Gas Mask Nation was awarded the 2024 Prize for Outstanding Book from the Southeast Conference of the Association for Asian Studies. It explores the multilayered construction of an anxious yet perversely pleasurable culture of Japanese civil air defense. It investigates these layers through a diverse range of artworks and media. Most centrally, it reveals the immersive and performative nature of the culture of civil defense as Japan’s loyal imperial subjects were mobilized dutifully to enact highly orchestrated, large-scale civil air-defense drills throughout the country on a regular basis. Prevailing scholarship portrays the war years in Japan as a landscape of privation where consumer and popular culture—and creativity in general—were suppressed under the massive censorship of the war machine. Without denying the horrors of total war, we must revise this understanding of the cultural climate. Amid this hardship, tasty caramels were still sold to children with paper gas masks as promotional giveaways, and popular magazines featured everything from attractive models in the latest civil-defense fashions to marvelous futuristic wartime weapons. The visual and material culture of civil air defense, or bōkū, titillated the senses. Pleasure, desire, wonder, play, creativity, and humor were all still abundantly present. By grasping the full nature of wartime’s all-encompassing sensory and compensatory enticements, this book unmasks the dangers of its mix of sacrifice and gratification.

Gennifer Weisenfeld is the Walter H. Annenberg Distinguished Professor of Art History and Visual Studies at Duke University. She received her Ph.D. from Princeton University. Her field of research is modern and contemporary Japanese art history, design, and visual culture. She has written three books: Mavo: Japanese Artists and the Avant-Garde, 1905-1931 (University of California Press, 2002); Imaging Disaster: Tokyo and the Visual Culture of Japan’s Great Earthquake of 1923 (University of California Press, 2012, Japanese edition Seidosha, 2014); and most recently, Gas Mask Nation: Visualizing Civil Air Defense in Wartime Japan (University of Chicago Press, 2023). She also has a new book forthcoming from Duke University Press titled The Fine Art of Persuasion: Corporate Advertising Design, Nation, and Empire in Modern Japan.