Professor Takeda at Aoyama Gakuin University in Tokyo kindly mailed me a couple of interesting things to read from Japan. They are all interesting from an academic point of view, but one of them is absolutely hilarious and I have to blog about this. It was a new journal called “MamoR,” and is basically a PR magazine that Japan’s Ministry of Defense has started to issue.
The target audience is probably teenagers. The magazine is full of (pathetic) efforts to pop-culturize defense and military issues. The very first pages are a female idol’s pin-up shots in military outfits. The magazine (of course) reduces complex military affairs to a black-and-white heroic narrative. It uses cartoon characters, puts “SDF” in hiragana (じえい隊 instead of 自衛隊), and even introduces a curry recipe. There are restaurant guide pages, fashion pages, and fortune-telling pages, all creating a pop and accessible image of the military.
百聞は一見に如かず。Enjoy the pictures!
Haha, this is hysterical. I thought Yuzupon stands for Yuzu-ponzu.
Desho?