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Introduction

MEANING AND VALUE IN THE EVERYDAY

A teenage girl stands in a train on her morning commute to school, her eyes fixed

impassively on the smartphone in her hands. In front of her sit two passengers,

asleep, catching whatever rest they can. This sense of fatigue and weariness fol-

lows her as she goes through the day, at one point standing alone in a stairwell

with her face buried in her hands and at another gasping, “I can’t do this.” A teen-

age boy in his work uniform slumps back against the shelf of a convenience store

stockroom, staring blankly in front of him at a long row of brightly lit refrig-

erators filled with an array of bottled and canned drinks. When the words of a

co-worker nudge him to sit up, the distant expression on his face shows a hint

of resignation. These two youths were the creation of an animated public service

announcement which inscribed on the screen one word that encapsulated its

message: “wasteful,” or in the original Japanese, mottainai.1

The ad, a high-quality production in the style of a movie trailer, promised

nothing less than the potential of mottainai to transform melancholy about

daily routines into contentedness with a life worth living. This theme was crafted

jointly by the nonprofit Advertising Council Japan (AC Japan) and the national

broadcaster NHK (Japan Broadcasting Corporation, or Nippon Hōsō Kyōkai), and was promoted through the television spot in the summer of 2015 and online

for months thereafter.2 Its ultimately hopeful note was expressed through the arc

of the visuals, as the early scenes of youth dejected with school, sports practice,

and work gave way in the second half to a montage of more heartening moments

like playing at the beach with a friend and taking time for contemplation. This

optimism, subdued and restrained, was underscored by the wistful soundtrack

Siniawer, Eiko Maruko. Waste : Consuming Postwar Japan, Cornell University Press, 2018. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/upenn-ebooks/detail.action?docID=5516832. Created from upenn-ebooks on 2020-04-05 13:14:54.

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2 INTRODUCTION

of piano and strings, joined in the second half by the sparkling of chimes. The

motifs of promise and renewed search for purpose were emphasized by the inten-

tional focus on young people with so much of their lives ahead of them. And they

were well suited to a time when Japan, tested and tried by a series of challenges,

was setting its sights ahead on recovery and revitalization. That the torpor of the

present could somehow give way to a better life was explicitly expressed in a line

presented over the closing scene: “With mottainai, the future will change.”

Mottainai here meant more than just being wasteful. This was not an explicit

definition or pedantic enumeration of practices that should be considered a

waste; it was not that the teenage girl’s absorption with her smartphone or the

teenage boy’s part-time job was being labeled wasteful.3 Rather, what this take on

mottainai urged was serious and purposeful reflection about what was wasteful

in one’s day-to-day life. Throughout the spot, the voice-over listed in a steady

cadence all that could be realized just by being attentive to this single word: you

could be rescued and revived; become courageous, serious, introspective, and

kind; rediscover yourself; figure things out; feel at ease; embrace aspirations; and

start moving forward. What the announcement encouraged was consideration

of the motivations, purposes, and desires of one’s daily life. It was the absence

of such self-reflection, if anything, that rendered one’s time and energy wasteful.

This was a public service announcement not about a discrete social problem but

about the idea of waste—about deliberately figuring out what is wasteful so as to

discover what is meaningful.

FIGURE 0.1. Public Service Announcement about Mottainai. An early scene from the AC Japan and NHK public service announcement about mottainai.

From “AC Japan CM mottainai,” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GXODCN6rfTc.

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GXODCN6rfTc

MEANING AND VALUE IN THE EVERYDAY 3

This conception of wastefulness bore the marks of its time. In a long and

shifting past reaching back many decades, waste had not always been understood

this way. As we delve into the history of how waste and wastefulness have been

thought about in Japan, from the immediate aftermath of devastating world war

through the more recent past, we will see how malleable and capacious these

ideas were and how deeply they were etched by the priorities and aspirations

of their historical moment. What the announcement also illustrated so point-

edly and elegantly was a fundamental quality of waste: its remarkable capacity

to reveal what is valuable and meaningful. A historical examination of waste can

thus be a story of people’s many and ever-changing concerns, yearnings, disap-

pointments, and hopes. This history of waste is at its heart a history of how

people lived—how they made sense of, gave meaning to, and found value in the

acts of the everyday in postwar Japan.

