Kamishibai and the Art of the Interval

The Cartesian search for truth … is posed as the problem of relating the external world to the interiority of a pure mind divested of all emotion, sensuality and corporeality.

—Scott McQuire, Visions of Modernity

The system of perspective is not just a form of representation, not just a representational device, but is rather a representational device that also possesses a thematic content…. It is an expression of a desire to order the world in a certain way: to make incoherence coherent, objectify subjective points.

—Michael Ann Holly, Past Looking: Historical Imagination and the Rhetoric of the Image

Kamishibai is a performance art that was popular in Japan from the late 1920s to the 1960s and today lives on in nostalgia venues such as the International Manga Museum in Kyoto and the Shitamachi Museum in Tokyo. Most simply, a kamishibai play is a set of pictures used by a performer to tell a story to an audience, usually of children aged four to twelve. During Japan’s Fifteen Year War (1931–1945), however, kamishibai was a crucial medium for the dissemination of propaganda to a variety of audiences, adults as well as children.¹ The questions driving this study are: How did the characteristics of kamishibai function in the context of prowar, imperialist propaganda to make that propaganda effective (or not)? And do the Cartesian or anti-Cartesian elements of kamishibai plays have any influence on the propaganda effect?

For my purposes here Cartesianism boils down to three major elements: (1) the split between the mind and body, with the mind considered primary; (2) rationalism—a belief in science as the standard for truth; and (3) a conceptualization of the human self as stable and enclosed, separate from the world, and able to observe and judge the world in a detached, objective, rational manner.² As in the second epigraph above, I take Cartesian perspectivalism in the visual aspects of kamishibai—the illustrations—as more than simply a neutral choice of representational style: it indicates a desire to “order the [kamishibai] world in a certain way” that could convince viewers to understand and respond to their own world in similar terms. When considering the effectiveness of any tool of propaganda, the question arises: what kind of “subject” is being interpellated by a particular propaganda text? Here I will specifically consider the ways that Cartesian perspectivalism—in both a visual-culture and phenomenological sense—was used in propaganda kamishibai to construct particular kinds of subjects, and also the ways that certain characteristics of the medium seem to resist aspects of Cartesianism.

Kamishibai may be best known today as one of the direct precursors of postwar manga and anime,³ but over its forty-year heyday it enjoyed enormous popularity, at times eclipsing rival entertainment media for children such as movies or radio (in the 1930s and early 1940s) and manga (in the 1950s). It was only the rise of television—tellingly known as denki kamishibai (electric kamishibai) in its early years—that finally brought about its demise.

Looking backward, kamishibai’s roots clearly lie in a host of what J. L. Anderson calls “commingled media” in Japan—etoki from the Heian period; nozoki karakuri, magic lanterns, and utsushie from the Edo period—as well as being influenced by Meiji-period performance forms such as rakugo and yose.⁴ Rather than tracing kamishibai’s debt to these older forms, however, in this project I will concentrate on its relationship with the cinema, still developing in the late 1920s and early 1930s when kamishibai was born. In fact, it was cinema’s transition from silent films to the talkies that helped ensure kamishibai’s success, as we shall see.⁵

One characteristic to be noted immediately, however, is the intensely commingled nature of kamishibai, even when compared to other Japanese commingled media: kamishibai consisted in every context and every time period of three integral parts: pictures, story (sometimes in the form of a printed script), and performance.

In the next section we turn to the structure and techniques of kamishibai, which comes in two forms: gaitō (street-corner), referring to performances on the street by a professional, with children as the audience; and kyōiku (educational) or insatsu (printed), referring to performances in a variety of educational or religious venues. It was the latter form that was adapted during the war for use in conveying propaganda to a wide range of audiences. In order to comprehend the media characteristics that made kamishibai suitable (or not) for wartime propaganda messages, it is necessary to understand its prewar origins and the material realities of its typical deployment.

A form of street theatre, gaitō kamishibai appealed particularly to children of the urban laboring classes, who could derive affordable entertainment from the daily visit of the kamishibai no ojisan (literally “uncle kamishibai,” the kamishibai performer)⁶ to their neighborhoods with the latest installment of a serial narrative. A performer would travel on a specially equipped bicycle and, on arriving at one of his usual stopping-places, he would announce his presence with hyōshigi (wooden clappers) or other musical instruments. Children would instantly gather from all directions, some of them carrying even smaller children on their backs. The performer would first sell them cheap candy or snacks, and then, while the children crowded together in front of the stage eating the treats, would relate a set of three short narratives: a slapstick cartoon for the smallest children in the audience (with flat, cartoonish visuals), a melodrama for the older girls, and an adventure story for the older boys (in more realistic visual styles). Both the melodrama and the adventure story would be one episode of a serial narrative; a single story might go on for months or even years, with the children running out to consume each day’s installment.

