The Asia-Pacific Journal | Japan Focus Volume 9 | Issue 50 | Number 1 | Dec 11, 2011

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Postwar Japan's National Salvation　　戦後日本の国家救済手段

Sheldon Garon

Postwar Japan's National Salvation

Sheldon Garon

The following is a chapter from my new book,Beyond Our Means: Why America Spends Whilethe World Saves. Beyond Our Means tells theglobal story of how many states and societieshave actively encouraged household savingfrom roughly 1800 to the present. To do so,they established an array of institutions aimedat attracting “small savers.” These includedsavings banks, postal savings systems, schoolsavings programs, and wartime and postwarsavings campaigns. Although four of thechapters present the history of Japanesesavings-promotion, the book also describes thedevelopment of similar efforts to encouragesaving in Europe, the United States, and otherAsian nations. This is not simply a comparativehistory, but emphatically a transnationalhistory. Japanese, Koreans, Chinese, andGermans love to talk about thrift as a part oftheir distinctive “culture,” yet nations do notsave simply because of indigenous traditions. The similarities in savings institutions andcampaigns across the globe are far fromcoincidental. They resulted in large part fromtransnational or international exchanges ofknowledge. The postal savings bank, forexample, was not a peculiarly Japaneseinstitution, but originated in mid-nineteenth-century Europe. In turn, the emergingJapanese model of savings-led developmentprofoundly influenced rising economies in Eastand Southeast Asia, including China. Ratherthan offering disparate case studies, the bookinterweaves the history of savings promotionon three continents.

As the subtitle suggests, Beyond Our Meansalso spotlights the historical developments thatculminated in America’s current predicament. In the wake of the 2008 housing and financialmeltdown, it has become painfully clear thatAmericans have saved too little, spent toomuch, and borrowed excessively. In their highsaving rates and modest consumption, EastAsians and continental Europeans resembleeach other, whereas the United States standsout as exceptional. The book reveals howhistorically the U.S. government did much lessto promote small saving, and after World War

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II—and especially since the 1980s—encouragedconsumer spending and borrowing as thedrivers of economic growth.

In wartime, we promoted savingwith the slogans, “Wage War untilWe Win” and “All for Victory.” Butin the coming savings campaign,“Economic Recovery” and “Revivalo f t h e R e a l m ” w i l l b e o u rwatchwords as we remindeveryone, too, of the importance ofsaving to the savers themselves.

—Ministry of Finance, secretmemo, 19461

Japan waged one of history’s most total wars.Its defeat in August 1945 was no less total.Some sixty-six cities lay in ruins, the targets ofwave upon wave of B-29 bombers. This proudnation—which had so successfully maintainedits independence against nineteenth-centuryWestern imperialism—suffered immediate military occupation by the Allied forces. Overthe next six and a half years the Japanesegovernment took orders from the SupremeCommander of the Allied Powers (SCAP) in theperson of General Douglas MacArthur andbriefly General Matthew Ridgeway. Though nominally an Allied operation, the Americansdominated the occupation from start to finish.For a great many Japanese, the stunning defeatgave rise to profound disillusionment with theelites who had led the nation into ruinous war.An assertive labor movement organized morethan half of the industrial workforce, andCommunist and Socialist parties threatened thehold of the conservative establishment.2

This would seem an inauspicious time for thegovernment to call upon the people to makefurther sacrifices. Committed to democratizingJapan, the American occupiers sharplycriticized the “virtually compulsory” features ofthe wartime savings campaigns.3 Nor was the

populace capable of saving much. Rampantinflation eviscerated the savings so dutifully putaside in wartime. Families withdrew remainingfunds to buy food at exorbitant prices on theblack market. Japanese uncharacteristicallyengaged in dissaving. Household saving ratesplunged into negative territory. Depositors inthe supposedly state-guaranteed postal savingssystem suffered additional losses. Bombing andfires destroyed the records of nearly fifty-twomillion accounts held in postal facilities. Formany depositors it took years to restore theiroriginal accounts (only 62 percent of which hadbeen successfully reclaimed by the end of1957). Moreover, the Ministry of Finance’sDeposit Bureau had invested a large chunk ofthe people’s savings in Japan’s colonies andoccupied territories. We speak today aboutAmerican banks holding “toxic assets.” Imaginewhat happens when your bank—the postalsavings system—makes huge loans throughoutthe empire, and then the empire itselfdisappears following Japanese surrender in1945? More than ¥6 billion in overseasinvestments vaporized, and postal depositorswere compelled to indemnify the state for aportion of the losses. If that were not enough toblast public trust in financial institutions, thegovernment partially froze all other savingsdeposits in March 1946 in an effort to reducethe money supply and convert Bank of Japannotes into “new yen.”4

Saving Japan

Under the circumstances, we would hardlyexpect a defeated and occupied nation to revivethe punishing savings campaigns of wartime.Yet that was precisely the course taken by thegovernment of the New Japan, as it wasrebranded once again. In November 1946 theBank of Japan and Ministry of Financelaunched the first of nine National SalvationSavings Campaigns. They ran until the end of1949.5 Not even in war had officials soexplicitly linked saving to “national salvation.”By this they meant the survival of Japan as an

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independent, significant nation. Economicbureaucrats conducted the postwar campaignswith the remarkable self-confidence that thegrand campaigns of yesteryear could berevived with little popular resistance, and muchcooperation. In a 1947 radio address, FinanceMinister Yano Shōtarō urged the nation to“reduce your daily living standards as much as you can, economize, and above all save yourunspent money.” No detail escaped theminister, as he implored people to use fewertissues when blowing their noses.6

The National Salvation Savings Campaignsaimed to restore the discipline of the bunker,albeit for peaceful ends. The succeedingfinance minister, Kurusu Takeo, pined for thegood old days when everyone recognizedluxury as the enemy. The wartime savingsdrives had after all imposed “healthydiscipline” on consumers, helped financenational debt, and subdued inflationarypressures. Given the needs of postwareconomic recovery, “the importance ofaccumulating capital has not in the leastchanged from wartime to the present.” YetJapanese consumers were proving lesscooperative, the finance minister complained.Following the war, the people experienced“psychological liberation” from pressures tosave, and their “sense of thrift hit rock bot-tom.” Worse, “their desire to consume, whichhad been suppressed during the war, burstforth and added fuel to the fire of inflation.”7

This was an extraordinary statement,considering how many Japanese at the timewere struggling to survive.

Ministry of Finance officials grudged they couldno longer compel people to save, nor wouldwartime appeals still persuade. However,rather than alter the campaign machineryfundamentally, they opted for new slogans. Aspart of the makeover, the ministry pledged thatthe National Salvation Savings Campaignwould be a “truly democratic people’scampaign.” Not that the bureaucrats had

suddenly embraced popular initiative. Ademocratic people’s campaign would be onewhere the state made the “people understandthe absolute necessity of saving for the revivalof the realm and building the economy of theNew Japan.”8

Officials relentlessly communicated how smallsavings would fuel economic growth based onexports. No one did this as poignantly as ViceMinister of Finance Ikeda Hayato in a savings-promotion speech to the citizens of Hiroshimain 1947. A native of that unfortunate city, Ikedaalluded to the recent atomic bombing andpraised residents for extraordinary efforts atrebuilding. Yet without wasting more words onthe human toll, he explained that recoverywould come about only if every Japaneseengaged in “diligence and vigorous efforts” andsubmitted to “lives of austerity.” The key toachieving a higher standard of living in thefu ture l ay in increas ing expor t s o fmanufactured goods. To spur exports, Ikedaelaborated, people must save all of theirunspent income, which the government andbanks would then invest in industry. Standingin Hiroshima, a city that had endured morethan its share of suffering from the last bout ofmobilization, the vice minister veered towardthe melodramatic. Only by continued austerity,he warned, “will our country exist in thefuture.”9 Ikeda has gone down in history for hislater role as the prime minister whose IncomeDoubling Plan of 1960 would stimulatehousehold spending. But back in 1947, he wasno champion of consumption as the engine ofJapanese recovery.

For that matter, neither were the Americans.Although officials of the Occupation (or SCAP)disliked the undemocratic aspects of Japanesesavings campaigns, they supported theNational Salvation campaigns with surprisingenthusiasm. One SCAP staffer reported on thedrive’s “marked degree of success” inincreasing savings to check inflation andprovide the vitally needed credit for the

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rehabilitation and expansion of the Japaneseeconomy. It was “a most commendableprogram in all its aspects deserving the fullsupport of the Japanese people.”10 Indeed, theAmericans rarely missed the opportunity totout the importance of saving over consumptionfor postwar Japan. This is ironic, for SCAP didits utmost to convey images of U.S. abundanceto the Japanese people. In 1947 Japanesenational radio began broadcasting “News fromAmerica” (Amerika tayori) showcasingAmerican affluence and homes filled withelectrical appliances. Millions of Japanesefurther learned of American consumer life fromthe comic strip Blondie, introduced by the dailyAsahi shinbun in 1949.11

Yet the Americans were more intent ondemonstrating the occupiers’ unsurpassedpower and wealth than on exporting theirmodel of mass consumption to East Asia. TheJapanese themselves were in no position toembrace the model. The gulf between postwarJapan and the United States was enormous.Not until 1952 would Japan’s per capita levelsof consumption recover to the prewar high of1934–36. In 1946 food accounted for fully 68percent of household expenditure, andhouseholds still devoted 49 percent of theirconsumption to food as late as 1955. FewJapanese could afford the vacuum cleaners ortoasters depicted in Blondie—much less manyof the basic necessities. Prior to 1950 theybought so little cloth and clothing that thenation’s once vital textile industry came to avirtual halt.12

Far from encouraging domestic spending,Washington expected Japanese to pullthemselves up by the bootstraps—that is, bysaving and sacrifice. Americans commonlyoverestimate our generosity toward occupiedJapan. In 2003 during the early months of theU.S.-led occupation of Iraq, Senator LamarAlexander (R-Tenn.) remarked: “After WorldWar II we built schools and roads and hospitalsin Japan and in Germany when we did not have

those things in Tennessee.”13 Stirring words,but not exactly true. In Western Europe, yes,the United States financed the Marshall Plan inthe late 1940s and 1950s. The plan aimed inpart to create mass consumer markets basedon the postwar American formula ofconsumer-driven growth.14 However muchAmericans would like to believe otherwise, the United States never offered the MarshallPlan to Japan. Washington pushed the Japaneseto tighten their belts not only to financerecovery and fight inflation, but also to paythe huge costs of housing and supplyingoccupation forces. Although the Americansprovided emergency food relief, U.S. aidtotaled less than half of what the Japanesegovernment was compelled to pay to maintainthe occupation.15 The Japanese people,according to Under Secretary of the ArmyWilliam Draper in 1948, “will have to work hardand long, with comparatively little recompensefor many years to come.” Joseph Dodge, thebanker whose U.S. mission in 1949 forced theadoption of harsh austerity measures, calledupon the Japanese government to hold the standard of living to levels prevailing beforethe early 1930s.16 The American taxpayer,Dodge insisted, would not maintain theJapanese people; they must themselves“accumulate capital by producing more cheaplyand by saving and economizing.”17

