Japan, 1972: Visions of Masculinity in an Age of Mass Consumerism by Yoshikuni Igarashi

Abstract

Reviewed by: Japan, 1972: Visions of Masculinity in an Age of Mass Consumerism by Yoshikuni Igarashi Michele M. Mason Japan, 1972: Visions of Masculinity in an Age of Mass Consumerism. By Yoshikuni Igarashi. Columbia University Press, 2021. 384 pages. ISBN: 9780231195546 (hardcover; also available as softcover and e-book). Yoshikuni Igarashi's Japan, 1972: Visions of Masculinity in an Age of Mass Consumerism is a fascinating read that offers textured analysis of a watershed moment in Japanese history. Igarashi makes a strong and nuanced argument for identifying 1972 as the year that marks a pivotal moment between "two Japans—the one before the high economic growth from the late 1950s to the early 1970s and the one borne of those years" (p. 3). Highlighting the multiple effects of and tensions in Japan's economic miracle and subsequent embrace of mass consumerism, his work presents readers with a cultural history anchored in the dizzying transformations after the Occupation of Japan as viewed by male artists and activists unsettled by changing norms and expectations. The rapid and radical economic, political, and social shifts described therein rival the Meiji-era projects of nation-state creation, industrialization, and homogenization of the Japanese populace. With his trenchant readings of political discourse, media messages, and popular culture, Igarashi contributes a new [End Page 369] and significant portrait of a transformative phase that lasted just over a decade while illuminating a fragile masculinity attempting to negotiate the changes. Japan, 1972 is organized into a stand-alone introduction and three thematic parts—"Television," "Travel," and "Violence." The chapters, which move chronologically through the time period under study, divide broadly into two sets: the first two chapters, which comprise part 1, draw on a wide variety of media-related examples and critiques to explicate the production and normalization of the postwar consuming subject, while the rest, which make up the following two parts, advance close critical readings of specific films, manga, and journalistic writings and, in the final case, the implosion of the radical leftist United Red Army. In every chapter, Igarashi leverages a fascinating array of cultural-historical details, resulting in a meticulously sourced volume that traces the changes in and challenges to this interstitial moment in Japanese history—a snapshot of a multifaceted contestation of radical social reorganization. The introduction sketches the entanglements that linked the high-growth economy, dominance of television, and homogenization of the postwar Japanese population. New modes of seeing and being gradually enmeshed individuals, families, homes, neighborhoods, schools, and national identity in a vision dominated by the logic of mass consumption. Television would play a central role in what Igarashi terms "metavision," specifically, a "new way of seeing: thanks largely to television, individuals gained an outside perspective from which to view themselves critically" (p. 5). No one was immune, but Igarashi focuses on men in particular. Conditioned by a social model that assigned productivity to men and consumption to women, the feverish adoption and glorification of consumerism by the Japanese public was interpreted by some as a domestication/feminization of the nation and the foreclosure of an "outside" from which to formulate and enact oppositional politics. This outside was generally understood to comprise men on the economic and/or nationally geographic margins, and critics of this paradigmatic shift "yearned for narratives that would better realize their free and independent agency" (p. 5). Seeking out new ways to parse and resist the assumed pacification of men's traditional powers, male artists and leftist activists questioned, critiqued, and envisioned rebellions against the pervasive "feminizing" power of material comfort and consumer culture. To that end, Igarashi argues, they attempted to "reconstitute Japanese manhood through imaginary heroes' struggles" (p. 6). From here this well-paced and well-organized volume progresses to part 1 and its two chapters on television, "Reflections on the Consuming Subject: The High-Growth Economy and Emergence of a New National Character" and "Circular Vision: The Metavisuality of Television." Igarashi deploys statistics, essays by cultural critics and Marxist scholars, vacuum-cleaner ads, coverage of the imperial family, and more to detail the crucial links between the high-growth economy and the emergence and domestication of television. He emphasizes that this new medium played an...