Following Japan's invasion of China in 1937, Japanese bureaucratic and intellectual elites constructed a volatile image of the munitions worker as trickster. Within this discursive realm, the worker became an object of hope, fear, and rage for the guardians of an idealized home front struggling to bolster war production while still adhering to wartime goals of national austerity. In the cultural fantasies and nightmares of the Japanese home front, the munitions worker fluctuated between the valorized “industrial warrior” laboring for the nation and a violent delinquent ready to wreak havoc on society.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.