1950s Japan Research Articles

Beautiful Sounds, Beautiful Life: Cultivating Musical Listening through Hearing Aids in 1950s Japan.

Hearing aids facilitated musical listening in postwar Japan in two distinctive ways. First, hearing aid developers and their associates in deaf education used assistive technologies to play music, thus promoting a new mode of listening that in their view would enhance deaf people's lives. Second, some developers sought to expand into general consumer music hardware, with Japanese and American sources marginalizing the hearing aid's role in postwar domestic electronics development. Hearing aid manufacturers formed multilateral, sociotechnical coalitions, cultivating what could be called a "regime of rhythm" form of listening: it emphasized the personal, transformative potential of music. Arguably that regime of rhythm was deeply intertwined in hearing aid manufacturers' public outreach campaigns, pedagogical practices at schools for the deaf, and consumer sound hardware, to promote the perceived maximum use of people's sensory abilities through listening to music.

On the Relationship between Documentary Films and Magic Lanterns in 1950s Japan

In this paper, I explore three cases from postwar Japanese media history where a single topic inspired the production of both documentary films and magic lanterns. The first example documents the creation of Maruki and Akamatsu’s famed painting Pictures of the Atomic Bomb. A documentary and two magic lantern productions explore this topic through different stylistic and aesthetic approaches. The second example is School of Echoes, a film and magic lantern about children’s education in rural Japan. The documentary film blurs distinctions between the narrative film and documentary film genres by utilizing paid actors and a prewritten script. By contrast, the original subjects of the documentary film appear as themselves in the magic lantern film. Finally, the documentary film Tsukinowa Tomb depicts an archeological excavation at the site named in the title. Unlike the monochrome documentary film, the magic lantern version was made on color film. Aesthetic and material histories of other magic lanterns include carefully hand-painted monochrome films. Monochrome documentary films in 1950s Japan tended to emphasize narrative and political ideology, while magic lantern films projected color images in the vein of realism. Through these examples of media history, we can begin to understand the entangled histories of documentary film and magic lanterns in 1950s Japan.

The role of the Small Business Finance Corporation's agency loans in 1950s Japan

The role of the Small Business Finance Corporation's agency loans in 1950s Japan

『山びこ学校』というユートピア : 一九五〇年前後における の創出( 戦後日本文学における"幻想(ファンタスム)/理想郷(ユートピア)"のゆくえ)

『山びこ学校』というユートピア : 一九五〇年前後における の創出( 戦後日本文学における"幻想(ファンタスム)/理想郷(ユートピア)"のゆくえ)

Korean Artists in 1950s Japan

Korean Artists in 1950s Japan

Cold War Sewing Machines: Production and Consumption in 1950s China and Japan

With the “consumption turn” in the humanities and the social sciences, a phenomenon evident in English-language scholarship from the 1980s onward, production ceased to command the attention it had once received from historians. A recent (2012) study of the sewing machine in modern Japan by Harvard historian Andrew Gordon demonstrates the effects: what could feasibly have been published under the title “Making Machinists” was instead marketed as “Fabricating Consumers.” What does it mean to talk about consumers in 1950s Japan, a time and place of hard work, thrift, and restraint? For Gordon an important premise was the role of women in the postwar economy. This provides a point of departure from which to explore the ideologies and practices of production and consumption across the Cold War dividing line between “consumerist” and “productionist” regimes in East Asia. The Cold War was a time of sharp differences between the two societies, but also a time of shared preoccupations with productivity and national growth. In their different political contexts, Japanese and Chinese women were acting out many of the same roles.

Midwife and Public Health Nurse Tatsuyo Amari and a State-Endorsed Birth Control Campaign in 1950s Japan.

Mrs. Tatsuyo Amari, a qualified midwife and nurse, served Japan's state-endorsed birth control campaign as a "birth control field instructor" in rural Minamoto Village of Yamanashi Prefecture just west of Tokyo. Her work sheds light on the role of female health-care workers in health and population governance in 1950s Japan. Amari not only facilitated the "top-down" transfer of the state-sanctioned idea of birth control and contraceptives, as did other birth control field instructors, but also enabled the "bottom-up" flow of knowledge about people's reproductive lives through her participation in the policy-oriented birth control research called the "three model-village study." Contextualizing Amari's engagement with the study elucidates how the state relied on the established role of female health-care workers as intermediaries between the state and the people. Finally, Amari's contribution to the scientific aspect of the campaign may motivate historians to recognize the politics around the participation of female health-care workers in the science of birth control.