Reinforcing the Japanese state’s penchant forsavings campaigns were trends in the rest ofthe postwar world. While the American modelof mass consumption struck both the occupiersand occupied as inappropriate, Japaneseofficials voraciously studied contemporaryEuropean programs that promoted saving andrestrained consumption. Japan was hardlyalone, they observed, in adopting austeritymeasures to recover from the war. Nearly allthe former belligerents were doing so, notedFinance Minister Yano in 1947. In the newFive-Year Plan, the Soviet people were“resigning themselves to austere living” andmaking “spirited efforts at recovery.” The

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French and Belgians, he rightly observed, hadmounted nationwide drives to reduce prices,and the Dutch launched a savings campaignunder the no-nonsense slogan “Work Hard,Save Much.”18 Eager to keep abreast of thelatest in global savings-promotion techniques,Japan’s postal savings bureau in 1951rejoined the International Thrift Institute,which had relocated to Amsterdam after thewar. Throughout the 1950s and early 1960s,Japanese officials regularly reported on vibrantsavings campaigns in Western Europe.19

Once again, Japanese bureaucrats expressedtheir greatest admiration for postwar Britain’sNational Savings Movement. Let us return toVice Minister Ikeda’s memorable speech inHiroshima in 1947. The British won the war, heinformed the audience, yet they “have notchosen the easy path.” In the postwar era,

they have rationed even bread,which had been freely sold inwartime. The British people ...have persevered , wear ingextremely old and shabby clothes,and eating small meals. Why mustthe victorious British maintainharsh lives of austerity? Theanswer, without a doubt, is thatthe money and material saved bylives of austerity can be applied, infull, to economic recovery.... In thenear future, free trade will be re-established in the world. These people are in a hurry to establisha favorable position that allows them to strut upon the stage ofglobal economic competition.20

Like the Japanese, the British strove to reviveexports by boosting savings while severelyconstraining domestic consumption. Japanesebureaucrats were in awe of Britain’s success insecuring the emergency loan of $3,750,000,000from the United States in 1946. The British

could borrow at this extraordinary level, judgedthe Bank of Japan, only because their citizens,“who have little to spare,” saved money while“living in destitution and austerity.”21

And like the British government, the postwarJapanese state maintained many of the wartimepolicies that encouraged saving. As before,officials announced an annual savings targetand allocated targets to each prefecture.22

another carryover was the wartime innovationof “model savings districts.” Officials workedwith civic groups and financial institutions indesignated communities with an eye towardmaking these districts exemplary cases for“those locales that save erratically and thoseclasses that lack an understanding of saving.”23

The government also retained the wartimeincentive of tax exemption on interest earnedon deposits made through the national savingsassociations.

The postwar campaigns continued to rely onthe national savings associations, thoughphrased in the oxymorons of the New Japan.Increasing savings was “not simply a matter ofvoluntary saving by the individual,” explainedthe Ministry of Finance, but “fundamentally re-quires cultivation within democratic savingsassociations based on mutual, collectiveencouragement.”24 Although Japanese could nolonger be compel led to jo in sav ingsassociations as of 1947, prefectural officialswere nonetheless ordered to organize or revivesavings associations rapidly, for the Ministry ofFinance desired “total participation by theentire nation.”25 By 1949 there were eightythousand national savings associationsenrolling ten million members.

Achieving “Economic Independence”

For three years the National Salvation SavingsCampaigns harangued the Japanese. Resultswere nonetheless mixed. In one survey taken inSeptember 1948, more than half of therespondents replied they were unable to put

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anything aside.26 Household savings ratesremained negative from 1947 to 1949, asfamilies drew down their reserves to survive.Even the Ministry of Finance acknowledgedthat the campaigns failed to enlist thecooperation of many citizens below the middleclasses.27

By other measures, however, the NationalSalvation campaigns were a success. The rapidgrowth in total savings on deposit exceeded the expectations of planners. Increases in totaldeposits in fiscal 1948 and the first half of 1949ran at roughly four times what they had beenduring the first five months of the campaign.Japanese managed to increase savings at a timewhen most were still struggling to make endsmeet. Economizing in everyday life played acrucial role in checking inflation, the worst ofwhich passed by the end of 1949. Domesticsavings proved crucial to financing postwarJapan’s recovery and growth, for neither theU.S. government nor private foreign investorswere inclined to extend loans at favorable ratesto their devastated former foe.28

Just as important, the campaigns did much torestore popular confidence in the nation’sfinancial institutions. In 1947 the governmentannounced an end to the freeze on depositsenabling funds to be freely withdrawn. Theauthor i t ies moreover introduced orreintroduced incentives to encourage saving.Interest rates rose steadily—for example, to 4.7percent on one-year deposits in autumn 1949.Tax exemption on interest was granted not onlyto those who made regular contractual depositsthrough the national savings associations, butalso to all postal savings depositors. To boostsavings, officials went so far as to encouragetax evasion. The saver was permitted to opentime (fixed-term) de- posits without registeringhis or her true name. This practice effectivelyexempted all time deposits from taxation. Timedeposits became wildly popular over the courseof the National Salvation Campaigns,accounting for the greatest number of new

accounts.

Although SCAP officials generally supportedthe National Salvation drives, the campaignsfaced their first American challenge inSeptember 1949. A U.S. mission headed byProfessor Carl Shoup advised the Japanesegovernment to check inflation primarily by taxcollection, rather than voluntary saving. Concerned about widespread tax evasion, theShoup report recommended abolition ofunregistered de- posits. Savings-promotionofficials look back upon this period as theirdarkest hour. U.S. pressure closed down theNational Salvation campaigns in late 1949.

In retrospect, the bureaucrats needn’t haveworried. SCAP authorities had neither theknowledge nor inclination to stamp out Japan’sinfrastructure of savings promotion. In 1950the Ministry of Finance directed that thesavings campaign continue at the local level asan “independent” movement. Within the nextfew months, according to the leading officialhistory, savings promotion committees were“autonomously” organized in nearly everyprefecture. The Ministry of Finance and Bankof Japan in fact cosponsored severalnationwide drives be- tween 1950 and early1952. These included the “Special Campaignsto Hasten Economic Independence.” Thepopulace was told to save, this time, togenerate the capital necessary for Japan totake its place as an “independent nation” oncethe occupation ended. In September 1951Japan and its former enemies concluded theSan Francisco Peace Treaty. The Allies agreedto terminate the occupation on April 1 of thefollowing year. No sooner had Japan signed thetreaty than economic bureaucrats busilyprepared to overturn what remained of theAmerican restrictions on centralized savingspromotion.29

On April 15, 1952, just days after the occupation ended, officials unveiled theCentral Council for Savings Promotion. This

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would be a permanent organization on theorder of Britain’s National Savings Committee.Although the Central Council’s name (chochikuzōkyō) was officially translated as “SavingsPromotion,” most Japanese would haverendered it as the Central Council to IncreaseSavings. According to its charter, the CentralC o u n c i l s e r v e d “ a s t h e n u c l e u s o fnongovernmental savings promotion,” workingto “enlighten public opinion on behalf ofincreasing savings.”30 Despite some changes inmission, the renamed organization is still activetoday.

Japan’s savings promoters lost no timesignaling that the Allied occupation was over.New posters resurrected the nationalistsymbols of the prewar savings campaigns.Fearing the revival of ultranationalism, SCAPcensors had banned images of Mt. Fuji in filmsand other media.31 Yet with the end of theoccupation in sight, Mt. Fuji re- appeared inpostal savings posters. Superimposed onJapan’s majestic mount was a dove with ahalo. Another previously taboo symbol, therising-sun flag, resurfaced in Central Councilposters over the next half-decade. Japanesewere now exhorted to save to build aneconomically prosperous nation, not amilitarized great power. But as before, theywere to do so for the sake of the nation. Theends had changed since wartime, while them e a n s — t h e i n t r u s i v e s a v i n g s campaigns—survived defeat and occupationwith barely a scratch.

The Central Council for Savings Promotionplunged into the work of encouraging people tosave more. The 1952 national budget forsavings promotion increased twentyfold to¥100 million. Bureaucrats did all they could toexempt interest on most savings from taxation.Reversing U.S. efforts to clamp down on taxevasion, they once again permitted savers tohold multiple time deposits without registeringtheir true names. With great fanfare the statecompletely eliminated taxation of interest on

savings deposits from 1955 to 1957. In 1963new legislation permanently exempted intereston small savings accounts of any type. Thegovernment kept raising the ceiling on savingsexempted from taxes, eventually to ¥3 millionper person in 1974.

“Your Savings Build the New Japan,” 1951. Mt. Fuji,featured in prewar and wartime propaganda, returnsin this postal savings poster as the symbol of nationalpurpose, now focused on peace and prosperity.Courtesy of the Communications Museum, Japan, XD-B42.

For all the authorities’ insistence on the“private” status of the Central Council, this wasa heavily bureaucratized venture. Councilmembers represented financial institutions,business associations, media, the academiccommunity, popular organizations, and stateagencies. Nonetheless, Bank of Japan officials

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have performed all day-to-day operations to thepresent. The civil servants coordinated a vastnetwork of prefectural savings-promotioncommittees, banks, local governments, schools,and national and grassroots groups. Armedwith substantial media budgets, they churnedout posters and banners while securing thecooperation of newspapers, magazines, andradio stations. By the mid-1960s most Japanesefamilies owned a television set. Central Councilofficials worked closely with popular weeklytelevision programs, notably Okusama nohiroba (Madame Housewife’s Forum), to raisehousewives’ consciousness of the need to savemore.32

Although officials emphasized the benefits ofsaving to families, strident appeals to economicnationalism persisted long after Japan regainedpolitical independence in 1952. Asserting thatthe Japanese economy required greateramounts of domestic capital to achieve trueindependence, campaigns still urged citizens tosave “to hasten independence.” Like Britain’sNational Savings Movement in the earlypostwar years, the Japanese governmentrelated saving to a do-or-die struggle to financeexport industries and restrain consumption ofimports. Not until the latter half of the 1960swould Japan enjoy sustained international tradesurpluses. In 1957 an acute balance ofpayments deficit prompted the state to launchsavings drives to “Promote Ex- ports andConserve Foreign Exchange.” Such campaigns,year after year, helped shape an enduringpopular consciousness of national crisis andvulnerability. As late as 1987, when U.S.leaders were vocally criticizing Japan for itsskyrocketing trade surpluses, fully 30 percentof Japanese respondents in one poll believedtheir nation still suffered trade deficits vis-à-visAmerica.33

Among the institutions mobilized to promote saving, the state continued to rely on twoprewar stalwarts to mold postwar Japan’sculture of thrift. In the aftermath of World

War II, officials reorganized school savingsprograms into “children’s banks” (kodomo noginkō). At their highpoint in the 1950s, morethan thirty thousand schools and eight millionschoolchildren participated. The CentralCouncil annually hosted ceremonies tocommend some two hundred “superiorchildren’s banks.” Social studies curricula, too,cultivated the “spirit of saving.” Millions ofJapanese children regularly deposited their yenat school over the next several decades; longafter most American schools had abandonedschool savings programs.34

Then there’s the post office. Postal savingsloomed even larger in postwar savingspromotion than before 1945. As a share ofhousehold deposits, postal savings rose steadilyin the postwar era peaking at 34 percent in1999.35 The Japanese postal savings system istoday the world’s largest financial institution.The system exploited its incomparable access to the populace. Whereas commercial bankspossessed relatively few branches concentratedin urban areas, more than fifteen thousand postoffices offered depository services throughoutthe country in the 1950s. Some twenty-fourthousand do so today. Postal savings officialswent from innovation to innovation in the questto lure customers from the banks. Improving onprewar practices, they inaugurated a highlypopular service whereby postmen collectedsavings. The postwar post office’s mostattractive financial product has been theteigaku deposit, which accounted for half ofthe total value of postal deposits by 1960 andan astounding 91 percent in 1988. These areten-year, fixed-rate time deposits that permitwithdrawal, penalty free, any time after sixmonths. At times of rising interest rates, manycustomers happily shifted funds out of teigakuaccounts into higher- yielding deposits. Mostcommercial banks could not compete, unwillingto incur the interest-rate risk inherent inteigaku deposits. Postal savings thus enjoyed asignificant interest-rate advantage over thebanks. The post office further encouraged

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saving by selling life insurance on veryfavorable terms to policyholders, waiving forinstance the requirement of thorough medicalexaminations. Postal life insurance grew toaccount for 30 percent of all life insurance by1999.

