Gas Mask Nation Visualizing Civil Air Defense In Wartime Japan Gennifer Weisenfeld by Gennifer Weisenfeld 9780226816456, 0226816451 instant download after payment.

A fascinating look at the anxious pleasures of Japanese visual culture during World War II.

Airplanes, gas masks, & bombs were common images in wartime Japan. Yet amid these emblems of anxiety, tasty caramels were offered to children with paper gas masks as promotional giveaways, & magazines featured everything from attractive models in the latest civil defense fashion to futuristic weapons.

Gas Mask Nation explores the multilayered construction of an anxious yet perversely pleasurable visual culture of Japanese civil air defense—or bōkū—through a diverse range of artworks, photographs, films & newsreels, magazine illustrations, postcards, cartoons, advertising, fashion, everyday goods, government posters, & state propaganda. Gennifer Weisenfeld reveals the immersive aspects of this culture, in which Japan’s imperial subjects were mobilized to regularly perform highly orchestrated civil air defense drills throughout the country.

The war years in Japan are often portrayed as a landscape of privation & suppression under the censorship of the war machine. But alongside the horrors, pleasure, desire, wonder, creativity, & humor were all still abundantly present in a period before air raids went from being a fearful specter to a deadly reality.

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Gennifer Weisenfeld is Walter H. Annenberg Distinguished Professor of Art & Art History at Duke Univ. Her field of research is modern & contemporary Japanese art history, design, & visual culture. Her first book, Mavo: Japanese Artists & the Avant-Garde, 1905–1931 (UC Press, 2002) addresses the relationship between high art & mass culture in the aesthetic politics of the avant-garde in 1920s Japan. Her 2nd book, Imaging Disaster: Tokyo & the Visual Culture of Japan’s Great Earthquake of 1923 (UC Press, 2012; Japanese edition Seidosha, 2014) examines how visual culture has mediated the historical understanding of Japan’s worst national disasters…