Japanese Penny Dreadfuls

May 19, 2018 4:38 PM

Stories of this sort—lurid, sensational, violent—were the bread-and-butter of Tokyo’s early tabloids
posted by MovableBookLady (2 comments total)

This paragraph seems particularly relevant these days:

In fact, embellishment and even fabrication do not appear to have been particularly bothersome to those in power, writes Rebecca Salter in Japanese Popular Prints: From Votive Slips to Playing Cards: “The authorities, who may have known the full facts, were content with the confusion sewn by this uncertainty, as long as one version of a story did not appear to gain ascendancy as the correct one.”

posted by languagehat at 8:03 AM on May 20, 2018

Canadian born, Tokyo based and Metafilter's own David Bull just recently did a video on a similar publication from the same era - Japan's answer to pulp novels.
posted by PenDevil at 3:45 AM on May 21, 2018 [1 favorite]