Empire of Things

by Frank Trentmann

  Saving was not genetic – the savings rate had been low in the 1920s – but the product of history and policy.19 In the space of twenty years (1955–75), the household savings rate rocketed from 11 per cent to 23 per cent. In part, Japanese families were saving more because their incomes were growing faster than they could spend them; in part, because the war had destroyed homes and assets and they had to save up from scratch. But they were also subject to considerable moral pressure by the government in collaboration with business, media and civic groups. A Central Council for Savings Promotion started work in 1952, funded by the Bank of Japan. People had barely emerged from the rubble of war when they were warned against ‘excesses of consumption’. Children’s banks were set up, and women ran model savings groups in their neighbourhoods, subsidized by the state. Before the war, the ‘life improvement’ campaign had focused on eradicating old customs. After the war, that energy was directed towards promoting Japanese products.

  In Western Europe, the eighteenth century had normalized ‘luxury’. By stressing the ‘innocent’ and ‘modest’ nature of comforts and conveniences, it took the sting out of moral critiques of excess. In post-war Japan, denunciations of ‘luxury’ returned with a vengeance but at the same time there were national campaigns to promote the latest comforts and technologies. In the 1960s, while Japan still suffered from trade deficits, foreign products were the subject of anti-luxury campaigns. For late modernizers, nationalism offered a moral script that would have far greater consequences than for earlier consumer-patriots such as the American revolutionaries of the 1760s–’70s. Buying national had the full backing of the state. From 1958, the Japan Consumers Association set out to promote ‘virtuous consumption’ (shōhi wa bitoku), which meant buying a Japanese TV. Tellingly, the association was the child of the Japan Productivity Centre and MITI (Ministry of International Trade and Industry). Its raison d’être was to encourage demand. Similar campaigns followed in South Korea, which inherited Japan’s institutions, and also managed to double its savings rate in the 1970s–’80s. Here, the crusade for a ‘wholesome consumer lifestyle’ received an additional boost from Korean Presbyterians troubled by materialist excess and moral corruption.

  Savings and national product campaigns were not a uniquely Asian phenomenon, of course. Nor was the exhortation for the consumer to be a patriotic shopper. In Germany and Austria, the consumer was mobilized during the First World War to save vital resources. From Egypt to China, nationalist protesters had burnt the clothes of their imperial masters in the inter-war years. It was the scale that was new in Japan and Korea. They were the first to turn saving and consumption into a sustained strategy of state-led development in peacetime. In Europe, significantly, it was late modernizers such as Finland, which followed a similar path in the 1960s, using ‘target’ saving to tap wages and direct discretionary spending into TVs and washing machines.20

  Saving and consumption were nationalist pistons of growth, channelling precious capital from private households to Japanese firms. By 1960, every other Japanese home owned a TV and a washing machine. Most of them were bought on instalment. Domestic consumer demand was far more significant for Japan’s growth than is sometimes realized in models of export-driven development; exports contributed only 11 per cent to Japan’s GDP, half the figure in Western Europe during its miracle years.

  Generating such demand for consumer goods was not easy. In 1955, a television cost ¥140,000, almost as much as a modest house in one of the big cities. War and poverty had scarred the country, and most Japanese suffered from poor nutrition and bad housing. Yet, five years later, almost every second Japanese household had its own TV. The speed of adoption was the result of push and pull factors. Families had more money to spend, as incomes rose and taxes fell. Equally important was the idea of a ‘bright life’ (akurai seikatsu). The big manufacturers worked hand in glove with electricity companies to show how electric goods were the ‘Key to Happiness’, as one series of exhibitions was called in 1960. Buying consumer durables, they explained, was rational and saved families money and time. A housewife washing her laundry in a wooden tub consumed one third more calories than did her neighbour with an electric machine. Any saving was illusory, since she needed to spend more on food, adverts explained. Giving wives greater leisure time was, moreover, a mark of civilization. In these years, advertising budgets rose fifteen-fold. Matsushita Electric spent a whopping 9 per cent of its sales on adverts and, like other companies, set up its own instalment loan subsidiary. In 1960, it was routine for a family to devote 10 per cent of its budget to repaying such loans.

