Japan's Carnival War excels because author Benjamin Uchiyama skillfully musters evidence from diverse wartime sources and vividly illustrates cultural developments on the Japanese home front that demonstrated an evolving popular engagement with war. The book's organization and sentence-level composition are dynamic, and its central argument about “carnival war” leads the reader to rethink his or her views about wartime Japanese society.
Uchiyama uses the concept of a carnival to structure a novel perspective on wartime Japan. He argues that historians of multiple generations have been too quick to depict the Japanese home front as a constrained environment, namely, one in which the state and grassroots actors worked together to create a society tamed by regulations, restraint, and all-in sacrifices. Instead, in his view commonplace activities such as reporting the news, working in factories, supporting servicemen, and even idolizing celebrities must also be recognized as manifestations of cultural inversion that nonetheless advanced rather than undermined Japan's war effort. In wartime Japan, “cultural constructs oscillated between irreverent media celebrations of the grotesque and nonsensical on the one hand and a state-regimented, highly disciplined mode of life on the other” (p. 254). Commercial mass media venues played a major cultural role by popularizing five types of “media-constructed carnival kings” (p. 20). Each of these groups occupies one of the book's five main chapters, which are arranged in such a way that Uchiyama shepherds the reader from the start of the war to its end. Under his direction, the rich cultural character of the home front emerges via “stages” of war experience (p. 13), in contrast to the static, undifferentiated cultural terrain often found in depictions of wartime Japan.
Chapter 1 examines how war reporters sought to satisfy readers’ desires for “thrills” and “speed” within battle reportage while abiding by military and press regulations that governed the nature and contents of such reporting. Uchiyama focuses on the first year of the war and how war reporters “knit together … a potent combination of war and pleasure for a home front audience” (p. 62). Reporters were admonished by official voices not to over-sensationalize the fighting, even though their treatments drummed up popular support for the war.
In chapter 2, Uchiyama shifts focus from men enabling nationalism to men behaving badly and threatening national gains. Munitions workers, who became vital to war production after 1938, were prized laborers but also drew criticism for “scorning state-promoted values of thrift and self-discipline” (p. 69). Thanks to their salaries, munitions workers partook in binge consumption and embraced sumptuary trends like “hair greasy from pomade” (p. 78) that drew the consternation of a public increasingly exhorted to embrace thrift. Uchiyama casts the munitions worker as a “trickster-like figure” (p. 67) who used his position for cultural and economic gain but did not seek to undermine the system within which he operated.
In chapter 3, Uchiyama explores how the returned soldier found himself in a cultural bind prior to Pearl Harbor: he was both hero and everyman, and had to balance his expectations of demobilization with the actualities of veteran status. Voices in the mass media, ranging from established writers like Hino Ashihei to returned soldiers themselves, gave their two cents about how these men ought to be treated. This is a thoughtful examination of how soldiers straddled two warfronts, and Uchiyama makes many fine observations. However, he needs to establish disabled veterans (shōi gunjin) as a distinct subset of returned soldiers (kikanhei); at times he over-extends measures for disabled veterans when discussing demobilized soldiers-at-large (see his points about the “Five Principles for Disabled Servicemen” on p. 151). Still, Uchiyama's general treatment of anxieties surrounding returned soldiers illustrates the potentially disruptive power of combat veterans as persons with the cultural authority to deflate the jingoism of war.
Women figure prominently in chapter 4, which highlights the female movie star, called an “ideological contortionist” (p. 162) by Uchiyama. Here, he spends much time discussing the wartime film industry, in particular the joint effort by movie studios and government ministries to isolate star quality and harness it for patriotic purposes.
Lastly, in chapter 5, Uchiyama presents youth aviators as the embodied confluence of imperial enthusiasm, young fandom, technological wonder, and militaristic zeal. He links prewar enthusiasm for aviation to the grim fascination with the kamikaze that emerged within late wartime mass media.
I encourage readers of all sorts to engage with Japan's Carnival War, despite its hefty cover price. (I would readily assign it for my undergraduate course on wartime Japanese society were it not for the book's cost.) Although there are a few moments when specialist readers may find fault with its supporting factual points, the sum of the book's creative argument, fine use of historical sources, and canny focus on specific case studies within an ever-changing home front overcomes such caviling. Japan's Carnival War is innovative scholarship that features skillful archival research.
This review relates the perspectives of the author and should not be construed to represent views held by the U.S. Department of Defense, the U.S. Navy, or their constituent institutions.
