Red Guards and Salarymen
The Chinese Cultural Revolution and Comic Satire in 1960s Japan
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 3656397 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Erik Esselstrom (University of Vermont, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2015 |
| Volume | 74 |
| Issue | 4 |
| Pages | 953-976 |
| Publication date | 2015-11-01 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | The Journal of Asian Studies (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0021-9118 • E-ISSN: 1752-0401 |
| Publisher | Duke University Press (PUBLISHER • US) |
| DOI | 10.1017/s0021911815001096 |
| OpenAlex | W2264103099 |
| Language | EN |
| References cited | 23 |
This article explores how Japanese comic artists represented the early years of the Chinese Cultural Revolution in popular print culture, especially lowbrow comic magazines. It posits that Japanese cartoonists in their role as both purveyors of everyday humor and keenly observant social commentators employed the imagery and rhetoric of the Red Guard movement to critique the conservative social and economic order of Japanese corporate culture during the late 1960s era of high-speed growth; moreover, it contends that there was a surprisingly receptive audience for such criticism among the rank-and-file "salarymen" of the urban Japanese middle class. Finally, the precisely informed humor found in these comics also suggests that their target audience possessed detailed familiarity with contemporary events on the continent and interpreted those events through a deeply embedded cultural framework of ambivalence concerning modern Chinese society
Aesthetics · Ambivalence · Art · China · Comics · Criticism · Cultural revolution · Guard (computer science) · Literature · Media studies · Political science · Popular culture · Rhetoric · Sociology · Asian Culture and Media Studies · History · Hong Kong and Taiwan Politics · Japanese History and Culture · Law · Psychology · Social Psychology
The enigma of Japanese power
Foreign Front
Haiboku o dakishimete
Third World Maoism
May '68 and Its Afterlives
Mao's Little Red Book
Making Japanese Citizens
Maiden Voyage
The Literature of Travel in the Japanese Rediscovery of China, 1862-1945
Fire Across the Sea
Organizing the Spontaneous
Minamata
Carnival of the Aliens. Korean Embassies in Edo-Period Art and Popular Culture
The Literature of Travel in the Japanese Rediscovery of China, 1862-1945
AHR Forum Japan 1968
Shaking Up Japan
Luxury is the Enemy
China in the Japanese Radical Gaze, 1945-1955
Drawing Sexual Violence in Wartime China
Critical Perspectives on Mao Zedong's Thought
Embracing Defeat
| Citation velocity | historical |
|---|---|
| Highly cited | No |