Magazines and the Making of Mass Culture in Japan provides a detailed yet approachable analysis of the mechanisms central to the birth of mass culture in Japan by tracing the creation, production, and circulation of two critically important family magazines: Kingu (King) and Ie no hikari (Light of the Home). These magazines served to embed new instruments of mass communication and socialization within Japanese society and created mechanisms to facilitate the dissemination of hegemonic forms of discourse in the first half of the twentieth century. The amazing success of Kingu and Ie no hikari during the 1920s and 1930s not only established and normalized participation in a Japanese mass national audience - a community which had previously not existed - but also facilitated the rise of Japanese mass consumer culture in the postwar years.

Amy Bliss Marshall argues that the postwar mass national consumer in Japan is foreshadowed by the mass national audience created by family magazines of the interwar era. This book narrates the development of such publications, one explicitly capitalist and one outwardly agrarian, based on missions with an overarching desire to create a mass audience. Magazines and the Making of Mass Culture in Japan highlights the importance of the seemingly innocuous acts of mass leisure consumption of magazines and the goods advertised therein, aiding our understanding of the creation and direction of a new form of social participation and understanding - an essential part of not only the culture but also the politics of the interwar period.

About the Author
Amy Bliss Marshall is an assistant professor of History and Asian Studies at Florida International University.

Reviews

"While Marshall keeps her attention tightly focused on just two Japanese magazines, her careful and meticulous archival research, historical contextualization, and textual analysis stand out as helpful models for those studying the role of mass media in the dissemination of ideology in other historical and cultural contexts."

-- Kyoko Omori, Hamilton College * University of Toronto Quarterly: Letters in Canada 2018 *

"This is a carefully researched and engaging work of scholarship that does justice to its subject while illuminating larger issues. It deserves to be read not only by cultural historians of interwar Japan but also by scholars of print culture more broadly."

-- Kerim Yasar, University of Southern California * Journal of Japanese Studies *

"Magazines and the Making of Mass Culture in Japan makes an important contribution to English-language scholarship on Japanese magazines, which has tended to concentrate on publications for women."

-- Jan Bardsley, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill * Monumenta Nipponica *



Book Information
ISBN 9781487502867
Author Amy Bliss Marshall
Format Hardback
Page Count 240
Imprint University of Toronto Press
Publisher University of Toronto Press
Weight(grams) 520g
Dimensions(mm) 235mm * 159mm * 25mm