A01=Gennifer Weisenfeld
advertising
aerial bombardment
aesthetics
Age Group_Uncategorized
Age Group_Uncategorized
airplanes
art
Author_Gennifer Weisenfeld
automatic-update
boku
bombs
cartoons
Category1=Non-Fiction
Category=HBJF
Category=HBLW
Category=HBTB
Category=HBW
Category=NHF
Category=NHTB
Category=NHW
civil air defense
consumption
COP=United States
creativity
Delivery_Delivery within 10-20 working days
desire
drills
empire
eq_bestseller
eq_history
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
fashion
film
futuristic weapons
gas masks
gender
government posters
history
humor
japan
Language_English
magazines
newsreels
nonfiction
PA=Available
play
pleasure
politics
postcards
Price_€50 to €100
promotional giveaways
propaganda
PS=Active
social mobilization
softlaunch
visual culture
war
Product details
- ISBN 9780226816449
- Weight: 1474g
- Dimensions: 178 x 254mm
- Publication Date: 28 Mar 2023
- Publisher: The University of Chicago Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Hardback
- Language: English
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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.
