Takiji Kobayashi and the Tokko Police
There was a unique author before WWII in Japan who was a member of the Japanese Communist Party.
Takiji Kobayashi (1903 – 1933) was a Japanese author of proletarian literature. He is best known for his short novel Kanikōsen.
Kobayashi was born in Odate, Akita, Japan and was brought up in Otaru, Hokkaidō. After graduating from the Otaru School of Higher Learning, which is the current Otaru University of Commerce, he worked at the Otaru branch of Hokkaido Takushoku Bank. His most famous work is Kanikōsen, or Crab Cannery Ship, a short novel published in 1929. It tells the story of several different people and the beginning of organization into unions of fishing workers. He joined the Japanese Communist Party in 1931. The young writer apparently died due to torture after arrest by the Tokkō police two years later, at age 29.The Tokko police, which existed in Japan before WWII, was a kind of special elite police organization as "Tok" means special and "ko" means high. The Tokko police did not belong to an ordinary chain of command which stretched from each police station in a prefecture to the head of the police in the prefecture subject to the administrative head or the governor of the prefecture. Tokko police units in local prefectures directly belonged to the Interior Minister of the imperial government in Tokyo. They specialized in detecting and arresting political criminals or citizens who were against the imperial regime or who were socialists or members of the Japanese Communist Party. After the Pearl Harbor Attack in 1941 which threw the Empire of Japan and the US into WWII, Tokko detectives started to clam down on pro-American citizens, too.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Takiji_Kobayashi
Takiji Kobayashi, after having graduated from a business college in Otaru City, worked in the Otaru branch office of Hokkaido Takusyoku Bank. (Hokkaido Island faces the Okhotsk Sea where Japanese and Russians are engaged in netting crabs.) He wrote a novel titled March 15, 1928 based on a large political crack down on socialists and communists the Imperial Government made by applying the Public Security Preservation Laws, a notorious law enacted to attack anti-government citizens. In this novel, Kobayashi depicted how Tokko policemen tortured innocent citizens.
Then in 1929 Kobayashi issued the famous novel Kani-kosen. It was a story of poor laborers hired by a fishing company which operated fishes to capture and process crabs. Kani means crabs in Japanese. Those workers, having been treated cruelly by the company management, went into strike on the sea, but the management asked help from a destroyer of the Imperial Navy whose sailors eventually defeated and arrested angry and revolutionary laborers.
After Kani-kosen was made public, Takiji Kobayashi was fired by the bank. In 1931 he joined the Japanese Communist Party which was then outlawed in Japan. Then a spy approached him to trap him in Tokyo. Accordingly Kobayashi was arrested and put into a jail to be tortured. The Tokko police had a grudge against the author of March 15, 1928 where Tokko policemen were depicted as cold-blooded and wretched guys indulging in barbaric torture. They killed Kobayashi just like cold-blooded and wretched detectives would do.
After WWII, the Japanese Communist Party became legitimate with introduction of the new Constitution in 1947.
But today Japan has come to have more and more irregular employees or cheap labor force for businesses. The gap between the poor and the rich has been widening since global competition among businesses was intensified and Japan went into 15-year long deflation in late 1990s. So, the general public of Japan and especially young people recently turned their eyes to Takiji Kobayashi. In 2008, a half million copies of Kani-kosen were sold. Even a movie titled Kani-kosen was made in 2009. The media called it the Kani-Kosen Move.
Kanikosen Movie Poster
Before and during WWII any Japanese who believed in a religion or philosophy or practiced political activities which were against the imperial regime or which did not show enough respect for the emperor were regraded as a kind of criminals. Accordingly they were suppressed, imprisoned, tortured, or killed. Therefore when the Empire of Japan fell in 1945 as it was defeated by the US in the war, many communists, socialists, and other citizens who had been held in prison by the Tokko police but were still alive were released and welcomed by the general public like heroes. Indeed even ordinary Japanese citizens hated Tokko so much. Today there is no such a special elite police unit in Japan.
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