Waste and Everyday Life To ask what has been considered waste and wasteful is to venture into various

facets of day-to-day life, following the traces of people’s expressions about what

they do and do not value. When attuned to waste, we find its presence in so many

questions asked in the course of modern living. Should this tired sweater be

thrown away? How should all my stuff be organized? Can these old leftovers in

the fridge be eaten? Is it justifiable to spend money on the latest smartphone? Is

it possible to be more efficient and productive at work? Can this evening be spent

playing video games or hanging out at the neighborhood bar? The ubiquity of

waste comes into focus when its conception is broad and inclusive of its many

manifestations.

Garbage, with all of its materiality, may be the most visible and tangible incar-

nation of waste. As many who study it have written, to categorize a thing as gar-

bage, however mindlessly, is to implicitly reject it as valueless.4 Once the tattered

shirt, used plastic wrap, or paper coffee cup is discarded, it joins on the rubbish

heap all of the detritus cast aside as useless. The amount and composition of

trash itself is a mirror of the society responsible for its creation, and discussions

about what to do with garbage and how to handle the afterlives of stuff suggest

much about people’s relationship to material things, what they want to own, how

and what they choose to consume, and how they treat their possessions.

But waste need not be thought of just as discarded matter; it can also be

understood more expansively as anything, material or not, that can be used and

disused. Electricity, food, money, and time can all be wasted. Indeed, there is a

parallel between deeming something garbage and deeming anything a waste, be it

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4 INTRODUCTION

of energy or money or time. All are determinations of value. This wider concep-

tion of waste allows us to see a fuller swath of what might be considered wasteful.

Rubbish, such as a broken refrigerator or outdated videocassette recorder, can tell

us about the societal context in which the decision to discard was made, about

opportunities for repair, attitudes toward disposability, or planned obsolescence.

Other versions of this kind of judgment—to deem the use of a clothes dryer a

waste of electricity or a lengthy meeting a waste of time—can further open the

field of historical vision. They raise questions not just about clothes dryers or

meetings but also about understandings of electricity and of time, household

responsibilities and practices, and attitudes toward work. Thinking about waste

writ large makes more evident the trade-offs in decisions about what to expend

and what to save, like whether money and electricity should be spent on a wash-

ing machine to spare physical labor and time. Highlighted too is how a thing or

action could be wasteful in more ways than one, how a television set could be a

waste of money, electricity, space, and time.

Time is a purposeful inclusion, even though it is distinct in some ways from

its material counterparts. Time cannot be accumulated like money or things;

it cannot be reused or recycled like resources; it cannot be discarded; and it is

always, continuously, and necessarily being expended, whether deliberately or

not. Yet time is similar to things, resources, and money in its finite character,

and in the linguistic possibility of its being “used,” “saved,” and “wasted.” The

categorical boundaries between waste of different sorts can also be porous, as

time can be seen as a resource or converted into money. And it is interconnected

with the material. Not depleting natural resources can extend time horizons,

being efficient can translate into earning more money and buying more stuff,

and throwing things away can mean mortgaging the future for the present. Pre-

cisely because the material is so bound up with modern, industrial, and capitalist

notions of time, it should not be surprising that garbage, resources, money, and

time have all been sites of anxiety about and hopes for daily life.

