Presentation and Acceptance of Works during the 1950s Cultural Movements

A Case Study of The National Congress of Culture

Abstract

This study analyzes the publication of works during the National Congress of Culture and describes the differences between the acceptances of several social classes in those works.

Post-war Japanese cultural movements during the 1950s had two features: creating cultural works and presenting them. Papers regarding the presentation of these works highlight how people identified with them. However, the participants were from multiple social classes, and existing studies have not explored the differences or contradictions between them.

Bourdieu argues that cultural works are accepted as “suitable” for a specific social class due to their stake in the work and its cultural capital. This study refers to Bourdieuʼs theories to analyze the presentation of the works and explore the differences between peopleʼs impressions of and stake in the works.

The National Congress of Culture was held by the National Congress of Culture during the late 1950s as an annual meeting and consisted of the presentation of movies and dramas made by the working classes. These presentations were understood as an extension of labor and as an everyday activity. Many people mentioned two specific works: Motomeru-Hito and Kasya-no-Uta. Motomeru-Hito was a drama made by Osaka prefecture laborers, and Kasya-no-Uta was a chant by Japan National Railway laborers.

However, there was no mass identification with these works, and disagreement between students, members of cultural movements, and laborers emerged. These differences reflected their different stakes in the student, cultural, and labor movements. Since there were no adequate explanations or discussions of these works, their ideas, and concepts, the differences in peopleʼs cultural capital were not offset, and participants experienced themselves to be outside the everyday movements. People could not understand the performerʼs emotions or the differences between their positions in cultural movements. Therefore, differences in social class arose within cultural works, which limited the development of postwar cultural movements.