In the 1930s and early 1940s, the Japanese government maintained strict control over publishing. All media, including radio, newspapers, and films, was heavily censored. Posters were published to promote the idea of one’s civic responsibility and a government in control. Similarly, large-scale propagandistic paintings that focused on the nation’s sacrifice and the success of the war effort were displayed in exhibition halls for the public to see. They were painted in what was known as “Western style” (yōga 洋画) for a sense of “realism.” These same paintings became illustrations for books that were also part of this all-encompassing propaganda campaign.

Avant-garde Japanese art, like Surrealism and Abstractionism, was equated with Communism and suppressed through military coercion. Still, like Shimozato Yoshio’s photography book [#76], they continued to be privately published at great risk to the artists involved.

With all media strictly controlled by the government, much of Japanese publishing during World War II was propaganda to bolster the war effort. By 1943, when the book was published (and things were not going well for the Japanese military), much of that propaganda focused on raising the morale of the public. This book, for example, highlighting the success of the Japanese navy almost two years after the bombing of Pearl Harbor, includes an aspirational image of Japanese planes just minutes from bombing New York City.

Because surrealist images and erotica were banned during World War II, this book was privately published by the artist, a founder of the Nagoya Photo Avant-garde Club (Nagoya abangarudo kurabu 名古屋アバンガルドクラブ). The first half of the book is comprised of his abstract and erotic photographs of cacti—influenced by Salvador Dali’s comment that “Beauty should be edible, or not at all.” Photographs by other artists of the Nagoya group fill the last 10 pages of the book.

Post World War II, 12 years after the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, photographer Domon Ken produced this unflinching photobook about the ongoing devastation of the attacks on Japan and the after-effects of nuclear radiation. Though criticized by some for exploiting his subjects, this book was also praised for allowing Hiroshima’s living victims to speak. Believing his work to be a political act, he became the leading figure in the Photorealism movement that emerged in Japan after World War II.

78, 79, 80. Kokumin bōkū zufu (National Air Defense Maps) / 編著 国民防空図譜, 1941

Yagi Minoru (?), editor

35 lithographs (portfolio)

Tokyo: Dainihon Bōkū Hōkokukai, Shōwa 16

八木稔 (?)

石版画三十五枚 (ポートフォリオ)

東京: 大日本防空報国会, 昭和 16年

In September of 1940, Japan entered World War II and shortly afterward established a mandatory program of civil defense. Posters like these, color lithographs published in 1941, were printed with captivating graphic designs (what have been called “perversely pleasurable images”) to promote both military propaganda and public education. They succinctly imparted crucial but otherwise complicated information to a population that had been tasked with assigned roles in the aftermath of an attack and in the prevention of loss of life.