ABSTRACT
In Japan, as with other regions that were long deemed “peripheral” to the war, news was not just passively “consumed”. It was actively appropriated and interpreted. The mass media produced texts and images in which interpretation surpassed simple coverage and functioned as a platform for politicians, intellectuals, academics and businessmen to discuss the impact of the war. Simultaneously, the ministerial bureaucracy commissioned a large number of studies of the war, sending bureaucrats to Europe and the USA, resulting in extensive publications. There was also mediation and reflection within less elite levels of society.
This chapter will focus on the Ministry of Education, but also on an elementary school teacher and his attempts to mediate the war for his pupils and local citizens, as well as on urban consumption culture. As the department store Mitsukoshi shows, the war was featured there in exhibitions and public lectures, for instance by an engineering professor who shared his direct observations of wartime Europe. The chapter argues that the entirety of this complex web of activities by mediators on different levels constituted a form of collective war experience that differed from societies more directly involved in military fighting, mobilisation and mass-destruction.
