1942 Furushima Japanese Propaganda View of Pear Harbor Attack

Celebrating the Japanese Attack on Pearl Harbor.

This is a 1942 Furushima Matsunosuke bird's-eye view of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, issued by King magazine to celebrate the destruction of the American battleships for a Japanese audience. Published less than three months after the attack, at the apex of Japan's wartime imperial expansion, it combines a panorama of Ford Island with an emphatically triumphalist account of Japanese naval power. The accompanying text asks readers to hang the picture nearby, remember the servicemen's sacrifices morning and evening, and cultivate confidence in ultimate victory.

A Closer Look

Ford Island dominates the foreground, with its intersecting runways, hangars, parked aircraft, and waterfront installations rendered in oblique perspective. Beyond it, channels and low peninsulas lead toward Oahu's mountainous interior. Japanese aircraft bearing red national insignia sweep across the sky and descend toward the harbor, while American warships burn along the island's shores. The image provides neither place-name labels nor a tactical key; instead, it depicts heroic action in a style similar to the militaristic comic books marketed to Japanese boys before and during World War II.

The Japanese text along the left margin supplies the interpretation that the unlabelled image leaves implicit. It dates the attack to December 8, 1941 (the date in Japan corresponding to December 7 in Hawaii), and claims that the Combined Fleet annihilated the main strength of the American Pacific Fleet. It then explains that the magazine commissioned the painting to commemorate the achievement and express gratitude to the imperial forces. Its closing appeal links domestic display with national unity and prosecution of the Greater East Asia War, the Japanese wartime designation that combined the Pacific War against the U.S. with Japanese invasions ('liberations') of European colonies in Southeast Asia and Japan's war in China (previously euphemistically called the 'China Incident').

The view's claim of annihilation was a propagandistic exaggeration. The attack indeed inflicted devastating losses on the battleships, but the American aircraft carriers were absent, and the base's fuel storage and repair facilities survived. Those surviving resources allowed Pearl Harbor to continue supporting American operations. More importantly, as some Japanese war planners were fully aware, American industrial capacity would soon be able to replace or repair the lost ships while producing many, many more than Japan could.

King Magazine and Kōdansha

King (キング) was a monthly general interest magazine published from 1924 - 1957 by Dai Nippon Yūbenkai Kōdansha (大日本雄辯會講談社, now known simply as Kōdansha). It was one of the most important magazines in Japan in this period, and its wide range of material combined with a readership that cut across typical class and geographical divisions meant that King was an important contributor to the birth of mass culture in Japan. Along with King, Kōdansha published a number of other magazines, including Women's Club (婦人倶樂部) and Boy's Club (少年倶樂部), and had become a major shaper of Japanese culture and public opinion by the 1930s, controlling 70% of the magazine market.

Founded by the dynamic Noma Seiji (野間淸治), Kōdansha suffered difficulties during the war period due to both intense censorship and the death of both Noma Seiji and his son, Noma Hasashi (野間恒), within weeks of each other in 1938. Still, the company survived the wartime era and, after a period of difficulties during the U.S. Occupation due to Kōdansha's endorsement of militarism, benefited from a postwar publishing revival. Although King and other magazines ceased publication in the postwar period, Kōdansha branched into other areas, including manga and music recording, and is now the largest publisher in Japan.

Publication History

This view was published in Tokyo by Kodansha on March 1, 1942, as the supplement to Volume 18, Number 3 of King. The painting on which the printed version is based was made by Furushima Matsunosuke (古島松之助). Hashimoto Motome (橋本求) is named as editor and publisher, and Dai Nippon Printing (大日本印刷株式會社) as the printing establishment. This view is cataloged among the holdings of the David Rumsey Historical Map Collection, the Story of Hawaii Museum, the University of Hawaii at Manoa, the Nichibunken (International Research Center for Japanese Studies), Ritsumeikan University, the National Museum of Japanese History, and the National Showa Memorial Museum.

