Postwar Japan and Visions of Mass Consumer Society

FAIN: FO-50017-06

Yoshikuni Igarashi
Vanderbilt University (Nashville, TN 37203-2416)

This project focuses on the radical economic, social, and cultural transformation of Japanese society in the late 1960s and the early 1970s and analyzes the ways in which members of Japanese society responded to this paradigmatic shift.

Associated Products

Japan, 1972: Visions of Masculinity in an Age of Mass Consumerism (Book)
Title: Japan, 1972: Visions of Masculinity in an Age of Mass Consumerism
Author: Yoshikuni Igarashi
Abstract: 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.
Year: 2021
Primary URL: https://www.worldcat.org/title/1156398691
Primary URL Description: Worldcat listing.
Access Model: Print and ebook (not open access)
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Type: Single author monograph
ISBN: 9780231195553
Copy sent to NEH?: Yes

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