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Reading Miriam Silverberg's book on "erotic, grotesque, nonsense," a popular catchphrase for Japanese urban mass culture of the late 1920s and early 1930s, brings you into a seductive world of popular magazines, ethnographic commentary, social surveys, novels, and movies that depicted the popular culture of everyday life in the entertainment districts of Tokyo. Like much of the lexicon of Japanese modernity, the use of foreign loan words ero guro nansensu underscored the self-conscious newness and foreignness of the modern. Of course, all modernities represent a radical epistemological break with the past and the introduction of something alien to received cultural practice. For Japan, however, the foreignness of the new in a temporal sense was united with the conviction that modernity came from "over there"--that its source was external. Silverberg's book takes up this encounter between the new and the old, the foreign and the indigenous, in an effort to understand how Japanese signified modernity in the space of urban consumer culture.
What she gives us is a timely and provocative challenge to the master narratives of interwar and wartime Japan, highlighting the political and social possibilities opened up by popular culture of the 1920s and 1930s, a moment more typically identified as the gathering of fascism. Often this culture is read as decadence--a dark and ominous sign of things to come. Whether an escapist plunge into hedonism that distracted elites from the rise of militarism, or a nihilistic abdication of political responsibility that prefigured the embrace of ultranationalism, standard histories look at the cultural movements of the 1920s and 1930s as laying the groundwork for fascism. Silverberg's portrait of this culture, in contrast, depicts a playful and knowing urban subject who uses new cultural forms to evade and resist...