Cartographers

Matsunosuke Furushima (古嶋松之助, fl. c. 1935 - 1945) was a Japanese Western-style (yōga) painter and official war artist (jūgun gaka) active during the 1930s and 1940s. While his exact birth and death dates remain unrecorded in standard art registries, his career is well-documented through military commissions, naval battle scenes, and wartime publications. Furushima trained under Tōjō Shōtarō (1865–1929), one of modern Japan’s premier marine painters renowned for his depictions of the Russo-Japanese War. Under Tōjō’s mentorship, Furushima developed a sharp technical foundation in grand maritime realism. Following the outbreak of the Second Sino-Japanese War, Furushima became deeply involved in front-line visual documentation. In October 1937, the Imperial Japanese Navy authorized him, alongside other established painters of military scenes, to embed with forces on the Shanghai front, an assignment followed by deployments across Manchuria as well as northern and central China. His work moved between official galleries and mass public media; he exhibited at state-sanctioned events like the Second Holy War Art Exhibition (Dai-ni-kai Seisen Bijutsuten) in 1941, while also reaching a broad civilian audience through military postcards (gunji ehagaki) and popular press supplements. In March 1942, for instance, his large panoramic reconstruction of the attack on Pearl Harbor (Hawai Daikaisenzu) was distributed nationwide as a foldout insert in the mass-market magazine King. Because his professional career was almost entirely tethered to the imperial war apparatus, Furushima faded from major public exhibition rosters after 1945, leaving an oeuvre that now serves primarily as critical historical documentation of wartime Japanese propaganda and naval art.   Further Details...

Hashimoto Motome (橋本求; 1918 - 1977) was a publisher and author with the publishing house Kodansha. After graduating from Waseda University, he joined Kodansha and became the editor-in-chief of Women's Club (婦人倶楽部) and later editor-in-chief of King (キング) in the early 1940s. After the war, he held several senior roles at Kodansha, while also writing a biography of the banker Kitaro Okano (岡野喜太郎伝 : 人とその事業) in 1952 and a history of Japanese publishing (日本出版販賣史) in 1964.   Further Details...

Kodansha (株式会社講談社, 1909 - Present), also known in the early Shōwa period as Dai Nippon Yūbenkai Kōdansha (大日本雄弁会講談社), is a Japanese publishing house founded in 1909 by Seiji Noma (野間淸治). Seiji founded Kodansha as a spin-off from the Dai-Nippon Yūbenkai (Greater Japan Oratorical Society) and produced the literary magazine Yūben as its first publication. The name Kodansha, a derivative of the defunct magazine Kōdan Club (Storytelling Club), in 1911, which it merged with the Dai-Nippon Yūbenkai. In 1925, Kodansha launched King (キング) , the first magazine to sell 1,000,000 copies in its first printing. Kōdansha published several other magazines including Women's Club (婦人倶樂部) and Boy's Club (少年倶樂部) and had become a major shaper of Japanese culture and public opinion by the 1930s, controlling 70% of the magazine market. Kōdansha suffered difficulties during the war period, due to both intense censorship and the 1938 death of both Noma Seiji and his son, Noma Hasashi (野間恒), within weeks of one another. Still, the company survived the wartime era and, after a period of difficulties during the U.S. Occupation due to Kōdansha's endorsement of militarism, benefitted from a postwar publishing revival. Although King and other magazines ceased publication in the postwar period, Kōdansha branched into other areas, including manga and music recording, and is now the largest publisher in Japan.   Further Details...

Dai Nippon Printing (大日本印刷株式會社; 1876 - present) is a Tokyo-based printing company with roots dating back to the Meiji era with the publisher Shūeisha (秀英舎), which developed a reputation for embracing new technologies and mechanization over traditional woodblock methods. In 1935, Shūeisha merged with Nisshin Printing (日清印刷), a publisher related to Waseda University, to form Dai Nippon Printing. In the postwar period, the company expanded further and was listed on the Tokyo Stock Exchange in 1949. In the mid-1950s, Dai Nippon was involved in printing the first editions of the Kōjien (広辞苑) dictionary, akin to Merriam-Websters in the United States or the Oxford English Dictionary in Britain, as well as Shukan Shincho (週刊新潮), long one of the most popular weekly news magazines in Japan. In subsequent years, the company branched out internationally and into other industries, including bottling Coca-Cola, but, like the publishing industry as a whole, has faced financial difficulties in recent years.   Further Details...

Source

Hashimoto, Motome, ed., King, vol. 18, no. 3, supplement, (Tokyo: Dai Nihon Yubenkai Kodansha, 1942).    

Condition

Very good. Slight toning.

References

Rumsey, 10806.000. OCLC 1199416624, 1527537605.