Wearing propaganda: Civilian textiles on the Japanese home front, 1931--1945 with reference to Britain and the United States

Textiles are not normally thought of as vehicles for propaganda, yet they can provide both public and personal canvases on which to express patriotic sentiments and serve as visible markers of national unity and tangible testimony to national goals. The textiles under study in this dissertation played such a role during the period of the Asia-Pacific War (1931-1945), first in Japan and later in Britain and the United States. Made for civilian use but patterned with motifs related to the war effort, these fabrics serve as provocative records of patriotic fervor, yet they have been largely unexamined as tools for reading wartime propaganda before the research undertaken for this work. Some of the designs are overtly patriotic and militaristic, others subtler in their presentation, but all were intended to reflect support of their country's commitment to the military goals of the time as well as to boost morale on the Home Front. Four objectives have been set for this dissertation: (1) To study the Japanese propaganda textiles produced during the Asia-Pacific War (1931-1945) and contextualize them within a wider framework of wartime propaganda and Home Front morale through comparison to comparable textiles from World War II (1939-1945) produced in Britain and the United States; (2) to place the designs on the propaganda textiles within established design traditions in Japan and to trace their development, evolution, and adaptation as propaganda icons within the extraordinary circumstances of war; (3) to show how the study of these textiles can expand our understanding of the pervasiveness of propaganda, how propaganda finds its way into even the most intimate facets of material life---such as dressing the human body---when a nation and culture are engaged in total war; and (4) to show that these textiles formed one part of a broader propaganda continuum and, by reference to Britain and the United States, to indicate that the Japanese propaganda textiles of 1931-1945 were not an isolated phenomenon limited to time, country, culture, or political creed.