The late Professor Moritaro Yamada, ex-member of Japan Academy, was one of the most eminent economists in Japan. In his masterpiece entitled Analysis of Japanese Capitalism (1934), he analyzed the basic structure of pre-war Japanese Capitalism which was characterized by the liliputian scales of peasant farming under the domination of semi-feudal landownership and by the pre-modern capital-labour relations under the conjunctive domination of Zaibatsu-concerns organized in the patriarchal system and of military bureaucracy formed in the absolutistic type. He defined this basic structure of pre-war Japanese Capitalism as its "military semi-feudal structural system" in comparison with British, French, German Capitalisms and especially with the "military-feudal" structure of Russian Capitalism under the domination of Tsar. By this "Analysis", he offered the strongest theoretical basis to the pre-war Japanese Marxian economics. The work had embodied not only the brilliant analysis of the basic structure of pre-war Japanese Capitalism, but also the specific analytical method of capitalism in one country. This analytical method was called by the author "the concretization of the theory of reproduction" which meant a specific reapplication of Marx's theory of schemes of reproduction to the analysis of national specificity of capitalist development. As Marx showed in his analysis of the schemes of reproduction, the inner articulation of capital, landownership and wage-labour has been determined only through the reproduction-movement of capital in general (the aggregate social capital). Lenin, in his famous comments on Bucharin's Economics of the Period of Transition (1920), reformulated this inner articulation succinctly into the scheme of "I v + m=II c and the accumulation". The starting point of Yamada's analytical method consisted in this simplified scheme with enormous implications (note that the above "m" implies the rent of landownership). The national specificity of capitalist development in the cases of the so-called "central capitalism" has been determined through its specific historical conditions of primitive accumulation which begins with the bourgeois land-reform and ends with the industrial revolution. The industrial revolutions in the developed capitalist nations mean the summing-up of the specific historical conditions of their respective primitive accumulations and, in turn, the setting-up of the specific courses of their respective capitalist accumulations in which the specific reproduction-movement of the national articulation of capital, landownership and wage-labour goes on. In other words, the national specificity of capitalist development in each industrialized nation would be crystallized in its industrial revolution. Thus, Yamada concentrates his analysis on the determination of industrial revolution both in theory and in real history. By this analysis, he has determined the national specificity of pre-war Japanese Capitalism as one formed with "the military semi-feudal structural system". This specific analytical method of capitalism in one country has been shaped through Yamada's synthetical intervention in the pre-war Japanese controversies on Marx's thoery which were partly the echoes of international controversies. In his epoch-making works entitled "The contradiction of the theory of value and its solution (Aufheben)" (1925) and Introduction to the Schemes-Analysis of the Process of Reproduction (1931), he has defined his position to the controversies. In the former paper, he clarified Marx's method of logical restructuralization of historical development by stressing the methodological implications of the contradiction of value-theory later on familiar as the "transformation problem". In the latter work, he integrated

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Kanikōsen was translated into English and published in America and Britain in 1933. The original Japanese version had been written by Takiji Kobayashi and published in 1929.The English version’s tittle was The Cannery Boat by Takiji Kobayashi, and Other Japanese Short Stories. But its translator’s name was not written anywhere in the book.
Unexpectedly, the name was revealed in a Japanese newspaper’s article reporting the roundup of the Japanese Communist Party members in 1934. It was William Maxwell Bickerton that translated Kanikōsen. He was British born and raised in New Zealand and was teaching English at Dai-ichi High School and other colleges in Tokyo. According to the article he was arrested under the Peace Preservation Law by the Tokkō (the Special Higher Police) on suspicion of giving money to the Japanese Communist Party. He told the police about his translation during the harsh investigation.
It was very rare for Japanese modern novels to be translated and published in foreign countries before the World War II. At that time, modern Japanese literature was hardly known in the West, though The Tale of Genji were translated into English in the 1925, which drew praises from many European literary people including Virginia Woolf and other modernists.
Why and how Kanikōsen was translated and published abroad is the theme of this paper. It inevitably has relation to the context of the world politics in the 1930s, especially of the rise of the Communist Movements in Japan and the West. For instance, one of the American Communist leaders, Michael Gold, a Proletarian writer himself, helped Bickerton publish his translation. This kind of political situation in the 1930s, rather than the literary quality and values of the work itself, supposedly urged the overseas translation and publication of the Kobayashi’s proletarian work.