Hostname: page-component-7b9c58cd5d-nzzs5 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2025-03-17T04:33:17.662Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

The War on Games

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  14 March 2025

Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Extract

Core share and HTML view are not available for this content. However, as you have access to this content, a full PDF is available via the ‘Save PDF’ action button.

2017 and talk of war games is all around us. When The New York Times reported on 10 July of this year that India, the U.S. and Japan had begun “war games,” surely very few readers thought of these war games as actual games. After all, they were designed to have submarines slide unannounced into the deep waters of the Indian Ocean in order to silently take positions near the Indian coastline. When, about a month later, according to The People's Liberation Army Daily China's army commanders declared that the mobile phone game Honor of Kings endangered national defense, they were not joking either. They appeared convinced that the game had infiltrated soldiers' and officers' daily lives and that their addiction to the game would undermine their combat readiness. Around the world, many similar, and often contradictory pronouncements are made daily.

Type
Research Article
Copyright
Copyright © The Authors 2017

References

Akiyama Masami, ed. 1991a. Shōgakusei Shinbun ni miru senjika no kodomotachi (Children at war as viewed by The Elementary School Pupils' Newspaper). 3 vols. Vol. 1. Nihon Tosho Sentā.Google Scholar
Ikuo, Amano. 1990. Education and examination in modern Japan. University of Tokyo Press.Google Scholar
Ambaras, David R. 2006. Bad youth: Juveline delinquency and the politics of everyday life in modern Japan. Berkeley: University of California Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bieber, Hans-Joachim. 2014. SS und Samurai: Deutsch-japanische Kulturbeziehungen 1993–1945. Munich: Iudicium Verlag.Google Scholar
Eppstein, Ury. 1987. “School songs before and after the war: From ‘Children tank soldies’ to ‘Everyone a good child’.” Monumenta Nipponica 42 (4): 431447.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Frühstück, Sabine. 2003. Colonizing sex: Sexology and social control in modern Japan. Berkeley: University of California Press.Google Scholar
Toshirō, Hanzawa. 1980. Dōyū bunka-shi dai 4-kan (Cultural history of children's games vol. 4). Tōkyō Shoseki.Google Scholar
Tadahiko, Inagaki. 1986. “School education: Its history and contemporary status.” In Child development and education in Japan, ed. Stevenson, Harold, Hiroshi, Azuma, and Kenji, Hakuta, 7592. New York: W. H. Freeman.Google Scholar
Shōichirō, Kami, ed. 1977. Nihon kodomo no rekishi 6 (A history of children in Japan 6). Daiichi Hōki Shuppan.Google Scholar
Keishichō Shōnen-ka. 1952. Shōnen no asobi to dōtoku ishiki no hattatsu (Youth play and the development of moral conscience). Keishichō Bōhanbu Shōnen-ka. In In Sōsho Nihon no jidō yūgi dai 25-kan (Collection of books on Japanese children's play vol. 25), ed. Kami Shōichirō, 1-102. Kuresu Shuppan.Google Scholar
Kinder, Marsha. 1993. Playing with power in movies, television, and video games: From Muppet babies to teenage mutant Ninja turtles. Berkeley: University of California Press.Google Scholar
Kracauer, Siegfried. 1960. Theory of film: The redemption of physical reality. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Noriko, Manabe. 2013. “Songs of Japanese schoolchildren during World War II.” In The Oxford handbook of children's musical cultures, ed. Shehan, Patricia and, Campbell Wiggins, Trevor, 96113. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Shigeki, Moriyama and Kazue, Nakae. 2002. Nihon kodomo-shi (A history of children in Japan). Heibonsha.Google Scholar
Morse, Edward Sylvester. (1917) 1978. Japan day by day, 1877, 1878–79, 1882–83. Boston: Houghton Mifflin.Google Scholar
Okano, Kaori, and Tsuchiya, Motonori. 1999. Education in contemporary Japan: Inequality and diversity. Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Piel, Lisbeth Halliday. 2017. “Outdoor Play in Wartime Japan.” In Child's Play: Multi-sensory histories of children and childhood in Japan, edited by Frühstück, Sabine and Walthall, Anne. Berkeley: University of California Press.Google Scholar
Roberts, Luke Shepherd. 2012. Performing the great peace: Political space and open secrets in Tokugawa Japan. Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Toshihiro, Tsuganesawa. 2006. Shashin de yomu Shōwa modan no fūkei (Reading the modern landscape of the Shōwa era in photographs). Kashiwa Shobō.Google Scholar
Mikito, Ujiie. 1989. Edo no shōnen (Youth during the Edo period). Heibonsha.Google Scholar
Fukuo, Watanabe. 1914. “Kodomo no sensō gokko.” Fujin to Kodomo 14 (11): 486490.Google Scholar
Yamashita, Samuel Hideo. 2005. Leaves from the autumn of emergencies: Selections from the wartime diaries of ordinary Japanese. Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press.Google Scholar
Yanagida, Kunio. 1957. Japanese manners and customs in the Meiji era, trans. Charles S. Terry. Ōbunsha.Google Scholar
Yutaka, Yoshida. 2002. Nihon no guntai: Heishitachi no kindaishi (The Japanese military: A modern history of soldiers). Iwanami Shoten.Google Scholar