Studies of the Weatherhead East Asian Institute, Columbia University. Portland, ME: MerwinAsia; Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press [distributor], 2015. xxvi, 159 pp. (Illustrations.) US$65.00, cloth. ISBN 978-1-937385-86-6.
Laura Neitzel’s book The Life We Longed For is a model of concise, lucid, thoughtful scholarship equally suited for the graduate seminar table and the undergraduate classroom. Its focus is the rise of the danchi, or apartment complex, as a locus of social engineering, political attention, and cultural dreaming during the 1950s and 1960s. Neitzel’s book brings scholarly attention back to the middle class of Japan’s twentieth century, a significant area of inquiry increasingly marginalized by the field’s ongoing fascination with Japanese empire and transnational history. Neitzel explores the work of “journalists, architects, social scientists, novelists, and filmmakers” (89) as well as the state agency known as the Japan Housing Corporation (JHC) and analyzes their collective efforts to democratize home and family, to rationalize human living space via the latest technological gadgetry, and to grow a postwar middle class committed to serious consumption as much as to hard work.
Neitzel first chronicles how the JHC addressed the housing crisis of the 1950s by developing suburban land into bedroom towns and by promoting the suburban apartment complex as a place to lead a “prototype of middle-class life” (25). She next examines the public discourse on the people who moved into these new “concrete islands of urbanity” (45). Known as the danchizoku, or the social vanguard of the apartment complex, they grabbed public attention as the beneficiaries of everything that was newly desirable in a nation moving beyond the demands and deprivations of war: liberation from hierarchical social relations, the introduction of material plenty within daily life, and membership in the showcase social group known as the middle class. Yet the arrival of prosperity also brought tension and anxiety. The privacy of danchi life led to isolation, the democratization of luxury yielded sameness and standardization, and technological efficiency produced boredom. Aspiration gave birth to anomie, as documented in the films of Hani Susumu and the literature of the alienated father/salaryman and the sexually promiscuous housewife. Neitzel concludes by analyzing the decline of the danchi as an emblem of postwar affluence and the curious rise of the danchi as an early twenty-first-century repository of nostalgia for good times gone by.
This book is a welcome contribution to our understanding of middle-class formation during Japan’s twentieth century. Neitzel joins a group of historians dedicated to establishing the cumulative common sense on this topic: aspiration mattered more than achievement within middle-class identity; the middle-class home was never separated from the world outside its walls but, instead, functioned as “a cultural/social pressure chamber and laboratory for measuring the effects of modernization and change” (111); and the 1950s was one of the pivotal decades of definition and growth for the middle class. (The other two were the 1920s and the 1980s.) She does not place the middle class of the 1950s in a temporal bubble but, rather, accentuates the links between the middle class of the 1920s and 1950s, including their never-ending struggles to disentangle themselves from “the feudal,” a catch-all term for any established custom that frustrated the individual’s ability to act in new ways, whether marrying for romantic love or living separated from in-laws. Yet historians also need to more sharply distinguish the differences among the 1920s, the 1950s, and the 1980s as moments of middle-class formation. For instance, while Neitzel, Louise Young, and other scholars have pointed to the centrality of consumerism to middle-class identity during the 1920s and 1950s, those moments displayed drastically different views on the virtues of consumerism. During the 1920s, when the practice of consumerism was coloured by a darkening association with immoral excess, the public reputation of the middle class was only weakly linked to consumerism; by the 1950s, fuelled by the rise of Keynesian economics and the state’s commitment to promote postwar economic recovery, consumerism acquired a veneer of patriotic action, and the middle class became publicly defined and socially sanctioned as consumers par excellence. Historians must be more attuned to the nuances of the evolution of the middle class. It was a dynamic social group with significant shifts in identity, habit, and membership across the twentieth century.
My one disappointment with Neitzel’s book was the absence of a sustained analysis of middle-class Japanese and their experiences of daily life within the danchi. While Neitzel skillfully examines popular discourse, mirroring the methodological approach of other historians of the Japanese middle class, she leaves to future scholars the task of relating popular discourse to everyday experience. Across the twentieth century, nestled in the pages of newspapers or the mokuji of magazines, is evidence of Japanese individuals aspiring toward material comfort, spiritual fulfillment, and emotional satisfaction. Historians must look more regularly to these voices to explain the propulsive forces that birthed the middle class. Institutions, whether secondary schools, print media, department stores, or apartment complexes, certainly guided individuals toward pathways to the middle class, but institutional efflorescence relied upon the energies of a populace eager to realize the promises of modernity and to pursue a new version of daily life that came to be stamped with the middle-class idiom. Future work must calibrate the dynamic relationship between these individuals and the institutions associated with membership in the middle class.
Mark Jones
Central Connecticut State University, New Britain, USA
pp. 823-825