Tsuneari Fukuda (25 August 1912 – 20 November 1994) was a Japanese playwright, translator, literary critic and public intellectual.
Born in Tokyo to a working-class family, Fukuda read English literature at Tokyo Imperial University. A scholar of D. H. Lawrence, he found his voice as a critic by contributing to literary magazines. Interested in theatre from a young age, Fukuda became associated with the shingeki genre of contemporary theatre, writing and producing numerous original plays, including The Man Who Stroked the Dragon (1952) and The Fuhrer is Still Alive! (1970), for which he was awarded the Yomiuri Prize and respectively. From the 1950s, he began a life-long endeavour to translate William Shakespeare's work into Japanese. He staged successful productions of these translations, starting with Hamlet in 1955, which set off a Shakespeare boom in Japan. Originally associated with the Bungakuza theatre company, he later broke away to found the Kumo and Subaru companies in 1963 and 1975 respectively.
A contributor to popular magazines such as Bungei Shunjū, Chūō Kōron, and Shokun!, Fukuda became well-known to the Japanese public as a conservative intellectual from the 1950s. He opposed the post-war Japanese script reform, and was awarded another Yomiuri Prize for his book on the subject, My Japanese Language Classroom (1960). He criticised left-wing movements, such as the Anpo protests, and questioned the dominance of pacifism in post-war Japan. A supporter of individual liberty and freedom of expression, he rejected the politicisation of art, and expressed doubts about Japanese modernisation. From 1969, he began teaching at Kyoto Sangyo University, and in 1981, he became a member of the Japan Art Academy. After suffering more than a decade of declining health, he died at Ōiso in Kanagawa Prefecture in 1994. Early life
Tsuneari Fukuda was born to Kōshirō and Masa Fukuda on 25 August 1912 in the Hongō ward of Tokyo, the first of five children. While Fukuda's parents received limited formal education, his father, Kōshirō was able to acquire white-collar work as a salaryman at the through self-study, and was also a calligrapher. Fukuda's given name was chosen by novelist , and originates from a passage in the works of Confucian philosopher Mencius. His mother Masa was fond of the theatre, and often took him to see kabuki and Noh plays from the age of three or four. From 1919, Fukuda attended the prestigious Kinka Primary School, where he received a liberal education that placed emphasis on independent learning. His studies were interrupted by the Great Kantō Earthquake in September 1923, which destroyed his home and much of Tokyo. He was evacuated to the countryside, and did not return to school until March 1924. Fukuda, whose family was of working-class origins, felt isolated by his privileged peers. The gap between the progressive academic environment and his conservative homelife signified his intellectual isolation, a trait that would come to define Fukuda.
From 1925, he attended Tokyo No. 2 Junior High School, which was also known for liberal education. In 1930, he was admitted to the elite Urawa High School in Saitama Prefecture, where he enrolled in a humanities and English language course. The school was enveloped in a wave of left-wing student activism taking place across Japan at that time, but Fukuda never participated. During his high-school years, he developed an interest in literature and drama, and was particularly drawn to the works of Hardy and Shakespeare. In an article published in the school newspaper, Fukuda criticised the politicisation of art in the then popular shingeki theatrical genre, which was often used as a vehicle for leftist thought. Around this time, he wrote his first play, called , and submitted it to a new playhouse called Tsukiji-za run by shingeki actor . It received honourable mention, but was never performed.
In 1933, he matriculated at Tokyo Imperial University, where he read English literature, graduating in 1936. His thesis, which was written in English, was entitled "Moral Problems in D. H. Lawrence". In the paper, Fukuda used works such as Lady Chatterley's Lover and Sons and Lovers to examine individualistic, modern man's capability for love. The whereabouts of this text are unknown. During his years at university, Fukuda worked as a private teacher to support his family, as his father had fallen into financial difficulties. Living at home, away from the intellectual safe space of the university dormitories, Fukuda retained a willingness to learn from everyday people that was rare in Shōwa-era intellectuals.
Before and during the Second World War During his graduation year, Fukuda underwent a medical exam to evaluate his suitability for conscription, which found him to be of a weak constitution. He was thus granted an exemption from military service. With the Great Depression in full swing, Fukuda was unable to secure full-time employment after completing university, and turned to part-time work for sustenance. In 1937, he enrolled in an English literature postgraduate course at Tokyo Imperial University; during this time, he wrote his first literary criticism of Shakespeare's Macbeth, and began contributing to literary magazines. He submitted an article on Riichi Yokomitsu to one such magazine, Kōdō bungaku, which was published in its February 1937 issue. In May 1938, he found work as a junior high school English teacher at Kakegawa in Shizuoka Prefecture. He quit in 1939 after objecting to the head teacher's practice of admitting talented baseball players for their athletic ability alone.
