?Final Price Realized includes Buyer’s Premium added to Hammer Price
Estimate: $ 600 - $ 900
(STORYTELLING.) Mumei No Ha Ha. (The Unsung Mother.) Complete set of 20 offset color Kamishibai story plates in original paper envelope with printed paper label. 10 1/2x15 1/4 inches each sheet size; light toning, otherwise very nice; outer sleeve with slight tears. Japan, Showa 19 (1944)
A fine set of Kamishibai story plates in both subject matter and condition. The pictures were displayed within a miniature stage to illustrate shows on the street corners of Japan. These stories were designed to impart a sense of nationalism and morality to children, subtly acting as a tool of wartime propaganda.
This is the heartbreaking tale of a Japanese mother whose son was killed in World War II. The mother is a hard worker but the people of the village do not acknowledge this; her son makes a Kunsho, or military medal, out of flowers and gives it to his mother out of respect of her hard work; she reflects on this memory and his boyhood innocence; the mother watches over her sleeping son on the night before he goes off to war; the son is now in the thick of the war; mother talks to her daughter about her plans to work in the factory making warplanes to support her son; the son receives a letter from the mother explaining her new job in the airplane factory; he imagines her face as he reads the letter; he writes a return letter to her; the fighting resumes early in the morning; the son fires a machine gun as the fighting intensifies, the Japanese soldiers are expecting aerial assistance; a shell explodes and the son is wounded; airplanes do come but they are American; the son dies in the arms of his friend; mother receives the letter explaining her son's death; she reads the letter to her daughter; mother imagines his spirit as he comes to say goodbye; the news of her son's death is crushing, but she forces herself to return to work in the airplane factory; she is back at work, carrying the memory of her son. In the end, it is an emotional dark narrative reflecting the horrors and sacrifices of war.
Exhibition Hours
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