Social Science Japan Journal Advance Access published online on May 15, 2007
Social Science Japan Journal, doi:10.1093/ssjj/jym026
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Consumption, Leisure and the Middle Class in Transwar Japan
Andrew GORDON is Lee and Juliet Folger Fund Professor of History at Harvard University. His recent publications include ‘From Singer to Shinpan: Consumer Credit in Modern Japan’ in Sheldon Garon and Patricia L. Maclachlan, eds., The Ambivalent Consumer: Questioning Consumption in East Asia and the West (Cornell University Press, 2006), and in Japanese, Nihon no Ni-hyaku-nen (Misuzu Shob
, 2006), a translation of A Modern History of Japan (Oxford University Press, 2002). He can be reached by e-mail at agordon{at}fas.harvard.edu
The rise of a mass consumer society and the spread of commercialized leisure are aspects of global modernity in the 20th century. In Japan, these phenomena emerged to prominence in the transwar decades from the 1920s through the 1960s. This essay argues that the ascendance of middle-class lifeways, consumption and leisure prominent among them, took place through a process that involved the transposing of difference as much as the diffusing of sameness. It identifies a causal dynamic in ‘transwar’ history, which extends the concept beyond political economy and beyond the simple claim that continuities stretch across the purported break of World War II.
* This is a revised version of an interpretative essay based in roughly equal parts on my own research and synthesis of other recent scholarship, and it was originally published in Japanese translation (Gordon 2006a). I appreciate the comments of SSJJ reviewers, which have been helpful to me in this revision.