Contemporary Urban Japan E-Book

John Clammer

• Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Serie: Studies in Urban and Social Change
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 404

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2011

Beschreibung

This volume demonstrates a fresh approach to urban studies as well as a new way of looking at contemporary Japan which links economy and society in an innovative way.

Leseprobe

Contents

Preface

Acknowledgements

1 Approaching Japan through the Study of Consumption

JAPAN AND CONSUMPTION

THINKING THROUGH JAPANESE CONSUMPTION

THE STRUCTURE OF JAPANESE CONSUMPTION

THE POWER OF THE GIFT

CONSUMPTION AND THE ORGANIZATION OF EVERYDAY LIFE

2 Consumption and Urban Cultures in the Japanese City

THE URBAN CONTEXT OF CONSUMPTION

URBAN SOCIOLOGY AND JAPANESE SOCIETY

THE SOCIOLOGY OF URBAN CONSUMPTION

3 The Context of Desire: The Political Economy of Consumption

THE POLITICAL AND ECONOMIC FRAME

THE PRAXIS OF CONSUMPTION

4 Shopping and the Social Self

THE ECOLOGY OF TASTE

CHOICE AND BEING

5 Gender, Class and the Internationalization of Consumption

INTRODUCTION

THE SETTING

THE PHENOMENOLOGY OF SHOPPING

THE INTERNATIONALIZING OF CONSUMPTION AND THE REINFORCEMENT OF JAPANESE IDENTITY

GLASS, CONSUMPTION AND GENDER

6 Consuming Bodies: Media and the Construction and Representation of the Body

INTRODUCTION

READING JAPANESE MAGAZINES

READING THE IMAGES

JAPANESE BODIES/CULTURAL THEORY

JAPAN, CONSUMPTION AND THEORIES OF BODY

THE BODY? MEDIA AND CONSUMPTION

TOWARDS A CONCLUSION

7 Sites and Sights: The Consuming Eye and the Arts. of the Imagination in Japanese Tourism

TOURISM AND EXPERIENCE

THE CULTURE OF JAPANESE TOURISM

8 Theorizing Consumption in Urban Japan

IDENTITY, MODERNITY, CONSUMPTION

COMMODITY, AESTHETICS AND EVERYDAY LIFE

THE COMMODITY AND THE GIFT CULTURE

References

Index

Studies in Urban and Social Change

Published by Blackwell in association with the International Journal of Urban and Regional Research. Series editors: Chris Pickvance, Margit Mayer and John Walton

Published

The City Builders

Susan S. Fainstein

Contemporary Urban Japan

A Sociology of Consumption

John Clammer

Divided Cities

Susan S. Fainstein, Ian Gordon and Michael Harloe (eds)

Fragmented Societies

Enzo Mingione

Free Markets and Food Riots

John Walton and David Seddon

The Resources of Poverty

Mercedes González de la Rocha

Post-Fordism

Ash Amin (ed.)

The People’s Home?

Social Rented Housing in Europe and America

Michael Harloe

Cities after Socialism

Urban and Regional Change and Conflict in Post-Socialist Societies

Gregory Andrusz, Michael Harloe and Ivan Szelenyi (eds)

Urban Poverty and the Underclass: A Reader

Enzo Mingione

Capital Culture

Gender at Work in the City

Linda McDowell

Forthcoming

Urban Social Movements and the State

Margit Mayer

The Social Control of Cities

Sophie Body-Gendrot

Copyright ©John Clammer 1997

The right of John Clammer to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

First published 1997

Blackwell Publishers Ltd

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Oxford OX4 1JF

UK

Blackwell Publishers Inc.

350 Main Street

Maiden, Massachusetts 02148

USA

All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purposes of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.

Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher's prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

British Library Catloguing in Publication Data

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data

Clammer, J. R.

Contemporary urban Japan: a sociology of consumption/John Clammer

p. cm. — (Studies in urban and social change)

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 0-631-20301-X. — ISBN 0-631-20302-8

1. Sociology, Urbane-Japan. 2. City and Town life—Japan. 3. Consumption (Economics)—Social aspects—Japan, 4. Consumer behavioi—Japan. I. Title. II. Series.

HT147J3C63 1997

307.76'0952—dc21

97–12661

CIP

Typeset in 10½ on 12 pt Baskerville

by Ace Filmsetting Ltd, Frome, Somerset

‘Modern Japan is surely now the heartland of contemporary consumption, and John Clammer’s book represents a long-overdue analysis of its significant features. Rich in illustrative detail and theoretically sophisticated, this is a thoroughly engrossing work which at its core contains a compelling and original thesis. It deserves to be read not only by those with an interest in Japanese society and culture but by anyone wanting to see a glimpse into the form a possible future Western consumer society may take.’

Martyn Lee, Coventry University

Preface

In the past three decades there have been dramatic changes in the fortunes of cities and regions, in beliefs about the role of markets and states in society, and in the theories used by social scientists to account for these changes. Many of the cities experiencing crisis in the 1970s have undergone revitalization, while others have continued to decline. In Europe and North America new policies have introduced privatization on a broad scale at the expense of collective consumption, and the viability of the welfare state has been challenged. Eastern Europe has witnessed the collapse of state socialism and the uneven implementation of a globally driven market economy. Meanwhile the less developed nations have suffered punishing austerity programmes that divide a few newly industrializing countries from a great many cases of arrested and negative growth.