  These corporate persuaders would have been far less successful without two influential supporters: women’s groups and sumo wrestlers. Local demonstrations of white goods – sometimes accompanied by free hand-outs of light bulbs and smaller articles – were often conducted under the auspices of women’s organizations. During and after the war they had been leading the fight against inflation and black markets. Now they helped to normalize consumption as the enemy of waste. Electric rice cookers were justified as functional rather than frivolous. For the TV set, it was love of sport that clinched the deal. Wrestling attracted huge crowds to public screens and travelling TV-cinemas. In the 1957 film Ohayo (Good Morning), two boys from a lower-middle-class family go on a silent strike to force their parents to buy a set so they can watch sumo wrestling. In real families, the entertainment of some was funded by the thrift of others. As with the nation, so with families: purchases were aided by a culture of caring, filial duty and sacrifice. Rather than spending it on herself, Hanada Mitsue put aside some of her modest salary, month after month, so that her ailing father could watch his beloved sumo on a discounted TV set: ‘I felt it would be such a pleasure for him to watch it at home.’21

  Among the new technologies, television was the most revolutionary because it transmitted ideas of a new lifestyle to communities separated by distance and custom. This much is obvious. The rapid penetration of rural life by consumer culture is unthinkable without the box. What has been far less appreciated is the role of the state in making rural communities more receptive to consumer culture in the first place. In short, we need to acknowledge the state (as well as the market) as an architect of the contemporary world of goods. This is true for India as well as China under and immediately after Mao, albeit in different ways and sometimes with unintended consequences.

  In the Indian countryside, goods were carried by three waves: family planning, the green revolution and electrification. Kerala in the south of India is well known today as a model of high literacy and social equality. Basic needs, however, were secured by creating new wants. The small family unit was integral to development and reformers appealed to parents’ material aspirations to create it, putting into practice what the Reverend Malthus had first dared to think a century and a half earlier. At local camps in the 1960s and ’70s, the Family Planning Programme dangled consumer goods in front of the rural poor to show what responsible parenting held in store for them. They handed out free wristwatches, radios and stainless-steel pots. In a prize-winning essay, a woman described ‘The Family I Dream of’ through its possessions: a radio, an electric fan and iron, a pressure cooker and a dressing table. What had been luxuries of the few would be within the reach of the many, with the help of self-restraint and sterilization.22 Ironically, it was often the extended family that delivered fridges and cars to the lucky few, brought back by ‘Gulf workers’ on their visits home.23 A small family was good; a big family with a cousin in Kuwait even better.

  Consumer goods had been sold in the Indian countryside since the late nineteenth century. By the 1950s, rich farmers earned enough to spend almost 40 per cent of their income on clothes, furniture, festivities, entertainment and other items not related to food and housing. But these were concentrated in the north, and even here most peasants ate cereals and little else. In poorer Orissa and West Bengal, the current of goods dwindled to a trickle. Most Indians lived on the edge
of starvation, their lives untouched by consumer culture. In 1959, half of rural India survived on the cereals they had grown themselves, although in the big cities only 2 per cent of food was home-grown.24 The droughts of 1965 and 1966 took a terrible toll.

