Japan, 1972: Visions of Masculinity in an Age of Mass Consumerism presents a fascinating cultural history of Japan's era of high economic growth. This period, which spanned the mid-1950s to the early 1970s, marked a dramatic transformation in everyday life as Japan's consumer culture rapidly expanded alongside the economy. Yoshikuni Igarashi argues that this transformation toward a mass consumer society spurred a crisis of masculinity, as men found themselves occupying a consumer role that was anathema to traditional models of masculinity defined through production. Japan, 1972 brings together analyses of popular media that register these anxieties and attempts to stake out a masculine identity outside of an increasingly totalizing consumerism.

The book's examination of mass consumer society is divided into three sections. The first, “Television,” presents a broad analysis of the historical conditions that led to the rapid growth of Japan's postwar economy beginning in the mid-1950s. The first chapter brings together numerous political and economic transformations of the era that led to wage increases and the creation of a new consumer society. Igarashi connects this to discourse on the emergence of a collective perception of Japan as a uniformly middle-class nation and how consumerism was foundational to this new national identity. The constellation of goods that formed the middle-class ideal consisted of home appliances such as refrigerators, washing machines, and, most importantly, the television.

The second chapter focuses on television's central role as both a commodity attainable because of the spoils of high economic growth and a visual medium that defined the consumer patterns and aesthetics of the high-growth era. Igarashi introduces the concept of “metavision,” a form of reflectivity enabled by televisuality. Like Benedict Anderson, who claimed for print media a role in establishing an imagined community, Igarashi argues that television enabled Japanese subjects to reconceive of their own position as part of a national collectivity. This chapter makes a compelling case for television as the most productive visual medium for interpreting the transformations of Japanese society in this era. Not only does television facilitate a self-reflectivity regarding the individual's position within national community, but it does so as a fixture in domestic space, viewed for significantly more hours and broadcast to a greater diversity of locales than media such as cinema. Precisely because this claim to television's centrality is so convincing, the relative absence of televisual texts in the remainder of the book is notable. More examples from the medium would have better sustained this incisive argument about television's metavisuality.

After the impressively wide-ranging analysis of the first section, Igarashi turns to close readings of comics, nonfiction literature, and films. “Travel,” the second section of the book, consists of three chapters that each focus on a male auteur and works that dramatize the growing impossibility of maintaining a position external to mass consumer society in the late 1960s and early 1970s. The third chapter, for example, analyzes two films by Yamada Yōji that concern the plight of rural laborers from the geographic peripheries of Japan. Where Spring Comes Late (1970) and Home from the Sea (1972) both feature families that must uproot their lives to pursue work elsewhere. Each film stages a confrontation with economic forces and subjects not yet fully assimilated into consumer capitalism, but while the former film resolves itself with the family persisting through agricultural labor on the geographic and social margins, the latter cannot accommodate the possibility of maintaining a position outside the oppressive effects of high economic growth. The geographic scope of each chapter is different—analyzing manga artist Tsuge Yoshiharu's nostalgia-laden rural fantasies and author Kaikō Takeshi's accounts of the Vietnam War—but the chapters follow a similar structure, comparing two texts to track a history of the intensification of mass-mediated consumer society across the late 1960s and early 1970s.

“Violence,” the third section of the book, tracks the conclusion of the vibrant protest culture of 1960s Japan. The first two chapters analyze popular media, including yakuza films and the boxing comic Tomorrow's Jō, that resonated with the participants of the leftist student movement. The protagonists represented an oppositional politics and attempt to counter capitalist villainy through violence, yet Igarashi shows that the instantiations of this media in the early 1970s eventually concede this position. The final chapter departs from the structure of the book thus far, moving away from close readings of violent narratives cherished by young leftists to an analysis of the role of violence in the militant organization the United Red Army (URA), which famously came to an end in a televised hostage situation. This chapter presents one of the most substantial engagements with gender. The violence internal to the URA was structured around punishing the body as an obstacle to revolutionary goals. As the rejection of bourgeois subjectivity meant a rejection of the body as a site of desire, sensation, and consumption, women's association with consumer society meant that femininity was put under particular scrutiny as masculinity underpinned the ideal revolutionary subjectivity. Because this chapter accounts for how masculinity is always shaped in relationship to femininity, it provides a more satisfying analysis of gender than other chapters that conceive of masculinity in relative isolation.

Japan, 1972 makes a compelling case that low- and middle-brow popular culture has been understudied in the history of postwar Japanese media, which has focused on works that possessed an oppositional relationship to the mainstream. Igarashi's selected texts are fascinating examples of popular media but are nonetheless by well-known auteurs. Igarashi's call for the study of popular culture would be well-served by further analysis of texts that are not as determined by discourse on authorship. Japan, 1972 is an invaluable contribution to Japanese media studies and postwar Japanese history that will surely shape a new direction in studies of popular media and the era of high economic growth.