Kiyochika's "Hurrah for Japan! One Hundred Victories, One Hundred Laughs:" Clear Ends, but with What Means?

Manipulating public emotions through war propaganda often relies on clearly denoting the difference between Us and Them. Much of the unofficial propaganda prints visually designed by Kobayashi Kiyochika (1847-1915) for both the Sino-Japanese War and the Russo-Japanese War used a naturalistic stylistic vocabulary in a straightforward syntax to boost pride in the Japanese army and denigrate the enemy. Yet the popular collaboration between Kiyochika and writer Koppi Dojin (a penname for Nishimori Takeki, 1861-1913) "Hurrah for Japan! One Hundred Victories, One Hundred Laughs" was more complex. Although the loose cartoonish style was direct and caustic, full understanding of the "laugh" depended upon rhetorically oblique humor. Each print densely combined visual and textual puns adopted from both Eastern and Western tropes. Some of its visual puns turned Western racist cartoons upside down. Yet often the gist of the joke depended on East Asian referents. My talk looks at the precedents for this type of hybrid humor in Marumaru Chinbun, the People Rights journal where Dojin and Kiyochika had previously been close collaborators for a decade, as well as what was adapted from humor journals coming out of the West.