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Throughout his book, The Thought War , Kushner constantly emphasizes the effectiveness of Japanese wartime propaganda by pointing to the everyday forms that it took, ranging from advertising, publishing, and cinema, to comedy routines. It is this "everydaynessâ[euro] that made propaganda of wartime Japan a "virtually unassailable part of social consciousness that stabilizedâ[euro] not only wartime but also postwar Japanese society (p. 3). Kushner ascribes an almost omni-potent agency to Japan's wartime propaganda in explaining not only why Japan's 15-year-long Asia-Pacific War lasted so long, but also why it helped postwar Japan rebuild so quickly. For Kushner, the goals of prewar, wartime and postwar of Japan's propaganda machine may have been different, but they all show the power of propaganda in uniting and stabilizing Japanese society in the modern period. In fact, it is this omnipresent power that Kushner ascribes to Japanese propaganda that distracts from his careful research of propaganda materials in Japan and China.
Kushner argues that the Japanese state's primary goal, before, during and after the war, was to "transform the Japanese people into active participants in the state's various projects.â[euro] (pp. 21-2). Japan's imperial propaganda was not produced by a central agency, like Nazi Germany's Ministry of Propaganda, but created like "a spoked-wheel: the authorities provided the center hub and the population supported the wheelâ[euro] (p. 16). The goal of wartime...