For some it meant repression, but for others it meant an opportunity to escape limitations. Thus, the social impact of the war years for Japanese subjects was quite varied.
And yet, the critical role the munitions worker played in sustaining Japan's war machine, along with the abetting of factory owners and the military services, shielded him from the most onerous state labor controls. But mobilization also sowed the seeds for new social conflict by granting a privileged group of workers the resources to engage in the modern-day practice of “binge consumption.” Footnote 1 The misbehavior of munitions workers enraged conservative guardians of an austere and disciplined vision of the Japanese home front. War mobilization did empower the state to reconfigure Japan's prewar class society into a rational and function-based “total war system” (Yamanouchi Reference Yamanouchi, Yasushi, Koschmann and Ryūichi1998, 3–4). Drawing on these valuable insights, the munitions worker serves as a heuristic device for exploring an alternative side to wartime modernity that celebrated not austerity but avarice, not obedience but disobedience, not discipline but disorder. According to this narrative, state-directed wartime savings campaigns and policing of factory youth contributed to the establishment of a modern, rational, and disciplined middle-class way of life that went on to define postwar Japanese society (Ambaras Reference Ambaras2006 Garon Reference Garon1997, Reference Garon2000). This perspective meshes well with the often-told story of the triumph of a hegemonic “culture of thrift” that prioritized economic frugality and the subordination of personal desire for national goals. Wartime Japan is usually characterized as a moment when national mobilization, labor controls, and rationing rapidly curbed consumer spending to the point of extinction (Francks Reference Francks2009 Havens Reference Havens1978 Rice Reference Rice1990 Tansman Reference Tansman and Tansman2009). This ambiguity led the munitions worker to be simultaneously valorized and despised in official and popular discourse.Īn examination of the munitions worker as trickster has profound implications for thinking about modern Japanese history. Labor scarcity provided workers in real life and the worker in the popular imagination opportunities to loyally serve the state in munitions factories but also to revolt against state imposition of socioeconomic controls. The onset of war led to the mass conscription of adult men into the armed services and a severe labor shortage on the home front. In wartime Japan, the munitions worker became a trickster within the discursive anxieties of Japanese police, intellectuals, and bureaucrats in reaction to the unexpected tumult of labor mobilization. What the trickster does do, however, is expose the hollow arbitrariness of official ideologies, thereby cracking open new imaginings of a more revitalized world (Hyde Reference Hyde1998, 6–9 Hynes and Doty Reference Hynes and Doty1997, 34–44). His deception and mockery of the status quo are disruptive but not fatally so, for he never completely overthrows the system. As metaphor, cultural construct, and the personification of society's deepest hopes and fears, the trickster intermittently upsets the official order. During the Asia-Pacific War (1937–45), the mischievous munitions worker was one of the most powerful tricksters on the Japanese home front.
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