Waste

Consuming Postwar Japan

Eiko Maruko Siniawer

• Publisher: Cornell University Press
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781501725869
• Topic: Geschichte
• Subtopic: Japanische Geschichte

In Waste, Eiko Maruko Siniawer innovatively explores the many ways in which the Japanese have thought about waste—in terms of time, stuff, money, possessions, and resources—from the immediate aftermath of World War II to the present. She shows how questions about waste were deeply embedded in the decisions of everyday life, reflecting the priorities and aspirations of the historical moment, and revealing people's ever-changing concerns and hopes.

Over the course of the long postwar, Japanese society understood waste variously as backward and retrogressive, an impediment to progress, a pervasive outgrowth of mass consumption, incontrovertible proof of societal excess, the embodiment of resources squandered, and a hazard to the environment. Siniawer also shows how an encouragement of waste consciousness served as a civilizing and modernizing imperative, a moral good, an instrument for advancement, a path to self-satisfaction, an environmental commitment, an expression of identity, and more. From the late 1950s onward, a defining element of Japan's postwar experience emerged: the tension between the desire for the privileges of middle-class lifestyles made possible by affluence and dissatisfaction with the logics, costs, and consequences of that very prosperity. This tension complicated the persistent search for what might be called well-being, a good life, or a life well lived. Waste is an elegant history of how people lived—how they made sense of, gave meaning to, and found value in the acts of the everyday.

Part I

RE-CIVILIZATION AND RE-ENLIGHTENMENT

Transitions of the Early Postwar Period, 1945–1971

1

THE IMPERATIVES OF WASTE

Amid the devastation and disorientation of late August 1945, only weeks into an uncertain time suddenly without war, the popular women’s magazine Fujin kurabu (Women’s Club) managed to print an issue and used its precious supply of paper to address the urgent concerns of daily life in a defeated Japan. Finding and preparing food was the main subject, in response to one of the most immediate and dire challenges facing those who had survived the war. Anticipating hardships yet to come, with winter just around the corner, a member of the Japan Home Cooking Research Association (Nihon Katei Ryōri Kenkyūkai) instructed readers on how to preserve and cook what they had been summarily and habitually discarding. Even corncobs, spent tea leaves, and tangerine peels were not to be thrown out but thoroughly used for much-needed sustenance.¹

To waste was unthinkable in the years just after the war, when many people were consumed by the pressing need to make the most of what little they had. Large swaths of more than sixty cities throughout the country had been destroyed by bombing, almost a third of people in urban areas were homeless, over half of Tokyo residences lay in ruins, and thousands of children had been orphaned.² In a time of widespread poverty and scarcity, wasting could be an existential threat, especially when it came to food. People were taught how the seemingly inedible could be made palatable and how to secure vital nutrients from whatever could be procured. When wasting could endanger health and even subsistence, such education about waste had gravity, and wastefulness could be conceived of as little more than an unaffordable luxury.

The idea that waste was dangerous and waste consciousness a necessity extended beyond food to garbage and human excrement, which garnered concern as filthy breeding grounds for pests, stench, and infectious diseases. As such, they were to be dealt with properly for the sake of basic health and hygiene. In these lean years when people discarded little, rubbish was not about abundance, excess, or a worrisome societal proclivity toward disposal. It was instead an issue of sanitation, something to be contained so as to mitigate threats to public health. Whether about food or garbage, waste consciousness focused on the acute challenges of day-to-day life and was, in fact, imperative in ways that it would never be again in the decades that followed.

Waste of various kinds was understood not just as perilous but also as backward and uncivilized. As the country sought to recover from its wartime destruction and establish itself once again as modern, there were clear parallels to ways of thinking that dated as far back as the late 1800s, when “civilization and enlightenment” had been the slogan of the day. Waste, as an impediment to the project of reconstruction and remodernization, was to be minimized or eliminated. Garbage did not just imperil health and hygiene but was also a marker of regression. The waste of money, effort, labor, and time were similarly viewed as both symptoms and symbols of civilizational inadequacy which were to be eradicated through the promotion of efficiency and rationalization. The impetus to do away with waste was partially pragmatic, to remove the inefficiency and irrationality that were considered obstacles to progress. It was also partially performative, to be rid of signs that Japan had not yet rejoined the countries of the modern and civilized world.