Besides convenience and higher interest, thepostal savings system marketed other sellingpoints. One was safety. All postal depositsremained government guaranteed, whereassmall savings accounts in other financialinstitutions received no such protection untilthe introduction of the Deposit InsuranceCorporation in 1971. The security of postalsavings persisted in the public imagination,particularly at times of financial volatility.Postal deposits surged during Japan’s 1990sdown- turn amid reports of weak and failingbanks. Second, postal savings receivedpreferential tax treatment. Although interest onall small savings accounts became tax exemptfrom 1963 to 1988, postal depositors benefiteddisproportionately. Few paid taxes, no matterhow large their savings. That was becausepostal employees systematically encouragedcustomers to open multiple accounts atdifferent post offices—each up to the tax-exempt limit.

The postal savings system operated more like awell-oiled political machine than a financialinstitution. Clerks tenaciously urged customersto open accounts, receiving bonuses for eachnew account. The most ardent champions ofpostal savings have been the thousands of“commissioned postmasters,” local notableswho run smaller post offices and exertconsiderable influence in their communities.When central bureaucrats revived nationwidesavings campaigns in 1952, they immediatelyorganized the commissioned postmasters into a“Promotion League” to advance the drives atthe grass roots. This was another repudiation ofthe U.S. occupiers who had previouslydissolved the old postmasters’ association as anundemocratic relic of Imperial Japan.

Recognizing the postmasters’ ability to mobilizevoters, the Liberal Democratic Party alliedclosely with the postmasters and significantlyexpanded postal savings. In power with oneshort break from 1955 to 2009, LDPgovernments created thousands of new “specialpost offices” headed by commissionedpostmasters. The postal savings lobby ralliedthe public itself. In 1970 the governmentestablished the first of several Postal SavingsHalls to promote “a better understanding ofPostal Savings” and enhance its image. Anypostal depositor might use the low- costfacilities, which included hotel rooms,swimming pools, and even wedding halls and planetariums. The Postal Savings Hallsbecame a huge hit, boasting fifty million guestsfrom 1972 to 1983 and plenty of newcheerleaders.36 Postal savings’ self-promotingefforts are only half of the story. The Japanesestate as a whole retained a direct stake inboosting postal savings because of itsimportance to public finance. The Ministry ofFinance’s Deposit Bureau had managed thevast pool of postal savings since 1885. DespiteU.S. attempts to weaken the bureaucracy’scontrol, the Ministry of Finance emerged fromthe occupation with expanded powers over theinvestment of postal savings. Postal depositsremained at the core of the ministry’s TrustFund Bureau, successor to the Deposit Bureau.Along with postal life insurance funds, theTrust Fund monies in turn flowed into the newFiscal Investment and Loan Plan established in1952.

As postal savings soared, the bureaucracyfound itself with ever- increasing amounts ofcapital that it invested without parliamentaryapproval. Often called the “second budget,”FILP funds amounted to one-third to one-half ofthe regular budget from 1953. Relying on thosefunds, the Japan Development Bank and othergovernment banks loaned large portions ofthe people’s savings to heavy and exportindustries during the 1950s and 1960s. FILP“became the single most important financial

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instrument for Japan’s economic development,”judges Chalmers Johnson.37 Since the 1970s,with Japanese industry enjoying ready access toprivate sources of capital, finance officials haveredirected FILP money increasingly to localgovernments and the improvement of livingstandards. At the end of the twentieth century,the FILP-funded Government Housing LoanCorporation provided more than one-third ofhome loans. Postal saving thus acquiredenormous legitimacy in postwar Japan. As thenation’s largest women’s federation explainedto members in 1955, “your [postal] savingsmake your fami ly , town, or v i l lage aparadise.” 3 8

Democratizing Thrift

Japanese household saving rates took off after1950, cresting to 23 percent in the mid-1970s.Only the Italians saved as much. Mosteconomists doubt that the Japanesegovernment’s savings-promotion programscontributed significantly to the high level ofsaving. Yet that may have more to do with theeconomics profession’s difficulties in measuringthe impact of moral suasion. For example,many economists used to relate Japan’s highsaving rates to firms’ routine payment ofbonuses to ordinary employees. These mighttotal 60 percent of one’s annual salary, andhouseholds commonly saved large portions ofthe semi-annual bonuses. We should not,however, ignore the role of policy andpersuasion in normalizing this practice.Beginning in the 1950s, housewives’magazines, savings-promotion officials, thepostal savings system, and commercial banksmounted public relations offensives to convincepeople to save their bonuses.39 The Japanesemight have increased saving rates even in theabsence of state promotion. The early postwardecades witnessed exceptionally rapid growth. From 1950 to 1973 the Japanese economy grewat more than 10 percent per annum. Typicallyhouseholds in fast-growing economies tend tosave at higher rates as consumption lags

behind rising incomes.40

Still, would the Japanese have saved as much?The wealth of qualitative evidence suggeststhat savings-promotion efforts reached deeplyinto society to continue shaping Japan’sculture of thrift. When they proclaimed thepostwar campaigns would be “democratic,” thebureaucrats were right about one thing. Acrossthe ideological spectrum, the cause ofincreasing savings enjoyed remarkably highlevels of support from political parties, popularorganizations, and ordinary Japanese. As incontemporary Europe, much of the Left vocallybacked the twin missions of restrainingconsumption and augmenting national savings.In October 1946 Japan’s Socialist Party joinedfour centrist and conservative parties to call upon the government to mount postwar savingscampaigns to stabilize the yen and fightinflation. Significantly, several Socialist leadershad been prewar Protestant reformers whoworked with the imperial state to inculcatehabits of thrift in the populace.41 In the postwaryears, too, the government subsidized Christianorganizations to assist in the campaigns. TheMinistry of Finance employed the famousChristian socialist reformer Kagawa Toyohikoto lecture savings- promotion officers.42

Upon becoming Japan’s first Socialist primeminister in 1947, Katayama Tetsu, anotherChristian, launched a new set of NationalSalvation Savings Campaigns. To financeexports and rebuild the national economy, theprime minister pledged to cultivate the“beautiful customs of diligence, thrift, andsaving—long part of our national character.”43

His government also revived the interwar dailylife improvement movement under thepostwar name of “New Life Campaigns.” Thesedrives taught households how to save in theirquest to rationalize and “bring science” to dailylife by cutting waste and “luxuries.” In 1955,when a conservative cabinet institutionalizedthese drives under the New Life CampaignAssociation, Katayama, Kagawa, and other

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Socialist leaders proudly served as directors.44

Along with much of the labor movement, theSocialist Party embraced austerity and nationalsaving as beneficial to the working class andthe Japanese people as a whole. No less thanthe economic bureaucrats, Socialists wereshocked by the nation’s early postwarhyperinflation, and they favored soaking uppurchasing power. While labor unions incontemporary America favored massconsumption as good for employment, theJ a p a n e s e L e f t — l i k e E u r o p e a ncounterparts—regarded saving as the bestmeans of generating jobs; the people’s surpluswould be channeled into investment inproduction. Although they crit icizedconservative governments on other issues,several prominent Marxian economistscooperated with the bureaucracy to promotesaving.45 Minobe Ryōkichi, the progressiveeconomist and future governor of Tokyo wroteMinistry of Education–approved textbooks thatinstructed students in the importance ofsaving. Household savings not only benefitedone’s family, but also “becomes the capital for industry and the public good, and theyfunction as the driving force in the nationaleconomy and the development of social life.”Though a socialist, Minobe subscribed to astrikingly middle-class view of the housewife’sduty to “rationalize consumption.” In “ourfamilies,” he noted, “the mother or older sisterkeeps a household account book. . . . Thosewho do this well have relatively rich consumerlives even if their income is relatively low.”46

Within large companies, workers’ wives eagerlytook part in employer-sponsored New Lifemovements from the 1950s to the 1970s. There,sometimes to the consternation of tradeunionist husbands, they learned methods ofhousehold budget-keeping and cutting “wastein daily life.” Rather than envision increaseddemand as the key to a vibrant economy, manyworking-class families continued to believe thatimprovements in daily life would result from

limiting consumption and boosting savings.47

Building on wartime developments, Japanesewomen became even more central toencouraging saving and rationalizingconsumption. Postwar officials relied on localwomen’s associations to run the nationalsavings associations—so much so that savingsassociations became known as “mothers’banks.” Savings associations also formedaround the women’s auxiliary of agriculturalcooperatives. Found in most villages and urbanneighborhoods, women’s associations in the1950s worked hard to shape the savings habitsof the community. Take the case of the award-winning “women’s association/egg savingsassociation” in one rural town in Miyagiprefecture. Every Saturday the group’slieutenants fanned out to visit members’ homesand gather eggs. On Sunday a wholesalerbought the eggs, and on Monday theassociation head deposited a share of theproceeds in each member’s savings account.48

In 1952 local women’s organizations, withsupport from the state, coalesced into theNational Federation of Regional Women’sOrganizations (Zen Chifuren). Claiming some7.8 million members at its peak in the early1960s, the federation provided the foot soldiersin the savings campaigns of the next severaldecades.49

Getting women to keep household accountbooks has been at the core of postwar Japanesesavings promotion. Victorian Britain andAmerica also popularized such practices, and housewives’ federations in contemporary WestGermany and elsewhere cooperated withgovernments and banks to teach womentechniques of “family budgeting.” Nonetheless,the methodical housewife-saver became acultural icon in postwar Japan as perhapsnowhere in the West. During the 1950s moreand more wives recorded the details of familyfinances in standardized account books issuedby housewives’ magazines and governmentagencies. By 1965 half of all surveyed

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households reported they kept account books(41 percent of them regularly). They wouldcontinue to do so at those levels for the nexttwenty-five years. Keeping a typical Japaneseaccount book was not for the languid. Eachday, one recorded income and then itemizedexpenditures into ten or more categoriesincluding taxes, food, housing, utilities,clothing, health,

education, self-cultivation and entertainment,transportation and telephone, sociallyobligatory expenses, and one-time specialcosts. Food expenditures were further dividedinto the subcategories of rice, side dishes,eating out, and “treats.” At the end of the day,literally, the diligent housewife calculated thecash balance as well as outstanding debts andamounts deposited in savings. Account booksfrom the 1990s further instructed users torecord all credit card purchases. By contrast,among free-spending Americans at the time,the whole point of using plastic was to delaythinking about whether one could afford thepurchase.50

The excruciating demands of the accountbooks prompted some women to refuse tokeep them. Yet the bigger surprise is howmany Japanese women utilized the ledgersmore or less as designed. According to officialsurveys from 1973 to 1984, roughly half ofthose surveyed who kept accounts replied thatthey recorded income and expenditures everyday. Another one-fifth claimed they itemizedexpenses daily but calculated balancesmonthly. The remaining one-quarter budgetedon a monthly basis.51 Economists have yet tomodel the impact of house- hold accountkeeping on saving and economizing. However,if a large proportion of the householdssystematically monitor spending by means ofaccount books in Society A (Japan) and veryfew keep such budgets in Society B (say, theUnited States), wouldn’t we expect to see substantial differences in saving rates—allother things being equal?

