Reviewed by: Propaganda Performed: Kamishibai in Japan’s Fifteen-Year War by Sharalyn Orbaugh Maki Kaneko Propaganda Performed: Kamishibai in Japan’s Fifteen-Year War. By Sharalyn Orbaugh. Leiden: Brill, 2015. 365pages. Hardcover €114.00/$148.00. The last twenty-five years have witnessed increasing interest in and publication on Japanese war propaganda during the Fifteen-Year War (1931–1945).1 The topic is still far from exhausted, and Sharalyn Orbaugh’s book Propaganda Performed: Kamishibai in Japan’s Fifteen-Year War sheds new light on the mechanism of Japanese war propaganda through a detailed investigation of kamishibai, or the telling of stories using illustrated cards by performers standing mostly on urban street corners. Kamishibai originated in 1930 and for the next three decades enjoyed significant popularity in Japan as an inexpensive street entertainment as well as pedagogical tool intended mainly, but not exclusively, for children of the urban working classes. Given its wide distribution, accessibility, and popularity, kamishibai exerted an impact on Japanese society in general and children in particular that equaled, if not exceeded, that of other popular media such as film, theater, fiction, songs, and manga. Yet due to its widespread perception as “vulgar” and “lowly” as well as the hybrid nature of its medium (consisting of at least the three components of script, picture, and performance), kamishibai has long suffered from scholarly indifference and ill fit with conventional academic disciplines. Propaganda Performed is virtually the first comprehensive study of kamishibai in English. (For previous scholarship on kamishibai both in Japanese and English, see the author’s comprehensive literature review on pages 3–6.) Among the numerous [End Page 450] contributions that it makes to multiple academic fields, its thoroughness as an introduction to kamishibai must first be acknowledged. Nearly 400 pages in length, the book includes 157 color illustrations and seven fully translated kamishibai plays. Since many kamishibai have been lost and surviving examples are not readily accessible, its reproductions of a wide selection of kamishibai playcards, all accompanied by detailed explanations or concise translations, are an extremely valuable resource. Chapters 1 and 2 discuss kamishibai in depth in terms of its history, producers, audiences, distribution system, social position, and modes of production/consumption. Together with the vivid color plates, this multifaceted analysis of kamishibai helps the reader to not only understand but also gain a lively sense of an otherwise largely foreign medium. The focus of the book is propaganda kamishibai created mostly during the Asia-Pacific War. The development of kamishibai coincided with Japan’s age of militarization and total war, and Orbaugh effectively links the particularities of the medium with the broader sociopolitical conditions of wartime Japan, covering an impressive range of issues from the politics of class, gender, and race to censorship systems and propaganda agencies. The breadth of the study extends well beyond that of a survey of a single popular medium and makes it an important resource for a number of scholarly fields, including visual culture, literature, media studies, urban studies, gender studies, and children’s culture, not to mention the study of war propaganda. While it is not possible in this short review to cover all the key issues and themes that this significantly large volume addresses, what follows is an attempt to locate some of the major ones chapter by chapter. The book consists of five chapters and a conclusion. Chapters 1 and 2 provide the background necessary to understanding the workings of war propaganda kamishibai. Chapter 1 delineates the history of kamishibai: its precursors and birth, the introduction of educational kamishibai by leftist intellectuals, the adoption of educational kamishibai by state authorities and later the Occupation government for their own political ends, and the heyday of street-corner kamishibai in the 1950s and its eventual extinction in the 1960s. Although the primary aim of the chapter is to offer a concise history, the author’s careful contextualization of kamishibai in the sociopolitical complexities of 1930s–1960s Japan also highlights several factors key to considering the political culture and intellectual history of the country. For example, the intriguing fact that the propaganda use of kamishibai during the Asia-Pacific War was cultivated by left-leaning progressive educators is...