Abstract

The image of Japan's black market as a historical marker, forged in the crucible of defeat, is powerfully persuasive, but also misleading. It did not arise, phoenix-like, from the ashes of defeat but grew steadily into a compelling structure of daily life from the late 1930s to the late 1940s. This paper analyzes its evolution and argues that the black market was in fact a structure of continuity linking war and defeat as a single historical era. As such, the black market was more than just a physical space, or collection of spaces, created by the laws of supply and demand where people engaged in various acts of illegal exchange. It was in fact a network of social practices identified by specific forms of behaviour and defined by a particular language, virtually all of which predated Japan's defeat. As a structure of continuity, the black market also represents a world decidedly un-Japanese, at least according to perceptions of Japan on this side of the Pacific. As one of the defining structures of a world of crisis, the black market offers us a glimpse of Japan that stands in marked contrast to the commonly accepted images of the Japanese people. Despite government propaganda about the special Japanese spirit of harmony and the "one-hundred million hearts beating as one" ( ichioku isshin ) and postwar exhortations to repent and sacrifice to rebuild the nation, the individual and collective acts performed within the black market stand as reminders of how great a gap exists between rhetoric and reality. As both monopoly and monopsony, especially after 1944, the black market drew into its orbit the government official, the military office, and the corporate baron just as it did the farmer, the salaried man and woman, and the entrepreneur. Enriching some, impoverishing many, and compelling most, the black market was the very antithesis of Japan's allegedly "beautiful customs" of harmony and selflessness.

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