Columbia University Press
Japan, 1972: Visions of Masculinity in an Age of Mass Consumerism
Key Metrics
- Yoshikuni Igarashi
- Columbia University Press
- Hardcover
- 9780231195546
- 9 X 6 X 1 inches
- 1.62 pounds
- History > Asia - Japan
- English
Secure TransactionBook Description
Yoshikuni Igarashi examines a broad selection of popular film, television, manga, and other media in order to analyze the ways Japanese culture grappled with this economic shift. He exposes the political underpinnings of mass culture and investigates deeper anxieties over questions of agency and masculinity. Igarashi underscores how the male-dominated culture industry strove to defend masculine identity by looking for an escape from the high-growth economy. He reads a range of cultural works that reveal perceptions of imperiled Japanese masculinity through depictions of heroes' doomed struggles against what were seen as the stifling and feminizing effects of consumerism. Ranging from manga travelogues to war stories, yakuza films to New Left radicalism, Japan, 1972 sheds new light on a period of profound socioeconomic change and the counternarratives of masculinity that emerged to manage it.
Author Bio
Yoshikuni Igarashi’s research focuses on Japanese cultural history during the interwar and post-World War II periods. His first book, Bodies of Memory: Narratives of War in Postwar Japanese Culture, 1945-1970 (Princeton UP, 2000), reads the absent presence of war memories in post-WWII Japan.
By examining the tension between the repression and the expression of the trauma of the war, it contemplates the impact of the war and defeat on postwar Japanese society. Igarashi’s second book, Homecomings: The Belated Return of Japan’s Lost Soldiers (Columbia UP, 2016) discusses the former soldiers who belatedly returned to postwar Japan after the end of the Asia Pacific War.
It pays particular attention to Japanese POWs detained in Siberian labor camps and soldiers who survived in the jungles of the South Pacific for more than a quarter century. Igarashi’s third book, Japan circa 1972: Masculinity in the Age of Mass Consumption and Metavisuality (Columbia University Press, forthcoming) focuses the radical economic, social, and cultural transformation of Japanese society in the late 1960s and early 1970s, stemming from the development of mass consumer society, and analyzes Japanese society’s anxiety-ridden and often violent responses to that transformation.
Source: Vanderbilt University
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