New Book Announcement from Cornell University Press



Waste

Consuming Postwar Japan

by Eiko Maruko Siniawer (https://history.williams.edu/profile/emaruko/)


Publication Date: October, 15, 2018 by Cornell University Press



See: http://www.cornellpress.cornell.edu/book/?GCOI=80140106932030


<http://www.cornellpress.cornell.edu/book/?GCOI=80140106932030>

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.



Advance Praise:

"Waste is an original, brilliantly conceived analysis of the protean forms and formations of waste in Japan--from the aftermath of WWII to today. Ranging across a multiplicity of genres, Eiko Maruko Siniawer insightfully demonstrates how waste's many meanings constituted a potent signifier for the society's ambivalence about scarcity and prosperity, frugality and affluence, wealth and well-being."


- William W. Kelly, Professor of Anthropology and Sumitomo Professor of Japanese Studies, Yale University, and author of The Sportsworld of the Hanshin Tigers


"Siniawer's Waste explores the cultural and social meanings of waste in post-WWII Japanese society. This is a ground-breaking social history of the essential but often overlooked aspects of modern middle-class living."


- Yoshikuni Igarashi, Professor of History, Vanderbilt University, and author of Homecomings: The Belated Return of Japan's Lost Soldiers


Save 30% off the book with the promotion code 09ANNOUNCE.


For further information, please contact Jonathan Hall at jlh98@cornell.edu <mailto:jlh98@cornell.edu>


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