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Japan, 1972 takes an early-seventies year as a vantage point for understanding how Japanese society came to terms with cultural change. Yoshikuni Igarashi examines a broad selection of popular film, television, manga, and other media, exposing the underpinnings of mass culture and investigating deeper anxieties over agency and masculinity.
List of contents
Acknowledgments
List of Abbreviations
Note on Personal Names
Introduction
Part I: Television
1. Reflections on the Consuming Subject: The High-Growth Economy and Emergence of a New National Community
2. Circular Vision: The Metavisuality of Television
Part II: Travel
3. Japan on the Move, a Family on the Run: Yamada Yōji’s Countervision of Contemporary Japan
4. Lost in Transition: Travel, Memory, and Nostalgia in Tsuge Yoshiharu’s Travel Manga
5. The Ethics of Witnessing: Kaikō Takeshi’s Vietnam War
Part III: Violence
6. Heroes in Crisis: The Transformation of Yakuza Film
7. Jō & Hyūma: Kajiwara Ikki’s Manga Heroes and Their Violent Quest for Historical Agency
8. Dead Bodies and Living Guns: The United Red Army and Its Deadly Pursuit of Revolution
Epilogue: Legacies of 1972
Notes
Bibliography
Index
About the author
Yoshikuni Igarashi is professor of history at Vanderbilt University. He is the author of Bodies of Memory: Narratives of War in Postwar Japanese Culture, 1945–1970 (2000) and Homecomings: The Belated Return of Japan’s Lost Soldiers (Columbia, 2016).
Summary
By the early 1970s, Japan had become an affluent consumer society, riding a growing economy to widely shared prosperity. In the aftermath of the fiery political activism of 1968, the country settled down to the realization that consumer culture had taken a firm grip on Japanese society. Japan, 1972 takes an early-seventies year as a vantage point for understanding how Japanese society came to terms with cultural change.
Yoshikuni Igarashi examines a broad selection of popular film, television, manga, and other media in order to analyze the ways Japanese culture grappled with this economic shift. He exposes the political underpinnings of mass culture and investigates deeper anxieties over questions of agency and masculinity. Igarashi underscores how the male-dominated culture industry strove to defend masculine identity by looking for an escape from the high-growth economy. He reads a range of cultural works that reveal perceptions of imperiled Japanese masculinity through depictions of heroes’ doomed struggles against what were seen as the stifling and feminizing effects of consumerism. Ranging from manga travelogues to war stories, yakuza films to New Left radicalism, Japan, 1972 sheds new light on a period of profound socioeconomic change and the counternarratives of masculinity that emerged to manage it.
Additional text
Igarashi pioneers a new paradigm for understanding the shift in cultural consciousness brought on by the spread of television. This book will interest scholars of all levels, from advanced undergraduates to senior scholars interested in modern Japanese history, cultural studies, social movements, media studies, and popular culture.
