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Paper short abstract:

This talk explores time-use surveys as a form of knowledge and as a longitudinal window into the lives of ordinary Japanese citizens. It deconstructs the finding that time spent on leisure, paid labor, and housework for working-age men and women barely changed from 1941 to 2020.

Paper long abstract:

Since their origination in the Soviet Union in the 1920s, time-use surveys have been a staple of sociological research, illuminating the division of labor and leisure, public health, and work-life balance. Perhaps more than any other instrument, these surveys reflect the attitude (often traced to the era of industrialization) that “time is money” and must be allocated according to a socially beneficial breakdown of productive activities. Today, international organizations routinely deploy time accounting to facilitate cross-national comparisons and make far-ranging policy recommendations. Remarkably, however, the history of time-use surveys remains obscure and unstudied in any national context, including Japan (one of the earliest and most consistent adopters of such research). The first known time-use study in Japan was carried out mere months before the attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941. Suspended during World War II, data collection resumed on a five-year cycle in 1960 and has continued to the present. Each survey has amassed data for 30-70,000 people, who record their activities in fifteen-minute increments over the course of a twenty-four hour period.

In this talk, I deconstruct time-use surveys as a form of knowledge reflecting evolving ideas about time, statistics and modeling, social participation, human activity, and power relations. I also use them as a longitudinal window into the lives of ordinary citizens. (Although social scientists regularly draw on the contemporary data, studies reaching back to the twentieth century are few.) Astonishingly, my calculations show that the time breakdown among leisure, paid labor, and housework for working-age Japanese men and women has barely budged from 1941 to 2020! This incredible finding defies the academic assumption that technological development, falling birthrates, rising educational access, changing gender norms, labor legislation, and other postwar transformations enabled people to reduce time spent on domestic and paid work and increase time for personal enjoyment. I explain the statistical methods behind my calculations; explore variation within age, occupational, educational, and geographic cohorts; and contextualize my findings alongside similar data for other developed nations. The apparent stability of time use in Japan, I argue, challenges much of what we believe about the emancipatory power of modernity/modernization.

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Paper short abstract:

The morality politics of spork usage in 1970s’ Japan reflect emergent tensions about national identity and children’s diet and manners. Culturalists warned that sporks hindered development of the cleverness and sensitivity that made Japan superior among the nations of the world.

Paper long abstract:

We are not only what we eat, but how. This presentation examines the 1970s’ morality politics of spork usage that accompanied the rollout of rice in school lunches. I argue that these discourses about the material culture and etiquette of eating reflect the economic and political context of 1970s Japan and (re)emergent tensions about national identity and the role of children’s diet and table manners in determining Japan’s future. Japan’s national school lunch program is a critical site of “making Japan.” Schoolchildren and teachers generally eat identical meals in their classrooms, serving and cleaning up after each other. Revived in 1946 by the Occupation, the program was nearly universal in public elementary and middle schools by the 1960s. Meals were mostly bread, milk, and soup, stew, etc. The spork was the standard utensil. Cheap, multipurpose, and hygienic, it was a rational mass-catering solution. In the mid-1970s, simultaneous to the introduction of rice to the menu, the spork became the villain in a morality play about children’s eating habits and the nation’s fate. Culturalist pundits warned that sporks hindered development of the special dexterity, cleverness, and sensitivity that made Japan superior among the nations of the world.

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Paper short abstract:

Despite the importance attached to the distinctiveness of the four seasons in Japan, historians have made little attempt to question how the country has coped with annual climactic fluctuations. Focusing on post-war Tokyo, this paper analyzes how the summer heat and humidity were negotiated.

Paper long abstract:

During the last decade or so, the promotion of international inbound tourism, as a new source of revenue to prop up the ailing domestic economy, has borne witness to campaigns and remarks stressing the distinctiveness of the four seasons (shiki). Despite work by literary scholars into the ideology of the four seasons, the construction of which was mainly instigated by the upper class in the early modern period through high culture, there has been relatively little attempt to either question how ideas about seasonality were worked out as everyday experiences or to historicize how modernization and urbanization impacted people’s relationship with the spring, summer, autumn, and winter.

Focusing on post-war Tokyo, specifically the period between the American occupation and economic high growth, this paper analyzes how heat and humidity—as lived experiences in the summer—were negotiated through an analysis of various sites of coolness and heat. As the population of Tokyo grew from eight to eleven million between 1955 and 1965 and major infrastructure projects changed the urban landscape, it shows how coping mechanisms for dealing with the heat and humidity were characterized, on the one hand, by heat-avoidance strategies that manifested themselves in a search for coolness in non-urban environments, in the home, and in shades created by new urban assemblages.

Yet it also demonstrates that the dictates of employment bore witness to paradoxical heat-inducing practices that manifested themselves in the not-so-cool clothes men and women wore, revealing the extent to which social and sexual norms inhibited the realization of individual corporeal coolness. As mechanical cooling made inroads into urban life, a shift from a passive to an active strategy of combating the summer emerged, resulting in inhabitants increasingly choosing not to leave the capital but to stay in the metropolis. Despite resistance to artificial coolness at home, where heat-avoidance strategies had been largely successful, the paper argues that the air-conditioner managed to establish itself first in the workplace, and then eventually in the home, as the needs of middle-class urban families made themselves felt.