- The Ambivalent Consumer: Questioning Consumption in East Asia and the West
This book is a valuable contribution to the slowly growing literature on consumption in Japan and elsewhere in East Asia. It is especially useful because it contrasts Asian patterns of consumption with at least a selection of those found in the West—in this case in the United States, Sweden, and the United Kingdom. With only two essays (out of the total of 12 chapters) on other parts of East Asia (South Korea and China), the book is in fact largely about Japan and its contrasts with the United States. This is both a strength and a weakness. While the comparative perspective is very welcome, the analysis of Japan would have been deepened by more linkages to consumption behavior [End Page 125] in the neighboring countries it has so significantly influenced economically and culturally, and in turn been influenced by. The United States seems to be an inevitable contrasting case, but despite its obvious role in generating some now fairly universal patterns of consumption, it is geographically, culturally, and historically remote.
That said, the essays in this volume (and the introduction by the editors) are of a uniformly high quality and represent an attractive mix of Japanese and Western scholarship on historical and contemporary consumption behavior primarily in Japan. One-third of the contributors are Japanese. While the book can be read profitably by scholars of consumption anywhere, it will be of primary interest to Japan specialists. As the editors explain in their introduction, the title refers to the substantial ambivalence they see about the globalized reach of American-style or American-inspired consumption. Ambivalence is found not only among critics of globalization, but equally among Asian consumers who fear, perhaps rightly, the erosion of their local economies; the destruction of cultural forms and practices including fashions, cuisines, popular culture, and patterns and content of entertainment and vernacular architecture; and, when excessive consumption displaces the culture of thrift that preceded it, the collapse of sociological patterns such as the many small family businesses that abound in Japan and the morality that underpinned those patterns.
The book is essentially an exploration of this dialectic between the globalization of consumption along largely American-led lines and the local debates and practices that have questioned, resisted, modified, rejected, and assimilated those patterns. It raises important theoretical questions, including, as the editors point out, whether all "consumer revolutions" are necessarily alike. It also alerts readers to the danger of anachronistic readings in which current U.S. understandings of "the consumer" are projected backward to encompass anyone who has ever bought goods or services, when in fact multiple consumer identities include the notions (as in Japan) that consumption is potentially selfish, environmentally dangerous, and wasteful and that consumption may be undertaken selectively for patriotic (as in Korea) or religious reasons. The social costs of consumption and the politics of consumption (for example, the Chinese desire to promote consumption while curbing consumer activism) constitute an important theme that runs throughout the book.
The 12 substantive chapters approach these central issues in a number of ways. Frank Trentmann's framing essay that initiates the book explores (mainly utilizing U.K. material) the evolution of the notion of the "consumer" as a social category and the dangers of anachronistic applications of the term. Lizabeth Cohen develops her idea of the "consumers' republic" to delineate the U.S. model of an economy and culture built on or around mass consumption. In one of the most interesting essays in the book, Shunya [End Page 126] Yoshimi explores the complex and mediated influences of the United States on postwar Japanese society, in part by deconstructing the notion of "America" for Japanese and the subtle dialectic of desire and rejection that still characterizes the postwar relationship and its many ambivalences and contradictions. Jordan Sand explores the nature of nostalgia and the nostalgic consumerism of the 1980s...