“The situation made celebrities not merely of the soldiers on the frontline, but of the ‘industrial heroes’ toiling to supply them. As Uchiyama observes with his customary originality of angle, it also made villains out of some of them, with various government big-wigs griping that Japanese teenagers had become a gaudy and reckless social underclass, with fathers away fighting, mothers working in factories, and the teens themselves earning big money in the wartime factory economy, and blowing it all on ‘reckless spending and foolish carousing.’ Some of them, it was alleged, were even travelling around Japan in disguise, donning school uniforms in order to avoid difficult questions.”

Over at All the Anime, I review Benjamin Uchiyama’s book Japan’s Carnival War.