Propaganda Performed: Kamishibai in Japan’s Fifteen-Year War by Sharalyn Orbaugh (review)

Over the last two decades, the work of literary historians has increasingly turned to the interrogation of "the great unread": those works of a popular register that were once widely read, occupying an important place in how people experienced the world in the past but that now have been all but forgotten.¹ As the work of literary scholars has moved beyond the canon, the study of literary works has also abutted the study of other forms of mass culture, everything from the cinema and television to animation and the graphic novel, and this expanded range of subjects has required a broader set of interdisciplinary tools. And while arguments about media specificity mean that an attention to what makes these forms distinct from one another has been an important part of academic disciplines (as well as interdisciplinarity), it has also become impossible to cordon off these various media from each other as their historical consumption (and quite often production) was never premised on these easy distinctions.

In her Propaganda Performed: Kamishibai in Japan's Fifteen-Year War, Sharalyn Orbaugh uses her training as a literary historian to analyze a genre of performance all but forgotten by the scholarly world in which a narrator performed a story that was illustrated by a series of paper slides. While the focus of Orbaugh's book is the wartime period, this form of narration has important connections back to the use of magic lantern slides in both the Edo and Meiji periods. This book is part of a renewed interest in the larger history of these modes of performance but also an important contribution in suggesting a way of approaching a broader set of issues related to how we can account for storytelling as a part of a history of culture (both literary and performance) over the last two and a half centuries.²

The body of the book provides a historical overview of kamishibai from the 1920s through the end of World War II and an extended analysis of wartime plays that focuses on different thematic elements within the plays themselves. Orbaugh also situates her reading of these plays within a theoretical discussion of propaganda and, in the book's conclusion, begins to think about what might be the neurobiology of propaganda and how this, in turn, can shape our reading of history.

One of the most intriguing problems raised by Propaganda Performed is a question that is at once historical and formal. As Orbaugh points out in her introduction, these works are of a "hybrid nature," sitting at an unusual crossroads of academic disciplines: "part script, part picture, part performance, it falls somewhere between literature, art history, and theater" (p. 2). Situated at a crossroad of disciplines—but not, in an obvious way, belonging to any one—forms like kamishibai have been especially vulnerable to being simply written out of history. Part of what Orbaugh is doing in this book, then, can be thought of as an act of recovery, though, it is important to point out, not recovery for the sake of recovery but always as part of a larger project of understanding how this form can be analyzed as part of a larger framework of wartime propaganda and how propaganda itself is an integral part of the twentieth century.

But formally this subject also poses a challenge: how do we address a subject that likely will be unknown by our audience? Is it enough to analyze these plays at the textual and graphic level without also presenting or representing them to the reader? In this sense, the book is itself an experiment in form, interweaving a historical and critical introduction to the genre with the presentation of seven kamishibai from Japan's 15-year war, the period between 1931 and 1945. Each chapter which treats a historical or generic aspect of the plays is followed by the presentation of a complete play that both reproduces the images used and translates...