Introduction: Japan’s Consumption History in Comparative Perspective

Over recent decades, we have become ever more familiar with consumer goods that originate in Japan, while the Japanese consumer, dressed in the latest fashion, exercising gourmet taste in food and drink and weighed down by the latest gadgets, has become an accepted part of the image Japan conveys at home and abroad. On the other hand, we are also well aware that Japanese households have demonstrated a phenomenal capacity to save and have appeared reluctant to spend their way out of the recent economic stagnation, suggesting an approach to consumption perhaps different from that typically associated with the spendthrift West. Nonetheless, we are far from familiar with the history that might help to explain the often distinctive features of Japan’s consumption practice. While historians of Europe and North America have been busily discovering the long development path of the consumer, the consumption history of countries beyond the heartlands of Western capitalist industrialisation, such as Japan, has rarely been explored. Indeed, scholars such as Stearns (2001) seem to suggest that these regions have little consumption history of their own.