Book Review: Japan's Carnival War: Mass Culture on the Home Front, 1937–1945 by Benjamin Uchiyama, Cambridge University Press, 2019

The iconography associated with most historical and cultural scholarship on war is that of deprivation. In the case of Japan, the Asia Pacific war years of the 1930s and 1940s are inextricably central to most accounts of its wartime cultural history. The late 1930s saw the rise of increased state activity with regard to national mobilization, control and censorship intended to boost ideologies of national sacrifice as the war dragged on into the next decade. Historical studies tend to lean into narratives of passive consumption of mass culture produced by the state towards the construction of a public sphere that aligned with the national interests of Japan at war. However, such narratives while successful at highlighting the influence of the ideological apparatuses employed by the Japanese wartime state, fail to account for the creative outlets that attest to and support studies on the role of popular agency and participation in wartime Japan. Scholarship fixated on state-sponsored social levelling and harmonization ignores the “social fractures and social ‘unevenness’ brought on by such levelling” (Uchiyama 2019, p.12).......