Across the various kinds of waste, the question of value remains central. And

these determinations of value are not fixed: no object, use, or expenditure is

inherently and unequivocally a waste.5 To treat or describe something as a waste,

be it pantyhose or buffets or long commutes, is to make a judgment or implica-

tion that is thoroughly subjective.6 Because these categorizations are not stable

or universal, something thrown away as garbage could, by a different person or

at a different time, be recharacterized and repurposed as valuable. The washing

machine, the disposable diaper, beer in a can, or golf club membership could

be seen as indispensable, innocuous, or superfluous. It is because these deter-

minations of value have been made in and shaped by a particular context that

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MEANING AND VALUE IN THE EVERYDAY 5

examining what has been considered waste and wasteful can reveal the social and

cultural concerns of that historical moment. In addition, explicit conversations

about what should be regarded as a waste, how to distinguish between undesir-

able stinginess and desirable frugality, how to draw the line between necessity

and excess, and what should be thought of as a luxury have also reflected histori-

cal misgivings and desires. It is these historical, subjective definitions of waste

that I am trying to capture, so my concern is not with what I (or you) might

find wasteful in postwar Japan. That would be a very different book. This story

is about how various Japanese people at various times thought about the waste

they saw and experienced in the world around them.

Such ideas about waste were usually forged in and about the everyday, through

the seemingly unremarkable regularity of the day-to-day that in postwar Japan

as elsewhere was a principal domain of experience.7 It was often in and about

the mundane that people expressed their attitudes toward waste as workers, con-

sumers, household managers, community members, and citizens. Questions of

waste were embedded in the small decisions of daily life—about what you might

do with a spare ten minutes between meetings; whether you should try to get

the last bit of lotion out from the bottom of the container; how much effort you

should put into fixing the toaster before you throw it away; how hot you need

to feel before turning on the air conditioner; and when to upgrade to the latest

computer model. For some, these questions elicited opinions, reflections on one’s

own behavior, and advice for curbing waste that were explicitly voiced. For oth-

ers, it was their acts of the quotidian, intentional or not, that revealed how they

wanted to spend their time, what they thought was worth purchasing, what mate-

rial things they wanted around them, and what principles or causes they viewed

as worthy of their dedication. What people needed and wanted was reflected in

what they said about and what they did with their things, resources, money, and

time. That people respond to larger existential questions in the everyday was

incisively expressed by the sociologist Anthony Giddens, who argued that “the

question, ‘How shall I live?’ has to be answered in day-to-day decisions about

how to behave, what to wear and what to eat—and many other things.”8 Or put

another way, the assumptions, habits, and decisions about waste and wasteful-

ness were fundamentally about what people found meaningful and valuable in

their daily lives.

Given the centrality of the everyday to shifting constructions of waste and

wastefulness, the various kinds of physical waste that did not intersect visibly

and regularly with day-to-day life appear little in the pages that follow. Indus-

trial and nuclear waste, for example, were not only categorized differently from

household rubbish by professional managers of waste, but also were not terribly

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6 INTRODUCTION

relevant to understandings of waste, as pressing an issue as they were to certain

people and communities. For most of the postwar period, their meanings were

fairly consistent in popular imaginations as dangerous and undesirable sub-

stances that required containment. Human excrement also said little about the

individual decisions of the day-to-day and, unlike with household garbage, its

per capita volume neither changed significantly nor could be controlled much.

The relatively straightforward challenge posed by the feces of increasing urban

populations was one that could be addressed with the development of sewer

systems. So it is touched upon only in the context of modernizing efforts around

sanitation, health, and hygiene.9 That these kinds of refuse receive scant attention

should indicate that this book is not centrally about physical waste. Issues of gar-

bage, or municipal solid waste, will certainly be discussed at length because it was

understood as a by-product of a mass-consuming society and of a culture of dis-

posability, and as a barometer of economic growth, views of material things, atti-

tudes toward the environment, and more. But there will not be a march through

the history of various categories of waste, be it medical, chemical, radioactive, or

otherwise. What is of interest is the idea of waste more than physical waste itself.

To write a social and cultural history of waste requires creating one’s own

eclectic archive of sources and drawing from them attitudes and sentiments

about wastage. A wide range of materials about the everyday forms the basis of

this volume, revealing how day-to-day life has been at the crux of different and

shifting thoughts about waste and wastefulness. Some of these sources could be

characterized as mass-market, popular, even lowbrow, be they television pro-

grams, newspapers, weeklies that border on the tabloid, women’s magazines,

and so on. These kinds of materials are quite prominent in the pages that fol-

low; they are usually named to make clear who was presenting certain ideas

about waste.

