Robin M. LeBlanc

Lessons from the Ghost of Salaryman Past: The Global Costs of the Breadwinner Imaginary

About the time of the one-year anniversary of the March 2011 Tōhoku earthquake and tsunami, a conversation about the politics of nuclear power started up among Japanologists, mostly political scientists, on a listserv I read daily. The original discussion emerged from the question of whether Japanese political leaders would push for restarting a number of the offline nuclear power plants across the country in order to cover expected gaps in Japans electricity supply. At first the debates participants took up the countervailing pressures Japanese policymakers face: the need to provide affordable power to Japanese companies in order to spur economic recovery, the inevitable increase in greenhouse gas emissions that would be produced by a shift from nuclear to fossil fuels, the polling data suggesting an overwhelming majority of Japanese citizens are opposed to restarting the plants (Mainichi Shinbun 2012). Then the listserv debate broke away from scholarly assessments of the electoral and policy dilemmas faced by the ruling Democratic Party into thinly veiled arguments between proponents and opponents of nuclear power. Some assertions were made about the nuclear power “phobia” and “emotional” opposition of those who, it was suggested, do not understand the science of it, and a debate commenced over the question of how many people the Chernobyl accident of 1986 had really killed.

The Life We Longed For: Danchi Housing and the Middle Class Dream in Postwar Japan by Laura Neitzel (review)

Laura Neitzel’s The Life We Longed For: Danchi Housing and the Middle Class Dream in Postwar Japan is, as its title makes clear, a study of how the large, government-sponsored multifamily housing projects known in contemporary Japan as danchi were connected with images of what it meant to aspire to the middle class in Japan in the 1950s and 1960s. Because of its careful survey of sources ranging from government white papers to women’s magazines and novels written about “danchi life,” The Life We Longed For is more than simply a study of danchi projects and their social meaning. The book is also a through-going examination of diverse aspects of what “ middle class” meant in the high-growth decades in postwar Japan, examining urbanization, the emerging nuclear family, gender roles, material culture, and even “democracy.” As such, the book pulls together the work of social scientists and historians who have traced aspects of Japan’s famous middle-mass consciousness in a myriad of different subfi elds. If I had to pick a single English-language book with which to teach about Japanese society in the postwar years, The Life We Longed For would be it. Neitzel explains at the outset that her intention is not to chronicle how life in danchi was actually lived. As she points out, only a small minority of Japanese families ever lived in danchi, and they were statistically distinct from the average. Rather, Neitzel seeks to give us a rich picture of how “danchi life” was understood in the public imagination, where these state-sponsored housing projects came to stand for all that was possible and, eventually, much that was wrong in Japan as the country changed dramatically between the 1950s and 1970s. The vast majority of danchi were built during an era of housing crisis, as the effects of the destruction of enormous residential areas during World War II were worsened by rapid urbanization and a growing population in the early postwar years. As Neitzel explains, at the end of 1945, Japan faced a loss of 4.2 million housing units (p. 4). Yet danchi were never intended to house the most needy. Rather, from the outset, the danchi were understood to be spaces for a new middle class that would model virtues of modern living in clear contradistinction to what was seen as the unsanitary and feudal daily life of the prewar era. A requirement that prospective renters make an income fi ve times the monthly rent eliminated most of the Japanese working class from

Gender Struggles: Wage-Earning Women and Male-Dominated Unions in Postwar Japan (review)

ing a labor-intensive industrialization model of the history of East Asia. Scholars will also want to connect the history of Japanese consumption to the burgeoning international studies on the “biological standard of living” as measured by historical changes in average height, life expectancy, and other quantifi able indicators. Such work confi rms, for example, some of the earliest critiques of the industrial revolution, revealing a mass deterioration in biological living standards in England from the 1820s through the 1840s, though the causes and their association with the industrial revolution remain a great area of debate. Such studies also confi rm a great improvement of mass living standards in England in the second half of the nineteenth century. The height and health profi les of Japan’s modern history will likely also provide new insights into the questions raised here. Because everyone knows what it is like to be a consumer, and because actual work in production is increasingly far from the experience of most college students (or professors), Francks’s book provides a natural way into these subjects. As a textbook, Francks’s study stands out for how it takes on a focused theme that allows her to cogently condense more than 300 years of Japanese experience. It is especially useful for its introduction of economic questions in a daily-life view that is easy for students to digest while offering plentiful concrete illustration.