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  • The Japanese Consumer: An Alternative Economic History of Modern Japan
  • Andrew Gordon
The Japanese Consumer: An Alternative Economic History of Modern Japan. By Penelope Francks (New York, Cambridge University Press, 2009) 249 pp. $90.00 cloth $32.99 paper

The Japanese Consumer offers what it promises—a concise, readable account of Japan’s modern economic history; it is “alternative” in that it places consumers rather than producers center stage. The book nicely combines a modest dose of quantitative economic history (only seven [End Page 677] tables in 250 pages) with a wide variety of qualitative evidence and numerous well-chosen illustrations. Its coverage is broad, ranging from the seventeenth through the twenty-first century in just 220 pages of text. Inevitably, it is primarily a work of synthesis. Francks draws impressively from the scholarship of a wide variety of historians writing in Japanese and English, including anthropologists and cultural, political, and economic historians.

The book’s principal arguments are that consumption in Japan was robust and expanding in the early modern era when the goods and services consumed were indigenous ones, not Western imports, and that consumption of those indigenous goods and services remained prominent, if not dominant, until the middle of the twentieth century. An additional argument is that despite its reputation as a nation of savers, Japan has also in modern times been a nation of aggressive spenders, its modern economic growth owing much to its consumers; one should not overstress exports in the analysis of Japan’s industrial or economic history.

A brief first chapter usefully situates a study of the Japanese case in the context of recent work on early modern consumer revolutions, particularly in Europe. The next two chapters look at consumption in the cities and countryside of Tokugawa era Japan (1600–1868). The urban story is relatively well known, although effectively told. The emergence of what Francks calls “ordinary consumption” in the countryside, however, has seen far less analysis in existing work, especially in English. Franck’s argument for the growth in demand for a wide range of goods, especially from the rural elite, is persuasive.

The remaining four substantive chapters focus on the expanding world of goods in connection with modern civilization in the late nineteenth century; the interwar flourishing of what was understood at the time as a Japanese version of global modernity; the postwar transformation of daily life, particularly through the spread of electrical goods to the home; and the more diverse consumption patterns of the recent post-bubble or postmodern decades. One point driven home is that indigenous goods, such as kimono, in both early modern and modern times had their own elements of fashion and trendiness, which kept them fresh and desirable in the eye of consumers (130–131). More generally, Francks emphasizes that the rising levels of consumption through mid-century reflected not only the purchase of products of modern industry (electric fans, gas burners, etc.) but also the greater access of ordinary people to indigenous goods (such as white rice and tatami mat floors) that had previously been out of their reach. Francks is attentive to questions of gender. Her discussion, in Chapter 5, of the redefinition of the mid-twentieth-century housewife as a rational, scientific manager of consumer life, in addition to her role caring for children and husband, is important.

With regard to interdisciplinary interests, Franck’s examination of the culture of consumption—how people at the time understood and [End Page 678] gave meaning to it—is limited. In early modern times, people had a range of responses—from excitement and pleasure to sanctimonious disapproval, and even a fear that profligate ways would destroy the country—which is not much discussed. Furthermore, treatment of what people in the 1920s began to call the “double life”—mixing modes of consumption understood to be Western and Japanese—is too brief, and misleading. The “double life” is strangely described as a concept introduced by Edward Seidensticker and “later theorists” (136). In fact, it was a term in wide circulation during the interwar era, usually lamented but sometimes celebrated. Closer consideration of the dilemma that it imposed would have strengthened this valuable study.

Andrew Gordon...

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