Marketing and Consumption in Modern Japan by Kazuo Usui (review)

This is a book with marketing in its title that really doesn’t do what it says on the cover. Essentially, it is a historical account of the development of the retail system, focusing almost exclusively on the ways in which retail forms were imported into Japan from the United States and Europe and adapted to the requirements of selling Western-style products in the Japanese environment. In its pre–World War II section, the book presents the familiar story of the establishment of department stores and the less familiar one of the development of keiretsu-style store chains by the manufacturers of new kinds of consumer goods; in its postwar chapters, it focuses on the emergence of Japanese-style supermarkets and convenience stores, as the keiretsu chains eventually became obsolete. In these terms, as what is effectively a business history of “modern” retailing in Japan, it shows how the dominance of manufacturers over the marketing of mass-produced goods continued to determine many aspects of the ways in which consumers acquired such items well into the high-growth era, within a regulatory framework that has restricted the growth of large-scale independent retailers until quite recent times.

However, what the book does not offer, despite its title, is the sustained analysis of the relationship between producers’ marketing activities and consumers’ choices that it seems to promise. There is virtually no mention of, for example, advertising or branding—surely key elements in “marketing” as normally understood—and discussion of consumer taste is largely limited to a few vaguely Nihonjinron remarks. We are told that Japanese people did not like the milky smell of Western-style confectionery but are given no explanation as to how this apparently innate distaste was overcome or how this might have been related to the marketing activities of confectionery producers. Brief historical background chapters describe broad developments—the Meiji Restoration ushered in “Westernization,” postwar nuclear families moved into danchi, and so on—but subsequent chapters make little attempt to link these to demand trends that might have reflected consumer agency in the development of consumption patterns.

Furthermore, the implicit assumption that “marketers”—broadly synonymous with modern-sector producers—determine what is bought leads to the conclusion, easily drawn from the book, that nothing could have been marketed before 1868, and even thereafter, “Japanese-style,” “traditional” goods required no marketing worth mentioning. “Hedonistic” consumption was apparently born with the moga in the 1920s (p. 53), and one is left to speculate as to what, if not pleasure, earlier Japanese consumers might have been getting from all that eating out, going to the theater, and buying nice things. Fashion, as a driver of consumption, is defined purely in terms of the wearing of Western-style clothes, so that girls’ school uniforms appear as the height of fashion. “Kimono” is almost always prefaced with “traditional,” despite the fact that the book’s cover itself shows a very elegant 1920s kimono outfit completely different from earlier styles, and it is clear (though largely only from reading between the lines) that prewar department stores depended heavily on sales of changing fashions in kimono fabrics. “Traditional” retailers are only of interest as the originators of “modern” retail organizations (the Tokugawa kimono stores that developed into department stores) or as throwbacks against which “modern” retailers had to compete (the small-scale food retailers who organized to oppose supermarkets). Only through careful scrutiny of the tables does it become clear that Japanese people, from the Tokugawa period through to well beyond World War II, must have continued to buy a significant proportion of their everyday goods from retailers who did not fit into “modern” categories and about whom we still know very little. Whereas the literature on retail history in Europe is now heavily populated with village shopkeepers, peddlers, and secondhand clothes dealers, that on Japan, it seems, is still dominated in particular by the department store, which sold to a limited market of better-off urban...