My dissertation examines the role of radio broadcasting in constituting mass culture as an integral part of politics in Japan during the period from the mid-1920s to the 1950s, that is, during both the Asia-Pacific War and the U.S. occupation. Transwar Japanese radio broadcasting has been discussed primarily in narrow terms of state control and indoctrination during the Asia-Pacific War, and the liberation of the masses or lack of such in the postwar "democratization" initiated by the U.S. occupation. My study demonstrates that Japan's transwar radio culture was far more lively and indicative of much more complex power relations. Contrary to common belief, wartime discourses and practices of Japanese radio never uniformly imagined radio listeners as passive audiences. Rather, political and social elites as well as government officials and broadcasters made systematic efforts to engage mass audiences as conscious listeners and radio participants who would choose to put what they heard into practice out of their own will. These efforts paralleled the empire's mobilization of national and colonial subjects for conducting the war. When the U.S. occupation arrived, habits of radio listening and audience participation from the former era actually facilitated, rather than impeded, the occupation's mission to transform the Japanese into active and self-responsible citizens for rebuilding the nation state in the new global order. My dissertation demonstrates that while radio was indeed a powerful and effective medium, politicizing the masses into "responsible" members of society through radio was neither a unilateral process nor a smooth operation. I argue that if radio served as a unique intermediary in transwar politics, it did so because of its ability to channel major political themes, norms, and representations into the realms of mass culture and the rhythms of the everyday. My research documents how seemingly trivial popular genres of broadcasting such as the amateur singing contest, the quiz show, and the serial drama played a central role, although not without unexpected twists, in awakening the masses into "responsible" and "useful" members of society in work and play.

Orson Welles’s greatest breakthrough into the popular consciousness occurred in 1938, three years before Citizen Kane, when his War of the Worlds radio broadcast succeeded so spectacularly that terrified listeners believed they were hearing a genuine report of an alien invasion—a landmark in the history of radio’s powerful relationship with its audience. In Radio’s America, Bruce Lenthall documents the enormous impact radio had on the lives of Depression-era Americans and charts the formative years of our modern mass culture. Many Americans became alienated from their government and economy in the twentieth century, and Lenthall explains that radio’s appeal came from its capability to personalize an increasingly impersonal public arena. His depictions of such figures as proto-Fascist Charles Coughlin and medical quack John Brinkley offer penetrating insight into radio’s use as a persuasive tool, and Lenthall’s book is unique in its exploration of how ordinary Americans made radio a part of their lives. Television inherited radio’s cultural role, and as the voting tallies for American Idol attest, broadcasting continues to occupy a powerfully intimate place in American life. Radio’s America reveals how the connections between power and mass media began.

This comprehensive companion is a much-needed reference source for the expanding field of radio, audio, and podcast study, taking readers through a diverse range of essays examining the core questions and key debates surrounding radio practices, technologies, industries, policies, resources, histories, and relationships with audiences. Drawing together original essays from well-established and emerging scholars to conceptualize this multidisciplinary field, this book’s global perspective acknowledges radio’s enduring affinity with the local, historical relationship to the national, and its unpredictably transnational reach. In its capacious understanding of what constitutes radio, this collection also recognizes the latent time-and-space shifting possibilities of radio broadcasting, and of the myriad ways for audio to come to us 'live.' Chapters on terrestrial radio mingle with studies of podcasts and streaming audio, emphasizing continuities and innovations in form and content, delivery and reception, production cultures and aesthetics, reminding us that neither 'radio' nor 'podcasting' should be approached as static objects of analysis but rather as mutually constituting cultural forms. This cutting-edge and vibrant companion provides a rich resource for scholars and students of history, art theory, industry studies, journalism, media and communication, cultural studies, feminist analysis, and postcolonial studies. Chapter 42 of this book is freely available as a downloadable Open Access PDF at http://www.taylorfrancis.com under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives (CC-BY-NC-ND) 4.0 license.

"Magazines & the Making of Mass Culture in Japan provides a detailed yet approachable analysis of the mechanisms central to the birth of mass culture in Japan by tracing the creation, production, and circulation of two critically important family magazines, Kingu (King) and Ie no hikari (Light of the Home). These magazines served to embed new instruments of mass communication and socialization within Japanese society and created mechanisms to facilitate the dissemination of hegemonic forms of discourse in Japan in the first half of the twentieth century. The amazing success of Kingu and Ie no hikari during the 1920s and 1930s not only established and normalized participation in a Japanese mass national audience--a community which had previously not existed--but also facilitated the rise of Japanese mass consumer culture in the postwar years. Amy Bliss Marshall Argues that the postwar mass Japanese national consumer is foreshadowed by the mass national audience created by family magazines of the interwar era. This book analytically narrates the creation and development of such publications, one explicitly capitalist and one outwardly agrarian, based on missions with an overarching desire to create a mass Japanese magazine audience. Magazines & the Making of Mass Culture in Japan highlights the importance of the seemingly innocuous acts of mass, leisure consumption of magazines and the goods advertised therein, thus aiding our understanding of the creation and direction of a new form of social participation and understanding--an essential part of not only the culture but also the politics of the transwar period."--

In Selling the Future, Ryan Moran explains how the life insurance industry in Japan exploited its association with mutuality and community to commodify and govern lives. Covering the years from the start of the industry in 1881 through the end of World War II, Moran describes insurance companies and government officials working together to create a picture of the future as precarious and dangerous. Since it was impossible for individual consumers to deal with every contingency on their own, insurance industry administrators argued that their usage of statistical data enabled them to chart the predictable future for the aggregate. Through insurance, companies and the state thus offered consumers a means to a perfectible future in an era filled with repeated crises. Life insurance functioned as an important modernist technology within Japan and its colonies to instantiate expectations for responsibility, to reconfigure meanings of mutuality, and to normalize new social formations (such as the nuclear family) as essential to life. Life insurance thus offers an important vehicle for examining the confluence of modes of mobilizing and organizing bodies, the expropriation of financial resources, and the action of disciplining workers into a capitalist system.

Using the framework of Edward Said’s Orientalism, this work examines how Western rock and pop artists—particularly during the age of album rock from the 1970s through the 1990s—perpetuated long-held stereotypes of Japan in their direct encounters with the country and in songs and music videos with Japanese content.