Magazines and the Making of Mass Culture in Japan

Family magazines like Ie no hikari (Light of the Home) and Kingu (King) became the first periodicals to reach more than one million readers in mid-1930’s Japan. These powerfully influential publications, moreover, helped to naturalize the practice of reading magazines and sculpted average perceptions of what such a product looked like. These magazines extended throughout Asia in the 1920s-1940s across the entire Japanese empire and beyond – from Sapporo to Okinawa, from Taipei to Seoul, Honolulu to Los Angeles. While there has been good work done toward better understanding the literature and advertising, for example, contained in such magazines, I argue that our historical understanding of magazines as a composite media with political power can still be usefully and critically expanded.

Japanese magazines in the Interwar years were produced and consumed as a mixed visual media, or a unified visual experience. The visual mixing that occurred on the pages of mass magazines developed in the middle of the 20^th Century and the manner in which they combined text and image, design and advertising shaped popular perceptions of print media in profound ways. Though the reader may not always be conscious of it, the content conveyed in the text of a magazine cannot be separated from the accompanying visual material — the pictures, comics, art, advertising, and graphic design — because, when he or she turns the pages of a magazine, all the elements are there together, to be perceived with the eye as smaller parts of an integrated whole. The creators of these publications understood that with their wide exposure came the potential for profound influence. Even with the first cover of Ie no hikari, the Sangyō Kumiai (Industrial Cooperative) explicitly discussed the appropriateness of the proposed articles and accompanying cover image because they were aware of the influence they could have over their audience in terms of ideals and desires, not just in the content but also in the imagery specifically. Similar discussions occurred with the folks at Kingu about the look and style the magazine wanted to project. This means they both, though independently, were aware of their power to communicate, thorough images and text, with the audience they had cultivated.

The self-conscious nature of the birth and development of magazines — advertising included — is thus particularly revealing about the process of naturalizing new consumption habits and the attendant shifts in cultural practices. I will provide a representative selection of pages that can illustrate the consistent relationship between advertising’s promotion of consumerism and the magazines as mass entertainment. This relationship supports the notion that consumerism itself provides an important conduit of meaning making within mass culture. Displaying the advertising in Kingu and Ie no hikari to track their trends over the course of the 1920s and 1930s reveals how the commercialized nature of magazines helped to provide a complementary layer of socialization. Put more simply, these magazines provided subtle lessons on how to participate in the nation not just as citizens, but as consumers as well.