“I’ll Keep Planning Our Household Finances,” 1955.The idealized Japanese housewife of the earlypostwar decades. Her modernity lay in rationalizingconsumption and increasing savings. Courtesy of theCommunications Museum, Japan, XD-C50.

Widespread account-keeping challengeseconomic thinking in an- other way. Americaneconomists tend to view saving as the productpurely of individual decision-making. Yetsetting aside money in postwar Japan could bean intensely public act subject to collective pressures. Residential women’s associationsdid not simply collect monthly savings frommembers. In what were called “group activitiesfocused on household account books,” activistwomen coached neighboring wives intechniques of monitoring family finances andmaximizing savings. Often they pried into theintimate details of other families’ spendinghabits. A married woman’s status within thecommunity became defined to a significant

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extent by how well she kept the account book.A great many Japanese wives felt the need to“keep up with the Joneses” not in spending, butin economizing. This anxiety was captured in a1959 cartoon. “Mrs. O sure gave up keepingher account book in a hurry,” snicker threehousewives beh ind the back o f oneembarrassed working woman. 5 2

Pressure on women to keep household accountbooks came from many quarters. Theincreasingly popular housewives’ magazines,notably Shufu no tomo and Fujin no tomo,continued their prewar drive to encouragefinancial management, publishing annualaccount books. Just as important werecoordinated efforts by the state and variouswomen’s organizations. As she had done beforeand during the war, Fujin no tomo’s HaniMotoko frequently assisted the postwar savingscampaigns. Comprised of loyal readers at thegrass roots, her “friends’ societies” receivedgenerous state subsidies to spread the use ofaccount books among other women. 5 3

Government agencies began publishing theirown household account books in 1947, and theCentral Council for Savings Promotion and itssuccessors issued countless copies of their“Household Account Book for the Bright Life”from 1952 to 2001.The mammoth NationalFederation of Regional Women’s Organizationsand other women’s groups helped distributethe official account books. Calling it theorganization’s “best seller,” the Central Councilannually issued two million free account booksby the mid-1990s, while women’s magazinesand other commercial publishers sold anadditional seven million ledgers.54

State campaigns benefited from a profoundchange in gender relations within the familyduring the 1950s and 1960s. As the Japaneseeconomy surged, husbands secured good-paying jobs that made it possible for women tostay at home without paid employment. For thefirst time, large numbers of Japanese womenenvisioned themselves as “house- wives.” It

also became the norm for husbands to tendermonthly earnings to prudent wives, who tookcharge of spending and saving. Wives therebygained a potent means of controlling husbandswho frequented the ubiquitous hostess barsand consorted with prostitutes. Women’sleaders gleefully advised housewives to doleout only small amounts of “drinking money” totheir men while saving the rest.55 The wife’scontrol of the purse strings fast emerged as asymbol of modernity. Women’s groups woulddenigrate “feudalistic” villages wherepatriarchy still reigned—that is, wherehousewives had not yet emerged as theprimary keepers of the household accountbook.56

“Success in the Bonus Rocket’s Return,” 1959cartoon. Using a remote control to capture herhusband’s bonus, the clever housewife boostshousehold savings and stops him from squanderingthe family’s money on hostesses and drink at the“Cabaret Moon.” Chochiku (Central Council forSavings Promotion), no. 27 (1959): 1.

During the 1950s the nation’s largest women’sfederat ions threw themselves intoencouraging saving in formal alliance with thestate . One o f the most enthus ias t icorganizations was the Housewives Association(Shufuren), usually portrayed as a fiercelyindependent proponent of consumer protection.Led by Oku Mumeo, a prewar feminist with

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socialist leanings, the Housewives Associationnonetheless paralleled official efforts in its owncampaigns to persuade every housewife to keepan account book and join the “housewives’savings movement.”57 In 1954 the HousewivesAssociation became a permanent member oft h e C e n t r a l C o u n c i l f o r S a v i n g sPromotion—along with the more conservativeNational Federation of Regional Women’sOrganizations and the woman’s auxiliarycouncil of the Agricultural Cooperatives. Thethree women’s federations and others joined with the Central Council to convene theNational Women’s Meeting for “New Life andSaving” in 1959. Over the next four decadesthis annual meeting brought together officialsand women’s delegates to devise strategies forrationalizing household finances. Oku, too,championed the rationalization of spending asgood for the housewife and good for the nation.In place of consumption, she urged members to“strive for a life with imagination andresourcefulness,” for “unless the cleverhousewife maintains her household, thiscountry will not rise.”58 Echoed by women’sleaders and officials alike, this deep-seatedambivalence toward consumption reinforcedJapan’s savings ethic even as material liferapidly improved.

Striking a “Balance” between Consumptionand Saving

Consumerism arrived officially in 1959. In itsannual Whitepaper on National Life, theEconomic Planning Agency declared Japan tobe in the throes of a “consumer revolution.”This was one revolution that would betelevised, as millions watched on recentlypurchased televisions. After years of austerity,families acquired a set of consumer durablesheretofore unimaginable. Not so long agoJapanese had died to defend the imperialhousehold’s “three sacred treasures”: themirror, jewel, and sword. The 1950s generationwhimsically recycled the term to refer to thetelevision, washing machine, and refrigerator.

A mere 5 percent of Japanese householdsowned black-and-white television sets in 1957.By the mid-1960s the television would be foundin nearly every home, alongside the two othertreasures.59

From these material changes followed acultural transformation of sorts. After decadesof devaluing consumption, state agencies beganencouraging spending on consumer durables.60 In 1960 the government of IkedaHayato—the former finance bureaucrat whoonce urged the citizens of Hiroshima to save allthey could—announced a plan to doublenational and per capita income by the end ofthe decade. Gone, it seemed, were thetraditional values of diligence and thrift. Now“consumption is the virtue,” proclaimed themedia. Inspired by the successful creation ofconsumer demand in the United States, someJapanese business leaders during the 1950senvisioned the production of “American-stylemiddle-class society” as crucial to the nation’sprosperity, writes Simon Partner. Even morethan exports, the steady expansion of domesticconsumption drove Japan’s high economicgrowth from 1955 to the mid-1970s.61

By many measures, Japan took on the trappingsof a mass-consumption society. Per capitaincome did not double by 1970; it quadrupled.Real per capita consumption increased at afrenetic 7.5 percent per year from 1955 to1973. Food’s share of household budgetssteadily declined from 50 to 20 percent (1955to 1988), enabling consumers to afford agreater array of goods and services.6 2

Moreover, the rapid rise of installment buyingand other forms of credit permitted lessaffluent Japanese to purchase the new masscommodities. An enormous advertisingindustry emerged to market consumption asthe basis of the “bright life.” Consumers movedbeyond the “three sacred treasures” to acquirethe “three C’s”: the car, color TV, and cooler(air conditioner).

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Thanks to substantial increases in housingloans, homeownership became the norm duringthe 1970s.63 Ever since, foreign visitors havebeen mesmerized by images of Tokyoitesspending, spending. Attired in expensiveclothes and hooked up to the latest gadgets,Japanese seemingly worshipped at the shrine ofmass consumption.

Appearances can be decept ive . Theunmistakable rise in Japanese consumptionlevels was not matched by the advent of anAmerican-style consumer culture thatprivileged spending over restraint. Inculcatedhabits of thrift did not diminish noticeably, butrather coexisted with the new consumption. Asincomes grew, households became capable ofincreasing both saving and spending.Household saving rates soared from 14 percentin 1959 to an extraordinary 23 percent in 1976.Far from spending lavishly, consumers oftenafforded costly durables only by severelycutting back on other expenditures, includinghousing.64

Japan’s new consumption resembled “consumerrevolutions” in Western Europe at the time. Innone of these cases do we see Europeans orJapanese catching up to Americans in levelsand patterns of consumption. In 1960 Japanesehouseholds still devoted 38 percent ofconsumption to food and only 10 percent tohousing and home-related expenditures.Similarly in West Germany and France,respectively, food accounted for fully 43percent and 46 percent, and housing for merely18 percent and 11 percent. In contrast,Americans spent only 32 percent on food andan incomparable 29 percent on housing,including furniture and household goods.65 Formost Japanese and Europeans, consumptioncontinued to be something that had to be“rationalized” within limited budgets.

Assisted by the major women’s organizations,the well-funded Central Council for SavingsPromotion maintained nationwide savings

campaigns through the prosperous 1960s andbeyond. Proponents of thrift found themselvesadapting their messages to the sensibilities ofthe new age. While acknowledging the benefitsof improved consumption, governmentspokesmen and women’s magazines advisedthe Japanese people to strike a balancebetween consumption and other vital needs ofthe household and nation—including saving,investment , soc ia l wel fare , and theenvironment. Similar thinking pervadedcontemporary European societies (see figures31 and 32). The French of the 1950s becamefamous for critiques of Americans’ seeminglylimitless consumption. The American model,observes one historian, appeared to threatenFrench conceptions of a “balanced economyand traditional ways of production, selling,saving, and spending.”66

In Japan during the 1960s, many economistswarned of the peri ls of “unbalanced”consumption. The catchphrase “consumption isthe virtue” should by no means be taken as arepudiation of the importance of saving, arguedKoizumi Akira; Japan’s high growth could onlybe sustained by the new investment generatedby greater saving. To Usami Jun, governor ofthe Bank of Japan, “The difference between acivilized country and a backward country iswhether it accumulates capital in large or smallamounts.” Rather than spend freely, the people“should endeavor to live rationally and save toincrease the wealth of Japan as a whole.”67

The recently announced Income Doubling Plandid not promise immediate improvements inconsumption, explained Okazaki Kaheita,chairman of the Central Council for SavingsPromotion. To develop the economy and raiseliving standards, the plan required “high-levelsaving,” which remained essential to bring“balance to Japanese life.”

