In 2004, children's book author Shinju Mariko introduced her readers to the character of Mottainai Bāsan, or No-Waste Grandma. Mottainai Bāsan wore her hair pulled into a tight bun, balanced her spectacles on the tip of her nose, and wielded a cane that seemed more like an accessory than a necessity for the sturdy and threatening woman. Of a generation that remembered the hardships of the World War II years, this grandma descended upon her young and fearful grandson to scrutinize his wasteful habits—leaving kernels of rice at the bottom of his bowl, letting the water run while he brushed his teeth, and discarding tangerine peels that could be put in bath water to make it aromatic (Shinju 2004). Mottainai Bāsan's lessons so captivated readers that 160,000 copies of the best-seller were snatched up in its first year, inspiring a series of books, a song, and a card game that helped fuel a popular and widespread fascination with the concept of mottainai (Gendai 2006, 234). Attention to mottainai surged as magazines, newspapers, children's literature, mass-market nonfiction, songs, government ministries, corporations, and nongovernmental organizations took up the question of what was to be deemed wasteful.
A standard dictionary of archaic Japanese words reveals that the linguistic history of “mottainai” dates back to at least the thirteenth century, when it was used in a collection of tales to suggest trouble, harm, and impropriety (Matsumura, Yamaguchi, and Wada Reference Akira, Akio and Toshimasa1994, 1174). It was also evoked in premodern times to express regret and disappointment or, in other contexts, graciousness; in more modern usage, the word could mean unworthy or undeserving of, as well as impious, irreverent, profane, or sacrilegious. In postwar Japan, the most predominant association of “mottainai” was with wastefulness—as in, “what a waste!”—with the millennial incarnation widely used to criticize waste of various kinds, including the squandering of material objects and resources such as food and energy. “Mottainai” thus became a convenient, one-word encapsulation of concerns about resource scarcity, food security, the proliferation of garbage, and a throw-away culture, and the term was used to push back against the perceived prevalence of consumerism, materialism, and environmental degradation.
The popularity and resonance of mottainai, as well as the ways in which it was defined and employed in the first decade of the twenty-first century, reflected a search for meaning and identity particular to this moment in Japan's history. While “mottainai” had certainly made appearances in previous postwar decades, the values and emotions that it evoked were spelled out and discussed more explicitly, deliberately, and visibly in millennial Japan than they had been before. “Mottainai” was said to capture not just the act of wasting, but principles and feelings associated with the consciousness of wastefulness, such as regret and shame for the loss of things, appreciation and respect for things as well as those who made them, and empathy and compassion. Indeed, instilling such values was the most important education offered by the character of Mottainai Bāsan (“Wasteful Grandma” in literal translation, but more accurately “Wastefulness-Conscious Grandma”), who was ultimately about much more than teaching children pragmatic lessons about how not to waste. Mottainai Bāsan was but one example of how discussions of wastefulness—about what was appropriate and not appropriate to throw away, about what was to be considered when determining what to use up or to discard—were fundamentally concerned with wide-ranging values, principles, and beliefs that were thought to define what it meant to be Japanese in the twenty-first century. Sometimes implicitly and sometimes explicitly, mottainai was held up (often problematically) as an expression of a uniquely Japanese identity and was marketed globally as a catchphrase for environmental responsibility with indelible Japanese origins.
This search for meaning and identity had echoes of times past, but was a particular, millennial variation on sentiments about Japanese affluence that reflected attempts to come to terms with the country's second continuous decade of economic anemia. When anxieties about energy shortages, environmental damage, and a culture of disposability began to be voiced in the 1970s, they were framed largely as the downside of economic growth or the unfulfilled promise of affluence. The fragility of affluence was a predominant theme in the 1990s, when the economic bubble burst and shook fundamental assumptions about the endurance and invincibility of Japanese economic growth and wealth.Footnote 1 This sense of economic vulnerability persisted after the turn of the twenty-first century, but there settled in an uneasy acceptance of a post-bubble economic reality in which Japan would not experience substantial economic growth in the foreseeable future, kindling an attempt to come to terms with an economically stagnant, yet still affluent, millennial Japan.
To trace the circulation of “mottainai” is illuminating in this context because the very concept of wastefulness inherently and implicitly reflects assumptions about value. In Japan and beyond, to be wasteful or to waste has involved recategorizing a valuable object as waste by the person who has used it up or discarded it.Footnote 2 Wasting has thus been a liminal act that captures an uncertain moment in the life of an object as its worth is examined and then moved from one category (valuable) to another (valueless).Footnote 3 Discussions about what constitutes wastefulness, then, have been about how value should be determined and what should be considered valuable. And because the process of (re)classification based on assessments of meaning and value can be disturbingly destabilizing, they have had the potential to reveal, as sociologist Zsuzsa Gille has argued, “underlying social and cultural anxieties and moral dilemmas” (Gille Reference Gille2007, 23–24).
In millennial Japan, these anxieties and dilemmas were about forging senses of self and nation at a moment of economic stagnation, manifesting themselves in an articulation of values: appreciation of financial wealth but also openness to conceiving of affluence in nonfinancial and nonmaterial terms; respect for material things; attention to excess; and a broad sense of environmentalism—all under the umbrella of a consciousness of wastefulness.
This examination of a forward-looking impulse to define millennial identities is intended to prompt a consideration of not just changing views on Japanese affluence, but also the ways in which the first decade of the twenty-first century differed from the “lost” decade of the 1990s. Historians might now begin to grapple seriously with questions about how to understand the past ten years, pushing back against the tendency to leave them uncharacterized or to lump them in with that which came before as the plural, “lost decades.” The working assumption that the 2000s were a continuation of or analytical appendage to the 1990s seems vaguely unsatisfying, as a practice of examining affluence, meaning, and identity emerged from the cold ashes of the Japanese economic juggernaut.
