Becoming Mr. Everyman: White-Collar Media as Mass Culture in 1960s Japan

The salaryman, or male white-collar worker, became a central figure in postwar Japanese society with the expansion of the white-collar labor sector throughout the 1950s and 1960s. During this time, the salaryman was portrayed as the protagonist, consumer, and even author of mass media including studio films, serialized novels, and weekly magazines. This talk will demonstrate how white-collar media came to define postwar mass culture through a discussion of the popular novel and film The Elegant Life of Mr. Everyman (1963), which centers on an unremarkable, middle-aged salaryman and his family. I read The Elegant Life of Mr. Everyman alongside the acclaimed televisual and print advertising produced by the novel’s author Yamaguchi Hitomi for Suntory Liquors. Examined together, these texts and their focus on domestic space reveal the structuring influence of advertising in Japan’s trans-medial image culture in the 1960s, which included the self-reflexive decentralization of the cinematic image. This talk shows how white-collar mass media, operating across mediums, participated in the construction of both urban Japan’s shifting media environment and the idea of the masses in the early 1960s.

Reischauer Institute Japan Forum Lecture Series