Kappa by Ryunosuke Akutagawa

One of the customs/practices that I find revolting and terrible in "Kappa," by Ryunosuke Akutagawa, is the slaughtering of Kappas when they no longer have a job. This shows how workers in the twentieth century, and to a certain extent in the modern 21st century world, how huge businesses and multi-corporations mistreat and exploit their workers. Workers were, and still are, underpaid and worked in unsafe and insanitary conditions. People only have value when they are working, so once people lose their jobs and are unemployed, they are seen as useless with little to no value in the society. These people are essentially tantamount to less than humans and animals. Thus, their only redeeming quality is to be dehumanized by becoming food consumption for the valued humans. In Akutagawa's satirical work, "Kappa," he criticizes our current capitalist society and the way we treat humans as exploitative objects. And he illustrates this by portraying Kappaland as a reflection of the human society, with the difference being that Kappas seem to openly express their opinions and thoughts of the current, controversial debates while humans tend to avoid and prevent people talking about this taboo issues (though, I believe this is also changing in the modern society as more people are expressively discussing human rights and current moral/ethical issues). Besides this difference, the Kappaland and the human world are very similar in many ways from having a civilized structure and society to having engineers, businessmen, and poets. Akutagawa mocks both the Kappaland and the human world as their system and society structures are both immoral and inhumane. However, Akutagawa seems to be insinuating that the human world is, to a certain extent, even worse than Kappaland because while Kappas do eat their fellow Kappas, it is normal and lawful in their culture and society, but humans sell women, and sometimes even their own children, without their consent and violating their human rights and the law to the world of prostitution as if they weren't their own blood (though, it's kind of hypocritical for the Kappas to say that because how lawful and humane is it to kill their fellow Kappas on the basis that they are deemed useless once they have failed to obtain or fired/laid off from a job).


Albeit the salary and working conditions in the modern, industrialized society are better compared to the past, with unions (though, I believe these unions are getting fewer and fewer) to protect workers' rights and more equality between men and women and people of different race/ethnicity, we see still a huge income gap between the rich and poor, men and women, and the dominant/oppressive and subordinate/oppressed race/class. We still see men and women being underpaid and undervalued for the so-called undesirable, manual labor and blue-collar jobs. Some humans simply see workers as nothing but dispensable things that we can replace anytime if they were to ever complain about their wages or working conditions, because we know that there are a limited number of jobs with an unlimited number of people willing to take those jobs. In the modern society, employers are not directly and overtly abusing their power and exploiting their workers, but they are doing it in a subtler way. People are being undermined and enslaved into these jobs in a covert and subtle way compared to the past with underwritten and subliminal rules of who to hire and not to hire for a job or who to rent or not to rent for a house. The motto of the companies is not for the profit of all but for the profit of the company and the corporate officials.



Discussion Questions: Do you think the Kappas practices/customs are worse than humans, vice versa, or are both equally as bad? If you were given a chance to live in the Kappaland (possibly forever), would you want to live there?