Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2019. xii, 280 pp. (B&W photos, illustrations.) US$99.00, cloth. ISBN 978-1-107-18674-3.
In Japan’s Carnival War, Benjamin Uchiyama offers a breath of fresh air to readers all too familiar with the narrative of tightening restrictions and stringent censorship that characterizes most depictions of Japan during the years of total war. In a careful and imaginative reconsideration of daily life and mass culture on the home front, Uchiyama advances two key arguments: first, that modernity did not fizzle into oblivion with the start of total war but instead lingered, reconstituting as subtle and elusive fractures in the shadows of daily life. And second: that the canonical portrayal of state ideological control exerted upon a compliant populace has obscured the realities of that reconstitution. Uchiyama endeavours to fill a space in the scholarship by tracing cultural practice in the context of cultural ideology, and by thoroughly considering the “consumer” half of Miriam Silverberg’s “consumer-subject” conceptualization of Japanese subjects.
Uchiyama develops a framework of “carnival war” to explore daily life in total war Japan as dynamic and improvisational. A carnival “shakes up but does not destroy the official order of things” (17). It suspends norms and levels social hierarchies. This Bakhtin-inspired lens offers a heuristic device for examining the ways that state controls over society fractured the identities, aspirations, and pursuits of the people, forcing them to find other, “carnivalesque” avenues of expression. Such fracturing, argues Uchiyama, could only exist because of (and in concert with) the “total war” conditions that characterize the period captured in this book, 1937 to 1945. During these years, as Japanese citizens anticipated, prepared for, and experienced mass mobilization for the imperial cause, they coped with the state’s dramatic imposition of social levelling by oscillating between two key roles: loyal imperial subject and glamour- (speed-, thrill-) hungry consumer of transnational culture.
Employing the “carnival war” as extended metaphor, the book traces the unevenness of daily life and public imagination through five chapters, each of which dives into a unique “carnival king,” an archetype of mass culture who reigned during the period of total war. In chapter 1, the reporter emerges as a “thrill hunter,” typecast as young, daring, and enthusiastic, dodging overworked censors to convey the twisted excitement of wartime brutality in stories that blur the lines of war and play. Chapter 2 introduces the munitions worker, the slick-haired, well-dressed “industrial warrior” who thumbs his nose at state propaganda of thrift with spending sprees and job switching, who thwarts long-standing social stratification by presenting himself as an “instant gentleman” able to afford the material markers of high society. The soldier, detailed in chapter 3, evolves in the public imagination in three incarnations as the war wears on: first the godlike hero racing to conquer city after city, then the humbler, humanistic Everyman deserving of comforts and heartfelt connection to the homeland, and finally the pitiable returned soldier, full of resentment that the people at home so misunderstand the realities of war despite the excess of war films, books, and newspaper articles besieging them. Chapter 4 introduces not a carnival king but a carnival queen, the movie star who offers tantalizing glimpses of glamour amid widening austerity measures at home. The final chapter sheds light on the youth aviator, a figure who encompasses a thriving cult of popularity surrounding the very idea of the aviator—fan magazines, enthusiastic aviation aficionados, and a charismatic image of the triumphant airman cultivated by a propaganda machine convinced that aerial warfare (and a citizenry well-versed in it) would be the key to winning the war against the Allied Powers.
In developing these carnival kings as archetypes, Uchiyama does indeed provide a convincing characterization of Japan at war as more than the dour faces of compliant citizens. And yet his effort is an overcompensation for that canonical narrative, and therein lie its weaker points. Uchiyama speaks of his carnival kings as “liminal,” but in their liminality lies a power, an ability to shape-shift, a voice of entitlement entirely out of reach for those on the Japanese home front who were truly the liminal ones, such as colonized subjects, the elderly, women who were not movie stars, and those who were foreign or racially ambiguous. Uchiyama’s five chosen kings were all paradigms vitally important to morale, to the war cause—they were not the tenuous, dispensable tens of thousands who would not dare to roll their eyes at policemen, order Western meals at a secret Ginza restaurant, or engage in the “carnivalesque revelry” that Uchiyama describes. Uchiyama takes scholars like Alan Tansman and Thomas Havens to task for their depiction of the humourless mood on the home front, but the more obvious studies with which to engage are those by Sheldon Garon and Yoshimi Yoshiaki, which do focus on the ways people cooperated with and responded to state-sanctioned propaganda; Uchiyama reduces his comments on these works to mere footnotes. In attempting to counterbalance the narrative of social constriction and regulation, Uchiyama is at times dismissive of self-policing, as if all cooperation is a tongue-in-cheek charade.
The bottom line: this is an excellent companion book for those who have read widely on the war and crave a fresh perspective. Uchiyama’s interrogation of gesture and material culture, alongside his well-chosen photographs and illustrations, convey the dynamic topsy-turviness of a splintered mass culture. The pomade of munitions workers, the smile of a movie star, and the fur-lined cap of an aviator swirl around the reader and offer a tantalizing and compelling alternative depiction of life during total war. Uchiyama’s exhaustive archival work also enlightens the reader with thought-provoking details absent from standard histories of Japan at war, such as the crisis of an understaffed press department, the conundrum of failing wage controls for desperately needed workers, the contention surrounding comfort packages, and the cultural icon of the heroic aviator before he became kamikaze. And although Uchiyama only briefly gestures to extended applications of the carnivalesque framework in his conclusion, he does offer food for thought, encouraging us to question how states continue to wage wars with seemingly little restraint from their people.
A. Carly Buxton
Buxton Research, Richmond
University of Chicago, Chicago