One play (one episode) would consist of ten to fifteen cards, about ten inches by sixteen inches, each of which had a hand-painted picture on one side. On the few prewar gaitō kamishibai play cards that are extant, we usually find the script hand-written on the other side.⁷ But in their first uses the prewar play cards typically had nothing written on the backs at all. The performers would have the general storyline explained to them each day when they came to pick up the new set of picture cards at the kashimoto (production agents; see below). Beyond keeping to the general plot and the painted images, they were completely free to invent or embellish as they wished. This practice only held true for the performers attached to the kashimoto’s headquarters, however. As the play cards were sent out to the kashimoto’s subsidiaries in the suburbs and beyond, the recommended narration and/or dialog for each picture would be added on the back of each card, which is why we now find them on the extant cards.⁸ After the war, when kashimoto turned to lithography to produce the cards, scripts were printed on the back of each. Gaitō performers were nonetheless still free to change or embellish the script at will.

For the performance the picture cards were placed all together in the stage-frame and then pulled out one after another to reveal the next scene, with the ojisan performing the narration and dialog in a variety of voices. Performers also added sound effects with musical instruments, they threw in jokes, songs, references to other popular media, and so on. The three commingled elements of kamishibai—the pictures, the script, and the performance—might work in harmony, or might be used to play off each other, depending primarily on the whim of the performer. The point to note here is that the emphasis in gaitō kamishibai was on the visual and performance aspects of a play, not on a fixed script.

The production and distribution of street-corner kamishibai was handled by production agents, known as kashimoto (literally “lenders”) who would commission stories and their hand-painted illustrations from professional scriptwriters and painters, often employing a stable of in-house writers and artists for this purpose. Each day a writer would come up with the next segment of the serial narrative currently under production, and a set of between ten and fifteen illustrations for that episode would be designed by the lead artist. Then multiple copies of each set would be hand-painted, and sometimes a sketch of the plot or suggested dialogue would be written on the back of each card. The completed story card sets were then rented out to kamishibai performers, together with a bicycle equipped with a small stage, and a storage area for holding the plays and the candy the performers sold to make money. The profit for the kashimoto came from the rental fee they charged the performers for the story cards, candy, and equipment; the performers made their profit from the volume of candy they sold to the children at a small mark-up. Because the performers and producers of street-corner kamishibai made their money from the volume of candy sales, they gave the children whatever they wanted in terms of plot and picture, in order to attract the largest possible audience. The 1910s through 1930s in Japan saw the construction of the concept of “childhood” as a distinct developmental phase, and the concomitant rise of both educational and entertainment media meant to appeal to this new demographic group.⁹ But most such media were created by adults with the aim of “improving” or “teaching” children; in contrast kamishibai plays were nearly unique in having no pretense of providing educational content: whatever the children liked, they got more of.

And what they liked was a healthy dose of the fantastic or gruesome, in the form of adventure stories featuring monsters, demons, ghosts, and the like, and heartrending melodrama that dealt with issues of concern to children: unkind stepmothers or bullies terrorizing innocent girls, evil men and women disrupting happy families, and so on.¹⁰ Many educators claimed that such stories were not natural fare for children, not what they would choose to consume if they had a choice. But kamishibai performers had an unmediated experience of children’s tastes and happily served up the horror and melodrama the children obviously preferred.

Street-corner kamishibai became wildly popular very quickly. It originated about 1929, and by 1933 there were already at least two thousand performers in Tokyo alone.¹¹ By 1937 there were some thirty thousand street-corner kamishibai performers across Japan,¹² performing for an estimated minimum of one million children daily.¹³

The sudden rise and phenomenal success of kamishibai was conditioned by the development of various other popular-culture media in the prewar period, but here I will concentrate on its relationship with the cinema. Film technology, in the form of Edison’s Kinetoscope, for example, was imported from the United States in 1896; by 1897 films were shown publicly in Japan accompanied by a katsud benshi (a live narrator who performed the dialog and narration for silent films; often shortened to katsuben or benshi). The first Japanese films were made in 1899, and the first Japanese film company, Nikkatsu, was started in 1912. By 1920, Shōchiku studio had also been established, and film production standards in Japan were impressive.¹⁴ In 1921 urban Japanese people listed the movies as their favorite form of entertainment. In the 1930s film remained extremely popular but was too expensive for children, particularly those of the working class, to view frequently. In contrast, even most working class children could afford the daily one-sen charge for the kamishibai man’s candy.¹⁵ Moreover, since kamishibai came to one’s neighborhood, unlike movies that had to be viewed in theaters, children who had chores or child minding to do after school could easily find a few moments to enjoy a performance.

