Eusociality and the Japanese media machine in the Great East Asia War, 1931–1945 1

In 1938, the Japanese mass media began aggressively promoting a universal program of extreme self-sacrifice for the sake of unattainable ideals of national greatness and racial destiny that would ultimately produce a catastrophic defeat. This chapter describes the militarized government’s reconfiguration of the media landscape to create an environment favorable to its war goals. Through an examination of wartime print media, film, and radio it shows how the wartime media propagated a quasi-religious myth of national destiny and racial superiority that enshrined and inculcated eusocial behavior, and demonstrates how the media ultimately spun this myth into an epic narrative of existential struggle. In closing, it explores the dubious legacy of this wartime media machine.