the “Evening of Entertainment” proved such a success that ten new programs were produced by January 24, 1932.36 In this way, NHK used the war to market their newly developed news services, competing with the press by innovating and expanding news production.
The war-mongering behavior of radio and press in 1931–1932 was a predictable reaction to the pressures of a well-developed commercial market for news; the media sensationalized the war because consumers bought more papers and radio contracts that way. But as in the earlier imperial war booms, their actions resulted in a transformation of the news market as well. In the wake of the Manchurian Incident, the Asahi, the Mainichi, and NHK emerged as the clear leaders in a more national news market, helping to define a nationally unified response to the military crisis in the empire. As the actions of the news media revealed, the commercial relationship between the mass media and the public created a positive feedback loop in the production and consumption of media products on the theme of war, and served to inflate the Manchurian Incident war boom.
This dynamic formed an integral part of the phenomenon of jingoism. War, by this time, was known to stimulate technological leaps in fields of medicine, weaponry, and heavy industry As Japan's experience in the war fever of 1931–1933 suggests, this also applied to developments in the mass media. The rise in demand during the Manchurian Incident provided an opportunity for the press and radio to test market innovations in format, invest in technological improvements, and put into practice new sales techniques. Such advances built upon the foundation of a well-developed national news market. The technological and commercial developments of the 1920s primed the news industry for a growth spurt once the right market conditions presented themselves. Responding energetically to these opportunities, the mass media infected the country with war fever. Essential to imperial jingoism, then, was the process of innovation and expansion in the mass production of an industrialized mass culture.
UNOFFICIAL PROPAGANDISTS
Led by the news media giants, an increasingly one-dimensional interpretation of the events in Manchuria expanded into other areas of mass culture. Books, magazines, movies, records, and other forms of popular entertainment took the sense of national crisis primed by the press and radio, and infused it with the boisterousness of a carnival, as Manchuria became the theme for vaudeville acts, Kabuki tragedies, and even restaurant menus. This cultural deluge constituted a second dimension of the imperial jingoism of the Manchurian Incident. Mass-culture industries flooded their marketplace with Manchurian-theme products, and in the process disseminated a specific package of information and a set interpretation of events on the continent. Manchurian-theme products glorified military action, heroized the colonial army, and extolled the founding of Manchukuo. Telling and retelling the epochal moments of the Sino-Japanese conflict in every conceivable cultural form, the mass media helped shape public memory of the Manchurian Incident. When representations of Manchuria moved from the factual, if selective, reportage in the news to fictionalized dramatizations on stage and screen, the complex realities of the military occupation were reduced to the simple and sanctifying patterns of myth.37 The saturation coverage, the winnowing out of key stories that rendered symbolically the justice of Japan's war aims, and the multimedia representations of these stories all were defining characteristics of imperial jingoism.
As was true for the press, jingoism was nothing new for the publishing and entertainment industries. From the emergence of mass magazines to the birth of modern drama, the development of the mass-culture industries was profoundly influenced by the cultural production of the Sino-Japanese and Russo-Japanese wars.38 In the decades between the earlier imperial wars and the Manchurian Incident, mass production of the enbon (yen book) brought the price of books down, and the publication of the entertainment magazine Kingu broke records for magazine circulation.39 At the same time, popular entertainment was revolutionized by the emergence of the film and recording industry. Like the technological advance of the press in the twenties, these developments profoundly influenced the scale of imperial jingoism, magnifying its impact on Japanese society.
Another factor behind the greater contagiousness of the Manchurian Incident war fever was the new reach of the mass culture industries. Distribution networks in place by the end of the Meiji ensured that mass culture produced in the metropolis reached urban and rural audiences throughout the country. The history of the penetration of the rural market by metropolitan book and magazine publishers paralleled that of the press. The provincial trade of the Tokyo-based publishing industry was handled by seven major distributors, all established between 1890 and 1912.40 Unlike publishing, where separate companies handled distribution, the early movie theaters were underwritten by such film-importing and production companies as Nikkatsu and Tenkatsu. From the establishment of Japan's first movie theater in the Asakusa neighborhood of Tokyo in 1903, the number of movie theaters grew rapidly. In 1912 the 164 first-run movie-halls nationwide were concentrated in Tokyo, Osaka, Kyoto, Kobe, Yokohama, and Nagoya, while over half of Japan's prefectures still had no theater. Less than ten years later all prefectures had at least one theater, and the numbers of first-run theaters had risen to 694. Of these, 86 were in Tokyo, 54 in Fukuoka prefecture, 47 in Hokkaid
Hard hit by the depression that had devastated the economy since 1929, the entertainment and publishing world looked upon the outbreak of the Manchurian Incident as manna from heaven. Charting trends in the book industry, a publisher's yearbook reported that “brisk sales of books on Manchuria have breathed new life into an utterly stagnated publishing industry,”42 Although before the occupation only specialty publishers like the South Manchurian Railway (Mantetsu), the China-Japan Culture Association (Chu
The Tokyo Metropolitan Library Readership Survey, used by all the publishers’ yearbooks as the benchmark for popular tastes, gives an idea of what sort of merchandise was moving off the shelves. Among the most read books of 1932, for example, were Understanding New Weapons, The Army Reader, and The Navy Reader; the celebrated account of a female journalist at the front, Along with the Army in Male Attire; and the immensely popular story of the three soldiers who exploded themselves in the line of duty, The Unswervingly Loyal Three Human Bombs (plus The Heroic Five Human Bullets). In the field of juvenile literature, children's favorites of 1932 and 1933 included Our Army,
