By the early 1970s, Japan had become an affluent consumer society,
riding a growing economy to widely shared prosperity. In the
aftermath of the fiery political activism of 1968, the country
settled down to the realization that consumer culture had taken a
firm grip on Japanese society. Japan, 1972 takes an early-seventies
year as a vantage point for understanding how Japanese society came
to terms with cultural change. 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.
General
Imprint: |
Columbia University Press
|
Country of origin: |
United States |
Release date: |
May 2021 |
First published: |
2021 |
Authors: |
Yoshikuni Igarashi
|
Dimensions: |
229 x 152 x 23mm (L x W x T) |
Format: |
Paperback
|
Pages: |
384 |
ISBN-13: |
978-0-231-19555-3 |
Categories: |
Books
|
LSN: |
0-231-19555-9 |
Barcode: |
9780231195553 |
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