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“Keep a Balance in Life,” Japan, 1955 (top). An earlyversion of the Japanese government’s message tobalance consumer desires against the needs ofaccumulating sufficient savings. Courtesy of theCommunications Museum, Japan, XD-C52.

The British poster, (bottom), that inspired theJapanese poster. Reproduced by permission of TNA,NSC 5/652a.

Such judgments were in f luenced bycontemporary American critiques of massconsumption, notably Vance Packard’s TheHidden Persuaders (1957) and The WasteMakers (1960). According to Okazaki, TheWaste Makers revealed how American industrychronically overproduced for the consumereconomy with Packard urging Americans torestore the balance among factors in theeconomy. Packard’s diagnosis might fit Japanbetter than the United States, Okazakiventured, considering how much Japanesesquandered on restaurants, clothes, and

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expensive skis they used only once or twice ayear.68 Women’s leaders also echoed Packard.Oku Mumeo of the Housewives Associationcondemned the advertising industry forpersuading Japanese to buy anything marketedas a “new brand.” Led by Oku, the consumermovement instructed Japanese to become “wiseconsumers” (kashikoi shōhisha) who would“rationalize how we buy and use things.”69

Too much spending might exacerbate anotherimbalance. Anxious about Japan’s recurrentdeficits in the balance of international payments, the government sent mixedmessages to the consumer. To supportdomest ic industr ies , o f f ic ia ls and manufacturers encouraged the consumption of“national products,” especially electrical goods.Spending on imports was another matter. Evenat the height of the “consumer revolution” inthe early 1960s, savings campaigns haranguedthe nation to economize overall and on importsin particular. As conveyed by numerouspamphlets, one’s patriotic duty still lay inboosting the nation’s savings. These wouldfinance the industrial production necessary toexpand exports and pay for imported rawmaterials. Speaking to women’s groups aroundthe country, Bank of Japan officials blamedconsumers for the worsening trade imbalance.After all, hadn’t they “unwittingly boughtsurprisingly large quantities of imported itemslike instant coffee and raisins”?70

In the course of the 1970s, feelings ofambivalence gave way to widespread criticismsof mass consumption itself. Although severaldevelopments fueled these discontents, theprecipitant was unquestionably the “Oil Shock”of 1973—74. That was when Arab members ofOPEC (Organization of the Petroleum ExportingCountries) embargoed oil. Energy-dependentJapan experienced galloping inflation, majorshortages, and the first decline in GNP sincethe early postwar years. Among conservativesas well as progressives, the Oil Shock served as the backdrop for a national

morality play about the evils of affluence andthe opportunity for spiritual rebalancing.Nat iona l leaders were uncommonlyphilosophical. Having succumbed to “materialaffluence” and “mass consumption” during thehigh-growth era, Japanese were said to havediscovered “a new form of affluence” as theycut back spending.71 The media, too, reportedon consumers’ return to saving and stinginess,blaming Japan’s current economic woes onrecent high living. “It’s undeniable,” wrote aweekly magazine, “that one of the main causesof rising inflation has been that motto,‘Consumption is the virtue.’”72

Japanese opinion reflected global trends ofecological awareness. In Europe and to a lessere x t e n t i n t h e U n i t e d S t a t e s ,environmental movements arose to demandenergy conservation and sustainabledevelopment. Established in 1979, WestGermany’s Green Party became mainstreamenough to enter the governing coalition twodecades later. In his polemic Small Is Beautiful(1973), British economist E. F. Schumacherarticulated the new agenda of seeking the“maximum amount of well-being with theminimum of consumption.” Although Europeanenvironmentalists did not espouse oldernotions of thrift, their conservationism andcondemnation of “overconsumption” reinforcedpropensities to save. In practice, stringentrecycling laws in Europe and Japan curbed theprevious “throwaway” ethos while discouragingconsumers from buying new products on theAmerican scale.73

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“The Economy as Linked to the Kitchen,” 1962.Aimed at housewives, this cartoon communicatesthat savings benefit the nation by financingindustrial production (center). Although someproduction results in individual consumption (lowerright), a huge portion is shipped abroad to remedyJapan’s trade deficit. The sinister Western tycoon(upper right) personifies “foreign countries,” whichsend ¥2 trillion in goods to Japan whereas Japaneseexports total only ¥1.5 trillion. Yasashi keizai nohanashi [Economics made easy] (Tokyo: ChochikuZōkyō Chūō Iinkai, 1962), Ministry of Finance, Japan.

Whereas the relation between thrift andenvironmentalism remained implicit inEurope, the Japanese state successfully fused the causes of saving, economizing, andconservation in the public mind. In 1974savings-promotion officials played a centralrole in fashioning the People’s Campaign toValue Resources and Energy. More than onehundred organizations took part representingconsumers, women, educators, the media,business, and local governments. Myriad localcampaigns harangued the populace to save andeconomize on goods and energy. Casting theirinvolvement in socially progressive terms,women’s and consumer advocates denouncedthe recent consumer boom as out of balancewith society’s needs for a more generouswelfare state and a cleaner environment. Thesocial critic Higuchi Keiko seized upon the OilShock as an opportunity for consumers to movefrom material affluence to a “truly affluent

society”—one that neither destroyed thenatural environment nor discarded the weak.74

Injunctions to economize filled the pages ofhousewives’ magazines. The language of“balance” appeared everywhere, illustrated inone cartoon as a scale that balanced “spiritualaffluence” against a heap of consumer goods.And a new catchphrase was heard o’er theland: “economizing is the virtue.”75

The American Other

Japan quickly recovered from the Oil Shock andresumed its rise as the world’s second largesteconomy. Leaders felt more convinced thanever of the virtues of Japan’s energeticpromotion of saving. The 1980s were a timewhen Japanese savings behavior took centerstage as an international issue as well. Thenation’s savings-promotion program evolvedfrom an exemplar for developing countries intoa model for the world’s largest economy. It wasa giddy moment in Tokyo. High savings hadtamped down inflation and provided the cheapcapital for industrial expansion, Japaneseofficials boasted. Meanwhile in the UnitedStates, “sluggish savings and investment”constrained productivity increases andaccelerated inflation. America’s troubles leftJapanese “convinced that maintaining a steadysavings attitude in our household economy“would surely contribute to price stability,improved productivity, and higher livingstandards.76

Plenty of Americans also took note of Japan’shigh household saving rate of about 20 percent.Revised data now calculates the U.S. savingrate at nearly 9 percent in 1979, althoughAmericans at the time believed it to be around4 percent. Malaise about perceived declineat home prompted the publication of a slew ofbooks on the “Japanese Model,” notably Japanas Number One: Lessons for America.Americans, noted the world-famous economistPaul Samuelson, “envy the Japanese for theiringenuity, drive, cleverness and thrift.”

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Lawrence R. Klein, winner of the 1980 NobelPrize in Economics and a leading Keynesian, nonetheless urged the United States to go from“being a high- consumption economy to being a h igh-saving economy i f we are toreindustrialize and improve our standard ofl iving.” 7 7 In a speech to the Japaneseparliament in 1983, President Ronald Reaganlavishly praised Japanese for achieving thehighest saving rates among industrializednations. This, he argued, was because Japanese tax policies incentive-ized saving byexempting most interest on deposits andkeeping tax burdens low.78

Newly confident, Japanese came to regardthrift as a key marker of their unique “national character” and a source ofsuperiority vis-à-vis the West. This was a bigchange from the early postwar years, whenofficials identified with European savings-promotion efforts and sometimes castAmericans as more prudent than Japanese.Journalists and politicians now spokedisparagingly of the “English disease,” in whichwelfare dependency led to a “diminished will towork,” and the “American disease” marked bywastefulness and laziness.79 In 1987 ToyamaShigeru, chairman of the Central Council forSavings Promotion, wrote a best seller extollingthe enduring Japanese spirit of hard work andthrift. As for the United States, he scoffed; thePuritan ethic of thrift had collapsed.Americans’ rampant use of credit cardsresulted in “excessive consumption,” and“millions of households live in debt.”80

As Japan amassed ever-increasing tradesurpluses in the 1980s, the issue of savingsbecame a flashpoint in U.S.-Japanese relations.Western governments heatedly accused theJapanese of “excessive saving” and under-consumption. It was all relative of course.Compared to Americans, Europeans lived insmall homes and were great savers. But in areport leaked to the press in 1979, theEuropean Economic Commission blasted

Japan as a country of “workaholics” who livein “what westerners would regard as little morethan rabbit hutches.”81 Bowing to foreignpressure, the Japanese government in 1986released the Maekawa Report, which promised to expand domestic consumption while curtailing programs that actively promoted saving. Two years later the Central Council forSavings Promotion tactfully renamed it- self theCentral Council for Savings Information. Thestate would no longer “promote” or “increase”savings, but merely provide information on howto save. More consequential was theelimination in 1988 of tax exemption onsavings interest for nearly all Japanese,excepting the elderly and a few othercategories. Henceforth interest on savingswould be taxed at a flat rate of 20 percent.82

However, Japanese leaders remained un-persuaded of the virtues of a consumption-driven economy. In publications intended forthe home audience, officials and economistswarned that the Maekawa Report should notalter the commitment to promoting highsaving—lest Japanese lose the values that madethem so successful. Before authoring the reportthat bore his name, Bank of Japan governorMaekawa Haruo ardently defended savings-promotion policies. High household savingenabled Japan to subdue inflation, he observed,while Americans amid double-digit inflationturned from saving money to buying more and more.83 Nor did the Japanese people comeforward to thank the Americans for trying toimprove their consumer lives. Women’s andconsumer groups furiously opposed thegovernment’s decision to abolish tax exemptionfor savings. One protest rally in Hibiya Parkdrew six thousand people. 84

For the first time, Japanese officials took tolecturing the Americans on the need topromote saving and investment so as to restorethe “balance” between those factors and out-of-control consumption. When U.S. negotiators in1990 attempted to remove Japan’s structural

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impediments to imports and foreigninvestment, the Japanese side shot back withits own prescriptions for reducing America’sglaring fiscal deficits. The U.S. governmentshould curb Amer icans ’ “excess iveconsumption” by restricting credit cards andintroducing Japanese-style tax preferences forsaving.85 This cockiness rested on Japan’s newstatus as the world’s greatest creditor nationwhile the United States was now the biggestdebtor. The Japanese had become, far andaway, the largest holders of Treasury bondsand bills. Then as now, the vast savings of EastAsians enabled the U.S. government andAmerican people to live beyond their means.

“From Saving to Investment”

Japanese self-assurance was not to last muchlonger. The nation’s abundant savingscontributed to soaring stock and real estateprices. In 1990–91, the bubble burst after theBank of Japan raised interest rates. For thenext eleven years the Japanese economy would be mired in a state of slow growth or nogrowth. Japan and the United States againtraded places. The U.S. economic boom of the1990s convinced American policymakers andeconomists of the brilliance of financialderegulation, consumer-driven growth, and themassive expansion of credit. Predictably,Washington pressed Japanese to stop saving somuch and instead consume their way out ofrecession.

