Laughter as Matériel: The Mobilization of Comedy in Japan's Fifteen-Year War

Abstract

formation and, on the home front, of young, determined women in cotton trousers hoisting bamboo spears, ready for the invasion of the home islands. Historians present the war as a monolith of government suppression; an evil conspiracy among military men, who deny the people freedom and force them into battle against Western armies they know to be militarily superior.1 Post-war Japanese intellectuals speaking on behalf of the wartime literati represented the period as anything but light-hearted. In his wartime diary, Nagai Kafu complains that the war hampered access to entertainment. In an essay written soon after the surrender, the renowned folklorist Yanagida Kunio disparages the products of Japan's wartime entertainment industry. And the journalist Kiyosawa Kiyoshi's diary is notable for its title, A Diary of Darkness; many Japanese commonly refer to the period as the 'dark valley'.2 Western commentators on wartime Japanese culture held similar views. The US research teams set up to study the Japanese psyche for propaganda purposes concluded that most Japanese were humourless - they did not readily laugh - and that the lack of a sense of humour, which was attributed to the war, would increase the effectiveness of US propaganda.3

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 12 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.