The Growth Idea: Purpose and Prosperity in Postwar Japan

Notes

185 Notes Introduction: The Growth Idea and Early Postwar History 1. For examples of notions of a “lost decade” and a “miracle” ended, see Harada Yutaka, Nihon no ushinawareta jünen: shippai no honshitsu, fukkatsu e no senryaku (Nihon Keizai Shinbunsha, 1999); Toshida Seiichi, Nihon keizai no shukudai: “ushinatta jünen” o koete (Daiyamondosha, 2001); Ötake Fumio, Yanagawa Noriyuji, Noguchi Yukio, Kenshö: ushinawareta jünen, Heisei fukyö no ronten (Töyö Keizai Shinbunsha , 2004); Tokyo Daigaku Shakai Kagaku Kenkyüjo, Ushinawareta 10-nen o koete (Tokyo Daigaku Shuppankai, 2005–6); Hiroshi Yoshikawa, Japan’s Lost Decade, trans. Charles H. Stewart. LTCB International Library Selection, no. 11 (LTCB International Library Trust/International House of Japan, 2001); Gary R. Saxonhouse and Robert M. Stern, eds., Japan’s Lost Decade: Origins, Consequences and Prospects for Recovery (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2004); Tim Callen and Jonathan D. Ostray, eds., Japan’s Lost Decade: Policies for Economic Revival (International Monetary Fund, 2003); Richard Katz, Japan, the System That Soured: The Rise and Fall of the Japanese Economic Miracle (Armonk, NY: M.E.Sharpe, 1998); Edward W. Desmond, “The Failed Miracle,” Time, April 22, 1996. 2. There were a number of interrelated trends, to be sure, on the Japanese national scene in the last years of the twentieth century that did by conventional measures seem rightful causes for worry. Several posed a particularly tough set of interlinked challenges to Japanese social and economic policy makers and began to exert a certain amount of constraining influence on personal experience and life trajectories: the aging of the population, an increase in government and corporate red ink, a rising tide of bad debt held by the financial industry, and a slowing of the total annual increase in national economic production of goods and services. Invocations of these factors became a constant refrain in Heisei-era Japan, but it was perhaps the last of these that was most broadly lamented. 3. Ryü Shintarö, “Hanamizake no keizai,” in Ryü Shintarö Zenshü, vol. 3: Seichö keizai no yukue (Asahi Shinbunsha, 1968), 116. This Asahi series was collected with others to form the basis of Ryü’s well-known volume Hanamizake no keizai, published by Asahi Shinbunsha in 1962. 4. Ryü, “Hanamizake no keizai,” 116. In daily parlance, keiki implied a general sense of “good economic times” and “business” being “up.” In more technical senses, the term stood in close relation to study of business cycles that had so dominated certain branches of neoclassical economics from the end of the nineteenth century into the early decades of the twentieth. 5. Mizutani Michikazu, Sengo Nihon keizaishi: sangyö, ryütsü, shöhi közö no henka (Döbun Kanshutsu, 1991), 68, tables 3–5. 6. Timothy Mitchell, Rule of Experts: Egypt, Techno-Politics, Modernity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), 82. 7. On the expansion of credit and marketing, see Andrew Gordon, “From Singer to Shinpan: Consumer Credit in Modern Japan,” in Sheldon Garon and Patricia L. Maclachlan, eds., Ambivalent Consumer: Questioning Consumption in East Asia and the West (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2006), 137–62; Lendol Calder, Financing the American Dream: A Cultural History of Consumer Credit (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999), and Simon Partner, Assembled in Japan: Electrical Goods and the Making of the Japanese Consumer (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), 168–71. 8. Sheldon Garon has elegantly and persuasively illustrated the continued force in the second half of the twentieth century of campaigns by some to control consumption and promote savings. His research has traced the ways in which these movements invoked both culturalist and political-economic rationales for their goals. For Sheldon Garon’s work in these regards, see Molding Japanese Minds: The State in Everyday Life (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997), 153–57; “Japan’s Post-war ‘Consumer Revolution,’ or Striking a Balance between Consumption and Saving,” in John Brewer and Frank Trentmann, eds., Consuming Cultures, Global Perspectives: Historical Trajectories, Transnational Exchanges (New York: Berg, 2006), 189–217; “The Transnational Promotion of Saving in Asia: ‘Asian Values’ or the ‘Japanese Model’?” in Garon and Maclachlan, eds., The Ambivalent Consumer, 163–87. In my own research, I have also found that those pushing for a reconsideration of consumption as not necessarily antithetical to happy economic outcomes always did so in a manner that also emphasized the importance that it be sober and rational. 9. The tension between ideals of frugality and simplicity on one hand and the consuming impulse on the other has been important throughout early...