B y t h e l a t e 1 9 9 0 s , m a n y J a p a n e s eacknowledged the anachronistic nature ofsavings-promotion mechanisms designed for adifferent age when saving had indeed beenJapan’s “national salvation.” This past decadehas witnessed some important changes. Themost politically contentious has been thereform of the postal savings system. As thenation’s “lost decade” wore on, Japanese andWestern critics questioned why Japan requireda colossal government savings bank in an ageof financial liberalization. Equally problematic,

the Ministry of Finance through the FiscalInvestment and Loan Plan retained control overin- vesting the world’s largest pool of savings.Incredibly little had changed since 1885. Tiedup in local projects and a great manynonper forming l oans , the na t ion ’ scapital—charged critics—could be moreproductively invested to advance growth.Effected in 2001, the first reforms transferredresponsibility for investing deposits from theMinistry of Finance to postal authorities.Nonetheless, investments largely flowed to theFILP as before. Other changes would probablynever have occurred had it not been for amaverick politician known for his Elvisimpersonations. Koizumi Jun’ichirō took overthe doddering Liberal Democratic Party andbecame prime minister in 2001. He choseto make privatization of postal savings thecentral issue in the 2005 general election,successfully running reformers against his ownparty’s entrenched postal savings lobby. Thenew parliament enacted legislation mandatinggradual privatization, beginning in 2007 andending in 2017.

What privatization means for the depositor isfar from clear. Fully guaranteed by thegovernment, postal savings reached the heightof its popularity amid widespread bank failuresin the 1990s. However, reform measures from2002 eliminated many of postal savings’historical advantages. As of 2007 the state nolonger guarantees postal deposits. They arenow covered by American-style depositinsurance up to ¥10 million (about $105,000),the same as for bank deposits. A decade ofnear-zero interest rates further diminished theallure of the ten-year teigaku time deposit.Japanese steadily moved money out of postalsavings into the banks. From 2000 to 2007,postal savings’ share of total deposits sunkfrom one-third to one-quarter.

On the other hand, postal savings’ dynamic rolein encouraging saving may well persist. Thenewly “privatized” Japan Post Bank dwarfs the

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next largest bank. With more than twenty-fourthousand branches, it reaches small savers asno other bank. Moreover, the postal savingssystem remains an aggressive marketeraiming to become a “one-stop financialshop.” For instance, post offices recently beganselling investment trusts (mutual funds). Postalsavings may never emerge as a truly privatebank. Koizumi retired in 2006. Other leaders inthe two major parties are less passionate aboutprivatization. Some 75 to 80 percent of postalsavings remains invested in government bonds.At the end of the ten-year privatization process,the Japan Post Bank will likely still function asa highly accessible postal savings system thatmakes it easy to save.86

In a second development, the governmentretreated from running nationwide savingscampaigns. According to stated policy in 1997,the Central Council for Savings Information nolonger asked people to increase savings. Theywere encouraged instead to plan their lives soas to strike that proverbial “balance betweensaving and consumption.”87 I must confess, Idid not fully appreciate the nuances on myvisits at the time to the busy work floor of theCentral Council’s secretariat inside the Bank ofJapan. It sure looked like savings promotion.Officials were working closely with localwomen’s groups to encourage account-keepingin the nearly five hundred model Life Planningand Savings Districts. They also keptconducting the annual contest for the bestessays on “household account book-keepingand life planning,” with 63,500 entrants in theyear 2000. The short films sent to schools,though slick as anime, likewise conveyed thewisdom of an earlier time. The Greedy Princessfeatured Princess Catherine, a spoiled brat,who gets all the luxuries she wants until herfairy godmother places her with a poor familywhere she learns “thrift and habits of healthyliving.” In Children Captured by the UFO, threetykes spend wastefully. They buy a cake, throwaway the insides, and just eat the frosting. Theeco-aliens who nab them worry that if such

children multiply, the earth’s nature andresources will be destroyed. The kids come tounderstand the consequences of wastefulnessand return to earth with a proper respect forgoods and money.88

By the year 2000, the old methods of savingspromotion were wearing thin. Children’s bankshad all but disappeared. Married women,who increasingly worked outside the home,could no longer be relied upon to serve asJapan’s version of savings commandos.Influenced by America’s success and anxiousabout Japan’s rapidly aging society,policymakers began urging savers to acceptmore risk and seek higher rates of return. Near-zero interest in bank and postal depositswould not build retirement savings. Financeofficials advised the nation to shift “from savingto investment.”

In 2001 the government unveiled a newapproach. The Central Council for SavingsInformation became the Central Council forFinancial Services Information. This time, itwas more than a change in name. Theorganization no longer explicitly encouragesJapanese to save. The revamped CentralCouncil provides consumers with helpfulinformation on an array of f inancialinstruments. These include not only savingsdeposits, but also stocks, credit cards, evenderivatives. As the government cut back onpledges to guarantee savings deposits in full,the Central Council worked to persuade thepublic to take “personal responsibility” forjudging the risks of their investment choices.Much of the information appears on its website,which soon averaged one million hits permonth. Five hundred volunteers serve as localFinancial Services Information Advisors. Mostare financial planners and other professionals,in contrast to the leaders of women’s groupswho volunteered as savings advisors under theold system. The Central Council’s other toppriority has been to institute financialeducation in model schools and eventually

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nationwide.89

Whether these transformations will altertwentieth-century Japan’s culture of thriftremains to be seen. Pressed by the Americans,the Japanese government in 1998 mounted ahalfhearted campaign to get the nation tospend its way out of recession.90 However, innone of the recent policy debates—whetherpostal savings privatization or introducing aninvestment consciousness—have the Japaneseprotagonists called on people to consume more.It’s all about shifting savings into moreproductive investments. In several respects, theCentral Council for Financial Servicesreinforces old-fashioned habits of saving. Analready risk-averse populace is being educatedabout the many risks involved in equities, aswell as the dangers of over-indebtednesslurking in consumer credit. The Central Councilno longer issues household account books, butthat’s in part because housewives’ magazinescontinue to publish these ledgers in themillions. The organization remains committedto encouraging Japanese to engage in financial“life planning.” It offers online diagnostic tools,free downloads of account-keeping software,and tips on how to stay with your householdaccount book even when you hate it. Thefinancial education program teaches childrenthe importance of saving, ecological living, andavoiding toraburu (trouble) brought on bycredit cards and internet shopping.91 Oh, andschools can still borrow The Greedy Princessand Children Captured by the UFO.

Nor is it clear that the Japanese will decisivelyshift “from saving to investment.” Stocks did infact rise as a percentage of household financialassets after 2004. The share in equities hassince retreated in the wake of the 2008 stockmarket crash. In comparative terms, thepersistence of small saving in Japan is striking.In 2006 half of Japanese households’ financialassets were in savings deposits and merely 16precautious Germans invested only one-thirdof their financial assets in bank and postal

accounts. At the other extreme, Americansplaced a minuscule 13 percent in savingsdeposits, but nearly half in stocks and mutualfunds.92

This br ings us to the most puzz l ingdevelopment of the past decade. Once thehighest in the world, Japan’s householdsaving rate slowly declined during the 1990sbefore going into free fall after 1999. In 2008 itstood at a mere 2.3 percent, among the lowestof OECD nations. Japanese households declaredThe Economist, had “lost their appetite forthrift.”93 Such conclusions are off the mark. Thesaving rate has not declined because Japanesejoined the ranks of America’s shopaholics. Farfrom it. Consumer spending per household hasessentially been flat since 1993, and in manyyears has fallen in real terms. The 1990s andearly 2000s, it is true, were a time of economicsluggishness in Japan, yet stagnation inconsumption continued amid the sustainedrecovery of 2002–2007. By contrast, Americanconsumer spending until the recent financialmeltdown increased every quarter since 1991,despite recession (2001) and slow incomegrowth thereafter.94 Neither can we blame theerosion of Japanese saving on a growingaddiction to credit. Although Japanese assumedfairly high levels of housing and consumer debtduring the 1990s, debt as a percentage ofhousehold financial as- sets has steadilydropped over the past decade.95 Even creditcards failed to beguile most consumers. In1992 the government finally permitted banks to issue cards with a revolving credit feature,yet Japanese responded in a most un-Americanfashion. Twelve years later, more than two-thirds of Japanese card users were payingmonthly credit card bills on time and in full,while in the United States nearly two-thirdsborrowed against their cards.96

If not greater consumption or credit-bingeing,what does account for the current phenomenonof Japanese saving so little? One plausibleexplanation draws from the well-known “life-

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cycle” hypothesis. Japan’s population is agingfaster than any other. As a greater proportionof the nation enters into retirement, the elderlynecessarily spend down wealth.97 Nevertheless,the life-cycle thesis does not explain whyrapidly aging populations in Germany andseveral other European countries have notexperienced appreciable declines in their highsaving rates.

The most compelling explanation is at once themost depressing. The Japanese are saving less,first and foremost, because a great manyhouseholds have suffered punishing drops inincome since the late 1990s. No other majoreconomy experienced anything like elevenyears of stagnation, followed in 2002 by arecovery unaccompanied by perceptibleincreases in household income. Japanesecompanies have slashed hours and salaries,besides cutting back on hiring young people asregular employees. As families struggle tomaintain relat ively modest levels ofconsumption, they have less margin to save.98

For better or worse, decades of savingspromotion have left their mark on the Japanesepeople. Over the past twenty years we haveseen little of the profound cultural embrace ofconsumption that occurred in the UnitedStates. Japanese households cope with stagnantincomes by continuing to “rationalize”consumption. To make ends meet, they spendmore on some things while cutting back onothers. The postwar housewives’ culture ofmonitoring spending has proved remarkablyresilient. Women’s magazines are still filledwith stories of resourceful housewives who dealwith a bad economy by adopting “economizinglifestyles.”99 Although the media trumpets thedecline of thrift among youth, recent surveysreveal that nearly half of married women intheir twenties and 43 percent of those in theirthirties keep household account books. Wewould also err in assuming that mosthouseholds no longer have savings. In 2008,Japan led the OECD countries in net household

financial assets (383 percent of nominaldisposal income). In net wealth (financial, real,and other assets minus liabilities), it rankedfourth behind Italy, the United Kingdom, andFrance, but well ahead of the United States. Ifthe risk-averse Japanese—unlike Americansand Britons—did not partake in rising housingand equity prices since the mid-1990s, neitherdid their assets collapse in the real estate andfinancial meltdown of 2008. The dearth ofconsumer spending undoubtedly constrains theJapanese economy, yet the abundance of home-grown savings permits the government tofinance extraordinarily high levels of nationaldebt at low rates and independent of foreigninterference in ways that Americans todaymight envy.100

Or they might not. When dealing with Japan,Anglo-American economists tend to beprescriptive. Supremely confident of their ownmodel, they have been quick to tell theJapanese what to do: stimulate consumption,unleash the forces of consumer credit, pushsavers to accept more risk. Despite thehousehold debt crisis presently afflicting theUnited States and Britain, The Economist stillcomplains that Japanese consumers “rarelyshift credit-card debts from one card toanother .” 1 0 1 We might do better to understand the historical forces that shaped how Japanese actually behave, and howthe Japanese model of savings promotion—in itsprime—became crucial to the rise of Asia’s other dynamic economies.

