Gas Mask Nation: Visualizing Civil Air Defense in Wartime Japan

By Gennifer Weisenfeld

A fascinating look at the anxious pleasures of Japanese visual culture during World War II.
 
Airplanes, gas masks, and bombs were common images in wartime Japan. Yet amid these emblems of anxiety, tasty caramels were offered to children with paper gas masks as promotional giveaways, and magazines featured everything from attractive models in the latest civil defense fashion to futuristic weapons.
 
Gas Mask Nation explores the multilayered construction of an anxious yet perversely pleasurable visual culture of Japanese civil air defense—or bōkū—through a diverse range of artworks, photographs, films and newsreels, magazine illustrations, postcards, cartoons, advertising, fashion, everyday goods, government posters, and state propaganda. Gennifer Weisenfeld reveals the immersive aspects of this culture, in which Japan’s imperial subjects were mobilized to regularly perform highly orchestrated civil air defense drills throughout the country.
 
The war years in Japan are often portrayed as a landscape of privation and suppression under the censorship of the war machine. But alongside the horrors, pleasure, desire, wonder, creativity, and humor were all still abundantly present in a period before air raids went from being a fearful specter to a deadly reality.
 

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Release date: Mar 28, 2023
• ISBN: 9780226816456

Book preview

Cover Page for Gas Mask Nation

Gas Mask Nation

Gas Mask Nation

Visualizing Civil Air Defense in Wartime Japan

Gennifer Weisenfeld

The University of Chicago Press

Chicago and London

The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637

The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London

© 2023 by The University of Chicago

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission, except in the case of brief quotations in critical articles and reviews. For more information, contact the University of Chicago Press, 1427 E. 60th St., Chicago, IL 60637.

Published 2023

Printed in China

32 31 30 29 28 27 26 25 24 23    1 2 3 4 5

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-81644-9 (cloth)

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-81645-6 (e-book)

DOI: https://doi.org/10.7208/chicago/9780226816456.001.0001

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Weisenfeld, Gennifer S. (Gennifer Stacy), 1966– author.

Title: Gas mask nation : visualizing civil air defense in wartime Japan / Gennifer Weisenfeld.

Other titles: Visualizing civil air defense in wartime Japan

Description: Chicago, IL : The University of Chicago Press, 2023. | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2021061573 | ISBN 9780226816449 (cloth) | ISBN 9780226816456 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: Air defenses—Social aspects—Japan. | Militarization—Japan—History—20th century. | World War, 1939–1945—Social aspects—Japan. | Japan—Civilization—1926–1945. | Japan—Social life and customs—1912–1945.

Classification: LCC DS822.4 .W45 2023 | DDC 952.03/3—dc23/eng/20220202

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021061573

This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992 (Permanence of Paper).

Dedicated to my teacher and mentor Yoshiaki Shimizu (1936–2021)

Contents

Introduction

1  Selling and Consuming Total War

2  Aviation and Japan’s Aerial Imaginary

3  Gas Mask Parade

4  Bombs Away!

5  Wondrous Weapons and Future War

6  Exhibiting Air Defense

Epilogue: Afterimages

Acknowledgments

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Introduction

An army of schoolgirls march through Tokyo, their faces an anonymous procession of gas masks. The photographer Horino Masao’s Gas Mask Parade, Tokyo (Gasu masuku kōshin, Tōkyō, 1936) is one of the most iconic images of the anxious modernism of 1930s Japan (figure I.1).¹ It reveals the vivid yet prosaic inculcation of fear in Japanese daily life through the increasingly pervasive visual culture of civil defense. Japan’s invasion of Manchuria in late 1931—the beginning of its Fifteen-Year War—marks the onset of a period of intense social mobilization and militarization on the home front as the war zone expanded on the continent and throughout the Pacific. Surveillance, secrecy, darkness, defensive barriers, physical security, and prophylaxis all became standard visual tropes of national preparedness and communal anxiety. Still, amid this anxiety, a culture of pleasure and wonder persisted, a culture in which tasty Morinaga-brand caramels were sold to children with paper gas masks as promotional giveaways, and popular magazines featured everything from attractive models in the latest civil-defense fashions to marvelous futuristic wartime weapons. The visual and material culture of air defense, or bōkū (防空), titillated the senses, even evoking the erotic through the monstrously enticing gas mask figures marching through the streets.