After returning to Tokyo, Fukuda was contacted by his junior high-school teacher, the linguist , who offered him a job as the editor of a new humanities magazine called Keisei. He accepted, and worked for the magazine until July 1940, when it went out of print due to a wartime paper shortage. He then worked on a criticism of Ryūnosuke Akutagawa, which was published in 1941, and the first time he was paid for his written work. During the same year, he also published a translation of D.H. Lawrence's Apocalypse.
Fukuda was again approached by Nishio during 1941. This time, he was offered a position in the newly founded , an extra-departmental body of the Ministry of Education that was established in August 1941. The organisation, which aimed to supervise Japanese language education in Japan's colonies, employed Fukuda as the chief editor and publisher of its journal Nihongo. As part of his duties, he left Japan for the first time to participate in a two-month long tour of Manchuria, Mongolia, and northern and central China from September to December 1942.
Fukuda attended a meeting of the Patriotic Association for Japanese Literature in March 1943. The organisation had been established by the Cabinet Intelligence Bureau in 1940 to monitor the activities of literary figures. At the meeting, he made remarks that were subtly critical of the military leadership, citing the emotional experience of visiting the Russo-Japanese War battlefield of Hill 203 at Port Arthur, where many Japanese died. Ken'ichi Yoshida, a literary scholar who also attended the meeting, recounted later that Fukuda's remarks were "one of the very few examples of courageous speech I heard during the war". In June 1943, Ken Hirano, who then worked at the Cabinet Intelligence Bureau, approached Fukuda about serving as his successor at the agency. Fukuda, who was critical of the perversion of culture by war-time politics, declined. He continued to contribute to magazines such as Shinchō, using complex diction to attempt to evade censorship.
Fukuda resigned from his post at the Society for the Promotion of Japanese Language Education in spring 1944. On invitation from Ikutarō Shimizu, Fukuda joined the Japan Pacific Association, and was assigned to the Department of American Studies. He worked on creating a chronological history of the United States, and also on a translation of Part III of Ève Curie's Journey Among Warriors, which was later suppressed by the Cabinet Intelligence Bureau. Fukuda, who married in January 1945, resigned in March to focus on building a bomb shelter for his wife and parents. His home was destroyed in an air raid in May, after which his family evacuated to Shizuoka Prefecture with the help of one of his former students from Kakegawa Junior High School. Fukuda himself remained in Tokyo, and started teaching at Tokyo Woman's Christian University in June, before fleeing to Kanagawa Prefecture after Japan's defeat in August.
In the immediate post-war period
Fukuda was reunited with his family in February 1946. They settled at Ōiso in Kanagawa Prefecture. With the war over, Fukuda began a new career as a "post-war critic", uniquely uncoloured by the ideologies of militarism or Marxism. At the invitation of Ikutarō Shimizu, Fukuda joined the (二十世紀研究所, nijusseiki kenkyūjo) in 1946. A group of public intellectuals devoted to the promotion of the study of the social sciences and philosophy that was founded that year, its primary activity was the holding of a series of public lectures. Other members included political scientist Masao Maruyama, economist and jurist Takeyoshi Kawashima.
In the post-defeat debate over responsibility for the Second World War, Fukuda rejected Masao Maruyama's prominent theory that the Japanese people's inability to resist authoritarianism was caused by their lack of a "modern ego" independent of the kokutai, or because of the lack of an ideological framework to deconstruct imperialism. Maruyama argued that, in pre-war Japan, the kokutai had a psychological or magical control over the Japanese people. By contrast, Fukuda argued that the Japanese people lacked the physical means to resist the violence of the state. He believed that humanity was flawed, essentially rooted in the physical egoism, and that no psychological means could be used to defeat brute force, saying: "It is impossible to expect ordinary people to be heroes; I do not have the courage to face that sort of state authority and continue a fruitless existence." Whereas leftist thinkers such as believed that democratisation would require the Japanese people to overcome physical egoism and become "modern" individuals with strong ideals, Fukuda believed that egoism was a critical element of humanity that had to be balanced with the psyche. He issued a defence of the Japanese people, whom he said held a point of view that was "Japanese", not "pre-modern" or "backward" as asserted by Maruyama. Fukuda expressed hope for a revolution to bring about the democratisation of Japan, but he believed that this should originate from the people, not the intelligentsia.