The Norwegian-American Lutheran Experience in 1950s Japan: Stepping up to the Cold War Challenge by Kate Allen and John E. Ingulsrud

The Norwegian-American Lutheran Experience in 1950s Japan: Stepping up to the Cold War Challenge by Kate Allen and John E. Ingulsrud

Posthistorical traditions in art, design, and architecture in 1950s Japan

This article examines the discussions on tradition in art, design, and architecture in the 1950s Japan. It first explores the historical background of the discussions among artists, architects and art historians from the nineteenth century to the Second World War. The article insists that they attached to Japanese traditions various meanings and values including what should be overcome in the process of Westernization, the roots to which Japanese people felt compelled to return in the age of modernity, and the sophisticated sensibility of the Japanese comparable to Western modern aesthetics. The article then investigates the postwar situations. Following European artists’ interest in primitivism, avant-garde artist Okamoto Tarō advocated tradition to make it function as a key factor in the dynamism of the cultural order. Although discussions were not developed and deepened among designers, tradition was actively discussed in a field of architecture. Architects like Tange Kenzō and Shirai Seiichi elevated the tradition debate into the ideological issue, extracting the dichotomy of the Jōmon and the Yayoi and applying them to actual buildings and houses. The tradition debate in architecture meant a new departure in the postwar period, creating important discussions and movements on historical consciousness in the later period, such as the Metabolist movement in the 1960s and the ‘Ma: Space/Time in Japan’ exhibition in 1978. In this sense, the tradition conceived in the 1950s Japan is best regarded as posthistorical.

Imaging the Rural: Modernity and Agrarianism in Hiroshi Hamaya’s ‘Snow Land’ Photographs

Th is article analyses the Snow Land photographic series by Japanese photographer Hiroshi Hamaya [1915–1999] in relation to issues of modernity, nostalgia and discourses of agrarianism in 1940s and 1950s Japan. Hamaya is one of Japan’s most celebrated and infl uential documentary photographers at both a national and international level. His Snow Land series presents an idyllic view of life in the small mountain villages of Japan’s Niigata Prefecture, emphasising a sense of community and spiritual meaning that Hamaya perceived to be lacking in modern society. In this sense, Snow Land constituted a critique of modernity. Th rough engagement with theorists such as Heidegger, Foucault and Barthes, as well as critical writings on agrarian ideology, this article investigates the underlying assumptions that govern Hamaya’s depiction of snow country, demonstrating that the series is shaped by a modern worldview and is tied to ideological discourses of agrarianism.

Tanaka Atsuko's Electric Dress and the Circuits of Subjectivity

A full understanding of Tanaka Atsuko's (1932–2005) work requires a reconsideration of its connections to the social context of 1950s Japan. Encountering the urban and industrial transformation, postwar shifts in gender status, and dramatic changes in the period's visual culture, she had to restructure her sense of place in the world. Rather than an articulation of individualism emerging from a fixed sense of self in the postimperial moment, Tanaka's work can be seen as expressing the frailty of subjectivity. It marks an interrogation of surface and selfhood that raises questions about the status of female subjectivity in 1950s Japan.

Film and Soldier: Japanese War Movies in the 1950s

In 1950s Japan, films about the Second World War, especially the conflict in the Pacific, were very popular. Though some of them concentrated on misery and suffering, others were surprisingly positive in their portrayal of Japanese soldiers. The 1950s have the reputation of a pacifist decade in Japan, when people were only too glad to forget the war as they turned instead to the future. This orthodox view is undermined, however, by the undeniable fact that a great many people wanted to see cinematic dramatizations of the war. The movies they watched left room for pride, dignity, the recognition of Japanese military power and even nostalgia for the war years. They were an important means by which people explored the meanings of the recent conflict. In particular, they explained and dramatized what had happened; presented examples of heroic soldiers and sailors; and contributed to the reintegration of ordinary soldiers who had been convicted as war criminals back into Japanese society. In doing so they played a vital role in reclaiming and validating the actions of military men, and in promoting the idea that there had been positive aspects of the war experience, despite the suffering the conflict had undoubtedly brought.