Ideals of waste consciousness have often been articulated in the form of

advice, doled out in newspapers, magazines, and mass-market books, about top-

ics ranging from time management to electricity conservation to decluttering.

Such advice literature has presented conceptions of waste and wastefulness more

than it has described actual acts of waste consciousness. Advice manuals and

books are articulations of aspirations, consumed by those whose lived experi-

ences can be quite distant from what is depicted in their pages. As observed by

the historian Catriona Kelly, “the relationship of behaviour books to real-life

behaviour is complex and oblique.”10 The connections between the constructed

ideal and actual practice have thus been probed carefully and skeptically, with

no assumption that the world of the reader mirrored the world of the advice

literature.

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MEANING AND VALUE IN THE EVERYDAY 7

Fictional literature has served, depending on the work, as social commen-

tary, an artifact marked by the economic and societal concerns of its time,

or an articulation, sometimes fairly opaque, of an author’s views of waste.

Whenever possible, information has been presented about how a work cir-

culated and by whom it was read so as to situate it in the social and cultural

landscape of its time. And, following Michel de Certeau’s urging, some atten-

tion is given to the ways in which ideas in texts were consumed and used.11

In fact, one chapter is dedicated entirely to the themes of, and responses to, a

single work of fiction so as to examine the contours of discussions about waste

and to explore how ideas could assume different shades of meaning in differ-

ent hands. Fictional stories have also been told through various media, with

some manga taking up the topic of waste. The translation of manga as “comic

books” or even “graphic novels” does not adequately convey their scope, rich-

ness, or artistic and literary depth. Manga have been written in many genres,

enjoyed a readership of all ages, and constituted a lucrative industry. They are

approached here like other works of fiction, but with due attention to and

analysis of their visual element.

Children’s stories and books have offered clear, didactic lessons about how not

to waste. Most that have taken up this topic are nonfiction, and their numbers

and popularity have swelled in the 2000s. Such works have defined aspirational

values for and attempted to shape the behavior of children, though their parents

have been secondary targets. Because most of their attention has been focused

on influencing the values and lifestyles of adult generations to come, they have

been by their very nature oriented more toward the future than to the past or

the present. The same could be said of junior high and high school textbooks

that address issues of waste for a slightly older readership of teenagers. Typically

assigned in home economics or sociology classes, these course materials explain

how and why young people should think about waste. And these messages have

had an official quality to them, presented as they were in textbooks approved by

the Ministry of Education.

The interests of the government have been patently apparent in its many large

surveys that were dedicated to, or asked about, waste and everyday life. There

were questionnaires about free time, daily life, resources, a culture of things, con-

sumer issues, environmental problems, energy saving, and garbage. In addition

to those conducted by the government, others were administered by citizens’

groups, corporations, marketing firms, and research associations about environ-

mental consciousness, attitudes toward saving, time use, energy consumption,

recycling habits, and garbage management.12 That there were surveys and survey

questions about waste reflects the significance of the topic. Even more revealing

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8 INTRODUCTION

is the wording of questions and options for multiple-choice answers, which illus-

trates the extent to which the surveys were exercises in moral suasion, conscious-

ness raising, and the dissemination of information. When it comes to the survey

results, in some cases they indicate what respondents thought the appropriate

answer might be, while in other cases they suggest how survey takers wanted to

see themselves. Responses that flagrantly buck the slant of the question or con-

tradict the initiatives of the group administering the survey give a possible hint

into how actual attitudes and behaviors deviated from the ideal. From surveys

to children’s books, advice literature to newspaper editorials, these varied and

sundry materials forged the many meanings—the norms, aspirations, purposes,

and practices—of waste in everyday life.

Waste Consciousness in Japan It may be tempting to assume at the outset that the history of attention to waste

is unique to Japan, that there has existed a uniquely Japanese culture of frugality.