Social science theories have struggled to encompass these changes. The earlier social organizational and ecological paradigms were criticized by Marxian and Weberian theories, and these in turn have been disputed as all-embracing narratives. The certainties of the past, such as class theory, are gone and the future of urban and regional studies appears relatively open.

The aim of the series Studies in Urban and Social Change is to take forward this agenda of issues and theoretical debates. The series is committed to a number of aims but will not prejudge the development of the field. It encourages theoretical works and research monographs on cities and regions. It explores the spatial dimension of society, including the role of agency and of institutional contexts in shaping urban form. It addresses economic and political change from the household to the state. Cities and regions are understood within an international system, the features of which are revealed in comparative and historical analyses.

The series also serves the interests of university classroom and professional readers. It publishes topical accounts of important policy issues (e.g. global adjustment), reviews of debates (e.g. post-Fordism), and collections that explore various facets of major changes (e.g. cities after socialism or the new urban underclass). It urges a synthesis of research and theory, teaching and practice. Engaging research monographs (e.g. on women and poverty in Mexico or urban culture in Japan) provide vivid teaching materials just as policy-orientated studies (e.g. of social housing or urban planning) test and redirect theory. The city is analysed from the top down (e.g. through the gendered culture of investment banks) and the bottom up (e.g. in challenging social movements). Taken together, the volumes in the series reflect the latest developments in urban and regional studies.

Subjects which fall within the scope of the series include: explanations for the rise and fall of cities and regions; economic restructuring and its spatial, class and gender impact; race and identity; convergence and divergence of the East and West in social and institutional paterns; new divisions of labour and forms of social exclusion; urban and environmental movements; international migration and capital flows; politics of the urban poor in developing countries; cross-national comparisons or housing, planning and development; and debates on post-Fordism, the consumption sector and the ‘new’ urban poverty.

Studies in Urban and Social Change addresses an international and interdisciplinary audience of researchers, practitioners, students and urban enthusiasts. Above all, it endeavours to reach the public with compelling accounts of contemporary society.

Editorial Committee John Walton, Chair

Acknowledgements

As in any study of this kind, numerous individuals have contributed to the formulation of ideas and their expression. Help in the first category has come from Rob Shields, who prompted me to write a first version of Chapter 4, which appeared in a collection edited by himself (Lifestyle Shopping: The Subject of Consumption, Roudedge, 1992). I was aided by Lise Skov and Brian Moeran through their invitation to participate in the workshop on Women, Media and Consumption in Japan held at the Department of Japanese Studies at the University of Hong Kong and for their detailed editorial comments on my paper for that conference, a very much shorter version of which appeared in the proceedings (Curzon 1995) and which has been gready expanded to comprise Chapter 6 of the present volume. Chapter 5 also began as a conference paper, at the Japan Anthropology Workshop session at the European Association of Japanese Studies conference at Copenhagen in 1994, and has benefited from the feedback of participants.

In the second category I would especially like to mention Hirose Takashi, who took on the burden of typing much of the manuscript and who has been a constant stimulus and friendly critic throughout the period of writing and revising, and also Ozawa Chikako, for her help with numerous details, assistance with word processing and unfailing support. Special thanks too must go to the Department of Sociology and the Contemporary Japan Centre at the University of Essex, where from April to September 1996 I was a visiting fellow in an environment that gave me both the leisure and the stimulation to complete the writing of the manuscript. Particular thanks at Essex to Tony Woodiwiss for his personal and institutional support and to Tanaka Hiroko for her friendship and advice.

1

Approaching Japan through the Study of Consumption

The study of consumption has recently emerged as a central concern in the sociology of culture. Rescued from its domination by marketing specialists, consumption has come to be recognized as an essential part of a constellation which links interest in the body, the nature of selfhood and the emergence of late (or postmodern society to older concerns with material culture, the organization of the everyday life world, the presentation of the self and the micro-economics of households, whether comprised of families or of individuals. These issues are in turn located within the broader context of macro-social change, including urbanization, globalization and shifts in the economies of both developed and developing societies. The fact that such major contemporary social theorists as Jean Baudrillard have placed the analysis of consumption at the heart of their total theoretical projects (e.g. Baudrillard 1970) should alert us to the potential centrality of consumption behaviour in the organization of everyday life in the contemporary world. But despite the growing recognition of the significance of consumption for anthropological and sociological analysis, few attempts have been made to explore in any detail the ethnography of consumer behaviour in non-Western societies, to link such a sociology of consumption to wider social, economic and political changes in such societies or to consider critically the relevance of theories of consumption in such contexts.

Of all the cases that might present themselves as candidates for such comparative analysis, Japan is certainly one of the most prominent. The first non-Western society to achieve industrialization under its own steam and without ever experiencing colonization, Japan is now the world’s second biggest economy and one of its most populous states. Famous for its achievement of a highly efficient export-oriented capitalist industrial system and the creation of a mass consumer society at home characterized by its scale and intensity, and equally for the quality of its products and services, Japan cries out for analysis as the most conspicuous example of mass consumption in Asia. While a number of other Far Eastern societies share some of these characteristics – Hong Kong, for example, Singapore certainly and to an ever-increasing extent the urban sectors of Taiwan, Malaysia and Thailand – Japan stands out for two reasons. The first of these is the sheer scale of mass consumption: a large population (123 million), heavily concentrated in large cities, apparently committed to consumption as a way of life, which is reinforced by media saturation and an intensity of advertising and information without equal in Asia (or possibly in the West, for that matter).