Defining Mottainai
In attempts to make sense of an affluent yet economically stagnant present, there was a nostalgia for a past that predated high-speed economic growth and seemingly demonstrated the existence of cultural worth separate from financial wealth. And this past was thought to be embodied in the generation that had come of age during the wartime years of scarcity and sacrifice. Yet this was not the kind of nostalgia that sought to reconstruct the past or to return to a previous time, but one that accepted what cultural theorist Svetlana Boym has described as fundamental to all forms of modern nostalgia, “the modern conception of unrepeatable and irreversible time” (Boym Reference Boym2001, 13).Footnote 4 There was not a desire to give up the advantages of affluence or to emulate completely the waste-conscious practices of the wartime generation. What was sought instead was the affirmation of mottainai as an enduring if lapsed national virtue as well as the adaptation of certain practices and values from the country's past.
To mediate between the past and the present, the figure of the grandmother or grandfather was often used to convey the lessons of the wartime generation—the one that had lived through wartime economic hardship and immediate postwar scarcity—to the generation that had known nothing other than an affluent Japan (see figure 1). The grandson in the Mottainai Bāsan series was not educated by his postwar-born mother, who was either conspicuously absent or inadvertently fell into habits of wastefulness herself. Even she needed to be taught how to salvage the yarn from an old sweater to knit something new and scolded gently by the grandmother for taking more food at a buffet than she could eat (Shinju 2007, 21, 23). In contrast, not being wasteful came naturally to Mottainai Bāsan because she grew up knowing how not to waste, presumably out of necessity. That she was dubbed Miss No Waste in her younger days suggests that she did not discover the ills of wastefulness in her old age but had been well aware of them all along, perhaps with unusual zeal but otherwise not unlike the rest of her generation (Shinju 2006).
Mottainai Bāsan looms over her young grandson who is crying after having been scolded for leaving the water running while brushing his teeth; she tells him that his tears are “mottainai” (Shinju 2004).
With Mottainai Bāsan as the messenger, there was an implication that the virtues she extolled had to be reintroduced to a generation that had lost their sense of what was truly meaningful. One of the values most emphasized was appreciating the worth of things as well as the people who made them (see figure 2). As such, Mottainai Bāsan gave particular attention to the waste of material objects, doling out tips on how to fix or repurpose things that were old, use things fully, and minimize food waste (Shinju 2008, 2). But wastefulness was not just defined in terms of the material, with mottainai also applied to the nonmaterial, such as emotions, time, and states of being broadly conceived. To Mottainai Bāsan, it was wasteful to take photos or video of a sporting match and miss truly seeing the teamwork and cheers of support, or to look at the autumn leaves without picking them up and playing with them (Shinju 2007, 3–4). And the Mottainai Bāsan card game had one card each for the following incarnations of mottainai: being angry all the time, not learning, doing something without earnestness, not looking up at the night sky, not listening to the sound of insects, losing at the word game shiritori by offering a word that ends with “n,” everyone in the world not getting along, and not valuing life.Footnote 5 These virtues extolled by Mottainai Bāsan extended far beyond not wasting to encompass the importance of play, happiness, education, earnestness, world peace, a vague sense of humanism, experiencing and living in the moment, not being carelessly stupid, and appreciating nature.
As much as Mottainai Bāsan proselytized to the younger generations about these values, there was no hint of a desire to return to the decades of her youth or to a time before Japan became affluent. In a 2008 book that tackled problems in the contemporary world, author Shinju Mariko had Mottainai Bāsan offer vignettes about nine children from different countries who suffered from climate change, food and water shortages, war, and poverty. There was the young girl in India who had never been to school, did not know how to read and write, and worked twelve hours a day in a rug factory where the boss scolded and hit the workers; the child soldier in Sierra Leone who was given a shot of drugs before being sent off to the battlefield, where children marched ahead of adults to set off land mines; and the homeless boy in Russia whose parents’ drinking drove him to the streets, where he begged in order to survive and sniffed glue to forget his sadness. In stark contrast, the Japanese girl, nine years old like all of the other children in the book, was picky about what she ate and left food on her plate. It was explained that Japan imported 60 percent of its food and discarded 30 percent of its food uneaten, which an angry Mottainai Bāsan criticized as a lack of gratitude for nature's bounty (Shinju 2008, 9–11, 33–35, 37–39, 45–47). There was a good dose of guilt here for the young Japanese reader who did not appreciate the privileges afforded by affluence, but it did not begrudge those privileges. The message, however misleading in its implication that Japan was free of economic and social problems, was that Japanese were fortunate to live in an affluent country and should not waste the opportunities and lifestyles that wealth provided.