Such a presumption would be understandable given American media stories and

mass-market literature on efficiency in Japanese manufacturing, especially in the

1980s, when there was much fascination with the country’s successes in the auto-

motive industry. More recently, there has been journalistic coverage of exacting

systems for recycling that require residents to sort their trash into numerous

categories, and popular enthusiasm for a decluttering method expertly promoted

as being Japanese.13 Some of these examples of minimizing waste resonate, I sus-

pect, with vague impressions of Zen and its association with clean aesthetics

and simplicity. In scholarly circles, research on generally high rates of monetary

saving relative to the United States has encouraged a focus on Japanese thrift.14

These characterizations have been perpetuated by various Japanese themselves

who have suggested, with heightened enthusiasm since the early 2000s, that waste

consciousness is a distinctively Japanese trait.

Yet waste consciousness in postwar Japan was forged largely and primarily

by the logics of phenomena—mass production, mass consumption, economic

growth, affluence, material abundance, and environmentalism—that assumed

certain forms but were not unique to Japan. The equation of waste management

with modern civilization; the importance of productivity, efficiency, rationaliza-

tion, and profit; and the indispensability of natural resources have been assumed

and experienced globally and with shared intensity in the developed world. Ideas

and practices like Taylorism, planned obsolescence, recycling, reuse, and declut-

tering have circulated widely, through and beyond national borders. Attention

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MEANING AND VALUE IN THE EVERYDAY 9

to waste in Japan was not singular, even if configured and expressed in particu-

lar ways.

The simplistic notion of an inherent and enduring waste consciousness and

frugality also collapses when we consider that there has been no such thing as a

“Japanese conception of waste.” What becomes apparent when we think about

waste more capaciously, when the focus is not solely on the shop floor or the

Zen temple or monetary savings, is that different and often contradictory under-

standings of waste and wastefulness have existed in Japan at the same time.

Furthermore, the postwar history of waste is one of change more than con-

tinuity. It is about how waste consciousness waxed and waned; how what was

considered wasteful sometimes endured and sometimes shifted; how individu-

als, groups of people, and governments attempted to establish new norms and

practices around waste for many and diverse reasons; and how waste assumed

different meanings, be they practical, didactic, economic, psychological, moral,

spiritual, or emotional.

However complex and familiar, the history of waste in Japan also has its par-

ticularities. Certain kinds of waste were the object of especially acute attention.

The disposal of material waste was one such issue of special concern, in part

because of the country’s relatively small geographic area. Discussions of house-

hold garbage gained an urgency as space in landfills was depleted and the need to

build incinerators intensified. Of relevance too has been the scant use of limited

domestic natural energy resources, especially after the decline of the domestic

coal industry and the demonstrated insufficiency of hydroelectricity in the 1950s.

Over that decade and in the 1960s, reliance on foreign oil surged such that by the

time of the global oil crisis in 1973, the country was the world’s largest petroleum

importer.15 With comparatively little domestic coal, oil, and natural gas, and the

oft-repeated mantra of Japan as a “resource-poor country,” a sense of insecu-

rity informed experiences of shortages and emergencies, and calls to not waste

resources and energy could be especially insistent. These two aspects of the physi-

cal landscape go some way toward explaining why concerns about the waste of

material things, resources, and energy became so tightly interwoven at formative

moments in the construction of waste consciousness.16

Who took up the mantle of promoting waste consciousness, and whose

behavior was the target of waste awareness efforts, were informed by postwar

Japanese understandings of gender roles. Gendered responsibilities and expec-

tations often gave waste consciousness different meanings for women and

men. The figure of the housewife loomed large when it came to the manage-

ment of waste in the household. When advice was offered and entreaties were

made about minimizing household waste, the targeted readership was typically

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10 INTRODUCTION

housewives. But the boundaries of who was considered a housewife were flex-

ible. Forming the backbone of this category were full-time housewives, but they

were rarely the sole intended audience for messages about waste, which tended

to be quite inclusive and sought to establish widely accepted norms. To have

addressed only full-time housewives would have been limiting because of their

small numbers, especially in rural areas, in the 1950s. And in the entirety of the

postwar period, the full-time housewife married to a salaryman was an idealized

norm but never constituted, as actual lived experience, a majority among mar-

ried women.17 The implied definition was thus usually broader, with “house-

wife” referring to a married woman who ran the home.18 It was the status of

marriage, more than that of part-time or full-time employment, that defined a

woman as a housewife.

