Japan's Total Empire. Louise Young

a hallmark of broadcasting in the 1930s and 1940s. The most spectacular of these was the live broadcast—simultaneous radio coverage from the scene of an event. In 1931 and 1932, NHK began participating in public ceremonials throughout the country with great frequency, involving themselves in troop send-offs and welcome parades, funerals, military reviews, collection drives, and armament christenings. Like the photograph, the live broadcast closed the distance gap and made the event immediate for the listening audience. Just as the first widespread use of battlefield photography during the Russo-Japanese War had illustrated the potential of photojournalism, the first radio war demonstrated the power of broadcast communications.

      Radio's live broadcasting of military ceremonies changed the local character of these events, greatly enhancing their appeal and news value. The first of the live broadcasts was a three-city air-defense drill conducted by Kobe, Kyoto, and Osaka on November 11, 1931. By the end of the year NHK had participated in three mass military funerals broadcast from Nii-gata and Sendai, and five send-off ceremonies from Hiroshima's Ujina Wharf. During the following year, radio audiences could tune in to live broadcasts on the average of once a week. The fifty-three live broadcasts included three prayer ceremonies held at Yasukuni, the national shrine where dead soldiers were enshrined as military gods; one air-defense drill; the “Fourth Memorial Service for the War Dead of the Sendai Unit of the Second Division” from Sendai City as well as thirteen other funerals; seven welcome parades, including the “Victorious Return of the Second Division” from in front of Sendai Station; two send-offs; twenty airplane christenings; three weapons-donation ceremonies; and an “Evening of Battle Stories Commemorating the Glorious Victory” from Tokyo's Hibiya Public Hall on June 29.³⁵

      NHK also developed live broadcast programs for troop entertainment. In a spectacular advertisement for their newly established radio link-up with Manchuria, NHK mobilized storytellers, singers, minstrels, comedians, and other popular entertainers to participate in an “Evening of Entertainment for Our Brothers in Manchuria.” Broadcast live from Tokyo Playhouse on October 30, the “Evening of Entertainment” proved such a success that ten new programs were produced by January 24, 1932.³⁶ In this way, NHK used the war to market their newly developed news services, competing with the press by innovating and expanding news production.

      The war-mongering behavior of radio and press in 1931–1932 was a predictable reaction to the pressures of a well-developed commercial market for news; the media sensationalized the war because consumers bought more papers and radio contracts that way. But as in the earlier imperial war booms, their actions resulted in a transformation of the news market as well. In the wake of the Manchurian Incident, the Asahi, the Mainichi, and NHK emerged as the clear leaders in a more national news market, helping to define a nationally unified response to the military crisis in the empire. As the actions of the news media revealed, the commercial relationship between the mass media and the public created a positive feedback loop in the production and consumption of media products on the theme of war, and served to inflate the Manchurian Incident war boom.

      This dynamic formed an integral part of the phenomenon of jingoism. War, by this time, was known to stimulate technological leaps in fields of medicine, weaponry, and heavy industry As Japan's experience in the war fever of 1931–1933 suggests, this also applied to developments in the mass media. The rise in demand during the Manchurian Incident provided an opportunity for the press and radio to test market innovations in format, invest in technological improvements, and put into practice new sales techniques. Such advances built upon the foundation of a well-developed national news market. The technological and commercial developments of the 1920s primed the news industry for a growth spurt once the right market conditions presented themselves. Responding energetically to these opportunities, the mass media infected the country with war fever. Essential to imperial jingoism, then, was the process of innovation and expansion in the mass production of an industrialized mass culture.

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      Led by the news media giants, an increasingly one-dimensional interpretation of the events in Manchuria expanded into other areas of mass culture. Books, magazines, movies, records, and other forms of popular entertainment took the sense of national crisis primed by the press and radio, and infused it with the boisterousness of a carnival, as Manchuria became the theme for vaudeville acts, Kabuki tragedies, and even restaurant menus. This cultural deluge constituted a second dimension of the imperial jingoism of the Manchurian Incident. Mass-culture industries flooded their marketplace with Manchurian-theme products, and in the process disseminated a specific package of information and a set interpretation of events on the continent. Manchurian-theme products glorified military action, heroized the colonial army, and extolled the founding of Manchukuo. Telling and retelling the epochal moments of the Sino-Japanese conflict in every conceivable cultural form, the mass media helped shape public memory of the Manchurian Incident. When representations of Manchuria moved from the factual, if selective, reportage in the news to fictionalized dramatizations on stage and screen, the complex realities of the military occupation were reduced to the simple and sanctifying patterns of myth.³⁷ The saturation coverage, the winnowing out of key stories that rendered symbolically the justice of Japan's war aims, and the multimedia representations of these stories all were defining characteristics of imperial jingoism.

      As was true for the press, jingoism was nothing new for the publishing and entertainment industries. From the emergence of mass magazines to the birth of modern drama, the development of the mass-culture industries was profoundly influenced by the cultural production of the Sino-Japanese and Russo-Japanese wars.³⁸ In the decades between the earlier imperial wars and the Manchurian Incident, mass production of the enbon (yen book) brought the price of books down, and the publication of the entertainment magazine Kingu broke records for magazine circulation.³⁹ At the same time, popular entertainment was revolutionized by the emergence of the film and recording industry. Like the technological advance of the press in the twenties, these developments profoundly influenced the scale of imperial jingoism, magnifying its impact on Japanese society.

      Another factor behind the greater contagiousness of the Manchurian Incident war fever was the new reach of the mass culture industries. Distribution networks in place by the end of the Meiji ensured that mass culture produced in the metropolis reached urban and rural audiences throughout the country. The history of the penetration of the rural market by metropolitan book and magazine publishers paralleled that of the press. The provincial trade of the Tokyo-based publishing industry was handled by seven major distributors, all established between 1890 and 1912.⁴⁰ Unlike publishing, where separate companies handled distribution, the early movie theaters were underwritten by such film-importing and production companies as Nikkatsu and Tenkatsu. From the establishment of Japan's first movie theater in the Asakusa neighborhood of Tokyo in 1903, the number of movie theaters grew rapidly. In 1912 the 164 first-run movie-halls nationwide were concentrated in Tokyo, Osaka, Kyoto, Kobe, Yokohama, and Nagoya, while over half of Japan's prefectures still had no theater. Less than ten years later all prefectures had at least one theater, and the numbers of first-run theaters had risen to 694. Of these, 86 were in Tokyo, 54 in Fukuoka prefecture, 47 in Hokkaid

, 39 in Osaka, and 34 in Shizuoka; the remaining prefectures had an average of 10 each.⁴¹ Both the investments in the machinery for mass production and the growth of nationwide distribution systems in the 1920s meant that once the publishing and entertainment industries caught the war fever, they spread it farther, faster, and more dramatically than during the earlier campaigns against China or Russia.

      Hard hit by the depression that had devastated the economy since 1929, the entertainment and publishing world looked upon the outbreak of the Manchurian Incident as manna from heaven. Charting trends in the book industry, a publisher's yearbook reported that “brisk sales of books on Manchuria have breathed new life into an utterly stagnated publishing industry,”⁴² Although before the occupation only specialty publishers like the South Manchurian Railway (Mantetsu), the China-Japan Culture Association (Chu

kai), or