Gas Mask Nation
Visualizing Civil Air Defense in Wartime Japan
Seiten
2023
University of Chicago Press (Verlag)
978-0-226-81644-9 (ISBN)
University of Chicago Press (Verlag)
978-0-226-81644-9 (ISBN)
A fascinating look at the anxious pleasures of Japanese visual culture during World War II.
Airplanes, gas masks, and bombs were common images in wartime Japan. Yet amid these emblems of anxiety, tasty caramels were offered to children with paper gas masks as promotional giveaways, and magazines featured everything from attractive models in the latest civil defense fashion to futuristic weapons.
Gas Mask Nation explores the multilayered construction of an anxious yet perversely pleasurable visual culture of Japanese civil air defense—or bōkū—through a diverse range of artworks, photographs, films and newsreels, magazine illustrations, postcards, cartoons, advertising, fashion, everyday goods, government posters, and state propaganda. Gennifer Weisenfeld reveals the immersive aspects of this culture, in which Japan’s imperial subjects were mobilized to regularly perform highly orchestrated civil air defense drills throughout the country.
The war years in Japan are often portrayed as a landscape of privation and suppression under the censorship of the war machine. But alongside the horrors, pleasure, desire, wonder, creativity, and humor were all still abundantly present in a period before air raids went from being a fearful specter to a deadly reality.
Airplanes, gas masks, and bombs were common images in wartime Japan. Yet amid these emblems of anxiety, tasty caramels were offered to children with paper gas masks as promotional giveaways, and magazines featured everything from attractive models in the latest civil defense fashion to futuristic weapons.
Gas Mask Nation explores the multilayered construction of an anxious yet perversely pleasurable visual culture of Japanese civil air defense—or bōkū—through a diverse range of artworks, photographs, films and newsreels, magazine illustrations, postcards, cartoons, advertising, fashion, everyday goods, government posters, and state propaganda. Gennifer Weisenfeld reveals the immersive aspects of this culture, in which Japan’s imperial subjects were mobilized to regularly perform highly orchestrated civil air defense drills throughout the country.
The war years in Japan are often portrayed as a landscape of privation and suppression under the censorship of the war machine. But alongside the horrors, pleasure, desire, wonder, creativity, and humor were all still abundantly present in a period before air raids went from being a fearful specter to a deadly reality.
Gennifer Weisenfeld is the Walter H. Annenberg Distinguished Professor of Art, Art History, and Visual Studies at Duke University. She is the author of Mavo: Japanese Artists and the Avant-Garde, 1905-1931 and Imaging Disaster: Tokyo and the Visual Culture of Japan’s Great Earthquake of 1923 as well as a core contributing author on MIT’s award-winning website Visualizing Cultures.
Introduction
1 Selling and Consuming Total War
2 Aviation and Japan’s Aerial Imaginary
3 Gas Mask Parade
4 Bombs Away!
5 Wondrous Weapons and Future War
6 Exhibiting Air Defense
Epilogue: Afterimages
Acknowledgments
Notes
Bibliography
Index
Erscheinungsdatum | 06.03.2023 |
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Zusatzinfo | 83 color plates, 102 halftones |
Sprache | englisch |
Maße | 178 x 254 mm |
Gewicht | 1474 g |
Themenwelt | Geisteswissenschaften ► Geschichte ► Regional- / Ländergeschichte |
Geschichte ► Teilgebiete der Geschichte ► Kulturgeschichte | |
Geschichte ► Teilgebiete der Geschichte ► Militärgeschichte | |
ISBN-10 | 0-226-81644-3 / 0226816443 |
ISBN-13 | 978-0-226-81644-9 / 9780226816449 |
Zustand | Neuware |
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