Expectations that a housewife run the household persisted even as the per-

centage of women in the workforce increased from the late 1970s onward. A wife

continued to be considered, and to assume the role of, the primary manager of

the home.19 Part and parcel of keeping the household humming along, it was

usually wives who dealt with household waste in its various incarnations, be it

the scheduling of time, household finances, garbage and recycling, or electricity

use.20 This gendering of the household as a female responsibility was reinforced

by the sheer volume of suggestions and expectations about waste management

in one’s family, home, and nonworking life geared toward women. Additionally,

the realm of the household often extended beyond the home to include the local

community. The neighborhood or residents’ associations, consumer organiza-

tions, parent-teacher associations, and citizens’ groups that took up questions of

waste usually consisted mainly of women.21 A good number of these organiza-

tions had connections to or had the ear of municipal government officials, and

served as sites of citizen activism around issues of waste.22

Juxtaposed with the construction of the household as the domain of women

was that of the workplace as the domain of men. When advice was offered and

entreaties were made about minimizing waste in the workplace, the intended

readership was typically male managers or white-collar workers, especially

through the 1980s. Expectations of waste management for men assumed the

predominance of work in their daily lives and tended to superimpose the goals

of the workplace on the male worker. Office supplies were to be used thoroughly,

electricity was to be conserved, and time was to be spent efficiently for the sake

of the financial bottom line. Gender was thus salient in differentiating not just

realms of waste consciousness but also the purposes of attention to waste.

The centrality of the housewife, business manager, and white-collar worker

in ideas about waste created normative conceptions of gender and waste

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MEANING AND VALUE IN THE EVERYDAY 11

consciousness that did not acknowledge diversity in lived experiences of the

home or of work. The same could be said of the related construction of the

middle class. Much of the discussion regarding waste and wastefulness, be it

about work, leisure, or consumption, imagined a virtually universal and rela-

tively homogeneous middle class. In some ways, this was not without basis.

What could be called a middle-class life started to become a majority experi-

ence in the late 1950s as urban and suburban areas expanded, metropolitan-

ism reached the countryside, employment in agriculture declined markedly,

the number of nuclear families ticked up, and high school graduation rates

rose.23 These developments helped reinforce the notion that almost everyone

was part of a fairly undifferentiated middle class. Much has been made of the

question, posed annually since 1958 by the Prime Minister’s Office in its sur-

vey of people’s lifestyles, about the social stratum in which respondents would

place themselves. Roughly 90 percent of people have identified themselves with

three of the five options, as being in the lower-middle, middle, or upper-middle

class. This consistent result has fed the presumption that there has existed a

large chūryū, usually translated as “middle class,” though it could mean some- thing more like “mainstream.” As the anthropologist William Kelly has argued,

this image of the middle class or mainstream has elided socioeconomic dif-

ference and “does not refer to a class category but to a category that works to

transcend class.”24 It also does not posit the existence of a lower or working

class against which the middle is defined.25 Even with increasing concern in

the 2000s about Japan becoming an “unequal society” or “society of dispari-

ties” (kakusa shakai), self-identification with the middle has persisted such that

worries about societal and economic gaps might be interpreted as those of and

about the middle class.26

Discussions about waste and wastefulness for much of the postwar period

have been predicated on this vision of Japan as a middle-class society and have

perpetuated this assumption through the definition of practices, values, and aspi-

rations of a middle-class life. Most people who concerned themselves with waste

did so as middle-class women and men, appealing to an audience of the same.

