戦後初期日本の児童文化におけるアフリカ表象

Abstract

During the early postwar period, one of the most popular narrative genres in Japanese children culture is an adventurous story in which protagonists have to survive at an unexplored frontier and fight off the invasion of villains with bad intentions such as world domination. In a lot of these works, the stories were often set in locations on the African continent, in a lush jungle, where several wild beasts and “brutal” native inhabitants live. Notably, these representations of “Africa” are clearly based on prewar adventure novels and comics, which means children culture in the postwar era had clearly been influenced by the colonial imagination that flourished in prewar Japan. The purpose of this paper is to consider how these stories represent “Africa” and how they are deeply influenced by various popular culture in imperial era. Moreover, this paper also examines the biographical stories and essays related to “Africa” and comprehensively clarifies the characteristics of the representation of “Africa” in early postwar Japan.