"While Marshall keeps her attention tightly focused on just two Japanese magazines, her careful and meticulous archival research, historical contextualization, and textual analysis stand out as helpful models for those studying the role of mass media in the dissemination of ideology in other historical and cultural contexts."
Kyoko Omori, Hamilton College, University of Toronto Quarterly: Letters in Canada 2018
"This is a carefully researched and engaging work of scholarship that does justice to its subject while illuminating larger issues. It deserves to be read not only by cultural historians of interwar Japan but also by scholars of print culture more broadly."
Kerim Yasar, University of Southern California, Journal of Japanese Studies
"Magazines and the Making of Mass Culture in Japan makes an important contribution to English-language scholarship on Japanese magazines, which has tended to concentrate on publications for women."
Jan Bardsley, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, Monumenta Nipponica
“Magazines and the Making of Mass Culture in Japan gives us a rich picture of how two media conglomerates successfully shaped a national mass consumer culture during Japan’s descent into militarism and war. In different yet complementary ways, Kingu and Ie no hikari tapped into, and thereby reinforced, a moral-political milieu of aligning individual with national societal aspirations that created the illusion of social cohesion and cultural homogeneity.”
Franziska Seraphim, Department of History, Boston College
"Amy Bliss Marshall’s book makes a significant contribution to our understanding of the formation of mass culture in modern Japan. It should also draw the attention of scholars working in the histories of nationalism, the media, and the urban-rural divide."
Mark Jones, Department of History, Central Connecticut State University