shobō, 2018), 145, 149.↩
4. Sasa Genjū, “Gangu・buki—satsueiki,” 146–7.↩
5. Sasa Genjū, “Gangu・buki—satsueiki,” 149.↩
6. For an introduction to Prokino’s activities, in addition to Namiki (1987), see Markus Nornes, Japanese Documentary Film: The Meiji Era through Hiroshima (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 2003); Diane Wei Lewis, “Home Movies of the Revolution: Proletarian Filmmaking and Counter-Mobilization in Interwar Japan,” in Routledge Handbook of Japanese Cinema, edited by Joanne Bernardi and Shota T. Ogawa (London and New York: Routledge, 2021), 51–67; and Makino Mamoru, “Rethinking the Emergence of the Proletarian Film League of Japan (Prokino),” translated by Markus Nornes, in In Praise of Film Studies: Essays in Honor of Makino Mamoru, edited by Markus Nornes and Aaron Gerow (Yokohama and Ann Arbor: Kinema Club, 2001), 15–45.↩
7. For more on tendency films and the proletarian movement, see Fujita Motohiko, Gendai eiga no kiten [The origin of modern cinema] (Tokyo: Kinokuniya Shoten, 1956), and Diane Wei Lewis, “Expressive Excess: Gendered Bodies and Proletarian Texts,” in Powers of the Real: Cinema, Gender, and Emotion in Interwar Japan (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center, 2019), 168–203. ↩
8. Namiki, Nihon Puroretaria Eiga Dōmei (Purokino) zenshi, 36.↩
9. NAPF was reorganized into KOPF precisely to facilitate these efforts, known as Bolshevization or popularization (taishūka, literally “massification”). For more on the Comintern debates on Japan that contributed to this change of strategy, see Germaine A. Hoston, Marxism and the Crisis of Development in Prewar Japan (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1987), and Tatiana Linkhoeva, Revolution Goes East: Imperial Japan and Soviet Communism (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2020).↩