The Revival of Military Masculinity Presented by Boys' Magazines:

UCHIDA Masakatsu

doi:10.11365/genderhistory.8.75

During the Asia-Pacific War the Shonen Kurabu (Boys Club) magazine functioned as a gender ideology production device, iterating the masculinity presented by Imperial Army soldiers, plunging the boys who read it into the encircling net of weakness-phobia, and sending them to the battlefield. Immediately after the defeat, Shonen Kurabu started to address peace and hope. However, the impetus it had before the defeat could no longer be seen.<BR>At the same time as the magazine was promoting hope, peace, and opposition to war, men who had enjoyed baseball before it became prohibited because of the war steadily began to promote the revival of baseball with the support of GHQ. The groups promoting baseball, which included the men in GHQ, Japanese Americans, and the leading men in professional or students' baseball, had different emotional attachments to baseball. In the process of the revival, ideologues such as Tobita Suishu, praised the beauty and pureness of young baseball players, and expressed the expectation that the reestablishment of the Japanese nation could be entrusted to such boys.<BR>It was not long before baseball magazines for boys made their debut. In those magazines Tobita and others promoted a vision of masculinity which they urged youth to learn, based on a fighting spirit, solidarity and vengeance. Baseball reflected the highest form of beauty. The images of the players of the revived high school baseball overlapped with those of young soldiers killed in battle. This can be seen as the revival of military masculinity presented in the wartime boys' magazines. Through the medium of promoting baseball, which seemingly symbolized peace, a masculinity based on a fighting spirit began to be seen again in the baseball magazines such as Yakyu Shonen (Baseball Boys).<BR>Needless to say, this fact does not mean that military masculinity took up its old hegemonic status. During the occupation period, when the boundary between genders was shaken and the earlier model of a militaristic masculinity lost its hegemonic position, several different versions of masculinities became possible. This essay through the analysis of masculine images in the post-war boys' magazine is the first step in trying to examine such images in an historical context.

The Revival of Military Masculinity Presented by Boys' Magazines:

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