The Japanese Consumer: An Alternative Economic History of Modern Japan

by Penelope Francks

• ISBN13: 9780521699327
• ISBN10: 0521699320
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2009-11-16
• Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Summary

By the late twentieth century, Japanese people were renowned as the world's most avid and knowledgeable consumers of fashion, luxury and quality, while the goods that embodied their tastes and lifestyle were becoming a part of global culture. Penelope Francks' book offers an alternative account of Japan's modern economic history from the perspective of the consumer. Tracing Japan's economy from the eighteenth century to the present, she shows how history has conditioned what Japanese people consume and compares their experiences with those of Europe and North America. In so doing the author presents a lucid and informed account of everyday life in Japan, exploring what people eat, how they dress, the household goods they acquire, and their preferred shopping and leisure activities. This beautifully illustrated book succeeds in making economic history palatable and entertaining. It will be a treat for students and all those interested in Japanese society and culture.

Author Biography

Penelope Francks is an Honorary Lecturer in Japanese Studies in the Department of East Asian Studies at the University of Leeds. Her recent publications include Rural Economic Development Japan (2006).

Table of Contents

List of illustrations	p. vii
List of tables	p. ix
Acknowledgements	p. x
Notes on the text	p. xi
Map	p. xii
Japan and the history of consumption	p. 1
Shopping in the city: urban life and the emergence of the consumer in Tokugawa Japan	p. 11
The great cities as centres of consumption	p. 12
Consumption and everyday life in the cities	p. 27
Goods, the state and society	p. 40
Country gentlemen, ordinary consumption and the development of the rural economy	p. 47
The rural elite and consumption	p. 48
Everyday consumption in the countryside	p. 54
Consumption and 'rural-centred' economic growth	p. 66
Civilising goods': consumption in the industrialising world	p. 74
Newspapers, trains and electricity: the birth of the modern infrastructure of consumption	p. 76
'Civilising grain': food and drink in the emerging urban industrial world	p. 87
Clothes and household goods: fashion, novelty and changing tradition	p. 97
Consumer goods and the path of economic development	p. 102
Living with modernity: the emerging consumer of the inter-war years	p. 108
Cities, suburbs and shopping	p. 109
Everyday life in the modern world	p. 123
Attitudes to modern consumption	p. 136
The electrical household: consumption, and the economic miracle	p. 145
From war and occupation to economic miracle: state, society and mass consumption	p. 146
Consuming the bright life	p. 163
Consuming and saving: the individual and society	p. 176
New tribes and nostalgia: consumption in the late twentieth century and beyond	p. 183
Shopping in the city, late twentieth-century style	p. 184
Consumption in practice in the post-miracle years	p. 193
The ambivalent consumer	p. 207
The Japanese consumer past and present	p. 218
Statistical appendix	p. 223
List of references	p. 231
Index	p. 242
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