Waste: Consuming Postwar Japan

About this book

In Waste Eiko Maruko Siniawer innovatively explores the many ways in which the Japanese have thought about wastein terms of time stuff money possessions and resourcesfrom the immediate aftermath of World War II to the present. She shows how questions about waste were deeply embedded in the decisions of everyday life reflecting the priorities and aspirations of the historical moment and revealing peoples ever-changing concerns and hopes. Over the course of the long postwar Japanese society understood waste variously as backward and retrogressive an impediment to progress a pervasive outgrowth of mass consumption incontrovertible proof of societal excess the embodiment of resources squandered and a hazard to the environment. Siniawer also shows how an encouragement of waste consciousness served as a civilizing and modernizing imperative a moral good an instrument for advancement a path to self-satisfaction an environmental commitment an expression of identity and more. From the late 1950s onward a defining element of Japans postwar experience emerged: the tension between the desire for the privileges of middle-class lifestyles made possible by affluence and dissatisfaction with the logics costs and consequences of that very prosperity. This tension complicated the persistent search for what might be called well-being a good life or a life well lived. Waste is an elegant history of how people livedhow they made sense of gave meaning to and found value in the acts of the everyday.