Prevailing scholarship portrays the war years in Japan as a landscape of privation where consumer and popular culture—and creativity in general—were suppressed under the massive censorship of the war machine.² Without denying the horrors of total war, we must revise this understanding of the cultural climate. Wartime Japan on the home front was a rationed existence of increasing scarcity. Movement and thought were prescribed. And people experienced profound loss as days were filled with death and sacrifice. Nevertheless, pleasure, desire, wonder, play, creativity, and humor were all still abundantly present. Humanity persisted in its complexity, and scholars do a disservice to history by reducing wartime to a caricature. In fact, by grasping the full nature of wartime’s all-encompassing sensory and compensatory enticements, we can unmask the dangers of its mix of sacrifice and gratification.³

Figure I.1 Horino Masao (1907–98), Gas Mask Parade, Tokyo (Gasu masuku kōshin, Tōkyō), photograph, 1936. Tokyo Photographic Art Museum.

To understand Japan’s social mobilization for war, we must examine the 1930s official and unofficial culture of civil air defense and how its multivalent imagery powerfully mediated the experience of wartime. This book explores the multilayered construction of an anxious yet perversely pleasurable visual and material culture of Japanese civil air defense. It investigates these layers through a diverse range of artworks and media forms including modernist and documentary photographs, films and newsreels, paintings, popular magazine illustrations, commercial postcards, cartoons, consumer advertising, fashion design, decorative insignia, everyday goods, official and commercial exhibitions, government hortatory posters, and state propaganda publications. Most centrally, it reveals the immersive and performative nature of the culture of civil defense as Japan’s loyal imperial subjects were mobilized dutifully to enact highly orchestrated, large-scale air-defense drills (bōkū enshū, also bōkū kunren) throughout the country on a regular basis. Japanese subjects’ prescribed civic roles were visibly demarcated by prominent armbands and inscribed sashes. Their faithful performance of such roles was denoted by lapels festooned with decorative badges that creatively merged cherry blossoms and propellers or depicted dramatic nighttime scenes of enemy aircraft illuminated by searchlights. Designated defense-drill captains were even given specially engraved watches to promote conscientious timekeeping. New public exhibitionary strategies helped spatialize this air-defense mindset to facilitate experiential inculcation. And at home, people continued to be surrounded by the culture of air defense—a kind of bōkū domesticity, if you will—replete with blackout shades for the lights, artillery-shaped lighters and ashtrays, and paper board games (sugoroku) themed on modern weaponry (shinheiki) that displayed images of airplanes, tanks, gas masks, and even military pigeons (gunyō tori) used for aerial photographic reconnaissance.

There was already a global culture of civil air defense that had emerged in tandem with the development of aviation warfare. The airplane brought the battle front to the home front. For Europeans, World War I was the crucible for the gestation of a collective imagination of civil air defense that continued to develop through the interwar period and into World War II.⁴ Far away from the battlefields of World War I, Japan was Britain’s ally but only experienced these home front threats secondhand. The nation had already triumphed in two major wars, the Sino- and Russo-Japanese Wars (1894–95 and 1904–5 respectively), both fought on land and sea. Nonetheless, as the historian Jürgen Melzer has convincingly shown, World War I was in fact an important milestone for the Japanese development and imagination of aviation. It presented an opportunity to fortify the Japanese empire by seizing German colonial territories in the Pacific and China, prompting Japan’s first foray into air war with the bombing of Qingdao in the summer of 1914. This was the Japanese military’s earliest deployment of airplanes, and it inspired an influential cadre of air-minded Japanese army technocrats who became champions of airpower and forged strong connections with civil aviation.⁵ Equally important for Japanese aviation was how wartime import restrictions spurred domestic manufacturing of aircraft engines, and how the postwar punitive terms imposed on German aviation in the Treaty of Versailles made it possible for Japan to acquire advanced German aeronautical technology.⁶

