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

Miriam Wattles
Associate Professor, Department of History of Art and Architecture
University of California - Santa Barbara

Wednesday, February 17, 2016
4:30-6:00 PM
A266, Bay 10, Smith Warehouse
Duke University



Manipulating public emotions through war propaganda relies on creating a huge gulf between Us and Them. Much of the unofficial propaganda designed by Kobayashi Kiyochika (1847-1915) for both the Sino-Japanese War and the Russo-Japanese War employed the then common illustration style to straightforwardly heroize the Japanese military while denigrating the enemy. Yet his most popular series, “Hurrah for Japan! One Hundred Victories, One Hundred Laughs,” was radically innovative and complex. Some of its visual puns turned racist cartoons promulgated in Western publications upside down. Yet often the gist of the joke depended on East Asian referents. My talk highlights the ways that Kiyochika drew upon tensions between past and present, East and West to come up with cruel, yet sometimes knowingly sympathetic laughs.

Co-sponsored by the Asian Pacific Studies Institute (APSI), and the Departments of Asian & Middle Eastern Studies; Art, Art History & Visual Studies; and History.