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.

"Gas Mask Nation explores Japanese daily life during the widespread culture of civil defense that emerged through fifteen years of war, beginning with Japan's invasion of Manchuria in 1931 and only ending with Japan's decisive defeat in WWII. This fifteen-year period involved intense social mobilization and the militarization of citizens. As in nearly every war since the invention of the airplane, surveillance, secrecy, and physical safety became visual symbols of national preparedness and anxiety. Everybody was vulnerable, always. And everybody had a role to play. Prevailing scholarship tends to portray the war years in Japan as a landscape of privation where consumer and popular culture were suppressed under the massive censorship of the war machine. Weisenfeld claims otherwise: while not denying the horrors of war, she shows that pleasure, desire, wonder, creativity, and humor were all still abundantly present. Even amidst the fear, tasty 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 futuristic wartime weapons. Gas Mask Nation examines the multilayered construction of an anxious yet perversely pleasurable culture of civil air defense through a diverse range of art works and media including experimental and documentary photographs, newsreels, popular magazine illustrations, advertising, cartoons, and state propaganda"--

In Behind the Gas Mask, Thomas Faith offers an institutional history of the Chemical Warfare Service, the department tasked with improving the Army's ability to use and defend against chemical weapons during and after World War One. Taking the CWS's story from the trenches to peacetime, he explores how the CWS's work on chemical warfare continued through the 1920s despite deep opposition to the weapons in both military and civilian circles. As Faith shows, the believers in chemical weapons staffing the CWS allied with supporters in the military, government, and private industry to lobby to add chemical warfare to the country's permanent arsenal. Their argument: poison gas represented an advanced and even humane tool in modern war, while its applications for pest control and crowd control made a chemical capacity relevant in peacetime. But conflict with those aligned against chemical warfare forced the CWS to fight for its institutional life--and ultimately led to the U.S. military's rejection of battlefield chemical weapons.

It revives the powerful emotions first evoked by these events, while providing new insight into how they have changed our nation and our times."--BOOK JACKET.

A book full of boxes. A box in itself. An unboxing. This book explores boxes in their broadest sense and size. It invites us to step into the field, unravel how and why things are contained and how it might be otherwise. By turning the focus of Science and Technology Studies (STS) to boxing practices, this collation of essays examines boxes as world-making devices. Gathered in the format of a field guide, it offers an introduction to ways of ordering the world, unpacking their boxed-up, largely invisible politics and epistemics. Performatively, pushing against conventional uses of academic books, this volume is about rethinking taken-for-granted formats and infrastructures of scholarly ordering - thinking, writing, reading. It diverges from encyclopedic logics and representative overviews of boxing practices and the architectural organization of monographs and edited volumes through a single, overarching argument. This book asks its users to leave well-trodden paths of linear and comprehensive reading and invites them to read sideways, creating their own orders through associations and relating. Thus, this book is best understood as an intervention, a beginning, an open box, a slim volume that needs expansion and further experiments with ordering by its users.

Treating rhetoric and symbols as central rather than peripheral to politics, Lisa Wedeen’s groundbreaking book offers a compelling counterargument to those who insist that politics is primarily about material interests and the groups advocating for them. During the thirty-year rule of President Hafiz al-Asad’s regime, his image was everywhere. In newspapers, on television, and during orchestrated spectacles. Asad was praised as the “father,” the “gallant knight,” even the country’s “premier pharmacist.” Yet most Syrians, including those who create the official rhetoric, did not believe its claims. Why would a regime spend scarce resources on a personality cult whose content is patently spurious? Wedeen shows how such flagrantly fictitious claims were able to produce a politics of public dissimulation in which citizens acted as if they revered the leader. By inundating daily life with tired symbolism, the regime exercised a subtle, yet effective form of power. The cult worked to enforce obedience, induce complicity, isolate Syrians from one another, and set guidelines for public speech and behavior. Wedeen‘s ethnographic research demonstrates how Syrians recognized the disciplinary aspects of the cult and sought to undermine them. In a new preface, Wedeen discusses the uprising against the Syrian regime that began in 2011 and questions the usefulness of the concept of legitimacy in trying to analyze and understand authoritarian regimes.

Historians have long been aware of the richness and complexity of the intellectual history of modern Japanese politics. Najita's study, however, is the first in a Western language to present a consistent and broad synthesis of this subject. Najita elucidates the political dynamics of the past two hundred years of Japanese history by focusing on the interplay of restorationism and bureaucratism within the context of Japan's modern revolution, the Meiji Restoration.