A nonfictional counterpart of Mottainai Bāsan for adult readers was Mottainai Jīsan, or No-Waste Grandpa, so dubbed in a book penned by his daughter-in-law Imai Misako. The book's subject was advertised on the dust jacket in a large font: “The heart and lifestyle of ‘mottainai’ that Japanese people are trying to consign to oblivion.” As in the Mottainai Bāsan series, mottainai was about material objects and more (in this case, “heart” or kokoro). And highlighting its allegedly imminent disappearance might have been intended as an appeal to potential readers’ nostalgic desire to learn about something that had allegedly once been so vital.Footnote 6 The historical mediator in this case was Mottainai Jīsan, a man named Imai Shigefumi who was born in 1914 and spent thirty-three years living under the same roof with his son and daughter-in-law until he passed away in 2003. Mottainai Jīsan's lifestyle was full of lessons about how to make the most of things like paper, water, food, clothes, and money, some of which (like drying tangerine skins to put in bathwater) were exactly the same as those taught by Mottainai Bāsan (Imai 2005, 7, 15, 209). That these habits were influenced by the wartime years was only implied with Mottainai Bāsan, but stated explicitly by and about Mottainai Jīsan. Author Imai Misako observed that her father-in-law was taught during the war that material things have lives and that he absorbed the oft-repeated wartime motto, “Luxury is the enemy!”Footnote 7 His experience of the scarcity of goods and a hunger that was sometimes debilitating affected profoundly how he lived and thought about everyday life well after he had the money to live differently. In 1974, one year after the Oil Shock, Mottainai Jīsan himself wrote a short essay in which he contrasted his generation, in which mottainai was born of necessity, with the postwar generation that was told that “consumption is a virtue.” Raised at a time when consumption was encouraged so as to increase production and earnings, those born after the war came of age in an era of disposability that was, he implied, alien to him (Imai 2005, 15, 19–20, 153–54).
From the perspective of author Imai Misako, it was her father-in-law's lifestyle that seemed somewhat alien compared to hers and to the times. Although she claimed that she respected Mottainai Jīsan's strong will to continue living as he always had without changing, there were hints that she found at least some aspects of his lifestyle strange and excessive. Imai suggested that there were times when Mottainai Jīsan crossed over the line between frugality and stinginess, especially when his seeming obsession with fully exhausting the life of things trumped any sensitivity to the feelings of people. It was an invasion of privacy, in her view, when her father-in-law would rifle through her trash to see what could be reused or would recycle private letters as a memo pad that was kept next to the telephone (Imai 2005, 43–44). As much as Imai endorsed the idea and spirit of mottainai, the gap between generations was undeniable, for while she could adopt some of her father-in-law's thrifty techniques she did not want to embrace his lifestyle. She could incorporate lessons from his war-forged life, but she did not want to return to it.
The waste-conscious grandmother or grandfather appeared in both fiction and nonfiction as a device to explore the meaning of wastefulness in part because the archetype likely resonated with readers’ own experiences and memories, endowing the figure with an air of authenticity. In a feature column on mottainai in the February 2006 issue of the monthly magazine Gendai (The present age), well-known personalities from authors to entertainers to business executives were asked about what they considered to be wasteful and remembered grandparents and parents who had told them not to waste. Actress Muroi Shigeru, born in 1958, recalled her grandmother who embodied “mottainai,” the word rendered in the dialect of her native Toyama Prefecture as “attaramon na” (Gendai 2006, 229). Taught by her own “Attaramon Bāsan” to not throw away things that could still be of use, Muroi kept supermarket bags, small boxes, and ribbons; repurposed film canisters to store hair pins or 500 yen coins; and salvaged day-old, dried-up rice that had been sitting out as an offering on her home's Buddhist altar by softening it with hot tea for her to eat or putting it in miso soup for her cat. Muroi attributed her waste-conscious ways to her grandmother, whose voice she could still hear saying, “Hey, this is wasteful (attaramon na)!” (229). In the same column, professor and science commentator Kitano Masaru, born during the war in 1942, shared his earliest memory of “mottainai,” which was of the word coming out of his mother's mouth. During his childhood, it was a given that food would not be left on one's plate and not eating all of one's rice, in particular, was seen as insulting to the labor of farmers. Kitano's mother warned him that children who did not eat all of the rice in their bowl would go blind, a threat that was also made to comic storyteller Tatekawa Shiraku, born a couple of decades later in 1963, by his mother (245, 247–48). Through the figure of a grandparent or parent, or one's own experience for some, there were personal ties for those of millennial Japan to the waste-conscious values of the wartime generation.
The harkening back to the frugality of the wartime decades, if not the experience of poverty and scarcity, served as a reminder that there were admirable qualities in a Japan that was not affluent. A scholar of religious thought and culture, Yamaori Tetsuo, located the roots of mottainai far in the past and considered its 1,500-year history a testament to the concept as an expression of the heart or soul (kokoro) of the Japanese people. Not only did the idea of mottainai predate the country's affluence, but postwar affluence diluted the potency of mottainai in the Japanese “heart and soul.” Yamaori explained that in his opinion, the ethics and morality of mottainai began to weaken in the late 1940s and 1950s, when the term “rice growing” (inasaku), with its traditional connection to mottainai, was gradually replaced by “rice farming” (komezukuri) against a background of economic growth and the development of manufacturing. As “rice growing” slipped from people's vocabularies, Yamaori claimed, mottainai slipped from people's “hearts and souls” (Yamaori 2006, 12, 14).
