Radio Broadcasting and the Nationalization of the Masses in Wartime Japan: The Case of Radio Listening Guidance

Abstract

This paper traces the history of the practice known as “radio listening guidance” in wartime Japan (1931-1945). During this era, the politicization of the masses into self-conscious citizens and imperial subjects consumed the attention of the political and cultural elite. Radio, a brand-new electronic and auditory medium, was considered to be a useful and effective tool for this purpose. Despite radio’s penetrating and homogenizing power, however, transmission alone did not guarantee the desired effects: radio’s real effect depended on how listeners engaged with the medium on an everyday basis. Thus, form the 1930s onward, the Japan Broadcasting Corporation attempted to make concrete interventions into the life and behavior of the masses in order to create “proper” listening habits and attitudes. The Ministry of Communications, the Information Bureau, prefectural governments, educators, and local elites also took part in this attempt. By investigating the discourses and practices of listening guidance, as well as their effects and limits, this paper shows that the making of “proper” radio listeners constituted a significant site of negotiations and struggles between mass audiences and the political and cultural elite of the nation. This study argues that the desire to regulate the thought and behavior of the masses and train them in self-discipline was inherent in the basic design of listening guidance. For this reason, the attempt to create self-disciplined radio listeners smoothly meshed with the wartime state’s mobilization campaigns to turn the masses into responsible and useful imperial subjects for the war effort. Despite this continued guidance, the gap between the ideal listener and the listeners in reality did not sharply narrow by the war’s end. The history of wartime listening guidance suggests that controlling the thought and behavior of the masses through radio was never an easy operation, thereby challenging the conventional representation of Japanese radio audiences during the war as passive victims or blind followers of top-down media messages.