Militarizing Childhoods, Infantilizing Wars in the Visual Culture of Twentieth-Century Japan

The frequency with which children have appeared in close proximity to soldiers is perhaps one of the most striking features of the visualization and textualization of war in the twentieth century. Such pictures and narratives become almost insignificant in their mass visibility at certain moments throughout the twentieth century. Around the world, such textual and visual configurations seem to iterate a pronounced intimacy, similarity, and natural connection between children and soldiers, innocence and war making. Whether Japanese Imperial Army soldiers are shown handing out caramels to Chinese children in the territories they had just conquered in the 1940s or U.S. soldiers appear chatting and laughing with Iraqi and Afghani children in the early 2000s, such depictions, I argue in this paper, feed into the modern ideology of the inevitability, humanity, and naturalization of war.

Adopting John Hutnyk’s term “trinketization” by which he means that children are turned into decorative trinkets, I will suggest that pictures and stories of children with soldiers work to evoke pity and sympathy, romanticize children, and trinketize childhood. They are collectively utilized to transmute war into an asthetic and rhetoric of rescue, peace, and (comforting) order. The context of war is manipulated. The exact nature of the relationship between soldiers of one nation and the children of another as well as the circumstances of their encounters are concealed. There is always a grateful, smiling child on hand to gaze up at a soldier, creating a fiction of facts that will form the basis of my analysis in this paper.