Playing War : Children and the Paradoxes of Modern Militarism in Japan / Sabine Frühstück.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Frühstück, Sabine, author.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Children and war--Japan.

Children and war.

Children and war--Japan--History.

Militarism--Japan--History--20th century.

Militarism.

War--History--20th century.

War.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (276 pages) : illustrations

Place of Publication:

Berkeley, CA : University of California Press, [2017]

Language Note:

In English.

Summary:

In Playing War, Sabine Frühstück makes a bold proposition: that for over a century throughout Japan and beyond, children and concepts of childhood have been appropriated as tools for decidedly unchildlike purposes: to validate, moralize, humanize, and naturalize war, and to sentimentalize peace. She argues that modern conceptions of war insist on and exploit a specific and static notion of the child: that the child, though the embodiment of vulnerability and innocence, nonetheless possesses an inherent will to war, and that this seemingly contradictory creature demonstrates what it means to be human. In examining the intersection of children/childhood with war/military, Frühstück identifies the insidious factors perpetuating this alliance, thus rethinking the very foundations of modern militarism. She interrogates how essentialist notions of both childhood and war have been productively intertwined; how assumptions about childhood and war have converged; and how children and childhood have worked as symbolic constructions and powerful rhetorical tools, particularly in the decades between the nation- and empire-building efforts of the late-nineteenth and early twentieth centuries up to the uneven manifestations of globalization at the beginning of the twenty-first.

Contents:

Frontmatter

Contents

List of Illustrations

Acknowledgments

Introduction: The Vulnerability Hypothesis

Part I: Playing War

Chapter 1. Field Games

Chapter 2. Paper Battles

Part II. Picturing War

Chapter 3. The Moral Authority of Innocence

Chapter 4. Queering War

Epilogue: The Rule of Babies in Pink

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Description based on online resource; title from PDF title page (publisher's Web site, viewed 20. Sep 2019)

ISBN:

9780520968233

0520968239

OCLC:

968151846