  It was the ‘green revolution’, from the late 1960s, which freed India from dependence on food aid and opened the floodgates to new tastes, habits and lifestyles. State assistance – in the form of price supports, tariffs and high-yielding seed varieties from Mexico – swelled the ranks of peasant consumers; in the course of the 1970s and ’80s, the poverty share dropped from over 60 per cent to below 40 per cent.25 In a predominantly rural society, this state-led development was arguably as crucial to the breakthrough of consumption as the liberal reforms after 1991. Self-sufficient peasants turned into aspiring consumers. They began to buy cooking oil, tea and sugar, drink more milk and eat more meat, put on ready-made clothes and wash their hair with shampoo, sold in little sachets for Rs1. Already in 1989, on the eve of the liberal reform era, people in the countryside bought over 70 per cent of the radios, bicycles, shoes and wristwatches sold in India. Every second tape recorder, ceiling fan, package of biscuits and bar of soap was sold to a rural family.26

  The Indian village was changing. The overall number of possessions, however, remained modest. Most families had only two or three basic products, such as a radio, a fan and a watch, not more – but the upward trend was unmistakable. More open markets after 1991 accelerated it. Greater urban demand translated in the countryside into more sales, more investment and more spending power. By 2001, for example, in Datia, a district in Madhya Pradesh in central India, 35 per cent of households owned a TV, 20 per cent a radio, 10 per cent a car, another 10 per cent a scooter. At the same time as consumer goods were narrowing the gap between city and country, they sharpened the visible divide between the haves and the have-nots in rural society. Half the households in rural Datia owned neither a radio nor a TV, let alone a motor vehicle.27 In the Indian village, two nations now lived side by side.

  The rural consumer revolution had two allies: banks and electricity. Indeed, it was the uneven expansion of these two which in no small part explains the uneven advance of goods. We noted earlier that easy credit stimulated conspicuous consumption in the Punjab a century ago. The recent expansion of the banking network in South Asia has multiplied these effects. In India alone, almost 300,000 branches of postal, co-operative and rural commercial banks opened their doors in the 1980s–’90s. Those with land and assets were able to take out credit more cheaply. For the many without, the ‘tyranny of the collateral’ meant they continued to live from hand to mouth, in a daily struggle for cash, at the mercy of loan sharks, without access to either savings or loans to buy big ticket items.28

  The electric charge has been no less powerful. In less than a decade (1998–2006), the number of Indian homes with electricity went up by a half, to 120 million. In 2005, households overtook industry as the biggest consumer of electricity. Much of this is urban air-conditioners and fridges. A family in West Bengal uses only a quarter of the electricity of a family in Delhi. Many villages in the south are still waiting for the current to arrive. That Indian states count villages as electrified once 10 per cent of homes are connected speaks volumes.29 These qualifications notwithstanding, the effects of electrification on rural life have been enormous. They are illuminated by developments in Bangladesh.30 Between 1978 and 2001, the number of rural homes with electricity has increased by more than a thousand times, the combined effort of local co-operatives and international development aid. The initial rationale was to help farmers run irrigation pumps. The repercussions for domestic life turned out to be as profound. Once connected, rural households took on urban habits. They saved more than their neighbours, invested more in the education of their children and bought more consumer goods. Electric lights and fans meant that families spent more time together in the home, able to study and work after sunset, and to relax. TVs and cassette players entertained and at the same time whetted a curiosity for the world outside. They spread ideas of modern life and personal hygiene which showed in the growing use of soap and sanitary latrines. Rural shops with electricity started to install fridges and carry a greater assortment of goods, in turn raising expectations of variety and choice. None of this was new in principle. Manufacturers and energy companies had long advertised electricity’s civilizing force in the United States, Japan and Europe. Electricity was integral to ‘life improvement’, as the Japanese called it. But these were societies that prided themselves on leading the race to modernity. It was news in a poor country that modern history had seemingly forgotten. Development aid and televisions arrived together, as international agencies picked up the baton in the race to modernize the home.

