Waste

In Waste, Eiko Maruko Siniawer innovatively explores the many ways in which the Japanese have thought about waste—in terms of time, stuff, money, possessions, and resources—from the immediate aftermath of World War II to the present. She shows how questions about waste were deeply embedded in the decisions of everyday life, reflecting the priorities and aspirations of the historical moment, and revealing people's ever-changing concerns and hopes.

Over the course of the long postwar, Japanese society understood waste variously as backward and retrogressive, an impediment to progress, a pervasive outgrowth of mass consumption, incontrovertible proof of societal excess, the embodiment of resources squandered, and a hazard to the environment. Siniawer also shows how an encouragement of waste consciousness served as a civilizing and modernizing imperative, a moral good, an instrument for advancement, a path to self-satisfaction, an environmental commitment, an expression of identity, and more. From the late 1950s onward, a defining element of Japan's postwar experience emerged: the tension between the desire for the privileges of middle-class lifestyles made possible by affluence and dissatisfaction with the logics, costs, and consequences of that very prosperity. This tension complicated the persistent search for what might be called well-being, a good life, or a life well lived. Waste is an elegant history of how people lived—how they made sense of, gave meaning to, and found value in the acts of the everyday.

Eiko Maruko Siniawer is Class of 1955 Memorial Professor of History at Williams College. She is the author of Ruffians, Yakuza, Nationalists.

Eiko Maruko Siniawer's study of waste in postwar Japan is history writing at its very best: expansive in scope, richly textured, compellingly narrated, and convincingly argued. This summary hardly does justice to the richness of the material discussed in the book, nor does it fully convey Siniawer's thought-provoking analysis throughout. Thanks to its breadth, the richness of its content, and the sophistication of its analysis, the book will be essential and compelling reading for anyone interested in the postwar history of Japan as well as notions of waste in the contemporary world.

Siniawer's book is a moving and meaningful cultural history relevant to Critical Discard Studies, rooted in the specific time and place of postwar Japan, and extends to the twenty-first century.

Waste makes an outsized contribution to the study of postwar Japanese history will be essential reading for students of modern Japan as well as our current era more broadly.

Yoshikuni Igarashi, Vanderbilt University, and author of Homecomings:

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

William W. Kelly, Yale University, and author of The Sportsworld of the Hanshin Tigers:

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