Kamishibai and the Art of the Interval

The Cartesian search for truth . . . is posed as the problem of relating the external world to the interiority of a pure mind divested of all emotion, sensuality and corporeality.

—Scott McQuire, Visions of Modernity

The system of perspective is not just a form of representation, not just a representational device, but is rather a representational device that also possesses a thematic content. . . . It is an expression of a desire to order the world in a certain way: to make incoherence coherent, objectify subjective points.

—Michael Ann holly, Past Looking: Historical Imagination and the Rhetoric of the Image

Kamishibai is a performance art that was popular in Japan from the late 1920s to the 1960s and today lives on in nostalgia venues such as the International Manga Museum in Kyoto and the Shitamachi Museum in Tokyo. Most simply, a kamishibai play is a set of pictures used by a performer to tell a story to an audience, usually of children aged four to twelve. During Japan’s Fifteen Year War (1931–1945), however, kamishibai was a crucial medium for the dissemination of propaganda to a variety of audiences, adults as well as children.¹ The questions driving this study are: How did the characteristics of kamishibai function in the context of prowar, imperialist propaganda to make that propaganda effective (or not)? And do the Cartesian or anti-Cartesian elements of kamishibai plays have any influence on the propaganda effect?

For my purposes here Cartesianism boils down to three major elements: (1) the split between the mind and body, with the mind considered primary; (2) rationalism—a belief in science as the standard for truth; and (3) a conceptualization of the human self as stable and enclosed, separate from the world, and able to observe and judge the world in a detached, objective, rational manner.² As in the second epigraph above, I take Cartesian perspectivalism in the visual aspects of kamishibai—the illustrations—as more than simply a neutral choice of representational style: it indicates a desire to “order the [kamishibai] world in a certain way” that could convince viewers to understand and respond to their own world in similar terms. When considering the effectiveness of any tool of propaganda, the question arises: what kind of “subject” is being interpellated by a particular propaganda text? Here I will specifically consider the ways that Cartesian perspectivalism—in both a visual-culture and phenomenological sense—was used in propaganda kamishibai to construct particular kinds of subjects, and also the ways that certain characteristics of the medium seem to resist aspects of Cartesianism.

Kamishibai may be best known today as one of the direct precursors of postwar manga and anime,³ but over its forty-year heyday it enjoyed enormous popularity, at times eclipsing rival entertainment media for children such as movies or radio (in the 1930s and early 1940s) and manga (in the 1950s). It was only the rise of television—tellingly known as denki kamishibai (electric kamishibai) in its early years—that finally brought about its demise.

Looking backward, kamishibai’s roots clearly lie in a host of what J. L. Anderson calls “commingled media” in Japan—etoki from the Heian period; nozoki karakuri, magic lanterns, and utsushie from the Edo period—as well as being influenced by Meiji-period performance forms such as rakugo and yose.⁴ Rather than tracing kamishibai’s debt to these older forms, however, in this project I will concentrate on its relationship with the cinema, still developing in the late 1920s and early 1930s when kamishibai was born. In fact, it was cinema’s transition from silent films to the talkies that helped ensure kamishibai’s success, as we shall see.⁵

One characteristic to be noted immediately, however, is the intensely commingled nature of kamishibai, even when compared to other Japanese commingled media: kamishibai consisted in every context and every time period of three integral parts: pictures, story (sometimes in the form of a printed script), and performance.

In the next section we turn to the structure and techniques of kamishibai, which comes in two forms: gaitō (street-corner...