Red Guards and Salarymen: The Chinese Cultural Revolution and Comic Satire in 1960s Japan

This article explores how Japanese comic artists represented the early years of the Chinese Cultural Revolution in popular print culture, especially lowbrow comic magazines. It posits that Japanese cartoonists in their role as both purveyors of everyday humor and keenly observant social commentators...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:	The Journal of Asian studies 2015-11, Vol.74 (4), p.953-976
Main Author:	Esselstrom, Erik
Format:	Article
Language:	eng
Subjects:	Audience Audiences Avant-garde Chinese languages Consciousness Cultural Revolution Culture Developing countries Familiarity History Humor Imagery Japanese language LDCs Mao Zedong (1893-1976) Middle class Political activism Rhetoric Social classes Society
Online Access:	Get full text
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Summary:	This article explores how Japanese comic artists represented the early years of the Chinese Cultural Revolution in popular print culture, especially lowbrow comic magazines. It posits that Japanese cartoonists in their role as both purveyors of everyday humor and keenly observant social commentators employed the imagery and rhetoric of the Red Guard movement to critique the conservative social and economic order of Japanese corporate culture during the late 1960s era of high-speed growth; moreover, it contends that there was a surprisingly receptive audience for such criticism among the rank-and-file “salarymen” of the urban Japanese middle class. Finally, the precisely informed humor found in these comics also suggests that their target audience possessed detailed familiarity with contemporary events on the continent and interpreted those events through a deeply embedded cultural framework of ambivalence concerning modern Chinese society.
ISSN:	0021-9118 1752-0401