1920s
1930s
A01=Miriam Silverberg
academic
Author_Miriam Silverberg
Category=JBCC1
colonialism
consumerism
cultural studies
culture
daily life
eq_bestseller
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
eq_society-politics
erotic
ethnography
fashion
food
government
grotesque
homeless
housing
ideology
japan
japanese
japanese history
mass culture
modern world
movies
pearl harbor
photography
political
politics
pop culture
popular entertainment
postwar
rural
scholarly
social studies
television
urban
wartime
world war 2
wwii
Product details
- ISBN 9780520260085
- Weight: 590g
- Dimensions: 152 x 229mm
- Publication Date: 01 Jun 2009
- Publisher: University of California Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Paperback
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This history of Japanese mass culture during the decades preceding Pearl Harbor argues that the new gestures, relationship, and humor of ero-guro-nansensu (erotic grotesque nonsense) expressed a self-consciously modern ethos that challenged state ideology and expansionism. Miriam Silverberg uses sources such as movie magazines, ethnographies of the homeless, and the most famous photographs from this era to capture the spirit, textures, and language of a time when the media reached all classes, connecting the rural social order to urban mores. Employing the concept of montage as a metaphor that informed the organization of Japanese mass culture during the 1920s and 1930s, Silverberg challenges the erasure of Japanese colonialism and its legacies. She evokes vivid images from daily life during the 1920s and 1930s, including details about food, housing, fashion, modes of popular entertainment, and attitudes toward sexuality.
Her innovative study demonstrates how new public spaces, new relationships within the family, and an ironic sensibility expressed the attitude of Japanese consumers who identified with the modern as providing a cosmopolitan break from tradition at the same time that they mobilized for war.
Miriam Silverberg is Professor of History at the University of California, Los Angeles and the author of Changing Song: The Marxist Manifestos of Nakano Shigeharu (1990).
