Abstract
This essay argues that what most clearly reveals Kanno Suga's last texts to be “resistance literature” was her use of figurative language to express the idea that death is life. In the prison diary and letters she wrote in the week before her execution for treason, Kanno repeatedly used metaphors of regeneration in connection with her faith in the revolutionary immortality she and her co-defendants would be accorded and in the ultimate victory of Truth and the anarchist Cause. Appearances notwithstanding, the Japanese state had only won this round of the fight. This essay also reflects upon the plural nature of Kanno's resistance whereby in these late texts, in effect, she practiced a subversion of more than one social institution. Attributing to Kanno a subversion of literary canons as well, the author situates the prison diary within a transnational “out-law” genre of autobiography described today as “testimonio” (testimonial literature).
Kanno Suga (1881–1911) achieved the dubious distinction of being the first female political prisoner in Japan's modern history to be executed. She was the one woman among twenty-four Meiji socialists to be sentenced to death early in 1911 for her involvement in a conspiracy to assassinate the emperor. Yet Kanno Suga is noteworthy for reasons other than for her role in the so-called Meiji High Treason Incident. As one of Japan's first feminists and also one of its first female journalists, she played an active role in various social movements in the Meiji era (1868–1912). Any one of these factors would qualify Kanno as a significant historical figure. Historians of Japan, however, have long tended either to ignore her or to focus their attention on her love life. Doubtless some have seen her as merely the “other half” of the “more important” anarchist theorist Kotoku Shusui, while others have apparently concluded that her romantic involvements are the most noteworthy features of her life. The fact that even works of women's history published in Japan seem preoccupied with Kanno Suga's romantic involvements suggests that it has not only been “within mainstream U.S. feminism [that] the good insistence that ‘the personal is political’ often transformed itself into something like ‘only the personal is political’.”
Notes
Because some scholars refer to Kanno as “Kanno Suga” and others as “Sugako,” I should explain in advance that her legal given name was “Suga,” though she often used “Sugako” or other pen names when earlier she worked as a journalist.
The defendants were found guilty as charged for their intent, not for an actual attempt. Twelve of those sentenced to death on 18 January 1911 had their sentences reduced to life imprisonment a few days later. On the Meiji High Treason Incident, see John Crump, The Origins of Socialist Thought in Japan (London and Canberra: Croom Helm, 1983), and Shiota Shobei and Watanabe Junzo, eds., Hiroku Taigyaku Jiken (The High Treason Incident: Confidential documents), 2 vols. (Tokyo: Shunjusha, 1959); and on Kanno Suga, see Itoya Toshio, Kanno Suga: Heiminsha no Fujin Kakumeika Zo (Kanno Suga: Portrait of a woman revolutionary of the Commoners Society) (Tokyo: Iwanami Shinsho, 1970).
Gayatri Chakarovorty Spivak, “In a Word: Interview” (with Ellen Rooney), in Outside in the Teaching Machine (New York and London: Routledge, 1993), p. 4.I would think that this focus on the personal-political has been a common tendency in metropolitan feminism elsewhere as well. In Japan, however, it has applied to many works on Kanno from the 1960s until recently: Setouchi Harumi, “Kanno Sugako: Koi to Kakumei ni Junjita Meiji no Onna (Bijoden daikyuwa)” (Kanno Sugako: The woman who sacrificed herself for love and revolution [Biographies of beautiful women]), Chuo Koron 80, no. 9 (September 1965): 291-301; and Suzuku Yuko, ed., Shiso no Kai e (Kaiho to kakumei), 21, Josei—Hangyaku to Kakumei to Teiko to (Into the sea of ideas: Liberation and revolution. Vol. 21, Women: Rebellion, revolution, and resistance) (Tokyo, ShakaiHyoronsha, 1990),Part3 on Kanno Sugaand Kaneko Fumiko is entitled “Hangyaku to Ai to” (Treason and love), pp. 30-52.
References
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- Raddeker, Hélène Bowen , 1997. Treacherous Women of Imperial Japan: Patriarchal Fictions, Patricidal Fantasies . London, New York: Routledge; 1997.
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- Shimizu, , Zenshu IIIpp. 205–217, Kanno, Miyashita Daikichi, Nümura Tadao, Furukawa Rikisaku, and Uchiyama Gudo met a number of times to discuss a possible insurrection. They not only discussed the need for arms and explosives but began to lay in supplies and experiment with the manufacture of bombs. Uchiyama was the first to be arrested in May 1909 for an infringement of the explosives control laws. Then the arrest on 25 May 1910 of Miyashita, Furukawa, Nümura, and two others quickly led to mass arrests. Since Kanno was already in prison by the time of the first arrests, having begun on May 18 to serve an earlier sentence for a publication infringement, the small group of conspirators were therefore all incarcerated before an insurrection could be attempted However, they had met the day before Kanno went into prison and vowed to carry out their plans on her release in the autumn.
