Author:
Title: [Hataraku Fujin]. No. 1 to no. 5 and no. 11.
Description: Tokyo, Nihon Puroretaria Bunka, Jan - Nov 1932 (Showa 7). Six issues in colour illustrated publisher's wrappers 22x15cm; contents range from about 140pp to 86pp, b/w illustrations, monochrome photo illustrations. Expected browning of the cheap paper, signs of use but all rather good. ¶ Maybe six elevenths - or six thirteenths, or not - of the whole run of this trouble making left wing magazine for the Working Woman. It's hard to untangle. I can't find any complete set of these original copies. A reprint, probably not complete, was made in 1980 which seems to include eleven issues running from January 1932 to an April/May 1933 double issue - eight for 1932 and three for 1933. I found a mention that no issues appeared some months. The issues here are numbered by the month they appeared - which may mean there are gaps in the numbering of a complete run or that there are issues no-one has found. The holdings of 13 university libraries in Japan put together seem to add up to v1(1 -10) for 1932 and v2(1-3) for 1933. Being a communist in Japan in the thirties was a fraught business and the foundation of the Nihon Puroretaria Bunka Renmei - Japanese Proletarian Culture Federation - late 1931 and the flourish of Proletarian books and magazines in 1932 and early 1933 was a last stand of the left. Being gaoled was one thing, being tortured and killed another. In her novel '1932 no Haru' (Spring 1932) writer Miyamoto Yuriko incorporated her editorship of early issues of this magazine, arrest after the April issue (on the right in the picture here), and the torture and death of poet Konno Dairiki. This wasn't her last arrest and Konno's wasn't the last death. Virtually nothing written in the last few decades on Japanese culture in the twentieth century doesn't mention 'Working Woman' while no-one, it seems, has read or even seen all of them.

Keywords: social science politics feminism women communism Japan c20th modernism progress reform political economy