Japan's Competing Modernities: Issues in Culture and Democracy, 1900-1930

14. Fashioning a Culture of Diligence and Thrift: Savings and Frugality Campaigns in Japan, 1900–1931

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14 Fashioning a Culture of Diligence and Thrift: Savings and Frugality Campaigns in Japan, 1900–1931 SHELDON GARON Historians, being historians, love to periodize. For several decades, they have been fascinated by the problem of “Taishò” and its evocations of “Taishò democracy” and “Taishò culture.” Defining the beginning and end of Taishò has itself been contentious. Should it be confined to the Taishò emperor’s reign (1912–1926) or perhaps commence in 1905 with the mass protests known as the Hibiya Riots? Or, as many American scholars assert, is it more useful to locate “Taishò” in the years from 1918 to roughly 1932—that is, the period between World War I and Japan’s “Fifteen Years’ War”? Regardless of how they periodize, historians generally treat “Taishò” as a time sandwiched between eras that were its antitheses. Political and social historians describe a transition from the oligarchic-bureaucratic Meiji order to “Taishò democracy,” which in turn succumbed to the repression and authoritarianism of the 1930s. For them, what distinguished Taishò was the rise and subsequent fall of new political and social forces—notably political parties, labor and tenant organizations, progressive intellectuals, women’s groups, and burakumin activists. The newer field of cultural history tends to identify “Taishò culture” with the advent of a “mass-consumption society” and the Americanization of popular culture. Like many Japanese scholars, Donald Roden explains the transition from Meiji to Taishò in terms of a shift in emphasis from production, “civilization,” and Victorian character-molding institutions to consumption and a “new obsession for culture and personality” (Roden 1990, 41–42, 52, 55; see also Harootunian 1974, 15–18; Takemura 1980; Minami 1965). The consumer culture of Taishò appears all the more distinctive in these accounts in view of its impending demise during the 1930s and war years, as the state launched wave after wave of punishing austerity drives. In recent years, political historians have grown wary of depicting the interwar years as an oasis of democracy and toleration surrounded by Meiji and early Shòwa illiberalism. Their work suggests instead that many of the authoritarian aspects of the 1930s evolved from processes at work during the preceding 1920s—including democratization itself (Fletcher 1982; Smith 1983; Mitchell 1976). The Diet’s passage of both universal manhood suffrage and the repressive Peace Preservation Law in 1925 was no coincidence, explains Gregory Kasza, for example. Rather, democratization may have broadened the base of support for suppressing far-left elements considered beyond the boundaries of the newly expanded political community (Kasza 1988, 20–27). Cultural historians, on the other hand, are just beginning to explore the transition from Taishò to the 1930s. As such, the image persists of “Taishò” as an age of unrestrained consumption and raucous self-expression. The case of interwar savings and frugality campaigns accordingly confounds prevailing characterizations of Meiji, Taishò, and Shòwa cultures. At first glance, the government’s drives appear to be curious anachronisms in a rapidly changing Japan. The very titles of the campaigns—“encouragement of diligence and thrift” and “moral suasion mobilization”—hark back to the neo-Confucian vocabulary of premodern China and Tokugawa Japan. Yet like other twentieth-century campaigns to manage society (see Garon 1997), savings-promotion efforts followed a strikingly linear path. They emerged on the national scale in the late Meiji era, became institutionalized during the 1920s and early 1930s, and ultimately reached down to shape the daily habits of nearly every Japanese amid the China and Pacific wars (1937–1945). Moreover, savings campaigns steadily incorporated middleclass social reformers, educators, and women’s leaders during the interwar period—at the very time when these new social forces are commonly represented as carving out autonomous spheres of political and cultural activity vis-à-vis the state. The 1920s must therefore be seen as an era when movements to consume and movements to save expanded concurrently, and, perhaps more surprising, frequently coincided. Indeed, the persistently high rates of personal savings, for which postwar Japan is famous, began their rise during the late 1920s. Reluctant to boost savings solely through material incentives (for example, higher interest rates), the state and allied groups actively promoted habits of thrift throughout the twentieth century. This essay traces the early development of these campaigns as a study in the complex interactions between consumption and thrift and between state and society. 313 Fashioning a Culture of Diligence and Thrift MODERNIZING “MORAL SUASION” As present-day...