ABSTRACT
The poet and critic Yoshimoto Takaaki is perhaps the most influential thinker of Japan's New Left, which emerged in the late 1950s in response to the orthodoxies of the Japanese Communist Party and the Japan Socialist Party. His 1958 essay "Tenkoron," translated, fundamentally altered the terms by which the old left guard was viewed. His critique of ideological conversion implicitly underscores the potentially devastating personal and political consequences of living at the cutting edge of the culture of translation in modern Japan. Honda Shugo's On the Literature of Ideological Conversion has already answered this question with a thorough and generalized definition. In July 1933, Sano and Nabeyama published their statement in the journal Kaizo (Reconstruction) using a co-signature. All of the ideological conversions of modern Japan have appeared not only as a compromise with and capitulation to the inferior conditions and constraints of Japanese feudalism.
