ABSTRACT
The poet and critic Yoshimoto Takaaki (b. 1924) 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 “Tenkōron,” translated here, fundamentally altered the terms by which the old left guard was viewed. The concept of “ideological conversion” (tenkō) articulated therein expanded the term far beyond its conventional association with those who had officially recanted their political views in the 1930s under severe pressure from the state. By drawing a direct parallel between the general intellectual stance of Japanese “modernism” and the ideological capitulation of Japanese Marxists, Yoshimoto extended his critique of ideological conversion to decisively denounce the very ideological purity of those who had refused to recant, pointing out that their steadfast insistence on principles was based on the same refusal to confront the realities of Japanese society that led to the ideological capitulation of those who recanted.