Those outside the imagined mainstream and those on the socioeconomic mar-

gins have made few appearances in the construction of waste and wastefulness

and thus also in this book. This relative absence is certainly not to suggest that

socioeconomic disparities have been historically unimportant, nor is it intended

to perpetuate their erasure. It speaks instead to how tightly ideas about waste and

wastefulness were interwoven with middle-class hopes and expectations, such

that it would be only a slight exaggeration to contend that waste consciousness

was constitutive of middle-classness in postwar Japan.

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12 INTRODUCTION

A History of Postwar Japan This book is at once a history of waste and a history of postwar Japan. By the

very definition of its chronological scope, it makes a case for thinking about the

entirety of postwar Japan as one coherent and cohesive period. This is not to

downplay the premodern history of concerns about waste, consumption, and

luxury. Nor is it to diminish the importance of prewar precursors for many post-

war approaches to waste and wastefulness. Continuities and persistence in what

some historians have come to call “transwar Japan” are acknowledged, and his-

torical debts to the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries are given their

due.27 But the postwar period is now longer than the one that stretched from the

Meiji Restoration to the outbreak of the Pacific War. And it can be distinguished

not just by the longevity of conservative political rule and an international posi-

tion at once weighty and subordinate, but also by a level of affluence that was

previously unimaginable and a society of mass consumption that was virtually

inescapable, both of which are so central to a history of waste.28 Historians of

Japan have not yet offered many narratives of the postwar as a whole, especially

apart from some notable edited volumes, even after the groundbreaking call

in the early 1990s to treat “postwar Japan as history.”29 Only by examining the

entirety of this period might we have more productive debates about its persis-

tent challenges, moments of fracture, and defining qualities. As one step in this

direction, this book offers a history of the long postwar with its enduring conti-

nuities, relentless struggles, and pronounced shifts.

In the years after war’s end, in the late 1940s and 1950s, the country embarked

on a project of re-civilization and re-enlightenment, the postwar version of mod-

ernizing efforts past. Language familiar from the late nineteenth and early twen-

tieth centuries about health, hygiene, efficiency, and rationalization was used to

urge waste consciousness in the workplace and the home. And waste was to be

managed not only to tackle the challenges of survival just after the war, but also

to make Japan civilized and modern once again.

When economic recovery shifted gears into rapid growth in the latter half of

the 1950s and the 1960s, societal and cultural adjustments were profound but

not sudden or smooth in these years of transition into an era of unremitting

mass consumption. In the late 1950s, as the financial and material exigencies of

the immediate postwar began to ease, there was both discomfort and excitement

about a burgeoning society of consumers. Different attitudes toward wasteful-

ness took shape as people considered what was acceptable to purchase, which

consumer desires were appropriate, and how tightly to embrace a more conve-

nient and more comfortable life.

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MEANING AND VALUE IN THE EVERYDAY 13

The achievements and changes spurred by high growth were brought into

immediate question in the early 1970s, a sharp pivot point in the postwar period

which sparked ambivalence about affluence, reflection about national goals, and

diversification of individual values and commitments. Concerns about waste

became acute as worries about garbage and resources inspired responses to the

costs and consequences of mass production, mass consumption, and preoccu-

pation with gross national product. With questions about whether the country

had overextended itself, waste came to be equated not with civilizational back-

wardness but with excess. At the same time, the desirability of a middle-class

life had become so deeply fixed that its conveniences and comforts were not to

be sacrificed but defended. The prospect of scrimping or going without came

to be considered anathema to the better lives that people had come to expect.

Consciousness of waste was thus both to change priorities and practices and to

preserve the hard-won gains and pleasures of daily life.

The 1980s, often excised from a longer history as an aberration because of the

singularity of the bubble economy, should rather be treated as inextricable from

the tapestry of the postwar. The need for the defensive posture of the previous

decade did ebb, waste consciousness was muted, and what in years not so long

past would have been considered luxuries became normalized as markers of the

middle class. At the same time, the 1980s stoked not just exuberance but also dis-

satisfaction and unfulfilled desires. Questions were asked about what life should

be about in a Japan of financial and material plenty, about the place of both

things and time in a better life. Sometimes coupled with these reflections, waste

consciousness came to be conceived in new terms of psychological, spiritual, and

emotional satisfaction.

