Yoshimoto Taka'aki, Communal Illusion, and the Japanese New Left

Yoshimoto Takaaki is arguably the most important Japanese thinker after World War II. Yoshimoto played a critical role in postwar debates on political commitment, literary criticism, origin of the state, peculiarities of popular traditions of laws and customs, and specific character of consumer capitalism in Japan. His rethinking of Marx, which permeates much of these studies, departs radically from the Marxist-Leninist materialist epistemology, stadialism, and vanguardism of both the Old and New Left, and it helped to create a unique intellectual space for the non-sectarian New Left radicals of the 1960s. This essay looks at some of the central themes in Yoshimoto's work by assessing his linguistic theory in relation to prewar pan-Asian struggles, his theory of communal illusion in relation to Marxism, his ideas about role of the intellectual in relation to wartime Communist apostasy, and the significance of these contributions to the making of the Japanese New Left.