The national consciousness of civil defense in Japan, however, was not triggered until later. It was, in fact, the catastrophic destruction of the imperial capital, Tokyo, during the Great Kantō Earthquake of 1923 that alerted the nation to the necessities of mobilized civil defense. The devastating conflagrations following the earthquake killed more than one hundred thousand people and razed over 44 percent of the city’s land area. Official campaigns for civil air defense in the 1930s explicitly drew on memories of this horrific national tragedy, linking it with prospective attacks from the sky, and emphasized that the damage from incendiary bombs (shōidan) would be exponentially greater than the earlier earthquake fires.⁷ As Kari Shepherdson-Scott has aptly noted in her analysis of the 1938 educational propaganda film The Unburnable City (Moenai toshi), produced by the Home Ministry and Tōhō Film Studio to instruct the populace about the need for civil defense, the earthquake was used as a surrogate referent for the air raid of the future to help Japanese civilians visualize the potential destruction that would occur if they were not vigilant in protecting their homes and the city. It also suggested that akin to the occurrence of natural disasters, modern war on the home front was inevitable.⁸ To cement this connection, officials made September 1, the quake anniversary, the day for the Tokyo Defense Corps (Tōkyō Rengō Bōgodan) to lead the city in civil air-defense drills in 1932.⁹ And again in 1934, the second large-scale Kantō air-defense drills in Tokyo, in Yokohama, and across Kanagawa prefecture were held on that day.¹⁰ Wartime civil air-defense journals continued to harken back to 1923 as a cautionary tale of the potential for cataclysmic destruction.¹¹

For the Japanese government, two groups were involved in air defense: first, the army and navy were responsible for preventing attacks; and second, civilians were charged with ameliorating damage and tending to the injured. The latter, commonly referred to as kokumin bōkū or minbōkū, which prompted the formation of regional and neighborhood air-raid defense corps (bōgodan) starting in September 1932, is the primary focus of this book, although the two are inextricably linked. In fact, linking them was a primary government objective. The key to civil defense was the formation of neighborhood associations (tonarigumi) throughout the country. These were units of ten to fifteen households tasked with defending their collective homes, and most importantly fighting fires. During the war, they also served as neighborhood watches, distributed food rations, sold government bonds, disseminated official propaganda, and enforced mutual surveillance. While the neighborhood association system was formalized and made compulsory by law in September 1940, it was already widespread in the 1930s.¹² Getting people to step forward to lead air-raid defense groups, however, regardless of the perceived honor, often required coaxing, such as special invitations to restricted imperial sites like Shinjuku Gyōen to instill gratitude and loyalty. Evolving in tandem with government air-defense legislation first codified in 1937, these neighborhood groups worked with local police corps (keibōdan), officially established on January 24, 1939, under the auspices of the chief of police, who was also in charge of the fire department. With backgrounds in firefighting and defense, over 150,000 police corps members were employed as paid civil servants to manage civil-defense practices. They wore uniforms that distinguished them from average civilians.¹³

Municipal air-defense drills in Japan began as early as 1928 in the city of Osaka, mobilizing nearly two million people in an orchestrated blackout and other activities.¹⁴ Drills were held in various municipalities around the country each year thereafter. These drills ramped up after the brief Shanghai Incident of 1932, a Sino-Japanese skirmish that prompted Japanese aerial bombardment on the Chinese mainland and was well publicized in the mass media.¹⁵ As the historian David Earhart has noted, these images of Japanese aerial bombardment of Chinese targets conveyed conflicting messages about Japan’s military might and its vulnerability, demonstrating that Japan was master of the skies in Asia, while showing the threat of devastation that these air raids posed for the homeland.¹⁶ This perceived vulnerability triggered widespread concern about protecting Japan’s own skies. By 1933 the term hijōji, or time of crisis, was in common use, and by 1935 air-defense drills were considered part of Japan’s calendar of annual events (nenjū gyōji) that included religious observances and festivals.¹⁷ The culture of air defense became part of everyday life.

Tokyo held a major regional defense exercise from August 9 to 11, 1933, less than six months after Japan stunned the world and withdrew from the League of Nations to protest being officially censured for its activities in Manchuria.¹⁸ In the interim, there had been numerous public donation campaigns to support such exercises, and newspapers publicized beautiful stories (bidan) of impoverished children even contributing their entire savings to the cause.¹⁹ The event was billed in the press as fundamentally different from previous exercises because it would simulate real battle (jissenteki) conditions employing both military and civilian defense corps.²⁰ In conjunction with these drills, the municipal government issued the information pamphlet Let’s Protect Our Imperial Capital! Citizen’s Information for Kantō Air-Defense Drills (Warera no teito wa warera de mamore! Kantō bōkū enshū shimin kokoroe) (figure I.2).²¹ On the cover of the pamphlet, a nighttime cityscape looms overhead, pictured from a dramatically low angle, accentuating the tower of the National Diet building. An antiaircraft artillery gun sits prominently in the foreground pointed upward at the night sky, gesturing toward enemy aircraft caught in the intersecting bleached beams of searchlights. The image takes the perspective of the viewer on the street gazing at the firmament. The urban space is claustrophobic, forcing the eye upward into the unknown. There is nowhere to go. All roads are blocked. Easily mistaken for a scene out of a contemporary expressionist film, the futuristic metropolis here is transformed into a weaponized, dystopian urban nightmare of ominous shadows on the ground and peril from above.²² Like the drills that it depicts, the cover image invites the viewer to imagine the heart-pounding experience of warfare in a city under siege. But as a simulation—in fact, a representation of a simulation—security is assured, and one can savor the threat of annihilation without actually experiencing extermination. Air-defense imagery was simultaneously frightening and enthralling.

