“Rewriting Hokkaido: The Indigenous Question in Akita Ujaku & Oguma Hideo”
Edwin Michielsen
University of Hong Kong
Mon 11/17/2025, 5:00 PM – 6:30 PM, HG 1010
This talk traces where Marxist literary critique meets Indigenous poetics, via Ainu-centered readings of Japanese proletarian texts. Focusing on Akita Ujaku’s short fiction and plays alongside Oguma Hideo’s 1935 poem The Flying Sled: For the Ainu People (“Tobu Sori: Ainu minzoku no tame ni”), I examine how proletarian writers grappled with the violence of primitive accumulation and the problem of mobility: who moves, who is made to stay, and on whose terms. Akita’s outsider depictions seek solidarity yet often filter Ainu voices through Wajin (Japanese) frames; Oguma, writing from the colonial north of Karafuto, reimagines solidarity as co-constructed and explores possibilities of land-based knowledge and care. The talk shows how class-centered visions both expose and obscure Indigenous claims to land, autonomy, and cultural survival. More broadly, it invites comparativist reflection on how proletarian aesthetics can be retooled to confront settler colonialism, and how Indigenous poetics reframe mobility, modernity, and revolutionary alliance.
Bio: Edwin Michielsen is Assistant Professor of Modern Japanese Literature and Culture in the Department of Japanese at the University of Hong Kong. His research examines proletarian literature and culture across the Japanese empire through the lens of international solidarity. Besides his current research, he is also interested in exploring postwar and contemporary Japanese literature and culture, with an emphasis on labor practices, ecology, and mental health.
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A talk in conjunction with Mimi Long’s F2025 Grad Seminar “Karatani & Friends,” syllabus here. Sponsored by the SOH Japanese Studies Research Cluster.
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