Whether imported or domestic, the movies in the 1920s were, of course, silent films, so the new profession of katsuben flourished throughout the 1920s. In 1929, however, Japan produced its first talkie, and the popularity of the silents faded, gradually driving all the katsuben out of work.¹⁶ Historians suggest that many of them turned for work to the newly emerging medium of kamishibai.¹⁷ The skill at performing dialog that the katsuben brought to their kamishibai performances may in turn have greatly contributed to its quick rise in popularity.

As soon as street-corner kamishibai’s popularity was established in the early 1930s, voices of concern and criticism were raised. Professional educators and parents’ groups were quick to find fault with street-corner kamishibai, often publishing the results of their meetings in newspapers and magazines. But some educators countered by emphasizing the instructive potential of the medium. In the mid-1930s, for example, the progressive Christian educator Imai Yone (1897–1968) promoted the use of kamishibai for bringing wholesome messages to children of the urban poor. She pointed to kamishibai’s ease of production, distribution, and performance: with a few cheap materials anyone could make a set of play cards, which were light and easy to carry and could be performed by anyone able to read the script.

She was also enthusiastic about what she saw as the medium’s sendenryoku, its unique persuasive power—one of the “faults” repeatedly cited by kamishibai’s critics. She acknowledged that it was not a medium suited to high art or expressions of the sublime, but because in kamishibai “the hearts of the performer and the viewers are unified,” it was a perfect medium for conveying messages to downtrodden or outcast people, particularly children, who were often suspicious of or resistant to other, more “elitist” educational media.¹⁸

Another influential promoter of educational kamishibai was Matsunaga Ken’ya (1907–1946), who had become involved with settlement work during his student days at Tokyo Imperial University (“Tōdai”), beginning in 1931. The well-known “Tōdai Settlement” group helped poor people by supporting and carrying out material improvements in the slum areas of town and by promoting education for poor children. Although his Tōdai friends disparaged kamishibai as vulgar and devoid of cultural value, Matsunaga, influenced by Imai, saw educational potential in the medium. His first experience with kamishibai occurred when one of Imai’s colleagues demonstrated a Christian play for the settlement group. Even though the performer was shy and softspoken, Matsunaga was reportedly powerfully impressed by the potential he saw in kamishibai as an educational medium.¹⁹

Matsunaga was similarly impressed by Jinsei annai (A guide for life), the first Soviet talkie to play in Tokyo, in 1932. The film was about a boy who ends up on the streets as a result of war and revolution, but who survives and pulls himself out of destitution through hard work. In cooperation with his colleagues in the Tōdai Settlement group, Matsunaga created the first nonreligious educational kamishibai, based on this film and with the same title, in January 1933.²⁰ Throughout the 1930s—or at least until government censorship became too oppressive late in the decade—educational kamishibai plays were used by people like Imai and Matsunaga to promote various populist, mostly leftist causes, among audiences of people who were, in various ways, disempowered or outcast.

At this point let me summarize the salient aspects of kamishibai as a medium. First, it is significant that in prewar kamishibai plays the images were more central than the script. The privileging of the visual might seem to accord with Cartesian modernity, in which vision is the primary, most rational sensory mode, but the other crucial element of prewar kamishibai was performance, which supplemented or at times contested the meanings suggested by the pictures displayed.

