Throughout his book, The Thought War, Kushner constantly emphasizes the effectiveness of Japanese wartime propaganda by pointing to the everyday forms that it took, ranging from advertising, publishing, and cinema, to comedy routines. It is this “everydayness” that made propaganda of wartime Japan a “virtually unassailable part of social consciousness that stabilized” not only wartime but also postwar Japanese society (p. 3). Kushner ascribes an almost omni-potent agency to Japan's wartime propaganda in explaining not only why Japan's 15-year-long Asia-Pacific War lasted so long, but also why it helped postwar Japan rebuild so quickly. For Kushner, the goals of prewar, wartime and postwar of Japan's propaganda machine may have been different, but they all show the power of propaganda in uniting and stabilizing Japanese society in the modern period. In fact, it is this omnipresent power that Kushner ascribes to Japanese propaganda that distracts from his careful research of propaganda materials in Japan and China.
Kushner argues that the Japanese state's primary goal, before, during and after the war, was to “transform the Japanese people into active participants in the state's various projects.” (pp. 21–2). Japan's imperial propaganda was not produced by a central agency, like Nazi Germany's Ministry of Propaganda, but created like “a spoked-wheel: the authorities provided the center hub and the population supported the wheel” (p. 16). The goal of wartime propaganda was to promote the image of Japan at home and in Asia as the leader of Asia given its monopoly of modernity. Accordingly, for Kushner, imperial propaganda involved all projects sponsored by the Japanese state between 1930–1945 including planning for the sensational 1940 Tokyo Olympic Games, the 1940 International Exposition, and even the invasion of China and Southeast Asia. In fact, imperial propaganda was so successful in galvanizing wartime Japan that Kushner argues that its success also explains Japan's relatively peaceful and brisk transition to postwar SCAP/ United States Occupation (p. 51).
One of the more successful treatments of imperial propaganda by Kushner is the chapter on Japanese Propaganda in China and the various postwar Occupational strategies. His detailed research on propaganda materials by the KMT and the CCP in China reveal how the basic orientation of the Chinese towards the Japanese was fundamentally different than that of the Americans or Allies in their production of effective propaganda that was culturally meaningful to the Japanese.
The weakest aspect of Kushner's argument, however, is revealed in “Chapter Two: Defining the Limits of Society.” By focusing on acceptable behavior in Japan in terms of gender relations, Kushner misses an opportunity to link his argument regarding imperial propaganda, not only in this chapter but also throughout, to larger ideological issues of wartime Japan. The book could have benefited from a larger conceptual framework by which to organize the meticulously collected ephemera on wartime propaganda that Kushner analyzed, and a connection to the wartime debates on “Overcoming Modernity” may have provided Kushner with such a critical synthesis. According to recent scholarship on Japan's discursive production of modernity, such as the seminal work by H.D. Harootunian, the modern is not just the outward phenomenon of technology as such, but also the inner world of thought. As such, Kushner's argument centers on the presentation of Japan as a modern nation, but does not identify how the wartime arguments on modernity were framed as uniquely Japanese by various Japanese ideologues. The wartime discourses on Japan's unique modernity and its ideological antecedents could have refined Kushner's arguments as to the success of trans-war propaganda in Japan. Kushner insists that Japanese wartime propaganda was especially resilient because of its “multiple centers of production” with multiple messages that centered not on emperor worship as much as the image of Japan as modern (p. 185). If he had tied propaganda to the larger discourses on modernity, Kushner would have been able to show that it wasn't propaganda (the medium) and/or the agents of propaganda (the messengers), but the ideology of Japan as unique (the message) that prevailed in the trans-war production of Japanese propaganda of which the famed nihonjinron (theories of Japanese-ness) and gomanizumu (Arrogance-ism) discourses are key legacies.
Nonetheless, Kushner's detailed account of Japanese wartime propaganda addresses the prosaic and popular appeal of Japan's wartime regime. Kushner's work is extremely beneficial to scholars and the general populace interested in examining the culpability of the masses in providing a base of popular support to the Japanese imperial regime. His work also nicely complements recent western scholarship on popular participation in the production of Japanese wartime fascism and national mobilization.
The controversial Fall 2010 exhibit in Berlin, Germany on Hitler also examined the popular support given to Hitler and the Nazi Regime by ordinary Germans, and this exhibit may only have been possible decades after the end of the Cold War and economic success of a reunified Germany in the European Union. One may hope that Japan will be able to critically examine its wartime responsibility by acknowledging that its wartime culpability extended beyond those at the Tokyo War Crimes Tribunal to civilian Japanese. The various agencies and formats of Japanese imperial propaganda reveal the extent to which the collusion between civilians, bureaucrats and military leaders collectively produced “democratic fascism” (p. 26). As postwar Japan continues to struggle in creating a coherent narrative about its moral and political responsibility of its wartime actions, Kushner's book just may contribute to providing the historical datum necessary to foment the beginning of the Japanese state's moral acceptance of its wartime actions in the Asian region.
