One of the great paradoxes of recent times is that Japan—a nation that has proved just as prolific at environmental destruction, overconsumption, and extreme waste of resources and energy as any other modern industrialized nation—has somehow acquired a reputation for possessing a “unique” form of “waste consciousness” that dates back to the prewar era and allegedly even premodern times.
In her groundbreaking study, Waste: Consuming Postwar Japan, Eiko Maruko Siniawer traces the evolution of waste consciousness in Japan from the immediate aftermath of World War II to the present. She argues that after acute shortages during the war and the immediate postwar era produced an intense waste consciousness, Japanese writers, intellectuals, and business figures struggled to overcome the wartime injunction that “luxury is the enemy,” and briefly succeeded during the high-growth 1960s in replacing this idea with a notion of consumption as a “virtue” that helped drive economic expansion.
However, according to Siniawer, the shocks of the 1970s—including the “Nixon Shocks,” when US President Richard Nixon decoupled the dollar from gold and imposed punitive tariffs on Japanese goods; the Oil Shock of 1973; and a garbage crisis in central Tokyo—forced a recognition that there might be limits to economic growth. A new form of waste consciousness emerged whereby Japanese people were encouraged to save energy and avoid waste on the margins, but in ways that never directly challenged middle-class mass consumption or economic growth. Although energy use and garbage volume declined for a time, growth resumed shortly thereafter.
It was during the Bubble Economy of the 1980s, according to Siniawer, that Japan saw the first stirrings of dissatisfaction with the secular religion of economic growthism. Rather than pursuing only material affluence, Japanese opinion leaders began to emphasize pursuing an “affluence of the heart.” Siniawer argues that this trend grew stronger with the collapse of the bubble and the onset of so-called lost decades in the 1990s and 2000s. New types of waste consciousness evolved around valuing leisure time or one's mental well-being. Many of these new strains of waste avoidance were gendered female, even as older forms of waste consciousness emphasizing productivity and efficiency persisted in corporate environments that were gendered male.
According to Siniawer, it was during this final period, as Japan attempted to transition from an economic to a cultural superpower, that the Japanese word mottainai (wasteful) was promoted to the world as a uniquely Japanese form of sensitivity to waste. Although this concept drew from earlier forms of waste consciousness, the newer emphasis on seeking “affluence of the heart” also helped produce the Japanese “decluttering” boom that resulted in cultural exports such as Marie Kondo and her “KonMari method” of household tidying-up.
Siniawer's study is laudably ambitious, both temporally and conceptually, and displays an enviable mastery of a wide variety of primary sources, including newspaper and magazine articles, films, advertisements, manga, and artworks. Incorporating aspects of social and cultural history, Siniawer's book is probably best viewed as a kind of intellectual history of ideas about waste and wastefulness in postwar and contemporary Japan.
Most ambitiously of all, Siniawer explicitly hopes her book can serve as a kind of history of the entire postwar period (p. 12). Indeed, insofar as Siniawer uses what people discarded and chose to keep to chart how Japanese desires and values changed over time, and also because she mentions, at least in passing, many of the major political and social events in post-1945 Japan, this book will be an indispensable reference for anyone doing work on this era.
Ultimately Siniawer does not fully address whether Japanese waste consciousness was in any way different from that found in other affluent postindustrial nations, nor whether it was connected to prewar ideas and practices concerning waste. In fairness, she never explicitly poses these questions, and perhaps finds them uninteresting, but given how many of her sources lay claims to such difference, the reader is left wondering whether these claims have any validity. To her credit, Siniawer implicitly casts doubt on such claims, and meticulously demonstrates how Japanese waste consciousness often had little discernible impact on the volume of waste in Japan. However, because Siniawer does not conduct significant comparative research across nations, and does not examine waste consciousness in prewar Japan, a reader cannot be entirely sure. That said, it would be excessively greedy to demand a book this wide-ranging and comprehensive be even wider-ranging.
Overall, Waste makes an outsized contribution to the study of postwar Japanese history. Moreover, in the era of onrushing climate catastrophe, understanding how advanced industrial societies like Japan have tried (and often failed) to mitigate wastefulness is more important than ever. Eloquently written and compulsively readable, Waste will be essential reading for students of modern Japan as well as our current era more broadly.