Another crucial element of gaitō kamishibai was that it offered multiple sensory paths of comprehension and enjoyment: the visual pleasure of the pictures and the antics of the performer himself; the taste and smell of the candy; the sound effects from drums, whistles, and other musical instruments, and of course the voice of the performer; and the touch of the other children’s bodies as they crowded around the small stage, which offered a restricted viewing angle of about 120 degrees. Educational kamishibai often dispensed with the candy but made maximum use of kamishibai’s other sensory possibilities, adding songs (Matsunaga reportedly sang the anthem of the Soviet Union’s Young Pioneers Association when he performed Jinsei annai, for example),²¹ and taking great care that the pictures were colorful and appealing. This contrasts sharply with Cartesian modes of knowing, in which bodily sensation was to be suppressed, as in the first epigraph above. In his First Meditation, Descartes describes the proper way to think: “I will consider myself as having no hands, no eyes, no flesh, no blood, nor any senses.”²²

One might argue that children were not involved in thinking or learning while watching kamishibai, so the radically interactive, sensual, and embodied nature of their experience is irrelevant. But Suzuki Tsunekatsu argues, on the basis of extensive interviews with people who remember viewing gaitō kamishibai in their youth, that children learned many life lessons from the ojisan. He quotes one woman as saying that “the moral lessons imparted by the kamishibai no ojisan were far more vivid than my teachers’ lectures.”²³ The interaction between the ojisan and the children was an integral element of the children’s enjoyment, and they took pleasure in a bond with the familiar ojisan that was unlike that with any other adult. They could question him, argue with him, exchange teasing banter, all without risk of getting in trouble. In Suzuki’s words, “the kamishibai man was an adult but had the same point of view (mesen) as the children.”²⁴ As a result, he argues, children trusted and learned from their local kamishibai performers in myriad ways in a safe space that allowed them to critique adult society.²⁵ He underscores the fact that “both the kamishibai man and the children lived on the fringes of the social order.”²⁶

In sum, kamishibai was characterized by unfettered creativity and spontaneity (in its performance), sensory abundance (in its consumption), heterogeneity (in the interplay of picture, script, and performance), and marginality—a feature that progressive educators such as Imai and Matsunaga used to appeal to disempowered audiences who tended to be wary of other instructional media.

When compared to the continuous visual motion of a medium such as cinema, kamishibai seems on first consideration to be very static, relying as it does on the display of still pictures. But several kinds of movement were, in fact, routinely incorporated into the performance of a play. First, the panels themselves, pulled out one after another, provided movement from scene to scene. Performers often pulled a panel out only halfway as they continued their narration, revealing a tantalizing bit of the next scene to raise suspense, and then suddenly revealing the rest. Decisions about the speed (fast or slow), the vigor (violently, gently, or smoothly), and the rhythm (halfway stop, slow revelation; quick revelation, etc.) with which the panels were pulled out of the frame was one of the most important skills for the professional performer to master. (Later, in propaganda kamishibai, such “stage directions” were printed on the play itself to aid the amateur performer.) Another kind of movement could be introduced by the performer shaking the stage or moving the picture card itself up and down within the limits of the frame, simulating violent diagetic motion.

And finally, kamishibai makes use of one “special effect” to enhance the impression of continuity and fluid motion: the sashikomi (literally, an insert). Some panels are made in two parts: the base panel that shows the second part of the movement, and a half-size panel (sashikomi) that sits snuggly over it. The picture on the half-size panel melds perfectly with that on the base panel so that the join is not visible, and shows the first stage of the movement. When the half-size panel is pulled rapidly aside and the full base panel is revealed, it appears that the background has remained unchanged while the foreground figure has moved from one place/state to another. An example can be seen in the wartime play Okome to heitai (1941, Rice and soldiers), in which the first view (with sashikomi in place) shows a soldier walking toward his commander to volunteer for a dangerous task, and then the second view (with sashikomi removed and the base panel fully revealed) shows the same soldier lying on the ground, having been shot by the enemy (Figures 1 and 2). This is the most common type of sashikomi, but inserts with different shapes could give the impression of a train moving across a landscape, or a balloon moving up and down, and so on.

The sashikomi allowed for visual continuity in the depiction of movement in special cases, but in fact the visuals of kamishibai relied even more strongly on discontinuity between panels. The basic structural nature of kamishibai is montage, a visual technique that was enormously popular in modern(ist) consumer culture and much theorized in cinema and art in the 1920s and 1930s.²⁷ Kata Kōji, one of kamishibai’s pioneers as both a practitioner and theorist, reports that in the 1930s, as the medium was developing on both the gaitō and kyōiku fronts, he and his cohort studied the work of filmmakers to improve kamishibai’s effectiveness as a visual/narrative medium. In particular he cites the work of Sergei Eisenstein (1898–1948) and Vsevolod Pudovkin (1893–1953) on montage in cinema.²⁸ The “interval” between one picture and the next could be used to produce a variety of visual and narrative effects through such cinemainspired techniques as continuity (making one picture flow naturally into the next) or disjunction (as in montage); “panning shots” or “close-ups”; changes in point of view; or distinctive changes in dominant colors or visual styles. The result, though inspired by motion pictures, differs from cinematic flow, even cinematic montage. Kamishibai presents a unique balance of stillness and motion, fragmentation and continuity, with the interval—the space in between one panel and the next—a crucial element in the storytelling technique.

