Erotic grotesque nonsense
Subtitle: the mass culture of Japanese modern times
By: Miriam Silverberg.
Series: Asia Pacific modern -- 1.
Publisher: University of California Press
Published: 2006
Place of publication: Berkeley
Language: eng
Number of pages: 369
ISBN-13: 9780520222731
Subjects: Popular culture -- Japan -- History -- 20th century; Japan -- Civilization -- 1912-1926; Japan -- Civilization -- 1926-1945
Description: "This history of Japanese mass culture during the decades before Pearl Harbor argues that the new gestures, relationship, and humor of ero guro nansensu (erotic grotesque nonsense) expressed a self-consciously modern ethos that challenged state ideology and expansionism. Miriam Silverberg uses sources such as movie magazines, ethnographies of the homeless, and the most famous photographs from this era to capture the spirit, textures, and language of a time when the media reached all classes, connecting the rural social order to urban mores. Employing the concept of montage as a metaphor that informed the organization of Japanese mass culture during the 1920s and 1930s, Silverberg challenges the erasure of Japanese colonialism and its legacies."--Jacket.
Notes: "A Philip E. Lilienthal book in Asian studies"--Jacket.

Includes bibliographical references (p. 327-343) and index.
Table of contents: title: Japanese modern times; title: Japanese modern within modernity; title: Japanese modern sites; title: The modern girl as militant (movement on the streets); title: The café waitress sang the blues; title: Friends of the movies (from Ero to empire); title: The household becomes modern life; title: Asakusa; title: honky-tonk tempo; title: Asakusa eroticism; title: Down-and-out grotesquerie; title: Modern nonsense.