ABSTRACT
This chapter examines Japan's history and popular art in order to illustrate the meaning of Liberation. In the political realm Liberation subsumes the individual as a political actor. If Liberality views the individual as embedded in a larger group, Liberation goes one step further and views the collectivity as an individual. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries political cartoons played a crucial role in knitting together the imagined community of modern national states via the technology of mass print media. Late nineteenth-century Japan, threatened by Western imperialist powers, used politicized art to construct new forms of identity by defining us and the other in order to carve out sovereignty and Political Liberation. Yulia Mikhailova explores how during the Russo-Japanese War political cartoons were employed to whip up chauvinistic sentiments that spread among the masses, which in no small way shaped its nationalistic sentiments and solidified Japan as an imperialist state.
