Erotic grotesque nonsense : the mass culture of Japanese modern times / Miriam Rom Silverberg

Japanese modern times
Japanese modern within modernity
Japanese modern sites
The modern girl as militant (movement on the streets)
The café waitress sang the blues
Friends of the movies (from Ero to empire)
The household becomes modern life
Asakusa
honky-tonk tempo
Asakusa eroticism
Down-and-out grotesquerie
Modern nonsense

"This history of Japanese mass culture during the decades before Pearl Harbor argues that the new gestures, relationship, and humor of ero guro nansensu (erotic grotesque nonsense) expressed a self-consciously modern ethos that challenged state ideology and expansionism. Miriam Silverberg uses sources such as movie magazines, ethnographies of the homeless, and the most famous photographs from this era to capture the spirit, textures, and language of a time when the media reached all classes, connecting the rural social order to urban mores. Employing the concept of montage as a metaphor that informed the organization of Japanese mass culture during the 1920s and 1930s, Silverberg challenges the erasure of Japanese colonialism and its legacies." --Book Jacket