This narrative of attention to wastefulness being an important value before the era of postwar affluence was reinforced and amplified by a nostalgic evocation of a time even before the wartime years: the early modern Tokugawa or Edo period (1600–1868), when there was allegedly little to no waste.Footnote 8 “There was nothing mottainai in the Edo period,” boldly claimed one of the Mottainai Bāsan playing cards (Shinju 2006). That the lack of garbage in the streets of Tokugawa Japan was noticed by Westerners was commented on by prize-winning writer and artist Akasegawa Genpei. To Akasegawa, this absence of waste stemmed from the valuing of things and of reuse that came so naturally that people may not have even been aware of it, at least from the early modern years through the prewar period (Akasegawa 2007, 7, 25). Author Akiyama Hiroko drew on the conventional wisdom about this lack of waste in her three-volume children's book series on what could be learned about mottainai from life in the Tokugawa period. In the first installment, she explained that the spirit of not wasting had already taken root in the lives of ordinary people in Tokugawa Japan and introduced to readers their guides to the past: a brother and sister, with a neighborhood cat, who travelled back in time from contemporary Tokyo to its early modern incarnation as Edo. On one page, the two children were on the dirty streets of Tokyo pointing out the garbage in the river, the discarded cigarette butts on the sidewalks, the usable goods that had been thrown out as trash, and the household garbage deposited curbside that had been strewn about by scavenging crows. On the next page, the pair found themselves in Edo, where the sister exclaimed, “There are so many people in Edo, but the streets are clean!” (see figure 3).
The caption to these contrasting images of Edo and contemporary Tokyo responds to the brother's question about why the early modern town is so clean: “Even a single nail and scraps of paper are picked up and reused” (Akiyama 2009a, 4–5).
In Akiyama's reimagination, the city of Edo became an idyllic place that had much wisdom to offer the young millennial Japanese children about how to live. These lessons were about particular values and principles that could be exported to the twenty-first century, not about the embrace of the early modern standard of living or lifestyle in its entirety. The two siblings learned that in the Tokugawa period, people did not have refrigerators so only bought from itinerant vendors what they needed for a given day so as not to have excess things that they could not store. The take-home lesson here was not to do away with the refrigerator, but to buy only what one really needed (Akiyama 2009a, 8–11). The two siblings also learned that in a time without electricity and gas, people matched their lives to the rising and setting of the sun. The take-home lesson here was not to do without electricity and gas, but to enjoy activities outside and, a bit more literally, take advantage of solar energy (Akiyama 2009b, 12–13, 18; 2009c, 14, 26).
The overarching theme of the books was that the history of the Tokugawa period, nostalgically presented by Akiyama, could help millennial Japanese redefine the meaning of affluence in their own financially uncertain times. According to Akiyama, people of the Tokugawa period were “kokoro no yutaka” or rich in kokoro, a notoriously difficult word to translate that can mean heart, mind, spirit, or some hybrid thereof. Even though they did not have material things or present-day conveniences, they knew what “real wealth” (hontō no yutakasa) was because they did not just think about their own happiness as people in contemporary Japan had done, but understood the importance of mutual support and gratitude (Akiyama 2009a, 2; 2009b, 2; 2009c, 2, 30). This was not a rejection of modernity or the relative affluence of being a first-world country, but a conceptualization of what affluence meant in millennial Japan. According to Akiyama, the kind of affluence that really mattered—the affluence of heart and mind—was rooted not in financial wealth but in values that could transcend and endure the country's economic ups and downs as they had for centuries. Using the same vocabulary as Akiyama, the professor Kitano Masaru too observed that the era of material wealth (busshitsuteki na yutakasa) was ending, giving way to the affluence of the heart and mind (kokoro no yutakasa). Expanding upon this idea, a storage consultant named Iida Hisae warned that people would continue their wasteful habits until they asked themselves, “What is real wealth (hontō no yutakasa)?” Wastefulness would lead to the loss of the affluence of the heart (kokoro no yutakasa) concealed in the shadows of the wealth of things (mono no yutakasa) (Gendai 2006, 246, 248).
The idea that affluence might be measured in more spiritual rather than material or financial terms was not new; “kokoro no yutakasa” had gained traction in the 1970s in the wake of the Oil Shock and concerns about resources and energy (see, e.g., Sakano 1979). Its resurgence in millennial Japan stemmed in part from the acknowledgment that any substantial economic growth, much less the high-speed or bubble-driven varieties, was a thing of the past. Fiction writer Takamura Kaoru observed that the lifestyle of the economic boom years, with its inattention to decisions about consumption and disposal, could not continue (Takamura 2006, 22–23). Several popular songs not only accepted the end of economic growth, but also bemoaned the wastefulness of financial affluence. Folk-pop artist Sada Masashi released the song “MOTTAINAI” in 2005, which opened with a verse about how those born into an affluent era did not feel sad when leaving food uneaten and threw away things that could be repaired and used. In later verses, he implied that affluence had created a self-centered generation that was unaware of their parents’ love and cared only about their own well-being. The chorus lamented, “The heart (kokoro) aches, divine favor is bad, mottainai, mottainai, mottainai, mottainai” (Sada 2005). Actor and singer Kobayashi Akira went further in his 2006 song, in which he suggested that the mainstream lifestyles and goals of the recent past were themselves a waste. He called mottainai recent college graduates who became new employees only to busily run about, bowing here and there, with no time even to get drunk. In one verse, a new employee took out a loan for a house with a nice lawn and sunny garden only to have a tall building constructed in front of it, casting shade over all. After expressing his sadness about mountains of garbage and a marriage gone bad, the song ends with “Only one life . . . mottainai” (Kobayashi 2006). Others too echoed the theme of wasting one's life by dedicating it to unappreciated work. One book commented that it was “mottainai to bury your talent in a workplace that wastes it” (Puranetto Rinku Reference Rinku2006, 9). In this vein of questioning the aspirations of affluent Japan, some emphasized the striving for happiness unconnected to material or financial accumulation. Nishinari Katsuhiro, mathematical physicist of emergent systems, mentioned in his study of waste the idea of Gross National Happiness, pointing out that in one listing of countries by this measure from 2006, Japan ranked ninetieth while Bhutan, even with its poverty rate of 30 percent, ranked ninth (Nishinari 2008, 189–91).
