Postwar Japanese Humor: Dark Humor and Laughter After the Little Boy

Abstract

This dissertation discusses dark humor in postwar Japanese culture, and examines the ways in which humor was used to assuage or avoid cultural trauma. This study provides a framework for understanding normative postwar Japanese literary and mass-media humor, and clarifies the relationship between conventional and dark humor. By looking at three exemplary works of humor, one conventional, one which embraces the superficial aspects of “dark humor,” and one which wholly gives itself over to the chaos of “dark humor” as both a humor-making device and a governing structural principle, this study sheds light on the various humor practices of postwar Japanese written culture.To show how normative humor helped Japanese readers turn away from postwar trauma, this study closely analyzes the seminal four-panel comic Sazaesan. Written by Hasegawa Machiko (1920-1992)– one of Japan’s, if not the world’s, greatest female cartoonists, Sazaesan adroitly depicts the various cultural crises plaguing everyday life in postwar Japan. By consistently availing herself of inclusive punchlines, Hasegawa’s Sazaesan manages to depict conflict without engaging in it. Though she may direct readers’ attention to some specific cultural problem in the first panel, by the fourth she has turned readers towards universally human and broad punchlines. In this way, Hasegawa helped readers in the midst of their crises without undermining political and social systems which allowed these conditions to occur. In his “Lessons in Immorality,” Mishima Yukio (1925-1970) uses shocking punchlines and controversial anecdotes to advocate for an overturning of the order of things. But while Mishima adopts some of the more obvious methods of dark humor – obscenity, cruel humor, shock, and absurdity, in the end he is unable to leverage humor successfully to argue for his vision of a new Japan built with a novel, Mishima-made morality. Last, this study reads Nosaka Akiyuki’s (1930- 2015) The Pornographers as an exemplary work of dark humor. A work which uses humor to undermine contemporary Japanese society, culture, and literature, The Pornographers embraces and humorously depicts the chaos of an unmoored world. Ultimately, Nosaka successfully uses humor to depict the impotence of literature to affect change in reality, and presents a uniquely humorous and pessimistic depiction of postwar Japan.