Despite considerable scholarship on prewar Japanese mass culture, there has not yet been a study in English of two of Japan's most popular magazines from that era—Kingu (King), published by Kōdansha, and Ie no Hikari (Light of the home), published by the agrarian cooperative organization Sangyō Kumiai. Both founded in 1925, Kingu targeted an urban audience, while Ie no Hikari catered to readers in farming villages. Amy Bliss Marshall's book Magazines and the Making of Mass Culture in Japan seeks to fill this gap by demonstrating how these two magazines created mass culture during Japan's interwar years.
Chapter 1 describes how both Kōdansha and the Kumiai used the category of the “family magazine” to promote a normative idea of Japanese identity to the masses. Chapter 2 shows how the two organizations used their respective magazines to promote, through entertaining content, a conservative ideology grounded in social conformity, family harmony,...
