Kanikōsen

Kani kōsen (蟹工船^?) published in English as The Cannery Boat (1933), The Factory Ship (1973), and The Crab Cannery Ship (2013) is a novel by Takiji Kobayashi, written in 1929. Written from a communist point of view, it concerns the crew of a crab fishing ship's hardships as they struggle under capitalist exploitation. The book has been made into a film and as manga. It is a short work, totalling around 80 pages in its English translation.

A crab fishing ship goes to the open sea off Kamchatka (now in Russia but then in the Soviet Union). The crew are not optimistic about their prospects; one crewman declares "We're going to Hell!" When the drown crew is saved by Russian, they find that foreigners are human being just like themselves and the Russian tell that proletariat the worker is a great being. A student worker says that the labour situation at the crew is worse the The House of the Dead by Dostoevsky. The crew ultimately revolt against their sadistic manager and foreman, form a union and take over the ship. However the new order on board is suppressed by the Imperial Navy sailors.

The book expresses its pessimism from the beginning, not only in the opening remark but in the description of the harbour of Hakodate being filled with rubbish, and the smaller boats being compared to insects.

Interest in the book has revived recently as the 2008 financial crisis has led to economic pressures on many Japanese workers. Interest increased after an article discussing the book appeared in the Mainichi Shimbun newspaper on 9 January. This was followed by further articles in other papers, which came to call the revival the "Kanikōsen boom". Headlines like "Kanikōsen - Sad reminder, lamenting disparity, young people’s empathy" (Yomiuri Shimbun 2 May) reflected its popularity among many disaffected young Japanese workers.

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Wikipedia