Taking all these characteristics together, we can see that kamishibai was a very modernist medium (in Miriam Silverberg’s terms), one that disrupted Cartesianism in a variety of ways, and it is perhaps not surprising, therefore, that it was used extensively by those resistant to the dominant discourses and power structures of the time.

Nonetheless, like all artistic or expressive media in Japan, as the (unofficial) war in China gained momentum in the mid- to late 1930s, kamishibai was coopted into the service of the government. Gaitō performers and producers were increasingly drafted into military or labor service, and kyōiku producers were bullied (or cajoled) into ceasing their progressive, educational (“leftist”) activities and turning their talents to the production of prowar, pro-imperialist propaganda kamishibai.

The Japanese word for “propaganda” is senden (“advertisement,” “persuasion”), the root of the word used by Imai Yone to describe kamishibai’s greatest virtue: its sendenryoku, persuasive power. Given this quality, it is no surprise that the government should turn to kamishibai for the dissemination of its messages. Considered superficially, kamishibai would seem to provide a terrific mechanism for instilling propagandistic ideas: a series of still pictures, accompanied by a static script, viewed by a willing audience—these elements would produce a phenomenological structure featuring a stable and seemingly natural relationship between viewer, viewed, and message, as in Cartesian perspectivalism. And, as in the second epigraph above, that phenomenological relationship would have epistemological consequences, making even the most unpleasant, illogical, and subjective government messages seem coherent and objective. Particularly after 1937, when the war in China became official, the government began working to tweak the characteristics of kamishibai to maximize its usefulness to the state.

When propaganda became the goal, the story content of kamishibai plays took on an increased importance and new techniques were devised to try to make the pictorial and performance aspects of the medium conform to the needs of the script. The scripts were now printed on the back of each picture card and a series of municipal ordinances were put in place to ensure that the script was always performed exactly as printed.²⁹ The presence of the performer, adding life and warmth to the story, and the multiple sensory pathways that characterize the consumption of kamishibai were recognized as elements that increased audience engagement with the material, so these were retained, but now within strictly monitored limits. The wildly creative, spontaneous, and heterogeneous nature of kamishibai was recognized as dangerous by those who wished to promote one clear authoritative message, and those elements of kamishibai performance were suppressed.

Because so many professional performers were drafted and unavailable, wartime kamishibai plays were performed primarily by amateurs: teachers, neighborhood association leaders, factory foremen, and young women specifically recruited for the purpose. A large number of manuals and magazine articles appeared, explaining proper performance techniques for the benefit of these amateurs. They were advised to:

Despite this new focus on the script, however, a well-known example of this kind of instruction shows that promoters continued to recognize the primacy of kamishibai’s visual elements: “First find a script that deals with your chosen topic. Then, without reading the explanations on the back at all, just look at each of the pictures one by one. Kamishibai are also sometimes called ‘gekiga’ [dramatic pictures] and from looking at the pictures you will come to understand your script’s special characteristics…. From the point of view of the audience, they get their emotional impact first from the pictures and then from the words.”³⁰ As we shall see, the creators of wartime kamishibai understood clearly the importance of the pictures, as different visual techniques were used to support the presentation of different kinds of propaganda messages.

Propaganda kamishibai also differed from earlier forms in the sense that each card set was a complete story, rather than being one installment in a serial narrative, and, on average, twenty cards would be allotted for a single story, as opposed to the ten or fifteen common for one episode of gaitō kamishibai. So the question arises: how did the writers and artists of propaganda kamishibai take a government message or a complex narrative and convey it in a mere twenty images/scenes? Here we turn to specific examples of visual techniques used in propaganda kamishibai.

