B enjamin U chiyama . Japan’s Carnival War

If one were to go to open-stack archives in Japan or its former colonies, he or she would always encounter a few booklets or magazine issues that appear extremely out of place sitting amid serious-looking, monotonous wartime publications: vulgar and gossipy, sensual and sensational, products for bad-taste consumerism if judged crudely. In Japan's Carnival War: Mass Culture on the Home Front, 1937–1945, Benjamin Uchiyama found a profound meaning in this genre, which previously slipped out of scholarly attention, and provided us with a new concept to explain wartime culture: carnival war. The idea of “carnival war” helps Uchiyama to capture rapidly changing cultural tides that produced “conflicting messages over wartime solemnity versus silliness and mass sacrifice versus mass desire” (5). The image of carnival, “a transient moment when the normal rules of the community are suspended, and existing hierarchies are leveled” (16), is useful in visualizing the murky power...

Aesthetics · Archaeology · Art · Consumerism · Front (military) · Geography · Literature · Mainstream · Mass culture · Meaning (existential) · Media studies · Political science · Power (physics) · Sacrifice · Sociology · Taste · Anthropology · Chinese history and philosophy · Historical Studies and Socio-cultural Analysis · History · Japanese History and Culture · Law · Philosophy · Psychology