Japan's Living Politics: Grassroots Action and the Crises of Democracy by Tessa Morris-Suzuki (review)

and, on the other hand, the economic rise that led to the bubble era. Although a work of history, Igarashi’s project speaks to a much broader audience including but not limited to scholars interested in cultural studies, mass media, gender issues, and sociological change. It adroitly illuminates the dramatic transformation of people’s sensibilities, daily lives, and understanding of their nation and their place in it. As a cultural studies scholar interested in the ongoing (re)construction of gender, I wished there had been some more sustained engagement in the book with the notions and contextualization of “masculinity” (versus men) specific to Japan during this time and in the specific texts. Igarashi’s unspooling of how the entrenchment of consumer culture precipitated a variety of insecurities that were captured, confronted, and reimagined in popular media is strong and sound. Still, a few well-placed interrogations of the negotiation of masculine identity within entrenched and transforming patriarchal norms—specifically, of how those norms were inextricably linked to imagined, assumed, and socially sanctioned power—would have brought the study more explicitly in line with its title. That said, Igarashi clearly presumes the constructedness of gender and demonstrates both that men dominated the spaces of cultural production and that “the defense of male identity was a central concern of the critical imagination” as they found their former roles and expectations changing faster than they could accommodate (p. 6). In this volume, Igarashi brings together, in carefully articulated and thoughtful readings, things that might on the face of the matter seem unrelated. He highlights cultural production and lived history, both mundane (domesticity and danchi) and monstrous (torture and murder). It is hard to do justice to all the details of the book in this brief review. I urge the reader to read and reread Igarashi’s thought-provoking chapters, which parse and clarify the effects of mass consumerism and new visual modes, media, and experiences. Japan, 1972 goes a long way toward explaining the tropes and national imagery that have shaped Japan into the powerful global economic and cultural force it is today.