A fascinating look at the anxious pleasures of Japanese visual culture during World War II. Airplanes, gas masks, and bombs were common images in wartime Japan. Yet amid these emblems of anxiety, tasty caramels were offered to children with paper gas masks as promotional giveaways, and magazines featured everything from attractive models in the latest civil defense fashion to futuristic weapons. Gas Mask Nation explores the multilayered construction of an anxious yet perversely pleasurable visual culture of Japanese civil air defense-or boku-through a diverse range of artworks, photographs, films and newsreels, magazine illustrations, postcards, cartoons, advertising, fashion, everyday goods, government posters, and state propaganda. Gennifer Weisenfeld reveals the immersive aspects of this culture, in which Japan's imperial subjects were mobilized to regularly perform highly orchestrated civil air defense drills throughout the country. The war years in Japan are often portrayed as a landscape of privation and suppression under the censorship of the war machine. But alongside the horrors, pleasure, desire, wonder, creativity, and humor were all still abundantly present in a period before air raids went from being a fearful specter to a deadly reality.

Yoshiaki Shimizu, one of the foremost scholars of Japanese art history, taught at Princeton University for more than twenty-five years, during which time he trained many students who have become respected professors and museum professionals. "Crossing the Sea" gathers original essays by thirteen of these students, in honor of Shimizu's extraordinary career at Princeton as well as his teaching at other institutions and his work as curator of Japanese art at the Freer-Sackler Gallery in Washington, D.C. Ranging in topic from premodern Buddhist, narrative, and ink painting in Japan and East Asia to modern and contemporary Japanese painting, prints, and popular visual images, these essays present innovative research that draws attention to remarkable works of Japanese art and their fascinating historical contexts and modern interpretations. Including reinterpretations of well-known works and richly developed accounts of their meaning and function in historical, religious, and cultural contexts, this volume also provides a state-of-the-field portrait of Japanese art studies today.

Focusing on one landmark catastrophic event in the history of an emerging modern nation - the Great Kanto Earthquake that devastated Tokyo and surrounding areas in 1923 - this fascinating volume examines the history of the visual production of the disaster. The Kanto earthquake triggered cultural responses that ran the gamut from voyeuristic and macabre thrill to the romantic sublime, media spectacle to sacred space, mournful commemoration to emancipatory euphoria, and national solidarity to racist vigilantism and sociopolitical critique. Looking at photography, cinema, painting, postcards, sketching, urban planning, and even scientific visualizations, Weisenfeld demonstrates how visual culture has powerfully mediated the evolving historical understanding of this major national disaster, ultimately enfolding mourning and memory into modernization.