Erotic Grotesque Nonsense: The Mass Culture of Japanese Modern Times (Asia Pacific Modern) [Hardcover]

Miriam Silverberg (Author)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 0520222733 | ISBN-13: 978-0520222731 | Publication Date: April 4, 2007 | Edition: 1

This history of Japanese mass culture during the decades preceding 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. She evokes vivid images from daily life during the 1920s and 1930s, including details about food, housing, fashion, modes of popular entertainment, and attitudes toward sexuality. Her innovative study demonstrates how new public spaces, new relationships within the family, and an ironic sensibility expressed the attitude of Japanese consumers who identified with the modern as providing a cosmopolitan break from tradition at the same time that they mobilized for war.

Editorial Reviews

Review

"Leaves the reader longing to know more, and regretting that the author is no longer here to help us satisfy that wish."--Japanese Studies

"This is a book not just for Japan specialists, but for anyone interested in a history of cosmopolitism and modern life."--Jrnl Royal Anthro Inst

From the Inside Flap

"A sumptuously documented book, one that makes innovative use of the principle of montage to generate informative historical readings of Japan's myriad mass cultural phenomena in the early twentieth century. Both in terms of its scholarship and its methodology, this is a truly admirable work."--Rey Chow, Andrew W. Mellon Professor of the Humanities, Brown University

"As Miriam Silverberg has brilliantly shown here, the modern times of 1920s and '30s Japan were rendered in a cacophony of cultural mixing: a period of consumerist desires and Hollywood fantasy-making but also the rise of nationalist empire-building. Excavating its kaleidoscope of everyday culture Silverberg astutely offers a theory of montage for how Japanese subjects 'code-switched' in juggling the mixed cultural/political elements of these times. Utilizing a montage of media, texts, sites, and scholarship, Silverberg leads the reader into the terrain of the 'erotic grotesque nonsense' in a work that is as scintillating as it is theoretically important."--Anne Allison, author of Millennial Monsters: Japanese Toys and the Global Imagination

"Unlike other scholars who merely view ero-guro-nansensu in its literal meanings, Silverberg brilliantly documents it as a complex cultural aesthetic expressed in a spectrum of fascinating mass culture forms and preoccupations. With great erudition and humor, she traces the sensory and conceptual modes that are animated with potency and sophistication through this cultural metaphor. This book is destined to be a classic in Japan scholarship."--Laura Miller, author of Beauty Up: Exploring Contemporary Japanese Body Aesthetics

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 388 pages
• Publisher: University of California Press; 1 edition (April 4, 2007)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0520222733
• ISBN-13: 978-0520222731
• Product Dimensions: 8.6 x 6.3 x 1.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.6 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,701,708 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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18 of 19 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Critical Mass, December 15, 2007

By 

Crazy Fox (Chicago, IL USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Erotic Grotesque Nonsense: The Mass Culture of Japanese Modern Times (Asia Pacific Modern) (Hardcover)

Study modern Japanese history in any detail and, if you don't blink and miss it, you'll probably come across the keyword "Ero-Guro-Nansensu"--usually it merits a rushed and almost politely dismissive reference as a sort of decadent hiccup between Taisho democracy and Showa militarism. If this ever piqued your curiosity, then this is the book for you: a fine, critically astute, scholarly historical study, it takes a focused look on everything you ever wanted to know about Erotic-Grotesque-Nonsense but were afraid to ask.

And then some. Extensive research went into this book, and that in the kind of ephemeral sources that are hard to track down and harder to evaluate, and as a result something of the vibrant popular culture of Japan from 1923 until the late 1930's is communicated to the reader--the cafes, the movie theaters, the dance revues, magazines and cartoons, modern girls and juvenile delinquents, Charlie Chaplin and Shirley Temple, Ginza and Asakusa, and all that jazz. Some of this intentionally stretches the usual parameters of the three terms just a bit, but this allows Silverberg to analyze the given cacophony of mass cultural phenomena in a wider historical sense and so explore larger issues such as cultural borrowing and code-switching, changing family and gender roles, and complex political tensions at work therein. And all of this in a very attentive, nuanced fashion that does justice to the subject, avoiding the fruitless but tempting binaries of modern/traditional, imitative/authentic, complicit/resistant and the like. As such, though, the prose is a bit stiff and academic for such a lively subject, especially at the beginning, but this seems to stem more from the author's attempt to take these supposedly frivolous matters seriously as history, which was especially innovative when she first apparently started working on this book and still is intriguingly fresh even yet--besides which, every so often flashes of a pleasantly dry wit glimmer through, and Silverberg's use of montage as an organizing principle for the study is as creative as it is appropriate.

If there's one thing that annoys me about the book, it's that three of the chapters have already been published as individual articles elsewhere*. I know this is standard practice nowadays so I won't hold it against this particular title, but it still makes me feel a bit like I've been suckered into buying the same book several times over by the disreputable Asakusa shills and hawkers described right herein. Still, in this book all of that prior work is revised and brought together with lots of new and intriguing material to form a fascinating overall consideration of the otherwise mostly overlooked and definitely underestimated phenomenon of erotic-grotesque-nonsense. This is sure to become a seminal work in the field and a standard reference for up-and-coming cultural historians of Japan. Highly recommended.

*In Japan in the World, Recreating Japanese Women, 1600-1945, and Mirror of Modernity: Invented Traditions of Modern Japan (Twentieth-Century Japan, the Emergence of a World Power , No 9).