There are many possible ways of categorizing the multitude of propaganda plays produced during the Fifteen Year War. Here I focus on the rhetorical function of the plays, and identify three major types: information, exhortation, and emulation. There are specific visual tropes that seem to characterize each.³¹

The first type provided factual information about real events, or gave how-to information, such as how to build a bomb shelter.³² Examples include Umi no tatakai (1941, Naval battles), Rondon daibakugeki (1941, The great air raid on London [i.e. The Blitz]), and Maree oki kaisen (1943, The naval battle of the Malay Strait). The first two consist entirely of photographs (Figure 3), and the third of realistically painted scenes of battle, using careful perspective. In Figures 4 and 5, from Maree oki kaisen, we see cinematically inspired shots: first a view of a Japanese airplane in the sky and then the view from that plane down onto the ships it is about to bomb.

It is not surprising that this genre of play should make use of photographs or of paintings done in classic perspectivalism, as its purpose is to present “reality” in a believable, scientific, and authoritative manner. In the case of the “how-to” version of the genre, diagrams and other “scientific” visual tools are also common.

The second type, the exhortation play, is intended to convince the audience to do something specific—buy war bonds, eschew the black market, participate in neighborhood watch groups, and so on—using direct pleas and arguments. Usually these are structured in the form of a very loose narrative—a young boy asking his grandfather naïve questions, for example, to which he receives exhortatory answers (in Bakudan jiisan [1942, Explosive grandpa]). Other examples include Jissen fujin (1942, Practical wife), about a woman who bullies her family and neighbors into proper wartime behavior; Taisei yokusan (1940, Imperial relief assistance), an early play that lectures viewers about the consequences of not shifting to a wartime lifestyle; and Tamago-mura (1946, Egg village), an interesting example of a play produced after the war by the Allied Occupation government to try to discourage people from trading on the black market.

In all these exhortation plays the visual style is at the opposite end of the spectrum from the information plays: utterly flat and cartoonish (Figures 6, 7, and 8). In the pictures, there is little or no attempt to reproduce a Cartesian “realism,” perhaps in order to make the characters as generic as possible. Because they are visually generic and flat, anyone can recognize these character “types,” such as the aged but feisty and wise Grandpa, and can easily identify with the social order they represent. The humor of the visuals also, no doubt, helped to soften the hectoring tone of the scripts.

The third type of play was meant to encourage emulation of the heroic behaviors dramatized therein. Emulation plays differ from the exhortation plays in that there is never any direct mention of proper behavior. These were complex narratives with interesting, sympathetic characters, coping gallantly with hardship and/or loss. Viewers were meant to be moved by the self-sacrifice and discipline of these attractive characters (often hard-working mothers) and thereby inspired to emulate them. Examples include Tengu no hata (1942, The tengu flag), a story aimed at school-age children; Teki kudaru hi made (1943, Until the day the enemy crumbles), aimed at male shopkeepers; Gunshin no haha (1942, Mother of a war god), and Mumei no haha (1944, The unsung mother), both of which feature perfect self-sacrificing mothers who produce perfect self-sacrificing sons (who die heroically in battle).

These plays are by far the most visually interesting of the three types described here. Because of the brevity of these plays (only twenty very short scenes) and the nature of kamishibai as a medium, the characterization that was so key to their success had to be achieved through the visuals as much as or more than through the script itself. A number of extremely talented artists contributed to the popularity of wartime kamishibai plays, notably Nishi Masayoshi, Koyano Hanji, and Nonoguchi Shigeru.³³ Each was capable of working in a variety of styles, suiting the visual style and color scheme to the play’s content.³⁴ In almost all cases, however, the illustrations of these plays exhibit an intriguing combination of flatness and roundness (three-dimensionality), “realism” and stylization/abstraction—that is, they combine both Cartesian and anti-Cartesian visual elements.

For example, in Figure 9, from Mumei no haha (pictures by Nishi Masayoshi), we see faces that are round, detailed and warm looking contrasted with flat and rough depictions of clothing, against a background that is also flat (though beautifully colored). This flatness is often mitigated by a haloing effect, making the human figures “pop out” from the flat background, as we see in Figure 10, from Gunshin no haha (pictures by Nonoguchi Shigeru). This haloing technique is similar to the multiplanar character that Thomas Lamarre identifies as a feature of much Japanese animation, though here, of course, the planes do not move.³⁵ Its effect in kamishibai is to highlight the human, particularly the human face, emphasizing the affective elements of the picture.

