Consumption and Sustainability in Asia. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press; Chicago: The University of Chicago Press [distributor], 2018. 262 pp. (Tables, graphs, figures, B&W photos.) US$130.00, cloth. ISBN 978-94-6298-063-1.
Consuming Life in Post-Bubble Japan is composed of eleven essays assembled by Katarzyna J. Cwiertka, professor of Modern Japanese Studies at Leiden University, and Ewa Machotka, associate professor in the Arts and Visual Culture of Japan, at Stockholm University. In 2014, they started a project titled “From Garbage to Art: Environmental Consciousness in Japan in the Post-Cold War Era.” Within this framework, they combined their interests in packaging conventions and waste in Japan, and gathered contributions from established scholars about the relationships between art, consumption, and sustainability.
An outcome of this collaboration, this volume lies in the wake of research that explores, through the prism of material culture, Japan’s trajectory from Meiji to the postwar era and the burst of the country’s financial bubble in 1990. The introduction states that in Japan, post-bubble stagnation did not halt consumption. On the contrary, commodification mirrored a society guided by the logic of late capitalism. The rise of irregular employment, wage inequalities, and the decline of the nuclear family model triggered a deep stratification of consumption patterns. Yet behind these disparities, life itself “has become a consuming project” (17), where our feelings, sense of place, or ideas are expressed in our relations to objects.
The volume’s first part shows how the retail sector faced an interplay of globalization, state and market reforms, technological innovations, and social changes. Hendrick Meyer-Ohle explains the initiatives department stores have undertaken to maintain their sales and their authority over fashion. Until the 1980s, it meant educating the “all middle-class” in mixing Japanese culture with Western newness, at each stage of a life course characterized by access to homeownership and definite gender roles. The difficulties certain institutions have experienced in adapting their normative conceptions are also reflected in Ofra Goldstein-Gidoni’s analysis of figures of domesticity. She sheds light on the role played by media in reasserting a reactionary rhetoric that confines women not only to a commitment to housing chores, but to its enjoyment through the marketed praise of Japanese beauty. It appears, however, that the “charisma housewife” (karisuma shufu) finds a positive echo among the youngest generations, who re-evaluate marriage as a means of ensuring stability. The promotion of idealized traditions in order to restore national pride after Fukushima, reduce food dependency, and counter a loss of competitive edge also pervades Japan’s gastrodiplomacy, as Katarzyna Cwiertka reveals. We learn how government officials tweaked the meaning of washoku (“Japanese cuisine”) to obtain inclusion on the Intangible Cultural Heritage list. “Hardly anyone remembers that washoku is […] the home-cooked food of the community, needing UNESCO’s protection” (102); it is now intertwined with the “Japan brand.”
Conversely, Japanese fast fashion retailers and convenience stores (or konbini), studied by Stephanie Assmann and Gavin Whitelaw respectively, owe their success to their responsiveness to demands from customers who have lower incomes, yet are still quality conscious and sensitive to ethical consumption. The business model embodied by UNIQLO or Muji is the antithesis of sustainability; but through their charity campaigns, collaborations with designers and coexistence with luxury outlets, they answer to a dualization of consumption behaviours, oscillating between frugality and hedonism. Likewise, thanks to their ability to cater to local needs, konbini have turned into infrastructures akin to “third places,” both ubiquitous and indigenized, especially in the countryside. In a society undergoing a process of “structured differentiation,” “they have fused mass-marketing and niche interests by being a little of everything to everyone”: supermarket, entertainment hub, and public service (79).
A second part of the book centres on mundane or artistic practices that revolve around recycling. It describes the range of agents who tackle the “afterlife of things,” and it invites the reader to rethink the values given to objects. Fabio Gygi’s interest in gomi yashiki (rubbish houses) highlights the uncanny feelings that arise when a neighbour redirects the materiality of discarded possessions from an expected path to disappearance. The role that Buddhist organizations play in easing anxieties related to the excesses of consumption is underlined by Jennifer Robertson. It appears that the development of funerals for robots is favoured by a lack of “ontological pressure” to distinguish human from non-human entities. Considering that the pre-bubble appreciation of the new was strongly associated with purity, and that waste disposal relies heavily on burning, we see how demographical and environmental concerns, and a sense of duty towards the debris left after the 3/11 catastrophe, improved the acceptance of reuse in Japan.
The last chapters provide temporal perspectives on the interactions between the critique of capitalism and the marketization of art. Drawing upon an ethnographic turn asserting art’s social embeddedness, Gunhild Borggren charts artistic engagements with consumption. She illustrates a transition of the Japanese art scene towards a support for altruistic practices, in a break with the entrepreneurialization of art epitomized by Murakami Takashi. Hayashi Michio investigates the effects of consumption on the uniformization of urban settings. At the juncture of the 1970s, in reaction to a perceived “death of landscape,” innovative photographers’ attempts at reconnecting with authenticity were swiftly co-opted by advertisers. The corresponding epistemic shift, i.e., the replacement of a subject’s sense of totality by a network of image signs, ushered in a post-landscape era. It entails the rediscovery of the satoyama (village-mountain) onto which one can project a nostalgia, as discussed by Ewa Machotka. She examines the Echigo Tsumari Art Triennale, whose organizers link satoyama to eco-art rather inconsistently; but in light of its impacts on regional revitalization, this example of “art festivalization” also exposes the possibilities of “commodity pathway diversion” (233). Finally, Kasuya Akiko presents a selection of artists who transcend the boundaries of art, not only by recycling modest things, but also by investing in former residential or working spaces, whose memories are then revived.
The book’s originality lies in its articulation of sociology, anthropology, consumption studies, and artistic endeavours, which illuminate under-investigated aspects of Japan’s contemporary dilemmas. The focus on recycling offers insights into ecological components of daily life that are often overlooked. The differences in conceptual frameworks between chapters leave the impression that the sociological and aesthetical approaches have not fully blended. However, the book introduced me to topics I would not otherwise have sought out, and the importance each author has attached to original references and fieldwork attest to the book’s lasting relevance. Information resituating, socially and geographically, the phenomena at stake would have completed the chronological contextualization: we are curious about their extent, compared to core aspects of the “consuming project” only indirectly discussed here, like in tourism or care. Nonetheless, at a time when the crises we are going through are rooted in our overconsumption of natural resources, this reading is remarkably timely.
Sophie Buhnik
French Research Institute on Japan, Maison franco-japonaise, Tokyo