Playing War: Children and the Paradoxes of Modern Militarism in Japan (Hardcover) (ISBN-13: 9780520295445)

In Playing War, Sabine Fr hst ck makes a bold proposition: that for over a century throughout Japan and beyond, children and concepts of childhood have been appropriated as tools for decidedly unchildlike purposes: to validate, moralize, humanize, and naturalize war, and to sentimentalize peace. She argues that modern conceptions of war insist on and exploit a specific and static notion of the child: that the child, though the embodiment of vulnerability and innocence, nonetheless possesses an inherent will to war, and that this seemingly contradictory creature demonstrates what it means to be human. In examining the intersection of children/childhood with war/military, Fr hst ck identifies the insidious factors perpetuating this alliance, thus rethinking the very foundations of modern militarism. She interrogates how essentialist notions of both childhood and war have been productively intertwined; how assumptions about childhood and war have converged; and how children and childhood have worked as symbolic constructions and powerful rhetorical tools, particularly in the decades between the nation- and empire-building efforts of the late-nineteenth and early twentieth centuries up to the uneven manifestations of globalization at the beginning of the twenty-first.

Author: Sabine Fr?st?k
ISBN-10: 0520295447
ISBN-13: 9780520295445
Publisher: University of California Press
Language: English
Published: 07/18/2017
Pages: 288
Format: Hardcover
Weight: 1.40lbs
Size: 9.00h x 6.20w x 0.80d