These emulation plays are also notable for pictures that represent an apotheosis—a representation of a character’s admirable perfection. Figures 9 and 10 are both examples of this, showing the audience the image that the loving sons carry in their minds of their adored mothers. Figures 11 and 12 are further examples from the same plays, this time highlighting the literal apotheosis of each of the heroically dead sons, as he becomes a god enshrined at Yasukuni. These apotheosis pictures use the halo effect not simply to produce a sense of depth through the suggestion of multiple planes, but to elevate, in psychological terms, the representation of these admirable characters.

Another common feature is a picture that encapsulates a character’s psy-chological confusion or torment, as in Figures 13 and 14 (from Teki kudaru hi made and Tengu no hata, respectively). Objective realism here is (at least partly) abandoned to convey the impact of a disturbing psychological state. Perspective is also frequently abandoned for the sake of psychological verity, as in Figure 15 (from Tengu no hata). In this play, intended to inspire children to patriotic fervor, the visual style is as if drawn by a child, with somewhat crude and clumsy depictions of trees and ponds, and a child’s disregard for proper perspective.

“Realistic” depiction is sometimes featured in emulation plays as well, however. In Mumei no haha, the visual style veers back and forth (as in film montage) between lushly colored pictures depicting home and the eponymous mother, in the mixture of flat and rounded styles

described above (Figure 9), and monochrome (dark green and white) depictions of the battlefield (Figure 16), which are more hard-edged and realistic looking (although not to the extent of the “photorealist” painting style we find in some informational plays).

In other words, propaganda plays display a range of faithfulness to Cartesianism, with the information plays the most “scientific,” “rational,” and perspectival in their visual styles; the emulation plays a mix of realist/rational and antirealist/psychological, and often multiplanar rather plays deliberately antirealist/humorous and almost completely flat, with very little use of Cartesian perspective.

I would argue that the emulation plays were the most effective and important type of propaganda kamishibai.³⁶ They were intended to rouse the viewers’ emotions and inspire conscious or unconscious imitation of the heroic behaviors depicted. The quality of the kamishibai medium, touted by Imai Yone, in which “the hearts of the performers and the viewers are unified,” was particularly important and effective in the context of propaganda, and it was the emulation plays that relentlessly pulled on the heartstrings. The seeming iconicity of Cartesian perspectivalism frequently used in the visuals for these plays was, therefore, a key element in constructing a narrative world that was believable and would therefore have the desired effect on the viewers. We see here Cartesian visual rationalism used in the service of evoking (irrational) emotion.

I would argue, however, that the effect of the emulation plays was not nearly so straightforward. For one thing, in all types of kamishibai plays the interval between one panel and the next forces the viewer to actively construct continuity in order to make the narrative make sense. In cinema, only special techniques such as montage or abrupt scene changes produce the same level of disjunction between one image and the next that is the fundamental nature of kamishibai. The viewers of wartime kamishibai were, therefore, far from passive, as they (albeit unconsciously) bridged the interval between panels to make sense of the plot.

In the case of the emulation plays this effect was often heightened by the sophisticated mix of visual styles in a single work, which sometimes changed drastically in the interval between one panel and the next, as we have seen in the case of Mumei no haha (Figures 9 and 16).³⁷ Despite kamishibai’s pull on the heartstrings and the radically embodied nature of its consumption, in these plays the connection between world, representation, and viewer is far from unitary or simple, far from straightforwardly Cartesian, and therefore the viewing subjects interpellated by the emulation plays were also not unitary or simple. Ironically, however, it may have been precisely the psychological complexity and multiple subject positions characteristic of these plays that made them effective.

It is impossible to gauge the actual effectiveness of kamishibai plays as propaganda in the Fifteen Year War. Something inspired the Japanese people to go on working hard even in the absence of much hope of victory, as they did in the final years of the war, and perhaps kamishibai plays contributed to that inspiration. And we do have evidence that audiences found specific plays to be moving or appealing—kamishibai plays, even propaganda, were perennially popular throughout the war. But, given the general characteristics of kamishibai as a medium—such as its multisensory and group-oriented nature—and the intensive use of montage and interval to enhance the artistry of many wartime plays, I doubt they appealed effectively to the rational, conscious level of viewers’ minds. They provided entertainment and beautiful, intensely colorful visuals, which no doubt provided a sort of mental relief from the oppressive atmosphere of “total war.” But beyond that I suspect that it was precisely the anti-Cartesian, heterogeneous, and commingled aspects of kamishibai that made wartime plays emotionally powerful, and therefore effective at motivating their audiences to continue the fight.