Japanese Propaganda

His research is the first of its kind to treat propaganda as a profession in wartime Japan.The Thought War will be important for not only students of Japanese history and culture but also those interested in comparative studies of World War II and the increasingly popular propaganda studies of the United States, Nazi Germany, Stalin's Russia, and the United Kingdom."--BOOK JACKET.

"In the 1930s and '40s, Japanese political architects of the Manchukuo project in occupied northeast China realized the importance of using various cultural media to promote a modernization program in the region, as well as its expansion into other parts of Asia. Ironically, the writers and artists chosen to spread this imperialist message had left-wing political roots in Japan, where their work strongly favoured modernist, even avant-garde, styles of expression. In Glorify the Empire, Annika Culver explores how these once anti-imperialist intellectuals produced modernist works celebrating the modernity of a fascist state and reflecting a complicated picture of complicity with, and ambivalence towards, Japan's utopian project. During the war, literary and artistic representations of Manchuria accelerated, and the Japanese-led culture in Manchukuo served as a template for occupied areas in Southeast Asia. A groundbreaking work, Glorify the Empire magnifies the intersection between politics and art in a rarely examined period in Japanese history."--Publisher's website.

The catalogue to an Exhibition of the same name taking place in San Francisco in February 2011

In the decade leading up to the attack on Pearl Harbor, at a time when Japan was expanding its influence in Asia, several Japanese institutions set about trying to convince Americans to support Tokyo’s plans and ambitions for China. This book seeks to analyze the original publications produced by these organizations and explores the methods used by the Japanese to influence American attitudes and policy. Four organizations active during the 1930s, the South Manchuria Railway Company, the America-Japan Society, the Foreign Affairs Association of Japan, and the Japan Pacific Association, were particularly instrumental in targeting the US. This book argues that they routinely used specific terminology to appeal to Americans, such as 'New Deal,' 'Manifest Destiny,' and 'Open Door.' Furthermore, the Japanese claimed that only they could meet the challenge of the growing communist threat, while their development programs would bring peace and prosperity to China. Nevertheless, American policy was not significantly altered by Japanese propaganda efforts, as documents from the administration of Franklin D. Roosevelt reveal that the president continued to prepare the U.S. for war with Japan long before Pearl Harbour. Examining original Japanese English-language propaganda sources from the 1920s and 1930s, this book will be of huge interest to historians of Japan, China, the US and World War II more broadly.

The first in-depth scholarly study in English of the Japanese performance medium kamishibai, Sharalyn Orbaugh’s Propaganda Performed illuminates the vibrant street culture of 1930s Japan as well as the visual and narrative rhetoric of Japanese propaganda in World War II.

With contributions from noted critics and film historians from both countries, this book, first published in 1994, examines some of the most innovative and disturbing propaganda ever created. It analyses the conflicting images of these films and their effectiveness in defining public perception of the enemy. It also offers pointed commentary on the power of visual imagery to enhance racial tensions and enforce both positive and negative stereotypes of the Other.

After more than six years of active fighting in the Far East and over two years of open war between Japan and the Anglo-Saxon powers, Japanese political warfare was still a factor largely unknown in the Western world. Overshadowed by the much nearer and more closely felt exertions of the Nazi propaganda machine, it came to be regarded as too remote to have any noticeable bearing on the general course of the war. In the months leading up to Pearl Harbour, Tokyo Radio, the official Domei News Agency and the Japanese press jointly conducted an efficient war of nerves which, for all its alleged clumsiness effectively deceived many in Britain and the USA. The attack on Pearl Harbour showed how Tokyo’s political warfare achieved its object: the creation of a political smoke-screen. During the period of Japan’s conquests in 1942 following Pearl Harbour, and before that in China, Japan’s political warfare showed itself quite capable of producing useful results.The volume is divided into two parts: the first deals with machinery and methods and gives as full and detailed a survey of the various government organs directing and controlling political warfare, the structure of the Japanese press, the organisation of Japanese broadcasting, the functioning of censorship and the extent to which education, science, literature, the arts and the cinema are being employed for purposes of propaganda, both in the Japanese homeland and in the wider area of the conquered empire. The second part deals with the aims and policies of Japanese propaganda, and attempts to give an outline of the way in which the machinery is being operated. It includes an analysis of the main groups of standard slogans and catchphrases which recur everywhere in Japanese propaganda and a special chapter is devoted to the use made of religion for purposes of political warfare.