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- Zenshu IIIpp. 210–210, and Mi-yashita Daikichi, cited in Crump, The Origins of Socialist Thought in Japan, p. 312. On the new role of the emperor in Meiji, see Carol Gluck, Japan's Modern Myths: Ideology in the Late Meiji Period (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1985), pp. 213-46..
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- Waswo, Ann , 1996. Modern Japanese Society, 1868–1994 . Oxford: Oxford University Press; 1996. pp. 90–90, Even in some of its more moderate forms recently in Japan, demands for Western recognition of cultural diversity all too often take the form of an inverted, but still essentialized and hierarchized “difference” between cultures or nations. To cite but one example, it seems that while Japan was once represented as the only truly “socialist” society, now it is portrayed as being more purely “postmodernist” than anywhere else. This sort of nationalistic discourse is still “orientalist,” which is to say that it is still premised on the same binary logic of East-West difference that, arguably, has long disabled the recognition of shared transnational experiences of oppression and thus the potential for solidarity.
- Shimizu, , Zenshu IIIpp. 182–182.
- Kanno, , Shide no Michikusa , Zenshu IIpp. 255–255, A pause on the way to death), in Shimizu, I shall henceforth refer to this simply as her Diary.) Kanno's use of “hitosuji michi” (literally, a straight road or path) suggests a path from which she could or would not deviate, so I prefer to read it as “unswerving” because of the word's common association with devotion, commitment, and purpose.
- Shimizu, , Zenshu IIIpp. 188–188.
- Shimizu, , Zenshu IIIpp. 182–182.
- Raddeker, Hélène Bowen , The Past through Telescopic Sights: Reading the Prison-Life-Story of Kaneko Fumiko , Japan Forum 7pp. 155–169, no. 2 fall 1995.
- Kanno, , 1911. "Shide no Michikusa". In: Zenshu, II . 1911. pp. 245–245, in Shimizu, She also said this in a letter to Tamikawa “Takeo” (Kotoku's niece) on January 21 (in Zenshu, III, p. 183.
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- 1911. Zenshu, II . 1911. pp. 261–261.
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- Kanno, Diary , 1911. Zenshu, II . 1911. pp. 268–269, in Shimizu.
- Zenshu, II . pp. 246–247.
- Zenshu, II . pp. 249–249.
- Zenshu, II . pp. 260–260.
- Zenshu, II . pp. 270–270.
- Shimizu, , Zenshu, II . pp. 272–272, While being interrogated seven months earlier Kanno had also remarked that she and her co-conspirators had hoped that the anarchist theorist and leader, Kotoku Shusui, would survive them to send news of the rebellion overseas. Doubtless they accorded him this role partly because he had visited the United States before and had contacts there. “If Kotoku survived when we died he would communicate the news to comrades overseas for us,” she said. “If he died with us, we wouldn't be able to send the news overseas, and this would not be at all beneficial to the natural development of anar-cho-communism in Japan. They wanted comrades and others overseas to know of the systematic political repression and injustice suffered by dissenters of all descriptions in Japan, largely to help the cause of anarchism and progress there. See Kanno's Sixth Preliminary Court Interrogation (13 June 1910), in, Zenshu, III.
- Kanno, Diary , 1911. Zenshu, II . 1911. pp. 250–251, in Shimizu.
- Zenshu, II . pp. 266–267, Here she sets up the truth of scientific (socialist) materialism in opposition to Buddhism. Moreover, her asking to be buried in the convict graveyard, not in the grounds of a temple, probably reflected her rejection of institutionalized religion and her identification with other recipients of State “justice.” She actually said that while she really wanted to be buried with her sister, whose grave was at a temple named Shoshunji, she did not like the priests there. And she even went so far as to say that, far from following the proprieties of funereal ritual, it would not matter to her if her ashes were “scattered to the wind or thrown into the river.
- Hideko, Kageyama-Fukuda , 1980. "Warawa no Hanshogai". In: Nihon-jin noJiden . Vol. 6. Tokyo: Heibonsha; 1980, by this time a veteran of the earlier popular rights movement and an active socialist-feminist. In 1904 she had written an autobiography entitled, My life so far), which was published in, This is discussed in Vera Mackie, Creating Socialist Women in Japan: Gender, Labour and Activism, 1900–1937 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), chapter 1.
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- Beverley, , The Margin at the Center . pp. 91–114, It should be noted that Beverley includes in this genre of testimonio–“whose unit of narration is usually a ‘life’ or a significant life experience”–both autobiographies or autobiographical novels and confessions, memoirs, and diaries.
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- Rubin, Jay , 1984. Injurious to Public Morals: Writers and the Meiji State . Seattle, London: University of Washington Press; 1984. pp. 162–166, It is clear in her diary and letters that Kanno felt constrained to justify herself even to her comrades because of her feelings of guilt over inadvertently involving in the incident some who had not been involved in the “conspiracy.” She also expressed herself at times with a humility suggestive of a consciousness of being a woman presuming to speak for male comrades. The most explicit example of a typically feminine humility would have been where-at least according to the lawyer, Hiraide Shu-Kanno attributed her/their failure or suppression to her “womanly lack of spirit.”.