Wartime is an extremely sensitive period of time for every country who got involved in. Whatever war it is and whatever goal a country has, wartime propaganda is always an essential tool for promoting the morale of the people or sometimes, even winning the war. Acknowledging the urgency to bind the nation together, the government promoted the value and ideologies they favored or expected the people to behave during wartimes by applying multimedia, which included war painting, Kamishibai, the two main types of media that I will discuss in this paper. As its name goes, war paintings are paintings that depict the scenes from battlefields. They can be bloody and gruesome sometimes, but mostly, war paintings aim at glorifying the soldiers and beautifying
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Just like its name indicates, sensoga mainly depicts battlefield scenes and primarily works as propaganda of wars. As people can imagine, the process of producing those sensoga was fairly painstaking. Although the sensoga artists were not demanded to fight with other soldiers, they still had to serve in the army so as to gain a better view of the battlefields and ensure that those artists could reflect their feelings of the war scenes better. They were called jugun gaka従軍画家, or official war painters, a special work emerged during wartime Japan that can be date back to the Sino-Japanese War from 1894 to 1895 and the Russo-Japanese War from 1904 to 1905 (Winther-Tamaki, 146). The official war painters, however, were still active in later wars, such as the Fifteen-Year War. According to some data, there were three hundred artists travelled with the army to the battlefields at the end of 1930s through the beginning of 1940s (Winther-Tamaki, 146). Some of those artists were demanded to create sensoga, regardless of the fact that they own desires to create something else. Those artists who refused to follow the military to battlefields faced obstacles like financial problems, limited supply of paint, and censorship (Winther-Tamaki, 145). Therefore, a boost of war paintings arose in wartime
Just like its name indicates, sensoga mainly depicts battlefield scenes and primarily works as propaganda of wars. As people can imagine, the process of producing those sensoga was fairly painstaking. Although the sensoga artists were not demanded to fight with other soldiers, they still had to serve in the army so as to gain a better view of the battlefields and ensure that those artists could reflect their feelings of the war scenes better. They were called jugun gaka従軍画家, or official war painters, a special work emerged during wartime Japan that can be date back to the Sino-Japanese War from 1894 to 1895 and the Russo-Japanese War from 1904 to 1905 (Winther-Tamaki, 146). The official war painters, however, were still active in later wars, such as the Fifteen-Year War. According to some data, there were three hundred artists travelled with the army to the battlefields at the end of 1930s through the beginning of 1940s (Winther-Tamaki, 146). Some of those artists were demanded to create sensoga, regardless of the fact that they own desires to create something else. Those artists who refused to follow the military to battlefields faced obstacles like financial problems, limited supply of paint, and censorship (Winther-Tamaki, 145). Therefore, a boost of war paintings arose in wartime