Visual and audio communication were essential for the culture of civil defense. To aid in the dissemination of these bōkū practices, the air-defense drills were simultaneously broadcast on the radio (bōkū hōsō) to the entire country and captured on film, offering extended vicarious delectation through traveling screenings or as clips in newsreels, turning each enactment into a media event.²³ Entrepreneurs and official organizations even issued sets of commemorative postcards for these events mirroring the pamphlet’s dramatic aesthetics and catering to a burgeoning consumer market for bōkū memorabilia as collectibles (figure I.3). Starting in 1938, there were regular air-defense movie screenings that included international films from Germany.²⁴ This multisensory approach obliges us to look beyond print and visual culture as isolated entities to a more complex network of modes that engaged all the senses. Bōkū culture was inherently multimodal since it mixed textual, visual, aural, haptic, embodied, and spatial elements in a variety of media forms.

Figure I.2 Tōkyō Shiyakusho, Let’s Protect Our Imperial Capital! Citizen’s Information for Kantō Air-Defense Drills (Warera no teito wa warera de mamore! Kantō bōkū enshū shimin kokoroe), pamphlet, August 1933.

Figure I.3 Cover envelope, Postcards of the Great Kantō Air-Defense Drills (Kantō bōkū daienshū ehagaki), Greater Japan Military Education Association (Dai Nippon Gunji Kyōikukai), August 1933.

Japan’s national propaganda movements were increasingly orchestrating bodily practices and reconfiguring geospatial relationships across the empire through mass game-style performances. The historian Hayakawa Tadanori has richly described these media-driven techniques of patriotism (aikoku no gihō) that included everything from creating popular dances and songs to normalize the raising of the hinomaru (rising sun) national flag to inculcating appropriate social morality in daily activities such as taking the train and eating.²⁵ The scale, reach, and impact of these media enterprises were staggering. As the historian Kenneth Ruoff has discussed, by 1940 there were 105 million imperial subjects, 73 million in Japan’s naichi (the homeland), and for the national Foundation Day (Kigensetsu) celebration that commemorated the 2,600th anniversary of the legendary founding of Japan by Emperor Jimmu, they were engaged en masse in over twelve thousand staged events that included a series of synchronized actions across the empire. The crowning event in Tokyo on November 10 was attended by fifty thousand people, while simultaneously broadcast throughout the empire by radio. Modern communication apparatuses—particularly the radio—were widely acclaimed in Japan along with all the wondrous new technologies of modern warfare. Such modern media enabled the dissemination and mass spectacle of air-defense culture.

In response to the 1933 Tokyo air-defense drills, a pithy cartoon ran in the English-language newspaper Japan Advertiser in August spotlighting their theatrical dimensions and the viewers’ experiences as spectators (figure I.4). So This Is an Air Raid! reads the title, voicing the reaction of the audience watching the New Ensemble drills on the Tokyo Stage. Removed from the activities, the audience views the city as a stage on which civil air defense is being enacted. It is an exciting curiosity rather than a life-or-death exercise. The viewing public’s skepticism toward such defense schemes continued well into the war years as many watched, and later participated, with deep misgivings.²⁶

Figure I.4 So This Is an Air Raid! cartoon, Japan Advertiser, August 1933. The Japan Times.

Publicly skeptical, the journalist Kiryū Yūyū (1873–1941) responded in the Shinano mainichi shinbun with his now-famous essay Scoffing at the Great Kantō Air-Defense Exercise (Kantō bōkū daienshū o warau), in which he dismissed their effectiveness and urged readers to consider ways to avert war rather than fall prey to a false sense of security in mobilization. Writing about the drills, he explained, broadcast nationwide over AK [JOAK, Tokyo Broadcasting Station], the residents of Tokyo, and indeed, the people of our nation, surely grasped and had an acute realization as to how heavy the damage would be, as well as how unspeakable the devastation would be, if it were actual warfare. Or rather, they likely strongly sensed that such a situation of war must never happen, and that it must never be allowed to happen. Yet, these mock exercises would be of no actual use, he concluded, because by the time enemy planes entered Japanese air space, they would drop bombs that would turn the wood houses of Tokyo into ashes, leaving no recourse but to request peace—in other words, surrender. Kiryū continued,

