Japan's Total Empire. Louise Young
of the village community, our heroine labors valiantly alone, solitary martyr to the national cause. Such narratives were entirely self-referential, constructing patriotic sacrifice as an expression of individual will rather than group spirit.
Moreover, in a reversal of the logic of the family-state, the nation was not represented as a metaphorical family, but rather the family as a metaphorical nation. Service to the nation was carried out within the family unit. In the farm wife's story, acts of patriotic sacrifice are inspired by the example of other family members. When her second son returned from a tour of duty in Manchuria on the eve of the Manchurian Incident, he too fell ill. Learning from his sickbed of the outbreak of war between Japan and China, he fretted that he could not be there “fighting the bandits and giving his life for his country.” Hearing this noble sentiment, his mother was moved to tears and could not rest until she made a gesture for the soldiers in Manchuria. Thereupon she took the entire family savings of twenty yen and donated it to the war cause. Significantly, such gestures did not aim to help one another but rather to make a grander display of patriotism—a game of suicidal one-upmanship in which each family member strove to outdo the other, competing for the greatest gesture of sacrifice.
By exaggerating personal demonstrations of patriotic sacrifice, such bidan promoted a peculiar vision of home-front support. Instead of exhorting people to work harder in order to increase domestic production in a time of crisis, the farm wife's story depicts the gradual evisceration of the household, leaving it a crippled, unproductive shell. After she disposed of the family savings, the farm wife's second son's condition worsened. On his death bed he took his sister's hand and apologized for being a worry to his family. “If only I could have died in Manchuria like my friend Okamoto,” he lamented. Conveying his dying wish that his sister “do something for the nation” in his place, the boy's final words were: “Goodbye Manchurian Garrison Army banzai!” In keeping with her brother's deathbed wish, the sister volunteered her services as a nurse at the front. This left the farm wife and her aged mother alone to support two invalids. The story concluded with the farm wife making her daily pilgrimage to the local shrine to pray for the safety of the imperial army. If every Japanese farm family followed this prescription for patriotic action, the nation would starve. Rather than promoting some vision of the nobility of tilling the soil and keeping the home hearths burning, this story is about a farm wife who allows her family farm to run to ruin while she and her family, one by one, succumb to the allure of Manchuria. All the glory is vested in Manchuria, patriotism projected onto the empire. At the end of the story, the farm wife ritually renews her gesture of patriotic sacrifice through prayer, still lost in a Manchurian dream.
Spinning tall tales of self-sacrifice, such home-front bidan created the domestic female version of battlefield heroes like Major Koga. In the contest to see who was the biggest martyr, pathos outshone pathos, tragedy overshadowed tragedy, and sacrifice outdid sacrifice. In this way the Manchurian Incident bidan boom promoted a new competitive-style patriotism that revived the virtue of sacrifice by making it a route to personal glory and success.
The bidan boom was but one symptom of the imperial jingoism that helped transform both the form and content of Japanese popular culture in the early 1930s. Beginning with the news media, a commercialized mass-culture industry took the opportunity—as it had in the past—to capitalize on the war in the interests of increasing circulation. In the process of using the war fever to expand the market for cultural manufactures, the mass media grew more technologically sophisticated and achieved a more thorough penetration of the national market. Such developments in the technologies and institutions of the culture industry helped contribute to the difference in scale between the war fever of 1931–1933 and the Sino-Japanese and Russo-Japanese war fevers of an earlier age. In the intervening years between Japan's initial wars of empire and the Manchurian campaigns, the media had become progressively more mass. With mechanization and the shift toward mass production in newspaper, book, and magazine publishing, as well as the emergence of new media like radio, cinema, and records, the vehicles of imperial propaganda became infinitely more sophisticated. In this sense, massification gave to the media the power to constitute, to unify, and to mold a national opinion on imperialism.
The military imperialism initiated on September 18, 1931, spawned a new set of images of the Manchurian empire, and in the process helped transform the content of Japanese popular culture. Part reinvention and part new construction, the popular catchphrases on why Japan must fight became part of the active vocabulary of empire building. Although the ceasefire of May 1933 was followed by anti-insurgency military operations in Manchuria, mass media production of imperial propaganda never again achieved the intensity of those early years. This high-growth phase of cultural production created the first building blocks of the cultural edifice of Manchukuo, in which people at home learned to live and breathe their new empire. Appealing to people through narratives of familial obligation, xenophobia, consumerism, and competition, the first imagining of Manchukuo helped reshape the cultural practices of Taish
As this chapter has shown, the mass media played a central role in stimulating the outbreak of the Manchurian Incident war fever and mobilizing support for the new military imperialism. But powerful as it was, the media did not single-handedly bring about the shift away from a foreign policy supporting cooperation with Europe and the United States, disarmament, and economic imperialism in China. Reinforcing the transforming impact of the mass media were the activities of a host of other agents of empire, for military expansion in Manchuria also suited the interests of aspirants to political power and social status. It was their activities, which are the subject of the next chapter, that made Manchukuo into the policy of the government and the empire of the masses.
1. John M. MacKenzie, Propaganda and Empire: The Manipulation of British Public Opinion, 1880–1960 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1984). On American imperialism and popular culture, see Richard Slotkin, The Fatal Environment: The Myth of the Frontier in the Age of Industrialization, 1800–1890 (New York: Atheneum, 1985), and Slotkin, Gunfighter Nation; and on France, see William H. Schneider, An Empire for the Masses: The French Popular Image of Africa, 1870–1900 (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1982).
2. For newspaper readership and the expansion of the publishing market geographically and sociologically, see Carol Gluck, Japan's Modern Myths: Ideology in the Late Meiji Period (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985), pp. 169–174, 232–233.
3. The same survey shows much lower literacy rates for women: 63 percent of single women and 55 percent of women supporting households could not read. The data was originally reported in T
4. The original survey was conducted by Naimusho eiseikyoku, Tky-shi Kybashi-ku Tsukishima ni okeru jitchi chsa hkoku (1921). Cited in Yamamoto Taketoshi, p. 225.
5. The survey of Tokyo working women was carried out by the Tokyo metropolitan government in 1924; nine hundred women were interviewed. The survey of miners was conducted at the Ashio copper mine in 1919; 1,200 households were interviewed. The farm village survey included forty-eight households and was carried out in 1934 by the Imperial Agricultural Association (Teikoku nokai). Since the village was located on the outskirts of Tokyo, subscriber rates were probably higher than the national average. The three surveys are discussed in Yamamoto Taketoshi, pp. 229–240.
6. Gluck, Japan's Modern Myths, p. 171.
7. Yamamoto Taketoshi, p. 412.
8. Ibid., p. 273.
9. Minami Hiroshi and Shakai shinri kenky
