The Length of a Capitalist's Drool

The Length of a Capitalist's Drool, drawn by Yanase Masamu in 1924, is the best known single image of his proletarian-cartoon period and the work most often cited as evidence of his transition from Mavo-era avant-garde painter to political graphic artist. The original drawing is lost, but the composition survives in book reproductions and on the Wikimedia Commons file used by Japanese-language Wikipedia: a corpulent top-hatted capitalist tipped backward in his chair, a thick stream of drool running from his open mouth in a long ribbon that doubles as a measuring tape, while small worker figures scramble at his feet to weigh the bourgeoisie's greed in literal inches. The image is a direct loan from George Grosz, whose ferocious Weimar caricatures of the German bourgeoisie Yanase had encountered during a 1922 visit to Berlin and whose stylistic mannerisms (the heavy black contour, the grotesque physiognomy, the use of objects as moral measurements) he openly imitated through the mid-1920s. Yanase had also produced a related 1924 piece titled The Face of the Bourgeoise Composed out of (the works of) Grosz, an explicit homage that placed him as the leading Japanese disciple of the German artist. The Length of a Capitalist's Drool was published in the early proletarian press in Tokyo during 1924, the year before the Peace Preservation Law of 1925 dramatically narrowed the space for left-wing publishing in Japan, and it circulated widely through the Marxist magazines and pamphlets that Yanase would design and illustrate for the next decade. The image's afterlife belongs more to political history than to the museum: it has been reprinted in studies of Japanese proletarian art, in surveys of interwar protest graphics, and on MIT's Visualizing Cultures platform as part of its exhibition on protest art in interwar Japan. The original is in the public domain by virtue of Yanase's 1945 death, which placed his work outside Japanese copyright after 2015, and the surviving reproduction is held under a public-domain mark on Wikimedia Commons.