Japan's Carnival War

Abstract

Carnival war was born during the brief but intense cultural moment of the Shanghai-Nanjing campaign when new literary, technological, military, and social forces swept into the Japanese home front. Out of this volatile maelstrom, mass media organs spawned the new wartime creatures of "thrills" and "speed" to reconfigure the violence of total war for mass consumption. Even with the fall of Nanjing and the fading of the war hysteria, these mediaconstructed phantasms continued to shape how intellectuals, reporters, and other agents of the culture industries promoted, debated, and gave meaning to total war until the twilight of the Japanese empire. In a narrow sense, "carnival" refers to the chaotic media coverage of the Shanghai-Nanjing campaign from August to December 1937, which Japanese military and police officials criticized as a literal "raucous carnival" (omatsuri sawagi) for undermining state-managed spiritual mobilization. Irreverent celebrations of violence undermined government efforts to construct deep emotional connections to the war among the populace through economic frugality, public service, and participation in a variety of patriotic rituals. 1 In a broader sense, however, carnival describes the nature of Japanese state-society relations in wartime. At first glance, the media-driven war fever during the first stage of the China War in 1937 seemed to replicate patterns found in the 1931-2 Manchurian Incident. During the Manchurian Incident, the major dailies, driven by commercial ambitions to expand circulation into rural areas and dominate the national news market, mobilized the public into war frenzy to support the Kwantung Army's invasion of Northeast China. This resulted in a more homogeneous narrative glorifying Japanese military expansion into Manchuria that dovetailed nicely with the government's policy of "go-fast"