No matter how it is dinned into us to remain calm and composed, and no matter how often we go through drills on a daily basis, in an emergency, we can do nothing in the face of the instinct of fear. I can see the panic of the city’s residents running around in confusion, and the dropped bombs will not only cause fires themselves but lead to fires everywhere. And we can imagine how it would cause pandemonium, a scene of carnage on a massive scale, a tragic spectacle similar to the Great Kantō Earthquake. Moreover, such an aerial attack could potentially be repeated multiple times.

The solution, he felt, had to be found in preventing enemy airplanes from reaching the skies above the imperial capital. Otherwise, Japan was destined for defeat. Expressing confidence in the nation’s modern wartime technologies of communication, Kiryū emphasized the need for early detection to deploy the air force to fight the enemy over the ocean instead: Air-raid drills must be held under such a strategic plan. Otherwise, it does not matter how large-scale it is, it does not matter how often it is held—it will be useless in the face of actual war. . . . And if holding such a drill cannot be avoided, it must assume a final war that will determine the victor and the loser. And as spectacular as that drill would be, it would essentially be a mere puppet show. This puppet show included blackouts, which in his estimation would only cause panic. For Kiryū, advancements in science were the solution to early detection and air defense. He concludes, The wonders of modern science will not cease until infrared is used in war. No matter how dark of a place you hide in, no matter where you hide, by using infrared, you can clearly ascertain the location of enemy military forces, making it easy to obliterate them. And as World War I demonstrated, those who attack from the sky are the victors, and those who are attacked from the sky are the losers.²⁷

For his efforts, Kiryū was summarily dismissed from the newspaper. And the newspaper company was actively boycotted by local veterans’ groups. The drills continued. From that point forward, directly engaging the general public in civil air defense, inculcating them with appropriate levels of alarm and preparedness while containing their terror, increasingly became a central mission of the government. Such actions engaged people in their own defense and also kept them occupied, deflecting attention away from potential criticism of the war.

The concerns that produced these air-defense drills and images spurred the national campaign Protect the Skies (Mamore ōzora, 護れ大空), which the government introduced in 1933 with an upbeat popular song. The army captain Machida Keiji (1896–1990) penned the lyrics, and the well-known composer Eguchi Yoshi (1903–78) wrote the music. The catchy tune, issued by Columbia Records, soon echoed through the halls.

Oh great Pacific Ocean!

Oh great Asian continent!

Our squadrons extend throughout the skies²⁸

Swallowing our enemies in their path

The power of our air force

Anyone would fear such an invincible country

Protect the skies

The skies of Japan

Protect the skies

The skies of Japan

Impregnable defenses

Tenfold and twentyfold strong

Searchlights and antiaircraft guns

Acoustic locators and barrage nets

In the skies above the imperial capital floats a fortress

Protect the skies

The skies of the imperial capital

Protect the skies

The skies of the imperial capital

Should the air-raid siren blare out of the darkness

Strictly follow the blackout regulations

And witness our Pure Land rise like the phoenix

No corner of this land is unprotected

Protect the skies

Our skies

Protect the skies

Our skies

Patriotic antiaircraft artillery and airplanes

The hot blood of patriotism surging to the heavens

All signs of the enemy blown to smithereens

The triumphal song booming to the edge of the sky

Protect the skies

The skies of our homeland

Protect the skies

The skies of our homeland²⁹

As the jubilant lyrics of the song suggest, aviation had expanded Japan’s strategic connection to the world. The invincible power of the nation’s air force was metaphorically envisioned as phoenix wings extending for ten thousand miles that could conquer any enemies. At the same time, that expanded radius afforded by modern aviation also implicated Japan as target. Mapped diagrams of bombing radii indicating attack ranges and target proximity from various regional outposts acutely reveal the island nation’s exposure as the enemy’s crosshairs similarly extended across the Pacific. The air-defense poster Action Radius of Heavy Bombers (Jūbakugekiki no kōdō hankei, 1938), cheerily rendered in bright colors, shows the target range of aerial bombers originating from Vladivostok, Alaska, and Manila, the capital of the American colony in the Philippines, as well as British-held Hong Kong, and the Bonin Islands in the Central Pacific (just south of which sat Iwo Jima, an eventual site of American invasion) (figure I.5).³⁰ The Japanese archipelago and colonial Korea are highlighted in bright red and sit in the center of overlapping target ranges from multiple destinations. It was clear that Japan existed within an overwhelming dialectic of strength and vulnerability.