In the immediate postwar, what was imagined as progress was liberation from the fear of waste and wasting. A better life would be free from the exigencies of survival and would be characterized instead by a safety and security brought about by economic recovery. Sparked too in these years was a glimmer of what an ideal life might look like. In the context of occupation, rosy visions of an American middle-class lifestyle of abundance and prosperity began to capture imaginations even at a time when most Japanese could barely dream of much beyond the struggles of the day-to-day.

Perils and Prescriptions

The shortage of food was a wartime condition that persisted into the peace. Rationing had been a practice for years, starting with sugar in 1940 and rice in the six largest urban areas in 1941. With the Food Management Law (Shokuryō Kanri Hō) of 1942, the government sought to control the consumption of grains, beans, potatoes, fruits, vegetables, soy sauce, miso (fermented soybean paste), and fish, though staple foodstuffs were available on the black market.³ By the last two years of the war, the lack of food had become severe, especially in major metropolitan areas and those provincial cities and towns struck by Allied bombing.⁴ The situation in these most desperate months was described by one food scholar, who recalled of his childhood: “From 1944 on, even in the countryside, the athletic grounds of local schools were converted into sweet potato fields. And we ate every part of the sweet potato plant, from the leaf to the tip of the root. We also ate every part of the kabocha [winter squash] we grew, including the seeds and skin.”⁵ Such memories, common among the wartime generation, suggest that food may have been consumed thoroughly and completely less because of moral suasion or instruction about waste consciousness than out of the sheer need for subsistence.

This food crisis was exacerbated in the immediate postwar years by the halt to rice imports from the now former colonies of Taiwan and Korea, the sharp increase in mouths to feed with the return of millions of demobilized soldiers and civilians from across the collapsed empire, and the typhoons and floods in September 1945 which depressed an annual rice yield that was the lowest in over thirty years.⁶ For those outside of the fortunate minority who averted hunger, “leftovers from restaurants, even the garbage of places where the more privileged dined, became depended-on sources of sustenance.”⁷ In the three months following the surrender, it was estimated that more than one thousand people in Tokyo, and over seven hundred in five other major cities, died from malnutrition. In the spring of 1946, the situation was so grave that hundreds of thousands of Japanese people protested against the lean food rations and corrupt black markets, and General Dwight Eisenhower, the U.S. Army chief of staff, asked President Harry Truman for emergency food shipments to avoid violent rebellion against Allied troops in both Germany and Japan. This importation of food, provided as a loan, helped avert the mass starvation that had been feared as imminent. Even so, for many people, hunger was an enduring and perpetual condition.⁸

Making the most of scant foodstuffs was thus a common topic of advice in magazines and newspapers. Aimed primarily at women in urban areas where food could not easily be grown, articles attempted to help readers subsist on meager rations that provided roughly half of the necessary daily caloric intake and whatever food they could afford to buy for exorbitant prices at mafia-run black markets.⁹

Suggested techniques for not wasting food were often about not wasting nutritional value, about extracting as many nutrients as possible from whatever foodstuffs could be procured. One commonly suggested method of eliminating the waste of food was to consume all of its parts, including those that, in better circumstances, would not have been considered palatable or edible. This included the leaves and stems of a sweet potato, the calyx at the top of an eggplant, the skin of persimmons, the core of cabbage, and the green leaves of the carrot and daikon radish. Tangerine peels were touted for being high in vitamin C. They could be dried for preservation and, before use, softened in water, minced, and added to simmered, vinegared, or dressed dishes. The dehydrated peels could also be sliced thinly or diced, roasted, and ground into a flour for use in steamed buns or dumplings. Corncobs could be chopped finely, dried, and then boiled in water for about ten minutes to create a liquid sweetener.¹⁰

In addition to maximizing the nutritional value of foodstuffs through proper preparation and consumption, attention to the measurement of amounts was recommended to make as much food as possible without wasting ingredients. An article in the April 1948 issue of Fujin no tomo (Woman’s Companion) provided recipes that specified how many rolls of sushi, of particular sizes, could be made from one gō (0.18 liters, or 6.09 ounces) of rice; how much tempura could be prepared from one cup of flour; and how many ohagi, or rice balls coated with sweetened red bean paste, could be eked out of one gō of adzuki beans. Outlined too were the portions of various dishes that could be made with one egg, calculated as equivalent to three shaku (0.054 liters, or 1.83 ounces) of liquid.¹¹