In a more sophisticated definition of post-bubble aspirations, Hiroi Yoshinori, a scholar of public policy and social security, declared that the era of single-minded obsession with growth had ended. Gone were the days when the abundance of goods and the desire for them, as measured by money, fueled the perpetual expansion of the economy. The singular focus on economic growth had succeeded, the affluence of goods (busshiteki no yutakasa) was achieved, but the emphasis on the fast speed of growth and on the closed nature of companies and families—what had, in short, been the dominant way of thinking about the country's postwar economic life—had to change. With the market economy now saturated, advised Hiroi, more attention had to be geared toward the spread of the kinds of human activities and desires that could not be measured by money. Writing in 2006, Hiroi envisioned in this way the end of one era and the beginning of another, one of “zero growth” in which economic growth was not society's absolute and unconditional goal but in which there would be plenty of “affluence.” Hiroi did not elaborate on how he defined this affluence, but suggested a concern with equality of opportunity and treatment of the individual, rather than the company or the family, as the base unit of policy making. For Hiroi, this broader understanding of affluence was tied to a conception of mottainai that was about much more than economizing or monetary savings and thus allowed for a more expansive consideration of value beyond just efficiency. That mottainai was in the contemporary spotlight was one hopeful indication to him of a movement toward the reexamination of the meaning of affluence (Hiroi 2006).
Others framed in positive terms what had been past anxieties and storied tropes about resource scarcity, marshaling them to promote a kind of waste consciousness that might become the cornerstone of Japanese identities in the twenty-first century.Footnote 9 Resource vulnerability had helped forge desirable character traits and abilities, one narrative went. A book titled Mottainai explained, “Japan is known to have very few natural resources. How to effectively use these limited resources has been deeply ingrained in the Japanese mind. Japanese innovation has come from a long heritage of maximizing potential in a limited environment” (Puranetto Rinku Reference Rinku2006, 8–9). Here, resource insecurity was recast in positive and productive terms and the mention of “long heritage” resonated with the nostalgic harkening back to the supposed mottainai spirit of the past, which implied that mottainai might come more naturally to Japanese than to other people.
The uniqueness of mottainai was reinforced not just by narratives about Japanese history but also by the understanding of the concept as having spiritual meaning. The spiritual could be construed quite broadly and in relatively secular terms. The above-mentioned book, for example, claimed that mottainai gave form to the “unique spiritual world of the Japanese people” in which the nonmaterial and nonvisible life of an object was appreciated and mourned when lost through waste. Mottainai was defined as “not just about material loss, but also about the sense of respect and compassion for the story behind every material object. This is a Japanese virtue. . . .” (Puranetto Rinku Reference Rinku2006, 7–9). Here, the largely secular values of gratitude and regret were endowed with spiritual meaning. Others spoke of specific spiritual beliefs related to wastefulness. In her children's book, Akiyama Hiroko shared with readers her (simplified) version of the history of tsukumogami, spirits that resided in tools that had been used for a long time. The Japanese characters for “tsukumo” were those for “ninety-nine,” she explained, which hinted at ninety-nine years of use or ninety-nine types of objects, thereby expressing the importance of an object's long life. Conversely, tools not cared for would become malevolent ghosts (yōkai) (Akiyama 2009a, 15).Footnote 10 The spiritual could also be tied to an established religion in Japan, typically Buddhism. Religion scholar Yamaori Tetsuo considered mottainai inseparable from Buddhist ideas about the transience and evanescence of life (Yamaori 2006, 18). And author Shinju Mariko revealed that she had modeled Mottainai Bāsan after the Buddha (Gendai 2006, 234).
While claims about the unique spiritual meaning of mottainai made rather implicit comparisons to other countries and peoples, in other instances invidious distinctions were made quite explicit. Writer and artist Akasegawa Genpei distinguished Japan's attentiveness to food waste with the supposed custom in China and South Korea of leaving food on the plate. But the brunt of his disdain fell not on Japan's Asian neighbors, but on the United States, which Akasegawa sardonically accused of being the source of a practice that epitomized wastefulness: the eating of a grapefruit with a knife and spoon such that edible fruit is left attached to the inside of the skin. That, said Akasegawa, was the kind of country that the United States was, in contrast to Japan, where grapefruits did not appear until the postwar period. The implication was that wasteful American ways tainted Japan in the postwar decades, before which Japanese did not consume grapefruit but tangerines, whose fruit could be eaten in their entirety and whose skin could be dried and used as mosquito-repelling incense. Akasegawa goes so far as to suggest that Americans probably could not understand the “characteristically Japanese concept of mottainai” (Nihon tokuyū no “mottainai”) because they were so accustomed to ample space that everything, from people to cars, became unnecessarily and wastefully large (Akasegawa 2007, 36–40, 42–43, 90–91). Others pointed out the linguistic uniqueness of mottainai. Kitano Masaru, for example, made the oft-repeated point that there was no clear English translation of or equivalent to the word “mottainai” so as to underscore its particularly Japanese character (Gendai 2006, 247). Although not all celebrations of the concept were so deeply rooted in cultural generalizations, essentialisms, and disdainful comparisons between countries, those who looked at it as a contribution to the world did presuppose some degree of Japanese uniqueness to mottainai.
