Panel 38: Midwest Japan Seminar #2

Chair: Kazue Harada, Miami University of Ohio

Hannah Marie Airriess, Indiana University, “Becoming Mr. Everyman: Middlebrow Media and Salaryman Masculinity in Japan’s Era of High Economic Growth”

The salaryman, or male white-collar worker, was at the center of Japan’s mass media landscape during the era of high economic growth (1952-1971). Middlebrow texts such as studio films, serialized novels, and weekly magazines, amongst other media, offered a mass cultural theorization of this figure as an archetypal national subjectivity of the era. This chapter of my in-progress manuscript introduces the 1963 film The Elegant Life of Mr. Everyman (dir. Okamoto Kihachi) to examine the development of this white-collar mass culture and the shared visual, narrative, and discursive vocabulary animated across media forms. I read the film, which centers on the life of an unexceptional salaryman working at Suntory Liquors, alongside Suntory’s real-life advertising and promotional materials from television and print media during the period of the film’s release. This reading uncovers the constitutive roles of wartime experience and postwar consumer identity in crafting a white-collar masculinity that was essential to building a national image of high-growth era Japan.