The preceding article corresponds to Chapter9, “Postwar Japan’s National Salvation,” inSheldon Garon, Beyond Our Means: WhyA m e r i c a S p e n d s W h i l e t h e W o r l dSaves (Princeton: Princeton University Press,2012): 255-291. © Princeton University Press.

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Sheldon Garon is the Nissan Professor ofHistory and East Asian Studies at PrincetonUniversity. In addition to Beyond Our Means:Why America Spends While the World Saves(http://www.amazon.com/dp/0691135991/?tag=theasipacjo0b-20), his books include MoldingJapanese Minds: The State in Everyday Life(http://www.amazon.com/dp/069100191X/?tag=theasipacjo0b-20) and The State and Labor inM o d e r n J a p a n(http://www.amazon.com/dp/0520068386/?tag=theasipacjo0b-20).

Recommended citation: Sheldon Garon,'Postwar Japan's National Salvation,' The Asia-Pacific Journal Vol 9, Issue 50 No 1, December12, 2011.

Notes

1 “Chochiku zōkyō hōsakuan” [Plan for savingspromotion], ca. August-September 1946, Aichibunsho, Chochiku: Chochiku zōkyōsaku, vol. 1,doc. 4, Sengo zaiseishi shiryō (hereafter SZS),Ministry of Finance, Japan.

2 John W. Dower, Embracing Defeat: Japan inthe Wake of World War II (New York: Norton,1999).

3 U.S. State Department, Interim Research andIntelligence Section, [and] Research andAnalysis Branch, “Control of Inflation,”Report R & A no. 2451, October 1, 1945,reprinted in Ōkurashō Zaiseishishitsu, Shōwazaiseishi: Shūsen kara kōwa made, vol. 20(Tokyo: Tōyō Keizai Shinpōsha, 1982), 49192.

4 Yūseishō, Yūsei hyakunenshi, 747, 751;Yamaguchi Osamu, Yūbin chokin no hyakunen(Tokyo: Yūbin Chokin Shinkōkai, 1977), 118-20;Horioka, “Consuming and Saving,” 283.

5 Chochiku Zōkyō Chūō Iinkai, Chochikuundōshi (hereafter CU), 15.

6 Yano Shōtarō, “Ōkura daijin rajio hōsō,” 5,Aichi bunsho, Chochiku: Chochiku zōkyōsaku,vol. 2, doc. 21, SZS.

7 Italics mine. “Ōkura daijin kōen genkō”[Finance minister’s address], September 16,1947, Aichi bunsho, Chochiku: Chochikuzōkyōsaku, vol. 2, doc. 36, SZS.

8 Ōkurashō [Ginkōkyoku], “Chochiku zōkyō nikansuru ken” [Savings promotion], ca. June1946, Aichi bunsho, Chochiku: Chochikuzōkyōsaku, vol. 1, doc. 3, SZS.

9 “Jikan chochiku kōen shiryō” [Vice minister’saddress], April 5, 1947, Aichi bunsho,Chochiku: Chochiku zōkyōsaku, vol. 2, doc. 1,SZS.

10 J. C. Smith (Chief, Money and BankingBranch, Finance Division, Economic andScientific Section, SCAP), “Statement forRelease in Connect ion with SavingsCampaign,” ca. September 1948, Noda bunsho,Chochiku zōkyō taisaku, doc. 42, SZS.

11 Shunya Yoshimi, “Consuming America,Producing Japan,” in Garon and Maclachlan,Ambivalent Consumer, 67-68.

1 2 Minami Hiroshi, Zoku Shōwa bunka:1945-1989 [Shōwa culture, part 2] (Tokyo:Keisō Shobō, 1990), 13-14.

13 New York Times, September 24, 2003, sec. A,p. 17.

14 Lizabeth Cohen, “The Consumers’ Republic:An American Model for the World?” in Garonand Maclachlan, Ambivalent Consumer, 58-59;Sheryl Kroen, “A Political History of theConsumer,” Historical Journal 47, no.3(September 2004): 709-36.

1 5 Richard. B. Finn, Winners in Peace:

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MacArthur, Yoshida, and Postwar Japan(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992),37, 332, n. 25; Dower, Embracing Defeat, 115.

16 Laura E. Hein, Fueling Growth: The EnergyRevolution and Economic Policy in PostwarJapan (Cambridge: Council on East AsianStudies, 1990), 147, 158-59, 356, n. 7.

17 Quoted in Kokumin Seikatsu Sentaa, Sengoshōhisha undōshi [History of postwar consumermovement] (Tokyo: Ōkurashō Insatsukyoku,1997), 61, n. 4.

18 Yano Shōtarō, “Ōkura daijin rajio hōsō,” 2.

19 Nagata Makoto, “Kokusai kinken kyōkai tosekai kinken dee” [International Thrift Instituteand World Thrift Day], Chochiku jihō [Savingstimes; hereafter CJ], no. 19 (January 1954):80-86; “Kaigai chochiku posutaa, kyatchifureezu-shū” [Foreign savings posters andcatchphrases], ibid., 67-71; “Berugii, Orandaryōkoku no chochiku undō” [Belgian and Dutchsavings campaigns], CJ, no. 43 (March 1960):56-57.

20 “Jikan chochiku kōen shiryō.”

21 Tsūka Antei Taisaku Jimukyoku [Office ofCurrency Stabilization Policy], Chochiku toinfureeshon [Saving and inflation], pamphlet(Tokyo: Nihon Ginkō, 1947).

22 E.g., Tōkyō-to Tsūka Antei Suishin Iinkai, “T-ōkyō-to [cho]chiku zōkyō hōsaku” [Savings-promotion program in Metropolitan Tokyo], ca.October 1946, doc. 26; Nihon Ginkō Kyōtoshiten, “Kyōto-fu kyūkoku chochiku undō kin’yūkikanbetsu mokuhyō narabi tasseigaku”[National Salvation Savings Campaign in Kyotoprefecture: targets and achieved savings byfinancial institution], ca. January 1947, Aichibunsho, Chochiku: Chochiku zōkyōsaku 1, doc.52, SZS.

23 Ōkurashō, “Chochiku jissen mohan chikusetchi yōryō” [Points for setting up model

savings districts], ca. April 1947, Aichi bunsho,Chochiku: Chochiku zōkyōsaku 2, doc. 7, SZS.

2 4 Ōkurashō, “Shōwa 22 nendo yobikinshishutsusho” [Preparatory budget outlays for1947], 10, Aichi bunsho, Chochiku: Chochikuzōkyōsaku, vol. 3, doc. 8, SZS.

25 [Ōkurashō], Ginkōkyoku, Kokumin chochiku-ka, “Shōwa 24 nendo kyūkoku chochiku undōhōsaku yōkōan” [1949 National SalvationSavings Campaign plan], April 5, 1949, p. 3,Aichi bunsho, Chochiku: Chochiku zōkyōsaku 5,doc. 4, SZS.

26 Tsūka Antei Taisaku Honbu [CurrencyStabilization Board], “Yokin ni kansuru seronchōsa” [Opinion poll on savings deposits],November 1949, p. 2, Noda bunsho, Chochikudōkō, 1947-51, doc. 7, SZS.

27 Ōkurashō, “Chochiku suishin kabu kikō nokongo no un’ei ni tsuite” [Future operations ofthe savings-promotion substructure], ca.January 1949, p. 1, Aichi bunsho, Chochiku:Chochiku zōkyōsaku, vol. 4, doc. 44, SZS.

28 Tsūka Antei Taisaku Honbu, “Chochiku undōsankanen o kaiko shite” [Recalling three yearsof the savings campaign], November 1949, pp.5, 8-10, Noda bunsho, Chochiku dōkō, doc. 6,SZS; Tsūka Antei Taisaku Honbu, “Yokin nikansuru seron chōsa,” 1.

29 CU, 16-17, 22-27; Ōkurashō, Nihon Ginkō, “Kōwa kinen tokubetsu chochiku undō yōkō”[Outline of the Special Savings Campaign toCommemorate the Peace Treaty], ca. August1951, p. 1, Noda bunsho, Chochiku zōkyō, doc.56, SZS.

30 CU, 148.

31 Kyoko Hirano, Mr. Smith Goes to Tokyo:Japanese Cinema under the AmericanOccupation, 1945-1952 (Washington, DC:Smithsonian Institute Press, 1992), 52-53.

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32 CU, 47, 74, 87; Chochiku Zōkyō Chūō Iinkai,Chochiku hakusho, 241; Central Council forSavings Promotion, Savings and SavingsPromotion Movement in Japan (Tokyo: CentralCouncil for Savings Promotion, 1981), 41-43.

33 New York Times, June 5, 1987, sec. D, p. 1;CU, 42, 44-45, 128-30.

34 CU, 17, 20, 72, 162; Kin’yū Zaisei JijōKenkyūkai, “Kodomo ginkō” no un’ei ni tsuite[Operations of children’s banks] (Tokyo: Kin’yūZaisei Jijō Kenkyūkai, 1995), 4.

35 For an excellent overview, see Thomas F.Cargill and Naoyuki Yoshino, Postal Savingsand Fiscal Investment in Japan (Oxford: OxfordUniversity Press, 2003), 9, 12, 42, 51-58, 64-69.

36 Savings Banks International, 1983, no. 4(Winter): 52-53; Yūseishō, Yūsei hyakunenshi,763; Patricia L. Maclachlan, The People's PostOffice: The History and Politics of the JapanesePostal System, 187-201 (Cambridge: HarvardUniversity Asia Center, forthcoming, 2011).

37 Chalmers A. Johnson, MITI and the JapaneseMiracle: The Growth of Industrial Policy,1925-1975 (Stanford: Stanford UniversityPress, 1982), 210, also 207-209.

38 Fujin jihō [Women’s times], no. 30 (July1955): 2.

39 E.g., Yūcho jihō [Postal savings times], no.324 (August 1974): 3; Shufu no tomo(December 1974): 214-19.

40 See Charles Yuji Horioka, “Why Is Japan’sHousehold Saving Rate So High? A LiteratureSurvey,” Journal of the Japanese andInternational Economies 4, no. 1 (March 1990):64-66, 76-80; David D. Selover, The JapaneseSaving Rate: Another Literature Review, JDBDiscussion Paper Series, no. 9312 (Tokyo:Japan Development Bank, 1994), 50-51.

41 Garon, Molding Japanese Minds, 163-66.

42 “Dai 3-kai zenkoku chochiku jimu shokuinkōshūkai” [Third national savings officerstraining course], September 17, 1947, p. 3,Aichi bunsho, Chochiku: Chochiku zōkyōsaku,3, doc. 1, SZS.

43 “Kyūkoku chochiku tokubetsu undō nikansuru Katayama naikaku sōri daijin dan”[Interview with Prime Minister Katayama onthe Special National Salvation SavingsCampaign], September 1, 1947, p. 1, Aichibunsho, Chochiku: Chochiku zōkyōsaku, 2, doc.46, SZS.

