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Magazines and the Making of Mass Culture in Japan provides a detailed yet approachable analysis of the mechanisms central to the birth of mass culture in Japan by tracing the creation, production, and circulation of two critically important family magazines:
Kingu (King) and
Ie no hikari (Light of the Home). These magazines served to embed new instruments of mass communication and socialization within Japanese society and created mechanisms to facilitate the dissemination of hegemonic forms of discourse in the first half of the twentieth century. The amazing success of
Kingu and
Ie no hikari during the 1920s and 1930s
not only
established and normalized participation in a Japanese mass national audience – a community which had previously not existed – but also facilitated the rise of Japanese mass consumer culture in the postwar years.
Amy Bliss Marshall argues that the postwar mass national
consumer in Japan is foreshadowed by the mass national
audience created by family magazines of the interwar era. This book narrates the development of such publications, one explicitly capitalist and one outwardly agrarian, based on missions with an overarching desire to create a mass audience.
Magazines and the Making of Mass Culture in Japan highlights the importance of the seemingly innocuous acts of mass leisure consumption of magazines and the goods advertised therein, aiding our understanding of the creation and direction of a new form of social participation and understanding – an essential part of not only the culture but also the politics of the interwar period.
List of contents
1. The Medium, the Message & the Masses: Understanding Japanese Family Magazines
2. The Splendid Power of Being in Perfect Harmony: How Two Publishers Made a Mass Japanese Audience
3. "We Came, We Saw, We Astonished:" How a Japanese Mass Was Won
4. Reading Together: How the Audience Participated
5. Learning to Consume: How Magazines Politicized Advertising
About the author
By Amy Bliss Marshall
Summary
Magazines & the Making of Mass Culture in Japan is a cultural history explaining the birth and early mechanisms of mass culture in 20th Century Japan through an examination of two family magazines, Kingu (King) and Ie no hikari (Light of the Home).
