Promiscuous Media: Film and Visual Culture in Imperial Japan, 1926-1945 (Studies of the Weatherhead East Asian Institute, Columbia University)

The early Showa Era (1926-45), which roughly coincides with the Nazi years (1920-45) and Mussolini’s ‘venti anni’ (1921-43), is generally assumed to be a dogmatically and fanatically nationalist period, and due this putative monomania is often seen as a straightforward subject to study. To the contrary, this book reveals a very different picture of the Japanese popular media of this time period. The book examines the ways in which Japanese film and visual culture responded to the issues of the day, producing adaptations of Hollywood genre films; admiring pioneering film theories from Russia and Britain; and examining the techniques of German animation and Disney films. Importantly, the veneration of the emperor’s portrait photograph is a key to understand and contextualize the era’s media-scape. It is crucial to note that domestic film manifested the inherent promiscuity and transnationality of its medium. Japanese films did play a familiar role as propaganda, but because of their heterotopic aspects, the medium also negated, opposed, and undermined the ideologically and nationalistically defined demands of the wartime state. For other visual cultural media, too, careful examination reveals they were a site of contradictions of the dominant totalitarian discourse. (192 words)

In Promiscuous Media, Hikari Hori makes a compelling case that the visual culture of Showa-era Japan articulated urgent issues of modernity rather than serving as a simple expression of nationalism. Hori makes clear that the Japanese cinema of the time was in fact almost wholly built on a foundation of Russian and British film theory as well as American film genres and techniques. Hori provides a range of examples that illustrate how maternal melodrama and animated features, akin to those popularized by Disney, were adopted wholesale by Japanese filmmakers.

Emperor Hirohito's image, Hori argues, was inseparable from the development of mass media; he was the first emperor whose public appearances were covered by media ranging from postcards to radio broadcasts. Worship of the emperor through viewing his image, Hori shows, taught the Japanese people how to look at images and primed their enjoyment of early animation and documentary films alike. Promiscuous Media links the political and the cultural closely in a way that illuminates the nature of twentieth-century Japanese society.

"In 'Promiscuous Media', Hikari Hori makes a compelling case that the visual culture of Showa-era Japan articulated urgent issues of modernity rather than serving as a simple expression of nationalism. Hori makes clear that the Japanese cinema of the time was in fact almost wholly built on a foundation of Russian and British film theory as well as American film genres and techniques. Hori provides a range of examples that illustrate how maternal melodrama and animated features, akin to those popularized by Disney, were adopted wholesale by Japanese filmmakers. Emperor Hirohito's image, Hori argues, was inseparable from the development of mass media; he was the first emperor whose public appearances were covered by media ranging from postcards to radio broadcasts. Worship of the emperor through viewing his image, Hori shows, taught the Japanese people how to look at images and primed their enjoyment of early animation and documentary films alike. 'Promiscuous Media' links the political and the cultural closely in a way that illuminates the nature of twentieth-century Japanese society."--Dust jacket The early Showa Era (1926-45), which roughly coincides with the Nazi years (1920-45) and Mussolini's 'venti anni' (1921-43), is generally assumed to be a dogmatically and fanatically nationalist period, and due this putative monomania is often seen as a straightforward subject to study. To the contrary, this text reveals a very different picture of the Japanese popular media of this time period