Ainu trivia [a partial entry on Ainu Wedding (1971), Ota Ryu]
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[Could you sympathize with Ota Ryu? Is there anything for you in Ainu Revolution Theory? Is there anything for you in revolutionary fantasies? Which of your causes are lost?] [As usual, I can relate only trivia. I don’t know what Ota Ryu remembered about the fall of Karafuto, or if his revolutionary consciousness might have been formed by an awareness of the crimes needed for its survival. In what conditions did he see the Koreans imported by Mitsui to labor there? Were the Oroks still in their villages? He left before the Soviets arrived. He joined the Japanese Communist Party a short time later. He soon left to pursue Trotskyism. Please tolerate my choice not to attempt to unravel the next three decades of activism. I am more familiar than most with Japanese leftist politics of the postwar period, but what does that mean? There is a good reason that nobody has attempted a complete genealogy in any language of the Japanese postwar left, since one name, one tendency, one event leads to dozens more. So, let me say only that Ota Ryu was involved in student activism, albeit as a fringe player, an organizer of misfits on the wild political edge. ▣ ▣ And here is a piece of trivia that leads us too tidily into our story to be true: Ota Ryu was converted from a global revolutionary ideology derived to something stranger and more powerful by his viewing of a documentary film called
Ainu trivia [a partial entry on Ainu Wedding (1971), Ota Ryu]
Ainu trivia [a partial entry on Ainu Wedding…
Ainu trivia [a partial entry on Ainu Wedding (1971), Ota Ryu]
[Could you sympathize with Ota Ryu? Is there anything for you in Ainu Revolution Theory? Is there anything for you in revolutionary fantasies? Which of your causes are lost?] [As usual, I can relate only trivia. I don’t know what Ota Ryu remembered about the fall of Karafuto, or if his revolutionary consciousness might have been formed by an awareness of the crimes needed for its survival. In what conditions did he see the Koreans imported by Mitsui to labor there? Were the Oroks still in their villages? He left before the Soviets arrived. He joined the Japanese Communist Party a short time later. He soon left to pursue Trotskyism. Please tolerate my choice not to attempt to unravel the next three decades of activism. I am more familiar than most with Japanese leftist politics of the postwar period, but what does that mean? There is a good reason that nobody has attempted a complete genealogy in any language of the Japanese postwar left, since one name, one tendency, one event leads to dozens more. So, let me say only that Ota Ryu was involved in student activism, albeit as a fringe player, an organizer of misfits on the wild political edge. ▣ ▣ And here is a piece of trivia that leads us too tidily into our story to be true: Ota Ryu was converted from a global revolutionary ideology derived to something stranger and more powerful by his viewing of a documentary film called