Fiction, Friction: A Sengoha Encounter with Lotus

Abstract

This thesis examines Japanese participation in the Afro-Asian Writers’ Association (AAWA) and its journal Lotus: Afro-Asian Writing (1968–1991), recovering a neglected history of Japan’s engagement with Third World internationalism. While recent scholarship has treated Lotus as a site of transnational solidarity and contradiction, Japanese contributions have remained largely absent from these accounts.The thesis argues that Japanese participation was structured by a grammar of victimhood and resistance first articulated at the 1958 Tashkent conference, which positioned the Japanese as victims and resisters of imperialism. This framing enabled inclusion in an anti-colonial project despite Japan’s own imperial past, but constrained how that past could be represented. The result was a persistent disjunction between critical prose, which gradually acknowledged Japanese complicity, and literary selections, which remained confined to narratives of victimhood and anti-war consciousness. Through close readings of works by Ayukawa Nobuo, Kijima Hajime, and Hotta Yoshie alongside texts by Palestinian authors in Lotus Issue 4 (1970), the thesis proposes that the journal generates a form of contrapuntal awareness in which the limits of Japanese anti-imperial literature become legible only in relation to writing from the colonized world — an effect produced through editorial juxtaposition rather than explicit critique, and all the more revealing for being unacknowledged.