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This chapter focuses on texts often categorized as peasant literature, Bildungsroman, children's literature, and proletarian literature. Despite the fact that they are all roughly contemporaneous, these writers and their texts are rarely discussed together. The broader category of down-to-earth literature allows a comparison of the diverse approaches and techniques these writers adopted, while the specific focus on food highlights the multiplicity of the seemingly simple and straightforward. The works examined include Nagatsuka Takashi's novel Tsuchi (serialized in the Asahi shinbun from June to December 1910, trans. The Soil, 1989), Miyamoto Yuriko's Mazushiki hitobito no mure (A Crowd of Poor Folks, 1917), Sata Ineko's short story “Kyarameru kōjō kara” (From the Caramel Factory, 1928), and Kobayashi Takiji's Kani kōsen (Crab Cannery Boat, 1929).

This introductory chapter examines the censorship in the literary and film history narratives of Japan. The country has infamous cases of artists being persecuted by the official censors. Most notable among them are: the murder of proletariat writer Kobayashi Takiji in a police custody for his treasonous writings, and the violent attack by a right-wing youth on the publisher of Fukazawa Shichirō’s 1959 story, which depicts the severed heads of imperial family members rolling down the Imperial Palace steps. Such incidents are often cited to prove that art in Japan has been at the mercy of pervasive censorship throughout much of its modern history. This conception demonstrates the censor as having the power to exercise a political or legal judgment on a work of art, and the artist as being either admirably subversive or unscrupulously complicit.

With World War II finally over, Japan, the Soviet Union, and the United States took three very different approaches to their fishing industry. Fishing was vital for Japan, a key to its economic recovery, and the government bet heavily on rebuilding the Japanese fishing fleet that had been the world's largest during the 1930s. The Soviets embarked on building what would become the world’s largest fishing fleet, operating on every ocean and challenging American post-war ocean supremacy. Fishing was never a vital industry in the United States, and fishermen faced declining catches on both the East and West coasts. The story begins with President Harry Truman visiting Seattle in 1945, and the announcement of the world’s largest fishing project, the 423-foot Pacific Explorer. Americans were set to claim the high-seas tuna fishery started by the Japanese in the Mandated Islands, and the king crab and bottomfish fisheries they had exploited in Alaskan waters. With all three nations embarking on an expansion of fishing, at different scales, the stage is set for the collapse of fish stocks, international disputes, and a war over who will be the leading fishing nation in the Pacific.