Protect the Skies soon became one of many popular national wartime songs (kokuminka) that took up defense themes, including the Air-Defense Song (Bōkū no uta) released by Japan Victor in 1940, composed as a recruitment ditty by luminary Sasaki Shunichi for the Greater Japan Air-Defense Association (Dai Nippon Bōkū Kyōkai) established in April 1939 by the Home Ministry to inculcate its national defense policies.³¹ These songs were both auditory entertainment and visual stimuli since the lyrics were circulated in print with evocative illustrations of airplanes and aviators. For example, the stanzas of Protect the Skies were emblazoned on a sky-blue postcard amid a squadron unit of three airplanes in perfect formation soaring triumphantly into the clouds. Symbols of power and dominance, airplanes were transcendentally beautiful. In fact, airplanes dominated the early twentieth-century visual field across the world. They were sublime objects appreciated both for their aesthetic qualities as well as for their technological marvels. As the aviation scholar Robert Wohl has noted, "The invention of the airplane was at first perceived by many as an aesthetic event with far-reaching implications for the new century’s artistic and moral sensibility. And while exciting the imagination, with its seeming conquest over nature, the airplane also gave rise to utopian hopes and gnawing fears."³² Aviation also quickly became associated with death in the public imagination, since the press sensationalized the fiery fatalities of numerous pilots in spectacular crashes. It was the excitement of risk-taking that drew crowds to watch the heroic aviators and produced the mass entertainment of aviation from its early years.

Figure I.5 Poster, Action Radius of Heavy Bombers (Jūbakugekiki no kōdō hankei), 1938. National Archives of Japan.

The aviator was a masculine hero par excellence. The urban historian Adnan Morshed has surmised that the aviator was viewed by many as a modern hero, a lofty symbol of the modern age, a godlike seer of the world, and, no less, a Darwinist emblem of highest evolution.³³ Japanese aviators were similarly heroic, often presented in stalwart poses gazing intently at a majestic sky, the new frontier. They were a fusion of man and machine that was emblematic of the modern age of industrialization. This hypermasculine identity did not, however, preclude the appearance of female aviators, who became parallel icons on the cultural scene in popular entertainment, albeit decidedly more jovial than their valiant male counterparts. Women dressed as aviators abounded in advertisements and on the stage. And just as the figure of the aviator traversed from male to female, it crisscrossed from the sublime to the everyday.

An amusing promotional paddle fan (uchiwa) distributed by a soy sauce company cheerfully presents the first stanza of Protect the Skies alongside a chorus line of three young girls dressed as aviators, complete with jumpsuits and goggles, standing on clouds (figure I.6). In unison, they brandish the national and imperial army flags, sending off their pilots to protect the nation. Like a theatrical dance revue, this chorus line evokes the familiar sounds of burlesque musical accompaniment orchestrating the figures in synchronized movement. They are Japan’s wartime version of the renowned Tiller Girls, the first precision chorus line of linked dancers, famously described by the German cultural critic Siegfried Kracauer in his 1927 article The Mass Ornament. Referring to the synchronized chorus line’s movement in perfect unison as a mass object of modern culture, a surface-level expression of the age, Kracauer compared it to factory labor under Taylorist-style capitalism, where individuals were being merged into undifferentiated masses as cogs in industrial machines. And regardless of how amusing their dances were, this precision female chorus line’s abstracted aesthetic machinery represented an alarming trend toward industrialism’s incorporation of the individual body—and the modern woman—into the national body politic, which the military-industrial complex soon mobilized on assembly lines to produce the weapons of war.³⁴

Figure I.6 Uchiwa fan, Protect the Skies (Mamore ōzora), advertisement with song lyrics, Soy Sauce Company, 1930s. H. Tamura Collection.

