Title: Japan, 1972: Visions of Masculinity in an Age of Mass Consumerism by Yoshikuni Igarashi (review)
Abstract: Reviewed by: Japan, 1972: Visions of Masculinity in an Age of Mass Consumerism by Yoshikuni Igarashi Ann Sherif Japan, 1972: Visions of Masculinity in an Age of Mass Consumerism by Yoshikuni Igarashi. New York: Columbia University Press, 2021. Pp. xv + 366. $140.00 hardcover, $35.00 paper, $34.99 e-book. Yoshikuni Igarashi entices readers to enter the cultural imaginary of late 1960s and early 1970s Japan in his Japan: 1972. As in his first book Bodies of Memory (2000), Igarashi structures his narrative around incisive close readings of significant cultural works as a means of exploring the imagination and aspirations of artists, audiences, and citizens.1 1972 signals a point when robust economic growth was teetering on the brink, and the hopeful social movements of the 1960s were subsiding. Accompanying these changes was the "somber realization that consumer culture and its attendant effects had taken a tight hold on Japanese society" (p. 4). Igarashi's study diverges from anglophone [End Page 197] scholarly trends that emphasize oppositional politics in cultural production. The author instead selects a body of popular works emerging from mass culture that "critically engage with the conditions of contemporary society" (p. 11). Although Igarashi forefronts "visions of masculinity," the book addresses issues that will interest a broad readership, including gendered identities, debates over Japan's martial past and affluent future, media shifts, and the possibilities of personal autonomy in a consumerist society. Only a few short decades after the extensive economic ruin and material deprivation of the Asia Pacific War (1941–1945), Japan's rapid economic growth and government policy in 1972 provided basic security to most citizens and distributed income more equitably than ever before. Japan's close alliance with the United States during the Cold War resulted in Japanese pursuit of a consumerist society. 1972 Japan had achieved affluence: Citizens replaced practices of frugality and reuse with high consumption. Yet material abundance comes at a price. Igarashi vividly demonstrates the cultural, ethical, and social challenges of this period. A long decade after prime minister Ikeda Hayato's 池田 勇人 (in office 1960–1964) initiation of a successful income-doubling plan and the iconic Anpo struggle (Anpo tōsō 安保闘争; 1959–1960), the cultural producers featured in Japan, 1972 grappled with the problem of how to "maintain a critical perspective" (p. 3) about the prosperity and abundance of which they were part. Igarashi posits a quiet but hugely significant paradigm shift in socioeconomic arrangements in 1972, which demanded that citizens embrace a consumer identity even as world events, such as the oil shock of the following year, threatened the stability of Japan's heavily export-dependent economy. Igarashi's choice of a wide range of works and genres—works in popular culture that anyone alive in 1972 would have at least been aware of, if they were not avid fan of—is productive. The book is structured in three major thematic parts: television (chaps. 1–2), travel (chaps. 3–5), and violence (chaps. 6–8), with two or three chapters in each part. The television section (part 1) surveys the historic conditions of 1972 as a world "saturated with media images" (p. 153) in a manner much more pervasive than earlier twentieth-century media shifts occasioned by movies and radio. Igarashi emphasizes visuality in a range of dominant and emerging broadcast and print medias—television especially but manga, popular movies, and photography as well. [End Page 198] Of the screen arts available in the mid-twentieth century, the television set's portability, affordability, and size made it an integral part of domestic space—as well as of rural communities previously isolated from metropolitan culture. Television's pervasiveness was analogous to that of radios, but it was associated with the compelling presence of moving image and light. Igarashi emphasizes a paradigm shift to metavisuality, resulting from the ubiquitous presence of the now-dominant medium of television in the lives of the nation. This "newly emerged visual field" (p. 6), according to Igarashi, was generative of new imaginaries of gender identities demanded by the weighty legacies of the Asia Pacific War. Televisions were entangled in the complexities of capitalist consumer culture during the early 1970s. This first section highlights the...
Publication Year: 2023
Publication Date: 2023-06-01
Language: en
Type: article
Indexed In: ['crossref']
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