Japan's Carnival War: Mass Culture on the Home Front, 1937–1945 by Benjamin Uchiyama (review)

In this bold and innovative study of Japan's wartime popular culture, Ben Uchiyama challenges what he sees as the one-dimensional depiction of Japanese society in that period as cohesive, controlled, and mobilized for total war. During Japan's total war from 1937 to 1945, he argues, mass culture was transformed into a "carnival war" that "entangled" (pp. 5, 17) state mobilization campaigns with media-driven merrymaking, subversion, and mass consumption in the urban playgrounds of the home front. Building upon Yamanouchi Yasushi's "total war system theory" and Mikhail Bakhtin's notion of "carnival," Uchiyama's book analyzes the diverse ways in which carnival war functioned as both a "safety valve" (p. 20) providing for the release of the pent-up energies, frustrations, and desires of Japanese civilians on the home front and an incubator for new ideas and cultural practices stimulated by the violence, deprivation, and repression of total war. Mass culture, as presented here, is chaotic, experimental, multifaceted, and multilayered in its various subcultures and, above all, consumer driven. Uchiyama makes a convincing case for the agency of the Japanese individual in an autonomous wartime space jointly created by both the state and ordinary people as consumers and subjects.

The chief strength of Japan's Carnival War lies in its rich and vivid depiction of the liminal spaces between state control and popular resistance. The study is structured around five cultural icons—the reporter, munitions worker, soldier, movie star, and aviator—that are taken up in successive chapters in roughly chronological order. Challenging the notion of the "Fifteen-Year War," Uchiyama joins recent scholarly trends in arguing that Japan's total war system began with the outbreak of full-scale war against China in 1937 rather than the seizure of Manchuria in 1931.

The first cultural icon is the Japanese war correspondent of the 1937 ShanghaiNanjing battle, who set the irreverent tone for carnival war through sensationalist and shocking depictions of slaughter as sport and eroticized violence by Japanese soldiers. As frontline witnesses of an escalating battle, they were the daring young soldiers of the media war, equipped not with machine guns but with cameras and radio telephones. Uchiyama contrasts the complex, chaotic nature of their reporting, reflected in the playful, ambiguously subversive "celebration of both the brutality and exhilaration of modern warfare," with the systematized efforts of the Home and Education ministries to rally the public around the standard notions of loyalty, patriotism, and "national unity" (p. 26). The latter traditional forms of propaganda and official narrative had been prevalent in the media coverage of the Manchurian invasion. The author suggests a combination of factors that helped produce the new style of media coverage, including escalating violence, heightened regulations, censorship loopholes, and military complicity. However, it is not entirely clear what drove the style and what it signified in the larger scheme of things. Here, one would have liked to obtain a sense of the ideological politics of this reporting. To what degree did Japan's ultraright groups promote notions of "thrills," "speed" (p. 21), and violence in the press? Were there transnational cultural influences from the European avantgarde, such as Futurism or German radical conservatism, that popularized the linking of violence, pleasure, and modern technology?

The munitions worker, soldier, and movie star are examined against the backdrop of the changing circumstances of the war. Their dual identity as "consumer-subject" (p. 14) is skillfully explored in the fluid, ambivalent images of the "carnival king" and "carnival queen." The war increased demand not only for essential military goods but also for nonessential goods reflecting new forms of consumption, such as magazines on film, fashion, and special interests; men's pomade; and commercialized mail-order care packages for soldiers. Increased demand in the munitions industries and labor shortages translated into high-paying jobs for male youth under the conscription age...