Heroic and spectacular images of airplanes predominated in all spheres. Thus, another fan fittingly displays three airplanes soaring upward pulling three main patriotic slogans: national unity (kyokoku itchi), loyalty and patriotic service (jinchū hōkoku), and untiring perseverance (kennin jikyū). The mass media prominently featured inspiring pictures of both airplanes and aviators, as did the Japanese military in its public art exhibitions. Airplanes themselves were proudly exhibited as vital weapons in the Japanese arsenal. The national defense pavilion galleries, added onto the venerable imperial Yasukuni Shrine in 1934, displayed one of the imperial military patriotic airplane models, number 30 (Aikoku 30-gō), inscribed with the name of the donors, schoolgirls, acknowledging the group that contributed financially to its manufacture. Such aircraft were purchased with public donations from nationwide fundraising campaigns beginning in late 1931 and given heraldic Shinto naming ceremonies at the Yoyogi Parade Grounds, presided over by the emperor, and broadcast across the country. Displaying the names of their donors on the fuselage, the planes flew flights of gratitude for audiences before heading to battle in Manchuria. The press extensively covered these fundraising campaigns, generating a massive upsurge in patriotic giving that came to be called donation fever. It inspired the popular Aikokugō Song sung by the child star Kawamura Junko with the catchy refrain, Go! Go! Our Aikokugō!³⁵ This patriotic plane, symbolic of the nation’s collective support for airpower, hung in the Yasukuni gallery suspended above a room full of impressive military weapons (figure I.7).³⁶ It included acoustic locators (chōonki), curiously shaped devices for amplifying the sound of approaching enemy aircraft, which stood below, gaping upward at the plane like colossal tubas. Oversized bombs, tanks, antiaircraft guns, and searchlights also filled the galleries. This panoply of instruments of defense and destruction were objects of wonder.

By World War I, aviation was transforming warfare and turning the sky into a new kind of battlefield. As early as 1908, famed science-fiction novelist H. G. Wells published The War in the Air in which he imagined futuristic aerial warfare while expressing a strong concern about the ferocity of Japan’s air force, a concern symptomatic of the broader fear of the purported yellow peril that had surged again after the Russo-Japanese War.³⁷ This fear was strongly reiterated in British author Steven Southwold’s 1931 dystopian fictional novel The Gas War of 1940, a self-described thriller, written under the pseudonym Miles. In the novel, Japan, among other alleged rogue nations such as Mexico, attacks America, taking an armada of bomb-laden dirigibles the nine thousand miles across China, Asia, Europe, and the Atlantic from the east, leaving behind them no more than a vast huddle of tumbled ruins soaked with gas and choked with the old and the new dead. Cruising over an area that included towns so widely apart as Newark and Memphis, as Richmond and St. Louis, the Japanese are described as having deliberately, cold-bloodedly, set about the murder of millions of civilians, and the destruction by fire and explosion of a hundred towns and cities. When eventually triumphant, they demand that the whole of the U.S. west of longitude 95 degrees W. should be ceded to Japan.³⁸ Representations of Japan as aggressor in the war of the future were circulating widely in popular literature abroad, and selected translations started to be published in Japan.³⁹ Japanese popular literature responded with a spate of future-war novels (and then film adaptations) with the US or the British as the nation’s adversaries.⁴⁰

Figure I.7 Postcard, gallery view, National Defense Pavilion (Kokubōkan), Yasukuni Shrine, 1942. Courtesy of Yasukuni Jinja.

As an identified potential military aggressor and, consequently, self-perceived target, the Japanese government realized the need to develop a comprehensive defense system. In the skies above the imperial capital floats a fortress, intoned the Protect the Skies air-defense ballad, a fortress for repelling squadrons of enemy aircraft. This fortresslike system came to be visualized as concentric rings of defense linking the air and ground and was widely depicted across the mass media (figure I.8). Protect the Skies (Mamore ōzora), a special photographic supplement issued by Children’s Science (Kodomo no kagaku) magazine in January 1936, vividly pictured these rings of defense using cinematic aesthetics and modernist montage.⁴¹

Figure I.8 Air-Defense Monitoring Zone (Bōkū kanshi chitai), illustration from Protect the Skies (Mamore ōzora). Children’s Science (Kodomo no kagaku) 22, no. 1 (January 1936), supplement. Courtesy of Kodomo no Kagaku.

The publication starts with approaching enemy aircraft: The battlefield of the land and sea goes to the skies, the great skies. The airplanes and their views of the sky and ground are pictured cinematically in vertical film strips, a visual device repeated throughout (figure I.9). In the outermost ring of the air-defense fortress stands an army of diligent observers surveilling the sky with binoculars day and night alongside large arrays of acoustic listening devices—the ears of the air-defense war. Greatly magnifying the hearing capabilities of the naked human ear, the acoustic locators could detect the sound of approaching enemy airplanes well in advance of their appearance. To reinforce this metaphoric connection, an oversized, disembodied ear is pictured hovering above the instruments, instantiating the amplified range into the ether. The second and third rings hold searchlights—the eyes of the air-defense war—placed among the acoustic locators and air force defense squadrons (figure I.10). A disembodied, oversized eye stares out with concern from the dark void, a visual synecdoche for the male watchmen seen peering attentively into the night sky. A film strip sits to the right picturing the powerful beams of light that illuminate the firmament. The next ring adds antiaircraft artillery. And the innermost ring around the city consists of barrage nets suspended from air-defense balloons (bōkū kikyū) floating portentously to snag any intruders just as a spider’s web catches flies.