Jikken Kobo and Takiguchi Shuzo: The New Deal Collectivism of 1950s Japan

In post-1945 Japan, the government, guided by the occupation authority, reeducated the people with a democratic ideology. Belligerent nationalism was replaced by a national mission of enrichment of arts and culture. Takiguchi Shūzō (1903–79), a poet-critic and supporter of vanguard art since the prewar period, continued to cultivate the spirit of defiance against the establishment in the postwar art world. However, as a respected man of culture, he was also involved in a project of building the first national museum of modern art for the purpose of public enlightenment. This article explores how Takiguchi fostered independent art movements despite his conflicting engagement with the establishment. In Takiguchi’s mind, artistic collectivism had to be rooted in the public domain so that art and society would inform each other. His utopian vision paralleled many objectives of the historical avant-gardes of the West, and it was transmitted to the postwar generation of artists, most notably, to the artists’ collective Jikken Kōbō (Experimental Workshop; active 1951–57). This group exemplified the postwar Japanese reception of the Bauhausian philosophy of unified art, and Takiguchi played an important role in fostering Jikken Kōbō’s interest in the Bauhaus. By placing the transmission of utopianism from Takiguchi to Jikken Kōbō in a larger politicocultural context, this article analyzes the effect of the legacy of the US-led occupation on the idea of artistic collectivism in 1950s Japan. The United States was already under the influence of the Bauhaus in the 1930s as evidenced in the establishments of Black Mountain College and the Chicago Bauhaus. The concept of progressive art education promoted by these schools eventually reached Japan through the postwar occupation, whose initial directive was fueled by New Deal liberalism. This article examines a work that revisited Bauhausian philosophy, Jikken Kōbō’s 1955 The Future Eve ( Mirai no ivu ), an experimental ballet theater based on a science fiction novel written in 1886 by the French novelist Villiers de l’Isle-Adam. The Future Eve revealed Jikken Kōbō’s affinity with the Bauhaus in its collective engagement with production of theater, its strong interest in merging art and technology, and ultimately, its belief in art’s relevance to social and public issues of the time.

Authors and Soldiers: Reconstructing History in Postwar Japan

In 1940s and 1950s Japan, dominant histories of the Pacific War—the Asian-Pacific front of World War II—emerged that simplified the disparate experiences of those involved and influenced the memory of the conflict’s storytellers. In particular, there have been two officialized histories of the war and postwar periods—the former constructed by the Japanese wartime state, and the latter framed by Japan’s Allied occupiers. The Japanese government imposed the unifying spirit of kokutai (national spirit or character) onto its citizens, portraying them as completely loyal to the Emperor and fully devoted to the total war effort. During occupation, the Allies represented the war as a misguided effort by the Japanese political and military leadership who victimized the people, forcing them into ravaging the Asian continent. America was Japan’s liberator, giving the people a democratic government promoting egalitarianism and freedom of expression. But were there no efforts to problematize these officialized histories that obviously elided the war’s complexities? An examination of postwar Japanese literature reveals that writers not only engaged with the dominant histories characterizing the Pacific War, but they also often subverted, undermined, and overturned such narratives. The medium of literature allows writers to reach out to mass publics, and thus gives authors the ability to shape society’s historical conceptions— perhaps by perpetuating dominant views, rejecting generally accepted norms, or creating entirely new historical frameworks. This paper focuses on three authors who wrote during the Allied Occupation—Haruo Umezaki, Shohei Ooka, and Hiroshi Noma—in order to contextualize the writings of Akira Yoshimura and Hikaru Okuizumi, who produced works in the decades following American withdrawal from Japan in 1952. Furthermore, it examines their works dealing specifically with soldier experiences—Umezaki’s 1946 “Sakurajima,” Ooka’s 1948 Taken Captive and 1951 Fires on the Plain, Noma’s 1952 Zone of Emptiness, Yoshimura’s 1967 Typhoon of Steel, and Okuizumi’s 1993 The Stones Cry Out.1 These were the men who saw the effects of Japan’s total war mobilization on the ground. These were the men who most forcefully were

Industrial Standardization and the Role of Governmental Research Institutes in 1950s Japan

Industrial Standardization and the Role of Governmental Research Institutes in 1950s Japan