| What Do Beautiful Stories of Wartime Consolation Tell Us? ：A Study on The Imperial Japanese Army Consolation Group of Nihon Shimbun Remmei and Konan Ni Jun No Tabi |
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| Lixin GUO |
| PhD Student, Graduate School of Humanities, Nagoya University |
戦時下の慰問美談は何を語っているのか―― 日本新聞聯盟の皇軍慰問団と『江南二旬の旅』を手がかりに |
| 郭立欣 |
| 名古屋大学大学院人文学研究科博士後期課程。比較文学、日本近代文学。 |
Correspondence
Lixin GUO ,Email: guo.lixin@g.mbox.nagoya-u.ac.jp
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Published online: 30 June 2021. |
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Copyright ©2021 The Global Institute for Japanese Studies, Korea University |
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This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial License ( http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
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| ABSTRACT |
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This paper focuses on the activities of the Imperial Japanese Army consolation group (sent to boost the morale of soldiers) on the Jiangnan front line and its commemorative book, Konan Ni Jun No Tabi. It was published in May 1939 during the Second Sino-Japanese War by the Japanese newspaper league (Nihon Shimbun Remmei) and was not available for sale to the public. The Imperial Japanese Army’s consolation mission to the war zone was highly active. Under the guise of comforting the Imperial Japanese Army and visiting battle sites, this group, while receiving preferential treatment from the military, continued to travel around war-torn Jiangnan. They eulogized the scenery of the battlefield in front of them and worked to connect the front line with the home front. In addition to being a beautiful story of the battlefield, the book Konan Ni Jun No Tabi glorified the work of this group as overwhelmingly successful and unprecedented, in this way making the text more of a beautiful story than a simple summing up of its work.
In this paper, based on an analysis of this book, the purpose of these stories, hidden behind the larger narrative of the Jiangnan battlefield, is examined. Another “Jiangnan” as seen by the group is revealed, as is the reality of their work and their success. |
Keywords:
The Imperial Japanese Army Consolation Group, The Second Sino-Japanese War, Beautiful Stories of Consolation, Jiangnan Front, Speech Control
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| キ―ワ―ド:
皇軍慰問団, 日中戦争, 慰問美談, 江南戦線, 言論統制 |
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