Japan's Total Empire. Louise Young
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The Tokyo Metropolitan Library Readership Survey, used by all the publishers’ yearbooks as the benchmark for popular tastes, gives an idea of what sort of merchandise was moving off the shelves. Among the most read books of 1932, for example, were Understanding New Weapons, The Army Reader, and The Navy Reader; the celebrated account of a female journalist at the front, Along with the Army in Male Attire; and the immensely popular story of the three soldiers who exploded themselves in the line of duty, The Unswervingly Loyal Three Human Bombs (plus The Heroic Five Human Bullets). In the field of juvenile literature, children's favorites of 1932 and 1933 included Our Army, Our Navy, Our Airforce, and Our Army and Navy—National Defense Reader for Young People; a biography of the Russo-Japanese War hero Admiral Nogi; Battleship Stories for Children and War Stories for Children; A Young Person's Guide to the Airforce and Air Battles; a book on Inspirational Tales of Patriotism for Little Boys and Girls; and the children's version of The Three Human Bombs.44
Just as booksellers promoted militarism for profit, popular magazines opened their pages to army spokesmen in order to capitalize on the Manchurian fever. Special issues brought out in 1932 and 1933 featured a spate of articles on “the Manchurian problem” from a pro-military perspective. Rekishi koron (History Forum) published a “Manchuria-Mongolia” issue in April 1933, with articles tracing the “special relationship” between Japan and Manchuria back to premodern times. In addition to a grisly column of hearsay from the front, “Tiny Tales of the Manchurian War,” Bungei shunj (Literary Chronicle) ran a special Manchurian section from March through May of 1932.45 Even such unlikely sources as the pulp magazine Hanzai kagaku (Criminal Science) found a way to bring army experts on board. In an issue devoted to “The Manchurian-Mongolian Lifeline,” editors commissioned an army general to write a feature on “The Judicial System and Punishment in Manchuria”46
The publishing giant K
Suddenly, the languorous jazz rhythms which had been the rage only weeks before were replaced by a boom in gunka (war songs). Sino-Japanese and Russo-Japanese war period classics came back into vogue; as the Asahi Yearbook explained, “the current hostilities have given the population a new appreciation of old favorites.”50 Record companies brought out a string of war songs including “Arise Countrymen” (Okiteyo kokumin), “Ah, Our Manchuria!” (Aa waga Mansh
The furor on screen and stage was, if possible, even more intense. For the first six months of 1932 theaters and moviehouses filled their bills with such productions as The Glittering National Flag, The First Step into Feng-tian—South Manchuria Glitters under the Rising Sun, The Four Heroic Human Pillars, and The Gallant Bugler.52 Movie companies encouraged conscripts to take a positive view of their call-up in the films The Mobilization Order, Sentar Goes to the Front, and Go to the Front, Boys! As Screen and Stage wrote of Go to the Front, Boys: “Our home villages are facing an unprecedented crop failure. But this is nothing to the crisis facing the Japanese empire…. In this spirit, this movie follows the story of infantry private Aoki Sentaro, who goes to the front with a brave heart, happy to die for his country.”53
The crisis in the empire, the heroism of battle, and the glory of sacrifice were the messages of the Manchurian Incident theme products that poured forth from Japan's culture industries, dominating the mass media in 1931 and 1932. These messages dovetailed beautifully, of course, with what the army wanted its public to hear about the Manchurian Incident. But the culture industries needed no arm twisting to advertise the army's cause: they became unofficial propagandists because crude militarism was all the crack. Audiences flocked to watch the dramas of death in battle; consumers bought up the magazines commemorating the glories of the empire. “Empire” was a fad, and such cultural fads were the rice bowl of the mass media.
Critical to the effectiveness of this informal propaganda was the popular conviction that what audiences were viewing was live history. Songwriters and dramatists lifted their material straight from the pages of the newspaper, moving from fact to fiction without skipping a beat. In dramatizing history as it unfolded, they shaded the line between news and entertainment and presented audiences with a pseudohistorical version of the events on the continent. The production of what today might be labeled “infotainment” was, at the time, another conspicuous feature of imperial jingoism. Rendering the brutality of war in the comforting conventions of melodrama and popular song, the entertainment industry obscured the realities of military aggression even as it purported to be informing audiences about the national crisis.
Newsreel screenings sponsored by the big dailies had already begun the process of transforming history into an entertaining public spectacle. Widespread shooting on location by movie companies further blurred the line between fact and fiction. All the film studios sent actors and technicians to do double duty in Manchuria, entertaining the troops one day and shooting film the next. Companies used on-location shots as a selling point in films like Ah! The Thirty-eight Heroes of Nanling, shot in Fengtian and Changchun. T