Consuming Life in Post-Bubble Japan: A Transdisciplinary Perspective

Consuming—in all its forms—is a central experience of human life. The consumer in capitalist societies is both exploiter and exploited, and an object of desire, to be wooed and disdained, measured and manipulated. Consumption is historically and culturally defined, and the economics of consumption is understood in deep context. In this volume, Consuming Life in Post-Bubble Japan, the editors, Katarzyna Cwiertka and Ewa Machotka, have assembled illustrations of the diversity of meanings of consuming through multiple disciplinary lenses and across recent historical experience in Japan. To consume in Japan is neither singular nor fixed in time, as these essays illustrate, exploring both actors and those acted upon, the institutions of commerce and production, the goods themselves, and the acts of using and using up, discarding and wasting. While many earlier works on consumption in Japan, such as Yano’s Pink Globalization (Yano 2013) and William Kelly’s Fanning the Flames (Kelly 2004), have illuminated the institutionalization of consumption and its constant change, this current volume extends the meaning and settings for consumption to fashion, art, food and post-capitalist concerns with waste and social inequality. Gavin Whitelaw’s chapter on kombini (convenience stores), for example, notes the demographic changes that assisted the ubiquity and ‘normality’ of the convenience store in Japan today and also discusses ‘structured differentiation’ in Japanese society and the concern with sustainability and waste in the perpetuation of ‘mottainai’ values. Stephanie Assmann’s chapter on ‘fast fashion’ highlights how brand identification has changed in meaning for consumers since the bubble years so that stores are now offering low cost ‘labels’ to be worn without embarrassment from brands such as Muji and Uniqlo. This trend speaks to changes in values and the broader spread of more nuanced desires. Muji is a fascinating exercise in itself; the name translates literally as ‘no name’, but it has rapidly becoming a global brand itself, speaking ‘Japanese’ in its minimalist cool. Muji shops sell a style—to the point that one Japanese customer noted ‘I don’t want to buy the socks or the notebook or the blanket—it is not enough. I want to live in the Muji space’ (personal communication).