  If anything, progress in the countryside was even more spectacular in China after Mao. Between 1979 – when peasants were once again allowed to sell in the market – and 1984 the rural poor shrank by half. Consumption doubled.31 Rural demand and private entrepreneurship drove the first phase of China’s consumer revolution. It was only in the 1990s that the state seized control of growth, prioritized urbanization and cut welfare – breaking the ‘iron rice bowl’ and a life of guaranteed security. Under Mao, aspirations had centred on the ‘four musts’: a bicycle, a radio, a watch and a sewing machine. Under Deng Xiaoping, after 1979, they were superseded by the ‘eight BIGS’: a colour TV, a fridge, a hi-fi, a camera, a motorbike, an electric fan, a washing machine and furniture. Most rural households managed at least five or six, notwithstanding the shift to urban growth and the rise in inequality since the 1990s. By 2007, 94 per cent of rural households had a colour TV, half had a motorbike and a washing machine and a fifth owned a fridge.32

  Rising disposable income made these purchases possible, but where did the desire come from? Behind these purchases lies a longer history of rising aspirations and private materialism. In 1936, Hsiao-Tung Fei observed country life in the Yangzi Valley and was struck by the pervasive ‘cultural control on consumption’:

  To be content with simple living is a part of early education. Extravagance is prevented by sanctions. A child making preferences in food or clothes will be scorned and beaten . . . If a mother lets her child develop special tastes in food, she will be criticized as indulging her child. Even rich parents will not put good and costly clothes on their children, for doing so would induce the evil spirits to make trouble.33

  Except for weddings and other ceremonies, thrift ruled. ‘Throwing away anything which has not been properly used will offend heaven, whose representative is the kitchen god . . . Clothes are used by generations, until they are worn out.’ Consumption was a matter for the extended family (jia), not the individual. It was a world apart from today’s ‘little emperors’, spoilt with toys, cash and Western fast food. Yet change was already on the horizon. Olga Lang sensed the first stirrings in the 1940s. The admonition not to spoil a child was still strong, as was severe punishment until the age of fifteen. But there were also signs that children were becoming less obedient and developing a sense of rights as well as duties. ‘Many working boys and girls,’ she noted, ‘are beginning to regard their earnings as their own and not as the property of their families.’ The change was especially noticeable among students. Yes, they all wanted to advance peace and happiness and make ‘great contributions to society and the nation’, but many now combined these altruistic goals with a desire for ‘comfort in my own clothing, food and housing’.34 The crucial words were ‘my own’.

  Ironically, Mao was the handmaiden of consumerism. In hard numbers, of course, Mao’s policies were the exact opposite. In the 1960s and ’70s, the earnings from growth were poured into investment, not consumption. The Mao suit and plain living were de rigueur. At the same time, Mao struck at the family as an outdated feudal institution. Women and youth were mobilized against their elders and given a whole new sense of self. The aim was to transfer their allegiance from their husbands and fathers to the coll
ective. When the collectives started to break up in the 1970s, however, it left behind a generation with a radical sense of individual autonomy. Mao thus accomplished a cultural revolution, though not the one he had intended. If saving was state directed in Japan, so was individualization in China.

  Yunxiang Yan, a farmer turned anthropologist who now teaches at the University of California in Los Angeles, lived in Xiajia village in Heilongjiang province in China’s north-east in the 1970s and has returned many times since. Under Mao, sociability and entertainment were collective. During the collective era (1956–80), villages and towns had brigades with their own performance troupes, dance parades, basketball tournaments and radio broadcasts; performers were paid by the collectives. At the same time, the revolution fostered a culture of private intimacy. Marriage ceased to be about what parents dictated and became instead about two people in love. Romance and courtship were on the rise in the 1950s–’60s, premarital sex normal by the 1970s. While formally arranged marriages continued, now the couple had often picked each other before getting their families involved. As, over the course of life, a major portion of consumption is concentrated in the wedding through bridewealth, gifts and ceremonies, the romantic revolution had major repercussions for consumer culture. Young women suddenly acquired a voice and choice. Paternalism gave way to individualism. Instead of having presents arranged by and for their parents, by the early 1970s couples were writing their own gift lists. For brides and grooms, the shopping trip to the provincial capital Harbin became a ritual where they bought their wedding clothes and personal items, sat for professional engagement photos and enjoyed a couple of nights alone in a hotel.