National and International Meanings of Mottainai
The idea that mottainai was an expression of Japanese identity that could be shared with the world took off in early 2005, when Kenyan activist, government minister, and Nobel laureate Wangari Maathai was invited to Japan by a reporter from the Mainichi newspaper and was introduced to “mottainai,” which she embraced and then promoted as a keyword for the global environmental movement. As explained by Maathai, “When I learned the concept of mottainai, I immediately knew it would be an important element of my message to the world. I liked the spiritual roots of mottainai. I also liked the fact that it captures in one term the ‘3Rs’ [reduce, reuse, recycle] that we environmentalists have been campaigning for over many years” (Puranetto Rinku Reference Rinku2006, 3–5). Her visit to Japan inspired the establishment of the Mottainai Campaign, sponsored by the Mainichi Newspapers Company and the conglomerate Itōchū Corporation with Maathai as honorary chair.
The Mottainai Campaign sought to internationalize mottainai, putting it forward as a Japanese idea that Japanese people could feel proud sharing with the world. The Itōchū Corporation conceived of “MOTTAINAI” as a brand, complete with a logo that was printed on products, such as t-shirts and cloth bags (Kyōdō News International 2005). The brand was intended to be global with a Japanese flavor, as was unequivocally announced at the top of the campaign's English-language website: “Mottainai. It is the message from Japan to the world.” The Japanese version echoed this sentiment, if worded slightly differently: “Mottainai is the watchword of the world” (Mottainai Campaign, n.d.). Expanding on this message, the official statement of the Second National Convention on Mottainai, sponsored by the Mottainai Campaign in the summer of 2008, proclaimed: “On this occasion, we declare our commitment to promoting MOTTAINAI, the spirit we Japanese have cherished since ancient times, throughout Japan and subsequently throughout the world” (Mottainai Campaign 2008). This spirit was defined as more than a synonym for the 3Rs, made unique by being Japanized at this moment of international presentation with the addition of a fourth “R” (respect) such that mottainai was said to equal “3R + R.” Although the fourth “R” did not gain much traction beyond the Mottainai Campaign, it was intended to transcend the pragmatism of environmentally friendly practices to embody sentiments and values: “Mottainai is the painful longing for things that have been lost” and “Mottainai is a way to say thanks to someone who has helped you” (Mottainai Campaign, n.d.).
In international forums, Wangari Maathai served as a spokesperson for the Mottainai Campaign, which was linked to her own Green Belt Movement. In March 2005, a month after her visit to Japan, she mentioned the term “mottainai” at a session of the United Nations Commission on the Status of Women, and she continued her publicizing efforts in the years to come (Kankyōshō 2005). In September 2009, at a United Nations summit, she urged world leaders to arrive at a climate change agreement several months hence in Copenhagen and explained that individuals, too, could do their part in addressing the problem. “Even at personal level [sic], we can all reduce, re-use and recycle, what is embraced as Mottainai in Japan, a concept that also calls us to express gratitude, to respect and to avoid wastage” (Maathai Reference Maathai2009a). Several months later at the UN Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen, she argued that values rather than science might be the key to concluding a meaningful and binding climate change agreement and mentioned mottainai in this context as one such compelling value. She explained hearing, at events organized by religious leaders, “words that express values like compassion, empathy and mottainai (encompassing respect, gratitude and not wasting)” (Maathai Reference Maathai2009b).
While the Mottainai Campaign was a nongovernmental effort backed by media and corporate sponsorship, the Japanese government also promoted mottainai as a brand for the environmental movement and, by extension, the nation. Prime Minister Koizumi Jun'ichirō repeatedly spoke of mottainai to domestic and international audiences after he met with Maathai during her initial visit to Japan in 2005, apparently struck by how impressed she was with the concept. Inspired by Maathai, he gave his own take on the origins of mottainai: an unspecified time of food shortages when parents told their children to eat their rice and be mindful of those people who had produced it (Koizumi 2005a; Shushō Kantei 2005). As Koizumi retold the story of his meeting with Maathai in subsequent months, he imprinted mottainai with Japanese origins using Orientalist tropes as he sought its internationalization. The concept was “hard to understand,” he initially claimed, by which he meant hard to understand for non-Japanese, all the more reason why he was surprised by its embrace by Maathai. What was implied in this early statement was explicitly spelled out in others, in which he expressed his desire for “foreigners” to understand the meaning of the word and pondered how difficult it would be to use in English, as well as French, German, and other foreign languages (Koizumi 2005b, 2005c; Koizumi naikaku mēru magajin 2005). By suggesting that “mottainai” had an inherently Japanese quality that was unknowable to foreigners, Koizumi preserved the uniquely Japanese nature of the concept so that it would still be branded as Japanese even as he was convinced that it could be a global word. Flipping the conventional conception of Japan as a liminal space in which foreign ideas become Japanized, Koizumi pushed outward a Japanese idea to be largely, if not thoroughly, internationalized.Footnote 11
For Koizumi, mottainai was part of an articulation of national identity in a post-bubble Japan. The era of mass production, mass consumption, and mass disposal was declared over. Economic growth, once a source of national pride, was revealed to have come at the expense of environmental degradation. Now allegedly wise about environmental pollution and climate change, Japan was to seek both environmental protection and economic development. While the country would continue to strive for economic growth, its identity could no longer rest solely on such accomplishments. Koizumi presented himself as the prime minister of both economic reforms and “Cool Biz,” a campaign to save electricity by encouraging workers to wear lighter clothes in the hot summer months. And in a press conference following the Gleneagles Summit of the G8 in July 2005, Koizumi put Japan forward as a country that sought to be a “zero waste, zero emission society” and ended by reporting that he had introduced at the summit the Japanese word “mottainai” as the encapsulation of the importance of environmental protection and the valuing of things (Koizumi 2005c, 2005d).
