The Growth Idea: Purpose and Prosperity in Postwar Japan (review)

Among American academics, the study of social science ideas in twentieth-century Japan is itself a growth industry, which ironically began to flourish after the Japanese economy entered its long lost decade. Significant producers of this work include the sociologist Bai Gao and historians Andrew Barshay, Jeffrey Hanes, and Laura Hein with book-length studies, and Victor Koschmann and Mark Metzler with shorter pieces as well as work in progress.¹ With The Growth Idea, Scott O'Bryan offers an important intervention in this dynamic field. His book is well worth reading and thinking about, accessibly and stylishly written, and persuasively argued. His distinctive contribution is a focus on a particular, nearly hegemonic idea. For O'Bryan, and for anyone interested in twentieth-century Japanese or world history, the questions of to what extent and at what points the idea of growth became hegemonic are important indeed.

O'Bryan calls his project "a history of the formative years of the growth ideal as it took shape in Japan during the first decade and a half after the Second World War." He argues persuasively that "there was a time when the knowledge formations and vocabularies of macroeconomic growth, its prescriptions and instrumentalized practices, were not yet so fully naturalized." His book explores the process by which "the idea of ever-expanding material and financial accumulation" achieved an "apparent temporal transcendence" (p. 3).

Although primarily a study of postwar Japan, the book situates the ascendance of the growth idea in both a global and a longer twentieth-century context. O'Bryan's foreign (Anglo-American world) protagonists are John Maynard Keynes and Simon Kuznets, the latter as pioneer in developing the tools of national income accounting. O'Bryan argues that the "growthist ideal" was put to the political task in Japan of defining a "national postwar purpose," and the inquiry takes this economic concept far outside the academy, showing that it became an article of faith (and lampooning) in popular culture as well as politics (p. 5). At a fairly high level of generality, this is hardly an original claim. The value of O'Bryan's work lies in showing with precision how and when the growth idea was conceived and how it won the day—how, that is, developments in the field of national income accounting turned gross national product (GNP) "from an obscure academic exercise into one of the key conceptual instruments" for the pursuit of macroeconomic growth (p. 5).

The book's first chapter ("A New Mobilization") acknowledges that a "desire for rationally ordered governance of economic life" in Japan is found in several previous eras: the 1890s under the impact of continental social policy ideas, the post-World War I era, and wartime mobilization. O'Bryan stresses not simply continuity into the postwar experience but significant new departures. One is the flourishing of new techniques and institutional settings for measuring the economy (most notably a group convened in the waning days of the war with Ōkita Saburō at the center, which from 1946 was nested in the Foreign Ministry as the Special Survey Committee). The other important shift which O'Bryan identifies in the move from war to postwar was the vision of "humanistic technocracy," or the insistence that planning can and should be democratic (p. 21). Although I have also found ample evidence that bureaucrats and civic groups alike following World War II embraced the notion that state-led campaigns for social reform such as the New Life Movement could be (and needed to be) democratic projects, I wonder how much of this shift was new; it is also the case that wartime technocrats (however self-deceptively) often envisioned their work as undertaken on the side of humanistic angels.

O'Bryan follows with a fascinating chapter examining "The Measures that Rule," as they were developed in Britain and the United States, and then Japan. He takes the relatively obscure topic of occupation...