Such advice was offered in the hopes that education would heighten vital attention to the waste of food. The advised culinary practices were likely not new, given the food shortages of the later wartime years, when people were harvesting wild plants like bracken and mugwort for sustenance. But there was a sense in these articles that more didactic work could be done.¹² According to a book on nutrition published in August 1946, with multiple printings shortly thereafter, Japanese housewives were continuing to discard fruit and vegetable peels as well as the bones and liver of fish despite the scarcity of food. A contrast was drawn with Germany, where, reportedly, housewives who threw away vegetable skins were criticized as uneducated, children ate all parts of fruit including the core, and inedible peels such as those of bananas were used as fertilizer. Unlike their German counterparts, many Japanese housewives were allegedly treating such food as “garbage.”¹³ Instruction was thus required to enlighten women about their uninformed and injurious waste.

Such guidance in books, magazines, and newspapers about how to prepare nutritious and economical meals drew on several decades of literature about home management geared toward housewives. In the 1910s and 1920s, cookbooks had increasingly stressed practicality and frugality to appeal to a new kind of housewife, one who was less likely to hire people to do the household cooking. At a time when becoming a servant was increasingly unappealing as other opportunities opened up for women in the workforce, the housewife came to assume more of the responsibility of cooking for herself and her family. Earlier cookbooks about how to supervise domestic workers and entertain guests with special meals became less relevant, and the target readership expanded beyond upper-class women to include younger housewives and unmarried women. And in the context of the economic hardship of the late 1910s and 1920s, “domestic cookbooks placed more and more emphasis on economical cookery and useful recycling of waste.”¹⁴ During the wartime years, women’s magazines geared toward an urban audience published articles about how to make the most of rationed foods and how to create substitutes for items that had become hard to acquire.¹⁵

The early postwar emphasis on nutrition as well as a more rational and scientific approach to food preparation were also an extension of “daily life improvement campaigns” from the 1920s and 1930s. The elimination of waste that had been promoted by government ministries, home economists, and others in those prewar decades remained relevant in the economic and social context of the immediate postwar.¹⁶

While the advice literature of the early postwar years continued to stress the importance of good nutrition, making do with little, and not wasting, it did not display the emphatically nationalist orientation of its prewar and wartime predecessors. Housewives of the 1910s and 1920s were to minimize waste and to be frugal so as to do their part in reducing the national debt and hastening an end to national economic woes.¹⁷ Housewives of the wartime period were to eradicate waste for the sake of the nation’s victory. The slogan “Luxury Is the Enemy!” was a common sight starting in the summer of 1940, appearing on signs and in magazines and newspapers to induce citizens to curb consumption and boost household saving.¹⁸ The Meiji Confectionery Company (Meiji Seika), the country’s largest candy maker, did its part for the war effort, sponsoring an advertising campaign in 1940 that urged people to refrain from purchasing luxury items and to buy war bonds instead. And throughout the wartime years, advice literature about food and cookery was infused with patriotic messages about the war effort.¹⁹

After the war’s end, and especially in the earliest years of the postwar, references to nationwide concerns were more subdued than they had been in the prewar decades. Housewives were still to be skilled, knowledgeable, and resourceful, but the purposes of their waste minimization were more intimately connected to improving their own daily lives. These articles of the immediate postwar focused largely on the pressing needs of individual readers and responded to the challenges of day-to-day life. In squarely confronting the realities of the time, the advice literature of these years was markedly different from its later incarnation as a purveyor of aspirations for an idealized life. The gap between didactic discourse and lived experience was smaller than it would be in future decades, as both those who gave and those who sought advice shared an acute understanding of waste consciousness as a matter of sheer necessity in dire economic and material circumstances.

One Person’s Trash …

Experiences of hunger, and of the need to make the most of what little there was without waste, were lived in the presence of American occupiers. In a defeated Japan, the United States loomed large as victor and occupier which, for over six years from the fall of 1945 to the spring of 1952, was “a reality encountered in everyday life.”²⁰ The nature and extent of interactions with Americans varied, and as the historian Yoshimi Shun’ya has pointed out, different Japanese people had different understandings of and feelings about the United States. But one image of the United States that took substantial shape during these years was of a wealthy country. Indeed, however American prosperity was viewed, the occupation years were formative for the widespread consideration of the United States as the embodiment of affluence and abundance. In Japanese imaginations, the United States became a “reference culture,” which, whether admired or criticized, served in the early postwar decades as a counterpoint for self-reflection about the status and future of Japan’s own society.²¹

The notion of the United States as a model of affluence was fueled by the visible chasm ...