This theme was echoed by Minister of the Environment Koike Yuriko, who advocated education about the spirit of mottainai as a kind of character-building enterprise to construct a society that could both maintain affluence and reduce its environmental burden (Kankyōshō 2005). In an attempt to teach the Japanese public about the wastefulness of plastic bags, Koike created the “mottainai furoshiki,” a wrapping cloth made out of recycled plastic bottles that sported a painting by Tokugawa-era artist Itō Jakuchū so as to highlight the “furoshiki culture” of that period. Furoshiki were said to be a physical manifestation of the values of mottainai, and with their own long history dating as far back as the eighth century. This special furoshiki, a symbol of the environmentally consciousness techniques and heart of Japan, was put on display and sold as the embodiment of Japan's “traditional culture” of the wrapping cloth and of valuing things (Kankyōshō 2006b). Prime Minister Koizumi, who went to one of the mottainai furoshiki exhibitions in Tokyo, hailed the wrapping cloth as a way to reduce garbage and to promote a recycling society that values things, both of which were essential to a Japan that was to embrace both environmental protection and economic growth (Koizumi naikaku mēru magajin 2006).
Highlighting Japan's long-held “tradition” of waste consciousness as part of its national identity peaked during Koizumi's administration but continued with somewhat muted enthusiasm through the succession of one-year prime ministerships that followed. Though unfocused for a brief time by Prime Minister Abe Shinzō's vague notions of building a “beautiful country, Japan,” mottainai continued to be invoked in environmental conversations both domestically and in international forums like the United Nations. The term was also occasionally used by the government in nonenvironmental contexts. In June 2011, the Japan Patent Office collaborated with its counterparts in seven other countries to establish a one-year pilot of what was dubbed PPH MOTTAINAI, a program intended to facilitate the consideration of patent requests in multiple countries. The name of the pilot program was born out of dissatisfaction with the existing patent application process, which was so inefficient as to be considered wasteful (Keizai Sangyōshō Reference Keizai Sangyōshō2011).
The attention given to mottainai by the Japanese government was mirrored by quasi-governmental and nongovernmental organizations with global reach that aimed to introduce “mottainai” into the lexicon of countries around the world. In Latin America, Mottainai Brasil had been established in the mid-1990s by the Japan chapter of the nonprofit Junior Chamber International as part of its Global Mottainai movement and continued to be active in the 2000s (Junior Chamber International, n.d.). In Vietnam, the Japan International Cooperation Agency (JICA), an independent governmental entity, supported a “MOTTAINAI Fair” hosted by the 3R Hanoi Project in March 2008.Footnote 12 And in Malaysia, the Japanese consumer electronics corporation Panasonic launched a mottainai campaign in September 2009 to promote its eco-friendly products. As was explained by the company's general manager of communications and branding, “mottainai was a universal phrase now that the company wanted to ‘popularise’ to Malaysians” (Lim Reference Lim2009). Efforts included an eco-ideas exhibition in Kuala Lumpur that showcased the concept, and outreach to preschool and kindergarten students through Mottainai Bāsan, who taught the children about not wasting through stories, songs, and activities (Chan Reference Chan2009; Lim Reference Lim2009; Lu Reference Lu2009). Sony Computer Entertainment also brought the word some attention from English-speaking players with its spring 2009 release of “Trash Panic” (“Gomibako,” or “Garbage Can,” in the Japanese market), a vaguely Tetris-like game for the PlayStation 3 console in which trash must be destroyed but valuable items labeled “mottainai” must be saved.
The concept also popped up as an inspirational idea or brand name in various places without conscious and purposeful promotion by a Japanese organization. In 2007, recent graduates of the Fashion Institute of Technology in New York City established a Brooklyn-based brand of sustainable menswear called Mottainai New York. One of the co-founders, Luke McCann, took to the concept when it was introduced to him by Japanese artist Yoshino Minako because it encapsulated his dissatisfaction with cheap, poor-quality, mass-produced, and mass-consumed clothes, as well as his commitment to high-quality, stylish, and durable clothes made from organic and recycled materials. An explanation of the brand name was regularly asked for in media coverage and was provided on the company's website: “The word Mottainai (moe tie nie) roughly translates into ‘what a waste’, and can be interpreted to sum up when people squander natural resources. Deeply embedded in Japanese folk tales, it is commonly used by parents to ensure children eat all of their rice. Children are taught that if they waste things, the ‘mottainai ghost’ will come” (Mottainai New York, n.d.). The Mottainai New York brand and philosophy reverberated with a Japanese magazine about small and medium-sized business, which ran a story on how Japan could learn from this American company that had internalized and capitalized on Japanese ideas, ways of thinking, and business culture. While McCann was described as having taken some time to truly understand mottainai, his company was also credited with reminding Japanese of the several-hundred-year history of the concept. Japan, it was feared, needed this foreign prodding about the value of its “traditional culture” and “ancient ideas” at a time when mass production, mass consumption, and fast fashion were hastening the loss of this “Japanese virtue” (Decide 2010).Footnote 13
Conclusion
In millennial Japan, mottainai provided a conceptual vocabulary for explorations of meaning and identities during a time of stagnant affluence. At the level of the individual, mottainai raised questions about what affluence had meant for what was valued and desired, and about what leading a rich life might and should mean. At the level of the nation, mottainai was a particular angle from which to consider and express Japanese identity. In attempting to forge a sense of national pride that was not tied to economic accomplishments, the discourse on mottainai resonated with the recently anointed “cool Japan,” an idea given currency by American writer Douglas McGray in a 2002 article titled “Japan's Gross National Cool.” The prospect that Japan could be cool, and that this might help define the country in the new millennium, was excitedly taken up by Japanese politicians, bureaucrats, and businesspeople who championed the export of Japanese popular culture, in particular, as a means of branding Japan and expanding its global influence (McGray Reference McGray2002).Footnote 14 Adopting a variation of Joseph Nye's (Reference Nye1990) concept of “soft power,” proponents of “cool Japan” hoped that national strength and recognition might be gained and measured by the export of Japanese-brand lifestyles and values at a time when it was felt that the country could not boast of military prowess or economic might. The idea that Japan might exert soft power in some form was not new, as evidenced by former prime minister Miyazawa Kiichi's notion of Japan as a “lifestyle superpower” in the early 1990s (Leheny Reference Leheny2003, 103–4). But the values that Japan was supposed to project to the world in the 2000s were intentionally framed and expressed in terms of a consciousness of wastefulness. As one example, an article published in the national daily Asahi shinbun in March 2005 asserted that Japan's assumption of an honorable position in the twenty-first-century world would depend on international appreciation of the country's core values—one of which was mottainai. Mottainai, it was explained, foregrounded the values of not wasting things, not creating garbage, protecting the natural environment, and preventing global warming (Asahi shinbun 2005). A “cool Japan” was to be conscious of waste, wastefulness, and environmental protection in ways that captured the multifaceted understandings of Japanese culture, values, and spirit.
