Gas Mask Nation: Visualizing Civil Air Defense in Wartime Japan

Weisenfeld, Professor Gennifer

ISBN 10: 0226816443 / ISBN 13: 9780226816449

Published by University of Chicago Press, 2023

About this Item

400pp. Colour and b&w illustrations.

Seller Inventory # 29805

Bibliographic Details

• Title: Gas Mask Nation: Visualizing Civil Air Defense in Wartime Japan
• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Publication Date: 2023
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0226816443
• ISBN 13: 9780226816449
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition: 1st Edition
• Condition: New
• Dust Jacket Condition: New
• Seller catalogs:
  • Contemporary Art,, Design and Lifestyle

About this title

Synopsis

A fascinating look at the anxious pleasures of Japanese visual culture during World War II.
 
Airplanes, gas masks, and 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, and 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 and newsreels, magazine illustrations, postcards, cartoons, advertising, fashion, everyday goods, government posters, and 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 and suppression under the censorship of the war machine. But alongside the horrors, pleasure, desire, wonder, creativity, and humor were all still abundantly present in a period before air raids went from being a fearful specter to a deadly reality.
 

About the Author

Gennifer Weisenfeld is the Walter H. Annenberg Distinguished Professor of Art, Art History, and Visual Studies at Duke University. She is the author of Gas Mask Nation: Visualizing Civil Air Defense in Wartime Japan, Mavo: Japanese Artists and the Avant-Garde, 1905-1931, and Imaging Disaster: Tokyo and the Visual Culture of Japan’s Great Earthquake of 1923 and is a core contributing author on MIT’s award-winning website Visualizing Cultures.