The Japanese Consumer: An Alternative Economic History of Modern Japan (review)

"For the world beyond the original sites of the industrial revolution," Penelope Francks explains at the beginning of her book, consumerism is thought to be "something that arrives as part and parcel of the imported industrialization that brings modern goods to domestic markets" (p. 7). This is a misunderstanding, as she explains, and will not take one very far in thinking about the Japanese experience. By extension, an account of the Japanese experience will help people working from other locales to better evaluate the big questions of consumption, modernity, and how they are connected.

Francks's book is a synthesis of a booming but still new literature. In 1931, in a public call for stimulating consumer demand, Ishibashi Tanzan complained about the way that consumption was ignored and treated as something outside economics.¹ In fact, economists outside Japan had actively discussed the place of the consumer since the 1890s—Alfred Marshall among others addressed the issue then. Historians ignored the subject for much longer, and the modern surge of interest dates back only to the latter part of the 1970s. Pioneering works by Stuart Ewen (1976) and Joan Thirsk (1978) considered the sources of consumer culture in the United States and Britain. Francks points to Neil McKendrick's 1982 essay on the consumer revolution in eighteenth-century England as a starting point.² Historians' interest in consumption surged in the late 1980s and 1990s as they realized that it was an issue of gender as well and took in influences such as the work of the Frankfurt School and the new cultural studies. Scholars of Japanese history, with their strongly culturalist orientation, also actively took up the subject.

The new fascination with consumption and with the agency of the self-fashioning consumer has mirrored a shift of attention away from production, in its own way tracking the tendency for Americans particularly to overconsume their way into massive trade deficits. At the same time, Japanese companies and workers, as international "overproducers," seemed to stand on the other side of the balance. These circumstances connect to a longstanding criticism of Japanese underconsumption—in earlier forms, the ideas that Japanese wages were too low and that Japanese consumers were not allowed to consume enough. Indeed, Francks raises this image as a frame to write against, to highlight an affirmation of Japan's place as one of the world's enduring, vigorous, and autonomously dynamic consumer societies.

In her main chapters, Francks traces the history of Japanese consumption through six phases (some of the labeling is my own):

1. 1. Urban origins: As historians of Japan know but as most historians of other countries do not, Japan developed a vigorous consumer culture during Tokugawa times. This began with a revolution in urban consumption, meaning a shift from status-based consumption (or, one could say, politically based consumption) to market-based consumption. (Of course Japanese people did not independently invent cities, markets, and money, or shops, teahouses, and fashion, and the prior influence of Chinese models of consumption still awaits fuller study.)

2. 2. Agrarian diffusion: In the latter part of the Tokugawa period, especially in the early nineteenth century, urban consumption patterns spread to the upper (commercially active) classes of rural areas. As a close reading of Thomas C. Smith's classic Agrarian Origins of Modern Japan makes clear, these "agrarian origins" thus followed a first phase of "urban origins." As argued by Susan Hanley and set in a sweeping world-historical context by Kenneth Pomeranz, Japanese living standards before factory industrialization thus seem to have compared favorably with living standards in Europe.³

3. 3. Globalization, phase 1: When the country was opened to large-scale foreign trade after 1859, it was thus a case of a highly developed and dynamic Japanese consumer culture receiving a great new stimulus from a dazzling and dynamic Western consumer culture. Far from the one being overwhelmed by the other, existing Japanese consumer culture...