Like their theories, Henri Lefebre and Tosaka Jun existed in different yet similar worlds. Both were born at the turn of the 20th century, and yet had very different paths in life. Lefebvre’s life stretched across almost the entire century, while Tosaka died at the age of 45 just before the end of World War II.
The two seemingly had nothing in common. One a renowned French Marxist and intellectual who undoubtedly helped to shape theories in almost too many disciplines to name, while the other appears little known outside of Japan.
It would be forgiven, then, to ask what use there is in comparing the two. The answer lies in the remarkable similarity between their theories of the ‘everyday’. For Lefebvre, this arose from his deeply held love of the Pyrenees countryside that he grew up in and which he retained throughout his life. Tosaka too spent time in the countryside, but it was in Tokyo that he formed most of his theories, and it was there that he formed his major critiques on journalism, which led to his ideas on the ‘everyday’.
As yet, it appears that there has been no major study comparing these two thinkers. There are several possible reasons for this. The first is that in the west French Marxism simply receives the major share of attention, with the East by comparison remaining much less studied, although this has begun to change in recent years. Another may be the circumstances of their lives. Lefebvre lived to the ripe age of 91, and wrote and published prolifically during his life. The major difference here is that he was allowed to. Lefebvre joins a long list of Western intellectuals who each sit proudly on their pedestal, and which no work is deemed complete without extensive name-dropping of each other – our class discussion ended up with almost two dozen names in one week’s reading!
The west celebrates its thinkers, Marxist or otherwise. Even during times of their theories having fallen out of fashion, or spoken of in derisory tones of the figures of yesteryear, they are still spoken about. In contrast, the political situation in Japan was far more fraught in the first half of the 20th century. Lefebvre was a proud member of the French Communist Party for thirty years, and although it possibly cost him his job as a teacher, it did nothing to silence him1. Tosaka was not nearly so fortunate. His involvement with the of Yuibutsuron Kenkyūkai (Society for the Study of Materialism) saw him and his fellow members arrested and imprisoned under the harsh Peace Preservation Law in force in Japan during the 1930s, and it was the circumstances and treatment in this that led to his death. Harry Harutoonian compares Tosaka’s treatment to Gramsci, noting that while the latter was allowed to both read and write during his imprisonment, Tosaka and his fellow prisoners received much harsher treatment, with the state aiming to “obliterate his memory altogether.”2.
This is obviously an area that requires further study, and it would make for an interesting essay topic to delve into this further. Both Lefebvre and Tosaka’s theories centre on the conception of the relationship between different kinds of space and time. For Lefebvre, this is the idea of a ‘traid’ of space as ‘conceived-perceived-received’, as well as his idea of three ‘kinds’ of time; ‘free/leisure-working-constrained’3. Rather than a triad, Tosaka examined four different kinds of space, focusing more on a critique and analysis of existing theories: the symbolic space of psychology, Kantian (philosophy), geometric (mathematical), and material (physics)4.
Both men then used this analysis in their conception of the theory of the ‘everyday’. Lefebvre’s views were very much shaped by his ideas of the rural-urban divide and his own lived experience of the growing industrialisation of the Pyrenees. His ‘everyday’ was the theory that rural sociology should be considered ‘horizontally’ and ‘vertically’, with horizontally being developments in difference places in the same historical period and vertically being historical developments over time in any given location5. Tosaka’s theory is somewhat similar to this, but his argument was for time and space to be seen not as a linear, unending ribbon, but as a series of individual days, which cannot be ‘exchanged’ for one another. Combining Lefebvre’s horizontal and vertical time, Tosaka rejected the idea of ‘historical time’, arguing instead for time to be compartmentalised and configured into ‘periods’, turning ‘historical time’ from a “mere process of thought” into what periods of “configured orientation”6.
An essay idea would therefore be to compare these two theories in a more in-depth manner, examining the circumstances of Lefebre and Tosaka’s lives in an attempt to discover the differences between their theories. It would require deeper comparison of French and Japanese Marxism in the 20th century, which also appears to lack scholarship. Doing so would bridge this gap between East and West in a small way and allow for a better comparison of the ways in which Marxist theories were changed and shaped around the world. It would by necessity be limited to the first half of the 20th century and so may have difficultly incorporating Lefebvre’s later theories, but there would certainly be more than enough scope to compare their ideas from several different angles.