44 Garon, Molding Japanese Minds, 164, also163-72.

45 Interview with Tachi Ryūichi (professor ofeconomics, University of Tokyo), November 27,1996, Tokyo. Suzuki Takeo in Chochiku ZōkyōChūō Iinkai, Chochiku hakusho, 2; for TsuruShigeto, see “Dai 3-kai zenkoku chochiku jimushokuin kōshūkai,” 2; Morito Tatsuo in ŌkuraZaimu Kyōkai, Shakai kaihatsu ni shimeruchochiku no jūyōsei [Importance of saving insocial development] (Tokyo: Ōkura ZaimuKyōkai, 1965), 80.

46 Italics mine. Minobe Ryōkichi, Keizai to seiji[Economics and politics] (Tokyo: Jitugyō noNihonsha 1955), 11-12, 199; also MinobeRyōkichi, Uno Masao, and Ujiie Hisako, Kakeito seikatsu [Household finance and daily life](Tokyo: Dōbun Shoin, 1958), 64-65; cf. LauraHein, Reasonable Men, Powerful Words:Political Culture and Expertise in Twentieth-Century Japan (Berkeley: University ofCalifornia Press, 2004), 162-75.

47 Andrew Gordon, “Managing the JapaneseHousehold: The New Life Movement in PostwarJapan,” Social Politics 4, no. 2 (Summer 1997):245-83.

48 CJ, no. 20 (April 1954): 120.

49 See Garon, Molding Japanese Minds, chap. 6.

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50 See Chochiku Kōhō Chūō Iinkai, Akaruiseikatsu no kakeibo, 1992 [Household accountbook for the bright life] (Tokyo: Chochiku KōhōChūō Iinkai, 1991), 9, 23, 124; Chochiku KōhōChūō Iinkai, Chochiku to shōhi ni kansuruseron chōsa, 1996 (Tokyo: Chochiku Kōhō ChūōIinkai, 1996), 146.

51 Chochiku Zōkyō Chūō Iinkai, Chochiku nikansuru seron chōsa, 1987, p. 124.

52 Yucho jihō, no. 141 (April 1959): 13; “Kakeiboo chūshin to shita guruupu katsudō ni tsuite”[Group activities focused on household accountbook], Shin seikatsu to chochiku: Dai 1-kaizenkoku fujin no tsudoi kiroku [New life andsaving: Record of the first national women’smeeting] (Tokyo: Chochiku Zōkyō Chūō Iinkai,1959), 42-49.

5 3 Ōkurashō, “Shōwa 22 nendo yobikinshishutsusho.

54 Chochiku Kōhō Chūō Iinkai, “Wagaya nomaruhi! Yarikuri” [Confidential to our homes!Make do], memo, doc. ’96-1, March 1996, p. 2;Fujin jihō, no. 67 (October 1958): 2; CU, 19, 33.

55 See Ono Yoshisa (chair, Nishi-TamagawaWomen’s Council), “Dannasama no osake nibaketa” [Lest it be spent on the husband’sdrinking], Fujin jihō 21 (September. 1954): 1;see Ezra F. Vogel, Japan’s New Middle Class:The Salary Man and His Family in a TokyoSuburb (Berkeley: University of CaliforniaPress, 1963), 76-77.

56 Fujin jihō 34 (November 1955): 1.

57 Funada Fumiko, “Kotoshi no mokuhyō: Kateino kagakuka e” [This year’s goal: bringingscience to the home], Shufuren tayori 10(January 1950): 2; Oku Mumeo, “Shufuchochiku no undō” [Housewives’ savingsmovement], Shufuren tayori 67 (November1954): 1.

58 Oku Mumeo, “Shin seikatsu e” [Toward new

life], Shufuren tayori 52 (August 1953): 1.

59 Keizai Kikakuchō [Economic PlanningAgency], Kokumin seikatsu hakusho, 1959[Whitepaper on national life] (Tokyo: ŌkurashōInsatsukyoku, 1959), 1, 74-77; Simon Partner,Assembled in Japan: Electrical Goods and theMaking of the Japanese Consumer (Berkeley:University of California Press, 1999), 247.

60 Patricia L. Maclachlan, Consumer Politics inPostwar Japan (New York: Columbia UniversityPress, 2002), 94.

61 Partner, Assembled in Japan, 5, also 149-56,168-70; Johnson, MITI, 16.

62 Horioka, “Consuming and Saving,” 261, 265,268-89.

63 Andrew Gordon, “From Singer to Shinpan:Consumer Credit in Modern Japan,” in Garonand Maclachlan, Ambivalent Consumer, 137-62;Sand, House and Home, 374-75; Gordon,Modern History of Japan 249, 267.

64 Partner, Assembled in Japan, 163-65.

65 International Labour Office, Year-book ofLabour Statistics , 1960, in CJ , no. 53(September 1962): inside back cover.

66 Richard F. Kuisel, Seducing the French: TheDilemma of Americanization (Berkeley:University of California Press, 1993), 17, 111.

67 Koizumi Akira, “Keizai no antei seichō osasaeru mono: Shōhi wa bitoku ka” [Factorssupporting stable economic growth: Isconsumption the virtue?], CJ, no. 50 (December1961): 15; Usami Jun, “Seikatsu to chochiku”[Daily life and saving], CJ, no. 86 (July 1966):6-7.

68 Okazaki Kaheita, in Shin seikatsu to chochiku3 (1961): 7-10; Vance Packard, The WasteMakers (New York: David McKay, 1960),274-93; Partner, Assembled in Japan, 130-31,

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188-89.

69 Oku Mumeo, in Shin seikatsu to chochiku,3:12-13.

70 Fujin jihō, no. 107 (February 1962): 1; CU,60-61.

71 Economic Planning Agency, Whitepaper onNational Life, 1975 (Tokyo: Economic PlanningAgency, 1975), foreword, 132, 136-37.

72 “Infure ni kachinuku: Shin-chokingakunyūmon” [Fighting inflation: A primer on thenew savings school], Shūkan sankei, December28, 1974, pp. 156, 158.

73 Charter of the Global Greens, Canberra 2001,5 , 14 , accessed Ju ly 23 , 2009; E . F .Schumacher, Small Is Beautiful: A Study ofEconomics as If People Mattered (London:Blond and Briggs, 1973), 52.

74 Keiko Higuchi, “Kore kara no shōhi seikatsu”[Consumer life from now on], Kurashi no chie[Tips on living] 94 (1974): 1.

75 Itō Akiko, “Kakeibo kichō no susume”[Encouragement of keeping household accountbooks], Kurashi no chie 116 (November 1977):1; 118 (March 1978): 3.

76 Central Council for Savings Promotion,Savings and Savings Promotion Movement,23-24.

7 7 Ezra F. Vogel, Japan as Number One(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1979);Paul A. Samuelson, “Two Success Stories,”Newsweek, March 9, 1981, p. 71; Klein, inBusiness Week, June 30, 1980, p. 61

78 Ronald Reagan, “Address before the JapaneseDiet,” November 11, 1983, Public Papers of thePresidents of the United States, book 2 (1983),1575-77.

79 Kenneth B. Pyle, The Japanese Question

(Washington, DC: AEI Press, 1992), 50-51.

80 Toyama Nihonjin no kinben, 163-64.

81 The Economist, April 7, 1979, p. 61.

82 Yomiuri shinbun, March 31, 1988, p. 7;Horioka, “Why Is Japan’s Household SavingRate So High?” 72.

83 Toyama, Nihonjin no kinben, 215-16;Shimomura Osamu, in Pyle, Japanese Question,112-13; Maekawa, in Kurashi no chie, specialissue (February 1982): 3.

84 Zen Chifuren, no. 123 (November 1986): 3;no. 125 (January 1987): 1, 3.

85 Yomiuri shinbun, October 28, 1990, p. 11;November 22, 1987, p. 7.

86 Yoshino Naoyuki, “Yūbin chokin no shōrei tozaisei tōyūshi” [Future of postal savings andFILP], Toshi mondai 99, no. 11 (November2008): 56-61.

87 “Chochiku Kōhō Chūō Iinkai Heisei 9 nendoundō hōshin” [Campaign policy of CentralCouncil for Savings Information], mimeo, 1997,p. 1.

88 Chochiku Kōhō Chūō Iinkai, Hoshigari himeno bōken (1990) and UFO ni tsukamattakodomotachi (1991).

89 See this link (http://www.saveinfo.or.jp),accessed August 11, 2009; interviews with theCentral Council for Financial Services’Masunaga Rei (Chairman) and Okazaki Ryōko(Manager), July 2002; also with Okazaki, June10, 2008.

90 Donald MacIntyre, “Spend Japan Spend,”Time (Asia ed.), April 20, 1998, pp. 14-16.

91 Kin’yū Kōhō Chūō Iinkai, Kin’yū kyōikupuroguramu [Financial education program](Tokyo: Kin’yū Kōhō Chūō Iinkai, 2007), 21-23.

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92 Kin’yū Kōhō Chūō Iinkai, Kakei no kin’yūkōdō ni kansuru seron chōsa, 2008 [Survey ofhousehold finances], p. 3; ibid., 2007, p. 11; fordata on consumer spending, debt, and assets,see Kin’yū kōhō chūō iinkai, Kurashi to kin’yūnandemo deeta [Data on living and finances](Tokyo: Kin’yū Kōhō Chūō Iinkai, 2007), 8, 21,37. German figures from 2001.

93 The Economist, July 5, 2003, p. 67.

94 Figures from U.S. Department of Commerce,Bureau of Economic Analysis.

95 “Index of Consumption Expenditure Level:Two-or-More-Person Households,” 1981-2008(adjusted for inflation and by distribution ofhousehold by number of household members),Statistics Bureau, Ministry of Internal Affairsa n d C o m m u n i c a t i o n s , a c c e s s e d(http://www.stat.go.jp/data/kakei/longtime/index.htm#time) August 14, 2009.

96 Gordon, “From Singer to Shinpan,” 160-62.

97 Charles Yuji Horioka, Wataru Suzuki, andTatsuo Hatta “Aging, Saving and Public

Pensions,” Asian Economic Policy Review 2, no.2 (2007): 303-19.

98 Charles Yuji Horioka, “The Causes of Japan's‘Lost Decade’: The Role of HouseholdConsumption,” Japan and the World Economy18, no. 4 (December 2006): 378-400.

99 E.g., “Watashitachi no tame-teku & setsuyakuwaza” [Our techniques for saving andeconomizing], Shufu no tomo 86, no. 10 (July2002): 68-85; “Kakeibo de fuan o kaishō[Erasing insecurity with an account book],Fujin no tomo 102, no. 11 (November 2008):122-45.

100 Account-keeping statistics in Chochiku KōhōChūō Iinkai, Seikatsu sekkei no tatekata[Constructing a life plan] (Tokyo: ChochikuKōhō Chūō Iinkai, 1999), 34; OECD EconomicOutlook, no. 86 (November 2009), Annex Table58.

1 0 1 The Economist , August 15, 2009, p.66. Chapter 10: Exporting Thrift, or the Myth of“Asian Values”