If the enemy were to penetrate the outer defense barriers, then searchlights and antiaircraft guns would be engaged. Sirens and then radio broadcasts would launch defense squadrons and activate air wardens and first responders, which included ladder brigades and bucket relays for extinguishing fires, gas-masked deputies spreading powder to neutralize poison gas, nurses and neighborhood wardens to carry stretchers and tend to the injured. The issue culminates with the Protect the Skies campaign song’s lyrics on the inside back cover recapitulating the reader’s sensory experience of protecting the skies through visual and auditory engagement.

Like this special issue, the visuality of wartime aviation was deeply affective. The approach of enemy aircraft seen from the ground was portrayed as awesome and terrifying; Japan’s defensive forces were depicted as mighty and heroic. Squadrons of airplanes colonized the sky. Their aerial combat was reminiscent of dogfights of yore. Conversely, the view of the ground seen from above was seemingly all-powerful—abstract and nearly absent of people—it produced a target devoid of humanity. When outfitted with cameras, airplanes profoundly transformed the nature of sight from above into an apparently omnipotent mobile vision. Morshed has described this aerial view as an aesthetics of ascension, the dominating gaze of a godlike spectator that emboldened planners to envision the future by reordering the chaotic present. In writing about famed architect Le Corbusier’s utopian concept of aerial vision based on his inspirational flight in 1929 and later seminal book Aircraft (1935), Morshed argues that this generated a new phenomenon of seeing things on a vertical frontier.⁴² In wartime, the vertical frontier required defense and conquest of the sky. The sky is a lifeline (sora wa seimeisen) was an often-repeated slogan for the national mobilization movement.

Figure I.9 The Battlefield of the Land and Sea Goes to the Skies, the Great Skies (Riku to umi to no senjō wa sora e ōzora e), photomontage illustration from Protect the Skies (Mamore ōzora). Children’s Science (Kodomo no kagaku) 22, no. 1 (January 1936), supplement. Courtesy of Kodomo no Kagaku.

Figure I.10 Searchlights Are the Eyes of the Air-Defense War (Shōkūtō wa bōkūsen no me de aru), photomontage illustration from Protect the Skies (Mamore ōzora). Children’s Science (Kodomo no kagaku) 22, no. 1 (January 1936), supplement. Courtesy of Kodomo no Kagaku.

Air-defense strategy for protecting the sky was communicated in a variety of visual idioms, including abstracted schematic representations akin to modern-day sports playbooks that were disseminated in popular materials like Mitsukoshi department store’s double-sided flyer Panorama Exhibit of the Imperial Capital’s Air Defense (figure I.11).⁴³ Department stores were key commercial partners in communicating civil air-defense culture to the viewing public. Long-standing purveyors of goods and entertainment, they hosted everything from civil-defense exhibitions of poster designs to dioramas demonstrating the proper militarization of daily life on the home front, all the while selling prepackaged comfort bags (imon bukuro) for families to send to soldiers on the front lines. Mitsukoshi’s flyer reveals a visual shorthand that came to be widely understood by the consumer public through systematic repetition and codification in all spheres of visual culture. The pamphlet presents the concentric rings of air defense under the title Easy Guide to Understanding Air Defense (Bōkū hayawakari) with six critical steps detailed. In addition to spotting attacks and responding to commands, the pamphlet’s key point was the need to hide [Japan’s] cities from the enemy by conducting blackouts, using camouflage, and activating the guard circle. It concluded, the army and the citizens must cooperate in preparing themselves for air raids in advance of the battles because, as the slogan went, without air defense, there is no national defense (bōkū nakushite kokubō nashi).

As the historian Sheldon Garon has detailed, air defense was a global movement facilitated by transnational learning that flowed among Axis and Allied nations despite vast differences in politics. More than militarism or fascism, it was a product of total war that put home fronts under extreme stress.⁴⁴ Therefore, Japan looked equally to Nazi Germany and Great Britain, not to mention fascist Italy, France, the US, and the Soviet Union,