The convention of characterizing all of the years from the early 1990s onward

as “lost” is intellectually inadequate, given the languorous shift into economic

malaise over the course of the 1990s and the distinctive notes of optimism in

the 2000s. As societal architecture was strained to reveal and create precarity of

various kinds, there was a pervading and disorienting sense of retrogression and

loss.30 Yet moored by the endurance of relative affluence and mass consump-

tion, there gradually opened a space for more expansive and variegated hopes

for individual and societal futures. A more global environmentalism took firmer

hold, and the broader conception of waste and meaning that had emerged in a

previous time of economic confidence carried over into subsequent decades of

economic malaise. In the 2000s, a broad definition of mottainai captured imagi-

nations, supplementing more prosaic terms that meant waste or wasteful. The

word mottainai, with its alleged Buddhist origins, became an umbrella term for

waste of many different kinds, and came to appear with greater regularity than

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14 INTRODUCTION

rōhi (which implied a criticism of extravagance and had declined in use since the early postwar decades) and as frequently as muda (which connoted uselessness

and was a conventional way to express wastefulness). At the same time, challenges

to the purported virtue of mottainai began to appear as people reconceived their

attachments to material things and their very sense of self. In twenty-first-cen-

tury Japan, the idea of waste expanded to encompass environmental commit-

ments, a search for individual and national identities, and attempts to define

anew relationships with things and with time in continued pursuit of an afflu-

ence of the heart, mind, and spirit (kokoro no yutakasa). This constructive and

forward-looking orientation should expose the laziness of continuing to extend

with each passing year the chronological reach of the so-called “lost decades.” In

time, we may come to better understand millennial Japan in terms of its various

attempts at redefinition and at finding itself anew in a world of stagnant afflu-

ence.

Bringing this history as far up to the present as possible is intended to illus-

trate the persistence of postwar Japan as a historical phenomenon and an ana-

lytical apparatus, but there are real challenges with writing such a contemporary

history. It is not clear what the implications and impacts of the disasters of

March 2011 will be, and how they will fit into the narrative arc of millennial

Japan. Without the benefit of hindsight, it is not evident whether something like

the new minimalism will prove to be a quickly passing trend or a phenomenon

with lasting influence. That politicians and scholars have repeatedly declared the

postwar over has indicated instead that there has been no unequivocal point

of closure, and it is hard to tell a story with no apparent end. History keeps

unfolding, sometimes in ways that contradict what was written not long ago.31

But I would suggest that histories, perhaps especially of the modern, never really

end and that hindsight can erase the important contingencies and ephemera of

the past. In the case of postwar Japan, we cannot artificially truncate the period

and claim its end because we continue to live in the postwar; there has been no

resolution to the complicated legacies of war, defeat, and occupation; and there

has not been a catastrophic experience on the scale of another world war to mark

unambiguously the period’s conclusion. Nor can we wait until the period seems

somehow over before we attempt to understand the larger stories of postwar

Japan.

At this present moment, many people—not unlike the fictional teenagers

in the public service announcement about mottainai—are grappling with how

to live in, and make sense of, a postwar Japan built on the pillars of economic

growth, financial affluence, and mass consumption.32 This has been a struggle

familiar in some form since the late 1950s and a defining characteristic of these

many decades. Even as people came to marvel at the astonishing availability of

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products to consume and new amusements to pursue, they considered the disap-

pointments, challenges, and unfulfilled promises of economic growth. Even as

the country’s wealth reached levels unrivaled by most in the world, there were

ways in which it was seen to have fallen short in the ways people lived and in their

sense of security and fulfillment. Desires to achieve and defend the privileges of

middle-class lifestyles made possible by affluence have existed right alongside

discomfort and dissatisfaction with the logics, costs, and consequences of that

very prosperity. This tension has long endured in postwar Japan, as utterly incon-

ceivable as it would have been to people in late 1945, who could imagine little

beyond the exigencies of daily life in the aftermath of war.

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