As with the construction of most brand concepts, the appeal of mottainai had much more to do with the needs and desires of the time than the accuracy of its claims. The attention given to mottainai seemed misguided to those who questioned the sincerity of Japan's commitment to waste consciousness and who believed that rhetoric about wastefulness lacked the requisite gravitas to tackle the plethora of serious issues that the nation faced. Environmental historians would also be quick to point out that Japan's record on environmental issues had been very uneven and that the focus on mottainai was a way to “greenwash” shortcomings in its environmental record (see DeWit Reference DeWit2009; Kingston Reference Kingston2011, 145–65). But the concern here has not been with veracity, sincerity, or effectiveness but with how mottainai was conceived and discussed as it was, when it was. After all, the term had not been evoked so often and so prominently before in modern Japan. The idea of not wasting, and the concomitant appreciation of frugality and thrift, certainly had a long modern history, as historian Sheldon Garon has illustrated.Footnote 15 But mottainai was conceived and advanced in specific ways and with exceptional intensity in millennial Japan. The discourse about the many ideas epitomized by the term as well as its deliberate promotion as a keyword for the global environmental movement and as a brand for the nation were particular to this historical moment.
What this conversation about mottainai provided in these years was a definition of allegedly unique Japanese virtues that transcended economic ups and downs by conceiving of value and meaning in spiritual rather than financial terms. Spurred by both economic insecurity and an acceptance thereof, the value and meaning of affluence as well as understandings of national identity were revisited. What differentiated the millennial decade from the one previous, then, was the fading of the trauma of rupture between the years of growth and the years of stagnation. If the 1990s had revealed that the economic downturn was not temporary, the 2000s eradicated any remaining hope of an economically ascendant Japan in the near future (see Yoda and Harootunian Reference Yoda and Harootunian2006, 1). And this acceptance left some openings for constructive self-reflection about individual and national identities. That worries, dilemmas, and challenges continued to hang over millennial Japan should not be understated. But the first decade of the twenty-first century was not lost, wasted, or retrograde—at least not to the extent or ways that plagued the 1990s.Footnote 16
The danger of trying to characterize such a recent past, some historians would comment, is that it is still very much playing itself out, that it is not even close to being done, and that there is not yet enough distance to offer a historical perspective with the benefit of hindsight.Footnote 17 We might consider that the past is always still playing itself out, that it is never truly done, that distance is not necessarily a historical virtue, and that hindsight can blind as much as it can illuminate. Approaching the recent past as history can also enable historians to capture ephemeral moments that might otherwise be invisible in histories privileging that which endures.
Yet it is true that at this particular moment in time, it is difficult to say with much certainty whether the surge of attention to mottainai and the concerns it reflected were indeed ephemeral or whether they will endure. There is the unavoidable, weighty question of how 3/11—the earthquake, tsunami, and nuclear disaster of March 2011—might mark the end of one era and the beginning of another. One can certainly hear echoes of the past in post-3/11 calls to save electricity (setsuden) in the face of energy shortages brought on by the suspension of nuclear power plants. Such moral suasion about not wasting energy has been taken up not just by the government but by authors of advice literature and mass-market nonfiction books that could very well have been written before 3/11.Footnote 18 There are signs too that values articulated before 3/11 continue to have resonance. The idea of an “Eco Edo” or an ecologically friendly Edo period seems to be enduring, with Mitsui Real Estate's continued promotion of the concept as but one example (Mitsui Fudōsan 2012). Yet there are also questions about the long-term impact of heightened anxieties about food security, energy independence, resource scarcity, and the financial costs of recovery and reconstruction.Footnote 19 For now, one can only speculate about what this sense of vulnerability might mean for identities, conceptions of affluence, and the search for meaning in post-3/11 Japan.
Acknowledgments
I would like to thank Andrew Gordon, Peter Frost, Kenda Mutongi, my colleagues in the History Department at Williams College, and two anonymous reviewers for providing helpful comments on the manuscript. I am also grateful for the feedback I received on talks about this material given at the University of Hong Kong and Waseda University, with special thanks to Izumi Nakayama, Charles Schencking, Fujino Yūko, and Obinata Sumio. Research was supported by the American Historical Association, the Association for Asian Studies, Williams College, and the National Endowment for the Humanities.
